by Rosie Rowell
I was bored, hot, and put out.
Beth flopped down on a rock in front of me and took a slug from the water bottle. ‘Found one,’ she called with a yawn.
Dad double-backed. ‘That’s a goodie,’ he said, getting out his notebook. ‘You’ve got a talent for this, Beth. Going to take after your old dad, huh?’
Beth snorted.
‘What is that?’ asked Xanthe, peering over Beth’s find.
‘A Spirophyton, most likely,’ Dad replied. ‘See the beautiful conical swirls. It was a small invertebrate animal that would have lived on the sea floor. That’s why it’s embedded in the rock.’
‘How old do you think it is?’ asked Xanthe.
Dad rubbed his chin. ‘Anything up to 200 million years.’ He took the stone from Beth and rubbed his finger over it. ‘Each of these rock fragments is a story that is eons old. Each story is slightly different and it’s all here. You simply have to know how to read it.’
Dad was such a nerd. A part of me longed to be as passionate about something, or someone, but nothing seemed interesting enough.
Xanthe took the fossil from him. ‘That’s amazing,’ she said softly, running her fingers over the ridges and grooves the ancient sea slug made against the rock face.
Beth caught my eye and shook her head. ‘Remember that one Simon found? That one was amazing.’
Xanthe raised an eyebrow as she turned the rock over.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ Dad said. ‘Fifty years ago you could find the most extraordinary things up here. This was the real Jurassic Park, not some Hollywood studio. Then holiday makers got to hearing about them, and things started disappearing.’ He shook his head. ‘Now it’s rare to find loose rock with fossil traces on them. It makes me mad.’
As we ate our lunch of cold sausages, cheese and soggy tomato sandwiches and tepid squash, Xanthe jumped up. She was holding a fragment of rock, small enough to fit into the palm of her hand. ‘I found one! It was lying next to me, like it wanted me to find it!’ She looked up at Dad, with shining eyes.
Dad leaned over to have a look. ‘Not bad for a beginner! That’s a lovely little crinoid shape.’
Xanthe held on to her treasure, turning it over and over in her hands. ‘I found one, Madge! A crinoid one!’
I smiled at her, but didn’t trust myself with words, on the off chance that I said: ‘It’s a frigging rock, Xanthe! Get some perspective.’
‘My dad would laugh at me now, all hot and sweaty and fishing around in the dirt for fragments of rock,’ said Xanthe later on.
I looked up. She never talked about her dad.
‘His favourite saying is “He who dies with the most toys, wins”,’ she continued.
Dad laughed.
‘What do you think, Tim?’ Xanthe turned to him. It occurred to me that with Xanthe there had never been the ‘Mr Bergman’ stage. In Leopold anyone older than you was either ‘oom[*]’ or ‘tannie’ – even if you yourself were an adult.
Dad looked away, towards the hovering mountaintops. ‘I don’t know, but then I don’t have that many toys. I think we are all magnificently important and entirely insignificant. Each of us has our place and time, nothing we do can help us extend that. The San and the Khoi people who painted the rocks around here, who left behind their stories for us, they knew that. Their time may have passed, but their significance remains.’
In the thick afternoon sun a jackal buzzard screamed above us. Dad stretched. ‘Enough mumbo-jumbo from me. Another half hour in purgatory, Beth, then we’re off.’ He turned in the direction of a clump of rocks nearby.
Xanthe watched him walk away. ‘Your dad is cool, Madgie.’
As we bumped our way back along the track, tired and sun baked and dirty, I felt as irritable as though sand had been caught between the layers of my skin. Xanthe was supposed to think I was cool – not Dad! Each time I felt close to understanding Xanthe’s world she changed the rules and left me as clueless as the day she arrived.
*. Gullies
*. Scoundrel
*. Uncle or adult man
CHAPTER TWELVE
Xanthe was gone, back home for the ten-day September holidays, leaving me in the valley of death. Though I’d have not thought it possible, it was worse than before.
Dad had gone too, into his study, to his other life of paleontological hypotheses and publishing deadlines, his door firmly closed.
