Thula-Thula (English Edition), page 14
It was almost winter. Hide it. Wear your tracksuit top on the tennis court, wear a jersey under your school blazer so no one can tell the zip of your school dress is undone.
Abel noticed it first, in the June holidays, when he tore off the sheet she pretended to drape around her in a repulsive concert scene. The next day was the first time she’d seen him stagger in the yard in the middle of the week. By four in the afternoon he passed out on the stairs and she and Sarah dragged him inside.
‘What’s the matter with your father today?’ Sarah asked her when they’d wrestled him onto the bed and removed his shoes. ‘He never drinks during the week …’
When Sarah turned around to put his shoes away, she was naked from the waist up, her jersey in her hand. A pregnant statue staring at the sleeping Abel. Sarah’s face turned grey.
‘Schoolboy fucker,’ she spat.
This wasn’t the WAU Sarah, or the church Sarah or the pill gobbler. This was a Sarah she’d never met.
‘You’re dreaming, Ma,’ she spat back.
‘Which fucker did you go and sleep with?’
‘There’s only one, Ma, as you know perfectly well.’
‘How should I know? I don’t watch where you sleep.’
‘I wish you would, Ma.’
Then she left them alone in the dusky room. Walked through the kissing gate to Mama Thandeka’s house. Tomorrow at the latest she would show Mabel the way to the stone house. She wanted to be gone from Umbrella Tree Farm before the holiday ended, and there were things in the stone house someone had to know about, in case she never came back.
The next morning Mama Thandeka limped into the yard with her walking stick. To say that Mabel wouldn’t come to work today. She’d been up all night with toothache and had gone to town before sunrise with a lift from Sweetwater.
She left in her white Corsa in the middle of the night one week before school started. A full moon lit the frosty night. Mabel helped her push the car to the top of the hill. Then Mabel jumped in on the passenger side and they free-wheeled to the causeway where she could turn on the engine without Abel hearing.
‘Goodness, Gertruidah, you must let me know when you get there.’
‘You’ll tell no one where I am; not even your mother. If my money runs out, I’ll text you, then you must fetch money from the cake tin and pay it into my savings account when you’re in town.’
‘I have another plan, Gertruidah. I’ll stuff my clothes and pretend I’m pregnant. Then you have the baby and bring him to me at night. I’ll fetch him from you here at the bridge and then Mama and I will raise him. I’ll say it’s the child of a white man from town …’
Tears streamed down her cold cheeks. ‘No, Mabel, I think the child will be deformed.’
‘Mama and I will raise him all the same.’
‘No, I never want to see the child. Now get out of the car, I have to go.’
Mabel opened the door, letting the ice-cold night sneak inside. ‘I’ll miss you, Gertruidah …’
‘Take good care of Bamba, please, Mabel.’
‘I will.’
She turned the key and pulled away slowly without headlights. The full moon cast its silver light on the road. After the turn-off to Sweetwater she turned on the lights. Ahead of her lay a lonely road. She turned up the music so loud it disturbed the child, and drove through the night.
At daybreak she reached Auntie Lyla.
When the light starts to fade she leaves milk and eggs underneath the umbrella tree for Mama Thandeka and Mabel. Beneath the rock there’s a plastic bag with four slices of bread and a peanut butter jar filled with honeycomb.
The evening star hangs overhead when the wooden kitchen table tumbles over the stoep wall. She hears the oleander tear. Only the Morris chair left, and then the kitchen will be empty. Everything gone, from freezers to dried and cracked soap splinters. Spice bottles, dishcloths, pots, glasses, serving dishes. Everything.
Before she can drag the kitchen appliances outside on a blanket, she has to clear the passage. The visitors’ book. Grandpa Strydom’s portrait. The portrait glass explodes when it hits the corner of the wardrobe. She hesitates with the family Bible in her hands. Is she allowed to throw it away? Does she even want to? She walks around the corner to the cast-iron table where heaven used to be when Anthony was a boy angel and she went to visit him on her tricycle. She moves the pot with blue forget-me-nots aside and places the family Bible on the table.
