Thula-Thula (English Edition), page 26
Her mother and Andrea’s mother came to make tea. She heard what her mother was telling Andrea’s mother. Even though she didn’t understand every word, she understood it all.
They’re not stories I’m making up! she wanted to shout. But she didn’t shout.
Then her mother was gone and she was cold under the table. Her bladder was full and she was hungry. When no one was around, she slipped out and tore the plastic clingwrap off the glass bowl on the kitchen table. Grabbed some of the cold pork slices and quiche squares and wrapped them in a dishcloth. Out through the kitchen door. At the back of the cement dam she squatted and peed. Wiped herself with the sleeve of the tartan dress. Folded the dishcloth open and prayed. God in heaven hear my prayer, keep me in Thy loving care. Amen. Then she ate all the meat and buried the dishcloth.
She didn’t go back inside until much later, when the last car had left and the evening was starting to get cold. She didn’t want to go inside. But a person can’t stay outside forever like a sheep or a cow.
I was ashamed of you in front of the people, Gertruidah, her mother said. You’re naughty and you’re stubborn. And you’ve messed up the plate with the meat. She stuck out her tongue at her mother, but without opening her lips.
Her mother went to sit beside Anthony’s grave until it grew dark. When she came back her eyes were swollen from crying and she had a migraine. She took headache pills, put on her pyjamas and said she was going to sleep until morning. Gertruidah should bath herself and eat the leftovers from lunch.
She took off her tartan dress and put on her flannel pyjamas. Her bed felt cosy. Her head fitted snugly into the pillow. The sandman came and carried her away, away, away.
Then the daddy bear growled beside her bed. You’re a naughty girl, he said, because when you’re supposed to sing, you run away. Now take off your pyjama pants. This time you’re going to sing!
Grandma Strydom’s dressing table was the stage. The daddy bear picked her up and put her on the stage. ‘Turn so you face the mirror,’ he said, ‘and spread your legs. Like this,’ and he grabbed her ankles and planted her feet in front of the side mirrors.
It was cold; she was still sleepy and longed for her flannel sheets. She didn’t want to be in a concert. It was funny the way the round end of the wooden spoon came through her legs like the head of a tortoise.
‘Sing the giddy-up song,’ the daddy bear said.
She couldn’t sing when she was sleepy. She didn’t want to look in the mirror. It felt like sin, even though the daddy bear said it wasn’t. The top of his foot was warm and soft. He rubbed her lightly until her titties turned into brown currants. Later on he lay on his back on the baby bear’s bed. Hug me with your legs, he said. She sat on his chest with her legs around his neck and sang the giddy-up song over and over.
Horsy horsy on your way
We’ve done the journey many a day.
Then the daddy bear said he was hungry for some frog meat.
She was made from human meat, not frog meat. She didn’t want to be the horsy. She didn’t want the daddy bear to try and push his trunk inside her petermouse. Her head became an empty swallow’s nest from which bits of clay were falling. Tiny tunnels, tiny tunnels. Sleeping Beauty wanted to hide inside the mud tunnels but she was too big to get inside.
The trunk pushed hard. And then the concert turned into the most painful concert she had ever held.
‘There,’ the daddy bear said, ‘now you also have magic ointment in your tummy.’
He wiped his wet, shiny trunk on her duvet. When he left and closed the door, the whitish magic ointment ran down her legs. She fetched her tartan dress from the laundry basket and wiped the white stuff from the insides of her legs. Put her pyjama pants back on. The pillow was soft. She cried herself to sleep.
In her sleep it stung where the trunk had torn her.
She raises the lid of the Steinway, presses down on a bass key, listens to the echo. And she decides: she will donate everything in this room to the library’s Africana room. It had been Mr Williston’s dream to turn the lifeless room into a place that would foster the town’s cultural and intellectual life.
‘If the people in this town received cultural nourishment,’ he used to say, ‘they’d run each other down less and be less sensation-seeking.’ He adjusted the date stamp and dripped ink onto the ink cushion.