Marta had gone, to visit her sister and pick up Simon in Cape Town. Without Marta the house was slowly falling apart. The ironing grew into piles that Mum would stand and look at, and then leave. The kitchen stood empty and quiet. Without the smell of banana bread wafting through the house; without the sound of pots banging and the rhythmic drone of the gospel radio station; without a curry on the stove, it did not seem like our kitchen.
That left Mum and Beth and me. I wandered around the house, picking things up and putting them down again. I sat on the top step of the stoep, looking out over the garden until my bum ached so much on the hard stone that I couldn’t bear it anymore. I was once again waiting, waiting away my life. In the empty days my mind kept pouncing on Simon’s return. I had to talk myself away from the same panic I felt each time he was due back from school. But this time was different – I had Xanthe. I’d barely notice he was around.
Midway through the week I found Mum in the courtyard, kneeling over her pots of bulbs. For want of anything else to do, I sat down and watched her digging them up, shaking the soil off gently and then laying them down in a growing pile. She spent a ridiculous amount of time on them, when all they did was flower for a few weeks, then she’d pack them away again. She told us stories of the spring bulbs pushing through the hard winter earth in England, first snowdrops and then daffodils and bluebells, how they meant an end to the interminable cold. That world was as unreal to me as the Christmas cards of cheerful robins and snow-dusted windowpanes. Our wild flowers made a mockery of pots and flowerbeds. They burst through pavement cracks in rioting reds and oranges, squeezed out between walls and fence posts and rock face in violets and yellows and blues. They transformed whole valleys into a runaway blaze of colour. Mum’s daffodils and irises seemed contrived in comparison, the opposite of what spring was about.
‘Well that’s it for this year,’ Mum said without looking up. I was surprised; I didn’t think she’d noticed me.
‘What?’
‘Spring. Do you know that you get more suicides in spring than any other time of year?’
‘Why wait till spring?’
‘Exactly.’ She sat back and looked at me. ‘Pass me that bag, won’t you.’ She pointed at a Checkers plastic packet lying a few feet in front of me.
I leaned over and chucked it in her direction but it landed in the space between us.
She gave me a withering look.
Making a big show of it, I got up and dropped it next to her, then sat down in a deck chair nearby. ‘I feel pretty suicidal at the thought of many more springs in Leopold.’
Mum laughed. ‘The worst of it is, you’re going to look back on this as the best time of your life.’
‘Kill me now.’
Beth appeared wearing one of Mum’s oldest dresses – a floor-length 1970s evening gown. The hideous pattern was made up of large swirls of blue and green and mauve paisley.
‘Oh, that dress!’ Mum laughed, clapping her hands.
Beth had pinned her hair in a single braid around her head, Heidi-style. She stretched out her arms to show off the enormous blue chiffon bat wings and did a twirl.
‘Going anywhere special?’ asked Mum.
‘Might be,’ replied Beth as she sat down at the edge of a lounger chair. ‘You never know.’
I snorted.
‘What?’ said Beth. ‘You don’t know what’s going to happen ten minutes from now.’
‘I have a pretty good guess.’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘Beth, you look gorgeous. Far better than I looked in it,’ Mum cut in.
‘My mother gave that dress to me,’ said Mum. As always the words ‘my mother’ came out an octave lower, with a little shake of her head. ‘She had it made for my first grown-up dinner party. God, what an awful night.’ Mum sucked in her breath at the memory. ‘She spent the evening steering me around the room, introducing me to all the suitable young men, saying: “Have you met my daughter Vivienne?’ and then she would smile at them, but it was scary, she’d sort of bare her teeth.’
‘Like this?’ Beth mimicked the way Mum smiled at Hannes. Dad called it the ‘Salisbury Rictus’, after the day Mum presented him to my English grandmother.
‘Yes!’ laughed Mum. ‘How did you know? It wasn’t all bad though. That was the night I met Lawrence.’
‘Lawrence! Of like Arabia?’ said Beth, wrinkling up her nose with distaste. ‘Who’d call their son Lawrence?’
