Thula-Thula (English Edition), page 17
Whenever they played in the tree house she wanted to tell Mabel about the magic ointment and other secrets. Like the paper wrapper of the red wax crayon that’d come loose inside her petermouse so her father had to take it out with his pinkie finger. He struggled; ouch, she said, it hurts. It was like winter time when the corners of your mouth tear when you yawn. The corners of her mouth didn’t tear any more. Her lips had been stretched by a baboon spider with a long trunk. It stank of sweet fish. When the trunk pushed all the way to the back of your throat, it made you want to throw up. But you couldn’t pull your head away because the daddy bear held it steady and ordered you to eat your oats porridge. And when you’d swallowed your porridge and cried because your throat hurt, your father gave you a peppermint to suck.
And he promised he would give you a BRNO .22 for your tenth birthday. But only if you kept quiet.
You tried to count the sleeps until then but you got mixed up.
You didn’t tell Mabel the things the daddy bear did with the wooden spoon, in case she wouldn’t want to eat the milk tart your mother stirred with it. Or about the time you were scared the daddy bear would accidentally set fire to your petermouse with the lighter that was kept beside the gas stove.
Quiet, or at night the leguan would come. And you wouldn’t get a .22.
She had to repeat grade one, but of the second year she remembers almost nothing except the day in the library with Mr Noman. Stop trying to remember. Sort out the house, get the builders in, get expert advice on growing prickly pears on a commercial scale.
Forget that you dreamed of becoming a librarian. It didn’t matter how good she was at languages, her father said, she didn’t have the right subjects for university exemption and he needed her too much on Umbrella Tree Farm.
Needed her for what?
Why had he encouraged her to choose subjects that would clip her wings?
She lets the blanket drop from her shoulders and digs a hole in the river sand. When water starts to seep into the hole, she spits into it, three times. Once for Abel. Once for Sarah. And once for Braham.
Then she gets to her feet, tamps down the sand, shakes out the blanket. Starts walking back to the house.
Today she wants to empty out the two guest rooms.
No one was allowed to talk of ‘Anthony’s room’. It’s been almost twenty-two years and on the night before they died Abel and Sarah were still fighting about him.
The thing she liked best was sitting on Anthony’s bed and paging through his school books. Funny little letters. Little gold stars Miss Robin had stuck onto the page, with something written beside them.
What does it say here, Anthony?
Outstanding.
Show me the letters, please?
Out-stand-ing.
Show every letter.
You first have to learn about double vowels like ou and ee and oa, Gertruidah.
Teach me, Anthony, please?
Only until the clock strikes four, then you must go so I can draw a map of the Sahara for geography.
What is geography?
It’s learning about the earth.
What is the Sahara?
It’s the biggest desert on earth.
What is a desert?
It’s lots of hot sand, bigger than the distance from here to town.
What is history?
It’s learning about what happens in the world.
What is science?
Jeez, Gertruidah, don’t you ever bloody stop!
I’m going to tell Ma you swore.
If you don’t say anything, I’ll teach you about ou and ee and oa. Look, the o and u in outstanding together make a little bundle that is ou.
Then Anthony did something that would always stick in her mind.
Look, Gertruidah, if you take ou and you write a t after it – he pointed at the t with his pencil – then it is out. Now if you write an s and an h before the ou, and a t after it, it is shout. It’s the same with oa. You write a b before oa and a t after it, then it is boat. Take the b away and write an s after t, then it is oats.
Show me more, Anthony?
No, next weekend. Now go, I want to draw my map.
A world of letters was unfolding before her. Magical things. She spent hours on the toilet with her mother’s magazines, until her legs became numb. She looked for words with ou and oa. The next weekend Anthony showed her ee and ea.
‘Did Ma know Gertruidah can almost read?’ he asked at the dinner table one evening. ‘Ma should see how many words she can make, and how many she can find in the Fair Lady and Woman’s Weekly.’
