Thula-Thula (English Edition), page 16
‘And no sooner had she stood up than she went right back to lying face down in the dust. That’s not standing up, Gertruidah; that’s offering to drown yourself in a saucer. You know what they say: Within each man lies the cause of whatever comes to him?’
Shock still reverberated inside her. The fly wouldn’t go away.
‘You forget that she was traumatised; betrayed by an authority figure that she ought to have been able to trust with her life. And when he ended up in jail through her doing, although it had really been his own doing, she was the one left battling to keep body and soul …’
‘You’re right, Gertruidah. But Andrea had a choice. She could’ve come back to school, or studied and gained some or other qualification. Whether she’s living an immoral life isn’t the issue, but she can at least make sure she doesn’t get pregnant all the time. Her father may have been the cause of her trauma but he isn’t around any more to …’
‘No, Braham, that’s where you’re wrong. Whether her father is in jail or in the Sahara Desert, he’ll always be with her.’ She angrily shook the fly from her hand. ‘It’s the mark of Cain; something she’ll never be able to scrub off.’
Fragments of her sessions with the psychologist in East London came back to her. ‘You must remember that ever since she was small her right to make her own decisions was compromised. In her eyes she’s nothing but a whore, and it wouldn’t make any difference if the church or the king of England told her she was a holy princess.’ The fly landed on her cheek.
The night before her right arm had grown tired. Swapping hands earned her a blow to the ribs. Don’t use your left hand, you lose the rhythm. In the warm night beads of sweat formed on her temples, her mouth was dry. Back to her right hand. Faster; this had to come to an end. Her eye caught the dark outline of her .22 against the wall. If she grabbed the gun … No, she would have to wait until they were checking the boundary fences, or moving cattle to a different camp, then she would blow him to hell with his own .303.
‘Could you bring me a fly swatter please?’ she asked the waitress.
The fly swatter was red. Her tricycle had been red. She hated red. She held the swatter out to Braham. ‘Please will you swat this fly?’
The fly turned to pulp on her hand. To the bathroom to wash her hands. Wash, wash, wash. The water felt cool. It felt as if she was washing away last night’s filth along with the fly.
She went back to her seat behind the maidenhair fern. ‘I don’t want to talk about Andrea any more, it upsets me.’
Braham moved the flowerpot aside and placed his hands on the table, palms facing up. ‘Next Friday night is the school’s cultural evening. The matrics are performing an extract from King Lear. Come with me, please?’
‘I can’t. Next Friday we’re dipping cattle.’
‘I know you don’t like it, but won’t you place your hands in mine for a few seconds?’
Ten seconds. Cool clean hands. His touch made her bladder contract. She withdrew her hands. ‘I must go. My father’s been waiting for the tractor filters. It’s my turn to pay.’ She placed the money and a large tip inside the bill folder. ‘Don’t wait for me next Friday; I told you we’re dipping cattle.’
She pulls up the middle feather from the sand cross and uses the shaft to write in the sand: The truth hit Gertruidah hard. She knows Braham didn’t betray her. It was she who’d kept pushing him out of her life. Not because she wanted to, but because she was afraid he’d turn into a night rider who breathed on her face.
How in hell did Andrea manage to sleep with other men?
Don’t think about Andrea. Rather think about how you will turn the shed into a processing plant. Picture the women picking prickly pears. Hear the ringing of the farm school’s bell.
She struggles to concentrate on her vision. Because the past keeps intruding on her thoughts. It is always present, just like Andrea’s ghosts that won’t be laid to rest.
Large parts of her childhood are recorded in her memory in precise detail. But other parts appear to have been erased. Or distorted, because her parents always accused her of fabricating stories.
‘They’re not gone, Gertruidah,’ the psychologist in East London had said. ‘Nothing in your memory bank is ever destroyed. They’re just sleeping, very deeply, sometimes. But if you …’
‘My parents told me they were figments of my imagination.’ She pulled her shirt tight over her bulging stomach. ‘Does this by any chance look like something I made up?’
