Entertaining Angels

by Marita van der Vyver

  ‘I’m sure they will be,’ said Griet recklessly. ‘They owe me a favour after the last year.’

  Don’t tempt fate, she heard her grandfather’s guardian angel whisper in her ear. But her father’s voice was louder than any angel’s. Be positive, he said, as always, and for once she wanted to be an obedient daughter. She and Jans were sitting on the balcony of Louise’s flat, she on the only chair and he on her packed suitcase.

  ‘When is D-Day?’

  Jans was wearing his white attorney’s shirt. His collar was unbuttoned and his striped tie hung loose. A film of perspiration gleamed on his upper lip.

  ‘D for Divorce?’ Griet was also still in her office clothes, but she’d kicked her shoes off and her feet were propped on the railing. ‘Hopefully next week.’

  The sun was setting after an oppressive summer’s day and the light was fading faster and faster. Tomorrow marked the beginning of a new month, she thought gratefully, the second month of a new year. Tomorrow night she’d sleep for the first time in her new flat. She didn’t have a bed or a fridge or a stove or even a bookcase, but she felt that she could get by with nothing but hope. Maybe even without cigarettes and a shrink, she tried to convince herself.

  She’d told Rhonda that afternoon that she wanted to come only once a month from now on.

  ‘If you feel it’ll be enough, Griet.’ Rhonda folded her hands on her lap, gold bracelet on the right wrist, gold Rolex on the other. ‘But don’t hesitate to ring if you change your mind.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  She wouldn’t change her mind, she decided.

  ‘How are you getting on with the fairy story?’

  ‘I don’t know whether it’s still a fairy story. I don’t know what it is any more. But I’m writing like never before.’

  ‘About your grandparents?’

  ‘More about myself,’ she said apologetically.

  ‘It’s time, Griet.’ Rhonda leant forward slightly on the red sofa. Griet cast a quick glance at the clock on the wall. Her hour couldn’t be up already. ‘It’s high time that you stopped running away.’

  Griet folded her hands on her lap too. Her arms were bare and her nails were grubby.

  Didn’t her shrink know that you could become airborne if you ran fast enough for long enough?

  ‘I’ll get the food from the oven,’ said Jans, getting up from the case with a groan. He’d picked up chop suey and spring rolls from a Chinese take-away on his way over. He pushed her back into her chair when she got up to help. ‘More wine?’

  ‘You’re my hero.’ Griet laughed, curling her toes over the railing and raising her arms high above her head. ‘What would I do without you?’

  He looked down at her, his head tilted slightly, his expression unfathomable.

  ‘You’d probably survive,’ he said as he walked away.

  She’d known him for a decade, she realised as she watched him go. She’d seen him naked, she’d seen him drunk, she’d seen him in love – often. But she’d never realised before what a sexy bum he had. Griet cast her eyes up to heaven and decided it was the new moon that was affecting her hormones. It wasn’t called the witching moon for nothing.

  ‘Let’s drink to Hansel and the witch,’ said Jans when he came back with the food and wine on a tray. ‘And to Mandela who is to be released one of these days.’

  Far below them the city lights started to flicker like candles in a cathedral. This was the last time that she’d see the world from this borrowed balcony. Venus twinkled in the sky high above the highest building, a brooch pinned to the darkening air.

  ‘We should drink to Gwen,’ she remembered suddenly. ‘I heard yesterday that she’s pregnant.’

  ‘What?’ Jans almost lost his balance on the suitcase. ‘What’s Klaus got to say about it?’

  ‘He doesn’t know yet. She moved out. And she doesn’t know whether she wants to go back to him.’

  Gwen had still been in shock when she met Griet for lunch the day before.

  ‘I can’t understand how it happened,’ she’d mumbled over and over again. ‘I just can’t understand it.’

  ‘Immaculate conception?’ Griet suggested at last, weary of the garbled babbling.

  ‘I threw out the Pill months ago in the hope that something would happen. I’d begun to accept that I was barren.’

  Gwen stared at the glass of healthy orange juice that Griet had ordered for her.

