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.
