Grace

by Barbara Boswell

  “The boy did a good job, Mary. We should let him come again.”

  Mary turned from the sink, smiled and nodded. She had won his approval, had done something good. And there he was smiling at her now, the light of love in his eyes reserved just for her. She had done something right and he’d seen it, acknowledged it. Mary blushed. Grace rolled her eyes. Her mother was too easy sometimes. Leaning across the door with a cigarette dangling from his lips, Patrick bantered and flirted with Mary as she and Grace finished the dishes. Buoyed by his mood, mother and daughter relaxed. The walls around them expanded a little, the house let out a sigh; the evening became lighter and soon jokes were flying while Patrick, glowing, made the embers of the dying sun linger for a touch longer than usual. He called them his girls. This was the father Grace loved, the husband Mary adored. This Patrick was why she could not leave.

  As he leaned over the bottom half of the door, it struck Grace again how handsome her father was when he smiled like this, how much she loved looking at the dark, smooth skin, the even features and the strong jaw sprouting day-old stubble. He came inside, strode over to Mary and scooped her into a firm embrace as she giggled coyly. On evenings like that, when the tensions between them ebbed away, life tasted sweet like the overripe peaches hanging from the tree in their back yard.

  Johnny worked his way into the De Leeuws’ lives, quickly becoming a fixture. At first he appeared once a week with his bare, cracked feet and downcast look, waiting patiently for Mary to issue instructions. Then he’d set to work, methodically making his way through the back yard, pruning, weeding, and watering in silent concentration. He never asked for anything. He was content to do his work, shuffle to their back door when it was done and, always keeping his eyes to the floor, stretch out his palms to receive his fifty cents. So much like a beggar, Mary had mused aloud. She wondered if Johnny felt her mother’s disdain. As the weeks gave way to months, his visits to their house became more frequent. Grace watched her mother soften towards the boy.

  “He’s not like all the others next door,” Grace overheard her saying down the line to Aunty Joan. “His clothes are always clean; his mouth too. He doesn’t swear or talk back, and he knows his place. Works hard.”

  This tenderness bemused Grace. It wasn’t done for people like hers, the De Leeuws, to mix with people like them: country bumpkins, coloureds, who didn’t speak English, who didn’t even own shoes. Mary had always prided herself on the shoes they all owned and maintained, despite the scarcity of money. You judge a man by his shoes, she was fond of saying. But Johnny loosened something in her, and Grace watched with amazement as Mary’s rigid rules about who was fit company for whom relaxed. On days when she arrived home early enough, she made the boy sandwiches while cooking supper. For Mary, this was a generous gesture, bold even. Although he was only a boy of thirteen, it still wasn’t appropriate for him to come inside the house, so it fell to Grace to serve her mother’s culinary gifts to Johnny in the back yard.

  At first he’d say thank you and leave the food untouched until Grace went back inside, but as weeks passed, Grace began to linger in silence, sitting somewhere close to him but never making eye contact, tracing figures in the sand under some tree, or reacquainting soft fingers with steely blades of grass. At first Johnny ignored her, but one day, overcome with hunger, he could no longer play the game. He picked up the plate of sandwiches, moved under the shade of the apple tree, and crouched down on his haunches as he bit into the cheese and tomato snack. Grace watched him slyly. He closed his eyes for a few brief seconds after the first bite, then slowly devoured the food in giant bites, not once pausing to look up or around. Nothing else existed in the few seconds it took Johnny to eat the sandwich. When he was done, not a crumb was left. He got up and offered Grace the empty plate with a muted thank you.

  Grace stayed outside longer and longer on these errands to take Johnny his late lunch. Careful not to interrupt his culinary reverie – his pleasure in food seemed almost holy – Grace waited and waited until one day she was brave enough to ask him a question. Did he like school? His answer was curt, but once the ice had been broken their chats lengthened, becoming a ritual to which they both looked forward. By now, Johnny was doing yard work three times a week; for Grace, they were the best days of the week.

