Some very good news from back home has left me nostalgic for a couple of special people today. In fact, I’m not the only one, as all six of us have been exchanging emails left, right and centre for the past few hours. Somehow, these have all taken the time-honoured ”where will we be in X years time” format. Now, because these are no ordinary girls, the predictions are fabulously creative. My future, if they are to be believed, is almost entirely dramatic.
- Carla will confess she’s been having a long distance affair with a gorgeous Eastern European playwright she met in 2009.
- Carla is in New York, in boots. She is somehow seriously involved with a large, angry African-American woman, much to her exasperation. This woman could be her flatmate, but is probably the supervisor of her dissertation. Both women don’t quite know how they landed up with one another. Carla is dating someone who is shorter than her but who all leddies agree is the most charming, wonderful thing for Carla since toast. Carla loves him, but struggles to admit it.
- Carla is touring SA with a theatre director. They are first in Cape Town, Darling, Bloemfontein then Johannesburg. Carla is tired of travelling and wants to make her own work. The director is in love with Carla who is repulsed by him. In the evenings, Carla is writing her play on an English woman writing a play in Darling.
- The leddies never got the whole picture…but there are topless photos of Carla on a yacht in the Med floating about on the Internet.
- ‘Fuck!’ yelled Carla. ‘Fuckity fuck fuck fuck!’ It was not that today was particularly worse than any other. It was just that she liked to say ‘fuck’ a lot, and also, most days for Carla demanded it. What a pity you couldn’t just give the people you met grades: mark them with a ‘D’ in red that left no room for misunderstanding. She tried communicating this kind of grading through her clothes: hats for those she liked, tweed for those she didn’t, makeup and unconventional arrangement of fabrics for solitude, and fully-fledged fancy dress themes for those she loved. But this morning she had searched her wardrobe over and over for an outfit that said, unambigulously, “You were sweet but it was just one of those things and anyway fuck off out of my way; I’m in love with an actor, late for the flight, concerned about your spelling and dying to write this down…maybe I should join an underground playwright’s movement in Cuba instead, bother where’s my Rooibos?” There was a pair of boots in the cupboard - with a particularly sharp, articulate pair of heels - that had promise, but even their vocabulary could not capture the gravity of the situation. You know the expression ‘too big for your boots?’ a jilted would-be lover once slurred at the local barman as he buried his goatee beard in a five-spirit killer cocktail dubbed ‘The Lever’. With Carla it’s different. She’s just the right size. It’s the damn boots that are just too small…Ya know?
Lovely, girls. Now, if you’ll forgive me, it’s my turn….
Anna luxuriates in warm autumn sunlight in her favourite window boxseat with the green, velvety upholstery. The stream in the Cotswolds twinkles and, if she opens the window just a crack, she can catch the last whiffs of the smokey bonfire of the autumn leaves Jules has manfully ridded the path of, to allow their family landrover through without getting swamped in an unforseen patch of mud. Jules has on knee high wellington boots and a fixed grin – it’s the least he can do after the boon of the visa. As Anna gazes at him, she thinks fondly of Ted Hughes – another such man of the land. Though, thank goodness Jules has never displayed such a penchant for birding. No, that would require her to be at least another 30 pages into her Advanced Yoga Guide for Zen Master Attention to the Things of This World and Simultanious Complete Transcendence From the Things of This World, and she can scarcely get beyond the title.
Ester wipes the sweat from her eyes, as she finishes what has been another long, hard, satisfying session of gardening. She knows that this season’s radishes will be beyond anything die Klein Karoo vrugtefestivaal has seen, if the steaming piles of Siberian husky poo her Scandinavian organic gardening assistant/newfound sex slave lovingly helped her spread last spring are anything to go by. Strangely, Odd is from Sweden, but she is willing to overlook this inconvenient fact, as his buttocks are as taut and firm as her prize marrows and his eyes as violet as the budding begonias (the nifty greenhouse that-Odd-built has allowed her to overcome even the harshest winter frosts in die Klein Karoo and sprout unheard of gloriouness, making her a small fortune in the introduction of organic foodstuff and eco-conscious farming methods to this otherwise rural backwater).
Very Odd indeed
Marelise put the final comma to her shopping list. Full stops were so depressing, so overdone, so…final. Besides, with the brood of Cambodian adoptees now numbering 3, full stops were long since a thing of the past. Short pauses, maybe, but no rest for the wicked. And, oh, how wicked she was going to be at tonight’s PTA to the hot little grade teacher in her pencil skirt with the pinch-me bottom…A little nip of gin, first, and then the world would not be the only globe that was hers tonight. How fortunate that she could always count on Clea’s docudrama to bring in the cash – whilst the brood were at their schooling with Ms Bumsandpennys, she could be the hot mama she was, taking to the cool coastal pools, or just talking smack with Auntie Amelia – the best sort of companion on days like these. Wrapping her leopard print kimono around her fabulous bosom, she alighted from the hot tub. “Drat” she said, “Why must I always forget to put it on after I alight, instead of before? Now it is all wet.” Fortunately for narrative continuity, she had an equally fabulous zebra printed one. Clutching the by now soggy shopping list, she peered out the wall length French windows into her golden apple orchard. “Ah,” she sighed, “Just where all the trouble started. I am suddenly inspired by the golden gloriousness to write a new poem.” The subsequent Husky Poo was translated into several languages, including Swedish.
Clea clicked ‘off’ with an impatient sigh. Why must people continually be so dull? She had been filming at the ’naturist camp’ for the past 67 minutes and still no visible energy fields. That is, she thought it was 67 minutes, but her cell phone clock was kind of spazzing out at the moment. Her tantric goddess guide, however, had been quite clear that now was “not the time to trust in new personal electric devices.” So manage she must with the old phone. This naturist lark was a favour for Kerrin, who couldn’t stomach the idea of delving into so much exposure all at once, but it was fortunate that she had her meat and potatoes work to go back to. This was, of course, the far more interesting docudrama of Marrry, Lease and Brood – a no-holds barred look at real African life with Cambodian orphans, shot in a gritty New York style on an Irish budget.
“Ummmmmmmmmgph” went Kerrin’s stomach. It was a sound she knew well. That sinking feeling when you wake up and the last of the cinnamon raisin twists have been nabbed. Damn that bitch. She ate everything in sight and was getting fatter by the day. Kerrin just knew she’d have to insist on dragging her, yelping and complaining, on a long walk today. And without the comfort of breakfast, Kerrins don’t do well with drag. Piddles, her multimillion dollar hotshot director’s dog who had unaccountably found a home with her since last saturday, looked soulfully up at her, as if to apologise. Ah well….At least the edit had gone well. Marry, Lease and Brood was going to make them all a fortune! She could feel her bounce returning, together with last night’s daquari. But wait! A new idea! It was genius, golden! She could animate Piddles’ ears to…No, wait! another idea! This one was better! Why not take the photos from last summer’s birdwatching camp and cut…But oh! Why had she never before thought of shooting a nightclub scene made entirely of edibles! WHY NOT DO THEM ALL? After all, it was only mid morning. It was at times like these, she thought, that one wished one weren’t so very Motivated.
Fate intervened in Carla’s life in the form of 5″8 meat packing giant, Klaus, who swept her off her heels and into the world of food processing. She grew out of her theatre phase along with her jeans in her 30′s, favouring sudoku and late nights watching extreme Canadian sports. A fond Aunt to all the leddiebrood, she sends them packages of sweet confectionary at Christmastime that sets macrobiotic Anna’s smile into one of fixed determination and sends Kerrin on a sugar high that results in a flood of short animations (scanimations) being let loose on the world, 9 months later.
