Ouma held Grace up, bracing her. Ashamed, the mother of the murdered woman didn’t know where to turn her eyes, swollen red with grief. The neighbours must be whispering – oh, what they must be saying! Ouma knew some of the difficulties her daughter had faced in life, but even in her death, she could not come to terms with them. Haughty, prideful... and now look how she ended up. She must have done something for a man to go berserk like that. The shame, the shame of it all.
The priest waited to greet the swaddled coffin at the altar while swinging a thurible, filling the small church with wafts of myrrh. The incense pressed down on Grace like an invisible hand in the centre of her chest, setting the room off into a dizzying spin. As the casket came to rest at the altar, a low moan swept up from the back of the church. As it broke over the rest of the congregation, it went into full-throated sobbing. Grace turned and found the source of the wailing. Rowena, her face planted into Tim’s shoulder, sobbed and heaved. Johnny was still not home. Johnny. His face was just a blur now to Grace who, despite her best attempts, could not summon it. She had completely forgotten about him until this moment. Now the image of him escaped into irretrievable memory, a place she used to visit in another, distant life.
And her mother was gone, into the same void as Johnny, to a place with no co-ordinates that no amount of love or no unbearable longing could bridge. What was Mary doing? Was she cold? Was she happy? Would Grace ever see her again? Was Johnny there too? Where was Patrick? It all became too much for her. She closed her eyes and willed herself to move to the top of the room against the church ceiling and fly beyond.
When she opened her eyes again the giant incense hand still constricted her throat. The priest was going on about how he had married them, how Mary had been a good Christian woman then but had moved away from the Church soon after. But it was not for them, mere humans, to judge. That was God’s work. For no one could know the state of Mary’s heart, nor her relationship with God. Perhaps in her final moments she had repented and found peace. Grace knew this not to be so. No one had asked her about those moments, despite the knowledge that she had been witness to them – no one wanted to know what she had seen. Those images were hers to carry, hers alone. We all have our crosses to bear.
Friends of Mary’s, people Grace had never seen before, stood up and told stories of a kind girl with a golden heart, someone who always stood up for those weaker than herself. They talked about a girl who loved animals and painting and beauty. To Grace this woman only vaguely resembled Mary. She tried to imagine her mother as a girl her age. She had never thought of Mary before as a child who had harboured dreams, who had wanted to be something in the world, not just somebody’s wife or someone’s mother. The thought loosened her. Grace started to cry, first softly, then in huge, heaving sobs. Something took possession of her body as she shook and wailed. The incense hand dropped and her body broke free. She cried and cried and cried – for the young girl Mary, for the woman she had become, and for what had happened in between. She cried for Johnny, for Patrick. She cried for herself, alone and forsaken by every single star in her personal cosmos. Others joined in the wailing. The chorus grew in strength and built up to a majestic, weeping crescendo that rolled until it was truly spent and all that was left in the stuffy, smoky church were a few muted moans. In the silence that followed, the priest prayed for Grace. He asked God to look after her, to bless her and keep her always on the right path. The congregation affirmed him with a roof-raising Amen, but Grace did not hear it.
Part 2: 1997
12
The sky turned from gloomy grey to dark blue as Grace hurried along the pavement. She reached a gate and mounted a steep staircase leading to the front door of her home, barely stopping to scoop the contents out of the wooden letter-box attached to the gate. Bills, bills, flyers for a new restaurant down the road, the weekly specials at Checkers. She rummaged through the mail as she lumbered up the stairs to the bright green front door. Before she entered the house, Grace turned and paused to take in the twinkling lights of the harbour. Welcome home, they seemed to blink in a silent language only she understood. Grace never tired of reaching the top of the steps and taking in the view as night threw its veil across the sea.
As Grace exhaled the day, she fingered the gold cross in the hollow of her throat. She was exhausted. With a swift crunch of her key she unlocked the front door and stepped into the freshly painted hallway. “Almond Butter” was the colour she’d settled on. David had laughed indulgently at her vacillations between different shades of yellow.
“Grace!” he shouted from the next room.
“Hello, love,” she replied, absentmindedly.
She flung her coat onto the bench beside the door. Then she dumped the clutter of papers she’d retrieved from the letter-box on a polished table. A plain white envelope she hadn’t noticed before peeped from underneath the pile of junk mail. She picked it up.
Grace de Leeuw.
The envelope was addressed to her – in her maiden name – the handwriting unfamiliar.
No one had addressed her by that name in the two years since she’d married. Heat rose into her cheeks.
The envelope bore the stamp of the only post office in the place where she’d grown up. The heat spread across her chest. She didn’t know anyone there any more – hadn’t been back since the day she’d left, after her mother’s funeral. She turned it over. No sender’s name, no address.
“Hey, Gracie!” David called again.
Grace stuffed the envelope deep into her brown bag, the one she wore to work each day, and left it on the bench. She’d deal with the letter later. She took a deep breath, composed herself, and strode down the long hallway, peeling off more layers of winter clothing as she went. By the time she reached the living room, she felt as if she’d shed her skin. Crouching down on her haunches, she scooped up the baby from the blanket on the floor.
