A Sport of Nature

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Somewhere along the journey the girl shed one name and emerged under the other. As she chewed gum and let slide by the conveyer belt of balancing rocks, the wayside halts where black children waved, the grazing buck sloping away to the horizon in a blast of fear set in motion by the passing train, she threw Kim up to the rack with her school panama and took on Hillela. The brown stockings collapsed down her legs, making fine hairs prickle pleasurably. She would dig sandals and a dress out of her suitcase and change without concern for the presence of other women in the compartment. She was going, each time, to her aunt, one of her mother’s sisters, in whose home she was given every advantage. She was coming from the Rhodesian girls’ school to which, she would say when asked why she didn’t go to school in South Africa, she was sent because her father had grown up in Salisbury. She was not the only child whose parents were divorced or parted or whatever it was they were. But she was the only Hillela among Susans and Clares and Fionas. What sort of a name was that? Didn’t know, couldn’t tell them. What she did tell them, without a moment’s hesitation, was that anyway she was always called by her second name, Kim. As the years passed, not even her teachers called her anything but Kim. Noone remarked when she went with the other Kims, Susans, Clares and Fionas to the Anglican Church on Sundays, although in her school record ‘religious faith’ was filled in as Jewish.

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