  ‘You’ll have to cut out all that coffee.’ Griet didn’t smoke a single cigarette during the meal. She could do anything for unborn babies. Her heart was aching with joy for her friend, and with longing for a child of her own. ‘Ask me. I know all about pregnancy.’

  Gwen burst out laughing when the waitress put two bowls of Greek salad and a little basket of wholewheat rolls on the table.

  ‘I wanted cheesecake and coffee, Griet!’

  ‘You’ll have to start eating more healthily.’

  ‘Anyway, as I was saying, things between Klaus and me got so tense that in the end I had no choice but to move out. It’s up to him whether he wants to spend the rest of his life sitting beside his ex-wife in a shrink’s office discussing his delinquent son’s problems, or whether he wants to live with me and face up to our problems. And three days after I move out, I discover I’m pregnant!’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to go back to him just because I’m going to have a baby. We’re too old for a shotgun wedding. Aren’t we? What do you think?’

  She already looked pregnant. Not radiantly pregnant as the women’s magazines always put it, but rather confusedly pregnant. Her skin seemed smoother. Of course, that could also be nothing more than her own overactive imagination, Griet told herself. Just the word pregnant was apparently enough to send her intelligence flying out through her ears.

  ‘How far gone are you?’

  ‘Already nearly ten weeks. I thought it must be early menopause when I didn’t menstruate.’

  ‘Do you think you’re going to be able to go it alone, Gwen?’ she asked carefully, like her therapist.

  Gwen stared at her orange juice for a long time and then smiled. ‘Would you mind holding my hand in the labour ward, Griet?’

  ‘He’ll want to have a say about the child,’ said Jans beside her on the balcony.

  ‘Men always want to have a say about what becomes of their semen.’ Griet struggled to get the chop suey to her mouth with the chopsticks: she was determined not to resort to a knife and fork. ‘They should just be a bit more careful before spewing it out all over the place.’

  I’m dreaming about Chinese food and sex [wrote a still-yearning Louise from London]. It’s got so bad that I phoned Rony in Hong Kong before dawn yesterday. I told him I was afraid we wouldn’t recognise each other and couldn’t he please send me a photograph. Then I’d send him one of me. (I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.) Now I know how someone feels who writes to a Lonely Hearts Club. You have to be fucking lonely to phone Hong Kong at five on a Thursday morning.

  But the oddest thing of all is that for the first time in months I’ve started treating my husband decently. I realise I’m over-reacting, as usual, but I feel like a person again – not just an unhappy wife. And God knows, Griet, if it takes an affair to make married life bearable, then it was worth the trouble of ringing Hong Kong. Even though my husband will probably throw me out of the house when the phone bill comes.

  ‘Talking of sex, I read a report that’ll interest you.’

  Griet imagined she could hear Jans smile beside her. She gave the chopsticks a break.

  ‘Do you know what koro is?’ Jans said.

  She had no idea what to expect.

  ‘It’s Malay for tortoise head – and the poetic medical term for Penile Shrinkage Syndrome.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Penile …’

  ‘I heard what you said, Jans.’ Griet laughed. She’d thought it was a condition that only existed in her imagination. Something c
aused by castrating witches. That shrinking feeling.

  ‘It’s apparently fairly common in the East. The sufferer grabs his penis before it disappears altogether, to prevent himself from turning into a ghost. The anxiety attack can last for up to two days.’

  ‘Why a ghost?’

  ‘Ghosts don’t have sexual organs.’

  ‘Don’t they?’

  ‘Can you imagine a ghost with an erection?’

  Griet shook her head and looked at the mountain that was flaunting itself under the floodlights like a prima donna. She was going to miss this view, she realised for the first time. Tomorrow she started all over again, she told herself. Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. She raised her glass to her therapist who was flying over the crescent moon on a broomstick, her hair blown every which way, her head thrown back like that time when she had laughed in her consulting room. It was a night when anything was possible.

