Leopold Blue

by Rosie Rowell

The dream was trapped inside the walls and low ceiling. To avoid my parents’ bedroom, I crossed the moonlit courtyard and slid back into the inky-black kitchen. I padded past the hulking shadows of the dining-room chairs, like highwaymen crouched over in trench coats, past the squat crouching leopards of the sitting room furniture and at last into the family room. Moonlight streamed in through the glass pane above the doors that led out on to the stoep. I opened the door and stepped out into the hot night. I sat down on the bench and spread my toes against the cool stone. I dug my spine into the wooden slats. Slowly the dream lost its focus and released its pinch on my mind. With a deep yawn I closed my eyes and rested my head back on the smooth-rough surface of the wall behind me.

  ‘You scared me.’ Mum stood in the doorway, wearing one of Dad’s old T-shirts and some awful homemade shorts. ‘You look like a former occupier of the house. For a moment I wasn’t sure.’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Shift over, you’re in my spot.’

  I looked up.

  ‘I’m quite nocturnal. I’ve spent many nights musing here.’

  I moved to the other side of the bench. The moon cut a neat crescent high above the pecanut tree, a spotlight its inky branches. The garden was alive with scurries and rustles in the undergrowth, the sporadic kaark of a sleeping chicken and the creeking of crickets. We sat side by side, neither of us willing to break the silence for fear of what had to come.

  Twice Mum started to say something. Eventually, tucking her hair behind her ear, she said: ‘I feel like I’m losing you.’ She wiped her eye and laughed. ‘I don’t know how to let you go gracefully. I’m not yet ready.’

  Hearing her tired, small voice punctured my anger. ‘I’m sorry about the Bibi … thing. I was rude.’

  ’Yes, you were.’

  ‘But the thing is –’

  ‘I know.’

  I felt her body sigh, as if letting go of a burden. Then she started laughing, a little trickle at first, but soon it turned into a rumble and as it gathered pace, it drew me in. ‘Oh my God!’ She wiped her eyes. ‘That was quite a performance.’ She pulled me towards her. ‘I can’t think where you get it from.’

  When Mum spoke again, it was with the tone she saved for grown-ups. It made me want to listen. ‘My first years in Leopold were such a disaster. I rushed in, desperate to become part of the town. I knew it would be hard. What I didn’t expect was that the Boer War would still be a current topic of conversation.’

  Her hands were very still in her lap. I covered them with one of my own and it swivelled around and grasped mine, still bigger than mine even though I was fully grown.

  ‘I spent years trying to fit into this town. But I’m different to them, Meg. It’s like spending sixteen years trying to be someone else. I’m no good at that. It’s a difficult way to live, feeling that you are not allowed to be whom you are. It can do funny things to your head.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘This AIDS work has made me feel valuable again. I know I will make a difference and it’s made me feel excited about being who I am. You and Beth will be off and away soon. I need to find myself again before that happens, or I might lose myself forever.’

  I had a question for her, before she got up and kissed me and went back to bed. ‘Mum,’ I started, ‘do you think … ’

  I sighed. What should I say – that I suspected that Xanthe wasn’t actually a very nice person, nothing like Jami Gertz or Queen Isabella of Spain; that she took drugs and had sex at the age of fifteen and didn’t seem to care about anyone but herself? I had a million reasons, each of them enough in themselves, not to speak to Xanthe again, but I couldn’t remember them anymore. Perhaps my expectations had been too high. The thought of returning to my life before Xanthe was miserable, and surely far worse than any of the bad things she had done, or could ever do.

  Mum was waiting, but I couldn’t find a way to begin.

  ‘It’s OK to have … colourful friends,’ she said, carefully. ‘They can be very good for people like you and I; they shake us up. But it’s not OK when you find yourself swallowed up in them, when you lose sight of who you are.’

  It was the answer I’d hoped for, it was the absolution I needed. But after my initial relief I felt I’d tricked her into it because I knew that taking drugs and having underage sex in a public place didn’t fit into the same category as ‘colourful friends’. And I knew that I would never tell her about any of it.