She jumped up from the table and fetched a Woman’s Weekly. Showed them lots of words. Then her father gave her the red cherry from his ice cream and told her she was a genius.
What was a genius? What was a coastline? And arithmetic? What colour was Jesus’ hair? What was auction commission? How did a boat float on the sea? Why didn’t trains ride on tarred roads? Where did Little Red Riding Hood buy her red cape? How did you know when November turned into December? Why was her birthday called New Year’s Day and Anthony’s birthday wasn’t called anything?
‘If you thula until the long hand of the clock gets to the top,’ Mama Thandeka said, ‘then I’ll make you sweet oats porridge. Here, use the scissors to trim the ends of the green beans.’
Asking. Finding out. Hearing new things. Nothing but nothing was better than that.
‘Quiet, Gertruidah,’ her father said, turning up the volume on the truck radio. ‘Daddy wants to listen to the news.’
They drove and drove. Until the news ended. How did the radio know when it was off and when it was on? How did the voice of the man who was reading the news travel all the way to the vygie camp?
‘I have an idea,’ her mother said. She was taking pins out of a piece of material. ‘Take all the Woman’s Weekly’s to your room. You can keep them there forever. Then you can colour in the words with your pencil crayons.’
It was the best present ever. Having Woman’s Weekly’s and being allowed to write in them. In the white margin around the words she made new ones. She didn’t know all the letters in the alphabet, but she knew the ones in Gertruidah. And the double vowels Anthony had taught her.
Eat. Tree. Treat. It. Rid. Hat. Hit. Heat. Get. Rat. Read.
Making words took a long time. She didn’t want to stop, even if she needed the toilet so badly she was almost wetting her pants. And when the tennis people came, she showed them her words.
‘Good heavens, Sarah, the child is barely four! She’s exceptionally intelligent!’
‘She picks it up from Anthony. Mandy at the playschool says all she wants to do all day is read. Not at all interested in painting or playing with clay. Even the ballet concert is almost forgotten – after all that practising in the passage in her little ballet shoes and with the castanets on her wrists.’
She’d learnt how to count to twenty long ago. And at Christmas time, when there was a garland of red cherries on the front door and Anthony didn’t have to go to school, he taught her to count to one hundred. Easy – you only had to concentrate every time you crossed over from nine, as in sixty-nine … seventy. At night she couldn’t sleep. She was too busy counting or building words. Then Anthony showed her what + and – and × and ÷ meant. He poured the box of air gun pellets out onto the carpet and taught her to make bundles. He’d barely started when she stopped him. ‘I know how to do it now, I’ll make bundles myself.’
‘But Gertruidah, these are difficult sums and you …’
‘You say the sum and I’ll make the bundle. Let me show you, please?’
He promised he’d teach her the rest of the alphabet at Easter when it was the next school holiday.
How long till Easter?
One hundred sleeps.
What is Easter?
It’s when Jesus died on the cross. And we hide Easter eggs in the garden and Ma makes hot cross buns.
Does an Easter bunny look different from a veld hare?
Yes, an Easter bunny is white.
How does an Easter bunny lay a chocolate egg?
She smooches with a male Easter bunny and then there’s an egg in her tummy.
What is smooch?
The male bunny climbs on top of the female and then he pees on her.
How do they manage to smooch out a chocolate egg?
Just because they’re Easter bunnies.
How do you die on a cross, Anthony? Do you bleed?
You must pay attention in church, I don’t know everything in the whole Bible.
Say you swear and promise that you’ll teach me the whole alphabet at Easter?
I swear.
Then he drove the truck over the cliff before hundred sleeps had passed.
No one hid Easter eggs or made hot cross buns.
Her mother told her to wear her white dress for Easter Communion. The church smelt of sweet wine and roses; everyone got palm crosses. They sang a song about Easter bells. When she looked up to see why her father wasn’t singing, she saw he was crying. She wrapped her arm around his leg and stroked the round bone on top of his knee. Lay against his arm until church was over. His black church suit with the grey-white stripes scratched her cheek. When the collection plate came around he gave her a big round one-rand coin.