  26

  The Gooseherd Goes Hunting

  Once upon a time a bald king decided to ban all colours except orange, white and blue. Any other colour gave him a headache. Red made him think of Communists and Other Instigators (Banned), green made him think of Marijuana (Forbidden), purple of Alternative Newspapers (Forbidden), yellow of Chinese Communists and Other Instigators (Banned), brown of District Six (Destroyed) and black, the wickedest of all colours, of the Unthinkable Future. The Future he’d like to Forbid, Ban and Destroy.

  It was naturally not child’s play to get rid of colours, but the bald king spared neither money nor effort. All trees, shrubs and plants were weeded out, except for the few that bore only orange flowers and fruit. The strelitzia was instated as the new national flower and the queen wore one pinned to her shoulder. The marigold was worn by the king in his buttonhole: oranges, mandarins, pawpaws, melons, carrots and pumpkin were the only fruit and vegetables allowed. All buildings were painted in the desirable colours, all traffic lights were altered so that from then on they showed blue, orange and white lights, and all streets were surfaced with white cement in place of black tar. Fortunately the sea, the sky and the mountains were blue, and the clouds and the beaches white, otherwise the king would never have been able to get rid of his headache.

  But then something very odd happened, even for a fairy tale. The bald king was declared crazy by his own wise men and councillors. A new bald king ascended the throne and astounded everyone by inviting all the colours back again. Even the most dangerous of all combinations, the three colours which had always made the previous king’s index finger stand straight up in the air with fear and rage. The black, green and yellow of the Unthinkable Future.

  The world rejoiced and even the angels were amazed. The people were overjoyed because they could once again drink ruby red wine instead of carrot juice and they could pelt each other with rotten tomatoes instead of oranges. The trees and shrubs and other plants grew again, and for the first time the grass was just as green on both sides of the fence.

  ‘I know I said I wouldn’t be back for a month,’ Griet told Rhonda, twirling a strand of hair faster and faster round her finger. ‘But I didn’t know the ANC was going to be unbanned and Nelson Mandela was going to be released and the exiles were going to come back. I didn’t know everything was going to change so fast. And not just here, the whole world! The Berlin Wall pulled down and that Rumanian dictator shot dead on Christmas Day – couldn’t they have waited one more day? – and the whole of Eastern Europe imploding and God only knows what’s happening with Communism.’

  ‘And you feel anxious.’

  ‘Anxious!’ If her finger wound any faster she was going to take off like a helicopter. ‘I’ve lived all my life in a world where everything was as predictable as … as … as your facial expressions! And now everything’s changing overnight, everything in my personal life and everything around me. Of course I feel anxious.’

  The faintest shadow of a smile hovered fleetingly at the corners of her therapist’s mouth. Rhonda did have a sense of humour after all, Griet decided. But she tried just as hard to keep it a secret as Grandma Lina had tried to hide her tree-climbing.

  ‘Is the whole world going to be transformed into a capitalistic heaven?’ Reflected light flashed blindingly off the face of Rhonda’s Rolex as she wrote something on her lap. It was a long time since she’d last written something in that file, Griet realised, but nothing could get her into more of a state today than she was already. ‘One great big Hollywood where the rich get even richer and the poor even poorer?’

  ‘It’s understandable that you should feel insecure now, Griet.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck about whether it’s understandable or not, I just want to be in control again!’

  ‘Of what, Griet?’

  ‘Of my emotions,’ Griet answered slowly. ‘Of what I write. Of my own little world.’

  Rhonda nodded rhythmically with every word.

  ‘I lost my husband, I lost my house, I lost my children and my stepchildren. One of my sisters has gone back to Johannesburg and my other sister leaves for New York next week and my lover is back in London. My mother and father are growing older and dying. I am growing older and dying. All I have left to lose is my mind.’

  ‘You were legally divorced last week, Griet,’ soothed her therapist. ‘I expected to hear from you. I would have been surprised if you hadn’t phoned.’

  She looked like the ventriloquist’s doll that Griet had seen on television the week before. The lips moved and the voice created an illusion of life, but the face remained a doll’s face.

