by Rosie Rowell
I froze. ‘That’s a big fat lie, Beth,’ I said, looking from her to Dad. He raised one eyebrow.
‘No it’s not,’ she said happily. After another bite of toast, she added: ‘Not just once, either!’
‘Liar!’
‘Am not. Ronel’s mother works in the office. She’s seen her school record.’
Dad digested the news. ‘Meg?’
‘I’m sure it’s not true,’ I said.
Beth sat back in her chair, grinning.
Of course it made sense. It was the reason Xanthe had arrived mid-term, it was apparent in the way the teachers treated her. I turned to Dad: ‘Even if it is, you’ve often said that everyone deserves a second chance.’
‘Or third,’ Beth butted in.
‘Shut up!’
‘Enough, both of you! You know better than to tell tales, Beth.’
I glared at Beth but she made a face and left the table. We used to be a team. Before Xanthe arrived she’d never have done that. She could only be jealous.
Before bed I stood in front of my mirror, repeating Xanthe’s words and mannerisms that had seemed to charm Mum rather than infuriate her. But my cheeky grin looked like a disfigured sneer and my nonchalant face sulky. I lifted my hair up and back to see what it would look like short and chopped off. I looked like an overfed baby. Suddenly I caught sight of Mum in the reflection of the mirror. My arms dropped down to my sides. Dad would have told her about Xanthe’s school record. I braced myself for an inquisition.
Instead, she stepped up behind me and wrapped her arms around my waist. ‘I like your friend. She has … character.’ She kissed my hair, and rested her chin on my shoulder. I tried to lean back into her as I knew she wanted me to, but my joints felt locked. She smiled at me in the mirror and after a moment whispered, ‘You’re far more beautiful than Xanthe, you know.’
*. Barbecue
**. Corn on the cob
*. The Dutch Reformed Church minister
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sometimes I wondered what Mum had been thinking when she married Dad. She had left England, her home and friends and career to live in a small community where she would never belong. She had gambled her whole life on him. Much as I loved him, it seemed like an awfully big risk.
Mum hadn’t made any farm visits since Xanthe had arrived. She had stopped standing in front of the clinic, harassing lactating mothers. She seemed more relaxed. She had even tried being funny.
A week and a half after Xanthe came to lunch, Mum arrived at the supper table holding a sheet of folded newsprint. Beth was fretting about finishing supper in time to see Beverly Hills 90210. The radio was set up next to the TV so that we could listen to the simulcast original English dialogue, rather than endure SABC’s Afrikaans translation. Last week Shannen Doherty had found a lump in her breast. The episode before that she’d had a pregnancy scare.
‘Ridiculous!’ Mum would mutter, but that didn’t stop her watching. I only stayed for Luke Perry.
After a few mouthfuls of spaghetti Mum put down her fork. She glanced at Dad and then turned to me. ‘Have a read about your famous mum! Bibi wrote a feature for The Herald about the HIV/AIDS awareness workshops I’ve been doing.’
‘What? Why?’ I asked, taking the newspaper from her.
In the depths of the Karoo region of South Africa a small Afrikaans farming community run huge tracks of land with the help of a large quasi-feudal labour system. In stark contrast to their white Afrikaner bosses, these labourers own nothing, not their house, their own futures, barely even the clothes on their backs. Education is scant, illiteracy is common. Many farms still practise the ‘dop’ system: they pay their labourers in alcohol.
‘This is rubbish,’ I said. ‘We don’t live in the Karoo.’
Mum rolled her eyes.
Malnutrition is high, pneumonia and tuberculosis everyday diseases. Add to this the bleak reality of the HIV/AIDS virus and the terrible result is a potentially dreadful loss of human life.
One woman is trying to make a difference, despite the enormous pressure of the white Afrikaans community. Dr Vivienne Bergman, a Cambridge graduate originally from Salisbury, has been living in the region for almost twenty years. She has taken it upon herself to roll out a series of workshops to educate and inform these abject communities about the spread and terrible consequences of HIV, much to the chagrin of the Boer community.
