Thula-Thula (English Edition), page 10
The curtain rods become javelins; they land beyond the cane chair.
In the distance she sees Johnnie pushing a wheelbarrow with hay to the milk kraal.
She disinfects the bath and dries it with a white towel. Then she pulls her clothes out of the cupboard and drawers and chucks everything onto the floor. The sorting is almost mechanical. What she wants to keep she tosses into the bath, away from everything. She sorts a bundle of whites and loads the washing machine. Of her underwear she keeps nothing but an unopened pack of panties and the lace bra Auntie Lyla gave her a long time ago.
There will be no more concerts in suspender belts, G-strings and fishnet tights while Sarah lazes about at book club discussions and conferences.
Conference time was stone house time.
When the date drew near, she climbed through the sliding window at night to carry supplies to the stone house ahead of Sarah’s departure. Bedding, clothes, toiletries. Tinned food, salt, teabags, flour, sugar. Matches, candles and candlesticks. A few things at a time, because she had to carry the .22 as well. It took an hour to reach the stone house in the dark. Less than an hour to get back because she made the return trip empty-handed.
She had to time it carefully and choose her route well. Abel was no fool.
One Friday night, when she was about fourteen, she was halfway to the stone house when she heard a stone fall somewhere below her. She froze. Baboons didn’t knock over stones at night. It was Abel.
Familiar with every rock and anthill along the way, she veered from her route at a ninety-degree angle, shoved the hostel laundry bag with provisions under a lemon thorn, and lay flat on the ground until his footsteps receded in the distance.
Then she headed back home as quickly and quietly as never before. Several hours passed before he came home and shook her awake.
While Abel and Sarah were at the Communion service on Sunday, she fetched the bag from beneath the lemon thorn and carried it to the stone house where she stayed until Sarah returned from the conference at the end of the week.
Missing a week of school meant nothing. A week in the mountains meant everything.
The next Monday Matron asked if her flu was better. Had her dad spoilt her, and brought her breakfast in bed while her mom was away? Flu. It was Abel’s invention. Yes, she said. And jelly with custard every night.
She makes several trips to carry all the shoes, clothes and hangers outside.
The dressing table is next. She pauses to eat a griddle cake and an orange, rinse her hands and face and catch her breath beside the water tank. The flower beds on both sides of the stairs resemble a battlefield. A red lace bra and G-string flap in the branches of a wandering Jew. Brought back from a cattle auction by Abel.
Abel brought back many things, from many different places. After Umbrella Tree Farm got an Internet connection he ordered them from overseas. When Sarah was away, he forced her to trawl through the online catalogues with him.
Was there a way to unravel the lies and deception of so many years?
No, there wasn’t. Without a blindfold you couldn’t carry on. Brainwashed, you came close to believing it was right, even though you knew it was wrong.
The jar of Vaseline was on her bedside table when she woke up the next morning. She felt inside her pyjama pants and touched the place where the tricycle had hurt her. It was a private little place, her mother said, that needed extra special care. Now, when she peeked inside her pants, she saw that the top of her petermouse was black and blue. She would ask her father to take her to the doctor. Perhaps a plaster would help to draw out the black and blue.
She traced her father to the shed where he was sawing planks. She’d brought him a pink marshmallow mouse with a liquorice tail. Could they ask the doctor to fix her petermouse, she asked.
‘If it still hurts the day after tomorrow we’ll go. Tonight you can rub it with Vaseline yourself. Then you call me when you’re done and I’ll tell you the story of Sleeping Beauty.’
‘It’s too sore to rub it myself, Daddy. Will you rub it, please?’
She stores the bread cloth and drinks some water. Fetches toilet paper from the truck and squats behind the shed, disgusted by the smell of urine.
She remembers the smell of wood shavings in the shed. At four-and-a-half, what could she have known about the body’s biological responses, about inhibitions? It was just rubbing Vaseline and it felt good.
And Abel was a thirty-five-year-old man. Who should’ve known better.
Everything was exactly like the night before. When she was about to drop off to sleep, her father knelt between her legs.
