by Rosie Rowell
‘I’ll get it,’ said Simon, opening his door.
I met Dad’s glare with a glower. ‘Snap out of it, my girl,’ he growled as he swung the car into the drive.
As Dad unpacked a box of medicines Mum had sent, we made our way across a scrub-and-dust field behind the farmhouse until we reached the hill. The best trees were found halfway up. I let Simon walk ahead of me. Soon we were swallowed up by the trees. Forests made me nervous. There was too little light. The crunching pine needles underfoot seemed too loud against the eerie silence. I stopped. Simon didn’t need me there to chop down the tree. I didn’t see why I should trudge up the mountain only to stand there and watch him.
‘Are you coming?’ Simon called. He started back towards me, disappearing and reappearing between trees. He had taken his sweatshirt off and tied it around his waist.
What did he care about? Not his mother or sister. He thought only about himself.
‘What’s your problem?’ I said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I care about lots of things, for your information.’
‘OK.’ He turned away. His new arm muscles were glistening.
‘What did your question even mean?’
‘I thought perhaps you had an opinion, Meg. Let’s get the tree.’
‘I have opinions!’ I shouted. ‘What does it matter what I think about the politicians? What difference does it make?’
‘A country is made up of individual opinions.’
‘Rubbish! What difference does Mum make? None!’
‘You’re wrong.’ He picked up the axe and stalked off.
I watched him, seething. I felt robbed of my position at home, of my closeness with Dad. ‘What are you doing back here, Simon?’ I shouted.
He didn’t stop walking.
‘Why do you keep hanging around Dad, hey?’
Still he ignored me.
‘Need more money?’
I bit my lip. I had gone too far.
In a few strides Simon was standing in front of me, so close that I felt his spittle. I’d never seen him that angry before. He looked like he wanted to shake me. I felt intensely alive.
‘I thought I’d screw your best friend. She’s a dog on heat around me.’
At first his words didn’t make sense. I stared at him. Then in a delayed realisation, I gasped and stepped backwards.
‘This is the new South Africa, Meg. Us coloureds are allowed to answer back.’
I fled, running, slipping, tripping over needles and roots and tree stumps down the mountain. When I reached the bottom, blood prickling out of the scratches on my ankles and palms, I turned to find myself alone. I was so angry that he hadn’t followed me that I screamed, ‘You ruin everything in my life!’
I ran along the fence line as far as I could, until I doubled over from the pain in my chest. Simon’s eyes burnt into my vision. He hated me. I shuddered. What did he mean ‘dog on heat’? Did he really mean that – no, surely not! I sat down. Calm down, I told myself. He’d be off to university soon. Probably even before Xanthe got back and then everything would be fine. But as I forced my breath to slow, he sat down next to me.
I pressed my knuckles into my eyes to block him out. Hannes had once told me of a baboon he had shot. When the animal had seen Hannes’ gun and realised he was trapped, he’d gouged out his eyes rather than face his death.
‘Old Witbooi is still alive and kicking.’ Simon broke the silence. ‘He must be like 150 by now. And how’s about that new mechanics store.’ He whistled. ‘Lar-ny[*] for little old Leopold.’
‘It’s not new,’ I mumbled. ‘It’s been here at least a year.’
‘Kind of new then.’
I opened my eyes. Darts of red and yellow criss-crossed my vision.
He picked up a stone and chipped away at the dry earth. ‘How’s school?’
Back to Xanthe. ‘Considering I’m on holiday, fine.’ I scooped up a handful of needles and jabbed their pointy tips into my leg. The leadenness in my heart threatened to leak out into my veins and stop my blood. I knew it was my cue to apologise, but after what he’d said about Xanthe, I couldn’t.
‘Stop trying to be friends, OK? You think you’re God’s gift to … everyone, with your fancy accent and your big overseas talk – well, I’m not taken in. Leave me alone.’ I paused. ‘And my friend too.’
Teetering at the top of the stepladder, I tried to lasso the string of Christmas lights around the top branches of the tree.
‘This is the best one ever!’ Mum enthused from beneath me. ‘The best pine tree.’