So some things won’t be thrown away after all.
She will dig a hole in the family churchyard and bury them with honour.
She grabs the legs of the half-moon table and knocks the remaining pot with gypsy roses from the second pillar. The table soars across the lawn. The hatstand follows. Abel’s hat and rain jacket. Copies of Farmer’s Weekly. A whip Grandpa Strydom wove. A stone jug that Sarah had shipped from Jerusalem. A bowl with dried pomegranates. She hesitates over the black-and-white photograph of Anthony. Reads the dates again: 3 February 1975 – 3 February 1985. Below it, in Sarah’s ornamental script, a quote from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, ‘In memoriam A.H.H’:
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Sarah placed it where Abel would see it every time he hung his hat. After Anthony died he couldn’t come home for coffee without being reminded of his complicity the instant he walked through the door.
The picture goes on the cast-iron table alongside the family Bible. It is time to bury Anthony for the second time.
The tapestry from Turkey. Red and old gold. Sarah brought it back from an overseas tour with one of her ladies’ clubs. While Sarah was away she started to menstruate. In those days marked by shame and doubt Abel started to sodomise her.
‘Don’t pinch, Truidah. Spread your knees a little more and drop your shoulders.’
A spasm gripped her bowels. She felt as if she was losing complete control when he pushed his Vaseline finger …
No, it doesn’t matter what the tapestry is worth, she doesn’t want it.
When the morning bell woke her that Wednesday in grade seven she found her hostel sheet and her pyjama pants covered in brown blood stains. She felt scared. Not of the blood. Blood on sheets was something she was used to. But she hated the thought of having to queue at the cash register with a packet of sanitary towels, of everyone knowing that blood was coming out of her. Even worse was the thought that she could get pregnant.
Her mother was in Turkey and wouldn’t be back until the following weekend. Not that this was the sort of thing she and her mother could talk about. She bundled the sheet into the bag in which her mother had sent apples to school. She would toss the bag into the rubbish bin in the school bathroom.
Without Mabel she didn’t know what she would’ve done. Mabel was in grade eleven, on the top floor with the big girls. Forbidden territory if you were in primary school. Whenever she was caught sneaking upstairs, Mabel got picked on. They hated the fact that she always got the highest marks in domestic science and played at centre for the first netball team.
She shoved a layer of toilet paper into her light blue school pants. When the breakfast bell rang, she was waiting for Mabel at the bottom of the stairs. Mabel ran back upstairs and returned carrying a chocolate box.
‘It’s inside,’ she whispered. ‘The plastic side away from your body. This afternoon during free time I’ll go to the chemist and …’
‘I’ll give you the money at lunchtime.’
‘My father gave me money too. The same amount he gave you.’
One day – she must’ve been in grade four – her mother sent her to Mama Thandeka’s house with some freshly picked green beans. She and Mabel sat on the bench underneath the pepper tree, stringing the beans, taking turns with her new Victorinox.
‘It’s a beautiful knife my father brought me, isn’t it?’
‘Gertruidah, did you know that your father is my father too?’
‘You’re lying, Mabel! My father is white and your mother is black and …’
‘Any colour man can make a child with any colour woman! Wait, I’ve got something to show you.’
Mabel went inside the house and came back with a piece of paper. ‘This is my birth certificate. There,’ Mabel pointed with her finger, ‘that’s where it says my father is Abel Strydom. But don’t tell Mama I showed you the paper. If you do, I’ll tell your mama that you play inside your panties in the tree house. Don’t think I didn’t see you …’
When she lights the fire, she must keep the hosepipe handy so the fire won’t spread to the garden. Or Mabel’s heart will break.
‘Here,’ Mabel said when she came into her room after free time with the bag from the chemist. ‘In the daytime you stick these inside your panties. And these,’ she brought out a small box, ‘these you must push up inside you at night. Push it in deep, but let the string hang out so you can …’
Please. Not this. ‘No, I won’t.’