“Hello, Sindi!”
She cooed and cuddled and kissed, inhaling the fragrant folds of her daughter’s neck, nuzzling her chubby cheeks, grazing the infant’s curls with her lips and planting kisses on the palms of her tiny, fat hands. She felt anchored. She was home. Sindi was growing daily, visibly; every new day brought to light a new skill, a new small facet of her personality.
The baby gurgled in her arms, smiled, and promptly threw up.
“Let me help you.” David, who had been watching the daily reunion, laughed. With a few swift movements he was up from his seat at the dining room table, brandishing a cloth with which to wipe the vomit from both mother and child. He pecked Grace’s cheek. In the large kitchen, which flowed into a living room, he had already lit a fire, and a pot of stew simmered away on the stove.
Good old David. Always ready to help, always cleaning up after her. He was always happy to see her, always cheerful in his welcome and always efficient in balancing Grace’s moods with the growing responsibilities of fatherhood.
“Have a good day?”
Grace nodded, although her husband didn’t wait for much more of a reply from her before launching into the details of his own day. She listened absentmindedly as she got back down onto the floor with Sindi.
“...been marking since I got home from school. I’m very worried about the Matrics this year...”
David had this way of making his day sound like it had happened at the centre of the universe. Grace made sure to look up and smile at appropriate moments as he narrated it all – the threatening rain in the morning, picking Sindi up from daycare, the conversation with the day-mother about her teething, what he’d decided on for dinner, the school prep he needed to finish by tomorrow.
Sindi babbled along with her father.
“Sit with her, Grace, while I make us some tea. And I think she needs a nappy change....”
Grace let the words slide off the invisible bubble she had constructed around her and her baby daughter. When she was at work, Sindi’s absence was a physical ache – all day she longed to stroke the brown curls,
nuzzle that pudgy neck and inhale her child’s sweet baby breath. By midday her breasts were painfully engorged. Pumping them took an entire lunch-break, a wasted hour that could have been better spent with her child instead. She loved work, but resented the time away from her daughter. She held Sindi tightly against her body, trying to create a private world for just the two of them. Sindi’s cheek against her neck was a relief; the balm she had been craving all day. At the sink in the kitchen, David chattered happily about his day.
They had married two years earlier after a courtship spanning their student lives.
Grace had laid eyes on David on their first day at the university – that venerable intellectual home of the left – as they stood in a snaking line around the registration building to sign up for their courses. The line reminded her of one she’d stood in for hours the year before, to cast her vote for the first time. She had just turned eighteen and this was the first time she could vote; it was also the first time Aunty Joan and Ouma got to make their crosses.
Grace felt a similar excitement lining up to register, although it was a much more mundane line. Nevertheless, it was a line that would stake out the future of each person standing in it. It was the beginning of the rest of their lives. For the first time in its history, students at this institution were lining up to register as free citizens in a democratic country. They were free, liberated by Nelson Mandela and the ANC. The promise of a university education, on top of the vote, inflated even their most extravagant hopes. There was nothing they couldn’t accomplish now, no limit to the imaginings of what they could be. They were free. Free! The very air around them was nectar, sticky with expectation, almost too sweet to breathe.
Grace fell in with a group of girls and was laughing with them when she noticed David, and noticed him notice her. She tried to avoid his eyes – she couldn’t bear to be looked at by men. Or anyone really. To function in her world, Grace needed to fade, not stand out nor attract attention. Things were safer that way. Nobody seemed to notice or care about a shy girl who didn’t say anything. No one expected her to have much to say anyway. But David didn’t stop looking, and as the hours wore on and the line barely moved, he seized the opportunity to shuffle up a few spots in the queue until he was next to her.
Blocking her off from the group in which she’d tried to blend, he introduced himself with the confidence of one who had always been listened to, and launched into a conversation that felt like it had been left off the day before. She liked him immediately. His voice was warm and strong, and they fell into an easy conversational rhythm – him talking, her listening, and interjecting every now and then. His strength and surety warmed a strength inside her that she hadn’t known she possessed. She had been anxious about starting this new part of her life. Her biggest fear was that someone from her old life would recognise her. The university bordered the township, which seemed to Grace, through the bus window, as depressed as ever. By the looks of it, democracy was yet to arrive on those streets. If any of her former neighbours had made it here, she’d rather not know them.
She worried about not making friends, about sinking further into that well of loneliness with which she was far too intimately acquainted. Her high school teachers had prepared them for university, stressing that it was nothing like school. One needed to have opinions, to make oneself heard, sometimes in a lecture hall of hundreds. Here it was ideas that counted, not learning things by rote. Grace knew how to study and memorise things – words, dates and passages – but she didn’t know what she thought about things. She had been feeling hopelessly inadequate even before entering the university gates.