I looked at Dad. This was appalling. If anyone ever saw this, Mum would be ostracised forever. We would all be. The throbbing in my head made it impossible to clutch at the right words.
‘I wouldn’t worry too much about it, Meg. Your grandmother once told me that only black lesbians read The Herald,’ he said.
‘Well, it’s nice that the black lesbians of England know that I’m trying to make a difference!’ Mum laughed. ‘I’m sorry you can’t see the good in it, Meg. Not to say a little disappointed. The thing is,’ she paused and looked at Dad, ‘The Sunday Times Magazine is going to publish the article this weekend.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ I said. ‘You said no, right?’
Her laughter rattled around the room, searching for somewhere to settle. ‘Why would I refuse? This disease is about to become a national crisis. This article could save peoples’ lives.’ She looked back at Dad. ‘It really could.’ Her voice was firm.
He was silent. His elbows dug down into the tablecloth; his left hand covered his right fist. He knocked his hands back and forth against his chin.
‘You didn’t even ask Dad!’ I said.
Mum turned to me. ‘This is not the nineteenth century. I do not have to ask your father’s permission. The appropriate response is, “Well done, Mum, that’s great news!”’
‘Fuck that,’ I muttered.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘How can you put a bunch of farm workers ahead of your family? You know exactly how people are going to react here.’
‘It’s a piece of journalism, Meg. No one here reads The Sunday Times.’
‘Are you insane? Everyone from here to bloody Bloemfontein will know about this before lunchtime on Sunday!’
‘That’s enough,’ said Dad, the warning shot.
‘Well done, Mum, that’s great news!’ I said in my sweetest voice. ‘As if you don’t make life difficult enough already.’ I pushed back my chair and stood up.
‘Sit. Down.’ Mum’s voice wobbled with barely controlled anger. ‘Sit down, bloody child, and finish your supper. I am sick to death of your tantrums. As long as you’re under this roof you will behave like a civilised person.’
‘Or what?’ I said. Through tunnels of rushing blood I heard Beth’s intake of breath.
‘Or I’ll ground you for the rest of the year.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! That’s more than two months, you fat witch!’ I felt like shouting. But I knew she’d do it, on principle if nothing else. I sat down noisily and stared down at my untouched plate. Knives and forks clattered through the silence. The hall clock struck a single chime. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Beth reach across and squeeze Mum’s hand. She responded with a watery smile. How dare she? She was the one causing all the trouble! I bit my tongue until the pain took my mind off the desire to burst into tears.
Dad was the first to finish. He folded his napkin next to his plate and left the room. In an amplified silence we listened to his study door shut.
Later that evening he appeared at my bedroom. He leaned wearily against the doorframe, as though it were propping him up.
‘Meg, your behaviour –’
‘You know what damage this article will do, Dad. The people she’s writing about are your friends.’
‘I know.’
‘So how can you stand by and let it get printed?’
He screwed his eyes shut, and rubbed his forehead a few times. ‘Your rudeness was unacceptable, Meg.’
‘Come on, Dad!’
He sighed. ‘Soon after your mother and I met, I travelled with her to England. S
he needed to complete her internship and I thought, Why not – how bad could it be?’ He smiled. ‘I tried living there.’ He shook his head. ‘In the end I realised I am not made to survive outside my natural territory – I was like a plant dug up and replanted in alien soil.
‘Your grandmother found me a job in a life insurance company. I sorted files all day on the top floor of a huge, ugly building, surrounded by mountains of boxed paper. There was one window, right up at the top of the vast room, and I’d climb up a stack of boxes and spend hours looking out through the filthy glass at the green hills in the distance.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘By coming to live here, your mother has done something for me that I wouldn’t ever have been able to do for her.’
‘So you’re going to feel guilty for the rest of your life?’
‘One day you’ll understand.’ He smiled. ‘Sleep tight, princess.’ He blew me a kiss that did not make it across the room.
CHAPTER NINE
I paused at the stop sign and waited for Xanthe to catch up.