‘Heavens, Gertruidah, what if you pee in your bed at night and everything gets wet?’
‘I’ll pee right through the push-up thing anyway and …’
‘The pee comes out of the other little hole. This weekend I’ll explain everything nicely. Just do what I told you.’
That weekend she squatted behind the cement dam and peed on her hand. Mabel was right, she had two holes.
On Friday afternoon she heard her father and the agriculture adviser in the office talking about fences and tomato plants. She could see Mama Thandeka hanging the hostel laundry on the line. This was her chance to sneak away to the stone house with Bamba. Once across the river she veered east, keeping to the rocky ledges so she wouldn’t leave footprints.
At the mountain pool a short distance from the stone house, she washed herself, then stretched out on a rock to dry in the autumn sun. Bamba lay by her feet and watched her. Although she was naked, she didn’t feel shy because Bamba’s watching was different from Abel’s. She wished her breasts would never grow bigger and the blood never come back; that all the hair on her body would stop growing.
She was almost certain Abel didn’t know about the mountain pool. The terrain was too rough for the cattle. There were places on Umbrella Tree Farm where no human had ever set foot. At tennis recently she heard her father talk about new rock paintings he’d discovered. In the fountain camp, in a cave he’d never even heard of, one his own father had never mentioned.
He would never find her stone house. The prickly pears around it grew too densely for people to get through. Only she knew how to get through them without a scratch. She regularly broke off some of the lower leaves to create a tunnel she could crawl through.
There’d been drama on Umbrella Tree Farm when she was in grade two. She heard the story in her hiding place underneath the breakfast nook. It all started in Grandpa Strydom’s time, with a worker who poached sheep. After slaughtering them, he buried the skins and entrails in places where no one ever set foot to look for cattle, and sold the meat in town. Grandpa Strydom called the police to help find the thief. They sent bloodhounds. Search parties. They combed the veld as far as Sweetwater, but the thief was nowhere to be found. Then Grandpa Strydom sent the police home, because there were calves to wean and potatoes to harvest; he couldn’t waste his time looking for a thief.
Long after Grandpa Strydom died a cow went missing. She heard her father tell Johnnie to pack some food and walk to the west of the taaibos camp where he’d seen vultures circling. The cow was probably dead but he wanted to be sure. When Johnnie came back he said it wasn’t a cow attracting the vultures but a dead man with a rotten foot and ankle. He must’ve been bitten by a snake and died there. Her father climbed up to the taaibos camp himself. And to be sure, it was the sheep thief. For years he had hidden in the mountains, eating veld foods to survive. He’d even made himself a pair of pants from dassie skins, sewn together with jackal sinew.
She reminded herself to bring needle and thread the next time she came to the stone house, just in case.
There was a smear of blood on the rock when she got up. But up here in the mountain the blood seemed different from at the hostel. Cleaner. She didn’t understand how the girls in the hostel could giggle about things like this. Their silly chatter irritated her.
Early in her grade six year it was announced that the grade six boys had to go to the woodwork class after break; the girls had to meet in the domestic science class where the clinic sisters would give a talk. Once everyone was seated on the tall domestic science stools, a clinic sister turned on the overhead projector. Soon they’d be big girls, she said, and there were things it was necessary to talk about without beating about the bush.
The drawings on the slides made everyone giggle and nudge each other. She got one fright after another. Andrea kept wiping away sweat. They were the only ones not laughing.
A clinic sister wouldn’t lie. Tongue kisses were a sin. Fright. Surely it wasn’t possible to have a baby with one’s father? Fright. The proper word for ‘magic ointment’ was ‘sperm’. Fright. Did blood on your panties mean you could have a baby? Then she could’ve had babies long ago. Fright.
For weeks afterwards everyone was whispering during break. But what they found sensational had for her become a nightmare. During break she sat near the rubbish bins. And her fear grew and grew.
She filled the water canister at the mountain pool and on the way back to the stone house passed the empty hare’s nest. No chance to say goodbye to the babies.