I was still too shocked by the afternoon to answer. Simon had walked away from me without a word, and he’d been silent all the way home. Dad blamed me.
As I took a bauble from Mum’s outstretched hand I looked down. I could tell by her tight mouth and the way her eyes darted backwards and forth that she was practising immense restraint not to say, ‘Two hands!’
‘Is everything alright, Meg?’ she asked.
‘I’m fine,’ I muttered.
‘Are you sure you want to go to Xanthe’s? You don’t have to,’ Mum said a few minutes later.
‘Of course I’m sure!’ I shouted, wobbling in my violent reaction. I was now more sure than ever. The stepladder shook. Mum’s eyes darted to the bauble in my hand.
I had to get away. I longed to be at Xanthe’s almost as much as the prospect terrified me.
‘They’re different to us,’ Mum said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Their values.’
‘What do you know about their values? You’ve only met Shirley once!’
‘That’s another thing.’ She held out her hand to me, to help me down, but I ignored her.
The orange bauble was cupped in my hand, like a baby chick, the way Simon had taught me to do. ‘Are you saying that I can’t go?’
She smiled. ‘You’re fifteen years old, Meg, of course you can go. Only –’ She sighed and looked around the room, as if her next sentence was waiting for her on the window sill, ‘Know who you are. Don’t be too impressed by otherness; it’s nothing more than a façade.’
‘Just because you ran away from the world, you think you’re better than everyone else. But I want to be like them!’ I shouted. The bauble flew out of my hand and smashed to the ground. Even before the million splintered fragments of glistening orange and gold had settled I was clambering down. ‘I’m sorry, Mummy,’ I tried to reach her across the room. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s only a bauble, Meg,’ she said, and left the room.
*. Good Lord!
*. Small hill
*. Posh
CHAPTER TWENTY
Xanthe lived in a leafy suburb of Cape Town – in a double-storey Victorian house nestled into a tapestry of green. A thick cover of trees cascaded down the mountainside to the edge of their garden. It seemed incredible that this mountain, so green and flat and neat, was made of the same rock as the jagged, parched peaks back at home.
I had always longed to live in a double-storey house. Ours was squat and heavy – a tired, swollen-ankled matron. Xanthe’s in comparison was a leggy model. A ground-floor veranda and upstairs balcony ran along the front and right-hand side. The long, thin poles that supported the veranda and the upstairs balcony looked elegant and sleek. Dove-grey wrought-iron broekie lace[*] decorated the underside of the upstairs balcony – jewelled fringes to this fine lady’s gown.
I followed Xanthe up the garden path. A bamboo wind-chime hanging from the branch of an oak tree knocked lazily against itself.
‘My mother has discovered feng shui,’ said Xanthe, turning back to make a face. She led me up the steps of the veranda and in through the front door.
‘Feng what?’ I asked.
Pale floorboards ran the length of the wide front hall, across to the staircase. A suggestion of jasmine blossom floated in the air. Our house smelled of polish and thatch. To the left was a dining room; to the right, through a set of glass
-paned doors, was a large sitting room across from which French doors opened onto the veranda, the garden and the mountain above.
‘Feng shui,’ said Xanthe. ‘After her trip to Hong Kong last year she changed the whole house around, to keep the dragons out.’
‘No, no!’ Shirley had caught up with us, ‘It’s to allow the dragon free access through our house on its way down the mountain to the sea.’
‘The dragon,’ said Xanthe slowly, looking at Shirley.
‘Why not?’ With an expansive sweep of her arms, as though in an aerobics class, Shirley illustrated the dragon’s passage down the mountain, in through the French doors, across the hall and out through the dining room. Shirley’s hands hovered in the air as we examined the dragon’s exit point – a rather small window.
‘It’s a bit of a squeeze for it to get out, but your father wouldn’t hear of me putting in another set of doors.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘So I leave it open all the time.’
Xanthe shook her head. I turned away to stop myself from giggling. Inside the sitting room was a gleaming baby grand piano. On its closed lid was a vase of blue chrysanthemums and a cluster of silver-framed photographs.
‘Do you play?’ I asked Xanthe.