On the way home she asked her mother: ‘Ma, are you a desert?’
‘What are you talking about, Gertruidah? You don’t even know what a desert …’
‘I do know! The desert is called Sahara. It sounds just like Sarah. Does Sahara mean the same as Sarah?’
‘Stop your chattering, Gertruidah, I have a headache!’
That Sunday she loved her father more than her mother. She stood on the back seat and leaned over his shoulder to place her palm cross inside his top pocket. Whispered in his ear that he could keep it forever. Because she would always love him.
He gave her a peppermint from his inside pocket and said he’d always love her too.
But he didn’t.
As soon as the building is done, she’ll go see a psychologist again, without the distaste and distress of the last time, in East London. She’ll get help with organising her thoughts; she will learn how to translate her thoughts into sound. To distinguish between love and hate. Between Sarah and Sahara. Between Abel and Cain. Between Gertruidah and Sleeping Beauty.
Or are they one and the same?
In the daylight the chaos in the garden startles her. She must get Johnnie to bury the stuff from the fridge before it starts to stink. Down near the river where the soil is sandy and he won’t have to use a pick axe and strain his old body. Maybe she should fetch the tractor and drag the furniture away from the wall; she doesn’t want to burn down the house. But no, the fire will just singe the wall; afterwards, she can paint it.
She must hurry up and get done with throwing things out. Tomorrow night, when it’s her eleventh fairy moon, she wants to strike the match.
A fairy moon is a bad moon.
The last one was three years ago, on New Year’s Eve 2005, one year after Auntie Lyla was cremated in East London. A dark night. She’d walked blindly down to the river to grieve for Auntie Lyla beside the water.
Hopefully tomorrow night will be a happy fairy moon.
She must stop recalling and replaying the moon tides. They are concerts on which the curtain has fallen. Rather get going with the things that have to be thrown away. But the clock inside her head won’t be silent. It tick-tocks, tick-tocks through the many devastating moons of her life. Escape is impossible.
Her first sense of the moon as something magical was right after Anthony’s death, before she knew anything about magic ointment. She was lying with Anthony’s Bamba on her mother’s bed. Wet tissues covered her mother’s bedside table. Her father brought her mother tea and a headache pill.
‘There’ll be a blue moon tonight,’ he said and stroked her mother’s hair.
Bamba got a fright when she jumped up. ‘Will you show me the blue moon, Pa?’
All day long she waited for night to fall. When at last it was dark, she and her father sat under a blanket on the stairs outside. The cold was stinging her nose. Finally the moon rose above the mountain ridge. It was yellow as cheese.
‘Why isn’t it blue?’ she asked.
Her father laughed and hugged her. He explained about two full moons in a single month. She didn’t understand what months were. All she knew was that he had lied about a blue moon. A blue moon wasn’t blue.
By the time she knew what months were, he showed her pictures of the half-moon, the fairy moon and the blue moon on the church almanac. But by then she no longer knew whether to believe him.
In the twenty-six years she’s been alive there’s only been a single dark moon. It was on Saturday, 31 January 1999, about two weeks after Braham started at the school.
‘You get a dark moon if there’s a blue moon on 31 January, in other words a second full moon on the last day of January,’ he’d explained to the class. ‘Then there is no full moon in February. It’s a rare occurrence.’ So he liked moons, just like she did. He enchanted her more and more. ‘There was a dark moon during the Second World War, in 1942. And the next one was in 1961, the year South Africa became a republic. There will be another dark moon in 2018, when you will all be in your mid-thirties. And again in 2037, when you’ll be old people well into your fifties.’
There was a school dance on the dark moon night of 31 January 1999, but Abel wouldn’t let her go. She was Goldilocks while in the school hall the other children lined up to form a singing, swinging train with Mr Fourie at the head.
I see the bad moon arising.
