as she does every Monday morning, Marta leans her shoulder against the flyscreen on our back door. The heavy buckets of hot water in her hands heave and slop. She struggles down the back steps, her head thrust forward, grunting with effort.
‘Au, eh-eh …’
Negotiating her way through the cement yard out to the mown grass in the back garden, she pours the steaming water into the galvanised tin bath and on her knees – her skirt tucked in around her – she bends over the frothing suds. Her hands move the heavy sheets up and down while she soaps and rubs them against the wash-smoothed patterns on the wooden washboard. Its deep hollow defines its surface, reflecting the stories, the histories of our lives, the mishaps and celebrations, events exciting and mundane. Along with Marta’s lamentations over her labours, they have all left their mark on the soap-polished wood grain. She kneels on the grass, humming and sighing. The lap of her overall is dark, saturated with rocking suds. She heaves at the wet sheets, groaning against their weight. Up and down, up and down, she marks the rhythm of her day.
On Tuesdays, she walks back again to do the weekly ironing still strung wrinkled and stiff along the sagging wash lines. She spreads the threadbare brown rug over the wooden table in the garage, covers it with the yellowed ironing sheet. She stands on a potato sack on the cement floor, ironing Pa’s cricket whites bleached clean after their soak in Reckitt’s Blue for the Whitest Wash after the glories of his Sunday match. Isak, a rolled brown-paper cigarette stub smouldering in the corner of his mouth, keeps her company while he whitewashes Pa’s grass-clotted white cricket boots on the grass under the plum trees.
In the winter months, Marta warms her hands against the heavy sad-irons crouching over the hissing primus stove on the corner of the ironing table. She tests each one’s promise of perfection against the tip of a spit-wet finger. Each iron’s temperament is a covenant; one of the many cautiously nurtured secrets she collects and hoards. She croons her Sotho hymns as she pokes the nose of a sad-iron into corners and sleeves, pressing down hard on collars and recalcitrant cotton creases. The clothes hiss under the heat, and her arm is stiff and straight as she strains towards the far corners of the old ironing table.
Sandy is asleep against the back wall of the garage. Next to his head, the small, blue-painted baby cupboard is sticky with dust, the lamb decals on the doors rubbed and faded. His ears are cocked, waiting for the fall of my footsteps. His stubby tail swishes backwards and forwards on the dusty floor like a perpetual metronome. The roof ticks under the sun.
Four houses away on the corner of our street, Jane’s deep voice booms, rolls to a stop against the garage walls. Jane is Marta’s friend.
‘Hau, Marta, Ma’M’Pho has gone to the shops?’
‘Eh, Jane. Ma’M’Pho has gone to the shops.’
‘How long will Ma’M’Pho stay at the shops, Marta?’
‘I don’t know, Jane. Maybe one hour?’
‘Maybe one hour, Marta? Maybe Ma’M’Pho will be longer?’
‘Ja. Maybe you are right, Jane. Maybe Ma’M’Pho will be longer.’
On and on, over and over, our comings and goings circle around the washing lines in the fenced and walled backyards.
On Friday mornings, Marta folds a ragged towel into a small pad and slowly lowers her thin knees onto it. She arches her back. Her bottom juts out square as an apple as she settles herself on the floor. The house is quiet. Dust motes float in through the open windows. The air is sweet with the syringa tree’s lilac perfume. Isak planted it in the back garden the day we moved into our new house. Doves are hooting and calling.
Marta pulls off the lid from the sticky, round tin of floor polish and sets it to one side. She wraps the greasy polishing cloth around her hand and reaches into the tin, scoops up a thick lump of polish and closes her fingers around it, folding it into the palm of her hand. She kneads it gently and wipes the softened polish across the scuffed surface of the floor. The sweet smell of lavender fills the room with its clean fragrance. By the time she’s spread the polish into all its corners, the surface of the floor is dry and dull.
She picks up the oval brush, its dirty bristles worn almost flat, and with its grubby, striped cotton strap held tightly over the top of her hand, she buffs and polishes with long sweeps of her arm until the wood is burnished like the sun. My arms are around her neck as I ride on her patient, green-overalled back. Polishing and rubbing, erasing the evidence of our days scuffed and scraped into the surfaces of her labour, she’s happy, and reaches back to pat my bottom.
But sometimes her face is closed and quiet. She clicks her tongue, shakes her head.
‘Eh-eh. No, M’Pho.’
I lean down then and press her covered head against mine, squeezing her tightly to give her comfort and love. But when she’s in a good mood, she polishes the teak floors on her hands and knees until we can see our reflections – the rosy pink of her scarf and the plaits behind my ears – smiling back at us from the glossy squares. Sometimes she lets me pretend I’m a cowboy on her back. I call her ‘Bessie’, shout ‘Giddy-up, girl!’ and we gallop away to the wild corners of unknown places.
‘Au, five years old already, M’Pho! Soon you’ll be too heavy to ride on my back. Next year in the big school – then you won’t want to play with me any more – then it will be your sister’s turn …’
I fold my arms and glare down at her. I don’t want anyone else to ride on Marta’s back. I was there first. It’s our game, Marta’s and mine.
It’s late in the afternoon. Marta’s finished her work for the day. She’s standing in the kitchen at the counter in the sun, drinking water from her blue mug. Behind her, the striped yellow-and-white canisters of flour and sugar, coffee and tea are lined up, soldiers standing to attention. The tap over the sink in the corner hasn’t been turned off properly – slow drops of water are plopping down on the hard surface. Ma doesn’t like to see water being wasted. The yellow strips down the middle of the silvery cupboard handles match the Formica tops. Ma’s Sunbeam Mixmaster squats hooded like a sleeping budgie in the corner. Ma’s visiting her friend, Tannie Viljee, for tea.
I’m kneeling on the gold-speckled counter-top, looking out of the kitchen window at the curly pink nerines bobbing above the purple and red anemones.
Under a small tree near the front gate, the garden tap is dripping slowly. Ma’s going to shout at Isak. The lawns run across to the bright flowerbeds against the split-pole fence. Gnats are hovering in ragged little clouds. Bees are sucking at the roses. In the thoughtful, tick-tocking afternoon, a turtledove coos and hums in a poplar tree near the gate. Sandy pants quietly on the kitchen floor. A long, shining thread of saliva hangs from his tongue and pools on the linoleum.
Marta’s eyes are closed. Her lashes are sparse and curly and the tribal cicatrices on her cheeks and forehead look like the perfect circles on my Ludo board. Leaning across the counter, I’m overwhelmed by my love for her.
‘Oh, Marta, listen! Look outside, see how beautiful the day is!’
Carefully, she places her mug on the counter and, standing on her toes, she leans over to gaze out of the window. She nods her covered head.
‘Eh, M’Pho, it is so.’
I turn around on my knees and hug her hard.
‘Oh wait, Marta! Just wait, okay?’
I