‘I don’t think it works. My mother bought it so that she had somewhere to put the photographs.’
‘Xanthe!’ Shirley laughed. I stepped closer. A few of the pictures were of Xanthe’s parents together. Shirley held the same pose in each one – her arms around her husband’s waist and a wide, radiant smile. His name was Alan – I remembered from the prize-giving lunch. He stood tall and stiff, one hand on his hip, staring intently at the camera – his brows drawn over the dark pools of his eyes. There was only one picture of him laughing: he was holding a fish a metre long. Even his eyes twinkled, as though the person taking the picture had said something very funny.
There were a lots of Xanthe: lounging on the back of a boat; sitting next to Alan on the steps in front of some ancient ruins – Rome, perhaps, or Greece. Simon would know, I thought and bristled at the thought of him. Another picture was of her standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, looking bored. I smiled. Only Xanthe could be bored in front of the Eiffel Tower. The rest of the pictures were of a podgy blonde child with a wide, impish smile. I leaned forward to peer at the little girl in a pink ballet tutu, standing on tippy-toes, ready to twirl away.
‘Oh!’ I said and looked up.
Xanthe laughed.
Shirley stepped beside me. ‘My blonde baby,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘If you had that hair you wouldn’t cover it in a mucky black dye, would you?’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ I said.
‘Come and put your bag down, Meg. I thought about putting you in the guest room, but you can’t very well have midnight feasts when you’re all the way down the passage, can you?
‘What?’ Xanthe wrinkled up her nose.
‘Midnight feasts, painting each other’s toenails, swapping secrets. I remember it all!’ said Shirley, leading the way upstairs.
Xanthe looked back at me and rolled her eyes.
At the entrance to Xanthe’s room I stopped. She had my curtains! Not my disgusting purple ones, but the curtains I’d imagined would change my life. Metres of the beautiful fabric billowed gently in the breeze, from the top of the tall sash window, gathering in an indulgent pile on the carpet.
‘Wow!’ I breathed. A quilt was folded over the end of her cast-iron bedstead. It was made of striped fabric in the same green and buttercup yellow as the curtains. Along the far wall was another window. This one had a deep seat. I could spend days there, reading and dreaming.
‘I love these curtains!’ I said. ‘It’s Biggie Best fabric, isn’t it?’ I said, running my hand over the quilt.
‘If you say so. Stop stroking my bed.’
I laughed. In a room like this I would always be happy.
Shirley arrived carrying a set of towels. ‘We are going to have so much fun!’
‘Go, Mother!’
The sudden silence left behind by the banished Shirley made a week seem a long time. I remembered Xanthe lying on my bed the first time she came to lunch. It felt like such a long time ago, and yet I still couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘How was Christmas?’ I asked.
‘Fine,’ Xanthe shrugged. ‘Usual.’
I thought back to the excruciating weeks of waiting, to the irrational fear I had felt that something would prevent the trip from happening. And what of that day at Hannes’ farm, of Simon’s words? I had thought at home that I’d ask her what he meant, but standing now in Xanthe’s room I knew it was another thing I couldn’t ask her about. I busied myself with my bag.
Xanthe picked up my copy of Emma. I had packed it imagining the two of us lying by the pool, reading our setwork books. She reached across to a small writing desk and chucked a large yellow book on it in my direction.
I picked it up. ‘Why would you buy the study guide?’
‘Why would you read the book?’
‘You read Chekhov.’
‘Chekhov is short. Chekhov says what he means and is done. This –’ she fanned through my book – ‘is like spending 450 pages inside my mother’s head.’
I found things that I loved in every corner of Shirley’s house. I loved the floral wallpaper in the downstairs loo, and the way the little soaps had been arranged in a patterned dish. I loved the deep green-covered loungers around the side of the pool. Shirley’s tea, served in botanical print porcelain mugs, tasted different to the tea at home. We ate homemade toasted granola sitting on bar stools at the breakfast island in the kitchen. Beth would die, I thought; she believed breakfast islands to be the height of sophistication. The floral fabric on the peg bag hanging up on the back of the kitchen door matched the oven gloves and the apron Shirley wore to do the washing-up. They were a set. It made my scalp tingle.
