Thula-Thula (English Edition), page 3
She needs him.
She doesn’t want to need him.
She takes the Victorinox from her pocket and polishes the red handle until it shines.
The year she got the Victorinox was also the year her mother dragged her out of the church one Sunday and gave her a hiding outside because she’d sung ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ so loudly. She never looked in the hymn book because to sing from the same book she’d have to stand close to her mother. She didn’t like her mother. It was better to keep all the hymns inside your head so you didn’t have to stand close to your mother.
Then her mother took her outside and said she was mocking the Lord if she sang ‘Polly shine your boots and shoes’. She hadn’t done it on purpose. It was what she’d heard the grown-ups sing. From then on whenever they sang ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ she ran away to Umbrella Tree Farm in her head, to sit by the river and talk to the creatures great and small.
The next September when her mother’s twin sister Auntie Lyla came to visit she brought her a hymn book of her own. She liked having her own hymn book. She liked reading the words herself, and not having to stand close to her mother.
She was thrilled about her Victorinox with the red handle and the black leather pouch she could hang from her waistband.
‘Come,’ her father said, ‘sit on my knee then I’ll show you what the knife can do. The Swiss are master knife-makers. This one is called a Victorinox. Over here!’ He slapped his knee as if she was a dog and he was ordering her to jump up against him. ‘No one at school will have an expensive Swiss army knife like yours.’
She didn’t want to sit on his knee. Didn’t want to!
But the red-handled knife was beautiful; she’d wanted a penknife forever.
And she only had to sit for ten minutes, even though it was bad. During the day, when the sun shone and someone might be around to see what her father was doing, it was different from the night. At night she didn’t sit on his knees; at night she knelt on hers.
At night she shouted, ‘Ouch!’ Loudly, so that her mother might hear. ‘Ouch!’ It stung where he slapped her bare hip and told her to be quiet. He said it was the place where her babies would come out one day and he had to make the hole bigger or her babies would get stuck inside her tummy. He said it was a father’s duty.
But she didn’t want to have any babies, ever. She didn’t want the hole to be bigger. She wanted Bamba to curl up at her feet, wanted her Lulu doll in her arms, wanted her mother to hear when she called. But no one cared what she wanted. No one knocked before they came into her room, and she wasn’t allowed a key. It was different at the hostel where you had to knock before going into someone’s room and you had a key for your locker in the study hall.
Her father said she couldn’t have a key for her bedroom. Her mother said her father knew best, but she knew she was lying. And her father lied too, but you couldn’t tell grown-ups they were lying.
‘Ouch!’ she screamed into the mattress.
Screaming didn’t help. No one heard.
She turned into Sleeping Beauty, asleep for one hundred years. And because the castle was overgrown with rambling roses covered in thorns, no one could come near her. She wasn’t Gertruidah Strydom: she was a sleeping princess on a featherbed. In her sleep, even though she wasn’t asleep, she drew a picture of the prince who would break through the rose thorns to wake her with a kiss.
When Braham Fourie joined the school as English teacher in her grade ten year, she couldn’t tell right away he was a prince.
After a while she forgot the ten minutes of knee-sitting. Forgot how the waistband of her shorts cut into the flesh of her abdomen as it was pulled tight from behind. Knuckles drilling against her tail bone as he wormed his hand inside. She no longer heard the panting in her neck. No longer felt his body jerk or the final bump, bump, bump against her back. She scraped the back of her shorts against the stoep wall to remove the rope of slime. Took Lulu down to the river; hugged her against her chest. ‘Thula thu, thula baba thula sana,’ she sang the song Mama Thandeka had taught her.
Ten minutes was nothing.
Your Victorinox lasted forever.
She imagined the day she would turn into a baboon that lived in the mountains, with no doors or walls. Then she would take her penknife with her. She could use her Swiss army knife to peel prickly pears in the veld, or to skin a porcupine if she were giddy with hunger. It had a screwdriver, bottle opener, ballpoint pen and toothpick. Tiny pliers for removing thorns. A ruler and a compass so you wouldn’t lose your way when fog rolled down the mountainside and you couldn’t see your hand in front of you. On one end of the ruler, a tiny magnifying glass to start a fire if you ran out of matches or they were wet. A torch the size of her little finger she could shine into Bamba’s eyes at night to check that he was alive.