‘Country towns, Gertruidah, can be full of spite and strife and cliques. Throughout history it has been the duty of the arts to bring calm and direction.’
After the scandal involving Andrea in grade eleven he submitted a plan to the municipality to turn the Africana room into what he called a cultural church. There would be evening concerts, book club functions, poetry readings, art exhibitions. It was critical for the town’s welfare, he maintained.
The town fathers turned it down.
The teak table with the cloth brought back from Israel will be the perfect centrepiece. The black Steinway will shimmer in candlelight. Mr Williston would’ve loved it.
She removes only a few things.
Her and Anthony’s christening mugs. In Sheffield silver engraved with their names and dates of birth. She places them on the cast-iron table. Perhaps she’ll place the pot with blue forget-me-nots on the freshly covered grave. Forget-me-nots stood for remembrance, her mother always said.
She smashes Abel’s brandy glass against the stoep pillar. Tosses his napkin ring into the foam covering the lavender bush, along with the carving knife and fork with which he used to carve the Sunday roast. Next she fetches the majestic high-back chair with the riempie seat upon which he used to sit on Sundays when he said grace. Puts it on the grass behind Grandma Strydom’s dressing table. Goes to the shed to fetch an axe. Starts hacking the chair to pieces. Dirty hypocrite! She wields the axe like a madwoman until nothing’s left but splinters and tattered riempies. Until there are no curses left to damn his soul.
My guilts are what
we catalogue.
I’ll take a knife
and chop up frog.
She buries the axe in the dressing table, in the spot where her left foot stood on the day of the tearing concert. Catches her breath at the water tank. Drinks water. Uses the sleeve of the white tracksuit to wipe the sweat from her brow. The familiar sequence of sitting down to rest, drinking water and wiping sweat, tears her away to a time she’d like to forget. When Braham and tennis were her alpha and omega.
The grade elevens were studying literary devices. The subject was irony. Ironical, ironical, her head sang. Like when she was small and they were driving back from Hermanus, and caw-caw-caw wouldn’t leave her head for ages.
The heat in the English class was stifling. Sun poured onto her desk, dust trapped in the beams of light. If only she could take off her jersey and blazer. But she could no longer close the zipper of her school dress.
Girded tight, Gertruidah radiated heat.
Earlier in the week when they started on irony, Braham used a nursery rhyme to demonstrate the gap between what someone said and what was ultimately understood.
Will you walk into my parlour
Said the spider to the fly.
Tis the prettiest little parlour
That ever you did spy …
Oh no, no, said the little fly,
To ask me is in vain
For who goes up your winding stair
Can never come down again.
That night she dreamt she watched the fly buzz around the seaweed washed up at Hermanus. Her feet were stuck in the sand. The next moment she was standing on the stoep wall on Umbrella Tree Farm. Grandpa Strydom was sitting in the cane chair. Anthony brought the quilt and her father arranged it over Grandpa Strydom’s legs and started feeding him maize porridge. Grandpa Strydom complained there was too much salt in the porridge. They argued. The porridge bowl broke on the stoep. She got scared. Then she clapped her hands and announced she was going to recite ‘The Spider and the Fly’.
No one listened.
Then Grandpa Strydom said her mother must pack his suitcase, he wanted to go back to the old-age home. Because Umbrella Tree Farm was a circus, he said. Excited, she ran to find Anthony to tell him the circus was coming to Umbrella Tree Farm. Then he said: you’re dreaming, Gertruidah …
When is a dream just a dream? And when is it a hidden memory?
Caw-caw-caw.
You’re dreaming, Gertruidah.
If she could believe the circus was coming to Umbrella Tree Farm, and could clearly see a Dutch countrywoman who really was on her way to town with a basket of cheese, she could imagine many other things too. Events that never took place.
You’re dreaming, Gertruidah.
No, she isn’t.
It really did happen.
The textbook lay open on page 111. She thought of cricket and the number 111. A Nelson. A score on which batsmen became extra vigilant because many batsmen lost their wicket on 111. She circled the 111, again and again. Thought about the time Mr Williston told her about Lord Nelson’s death at Trafalgar, in a bitter battle with Napoleon’s army. Nelson had just one eye, one arm and one leg. That’s why 111 was called a Nelson.