  Patrick took a shine to Johnny too. He got into the habit of stopping to chat with the boy when he arrived home from work, demonstrating this technique for pruning a bush, or that way of softening a hard patch of earth. Some nights he lingered for up to half an hour before stepping inside to take off his work overalls, smoking one cigarette after the other as he talked to the boy. On these nights, Grace brooded behind the lace curtains, watching with an odd mix of repulsion and delight, as the man and boy chatted. They were similar in stature. Both were muscular, but where Patrick was compact, Johnny had a leanness that belied his physical strength. At thirteen, Johnny was nudging past Patrick in height. Both had deep brown skin, polished to a high gloss. Johnny’s manner remained deferential; most often his eyes stayed on the ground as a sign of respect to the older man. In turn, Patrick’s stiff, pent-up manner relaxed with each encounter. Each time they spoke, he moved a little closer, gestured a bit larger, stayed outside a bit later with Johnny. From her spot behind the lace curtain Grace watched them, thrilled at first by their closeness and witnessing the firm affection she’d develop for Johnny transfer to her father.

  Until Johnny, Grace and Patrick had had few things in common. She stayed out of his way, speaking only when spoken to, waiting for him to talk to her, ask her about school, her friends. When she was younger he’d tell her stories – wonderful, phantasmagorical tales of animals who talked and commandeered their own ships out at sea; his swims as a young man out to Seal Island; his encounters with great white sharks. There were walks in the green swathe of land between the airport and their house where they picked flowers, examined chameleons, pulled out long reeds and sucked on their sweet, white ends. But as she grew older, Grace could not hold her father’s attention. Whatever demons lived in him started turning on her too, with increasing venom, and she slipped from his affection and he from hers. She could tell when he was drunk, at first by smelling his breath, later on by mere sight of the eerie, veiled glow that enlivened his eyes when he’d had too much. She had come to anticipate the inevitable violence that would follow most bouts of drinking. She learned to steer clear, become invisible. In that state, the very sight of her could set Patrick off.

  “You!” he would scream. “Why you? Why not my son?”

  This rant, unfathomable to Grace, was often the trigger to violence. Grace was an occasional target for beatings, but the full might of his blows was reserved for Mary. Grace never witnessed them. Even in supreme states of drunkenness, Patrick made sure that no one saw, not even Grace, who followed Mary around like a puppy, and who found the bouts of violence all the more terrifying for hearing but not being able to see them.

  The sounds of her father’s fists landing on Mary paralysed Grace, while Mary’s screams were an agony ripping through her chest. What was he doing to her? Where was he hitting? She heard every note of this warped symphony play out in grotesque detail. First Mary’s plea – “Please no, please don’t” – his voice raised, his fist striking flesh. A fresh cry from Mary, another and yet another blow. Violent, electrifying. Charging the air. A thud. Her head against the cupboard, or his body against the door? A crash. Perhaps a table falling or a chair hitting the floor after imprinting itself onto Mary’s body? Silence. Then a series of pathetic sobs, the sound of a soul breaking, and after that a fading into nothingness. Snoring. Her mother venturing to move, creeping out of the room. Water running in the bathroom. Mary’s footsteps at Grace’s bedroom door; her body slipping gingerly into the bed beside Grace’s rigid one. Grace regulating her breathing, pretending to be asleep, pretending not to have heard.

  On nights Patrick wasn’t home, Mary drew the night around them like a soft, velvet cloak. Huddled toget
her under the covers of her queen-size bed, she plucked stars out of the sky and spread them before Grace in a glittering private feast: the daintiest chocolate squares squirreled away for such occasions; candied oranges dipped in chocolate; toast triangles, crusts removed, topped with slivered avocado; sweet milky tea in fine china cups, warmed milk frothing against dainty rims. Decadent treats, hidden from him during the days and nights he was present, brought out on lace-covered trays on nights he forgot about Grace and Mary and found the lure of drink and women stronger than the need to be home. It was part of the warped economy of the house. They could not afford to paint the outside, but locked away inside was the best china Mary’s money could buy. No one had money to fix the sagging gutters or broken bathroom window, which was papered over with plastic, and yet on Friday when she got her pay packet, Mary brought home tinned oysters and fine chocolate. On nights she laid out these feasts they gorged on treats while Mary threw her own, personal handfuls of stars – her stories – back into the breathless sky. There was something about the dark intimacy of night, the drawing of curtains and the warmth of a bedside light that made Mary come alive. Her voice became low and seductive, her eyes sparkled, her pinned hair came cascading down her shoulders, free, as she regaled Grace with tales of her childhood.