In the warm moonless night she and Bamba sat in the doorway of the stone house eating bread and sweetcorn. A cricket sang its sharp, monotonous tune. How did a cricket breathe? Why didn’t bats collide with things they couldn’t see? Where did the blood inside her come from? How would she hide the blood from her mother? No one but Mabel needed to know. What would she do if she was wearing a tampon at night and Abel …?
Her thoughts went round and round and ended up nowhere. She leaned back against the warm stone wall and searched the sky for a comet. Anthony was a star, Mama Thandeka always said. But which star? What was inside a star? She must ask Mr Williston for a book about stars. The creeep … creeep of a crowned plover was making Bamba restless.
If she could turn into an animal she would want to be a crowned plover chick. Both the male and female helped to hatch their brown eggs, right there in a nest they’d scratched in the ground. But although they had a poor man’s nest, they didn’t allow anyone near their chicks. Even Bamba knew better than to go near a plover’s nest. They went wild at the slightest threat, diving at the enemy from the sky. If the diving strategy failed, the crowned plover pretended to be lame, dragging its wing to lure the enemy away.
Why didn’t her parents protect her as if she were a crowned plover chick?
Thinking became impossible: there were too many waves crashing inside her head. Bamba snuggled up beside her; soon they were asleep on the red grass bed.
On Saturday she kneaded clay to seal the roof. It would soon be winter and the stone house had to stay dry: there were books and other things that shouldn’t get wet.
By Saturday afternoon the blood had gone and she could once more walk comfortably. Homewards, even though she didn’t want to; she had no idea why she kept going back.
Sunday was Mama Thandeka’s off day.
‘Won’t you make us some potato salad with mustard, Truidah? Then we’ll drive to the vygie camp and I’ll cook some sausage on the fire.’
‘If I have to …’
She didn’t feel like being near him. She wished he would get drunk and fall into the fire.
It turned into a beautiful afternoon, after all. Under the wild olive tree in the vygie camp he poured her some apple juice. Talked about planting olive trees for domestic use. About Freesia that was about to calve. Tractor filters that needed replacing. The vegetable garden that had to be ploughed and dressed. Littlejohn who had to get to the dentist to see to his rotten back teeth.
‘It’s all those jelly babies,’ he laughed. ‘I do worry about what’ll become of him when he’s old …’
The cicada sang. The hadedah called. A breeze stirred in the wild-olive leaves. Bamba chased after a polecat. It felt good to be with her father.
‘Won’t you give me a piece of land, Pa, so I can plant a prickly-pear grove?’ She was asking nicely, nothing threatening or forceful about her tone. ‘I’ll take care of it on weekends and holidays. Do you know all the things you can produce from prickly pears, Pa? Can we try it and see …?’
‘No, it’s too labour-intensive.’
‘Then will you catch me a baby baboon, Pa? One can teach them lots of tricks. Please, Pa?’
A dark curtain dropped over his eyes. ‘A yard baboon is the last thing I want. I can’t stand to see an animal chained up.’ He doused the fire and started gathering their things. They drove home in silence.
She lay on her bed with the atlas Auntie Lyla gave her. It was important to know how big the world really was, because some day she would leave and not come back. To live in Greenland, perhaps, or somewhere in the north of Russia. While she was picking out a town in Canada, the doorknob turned and her stomach lurched.
That was the day she learned what it felt like when you wanted to die. From pain and humiliation. Because that afternoon was the first time Abel pushed a saliva-coated finger up into her backside.
The next weekend her mother came back from Turkey, with the red-and-gold tapestry for the passage wall.
She tears at the tapestry until it comes loose from the wooden slat. With the passage cleared, she can empty what’s left in the kitchen. Until her body can’t take any more.
Then she brushes her teeth, and gathers her pillows and blankets. Turns off the lights. Closes the front door behind her. Carves a route through the chaos at the bottom of the stairs, past Grandma Strydom’s dressing table lying prone in its puddle of egg. Closes the shed door behind her. Curls up in the truck. Arranges the pillows under her head.