  ‘Sometimes it’s hard to know what the right thing to do is,’ I said.

  ‘Sometimes it is. And there will be some choices you will make that you will never know if it was the right one.’

  ‘So how do you ever make a decision?’

  ‘You do what feels right in your heart.’ She pulled me very close to her, so that I could feel her heart beating against her ribcage. My breathing slowed to match hers and it felt as though the whole world breathed with us, in and out, in perfect time.

  Later, in the kitchen, while Mum boiled the kettle and warmed the tea pot, because ‘no matter what time of night it is, tea tastes better in a warm pot’, I reached up above her and pulled down the cake tin with the remains of the Christmas cake.

  ‘I hate Christmas,’ she said, peering into the tin.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Because it’s not a proper Christmas, because it’s not cold, because it’s not English.’

  ‘Quite the opposite. I’ve always hated Christmas, even as a child. It was my terrible secret. I thought it was evil to hate Baby Jesus’ birthday. But watching the way my mother wound herself up until she was teetering on the point of collapse, I never saw the point of it.’

  I stared at her. ‘So, what’s with your annual hysteria?’

  ‘I do it for you and Beth, to try and make it different for you. Each year I think I might finally have outgrown the familiar dread it brings. But mostly, I do it for my mother. An act of penance I suppose, to do one thing that would have made her proud after a lifetime of disappointment. And I bugger it up every year!’ She laughed.

  I looked down at the dense fruitcake, and suddenly understood why it had never tasted right. ‘Let’s chuck it away!’ I looked up. ‘Go on, throw it in the bin!’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Mum shook her head. She ran her hand through her hair.

  ‘Go on!’ I said. ‘It’s a bunch of ingredients.’

  She looked at the cake for another moment. ‘I can’t throw it away.’

  ‘Mother!’

  ‘Only because your dad likes it so much,’ she said with a small give-away smile.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  On the last Saturday of the holidays, I bumped into Juffrou du Plessis in the Spar. She was at the check-out counter, in the entrance of the shop. I saw her first, and for a moment thought of ducking behind the pile of Die Burger newspapers and the stack of braai wood, but there was no escape. The ratio of grey to brown in her bun had tipped over the holiday in favour of grey. Beads of sweat glistened across her hairline in the breathless morning. Her navy-blue and white polka-dot dress clung to her legs. Before I knew it, I was carrying her shopping bags to her car.

  She paused to catch her breath next to her white Toyota Corolla. ‘Something is different about you – what can it be? Taller? Maybe.’ She studied me with an intensity that made me look at my feet. My green slip-slops were covered in red dust.

  She was still frowning at me when I raised my eyes.

  ‘Your face is slimmer,’ she decided disapprovingly. ‘It’s hard for us,’ she continued as she watched me lift her shopping bags into her boot, ‘seeing you girls turn into women, and leave without a backwards glance.’

  ‘Who said I was leaving?’ My flash of confidence fizzled and popped under her look.

  ‘This town is no place for a bright thing like you. Every year we lose the best of our young people to the world. For those who stay behind, it’s not a life of many choices.’ She looked up at Bosmansberg behind us. It was impossible to imagine Leopold without Juffrou
, but would she have left, had she been given the choice?

  ‘We prepare you as best we can. Education isn’t about grammar and tenses. It’s about knowing right from wrong. Understanding the bond with your family and your community is the most important lesson of all. That’s your backbone.’

  I couldn’t listen to these words from the woman who’d gone out of her way to emphasise my family’s apartness for as long as I’d known her. ‘Juffrou, you don’t see my family as a part of the community. We’re the trouble-making Englishers, remember?’

  Juffrou looked wounded. ‘Wragtie child! For someone with a good brain, you can be very dense.’

  She looked hesitant then, caught by a private thought, but dismissed it with a shake of her keys. ‘Let us not get ahead of ourselves – we still have two more years together!’ She banged the boot shut, her familiar glower back in place. But before she reversed into the street, she turned back and winked.

  I walked home, puzzling Juffrou’s words. Perhaps Mum relied on Juffrou’s disapproval as much as Juffrou relied on Mum’s revolutionary streak. In a strange way they complimented each other.