  “Did I tell you about that time, I was about your age...?”

  “No, Mama, you didn’t,” Grace would lie. “Tell me now.”

  “Well, I had already discovered boys. I wasn’t shy like you. Now one boy in particular had his eye on my friend, or so we thought. But all the time, it was really me he was after. And one day, there he was, standing outside our door early one morning, waiting for me, with a bunch of flowers in his hands, picked from the neighbours’ gardens. Can you imagine the sight? Lovelorn, he was, completely silly eyed!” The pleasure of recollection brought a smile to her face. She smiled coquettishly, as if flirting with Grace.

  Stories like these made Grace feel inadequate, like a colourless, watered down copy of her mother. Suitors were not exactly lining up outside their door for her. There were other stories, too, not of Mary’s legendary beauty or the folly it inspired. These were about the priceless trove of oil paints that had been bequeathed to Mary by the white madam of a neighbour, how each fat tube had contained an entire universe of colour. Mary had sat with them for hours at first, just taking them in, getting to know them. Then she had worked up the nerve to shoplift a set of brushes at an art supply shop in the city and scavenged some leftover rolls of paper outside a paper warehouse. All by herself, she had learned the properties of the oils applied in different strokes, with different sized brushes, and had moved on to mixing them to form new colours. With her paints and brushes Mary had created entire worlds, private worlds of delight born out of nothing but her imagination.

  “What happened to your paintings?” Grace asked one night.

  “He threw them out, my father. Told me to stop wasting time with such silly nonsense.”

  “But why?’

  “He wanted me to learn something useful, something that would make a good job until I found a husband.”

  She’d giggle at the mention of said husband. Things hadn’t worked out the way Mary’s father had planned.

  “Why don’t we do that now? Paint?” Grace tried.

  And Mary would exhale the wordless sigh of a woman who had surrendered her dreams to the world too soon.

  On Patrick’s absent nights, Mary’s stories could entertain Grace for only so long. On these nights, there would come the inevitable hour when silence dropped over the house and they pricked their ears for his footstep long before his key turned in the front door lock. When stories dried up and treats were gobbled, Grace would be dispatched to bed, lights out. Mary would wait in the bedroom, not yet asleep, since that, too, could trigger his fury no matter how neat the house or how warm the supper.

  Sometimes their pre-emptive measures were enough, and he would fall asleep after wolfing down some food. At other times, seeking an outlet for his rage, Patrick would stumble into Grace’s room, wake her on the pretext of her not having completed this or that chore, and scold her: for being lazy, for being careless, for being awake, for being alive, for daring to live when his precious firstborn son could not. As if her coming was something she had planned, as if it had taken up the very air her dead brother was meant to breathe. On those nights, Grace was the valve Patrick needed to let off the bitter steam of grief and rage. And once he had awoken his fury, he would take it into the next room and vent it upon Mary.

  He apologised the next day, every time, blaming his violence on drink. But sober, too, he could be violent, though in a much more controlled way. Grace learned to stay out of his way then as well, perfecting the calculus of being present in a room without having that presence felt, of speaking without being heard, of living without interrupting the threadbare cloak of respectability Mary stitched out of nothing to hang around her family. Father and daughter became strangers. Grace stayed out of his way; hated him. And yet, she yearned for him and the love he had once shown and that still lingered in her memory. She longed for him to pick her up and embrace her, even though she was too big for all of that now. She wished for the times when he would hold her hand when they crossed a street. She longed for another extravagant story. She wanted him to lean into her when he spoke, the way she now saw him leaning towards Johnny as she watched them through the window as the light faded.