‘Oh, that was a long time before Dad,’ said Mum. She flicked her hair. Unlike Dad’s stories that grew more improbable and funnier with each telling, Mum’s ‘growing up’ stories, about places and friends and family we’d never met, always felt like a betrayal.
‘But look!’ Mum stood up, soil raining from her lap. She walked over to Beth and picked up a sleeve. ‘Moths!’ The length of the sleeve was pockmarked with holes.
Mum was quiet for a long time, staring at the sleeve in her hand. Beth looked at me. I shrugged. Eventually Mum sighed, the weight of which pulled her whole chest downwards. ‘It’s just a dress,’ she said softly to herself, and looking up at Beth and me repeated: ‘It’s just a dress.’
She let go of the sleeve and sat back into the chair next to me, all the time studying Beth.
‘Do you want me to take it off?’ asked Beth.
Mum smiled. ‘No, no! It’s lovely to see it again. I don’t know why I keep it buried at the back of my wardrobe. I should wear it more often.’
‘Oh dear God,’ I said.
From behind the closed study door came the low rumble of Dad clearing his throat. Things weren’t yet back to normal between my parents. Dad’s continuing quiet made Mum skittish. She found reasons to avoid the shops, but Dad had been right about the talk. After two weeks there was nothing more to be said.
Outside a lorry clattered by on the cement road – ka-donk, ka-donk, ka-donk.
‘My girls,’ Mum smiled, looking at us. ‘It’s moments like these that a mother will never forget. Moments of quiet.’ She said it with the tiniest of glances in my direction. She leaned back into the chair and closed her eyes.
Beth jumped up and, cupping her hands together at her chest, like Mimi Coertse, started singing ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’, in a falsetto. Mum laughed, still with her eyes closed and said, ‘Let’s have tea and cake out here.’
Beth broke off her song. ‘There’s no cake, Ma. There’s nothing left to eat.’
Mum opened her eyes and sat up. ‘There’s always something to eat.’ A few minutes later she returned with tea and a box of After Eight dinner mints.
Holding a mug of tea in her hand and with half a mint wafer in her mouth, Mum turned to me: ‘Have you heard from Xanthe?’
‘No.’
‘Why don’t you give her a call? Do you have her number?’
‘No.’
‘Was she going away?’
‘I don’t know!’
‘She’ll be with her Cape Town friends,’ said Beth, licking chocolate off her fingers.
‘Don’t be cruel, Beth,’ said Mum.
‘Why is that cruel?’ I snapped. ‘I don’t care.’
‘She’ll be back soon,’ said Mum. Then, after a moment, in her careful voice, she said, ‘She’s very lucky to have you as a friend. She gets an awful lot out of this friendship.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I felt like a sea anenome when it’s poked.
Mum pulled her mouth tight, then speaking slowly and delicately, said, ‘I’m not sure that she gives as much as she takes.’
‘Why do you always have to make everything so heavy?’
‘And she’s a troublemaker,’ said Beth, pulling at the hem of the dress.
‘Shut up!’ I shouted at Beth.
‘OK,’ said Mum, holding up her hands. ‘Enough.’
Having to listen to them was like having holes drilled through your eye sockets. I wanted to leave Beth in her ridiculous dress and Mum with her soil-encrusted knees, but I couldn’t stand my room any longer, or the sitting room or the garden.
‘Angel came by this morning,’ said Mum. She smoothed out the green foil chocolate wrapper on the wooden arm of the chair.
‘Angel?’
‘Yup. Looking for Marta.’
‘But –’
‘I know. Her baby, her child, I mean, is sick. She needed money for the clinic.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I gave her some money and told her to come back next week.’ Mum folded the foil in half and half again. ‘But she won’t.’
‘Did you give her some condoms too and a pamphlet on sexual health?’
Mum looked up. ‘Not so funny. She looked terrible, too thin.’
Of course she would be sick! In Mum’s world Angel could never be healthy and happy and having a good life.
‘Are you going to tell Marta?’
‘I don’t know. She’s very caught up in Simon’s return and what he’ll do next.’
‘It’s not fair the way Marta’s written Angel off,’ I said.
