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breath. Sometimes they have bronchitis at the same time and they spend days and days together in bed. It’s the beds that are helping to give them asthma, of course, because the undiscovered housedust mite is rampant in Dinah’s mum’s ancient German pillows and feather beds. Microscopic creepy-crawlies are having parties in the Kaiser’s bedlinen – because Dinah’s maternal grandmother was in at the bidding when Kaiser Wilhelm’s household items were auctioned off at the beginning of the Weimar Republic. For some reason that has never been explained to Dinah her mum’s family – though they brought precious little out of Germany except for money that got impounded and jewellery that got stolen – still had the Kaiser’s bedlinen when they sailed into Table Bay, the Kaiser’s bedlinen and the two ornately carved Gieseke thrones.
    Nobody knows about housedust mite when Dinah is a little girl. So asthmatics are thought to wheeze at night because that’s dream time, Freudian time, unconscious time. If you’re asthmatic, it’s because you’re daffy. It’s all in your head. Dinah’s dad doesn’t get asthma. He’s a physically superior specimen – that’s except for his terrible three-day-long migraine headaches which leave him groaning feebly in a darkened room. Otherwise, he’ll always take flights of stairs three treads at a time and he goes for vigorous daylong hikes in the Natal countryside at weekends, stamping in his sturdy boots to discourage the green mambas. But he still likes to contemplate the possibility of terminal illness. He does this withspirit at mealtimes while tucking into great quantities of bread and cheese, though he always keeps his slim, boyish physique.
    â€˜It’s a shame to leave such a little scrap on the dish,’ he’ll say, about a quarter-pound of mortadella, or a wedge of Danish Blue. Then he’ll proceed to his burial arrangements. ‘No fuss; no bother,’ he says. ‘Just throw me on to the compost heap.’
    â€˜
Ach nein
, Tächenherz,’ Dinah’s mother says, because she gets easily upset.
‘Ach nein. Nein, nein
.’
    To correspond with her daffy, mouth-breathing image, Dinah develops a range of facial tics. She screws up her left eye and then her right. She does it alternately, twisting up her face in a grimace. This is partly because she’s edgy, but mainly because she has one eye that’s a lot more short-sighted than the other eye. She does close work with her left eye and distance with her right. Her dad doesn’t believe in giving her glasses. He thinks they’ll only make her eyes worse. Plus he can’t help thinking that, compared with his own eyes, her eye deficiencies are chicken feed. Dinah’s dad lived all his pre-school life in a beautiful cloud of unknowing, a swirl of light and dark tinged with pink and gold, until he went to school. Then, just as the teachers were about to write him off as subnormal, the school nurse came round and tested his eyes and gave him glasses.
    Along with the housedust-mite feather beds are Dinah’s mum’s tasteful handwoven dust-impregnated bedspreads. She likes these because she is artistic. So is Dinah. She draws all the time and she draws quite well.
    â€˜Dinah is artistic,’ her mum says, ‘like me.’
    Lisa is labelled practical. She is not artistic. She is tidier than Dinah and she likes to bake cakes. Plus she always keeps her eyes open. These respective characteristics are blown up into long-term personality traits. Lisa, says their mum, should be a reporter. She is always first with news. This is true. She knows that Mrs Spinks has had her baby. She knows the moment that Babs has broken her leg.
    When they draw pictures together of houses and trees, Lisa’s pictures are not as good as Dinah’s. Their mum always likes Dinah’s best. Lisa says that this is