But the excitement in the line and the carefree laughter and chatter had loosened her. She didn’t trip over her words when David spoke to her, and was immensely grateful that he chose her to sidle up to. Emboldened, she sparkled at him.
David put her at ease. He asked questions, but none of them too probing, and freely gave information about his life and family. She envied this freedom, but carefully concealed her envy. Together on that first day they had explored the campus, discussed class options and compared their rosters, which conveniently overlapped at more than a few points. They ate a late lunch together in the enormous cafeteria, a modern contraption with a side wall of glass that made Grace feel as if she’d stepped into the future. Taking in the vast landscape from that huge window, she’d realised with mild surprise that she felt at home, that this was a place where she could breathe. Amidst hundreds of ambling young bodies she was anonymous, invisible, free. And yet there was this intimacy with her new friend, a kind boy with an open face, that made her feel a little less alone. For once, Grace felt good. This felt normal.
Over lunch she gave David the story she told all new acquaintances when they bothered to ask: her parents had died in an accident when she was young. She had been raised by her mother’s sister, Aunty Joan. Usually no one pried after this, and David was no different.
Outside the cafeteria there were ancient trees, a well-kept lawn, and a deep blue sky with only the slightest wisps of cloud. After lunch, Grace and David basked in the sun in companionable silence. In the distance, she made out the shape of the airport control tower, a monument to a different lifetime. How things had changed. No more burning tires, no more petrol smoke polluting the air, no more violent deaths for young men (for young women it was another story), no more disappearances. The things that had happened over there, so close to that airport, were a closed chapter of her life, buried deep inside of her. As always, the thought of Johnny came unbidden, as it did whenever she felt happy or sad. How he would have loved this place. Had he ever come home? Grace had never had the courage to return to her childhood home to find out.
As the day drew to a close, she felt sad at the thought of parting with her new friend. So this was what people meant when they said it felt as if they’d known a new acquaintance their whole life. Grace was telling him things she’d never before thought of sharing with another, things she didn’t know she had inside of her to give, about paints and new worlds and colours. Things that would have sounded stupid to anyone but David, who lapped up every morsel she shared. She liked herself in David’s presence; she had things to say and opinions to voice because he asked, and listened to her replies. At the end of that day she boarded a bus with him, pretending that she was going in the same direction, even though she’d have to take an extra train back home to Aunty Joan’s. She had wanted their conversation to last forever, to spread into the night, the next day, the next week.
Since that day she and David had been together. They had moved seamlessly from friendship to relationship to marriage. At twenty-seven years old, they were the loves of each others’ lives, as they liked to tell each other and everyone else. They were blessed to have found each other so early. Some of their friends limped from one dysfunctional relationship to the next. After graduating, they’d both found good, decent jobs – David as a teacher, Grace as an assistant to a director in a large financial corporation.
There was a year in university when Grace dreamed of writing poetry, especially after discovering a flood of recently unbanned books written by people like her; or at the very least becoming a writer for a newspaper. She might not have expressed herself very easily, but she thought about things deeply. If she were given a chance, she thought, she would be able to express her ideas well on paper. Instead she kept a notebook, in which she surreptitiously practised writing down her thoughts, along with the odd poem. But no one she knew had ever made a living at that, and she didn’t know where to start, so when she’d been offered the chance to make good money as a personal assistant, her first ever job interview after she graduated, the brown notebook was consigned to a bottom drawer in her dresser. Thinking and planning on behalf of someone else, always being one step ahead of him – that was her job. She found it exhausting but pleasing. She had a purpose; she was contributing to this new society. And soon there was her family to care for too.
Grace tickled
Sindi and laid her down on her stomach. She was nine months old and she needed time on the floor to strengthen her spine and forearms so that she could learn to crawl. Grace had read all the baby books, and knew every age-specific milestone Sindi was supposed to reach. It bothered her that she had not yet started crawling. She needed to crawl in order to walk – Grace was anxious for her to grow up healthy and happy.
David asked her again about her day, but what was there to say? She’d had a perfectly fine day, the same as every other day before it. She had taken phone calls, booked a conference venue, arranged meetings for her boss – all in all an adequate, smooth-running day once she had thrown herself into it. Why bother boring him with it all? She shrugged. “Good,” she told him.
Since Sindi’s birth, Grace was aware of how withdrawn and moody she had become. She missed her mother. Unable openly to tend to the wound that had reopened with her daughter’s birth, she’d taken to snapping at David. She knew it was unfair but sometimes she couldn’t stop herself. Tonight his small-talk chafed more than usual. She wanted to be alone; needed time to think. And uppermost in her mind was the white envelope she’d stuffed down into her handbag. Who could have sent her a letter, mailed from that post office? And how had they tracked her down?
David got that cautious look. She’d only been home five minutes and already she was tense, irritable. The more he tried to talk, the more she pulled away. The effect was predictable and it made them both uncomfortable. The more Grace withdrew, the more animated David became. It drove Grace insane, him babbling away like an idiot, hoping she’d thaw a little more. It had the opposite effect, but he couldn’t seem to help himself.
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