deep, hot smell of cracked earth fill the world around me. Small purple flowers spread their heads. Khaki weeds lean across towards me, slyly hooking their blackjack seeds into my socks. A line of ants weaves between small pebbles. The veld rustles and whispers around me.
‘Hurry up!’ Pa calls from the car. ‘What are you doing out there? Come on, get a move on!’
Sitting on my heels, my hands on my knees, I watch the dry ground suck up the warm froth. Tiny grains of red sand cling together in an irregular, damp patch. I shift my feet, trying to distribute the flow more evenly. The instep of my shoe gets in the way and a wet dribble marks the dusty leather. Ma opens her door.
‘Come on, love, hurry up! We’ve still got a long way to go!’
Still squatting, I squint up into the sun. Then I stand up and pull my broekies to my waist. Slowly I draw the toe of my shoe through the moist ground. Small clots of red mud stick to its sole. I climb back into the car, and before Ma slams the door shut, I look back and see my footprints in the dust.
On and on we drive across the pale plains of the Free State until we reach the small town where Uncle Sam and Aunty Anita live. I don’t want to get out of the car. Pa’s tired. His big hand reaches in, grabs my arm, and pulls me outside. I stand next to the car, crying.
‘D’you want a smack? Behave yourself – you’re not a baby! What are your cousins going to think?’
I twist away from him and run across the lawn. Ma’s standing at the bottom of the stoep, saying hello to everyone. I throw my arms around her legs and won’t let go.
She puts her arm around my shoulders.
‘Look,’ she whispers. ‘Look who’s here!’
I move my head away from her leg. She’s pointing at someone behind me. I turn around and see Granny Bobbeh. She’s smiling and stretching her arms out to me.
‘Granny Bobbeh’s come specially to look after you.’
Ma’s voice sounds high and strange. She and Pa kiss me goodbye. They climb back into the Studebaker. Ma holds my sister in her arms and they drive away without me.
Granny Bobbeh tries to comfort me, but she can’t fill the space Ma and Pa left behind when they drove away. She fusses and clucks, presses me to her heart, whispers in my ear. She pulls me onto her lap and folds me against her smell of apples. She croons, promises Ma and Pa will come back soon. I don’t believe her. Days and nights and more days pass.
Sometimes Aunty Anita gets a headache. She lies in a dark room all day, her eyes closed tight against the pain.
‘It’s just a headache,’ she says. ‘It’s just a bad headache.’
No one knows, but inside her head something grows and grows and, when she dies – too young, too soon – she leaves my cousins all alone, and Granny Bobbeh has to be their mother.
I want Ma. Quietly I open the closed bedroom door.
‘Ma?’ I whisper. ‘Ma? Where are you, Ma?’
In the dusty light filtering through from the passage, red and green jewels gleam across the straps of my aunt’s high-heeled cork sandals lying abandoned on the floor. I’ve never seen such gorgeous shoes, the way the coloured stones glow and wink.
Ma’s nowhere to be found. I cry all night. Mope all day. Refuse to eat.
‘I want my Ma!’ I wail.
Granny Bobbeh folds me in her arms. ‘Soon …’ she promises.
I whimper against her sweet smell. I don’t believe her.
Two weeks later, Pa and Ma with my baby sister on her lap come back to fetch me in the Studebaker.
I’m afraid they’ll leave me again.
I refuse to speak for half of a long year and I start to build walls within walls; bulwarks against loss and abandonment. Deep, wide ditches to hide in.
Birthday Party in the Drakensberg
‘It’ll be your birthday soon …’ Ma closes the oven door. The hot, sugary smell of biscuits drifts into the kitchen. ‘Pa and I think it would be lovely to go away on holiday before you start school next year.’
‘Is she also going to come with us?’
Ma shakes her head.
‘Your sister’s going to stay with Granny and Grandpa MJ again, so it’ll be just the three of us. We’ll have a lovely time climbing in the mountains. You can learn to ride a horse there – wouldn’t you like that?’
Our bedroom in the mountains is in a round hut. Ma says it’s called a rondavel. Just the three of us, like it used to be. The sun shines on my head. The tops of the mountains look like a dragon’s teeth. That’s how they got their name, the ‘Dragon Mountains’. Pa says they’re much higher than the Grootberg on Grandpa and Uncle Leslie’s farm.
I can hear the wind at night, twisting through the high, stony peaks. The room smells sweet from the grass on the roof. Ma says it’s called ‘thatch’. Geckos lie motionless against the white-washed walls. In the day, the sky is bright. The sun shines on the rocks, bounces off the windows of the hotel and the little, round huts clustered around it. Pa wears shorts and sandals, smokes his pipe on the steps outside. Sometimes he just likes to hold it in his hand, the cold bowl cupped in his big palm. Ma wears frilly sundresses with big pockets and white sandals with platforms and straps. At night she wears a dress of glittery silver, like a spider’s silk. She looks like a fairy queen. She tucks me into bed and they go to the hotel to dance. Anna makes our beds in the rondavel in the mornings. At night, she sits wrapped in a blanket on the cement step outside the door, promising to keep me safe.
In the mornings, they take me to the stables. I’m learning to ride on Bessie. ‘She’s very patient with children and beginners,’ says the groom, Johannes. ‘No, madam, sir – your little girl will be fine – we’ll look after her!’
Bessie’s coat is brown. She shines like Pa’s shoes after Isak’s polished them. She’s got long bristles on the sides of her pink nose. Her mane is black; it looks soft but it isn’t, not really. When she walks, the saddle on her back creaks. I like the sound; I think it’s talking to us. I go for long walks on Bessie. Johannes holds the reins. We plod through the high grass under thorn trees, along the paths around the rondavels and the hotel, my head nodding and bobbing along with Bessie’s, the saddle creaking, the long blade of grass in Johannes’s mouth getting shorter and shorter. Ma and Pa are walking in the mountains.
Ma buys me a necklace of little red and white daisies. It’s made of tiny beads. Each daisy has a small yellow bead in its centre. Each one is perfect. She fastens it around my neck.
‘It’s so beautiful, Ma – I’m never going to take it off!’
My fingers keep reaching, searching for it.
Before we left home, Ma baked and iced my birthday cake. She put it in a big cake tin and, when we arrived at the rondavel, she slid it under Pa’s bed to keep it safe. The legs of the iron bedsteads stand flat on the cement floor. Marta wouldn’t like that.
‘Can’t