‘I don’t believe for one moment that you’re fabricating things, Gertruidah. What does however happen is that one remembers those early years in terms of pictures and smells and moods. And usually in the wrong order, because at that age you haven’t yet developed your sense of time and space and dimension.’
‘If I remember it in the wrong order I might as well not remember it at all. Because then my memories are flawed.’
‘The fact that you know is good enough, regardless of the order. Instead of doubting their accuracy, why not write down your memories? You’ll soon see the pictures start to flow …’
A sudden longing for the river and the Egyptian geese. The finches kicking up a row. Drawing furrows in the sand with a reed. Gertruidah heard that death had a guard at the gate.
‘I’m sorry, my mind was wandering.’
‘If you write down your memories, eventually the pieces of the puzzle will start to make sense. How well do you know Goldilocks and Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood?’
A muscle twitched in the corner of her eye. The child kicked against her ribs; it hurt. ‘I know them backwards. I must’ve heard them a hundred times. Every child knows them.’
‘The reason you, and all the other children, know them so well is precisely because you heard them so often, Gertruidah. When was the last time you heard them?’
‘In primary school, I guess, about ten years ago.’
‘When last did your father molest you?’
‘In the June holiday when I was already six months pregnant. Pig.’
‘It started after your brother died. At the time you didn’t associate it with any given age but with your brother’s death. With rain and cold. You can remember standing on the stoep with your father watching the blue moon. The church almanac could tell you there was a blue moon in July 1985 when you were four-and-a-half. You remember your mother picking snowdrops after she returned from the WAU conference. Snowdrops usually bloom around September …’
The woman was digging too deep, she wished the hour would end.
‘Now, at nineteen, you can add up everything together and work out that you were about four years and nine months old when this thing began. Since then hardly a month went by when it didn’t happen, as recently as the June holiday. Your memories were being refreshed constantly. It’s normal to remember the detail as well as you do.’
She was staring at the purple-blue fish swimming around and around in its confined space. A part of her didn’t want to believe what she was hearing. So it was really true that she hadn’t made it all up? Did it really not matter that sometimes she got the order wrong?
‘Your subconscious is like a movie, Gertruidah. You’re the scriptwriter and the director and the cameraman. What the camera shoots you store involuntarily, and project onto the screen when …’
‘I’m not feeling well. Could we finish early today?’
In the next session they talked about insignificant things she would never think about again. Time and again the psychologist’s questions prompted her to recall details she thought she’d forgotten.
Did you have a dressing gown? What colour was it? Did it fasten with buttons or a belt? Did it reach all the way down to your feet, or just to your knees? Can you remember what it smelt like? Was it soft or rough? Did it have pockets? What did you keep in the pocket?
She could remember almost everything. After years of confusion, she was finally starting to believe in her own tangle of images. It was like a shiny portal opening before her.
When she went back to school the year after the child was born, she took the dusty church almanacs from their shelf in the shed and packed them one by one inside her suitcase. Then she hid them inside the bottom drawer of her hostel cupboard, as if she wanted to keep the years in a safe place where she could take them out and study them.
She looked at them for hours, noting the dates for Communion, Easter, and the school holidays. She filled sheets of paper with notes about apparently unconnected events. Small stories about her life. Than she tried to locate them in time, and inserted the story paper at the relevant month. They were all pieces she had to fit inside a puzzle to make sense of a meaningless existence.
On a sweltering day in her second grade eleven year, while she was resting between sets in a tennis match, she suddenly recalled the image of adults singing in a church. They were all wearing red togas and holding red candles, with silver Christmas baubles around their heads. There was a woman in the front row who sometimes sang alone, her voice as high as a bird’s. Sun poured through the church windows onto the woman’s shoulder. She sang: ‘For unto us a child is born …’
While the people sang in the front of the church, her mother carried her outside and took her to the toilet. She was wearing a disposable nappy but she didn’t want to pee into it. Only babies peed in their nappies and she wasn’t a baby any more. She was scared of falling into the toilet. Her mother said today was the Lord Jesus’ birthday and she didn’t have to be scared. Her mother supported her back with one hand so she wouldn’t fall in.
