at all.’
She often asked her parents if she could invite a classmate home for the weekend. Maybe then at least someone at her school would like her. But her father always said no. If she asked her mother, she said, listen to your father, he’s the head of the house and he knows best.
At night, when she said it hurt, her dad said the same thing, that it was all for her own sake.
She enjoyed her time with the psychology man. She wished Miss Robin could hear how well she read or the way she knew the answer to every sum, straightaway. She wanted to show him how quickly she could build a puzzle but every time he got up from his chair she could see the zipper in his pants, the library smelt of sardines and she’d hear someone rattling the doorknob. Then she couldn’t count or colour in. She lay down on her arms until he sat down again. It was Anthony’s death that had made her this way, her mother told the psychology man.
That was a lie.
She didn’t understand everything her mom told the man but it sounded as if she was on her side. Her mother talked about wanting to protect her child from digging up things unnecessarily, about time healing everything and not wanting her child to become a target.
Target? Was someone trying to shoot at her? And her mother was protecting her – she felt relieved.
They had guests for lunch that Sunday. She sat in the dark beneath the tablecloth in the breakfast nook. Unseen, she could listen to the grown-ups talk. Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table with Andrea’s mom, grating carrots and cutting pineapples into cubes. Her mother was saying the psychologist had said Anthony’s death was the problem.
That was a lie, the man never said that.
Her mother was telling Andrea’s mom a bunch of lies about what the man had said. But she knew he never said it. Never said she shouldn’t drink green or red cooldrink because it would keep her awake at night. Never talked about a bladder infection or her imagination running away with her. And her mother wasn’t saying a word about how well she’d read or that she’d never once coloured outside the lines.
‘Yes, Sarah,’ Andrea’s mom sighed. ‘We’ll never understand how Anthony’s death affected her. She worshipped him. Andrea’s problems are because of a difficult birth. Forceps delivery. Too little oxygen. She was a ten-pound baby, you know.’
She loved words and saved the difficult ones inside her head. Oxygen. Forceps delivery. Ten-pound baby. There were even bigger words she didn’t understand. Allergic, therapy, genetic, trauma, masturbation. It didn’t matter as long as she saved them. At times she took them out, repeated them silently, so only her tongue moved inside her mouth. At night while ugly things were happening inside her bedroom, she said them over and over. Then she forgot a little about the hurt and the sardine smell, she disappeared from her body and turned into someone else.
It felt good to be someone else. Then she wasn’t like Mr Noman who was no one. When she was Allergic Strydom she had transparent wings and could fly right up to the clouds. Therapy Strydom made a little red-and-yellow wooden boat and oars and rowed right past the crocodiles and river monsters all the way to the sea. Genetic Strydom was Goldilocks’s best friend. Together they picked poisonous mushrooms in the forest and fed them to Snow White’s stepmother. Trauma Strydom was a chambermaid who brushed Sleeping Beauty’s hair while she dreamed. Masturbation Strydom always wanted to be the boss. She didn’t like Masturbation Strydom because he hurt her.
Leaning on her elbow she sees smoke curl out of the chimney at Mama Thandeka’s house across the river at the foot of the mountain. They and Johnnie and poor slow-witted Littlejohn are the last people left on Umbrella Tree Farm: the other labourers’ cottages have stood empty for years. Abel always said the new laws made it impossible to employ permanent workers. But Mama Thandeka and Mabel and Johnnie and Littlejohn have life interest, so they’ve stayed.
Johnnie helps in the yard with Sarah’s flowers and the vegetable garden, the chickens and the evening milking. But he’s old and nearing the end of his life. Littlejohn is already in his late forties and the only things he’s good at are eating jelly babies and singing. What would become of him after Johnnie died used to be Abel’s problem. Now it’s hers. Johnnie mustn’t die. He’s more a father to her than Abel ever was. When she was small she’d go with him to fetch eggs every evening. At milking time she’d carry her little mug to the kraal and he’d fill it with warm milk – although later on milk made her stomach turn.
She must take him to the doctor for a check-up, and Mama Thandeka too.
The other labourers who came to the farm were all contract workers. Fencers, pruners, cattle workers, dam-scrapers, soil-diggers. Abel shipped them in as he needed them. Aside from Johnnie it was she who’d been Abel’s right-hand man. There was nothing she couldn’t do. Irrigating, milking, placing salt licks, checking fences, setting traps for the genets. Slaughtering sheep before Abel sold them all. He was being robbed blind and it was cheaper to buy meat at the butcher, he said.
Abel taught her well.
‘We have to keep her busy somehow,’ she’d hear him tell visitors. ‘Seeing as she’s not independent enough to go to university or get a job overseas. But Sarah and I don’t mind, we love her from the bottom of our hearts.’
No one would believe her if she told them how well he’d taught her another kind of manual and physical labour.
Only Mama Thandeka and Mabel knew who Abel and Sarah really were. But no one would believe them either.
At least Mama Thandeka and Mabel had each other and unlike her and Sarah, who were locked in endless battle, they loved each other. She’d be alone in the house from now on. But not lonely. For the greatest part of twenty-six years she’d longed to be alone. To never hear a floorboard creak or a doorknob turn. Maybe the kudu saved her from a prison sentence because she’d been nearing the stage where she would shoot them both in their sleep.
She hears the phone ring inside the house. Let it ring. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone.
She hears the marsh frogs, hears her stomach rumble. She hasn’t eaten anything all day. Not even a cup of tea after the funeral. She’d kept trying to evade the pitying hands rubbing and stroking her upper arms. People touching her made her shudder.
In her haste to put up the sign and lock the gate, she pulled the truck into the shed and left the shopping bag with bread, tomatoes, bully beef, oranges and Tennis biscuits on the front seat. Mama Thandeka’s medicine and Johnnie’s sugar and jelly babies too. She’ll fetch it later.
She wants her own food. The food in the house is dirty. Maybe she should go ask Mama Thandeka for a griddle cake.
Mabel was in a hurry when she came to the yard this morning carrying the laundry basket with wild chestnut flowers. She had to get home, she said, she had dough rising.
‘Is your mother’s chest better, Mabel?’
‘No. Must be rain on the way. Mama started wheezing last night. I was up half the night, rubbing Vicks into her back. You must remember the chest drops, please, there’s less than a quarter bottle left. Raw linseed oil and Turlington too. And Johnnie wants sugar and jelly babies. He says since Littlejohn ran out of sweets the day before yesterday he hasn’t stopped singing “This little light of mine”, not even in his sleep. Says it’s driving him to drink.’
‘Won’t you change your mind about coming to the funeral, Mabel? I’m only leaving at ten, so there’s plenty of time to …’