‘It’s rather hot for a mystery bike ride,’ she called. She was wobbling slightly on her bicycle. I remembered too late that the saddle on that one was loose.
‘This is not hot, Xanthe,’ I muttered to myself.
‘Do you know,’ she said as she stopped next to me, ‘where I come from, they’ve invented things called gears for bicycles.’
‘My mother brought them with her from England.’
‘Go figure,’ Xanthe muttered.
I pushed off and turned towards Bosmansberg.
‘We’re leaving town?’ Xanthe asked behind me.
‘We’re leaving town!’ I shouted as I pedalled away. After the bridge I turned onto the road that led past the agricultural college.
‘Are we going to meet some boys?’ called Xanthe, speeding up momentarily.
‘Not exactly,’ I replied, struggling to contain the dread. I’d shown Xanthe the library. We’d tried the double-size flake 99 soft-serve ice creams at Ricci’s café. The park, she said, resembled a parking lot gone to seed. The flower show had been ‘Nice, if you’re into flowers’. If I took her to the river Beth would follow us. Leopold’s grave was the only place left to go.
I knew she’d rather have stayed at home. ‘I like it at your house,’ she said after Sunday lunch. ‘Your family is so, I don’t know how to describe it … ’
‘Weird,’ I’d suggested.
‘Obviously, but in an unusual way.’
But I couldn’t be at home today. I couldn’t bear to watch Xanthe charm Mum and I didn’t trust Beth not to make a scene.
Long-armed sprinklers stretched across the college rugby fields, mechanical albatrosses lining up to take off. The grounds were deserted. Past the red-brick buildings, the land was neatly divided, a life-size ‘let’s play farm’ board game. To our left were green mielie fields, and beyond those, as far as the surrounding hills would allow, citrus orchards. The fields on our right stretched down to the river. This was where the boys practised ploughing, spraying, harvesting and crop rotation and where the school’s small herds of cattle and sheep grazed.
A bend in the road acted as the boundary. Bosmansberg rose up too steeply to allow any form of cultivation, and rocky scrub took over. It was also where the tar stopped. Within minutes the itch in my arms from riding over gravel was unbearable. Behind me Xanthe cursed.
On our right the river dipped away. We were surrounded by veld and sky. Leopold’s grave was around the corner, a few minutes’ walk from the road. It was in the middle of a clearing, on the site of an ancient San stopover point. With a little digging you could still find their sharp-edged stones and pounded-out rocks. Mum claimed it was deeply insulting to the San to have Leopold buried there. It was ‘blanket bullying’ and ‘a prime example of the rampant cultural insensitivity of the minority rule’. It was one of the few subjects on which my parents did not agree.
‘Why would Leopold have asked to be buried all the way out here rather than in the church graveyard?’ I’d asked the last time we’d visited it.
‘Because he had a soul,’ Dad had replied.
Mum snorted.
‘Are you denying a man a soul because he is born Dutch and not a San huntsman?’ Dad knew how to make a point.
I gripped the handlebars at the thought of Mum. Far worse than her annoyance with me was the politeness that had wedged itself between her and Dad. Each day passed more slowly than the last. The second hand of the hall clock kept time to our waiting. On it ticked towards tomorrow and the publication of the article, like the timer attached to a bomb.
A large gum tree marked the entrance to the grave. ‘Here we are.’ I looked back.
Xanthe’s pale skin was blotchy, her glacial eyes had retreated from view. A greasy chain print patterned her ankle. She absorbed the vast expanse of nothingness with a raised eyebrow.
I slung the satchel around my shoulder and let my bicycle fall at the side of the road.
‘Aren’t you worried someone will take it?’
‘Like who?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Like a baboon?’ I teased.
Instead of the expected laugh, Xanthe hesitated. ‘Baboons are dangerous.’
‘They can be.’
‘They jump on your car and steal your food.’
For the first time I understood the look Dad often gave me. ‘We’re OK, then.’
‘Seriously, Madge, what we’re doing here?’