It was her father who brought and gave her the knife. With love.
Abel who showed her how the knife worked while she was sitting on his knee. Also with love.
The difference between her father and Abel was as wide as a ravine.
And love was something she would never understand.
The maidenhair fern in The Copper Kettle was her witness that she told Braham: ‘I have no idea how to be good to you, ever. Because I don’t know what goodness is.’
Her stomach rumbles again. She hasn’t eaten anything since yesterday when Mama Thandeka sent Mabel with an enamel dish with mealie rice and curried potatoes and chicken livers. Mabel wanted to clean the house and do the laundry. But she sent Mabel home.
‘There’s nothing to do here, Mabel. Rather go …’
‘What about the laundry? There must be a bundle of sheets, I haven’t changed the beds since last Wednesday.’
‘Mabel, after the funeral tomorrow I’m going to burn the sheets.’
‘Heavens, Gertruidah, they’re good sheets! You can’t go and burn them, rather let me and Mama take them.’
‘I’ll buy you new ones. I don’t want their bedding here on Umbrella Tree Farm. Now go wash and braid your mother’s hair. You were going to do it on Sunday before the police came and everything got muddled …’
‘At least let me sweep the stoep and rinse out the milk cloths, and …’
‘There are no dirty milk cloths here. Now go, I want to make a sign for the gate. Tell your mother I said thank you for the food.’
‘What sign are you making for the gate?’
‘You’ll see when it’s done.’
After Mabel left she ate with her fingers. Drank water. Went to the shed to cut the sign out of a windmill fin. Gave it a coat of green tennis-court paint. The white paint for the lines she used to paint the words on the green background. Used the wool bale stencil to make even letters. Who would have thought Abel’s tennis-court paint would one day be used to keep people away from Umbrella Tree Farm. Who would have thought that one day she would make the rules, or that the tennis-court paint would be hers to mess with any way she liked.
The terribly important tennis court.
You needed an invitation to play. An invitation meant you were part of the elite who played social tennis on Umbrella Tree Farm on Saturdays, even if you could barely hold a racket.
When she was small, before she got her Victorinox, she used to pick up the balls people hit over the fence. Then they’d say, in voices dripping with condescension: Clever girl, Gertruidah! Just as though picking up balls wasn’t something she was quite capable of doing.
She remembers the last day she picked up balls for the grown-ups. She’d been waiting on the bench beneath the cedar tree for a ball to fly across the fence. Andrea’s mom, who was the magistrate’s wife and ran the tombola table at the church bazaar, rushed, breasts wobbling, to the net to meet a drop shot. She crashed into the net and hung doubled over the tape like a pillowcase on a washing line. Before she could straighten up, her stomach went. Pale brown liquid soaked her frilly pants and ran down her legs into her socks. The bubbling noises could be heard all the way to the cedar tree.
She laughed, she couldn’t help it. She’d never seen someone poo on a tennis court before.
The magistrate’s wife was crying; someone rushed over with a towel. Then, because she’d laughed, her mother dragged her into the lapa and beat her with a tennis shoe. She was rude, her mother said, and she was ashamed of her. Sarah pulled her ears too, because she’d hidden her Lulu doll away so Andrea couldn’t play with her.
‘You selfish child! It’s just a bloody doll! Why won’t you let Andrea …?’
But it wasn’t just a doll. It was her child.
She never picked up the grown-ups’ balls after that. From then on, on tennis days she and Bamba went to the veld. Bamba chased everything that moved: field rats, dassies, guinea fowl, lizards. A Jack Russell will even chase a jackal or a lynx and never give up, panting, like other dogs. Mama Thandeka had told her Bamba meant ‘catch’ in the Xhosa language; it was the name Anthony had given him. Bamba had been Anthony’s dog. When Anthony died, he became hers.