  I set up camp next to the pecanut tree. I had my Coke, Nik-Naks and chocolate digestives, my Walkman and, if all else failed, the irksome Emma to keep me company. I had pulled out our old red, green, yellow and blue-striped beach umbrella from the garage and planted it diagonally in the grass. It was my shield against the heat.

  But not Simon. From the moment his eyes had met mine on the beach in Cape Town, my familiar jealousy and resentment had started to transform into a violent desire to fight him. But that was absurd. Instead I had stayed out of his way.

  Now, a day before he was due to leave for university, he was suddenly beside me. I had forgotten Simon’s ability to move in silence, as if his footsteps left no imprint on the ground.

  ‘My mother finally told me who my father is. Was.’

  I shifted away. A black mussel shell had dropped out of the folds of the fabric when I’d set up the umbrella. I clutched it, pressing it into my skin.

  Simon pulled out a cigarette. He lit it, holding it between his thumb and first finger, like the skollies who hung about outside the off-licence. I reached out and took it out of his mouth, stubbed it out on the grass and broke it in half.

  He laughed and pulled out a handful of Wilson’s cola-flavoured toffees and offered them to me.

  I pushed his hand away. ‘You know I only eat the black ones!’

  He shrugged, took one and put the rest away. ‘I thought that you might have changed your mind at some point in the last five years.’

  How dare he discuss toffees! Why was he here? Hadn’t he caused enough trouble for one holiday? I turned until I had my back to him. The mussel shell was cutting me open. I opened my hand and watched it fall to the grass.

  Simon glanced down. We were back at the beach. I was looking at him, sitting alone on the sand, staring out to sea.

  ‘How could you, Simon?’ I blurted out.

  ‘What?’

  ‘After everything else you’ve been given, how could you steal the one friend I’ve ever had? How could you be so cruel?’

  Simon glared back at me, at first with disbelief and then anger. ‘What have I been given? I have had to prove myself worthy of everything I have, whereas you were born with it.’

  I bit the inside of my cheek and stared at the ground. That was beside the point. ‘I don’t want to talk about this.’

  ‘OK.’ He shrugged his shoulders.

  But the anger returned, more violent than before. ‘Who do you think you are, sauntering back after your fancy overseas trip, with your big fucking attitude?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re too sophisticated for this silly old town anymore. But for your information it’s not OK to have sex with someone on the beach.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not?’ I shouted. I knew there must be a perfectly good reason, but I was too angry to think of it.

  Simon spoke again, his voice cold and mocking. ‘What’s upsetting you, Meg? The fact that I was having sex on a beach, or that I was having sex with Xanthe?’

  I smacked him in the face. He pulled back, his eyes wide but he said nothing. He didn’t even lift his hand up to the red mark that spread across his right cheek. I sat back, struggling to push my breath back beyond my throat into my chest. I was shocked at how much my hand stung, but also at the satisfaction it gave me. I was shocked that as soon as I’d hit him, my anger evaporated and I had to wonder why I’d done it.

  ‘Xanthe’s not like you, Meg.’

  ‘I know, OK? I get it!’ My cheeks were burning.

  He frowned at me. ‘That’s a good thing.’

  ‘How can it be a good thing when she’s the one with the amazing life?’

  He picked up the shell and traced its curved perimeter. ‘She’s not that cool. It’s all for show.’

  I watched his finger. The curve of the shell reminded me of an ear. Maybe Simon was right. What actually lay behind those impenetrable, ice-blue eyes?

  Beyond the striped canvas, high above, a fish eagle’s cry pierced the silence, heralding in the early evening. ‘What about your dad, then?’ I prompted, after a pause. ‘Your mother … ’ I searched the sky.

  ‘Father Basil has been preaching about forgiveness and transparency in the new South Africa, so Ma thought it time I knew.’

  I raised my eyebrows. Those were dangerous words in a town like this.

  ‘She was right. He was a good-for-nothing rubbish.’ His laugh was hollow and painful to hear. ‘I never thought that knowing would be worse than not knowing.’