‘Daddy wants to show you a magic secret, Truidah.’
She was tired and sleepy but a magic secret sounded fun.
‘You’ll see, Daddy can make magic ointment come from his tummy.’
She got a fright. When Anthony left his towel in his bedroom, he sometimes ran down the passage naked. He had one of those too. But his had been a small white trunk, not a large brown one growing out of a baboon spider.
‘Look, Truidah, look … here it comes now …’
It was true, her father was a magician! The magic white ointment he’d made in his tummy came out of his trunk and splattered against her thighs and petermouse. His breath was coming fast, his head slumped forward. Then he rubbed the ointment over her legs and hips where it wasn’t even hurting, pulled up her pyjama pants and said it was bedtime.
He turned out the light without kissing her goodnight.
That night she dreamed that a baboon spider bit her. His poison made a balloon inside her tummy and she swelled up until she looked like a bullfrog. Then she burst open and a lot of slimy little green frogs crawled out of her tummy.
When she woke up her mouth felt dry and her bed was sopping wet. She lay quiet as a mouse, checking the ceiling for a baboon spider, looking for little green frogs on the floor. If only the last two sleeps were over and her mother back at home. Perhaps in Cape Town her mother had stopped crying over Anthony. Perhaps she’d bring her a sleeping doll as big as a real baby.
She steadies herself against the base of the tank and gets to her feet. The white load should be done by now. She must get everything onto the washing line today.
While the machine washes a coloured load, she empties the drawers of the dressing table. It used to belong to Grandma Strydom. It rests heavily on ball-and-claw feet. On either side of the big mirror in the centre are two side mirrors that can be tilted backwards and forwards. The dressing table has to go. She’s seen more than enough of her own reflection in those cursed mirrors. The bottom drawer is locked. It’s where Abel kept the sickening things that gave him so much pleasure. She doesn’t want to think about it. About their strange power to carry her briefly to the peak of ecstasy. Were good and evil really so closely entwined?
Move a little to the left … Now bend down … Oh, you don’t want to? Then I’ll show you that you do!
Stop, you’re hurting me.
Once upon a time there was a king and a queen who said: ‘If only we had a little child …’
Get down on your knees, Truidah … See how beautiful it looks in the mirror.
One day while the queen was taking a bath a frog appeared in the water …
Open your eyes! I can see they’re shut in the mirror!
The frog told the queen: One year from now you will give birth to …
She often stayed on her knees after he’d gone. Leaning against the bed, she buried her face in the duvet and called out to God.
She slips Abel’s keys from their hook on the hallstand. They were handed back to her after the police found them at the scene. The key for the bottom drawer is among them. He grew tired of opening the drawer to find she’d thrown everything away. Their little toys, he called them. They weren’t cheap, plus there was the postage.
Go on, pick whatever you fancy today.
The king and the queen invited all the fairies to their daughter’s christening …
Fine, if you’re not going to pick one, I will!
But by accident they forgot to invite the thirteenth fairy …
After a while you realised that throwing them away didn’t help. And then you no longer could, anyway, because Abel locked the drawer and kept the key.
So when he told you to choose, you did. Or you could expect to feel as if he was tearing your insides apart.
She kneels in front of the drawer but can’t bear to look inside. Whatever’s inside the drawer will have to share the fate of Grandma Strydom’s dressing table. That’s the moment she decides: As soon as everything has been chucked outside, she’ll douse it with petrol and set it alight. Let it go up in flames along with Abel and Sarah’s dark sides.
She tips the large mirror out of its brackets and balances it on top of her head. Grandma Strydom’s mirror is reduced to shards when she heaves it against the side of the stoep.
The side mirror next, then the other one. The loose drawers end up in the pampas grass.
The dressing table is heavy. She inches it along the varnished wooden floor towards the top of the stairs. Then she fetches a crowbar from the shed, wedges it underneath the dressing table to gain leverage and watches the dressing table tumble down the stairs in a wide arc. Another semicircle, another half-moon. It tears a hole in the lawn where it lands.