Mum raised her eyebrows. ‘The funny thing is that I always thought Angel sharper than Simon. Simon’s quick and determined, but Angel – that little girl was something else.’
‘Why would Marta do that then? It’s not very Christian.’
‘Perhaps she couldn’t bear to watch her daughter end up with exactly the same life as her.’
‘So if I do something you don’t like, will you cut me off?’
Mum looked at me. ‘What do you think? I’ll make your life a misery, but I’ll never let you go. That’s what love is about,’ she added quietly, looking down at her fingers. ‘At some point we’re all going to do something that hurts the people who love us. The more they love us, the more it hurts. It’s a fact of life. But love is bigger than actions.’
I knew she was talking about her own mother, far away in a town called Salisbury where it always rained, but even so I felt anger combust in every cell of my body. I dumped my mug on the stone and stood up. ‘That’s typical of you!’ I said. ‘That’s exactly why we don’t have any friends in this town, why people see us coming and cross the road. When you love someone, you don’t do things that hurt them. You don’t!’
I marched away. Safely on the other side of the kitchen swing door, my anger evaporated. I looked back out through the mesh. Mum was sitting perfectly still in the chair, looking down at the tiny square of green foil in her hands.
I sighed. ‘It’s not fair,’ I said to the empty kitchen, to the space where Marta should have been.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Marta arrived the next morning as we were eating breakfast.
‘Marta!’ said Mum. Her cheeks filled with colour that had been missing since the article appeared.
‘Good holiday, Marta?’ asked Dad, looking up from his newspaper.
‘Thank you, Mister Tim,’ replied Marta. She was carrying a yellow plastic bag with the words ‘Duty Free’ in large red writing.
‘Sister well?’ continued Dad, returning to his article.
‘As well as can be.’ Marta did not think much of her sister’s family-in-law. They were Seventh Day Adventists.
‘It’s been a long week, Marta,’ he said, patting Mum’s hand. ‘Do I look thinner? I feel thinner.’
Marta tutted with pleasure.
‘What’s in the bag?’ asked Beth. ‘Did Simon bring you tonnes of presents?’
Marta looked down at the bag. ‘Stuff and nonsense and Venetian glass.’ She shook her head. �
��Now what must I do with it? Imagine if Sister Bertha heard I had Venetian glass in my front room!’
Mum smiled. ‘How is Simon?’
‘He will be down to greet this afternoon.’
‘Plenty of time for that,’ said Dad. ‘He probably needs to rest up.’
Marta sniffed. ‘What has he been doing but resting this whole year? The child needs to make himself useful.’
‘Send him to me,’ said Dad, scanning the sports section, ‘I’m in dire need of somebody useful.’
Simon sat on the wall of the stoep in the late afternoon sun, leaning back on his right arm. I froze, and then stepped back into the family room, into the dark shadow cast by the open door.
He twitched, a sensory movement, an intuition. His eyes flickered towards the doorway. I held my breath, but after a second he turned away.
‘There is so much hot air circulating around this country at the moment,’ came Dad’s voice, ‘I’m surprised we haven’t taken off in the breeze.’
I examined this person who had replaced the grasshopper boy I knew, whom only nine months previously had sat on the same spot, mumbling and fidgety the day before he left for overseas. He wore long beige ‘Out of Africa’ shorts. Slipslops dangled from his toes. His brown ochre skin had paled away from the African sun. It would be a different colour on the chart now. Muscles moulded his arms where they protruded from his white T-shirt. I didn’t remember muscles.
As he took a sip of beer from the Amstel bottle next to him, I noticed a collection of leather bracelets on his wrist. And his hand, holding the green bottle, once too big, seemed to fit him perfectly.
‘It’s politics, Tim,’ replied Mum. ‘It’s what happens in a general election.’
‘Thank goodness for my wife, Simon, or how else would we navigate the modern world?’
I shook my head at my parents. They had entered into a careful truce, most likely for the benefit of Marta and Simon, but at least they were talking.
Simon smiled. His hair was cut very short. His face had changed shape, like silly putty drawn out wider and longer. He put down his beer and scratched his chin. It was stubbly now.