  She was legally divorced. She sat in her advocate’s office while her advocate and her attorney negotiated with the advocate and attorney who had been employed by her husband. Her ex-husband. She smoked all of her only packet of cigarettes in three hours. And then she was seized by panic. Since her little Napoleon of an attorney was still waging his war on nicotine, he couldn’t help her either. In the end, out of sheer desperation, she sent a messenger to the enemy camp’s waiting room to beg a cigarette from George. If she couldn’t get a damages deposit from her husband, then at least she could get a cigarette.

  She flipped through a pile of magazines, Time, The Spectator, The Economist, and read several articles carefully without taking in a single word. She read something about Georges Simenon writing a book in eleven days. It made her feel even worse. She couldn’t even read a book in eleven days.

  But there was one headline that stuck in her whirling brain: ‘Renaissance in Witchcraft’. An unprepossessing little article about a modern witch and her husband. Morgana and Merlin. They offered classes in Wicca (white witchcraft) in a house near London. The classes included the history of witchcraft and ‘psychic self-defence’. The latter immediately seized Griet’s imagination.

  She wondered if she shouldn’t write to Louise about the Wicca classes in her vicinity. Maybe they’d distract her attention from Hong Kong and chop suey.

  I got a photograph [wrote a slightly calmer Louise from London], and he has got a paunch. And he’s bald. So what? I’ve got a lot of time to think before his conference begins here in London. To dream about Hong Kong and try to accept my husband for what he is. I block my ears when he farts in the shower. I have stopped chucking orange juice at him. If I really can’t help myself, I chuck water at him.

  ‘I CAN’T COPE!’ she told her therapist.

  ‘The worst is over, Griet.’

  ‘Says who?’ Griet grabbed her bag. Her hands trembled as she took out her cigarettes. Was this how it felt to be divorced? ‘My friend is pregnant and I’m worried sick about her. She simply accepts that everything will be fine. I can’t. I simply cannot accept that a pregnancy will run its course successfully. I can’t accept that anything will run its course successfully. Well, I suppose I can believe that it might turn out OK in the end, but only after everything that could go wrong has gone wrong along the way. Is that pessimistic optimism? Or optimistic pessimism?’

  ‘It sounds as though you have plenty o
f material to write about.’

  ‘If I could only trust my PC. I blinked yesterday and the machine swallowed three thousand words. Just like that. The one day that I don’t back up, probably because my spirit was still hanging in the divorce court. What did I expect? Sympathy from a psychopath?’

  ‘If a machine gets very complicated, it becomes pointless to argue whether it’s got a mind of its own’, said a certain Professor Donald Michie of Scotland, according to this morning’s paper. ‘It so obviously does, that you had better get on good terms with it and shut up about the metaphysics.’

  It had to be Scotland. It just showed you, as Grandpa Kerneels would have said.

  The tale of the twelve huntsmen, that was what Griet had typed yesterday on her psychopathic computer. (With commentary from a cynical gooseherd.)

  Once upon a time there was a princess whose betrothed had to marry another girl. (Had to marry?) So the princess gathered together eleven ladies-in-waiting and they disguised themselves as huntsmen and rode to the castle of her betrothed. (Aha! Twelve strong roles for women!) He didn’t recognise her and took them into his service as huntsmen. (Male Amnesia Syndrome, a well-known medical condition, like koro.)

  But in the castle there dwelt a magic lion who told the king that his twelve huntsmen were not really twelve huntsmen, but twelve young women. When the king refused to believe him, the lion said he’d prove it if the king would strew peas on the floor the following day. Men walk with a steady tread over peas, said the lion, but women tiptoe so the peas roll about. (Says who?)

  But in the castle there was also a good servant who warned the huntsmen that they were to be tested. Be manly, the princess told her ladies-in-waiting, and walk on the peas. (Force yourself, doll.) The next day the young women walked so manfully over the peas that the king decided the lion had been pulling his leg. But the lion had another plan and said the king should have twelve spinning wheels brought out. Men hardly spare a glance for a spinning wheel, said the lion, but no young woman could resist one. (Says who?)