When it’s the turn of the wardrobe, she removes her school bag from the bottom shelf. It smells of leather and pencil sharpenings. If she hadn’t been worried about the field mice getting to it, she would’ve taken it to the stone house long ago. It was safe inside the wardrobe, hidden behind a stack of magazines. Whoever wanted to have a look inside would have to break the clasps, because the key was in the cake tin in the stone house. Leaving the bag on a chair, she empties the book shelf and stacks the books on top of her desk.
They’re for tomorrow. For some day. Maybe for never.
Rage produces the strength that sends the wardrobe across the wall. It crashes onto the bed base and what remains of Sarah’s antique York and Lancaster rose tree.
At ten past twelve the coloured washing goes up on the line.
In her bedroom nothing remains except the desk with its tower of books, the swivel chair, computer and printer. Bought with Bonsmara money – her Bonsmaras. Once she’s wiped everything with a disinfectant solution – the outside of her school bag, the cover of every book – she drapes a white sheet over it.
Then she heads for the kissing gate. In the shade of the umbrella tree Mabel has left a jar with black tea and a plastic container with stewed lamb, sweet pumpkin and samp. She eats the food before she turns her attention to the note Mabel has fastened to the lid with a lump of clay, and uses her Victorinox pen to write a reply.
All right, Mabel, I will leave the garden alone. But first I’m going to set fire to everything on either side of the stairs. Then we’ll go to the nursery for anything you want. Thank you for my food. Sala kahle to Mama Thandeka.
She rests against the trunk of the umbrella tree, listening to the blacksmith plover go clink-clink by the river.
Two days from now there will be a moonless night, the second one this month. A fairy moon. Why call it that if there’s nothing fairylike about the dark side of the moon? Unless fate blinds them and turns them into bat fairies that blunder into everything.
The way it blinded her all those years ago, and made her blunder into the night rider’s evil.
Just one little sleep and her mother would be home.
In the bath she scrubbed herself until she was squeaky-clean. Behind her ears, between her toes. She wanted her mother to know that she was a big girl now. So she wouldn’t come into the bathroom tomorrow and ask about the green and purple bruises on her petermouse. The thought of her mother finding out made her feel ashamed.
Her father was on the telephone talking about a church meeting. She sat on her bed and paged through a Garden & Home. If there was a big G and an H, then it was Garden & Home. She turned the page. Looked for the letters that made up Gertruidah. Finding letters was more fun than looking at pictures.
When she looked up, her father was standing in the doorway. It looked as if talking about the church meeting had made him angry. ‘What story do you want to hear tonight, Truidah?’
‘I rather want to find letters in the Garden & Home.’
‘No.’
He sounded cross. It made her throat feel dry. ‘It makes me clever when …’
‘Move up, then I’ll tell you about the Frog Prince. We must rub you with Vaseline.’
But the story he told her wasn’t about the Frog Prince. It was about the leguan who came into the house at night and pushed his blue-and-yellow forked tongue into your nose and sucked out your brain. He waddled from room to room until he’d sucked out everyone’s brain. Then he went back to the beginning and sucked out everyone’s eyes. Until there was no one left on Umbrella Tree Farm with eyes or a brain.
This time the ants didn’t tickle her because she kept seeing the leguan’s tongue. Her father told her to open her mouth wide, he was going to make magic ointment inside her mouth. Something smelt of sardines. Making the ointment made him feel tired but he said he would lie with her until she was asleep.
‘Truidah, the magic ointment is our secret, yours and mine. You mustn’t tell Mommy or Mabel or Mama Thandeka about it. Not Aunt Margie at playschool either. No one can know.’
She liked lying in the crook of his arm. It reminded her of when Anthony used to lie on his other side and they’d listen to him tell the story about The Three Billy Goats Gruff.
‘As long as you keep quiet, the leguan will stay away. If you tell someone, even locking the doors won’t help because he’ll make a hole in the door with his tail.’
Keep quiet. Don’t say anything. Beware of the leguan.
