Like a mermaid, the people always said. One evening she got caught in the rain and she went to bed with damp hair. The next morning she was lying in bed with her hair wound round her body like a golden cloak. Stone dead.’
Grandma Hannie was the youngest of sixteen children who had all come to bizarre ends.
One brother broke his neck when his horse shied at a ghost one night. It must have been a ghost, people said, because he was the best rider in the district. He wouldn’t have fallen off his horse, even if he’d been drunk.
It was the ghost of the sister with the wet hair, the family whispered. She was taking revenge because he’d snipped off a tress of her hair after her death. He’d apparently wanted to give his daughter a doll with real hair.
Another brother had married seven wives – sometimes more than one at a time, went the gossip – and suffered a heart attack on his seventh wedding night. The bride was a good forty years his junior, and six months later she gave birth to a child who inherited all his money and, according to the chagrined family, didn’t look like him at all.
But the strangest death of all came to the brother in the tower. He’d ended up the richest of all – because he was the stingiest, Grandma Hannie always said, but money couldn’t buy him happiness, she never failed to add. Never a very cheerful soul, in old age he gave himself over to gloom completely and built a tower that soared up to heaven on one of his farms. He sat in it all day scanning the horizon, on the lookout for the Communists or Judgement Day, whichever came first. One day he heard the roaring of lions and the trumpeting of elephants and decided Judgement Day had dawned. The Communists wouldn’t bring elephants along, he reckoned. He hurried down but, in his haste, he tripped on the tower stairs and broke his neck.
The elephants and lions belonged to the first circus that had ever toured the district.
Griet thought about her family, that night she wanted to get into the oven, and wondered whether committing suicide like this wasn’t awfully unoriginal.
‘I probably thought about George too. But I was fed up with always considering other people, what they’d say, how they’d feel. For once in my life I wanted to think of no one but myself.’
‘But you couldn’t do it,’ said Rhonda carefully. ‘You couldn’t do it because you were still thinking about other people.’
‘I couldn’t do it because a cockroach gave me a fright.’
‘I know it’s going to sound strange to you,’ said Rhonda, writing something in the file on her lap, ‘but the fact that you considered suicide, considered it seriously, but didn’t go through with it … indicates a degree of progress.’
‘Progress?’
‘Up until now you have simply hidden behind anger, Griet. You’ve refused to accept any responsibility for anything that happened. Now you’re beginning to face reality. That’s the most difficult part. It’s understandable that you would sometimes think about suicide.’
But I think about suicide all the time, she wanted to argue. I think obsessively about suicide and cancer and starving children and about what the hell is going to become of this country if heaven doesn’t help us. I have anxiety attacks about death and the possibility of getting Aids – maybe I already have Aids! – and that I could be raped or necklaced by a furious black mob, and then I think what the hell, if I do it myself at least I can choose the way I go. What’s finished is finished, Grandma Lina always said.
But suddenly she felt too tired to argue with her therapist.
‘Can you remember how you felt that day? Did something happen, no matter how slight, something that could have been the last straw?’
She hated it when her shrink sounded like an article in Cosmopolitan.
‘Yes,’ she answered crossly. ‘My spectacles fell off.’
‘Pardon?’
‘The day I put my head in the oven.’
A slight disturbance swept across the blue pools, a ripple stirred the water, and Griet smiled.
‘As soon as you stop waiting for him and focus attention on yourself, life will improve no end’, she’d read half an hour earlier in Rhonda’s waiting room. ‘Show me a fairy tale with a beautiful woman in it and I’ll show you a bimbo in limbo waiting to be released by the love of a good man.’ She’d snapped the magazine shut in irritation and lit a cigarette.
She craved a cigarette now, but she’d forbidden herself to smoke in Rhonda’s consulting room. A person had to have some self-discipline.
‘It was as though l had always looked at life through the proverbial rose-coloured glasses – such a wonderful hazy world – and then the glasses suddenly fell off. And then, for the first time, I saw myself as I am. Not as I’d like to be. It was a hell of a shock.’
‘Help Me, Rhonda’, the Beach Boys sang, ‘Help Me, Rhonda’. It was a tune that often ran through Griet’s mind when she looked at the Mickey Mouse clock. Her hour was nearly over.
‘It finally got through to me that maybe I’d never have a child, never write a great novel, never even have a successful relationship with a man. I’d never felt so fucking useless before.’
‘You spent nearly seven years with a man,’ said Rhonda comfortingly from her red sofa. ‘You were married for three years. You can’t make out now that everything was one big disaster.’
‘Sorry,’ mumbled Griet, ‘but that’s how I feel. It’s like a movie with a bad ending. You remember the end, no matter how good the rest was.’
‘It was not clear why the ice was green.’ That was the last sentence of the report she’d read that morning, the sentence that had given her hope again. At least there were still some things that even her husband and her shrink couldn’t explain.
5
And Why Are Your Eyes So Big, Child?
There were days like today, when Griet felt as though she was trapped in the middle of a massive children’s party. Every woman in the supermarket had a child hanging on to her hand or packed into her trolley among the groceries. As though you could buy a child off the shelf like a life-sized gingerbread man.
And as if the epidemic of children weren’t enough, every shelf in the supermarket mocked her failure as a woman. Baby bottles and disposable nappies and Purity food in various colours and flavours. Toddlers’ toys and pet food, colouring books and fat crayons, peanut butter and golden syrup. Everything made her think of children.
On days like this she envied the biblical Sarah. Or Lorca’s Yerma. They’d at least escaped the humiliation of the modern supermarket.
Purposefully, she walked past the rows of medicine, past Kiss-it-better-with-Band-Aid and Doctor-it-with-Dettol, heading for the boring washing powder aisle. She felt like Little Red Riding Hood – in a red T-shirt with an orange plastic basket – who had to resist the temptations of the forest. Her only comfort was that she didn’t have to push a heavy trolley around since she no longer shopped for her husband and his children.
It was impossible to explain how everything inside her contracted every time she thought about the children she’d
