disasters in the colourful land were always caused by people. There were mountains that spewed fire, not because a god decreed it should be so, but because careless people set the mountains alight. There was a dangerous hole in the air above the land through which the sun’s deadly rays shone down and burnt man and beast. The hole wasn’t made by a god either, but by people who were more concerned about holes in their clothes than a hole in heaven. What the people didn’t realise was that the angels watched them through the hole, like children lying on their stomachs, peeping through a crack in an attic floor. And the angels were so shocked by what they saw that their wings bristled on their backs.
It was a country where black rhinos and black children perished by the thousand. Then one day the people grew concerned and collected millions of rand to save the rhinos. It was without doubt a strange land, the angels told each other, shaking their heads.
‘I’m writing a fairy tale,’ Griet told her therapist. ‘I actually wanted to write about my relationship. But I’m better with fairy tales.’
Rhonda smiled encouragingly, a teacher watching a toddler forming her first letters with clumsy fingers. She must have had a trying day, reckoned Griet, because there was an unmistakable crease in her long cotton skirt. But her blouse was as snow-white as ever. Not even a grimy ring on the collar. Griet smoothed her own blouse self-consciously. It had also been clean this morning.
‘Do you want to tell me more?’
‘No,’ Griet said quickly and then added apologetically, ‘there isn’t really much more to tell. I’ve hardly begun. I don’t know how it’s going to end.’
‘Nuns startled by green ice from heavens’, she’d read this morning in the paper, one of those absurd little reports she always remembered better than the serious main stories. She obviously had a need for inexplicable phenomena, after seven years with a man who could explain everything logically, rationally and unemotionally. And any question he couldn’t answer, like what is the meaning of life, he could always evade with cynicism.
A large piece of green ice, she read with increasing interest, had fallen out of the air through the window of a Roman Catholic convent. The nuns, frozen in terror, had stored the evidence in a fridge.
Evidence for what? Griet wondered. A court case against the divine powers that had hurled the ice earthwards? And who would stand accused in the dock? The angels surely wouldn’t take out their disappointment in the human race on a group of nuns. No, Griet decided, the poor witches would probably get the blame again. And how could you hold it against them if they broke a few convent windows now and then? Everyone knew what the Roman Catholic Church had done to witches for centuries.
‘Have you seen George again?’
‘No.’ Griet glanced at the Mickey Mouse clock. Still almost a full hour to go. She might as well be honest. ‘I tried to see him. I drove past our house a couple of times … I mean his house … or past friends’ houses where he might be visiting. But I couldn’t pluck up the courage to go in. I’m afraid of what I might do to him.’
‘Are you still angry with him?’
‘I don’t want to beat him to death like a month ago, if that’s what you mean. I’ll never be stupid enough to try to hit him again. I nearly broke my hand. I don’t even know how to make a fist. It just isn’t something that decent girls learn at school. All we ever learnt was how to kick a guy in the crotch, but the PT teacher said that’s very serious and you should only do it if you’re being raped.’
Rhonda nodded sympathetically, but didn’t say anything.
‘She didn’t say what you should do when your baby dies and your husband drives you out of the house,’ said Griet.
‘You were very badly hurt.’ Rhonda leant forward a little on the red sofa, her eyes peaceful, as always. Griet felt as though she could sink away into those still pools, down, down, down, with stones in her pockets, like Virginia Woolf. ‘And you hide it under this terrible anger.’
She didn’t want to beat him to death any more, she told her therapist. She wanted to torture him to death slowly, but she didn’t tell anyone that. She wanted to lock him into his own house, without a telephone or newspapers or books or any contact with the outside world. She wanted to flush his sleeping pills and his depression pills down the lavatory. She wanted to install a remote control video camera in every room, and watch him as he slowly went mad.
Sometimes her own madness frightened her.
‘He says he can’t understand why I’m so angry. That’s the worst of all, that he can carry on with his life as though nothing had happened, as though I were a page that could simply be torn out. Not a page with words on it, not something you’d miss if it disappeared from a book, not even a bloody advertisement page! A snow-white, completely blank page.’
‘Isn’t it perhaps possible that you want to punish him in some other way now?’ Rhonda asked carefully. ‘Now that you don’t want to hit him any more?’
‘How do you mean?’ Griet asked, just as carefully.
‘Didn’t you think about him the night you put your head into the oven?’
‘I knew you’d ask that,’ said Griet slowly.
Grandpa Big Petrus, who’d been punished with the Hand of Death, often spoke to the angels. That was long before there was a hole in heaven, but he had his own methods of making contact with celestial beings. He’d simply take a long walk in the veld, look up into the cloudless sky of his beloved Karoo, and hear the fluttering of angels’ wings.
He agreed with them that he lived in an extraordinary country. Especially after he’d lost his farm during the depression years and had to live as a poor relation on his nephew’s farm. People said he never got over the humiliation, it had affected his mind, he’d started hearing voices.
But little Griet knew that since childhood he’d talked to the angels like other children play with fairies and gnomes. He told her himself, when she was still very young and he was already very old, one day while she was listening to the fluttering of wings with him.
‘He was a good man,’ Grandma Hannie said after his death, ‘but he was too proud to be a poor relation. That’s why he was punished with The Hand.’
Grandma Hannie always spoke with great awe of The Hand.
‘He was meek and mild,’ Grandma Hannie always said. ‘He only got angry once in his life. Then he struck a man stone dead. He didn’t know his own strength. The magistrate said he’d been punished with The Hand of Death and he might never again strike anyone, not even his own children.’
Grandpa Big Petrus was a giant of a man – so big that Grandma Hannie had to make all his clothes for him. He had feet like mountains and hands like hills. Little Griet couldn’t keep her eyes off his hands, especially not that deadly one that had sent a man straight to his grave with one blow. The Hand was as brown as the earth and baked rock hard by a merciless sun, cracked like an empty dam in a drought.
Grandma Hannie was a tall, sinewy woman with long sinewy hands, but when she knelt beside Grandpa Big Petrus, he folded both her hands in one of his. Grandma Hannie’s hands were covered with blotches and blue veins that always made little Griet think of villages and rivers on a geography map. But Grandma Hannie’s fingers were light as feathers when she dried Griet’s hair.
‘My prettiest sister