The pee wouldn’t come because in one corner of the floor behind the toilet door there was a spider with extra-long legs like tiny hairs. Never mind, her mother said, it wasn’t a spider; it was just a cracked tile. Her mother opened the taps and said: ‘Shwee, shwee, shwee.’ The sound of the water and the shwee-shwee-shwee helped the pee come out.
After tennis she went to the church hall, without asking Matron’s permission. Behind the door in the corner toilet near the wash basin she found the cracked tile, just the way she’d remembered it. After evening study she spread out the almanacs on the bed. Her mouth went dry when she saw that Christmas 1983 had been a Sunday, and that on this occasion a Christmas cantata was sung.
If she could remember this much detail about a day when she wasn’t quite two and still wearing a disposable nappy, what else might she still find inside her memory bank?
She remembers flashes from the time after her mother came back from the WAU conference in Cape Town. Crystal clear images of her grade one year. The morning when she first went to big school her mother placed a pink calcium tablet in her hand and said she should chew one every day at the hostel so she would grow up to have strong healthy teeth. Her hair in two plaits, tied with light blue ribbons. A transparent blue button on the belt of her school dress. Light blue, stretchy panties.
She wasn’t afraid of big school. There were lots of faces she recognised from playschool. And she knew Andrea well, because of Saturday’s tennis. Andrea wasn’t her friend but sometimes Andrea brought her sleeping doll and then they’d play house in the lapa. Andrea was different from other children. Not at all bossy, and she always did what you told her. But she didn’t like Andrea at all. Because one day in the lapa Andrea had done something ugly.
‘Come let me lick you,’ Andrea said.
‘No, my mother says I’ll get ringworm if Bamba licks my face.’
‘I don’t want to lick your face, I want to lick your little pussy.’
‘What is a little pussy?’
Then Andrea pulled down her pants and showed her her petermouse.
‘Pull down your pants too.’
She’d shuddered, because Andrea’s petermouse was red like raw meat. ‘If you do that again, I’ll tell my mother you do ugly things!’
‘It isn’t ugly! My dad says I have the prettiest little pussy in the world. He licks it where it burns so it’ll get better. He says spit is the best medicine.’
She threw down the doll and ran outside because it felt wrong. And she was scared that her mouth would start talking all by itself about things like magic ointment. From then on she didn’t like Andrea at all.
Her mother took her to school and showed her her classroom. None of the other mothers was dressed as beautifully as hers. Pearl earrings and a handbag that matched. Her teacher was Miss Robin. She didn’t know Miss Robin well because she didn’t play tennis and went to the Catholic Church. But Miss Robin had been Anthony’s grade one teacher and she used to write out-stand-ing next to his gold stars.
There was a ham and tomato sandwich in her lunchbox. Tiny specks of black pepper clung to the tomato.
After break they sat on the carpet and listened to the story about the Seven Billy Goats. There were tiny blue-red varicose veins around Miss Robin’s ankles. How old did you have to be before you got varicose veins? She was lucky her mother and father didn’t have them.
In grade six she joined the town library and got to know Mr Williston who, the first time she saw him, reminded her of Peter in the Bible. She sat in the library during free time on Wednesdays. She didn’t feel like wandering through town on her own and she didn’t want to go to Andrea’s house either, because she didn’t want to be alone with Andrea. Besides, the one time she’d gone there the house had made her anxious. It was spooky and stale, the curtains drawn. At home Andrea’s mother looked nothing like the friendly woman behind the tombola table or at tennis. She seemed a different person altogether, and her stomach was running all the time.
It was bad.
