Back then, when we tandem-bathed regularly, my own skin was a mess. My uneven tan meant that even though we shared the same warm undertones, the state of my skin was all wrong. Where my mother was a smooth sepia brown, enriched by the sun, my patchy fawn shades ranged from pale tan to dark deer-red. Pimples hadn’t arrived yet, but I had those dry, white patches of skin that my mother insisted was because I didn’t eat enough vegetables. She would threaten me with scurvy if I kept it up. I’m still a bit cross about that comment, because it was she who bought, cooked and dished my food, watching over me like the Eye of Sauron until I finished everything. Did she expect me to grow extra vegetables on the sly under my bed? Mxm.

This is a historical gripe and I am an adult, but I wouldn’t dare bring it up, even now. Recently, while watching me meticulously pull off every single string of spongy white tissue lining an orange, my father called me an OCD fruitcake. I retorted that I only do that because his wife told me that citrus pith causes cancer, so if I am mad then so is she. Out of nowhere, my mother klapped me on the head from behind. Who is she, the cat’s mother? I didn’t even know my mother was home.

This woman does not look favourably on revisionist history or having her judgment questioned. She definitely did not look kindly on my primary-school-skin palette of bright-red face, milk-white boobs and burnt-brown everything else. Lathering my sun-burnt body with After-Sun after galas, she would look disapprovingly at the X between my shoulder blades and circle in the middle of my back – standard issue tan lines from that standard issue one-piece – and threaten to skin me alive if I kept scorching my body. Somehow, she knew I thought it was cool to only put sunblock on my nose like a cricket player.

I was stuck on Strand Street in a peak hour gridlock trying to get to the Sea Point beach in an overcrowded tourist town because of poor planning and a desperate need for water. Newlands pool, closer to home, still hadn’t reopened after the city government declared war on water-users. I figure they’re governing the water crisis by institutionalizing a fear of missing out. More people panicking about when Woolworths bottled water stocks will run out means less people talking about the poor planning that led to the situation in the first place. But hey, who am I to get all judgy. But if I were truly a resident of this city, I would know when to stay indoors, avoiding the masses. It’s the seventh sense of Capetonians. The sixth is knowing how to dress for mercurial weather.

As I sat in traffic, I couldn’t stop thinking about this as the sun seared the tops of my thighs, my shorts hiked up as far as possible. The Clinique Smart Repair moisturizer on my face had an SPF15, but there was no protection for the rest of my limbs. No question, my mother would not approve.