I started up the path, pushing aside spear-tipped grass reeds and overgrown fynbos[*] as we walked. I thought about mentioning the possibility of snakes, but after her reaction to baboons, decided against it. ‘We’re going to Leopold’s grave. It’s nothing special. I used to come here with Simon.’ I stopped.
‘Who’s Simon?’
I looked up at the empty sky. ‘Marta’s boy.’
‘Chilling out in a graveyard. That’s pretty dark for you, Madge.’
‘You’ve seen the alternatives,’ I replied, ignoring the smile twitching about on Xanthe’s lips.
The silence in the clearing was older than the world. The air had not let go of the recent rain. I dropped the bag under the sprawling wild olive tree and wandered towards the cave. It was shallow, as though a hand had reached in and scooped out the front section. As well as their discarded tools, the San had left behind the story of an elephant hunt on the back wall. Simon and I believed there was something magical about this cave. The sun reached a point mid-afternoon where its rays fell directly on to the smooth rockface. As it did so, the yellow-brown stone turned an orangey-red; the ochre San huntsmen golden. We had a game: if we sat very still, held our breath and half-closed our eyes, we were sure we could see them move. I’d never tell Xanthe about that.
Leopold’s grave was in the middle of the clearing. The raised cement casing was enclosed in a rusted iron fence. The original gravestone had been replaced a few years ago with a grand grey slab. Xanthe leaned over and read the carved words: ‘“Yeah though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no ill.”’ She humphed. ‘But you didn’t, did you?’
‘Hey?’
‘This Leopold guy.’ She turned and jabbed her finger at the gravestone. ‘You, Johannes Basson Leopold, you didn’t keep walking, And now Madge has to live in the valley of death. You should be ashamed of yourself.’
My first instinct was to snap: ‘Come on, Xanthe, it’s not that bad,’ but I caught myself and said, ‘They say he’s a restless soul.’
‘You don’t scare me, Madgie.’
She sat down next to me on a rock. I pulled out two oranges from my bag and handed one to her.
‘What exactly did you two do here?’ she asked, peeling her orange. She stood up, letting her peel fall to the ground, and walked into the cave. It took her a few moments to find the paintings. She ate her orange in silence, standing in front of the copper hunstmen pursuing their elephant.
I picked up her peel and put it in the backpack.
I looked up. She walked towards me, holding a stick. Quivering on the end of it was something limp and rubbery. Bits of dirt and leaf stuck to it. I stood up to see what it was. She waved the stick, dangling the thing at me.
‘Yuck!’ I laughed and jumped out of her way. Then I saw the white and blue plastic wrapper on the ground. It came from Mum’s bucket.
‘You and your friend?’ Xanthe asked.
‘Xanthe!’
She held out the stick between us, a drawn sword. ‘Have you kissed him?’
‘Don’t be weird.’
The stick hovered a moment longer, then she chucked it into the nearby bushes.
‘Just kidding. Have you kissed anyone?’
I looked down. ‘So this is all there is to see. A grave in a cave.’
‘Aha! I knew it,’ she said, and we both knew what she was referring to.
I walked back to the satchel on the rock. I needed to say something funny, but I was so humiliated that I didn’t trust myself not to cry. With my back still turned, I fished out the bottle of water and took a sip.
‘Madge, come on, I was teasing.’ Xanthe’s voice was much closer than I expected. ‘Hey, listen, it’s not your fault, it’s this town. The real worry would be if you had kissed someone here!’ She laughed.
I smiled into the plastic bottle and sipped again.
‘But tell me, Margaret Bergman, are you really planning on saving yourself until you’re married?’ she asked, in Juffrou du Plessis’ heavily accented English.
I choked on the water. Half of it went up my nose, which hurt so much that my eyes stung. The rest landed up on the ground.
‘You have to think about these things, Madge. What if you don’t get married?’
‘I don’t know.’ I wiped my nose on the back of my arm. ‘Maybe if I’m like sixty and haven’t gotten married I’ll have sex, to know what it’s like.’
Xanthe snorted.
‘Or fifty,’ I said. ‘You’re probably too old to have sex at sixty.’