Bamba wasn’t allowed near the tennis court because he ran up and down along the fence and barked. If he wasn’t allowed there, she would stay away too.
When she was older her father tried hard to teach her to play tennis. Her clumsiness was just a pretence. She didn’t want to play tennis. She didn’t want to bend down in front of him wearing a short tennis dress so he could stare at her bare legs.
She only started playing in grade ten when Braham Fourie became the school’s tennis coach.
She began to feel sorry for Andrea the day her mom crapped herself on the tennis court. Her eyes always seemed wet with tears and she was fat. Gertruidah knew, without knowing how she knew, that Andrea’s mom took laxatives, just like Sarah. She’d sometimes seen the empty bottle in the bin in the bathroom. Each tablet contained Bisacodyl 5.0 mg, the label said. She didn’t know what it meant. But she knew she would when she was older. Just like one day she’d know the meaning of all the grown-up words she’d stored inside her head.
Maybe her mother was afraid her own stomach would go on the court, maybe that was the reason she didn’t play. On Fridays she cooked for Saturday’s tennis. Nibbling constantly. Egg mayonnaise. A bit of puff pastry. Salami. Ox tongue. Glacé cherries. As long as she kept taking laxatives, she wouldn’t get fat. Along with crossword puzzles, cooking was Sarah’s gift. Whenever Abel bragged about her food or the set of cast-iron garden furniture she’d won with a crossword, Sarah blushed.
Abel was a skilful player. Agile, tactical. He shone at the net and used his height to advantage. He was a gallant host, too, because on Saturdays when there was tennis he didn’t drink. On Sunday he would have to lead the hymns in church and he always said he couldn’t take the lead in the Lord’s house with a hangover.
Thinking about it makes her feel sick. How could the same man who led the hymns in church make her sit on his knees with the Victorinox? How could he use the same throat for praising the Lord and for panting behind her shoulder blades like a tired dog?
And yet.
In primary school, on Saturdays when she and Bamba didn’t go to the veld or if they were home early, she’d sit on the stoep wall and watch him serve in the distance, watch him move up swiftly to the net. Then she loved him, she didn’t know why, perhaps because with other people around she felt safe. She liked the way he looked in his tennis clothes. They were a different white from the white of his skin. Some nights when he came into her room she imagined he was wearing his tennis clothes; that it wasn’t him beside her bed.
Then she would become Sleeping Beauty.
The sting of the spinning wheel needle would fade away.
The drop of blood disappear.
She was asleep in a castle in a land far, far away, on sheets of the purest white. While she was Sleeping Beauty, everything stood still. Even the king and the queen turned into statues. Nothing stirred – not the steam rising from the plates of food, the flames in the fireplace or the palace curtains. Sleeping Beauty slept and waited for the prince to wake her with a kiss.
She waited a very long time.
By this morning the paint on the sign was dry and she drilled holes in the corners so she could put it up when she returned from the funeral. From today onwards no one will ever possess her body again or have a say about what she does on her own farm. No one but she will fasten the lock and no one but she will open it.
NO ENTRY
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
She sits down on the base of the water tank. With her Victorinox she slices the tomato and opens the can of bully beef. The phone rings again. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone. Even less go inside the house. Her cellphone is in the truck, its battery flat. She doesn’t care.
The clouds have gone and the late afternoon sun washes the fog on the mountain in light pink. It’ll be milking time as soon as she’s done eating. She’s told Johnnie until the rain stops she’ll take care of the milking herself.
She stows the remaining food inside the shopping bag, grabs a handful of Tennis biscuits and walks to the kraal to milk Freesia. She plans to pour out half the milk for the chickens and take the rest to Mama Thandeka and Mabel. There’s no need to keep milk in the house: she doesn’t touch anything that’s whitish and wet. Milk, maize porridge, cheesecake, white sauce, cream, floury apples, yoghurt, cottage cheese. Gertruidah has to be the only child in the world who throws up if she eats ice cream, she once heard one of the tennis women tell her mother. Sarah had laughed: Gertruidah was just fussy.