She had to sharpen her own vigilance. Convince everyone a shoulder injury was the reason she kept her tracksuit top on during tennis. And why when winter came she couldn’t play netball. She was already battling to keep her place in the tennis first team. Flat-footed; having to rely on power and technique. Soon she would have to stop playing.
Recovering shoulder injury.
A brilliant excuse.
‘Dramatic irony,’ Braham was saying, ‘is used in tragedies and comedies to engage the audience. The audience is aware of what is happening in the plot but the character has no idea …’
She knew what dramatic irony was, she didn’t need to listen. In pencil in the margin on page 111 she wrote meaningless phrases built from the letters in dramatic irony.
A moon to moan at, a road to roam, in my room a toad to try … A man I cannot marry … Damn my timidity … Ma, am I mad or am I dirt?
If she counted forty weeks from her last period, when the century turned in the stone house, the child would be born on the sixth of October. That meant she was twelve weeks pregnant. Running around the rugby field or jumping from her hostel cupboard ten times after lights out hadn’t helped.
Gertruidah hated the egg, dreaded the date.
Since the middle of February she’d been feeling awful. Ate almost nothing. Bony shoulders, sharp hip bones. Gertruidah, a dried reed, a tired drudge. In the morning when she went to the bathroom she had to hold on to the wall to keep from fainting. Sweat ran from her scalp; her lips felt numb. The breakfast oats porridge made her retch. After school when she got back to the hostel the stink of boiled cabbage made her gag. Gertruidah gagged at the air that greeted her there.
There was only one thing to do: keep quiet. When she could not hide it any longer she would jump from a cliff.
‘We all dissemble,’ Braham said while he wrote on the blackboard. ‘No one wants to be found out. But at some or other point our masks crack …’
Her mask wouldn’t stay in place much longer. No one would believe her if she said it was Abel Strydom’s child. How long before people would be able to see she was pregnant? As soon as May? By then it would be winter; she could wear her parka; wrap a blanket around her during study time; drape a school scarf in front of her body. Take care how she stood so she couldn’t be observed sideways.
Gertruidah hid her girth.
With a bit of luck she could hide it until the June holiday. So she could sit in Braham’s classroom a short while longer and be close to him on the tennis court. Only then would she jump from the cliff.
‘Gertruidah.’ His voice yanked her back to the present. ‘Can you tell us …’
Her eye caught the sentence on the blackboard: Everyone is a moon and has a dark side he never shows to anybody.
‘It’s at the top of page 111 …’ Stammering. ‘Mark Twain said it …’
Someone sniggered. Another one. You never lose your own shadow. Braham knew she was clever. ‘We’ll get back to the question in a minute. Let’s first find out who in the class knows who Mark Twain was.’
The sniggering stopped. No one knew. She put up her hand.
‘He was an American author, Sir.’ She wasn’t stammering now. ‘His most famous works are Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Both are in the town library; I’ve read them both …’
The class was astonished. So was the look on Braham’s face.
Thank you, Mr Williston, thank you.
‘That,’ and he turned towards the class, ‘is what I call being well-read. Excellent, Gertruidah. Now can you tell us …’
She didn’t hear the question. Dizziness and cold shivers overwhelmed her. Vomit flooded into her mouth. Without a word, she stormed out into the passage. Ran. Didn’t make it to the bathroom. Vomited through a window in the passage. Nothing but slime in her stomach. Again and again. Came upright, felt for a tissue in her blazer pocket.
‘Here, Gertruidah.’ He was standing behind her, dangling his handkerchief over her shoulder.
She didn’t want him to see or hear her humiliation. ‘Thank you.’ Took the handkerchief, to own something that belonged to him.
‘What’s the matter, Gertruidah? You’re pale as a sheet.’
‘Nothing’s the matter. It’s a hot day, that’s all. Just leave me alone.’