  ‘It can’t be that bad,’ I mumbled, pulling at a tuft of grass.

  ‘It is,’ he insisted, ‘because when you don’t know you can be anybody. But when you know –’ He sighed. ‘For the first time in my life I am ashamed of who I am.’

  I realised that for as long as I could remember, I had resented Simon for infiltrating my family, as if he didn’t deserve to be part of it. I had been wrong. What he didn’t deserve was to feel ashamed of his family. Nobody deserved that, least of all him.

  ‘Your background means nothing, Simon. Look at Mandela.’

  ‘What about Mandela?’

  ‘Look where he came from. Now he has a Nobel Peace Prize and is set to be president.’

  ‘Meg, he was pretty much royalty. His father was the chief of his tribe.’

  ‘Oh. Not a great example, then.’ I stole a glance at him. ‘Parents are heavily overrated.’

  Simon smiled.

  ‘And at least your mum doesn’t suffer from delusions of sainthood.’

  ‘She’s doing something important, Meg. She’s going out of her way to try and save the lives of people whom nobody else sees as important enough to bother with.’

  ‘I guess,’ I shrugged. I hadn’t thought of that before.

  The milking bell rang across the river. Simon and I had made up and suddenly I didn’t want him to go quite yet.

  ‘How did it feel coming back?’ I asked.

  He looked at the shell. ‘It feels like I’m a loose fossil trying to fit back into my original rock bed. Time and weathering and, exposure,’ he paused for a breath, ‘have changed my shape. I don’t fit.’

  I didn’t like that comparison. It reminded me of the little box at the back of Xanthe’s drawer. ‘Or maybe it’s like waking up to find you’ve turned into a butterfly. But essentially you’re still a worm.’

  Simon laughed but it died quickly. ‘I don’t like the way my ma looks at me. It’s like she’s seeing a stranger. And sometimes she talks to me like she’s speaking to … ’

  ‘To?’

  ‘A white person,’ he muttered.

  ‘Simon … ’ I wanted to reach out and place my hand on the cheek I’d hit, but my arm didn’t feel long enough.

  He looked up. ‘She didn’t need to tell me about my dad. I think she did it in cas
e I start forgetting who I am.’

  ‘No!’ Marta wouldn’t be that cruel. But without Simon Marta was alone – a small woman shrinking with age.

  ‘Why won’t she talk to Angel?’

  Simon shook his head.

  ‘Why not?’ I insisted, ready to argue Angel’s case, but the look on his face stopped me.

  He sighed. ‘It’s not my battle, Meg. That one at least is not mine.’

  ‘Do you think that going away to school and overseas has changed you? Do you think your essence has changed?’

  He was quiet for so long that I wondered whether I’d spoken my question out loud. Then he turned to me, his brown ochre neck tilted to the side, with a smile that made me smile back.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  Simon had escaped Leopold and travelled overseas, but he was still alone. Perhaps lonely was not the same as being alone.

  ‘Remember when I went to school in Cape Town and I wrote you those letters? You never replied.’

  I looked at my stubby fingernails, feeling ashamed. I had been so jealous of Simon for leaving, for being singled out, that I had not replied out of spite. ‘I still have them,’ I said. ‘They’re very funny.’

  ‘Will you write to me this time? Tell me everything that’s not happening in Leopold?’

  Something inside me jumped at the idea. He’d tell me about life at university, about things I needed to know. But I was also afraid. I thought back to my dream at the beach, of being pulled further out to sea, away from the receding shore. ‘Oh, Simon, you’re going to be too busy with your new life to reply.’

  ‘For every letter you write, I’ll write back. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I said, meaning it.

  In the late ripeness of January, too early in the summer to even dream of the cooler days of March and April, Simon reached across the diagonal pole of the beach umbrella. He turned my chin so that I could see him – his straight nose, his jaw, wider than before, and his eyes. I knew his eyes well, I recognised the intensity, the quickness, but there was a new darkness I felt I understood.

  His lips touched mine for a moment, although it didn’t feel like that. It felt like talking and laughing and dreaming in the same moment, carried on a current that pulsed between us. I was sure he felt it too.