I see trouble on the way …
Don’t go round tonight,
… it’s bound to take your life,
There’s a bad moon on the rise.
At school the following week, everyone was singing the song; it was like a fever had got hold of them. She didn’t sing along. She was filled with a mixture of dread and anticipation every time she walked into the English class and saw him.
She must get on with the house. The fire must be burnt out by daybreak on Sunday. On Monday it will be the first day of spring.
For her too.
When her mother came back from Cape Town, the round fleshy top of her petermouse was black and blue, and the first snowbells had opened. When snowbells flowered it meant the fairies had come to announce the end of winter. Snowbells meant hope, her mother said.
What did hope mean?
It’s when you have something to look forward to.
Then her mother picked every last snowbell for Anthony’s grave. She didn’t even leave one tiny one she could wear behind her ear. But she didn’t mind because her mother let her bath by herself and she’d brought her a sleeping doll from Cape Town.
She liked having a baby of her own even if it wasn’t born in a proper hospital. She and Mabel baptised the baby at the bird bath underneath the cedar tree. Her name was Lulu. Her father made a wooden bed with tall sides so Lulu wouldn’t fall out in her sleep. Then she and Mabel carried the bed up the rope ladder and put it in the tree house.
When she thought of telling her mother about the tricycle and her greenish-purple petermouse, her tummy felt funny, as if she’d swallowed a green peach whole. Rather keep quiet. About Vaseline and magic ointment and the leguan too. Besides, her mother stayed in bed all day, crying.
One day her father tore open the curtains and gave her mother a terrible scolding. He smelt of brandy. He shouted at her to stop being pathetic and get out her sewing machine and mend his clothes and wash his deacon tie with benzine because he was ashamed of going to church with such a dirty tie.
‘To church? You? To humble yourself before God with that stinking brandy breath?’
She sounded like a crow that was going quaaa-quaaa-quaaa.
When Anthony was alive her father sometimes smelt of brandy. After tennis. A little sweet. But he never fell asleep with the glass still in his hand. The glass never slipped from his hand and shattered on the floor.
That was the first time she heard her mother say: ‘It was you who killed my child, Abel, you!’
How could it be? Her father was at home when the truck went over the cliff. He couldn’t have been in two places at the same time.
‘You stole my child from me, Abel Strydom! God will punish you for what you’ve done to me!’ Now her mother and father were both shouting. She was so frightened she went to sit with Lulu in the tree house. What did ‘humble’ mean? How did you steal your own child? She didn’t want God to punish her father or let him die. If he died, who would play snakes and ladders with her at the kitchen table? Or check Bamba for ticks? Peel white figs for her, or crack almonds?
High up in the tree house she felt scared. She didn’t want her father punished. She prayed for Jesus to come and dry her mother’s tears.
Because she was small, she didn’t know a time would come when she’d sit at the foot of the sand cross and beg God to bring retribution over Abel Strydom. Or that her mother’s tears would one day leave her cold.
She walks back and forth between the two guest rooms; each with its own bathroom. Where to start? Everything looks so elegant and refined.
In one room, a four-poster with a crocheted bedspread. A pitcher and wash-basin on the marble wash stand. Brown glycerine soap. Above the wash stand, a painting of red roses. THE LORD IS MY LIGHT AND MY SALVATION. Ps. 27:1. Sheepskin rugs. Rose potpourri in a gilt-edged porcelain bowl. Paraffin lamps adapted into electrical bedside lights.
This was where Auntie Lyla stayed during her annual visit from East London every September. Blissful days because while Auntie Lyla visited Umbrella Tree Farm her mother didn’t take laxatives. And the night rider didn’t prowl around after dark. And Auntie Lyla always brought her books. A dictionary. Crossword dictionaries. A thesaurus, and a bilingual dictionary. A dictionary of mythology and another of music. An atlas. Poetry books. A concordance to the Bible. Auntie Lyla said the more you read, the cleverer you become.