‘I will tell the secretary to phone Matron. Rather go back to the hostel …’
‘Leave me alone, I said!’
She walked off. For the rest of the lesson she sat beside the rubbish bins. That was where Andrea found her.
‘Mr Fourie told me to come and check if you’re okay.’
Big fat Andrea. Her head seemed to grow straight from her bulky shoulders. She smelt of sweat. ‘I’m fine.’
‘I need to talk to you urgently, Gertruidah …’
‘I don’t want to talk right now.’ What if she wanted to talk about bladder defects?
‘Please, Gertruidah? Can I come to the hostel this afternoon and …?’
‘No, this afternoon I’m going to the doctor for a Voltaren injection for my shoulder.’
‘But I must talk to you. When can I come?’
‘Rather don’t come at all.’
When the bell signalled break, she escaped from the clumsy whale’s sweaty odour. To the hostel, to brush the taste of vomit from her mouth.
She takes a final look at the living room. Walks up to the teak sideboard and picks up Abel and Sarah’s wedding picture. Smiling young faces. Arms linked. And yet, with the mark of death already written in their eyes.
What happened? How? When? Why?
She pulls the door shut. Everything inside the room now belongs to Mr Williston’s memory. She wishes she knew where he was. To write and tell him that Abel and Sarah are dead. To tell him about the pain and fear of all these years. To thank him for teaching her about an aura of mystique. Maybe it will be easy to find out where he is. But it would be meaningless. Her whole life is meaningless. Stolen by Abel Strydom.
Are there degrees of comparison for hate? Hateful? Hated more? Hated most?
She leans her forehead against the closed living room door. Fragments from Auntie Lyla’s ‘Frog Prince’ flash through her jumbled thoughts.
At the feel of the frog
the touch-me-nots explode
like electric slugs.
Mr Poison
is at my bed.
He wants my sausage.
He wants my bread.
As a little girl how could she have known that the human sexual organs respond automatically to a certain kind of touch? To this day she believes she’s a whore, because there’d been times when the sex gave her pleasure. How could she have guessed that it was what nature had ordained for humans?
She carries the wedding photograph to the cast-iron table where it joins Anthony’s picture and the christening mugs. The next time she’s outside she must fill her toothpaste glass with water for the forget-me-nots.
She recalls a tea party at the cast-iron table when she and her mother drank proper tea with milk and sugar from the tree-house teacups, and her mother told her the story of forget-me-nots. When she wanted to hear the story again, she fetched the tiny teacups once more for her mother and her.
One day, in a land called Germany, far across the sea, a brave knight and his betrothed went for a walk on the banks of the Danube River. While they walked they held hands, because they loved each other. Then the girl saw a bunch of tiny blue flowers floating on the river, and she told the knight that she longed to have those flowers. And because he loved her, he jumped into the river and grabbed the flowers before they could float away. But when his knight’s clothes got wet they became so heavy that he couldn’t get back up the slippery river bank. So he tossed the bunch of blue flowers to his betrothed and called: Forget me not! And then he drowned.
Forget me not. She wishes Braham would say it to her just once.
Or had he, and had she chosen to forget it?
She fills her water bottle and hooks the strap of the .22 over her shoulder. Walks over to Johnnie to say he must take the milk and the eggs and the ripe vegetables and share them with Mama Thandeka. A warm northwesterly wind whips the mountain as she starts the climb to the stone house. It is two o’clock. She wants to be back before dark. Bring Lulu back down with her and put her on the cast-iron table. So she can bury her child. She walks faster. If the northwesterly wind shifts to southeast, fog can swallow the mountain within half an hour.
On a Saturday near the end of April in the second term of grade eleven, she miscalculated the shift of the wind and how easy it was to lose your bearings. If you did, the only direction came from the compass on the ruler of your Victorinox that pointed north.
She’d gone to the stone house because, even in late autumn, the day was dry and hot. She had to get away from the tennis court and the lapa kitchen before it would become absolutely necessary to take off her tracksuit top. Although she was thin as a reed, she could already feel a bump.