  Patrick rested his hand on Johnny’s shoulder and something ripped inside of her. In that instant, she hated Johnny; wanted him to get away from her family and out of her life. Why had they ever let him in? They had been fine, just the three of them, even with their problems. At least her parents had been hers and hers only. Grace went to bed nursing horrible thoughts, hating both Johnny and her father, who seemed especially cheerful when he finally came inside that night.

  She could never hold a grudge against Johnny for too long, though. The next time she saw him, he smiled as he held out a peach out to her, the best one from the tree. His shy smile melted her and soon she was laughing and teasing. Johnny pulled her braids, pretending to sweep her feet with the yard broom. They sat down under the peach tree, and looking at his open lovely face, still childish but revealing the features of the man he’d become, Grace forgave her father for loving Johnny. Who wouldn’t love him, this Johnny? She realised then, with an unfamiliar tremble, that what she felt for him was love; that she thought of him as hers. Her Johnny, now gone.

  It was well after midnight and people were still coming and going next door. Johnny must not be home yet. The smell of petrol clung to the air and the night sky held an unnatural orange glow, which meant the fires the students had lit earlier in the day were still burning.

  Grace was looking at the troubled sky when a figure took shape outside her bedroom window. Petrified, she froze, unable to scream. A man was creeping towards her. A soldier – coming to finish the work of today. One of those who were at the school and who had taken Johnny away, had teargassed them and shot everyone. Grace felt certain she was about to die, in her bed, the one place that was supposed to be safe. The figure grew larger as it came closer. A hand reached out. Grace found her voice and unleashed a siren-like, unearthly scream at the same time as the features of the shadow figure came into focus. It was her father.

  7

  Patrick woke up with a throbbing head and a dark mood upon him. It hurt even to roll out of bed. He cursed himself silently for having drunk so much. As the night’s events floated back into consciousness, he moved to cursing Mary instead. Damn bitch! All he had done was go to the house to see whether Grace was okay. He had just wanted to see her, hold her against him, feel her breathing, but Mary had been a bitch about it, as usual, and had denied him that. She must have known by then that the boy next door, Johnny, was missing. Surely she should have been able to imagine Patrick’s distress at this news. What harm would it have done to let him in? To sit with Grace for a few minutes? It was t
he most horrible of times, police going mad, shooting children, and here Mary was, stubborn, defiant, denying him his duty to protect his family. Denying him the very thing that made him a man. He stood up, casting around for something to drink. In the little shack he now called home there was nothing. He did not even own a refrigerator – his meals, prepared on a single-burner gas stove, required few ingredients.

  Patrick had been doing all right. Mary had kicked him out many times before. This time, too, he was sure he’d be allowed back after a suitable penance. He had been determined to stop drinking for good. And though this split between them had been the longest yet, he had not touched a drop since they’d parted. He had stayed with his new job, turning up each morning ten minutes before starting time. He was making a go of this new life. He had left the old drinking friends behind. Once he had even gone to Mass, but he found he could not stand being within the confines of a Catholic church – the incense choked him and every time he went down on his knees he had the dizzying sensation of some big, unseen hand trying to topple him. He left before the service was over, bathed in cold sweat, as if some ungodly force had wanted him gone. He found some solace at the big tent – less morose, no incense to choke him; all-in-all, a much more pleasant place. He’d even been baptized again, and the goodwill he’d received afterwards had helped him keep it together. He had been doing all right – until last night.

  Sick with worry about Johnny and infuriated by Mary’s callous words, he had had nowhere to turn. He had wanted to help look for the boy but when he went to Tim and Rowena’s it was obvious he was not needed. He had wanted to sit with Grace, but was not wanted there either. He had needed the girl, perhaps more than she’d needed him, he now admitted to himself. He needed the coltish limbs, the just-washed child smell of her hair, the thin brown arms around his neck. He imagined picking her up like he used to do when she was a small child, when she’d wait for him at the end of the long passage and would charge at him the moment he’d step inside the door. He’d scoop her up, she’d throw her arms around him, and they would dance, she squealing with delight. Of course she was too grown up for all of that now, but last night Patrick had needed to feel that old connection between them. He admitted for the first time, as the feeling of impotence had subsided after Mary had turned him away, that he missed her.