earlier. ‘I wanted to find my son before I died,’ Assunta Rabuzzi had apparently told reporters. Griet immediately snipped out the report and fastened it into her Creative Arts Diary.
She tried not to think while she did the rest of her shopping. Little pork sausages that reminded her of her son’s toes; button mushrooms that looked like his nose. Shell pasta that reminded her of the perfect curves of a baby’s ear; downy peaches that felt like a baby’s skin, bringing a lump to her throat as her teeth broke through the skin of the fruit, making her weep with longing while she gulped down the chunks. ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ Once, long ago, on her grandfather’s farm, she’d seen a sow eat her own piglets. Then she’d gone behind the sty and brought up her grandmother’s lunch.
In a trolley in front of the dairy products sat a little boy with wide grey eyes. She’d ignore him, Griet decided, taking a block of butter for her basket. He was wearing blue canvas shoes and swinging his feet. Griet wondered what sort of cheese she should buy, and where the child’s mother was. Mozzarella.
Why did her favourite newspaper reports, like her favourite foods, usually come from Italy? Green ice falling on convents and ancient women finding lost sons. Pizza and pasta and Parma ham. Maybe foods like this make the mind more susceptible to fantasy and outlandish stories.
She could hardly imagine what boerewors and biltong did to the minds of her own people.
In Dante’s vision of hell, the souls of suicides are portrayed as stunted trees beside a river of blood. Imagine how many South African trees must be growing beside that blood-river! All the men who’d destroyed their families before they committed suicide, as though they were afraid that no one but their own children would play with them in hell. All the political jailbirds who’d flown out of tenth-storey windows, and all the others who’d pre-empted the authorities and taken death into their own hands.
Just imagine whom she might have met in this grove of stunted trees if she hadn’t been frightened off by a cockroach. Griet felt her feet lifting off the ground. Hemingway and Hitler, Janis Joplin and Marilyn Monroe, Othello and Ophelia … Griet rose slowly, watching the child’s swinging feet grow smaller and smaller. Nat Nakasa and Ingrid Jonker … It was dangerous to leave little boys like this in supermarket trolleys, she realised while she hovered high above the fridges full of cheeses from different countries. Van Gogh of the Netherlands and Cleopatra of Egypt and the chaste Lucretia from classical Italy … Mad people could easily steal them. She wafted through the ceiling, as easily as the winged horse of the muses would glide through the clouds. She flew, free as a witch, light as an angel.
6
I’ll Huff and I’ll Puff and I’ll Blow Your House Down
Griet felt like crying when she saw the house she’d lived in for so many years. Home is where the heart is, she thought as she walked through the neglected garden. And if you no longer have a heart, home is probably where your books and your music and your most precious memories are kept.
The clivias burned like orange flames under the bedroom window. A powerful antidote to impotence, according to old wives’ tales, and protection against evil. Although a small forest of clivias couldn’t protect the inhabitants of this house from impotence or evil.
She unlocked the front door carefully, and felt her knees weaken as she stepped inside. She could smell her husband, she realised in a panic in the hallway, next to the table with the telephone and the answering machine. But he couldn’t be here. She’d made certain that he wouldn’t be here. It was only his smell lingering in the house: the smell of his toasted cigarettes and his body after a game of tennis and the red soap he used every morning in the shower. She could smell him because the memories in this house sharpened all her senses, because she had crept back like a dog to dig up old bones.
Grandma Hannie’s house was a House of the Senses, a small labourer’s cottage on a Karoo farm, cool and dark as a cellar, especially on Sunday afternoons when everyone was supposed to be sleeping. There was a front door used by nobody but the dominee, and a back door that stood open day and night with a screen door that slap-slapped continually. One hard slap, deafening until you grew accustomed to it, and two softer slaps like echoes, every time someone came in or went out of the kitchen.
There were a number of other noises around the house, especially on a hot Sunday afternoon. The crack of the dog’s jaw as he snapped at flies, the complaints of the windmill in a sudden gust, the drone of a lorry far, far away on the highway. The creak of Grandpa Big Petrus’s bed when he rolled his giant frame over.
And at night there were inexplicable gurgling noises in the attic. Grandma Hannie said it was rats or something; Grandpa Big Petrus said: Impossible, rats don’t gurgle, it was Something. Grandma Hannie shook her head and held her peace.
The most memorable sound was the hymn they sang in their bedroom at dawn each day, after they’d read a passage from the Bible and said a few prayers. Grandpa Big Petrus’s confidently pure bass, followed by Grandma Hannie’s hesitant falsetto. She didn’t care much for singing, she only did it to make him happy.
Griet looked through the pile of unopened mail on the telephone table, found a few envelopes addressed to her, mostly accounts that she thrust into her handbag and Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes which she crumpled up. She went to the kitchen to throw them away. Really just an excuse to postpone braving the bedroom.
She’d left in a hurry, just throwing a toothbrush and a few items of clothing into a suitcase in the middle of the night after her husband had told her she was the most pathetic specimen of humanity he’d ever come across. She’d spent the rest of the night sitting in her car down at the beach, feeling just as pathetic as her husband said she was. At five the next morning she’d gone to her office – the security guard in the entrance foyer stared at her creased clothes and uncombed hair – and rung Louise in London.
‘I need your flat for a couple of weeks, until I find a place of my own.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Louise mumbled drowsily – it was still dead of night in London. ‘What’s going on?’
‘George has thrown me out.’
She tried to sound businesslike, not to saddle Louise with her personal problems, but her voice wouldn’t co-operate. The night in the car had been unreal, a nightmare she’d wake from, but now she was awake: she didn’t have a fairy godmother, she told herself in front of her word processor in the grey morning light. She couldn’t think of anyone able to turn a pumpkin into a flat.
‘Shit.’ Louise’s usual response to any communication out of the ordinary. After a long moment of silence during which Griet expected the dreaded ‘I told you so’, Louise sighed dramatically, ‘Marriage stinks, that’s all I can say.’
‘Can I use your flat, please, Louise?’
Her voice was trembling dangerously.
‘Of course.’ Louise was wide awake now. ‘Stay as long as you like but don’t be surprised if I join you in a couple of months. My husband’s driving me up the wall.’
Louise had married a British citizen because she wanted to get rid of her South African passport – as she admitted unblushingly – but she was sceptical enough about the arrangement to hang on to her Cape Town flat. You never know, she said. It’s best to keep the back door open. She’d learnt her lesson with her first divorce. Griet thought her friend was far too cynical to make any marriage work.
‘Is it that bad?’
‘It’s
