Free Frankie and Stankie by Barbara Trapido Page B

tweaks while she’s about it. Dinah tries to protest but Sally is always too forceful for her.
    â€˜I don’t want you to do them,’ Dinah whinges, ‘because last time you did them all funny.’
    â€˜That’s because I was small,’ Sally says. ‘I’m bigger now, so I know how to do them prop’ly.’
    â€˜You did them yesterday,’ Dinah says, but Sally is already pulling out the regulation grass-green ribbons that match Dinah’s regulation grass-green pinafore dress.
    At lunch-break Sally does swapping.
    â€˜Swap your sandwiches for mine,’ she says.
    Sally guzzles all Dinah’s blue cheese and celery on nobbly health bread and all her roast beef and piccalilli, even though piccalilli is one of the few things Dinah likes to eat, and she likes the bits of cauliflower best of all. Then Dinah goes home with her lunch-box full of Sally’s sweating plum-jam sandwiches. The jam is always oozing through the bread in the humid heat, dyeing it purple. The sight of Sally’s sandwiches drives Dinah’s dad to distraction, because he thinks the brand-new health bread is such a delicious innovation and he buys it all the time. But it’s not really meant for him. The health bread has recently been devised as a way of injecting some nutrients into the terrible carbohydrate diet of the black urban poor. But the black urban poor are refusing to buy it – they, who were once such successful pastoralists with a varied agriculture. The poor are now committed to a debased industrial diet of maize meal, white bread and Coke. That’s along with the occasional lump of gristly flyblown meat. ‘Boys’ Meat Two Shillings. Dogs’ Meat Two and Sixpence.’ Dinah wishes that she could dump Sally’s sandwiches in the litter bin. But, after school, Sally always walks her home. Then Dinah walks Sally home. Then Sally walks Dinah home and then it’s time for supper.
    Dinah can’t remember ever actually entering Sally’s house, but she knows Sally has a much older sister, because Sally tells horrid stories about her sister’s monthly periods. She says it makes her sister go smelly and that at dinner time her dad will sniff the air and then he’ll say, ‘What’s that nasty smell? It smells like bad meat in here.’ Sally has a wild tale about how once the doctor had to come and chop her sister out of her sanitary pad because she’d got stuck to it. Dinah hasn’t much of a clue what Sally is talking about,because her own mum is always so discreet about what she calls her visit –
‘Mein Besuch
’ as she says – though daffy blue-baby Bev, who goes to the open-air school, has a live-in auntie who launders her re-usable sanitary towels and pegs them up on the washing line complete with blood-brown stains. Dinah has always vaguely imagined that the stains are Bev’s auntie’s poo.
    Bev’s dad has a hobby which is to keep on building more and more stone walls in the garden and her big brother Barney’s hobby is to smash milk bottles in the road and to knock out streetlights with stones. Bev’s family has a dog that’s fixed to a chain which runs along an iron bar that’s riveted to one of the stone terraces, so that the dog spends all day running the length of the bar and barking itself into a frenzy. The chain makes Dinah feel crawly inside, but it’s not as bad as the house she has to pass on her way home from school where there’s a monkey in a collar fixed to a tree stump by a three-foot chain. All the monkey can do is jump from the ground on to the tree stump and back again. It’s in the garden of one of those blue-collar white households where to border your flowerbeds with arched sections of rubber motor-car tyre counts as a style statement and to flick a bull-whip in the yard counts as a hobby. A bull-whip is called a sjambok and you can buy them from the vendors