On Friday morning, the day after I arrived, Shirley stood at the bottom of the stairs, handbag over her right shoulder. Her orange-red lipstick – ‘Hawaiian coral’, I decided – matched her fresh nails. As we descended, Xanthe in her Doc Martin boots and skinny jersey dress, I in my jeans and polo shirt, she said: ‘Meg looks so pretty and neat, don’t you think, Xanthe?’
‘Doesn’t she,’ replied Xanthe.
Outside, Shirley stopped to lock the security gate. ‘I don’t know where Wellington is today. I’m at my wits’ end with that man.’
‘Didn’t his father die?’ asked Xanthe.
‘That was a month ago. He took two weeks to bury his father. But if it’s not one thing, it’s the other. Two months ago he had to go to an uncle’s funeral, before that an aunt. Three funerals in three months. How much family can one man have?’
As we snaked through the garden, Shirley pointed to the yellow rose bushes. ‘See my Germiston Golds, Meg. They never let me down. And look at my water feature in the corner! The birds go mad for it.’ The interior of her car gleamed. Instead of map books curling out from the seat pockets and sweet wrappers stuffed into the ashtrays, there was a tube of Wet Wipes.
Shirley returned to the problem of Wellington. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I feel for him. I lent him money to pay for his father’s funeral, don’t tell your father, Xanthe, he’d kill me if he knew. And I’ve never found out what happened to that Mont Blanc pen of your father’s. I don’t like to think.’ She sighed. ‘Does your mother have the same domestic issues up there in the Karoo?’ she asked, facing me as she reversed down the drive. I smiled, wondering whether I should explain that we didn’t live in the Karoo, that Leopold was part of the greater Cederberg Mountain region, and only three hours away, as opposed to the Karoo that was five hours away and where there was hardly a koppie, let alone a mountain.
Shirley didn’t like silences. The subject did not matter; she skipped happily from cousin Nicole in England who had forgotten to phone her mother on her birthday, to Mary from bridge who was having a new kitchen put in. Shirley did not approve of this; there was nothing wron
g with the old one. But then Judy had had new curtains in her sitting room and Mary had always been competitive.
Xanthe ignored her. She fiddled with the radio stations, jumping between Radio Good Hope and Radio Five, so it was left to me to ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and laugh at the appropriate moments.
We turned onto the freeway, following an arc along the edge of the suburbs that nestled at the bottom of the mountain. As we passed a sign for Newlands Forest and Rhodes Memorial, Shirley interrupted herself and said: ‘Don’t you think it would be lovely to climb the mountain, darling?’
‘No,’ replied Xanthe.
‘We can walk up Skeleton Gorge. Make a day of it.’
‘Madge is sick of the mountains. It’s all she knows.’
Shirley smiled at Xanthe and patted her thigh. ‘You’re a very thoughtful girl,’ she said as she slowed the car down to stop for a red light.
Nelson Mandela was smiling at us from a poster, surrounded by happy children of all races. Next to the ANC’s slogan, were the words: ‘A better life for all.’ In Leopold the ANC’s posters were confined to the Camp.
‘Lock your doors!’ Shirley shouted, leaning over Xanthe to push down the knob. She swivelled around to make sure I obeyed. Ahead of us, making their way through the three lanes of cars, were two boys of Beth’s age. One was selling boxes of grapes, the other bunches of roses. ‘I don’t drive into town anymore if I can help it. It’s full of hooligans,’ said Shirley in a low voice, not taking her eyes off the boys.
As she pulled away, a mini-bus taxi cut in front of her. The car jerked as she braked. ‘Look at that! “Bad Boy”,’ she said, reading the name on the back of the van. ‘Bad Boy indeed!’ At the next set of traffic lights Shirley pulled up in the lane next to ‘Bad Boy’. She hooted, leaned forward and shook her fist at the driver. ‘Where’s your blooming licence?’ she shouted at him, through her shut window. The driver, dreadlocks piled high in his rasta hat, laughed and turned his music up until the van was rocking to the doof-doof-doof of the base.