Unlike the library, which had magazines and newspapers and smelt of teak oil and paper. Mr Williston didn’t give her the creeps. And no one talked to her or expected her to talk. She decided if she didn’t have enough money to start a prickly-pear farm when she finished school, she would become a librarian. Because it was the sort of work where you didn’t have to talk much.
Mr Williston taught her how to sort the books and pack them away. That was how she came across the Quaker book. He allowed her to take it out even though it was in the adult section. She hid it underneath her hostel mattress and that weekend she took it home. Luck was on her side: Abel forgot to lock his office when the tennis started. She photocopied the book. Then she put the punching-machine in a shopping bag along with the photocopies so they wouldn’t get wet if it rained, and carried everything to the stone house. The book was difficult; she struggled with the big words.
The next weekend she stole her mother’s dictionary and took that to the stone house too. She had a dictionary of her own that Auntie Lyla had given her, but it was at the hostel, inside her locker in the study hall. It had to stay there, because she was the only child in grade six with her own dictionary. It made her feel important.
There was a big palaver when her mother needed the dictionary for her crosswords.
‘You’re the only one who could have taken it, Gertruidah!’
‘Are you calling me a thief, Ma?’
‘You’re always stealing things from the pantry and your father’s shed and carrying them off into the veld! Where is my dictionary, Gertruidah?’
‘You can search my room if you like, I’m innocent.’ She wished she would. She wanted her mother to discover the bottom drawer of the dressing table was locked, and believe her dictionary was inside. So she would have the drawer forced open and find Abel’s little toys from overseas.
She disappeared to the stone house every chance she got, to study the Quaker book. After a while she knew it off by heart. Priests and rituals are an unnecessary obstruction between the believer and God … She stopped going to church or Sunday school. If her parents tried to force her, she ran away. Quakers do not celebrate Easter and Christmas … Easter bunnies, chocolate eggs and Christmas presents were stupid. Quakers don’t believe in sacraments … When the time came for her confirmation, she refused. She would not let them have their way. The year she started menstruating, she unbaptised herself in the river. Quakers refuse to take oaths or to take off their hats before a magistrate … Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t erase her promise of silence to Abel. But she could snub Andrea’s magistrate father when he came to play tennis. Children are specifically welcomed … A place where she was welcome. Thank you, Lord. Quakers established the first anti-slavery movement … Some day the time would come when she would no longer be Abel’s moonlight slave.
After Miss Robin got to the end of the Seven Billy Goats she let them look at the pictures. She’d have preferred to hear the story again, but Miss Robin said she had other things to do. When she offered to read it herself, the other children laughed. Imagine being able to read in grade one, she had to be lying.
How could they not know what an r or a d looked like or what ou sounded like? Because she could read everything, every letter and double vowel. Big words too. Anthony had shown her how. And after he died, Mabel carried on teaching her.
Mabel was nine when Anthony died. When her father took Mabel to Auntie Margie’s school in the truck, she was jealous. Although there were only coloured children in the little farm school, she longed to go with her. But her father said she would go to the town school, and only once she turned six.
In the afternoons she and Mabel sat in the tree house and Mabel taught her to read and write.
‘There are two alphabets,’ Mabel said.
‘Now you’re lying, Mabel.’
‘I’m not. Your mother told me. There’s the ordinary abc, and then there’s the fairy alphabet. All the letters of the fairy alphabet start with flowers.’
‘Say it for me, please?’
She thought she could tell from Mabel’s face that she was making up a story.
‘Anemone, begonia, cherry, daisy, edelweiss, forget-me-not …’
Maybe Mabel was telling the truth. ‘I want to practise the ordinary abc instead.’
Mabel made her practise a d and a D. And all the other letters.
‘No,’ Mabel said. ‘You don’t start with the long leg of the d; you start with its fat tummy. Then you go round and round with your pencil like this. Slow down, Gertruidah, don’t let the tummy go over the line … Now go up higher when you make the leg …’