‘Do you promise, Truidah?’
She held out her hand to pinkie swear. ‘I promise,’ she whispered. ‘Forever …’
‘Do you still love Daddy, Truidah?’
‘Lots, more than ten thousand and another fourteen.’
He lay with her for a long time. She pretended to be asleep but the salty taste in her mouth wouldn’t go away. How big was the hole the leguan would make in the door? Would Bamba bark? What did a person look like with no eyes? Could you poison a leguan?
Then he quietly withdrew his arm and tucked the blanket around her neck. She couldn’t understand why he was crying when he left the room. Was it because he was missing her mother? Or perhaps he had a cold.
Because you’d promised not to talk you lost your voice.
Because you pushed away your food they said you were a fussy eater and because you didn’t talk they thought you were stupid. Everyone thought Anthony’s death was the reason you’d changed.
No one knew how scared you were of the leguan.
◊◊◊
After lunch I lie down to rest. The dusk has come to my room early because Mabel has drawn the curtains. My heart is filled with black tears. In my weakness I want to say: Masithandaze, let us ask for mercy. Mercy on everyone who has sailed on and everyone who stays behind. We have lived too long with hearts of snow.
When the sun stood close to noon Mabel left with Gertruidah’s food. There was only a small piece of neck left over from the sheep Abel gave us last month, so I told her my stomach didn’t want meat. Mabel said she would take the path down by the river, along the honeysuckle hedge so Gertruidah wouldn’t see her.
‘Eat your dinner, Mama, and have a lie-down while I go spy on the yard,’ she told me.
Mabel won’t let herself get caught. She has clever blood in her veins. My tata’s blood that can track and sniff out anything. Abel’s blood that makes her see up ahead as if she had ten eyes, and every eye turns in its own direction, just like a chameleon’s. And although she has none of Samuel’s blood, she carries his clever words inside her. It is a good thing she is watching the yard. For years now I have waited for Gertruidah’s anger to grow too big for her heart.
When she was a little girl, she talked all the time. Just like the mousebirds if there was a tree snake sliding among the branches. On Saturdays when the townspeople came to play tennis on Umbrella Tree Farm and party until who knows when at night, and I had to stay behind to do the dishes, Gertruidah would stand on the garden bench or the piano stool and put on a concert for the people. She sang songs, she knew all the verses. ‘You are my sunshine’ … ‘Jesus loves me’ … ‘I’m a little teapot’. For ‘Old McDonald’ she knew all the animal sounds. The donkeys, pigs, chickens and ducks. Then everyone clapped and Gertruidah curtseyed like one who knew how to curtsey.
Missus Sarah was a good mama. She was patient with Gertruidah in the kitchen. Never made a fuss if she put her fingers in the dough or dropped an egg. Sifting flour. Baking gingerbread men. Teaching her to make chains with the crochet needle. Story books. Paper dolls. Tapes with rhymes, songs and riddles. Gertruidah couldn’t get enough of riddles.
‘What two keys can’t open doors?’
‘I wouldn’t know, Gertruidah.’
‘A donkey and a monkey! And this one: What always sleeps with his shoes on?’
‘No, Gertruidah, you’re too clever for me!’
‘It’s easy, it’s a horse!’
Gertruidah wasn’t all that sad about Anthony. She was too small to really understand what death was. One day she came in from the garden with a handful of red berries; there were twenty-eight, she said. I counted them myself: twenty-eight.
‘Don’t eat just any berries, some are poisonous. Where did you find these ones?’
‘In heaven,’ she said. ‘I’ve just come from there. Anthony gave them to me. He told me to share them with you, Mama Thandeka.’
Then she put fourteen berries aside. Not one for me and one for you until all the berries were gone. Clever for her four-and-a-half years. But slowly, so at first I didn’t notice, the great silence crept up on her.
I told Missus Sarah she must get Gertruidah’s tonsils checked because bad tonsils can give a child a big setback. Missus Sarah said she was going to give Gertruidah worm tablets too because the child was always scratching.