Licking an ice cream cone was the worst thing in the world, she’d wanted to say – but didn’t, because it wasn’t true. There were worse things. The smell of a sardine sandwich. Watching her father suck the marrow from the bone in the Sunday roast. Raw egg white. Standing on a slug and feeling the gluey slime between your toes.
And the worst thing of all, the thing she couldn’t tell anyone about.
It was best to say nothing. Then there’d never come a day when you had to drop your gaze before Braham’s at the table behind the maidenhair fern.
Freesia lows when she enters the kraal carrying the milk bucket and stool. The white spots on her Friesian hide are tinted pink by the evening light. ‘I’ve missed you, Freesia. I have a lot to tell you.’
She cannot talk to people, only to cows and frogs and to Bamba. They will never betray her.
When she’s done milking and puts the bucket aside, Freesia playfully nudges her. That means she’s itching. Or perhaps it’s her way of saying goodnight.
Did anyone ever tuck her in and wish her goodnight, sleep tight? It doesn’t seem possible. And yet she has a memory of her mother lying beside her at bedtime and, sometimes, Anthony in his striped pyjamas on the end of the bed. Lying in the crook of her mother’s arm and looking at pictures of pumpkin coaches and a shoe full of children while her mother read. She remembers the scent of her mother’s powder and that lying in her arm had felt good.
But perhaps she remembers wrong.
Had being powerless against Abel been an illusion? Had feeling powerless been an escape or had she been programmed to believe sex with your father was normal? Vaguely she remembers bathing with him when she was small. He’d build a tower of bath foam on top of her head and they’d laugh so much her mother would come to see what was the matter. Him washing her tiny body, everywhere, without it seeming wrong. Falling asleep in his lap while he cleaned her fingernails with his penknife. Being carried to bed and kissed goodnight. No nightmares while she slept.
Sometimes she played a wedding game under the wild olive tree. She wore her mother’s high-heeled shoes and her father was the make-believe groom. She’d marry him some day, she said. He laughed and tossed her high up into the air. Brought her berries and sour figs after he’d spent two days in the mountains looking for cattle.
Then Anthony died; her mother went away to the Women’s Agricultural Union conference and everything turned bad. Back then she believed the things fathers did were right because they were fathers. That all fathers turned the doorknob at night. That it was part of loving, like picking you up and giving you a piggyback and playing catch in the yard.
And yet she never talked about it with other little girls.
Are you born with the knowledge that something is wrong even if you don’t know?
She recalls a Friday. Leap year, 2008.
In her shirt pocket, Grandma Strydom’s ruby ring, brought out of its hiding place in the cake tin in the stone house. In her mind she moved the vase with wild chestnut flowers aside and reached her hands out to Braham. It is leap year, she said, will you marry me? A thousand times she heard him say, let’s go to the magistrate’s office right now.
Dreams. Dreams of travelling to France, to the Saint Claire Church in Avignon to visit the chimera of a fourteenth-century poet. It had been Braham who introduced her to Francesco Petrarca. Dreams of turning Umbrella Tree Farm into a prickly-pear farm. Of travelling to Yorkshire to sit at the grave where the poet Sylvia Plath’s journey ended. Of being wheeled into a hospital theatre for an operation to repair her weakened sphincter muscle. Of playing in the final on Wimbledon’s Centre Court and winning. Of marrying Braham.
Without dreams, no matter how far-fetched, she would’ve ceased living long ago. Simply collapsed and died. Dreams carried her away from the horrors.
Her mother’s voice telling guests: Gertruidah exists in an imaginary world and, what is worse, she believes the things she makes up. I can’t bear to think what’ll happen to her when Abel and I are no longer there …
Leap year, 2008. She recalls the swampy February afternoon heat when she got out of her air-conditioned car outside The Copper Kettle. Braham’s car was already there. She was tired. All week long Abel had taunted her with a toy he’d ordered from America on the Internet. A black rubber thing, covered with tiny tentacles. Repulsive.
‘Get some KY jelly when you go to town,’ he’d ordered the night before. ‘Batteries too.’
She would kill him, she swore. ‘Get it yourself.’
