Bone Meal For Roses

by Miranda Sherry

  The little portion of land that they chose to keep was the source of an age-old dispute between Jem and Anneke and their neighbour, Tertius le Roux, because it contained a natural spring. This made the ground swampy, not much good for crops, but le Roux wanted to reroute the water flow to irrigate his vast vineyards. ‘Waste of bloody resources,’ he’d bellowed at Jem when he’d refused, once again, to sell. How could he sell? The land, which sported nothing but a cluster of worn-down farm buildings arranged in a large U, long unused and falling to ruin, was special to Anneke. Despite le Roux’s efforts to rally the community to support him in his battle to take ownership of the spring, Jem and Anneke spent two years converting the stables into a long L-shaped house that showed only a blank, solid wall to anyone approaching from the road, but which opened all along its hidden length on to the sun-filled courtyard on the far side. Flanked by a raw, rocky hill and an old barn set at right angles to the stable, the courtyard was utterly private.

  There they hollowed out a pond and created drainage rills to manage the swampiness from the underground spring, piled on layers and layers of well-rotted manure and compost, planted a lemon tree, an olive and two kinds of plum. At one end, they planted flowering quince, to grow into a hedge along the bottom of the hill that divided their land from the le Roux’s. They created a small grove of silver birches which flourished in the sheltered space, protected from the unforgiving African sun and the buffeting wind. They built a set of raised beds for vegetables in one corner, and filled in the rest of the space with a multitude of seeds that, over the years, have grown into a lush wonderland of flowers, fruit and herbs.

  It is the fragrance of this garden that seeps into the bakkie when, at long last, Jem and Poppy’s journey comes to an end. They’re parked inside a large, wooden barn with shafts of sunlight slanting through the gaps and knotholes of the slatted walls. In amongst the bars of light lurk mechanical shapes of various vehicles wearing blankets of dust. Poppy can make out another, older bakkie, something that looks like a tractor in pieces, and two motorbikes, one splattered with mud, and the other blotched with rust. Jem opens the driver’s door, letting in a rush of cool, scented air.

  ‘We’re home.’ Jem walks around the van, unbuckles Poppy’s seatbelt, and lifts her out. The smell is fuller and sweeter than anything she’s ever encountered. She can’t even dare to imagine where it’s coming from. As Jem carries her through the vast barn to the wooden door in the back, the impossible fragrance causes two tear tracks of clean pink to snake through the grime on Poppy’s cheeks. The smell grows stronger, and when Jem opens the door, it fills her completely.

  The garden.

  At first, it’s just an onslaught of green, but as Jem carries her further in, Poppy sees fuzzy-bodied bees buzzing between long pale green stalks topped with purple flowers. When she looks up, there are tiny green birds with white rings around their eyes bouncing and peeping high in the limbs of a tree studded with bright lemons. As Jem’s ankle brushes past one of the shrubs beside the path, a delicate cloud of butterflies rises up and then settles back down again, as if someone has lifted an invisible net with silk bows tied all over it.

  In the heart of the garden, in a clover-covered clearing surrounded by yellow, white, red and pink roses, sits a wheelchair, and in it, a soft, cream-skinned creature with wispy white hair who must be made from rose petals herself.

  ‘Poppy, it’s time to meet your ouma.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  IT TAKES THREE consecutive bathtubs of warm, soapy water to eliminate Poppy’s carapace of accumulated dirt. The first lot of water is dark grey-brown in minutes, and Anneke picks up the child from the scummy puddle, wraps her in a towel, and holds her close while Jem drains the tub, cleans the grime off it, and runs a fresh one. The second time around, Anneke kneels on the bathmat, despite her aching knees, and gently, so very gently, soaps Poppy’s skin. Patches of what she thought were dirt turn out to be welts and bruises, and as Anneke scoops water over tiny sharp-boned shoulders and knobs of spine, a whipping storm of rage hurtles through her, battering her insides until her soothing mutterings and croons of comfort are unable to make their way out past the thick paste of bile lodged in her throat.

  The third bath takes place in grim silence. Jem crouches down to help comb conditioner through the child’s matted hair, starting at the very ends and carefully working upwards. Now that it’s clean, the similarity between Poppy’s hair and the way Anneke’s used to be is startling. It is as if sopping strands from the past are slipping between his fingers.

  When the child begins to shiver, Jem and Anneke exchange a wordless look and begin the final rinse, despite the fact that half her head is still a knotted mess. Poppy watches them both with huge, light-coloured eyes that flick from Jem to Anneke and back again. She hasn’t made a sound the entire time, but responds to whispered instructions like Close your eyes now, Poppy, we’re going to rinse, acquiescent as a doll as she’s finally lifted from the water and dried with a clean towel.

  By the time the ordeal is over, and Poppy is dressed in one of Anneke’s vests and a cardigan that they have to wind around her twice like swaddling and tie closed with a ribbon from Anneke’s sewing box, Anneke and Jem are as pale-faced and silent as the girl. Jem bundles her in a blanket and sits at the kitchen table with Poppy on his lap, wrapped up like a pupae, while Anneke prepares something to eat.

  Night presses in against the kitchen window, dense with the solid buzzing song of the frogs around the pond. Inside the room, now warm with the scent of scrambled eggs and buttered toast, the contrasting wordlessness almost becomes a tune in itself, a silent harmony in the symphony of the clicks and screeches and calls of the garden and the wild hills beyond.

  Later, in bed, with the girl asleep between them, Jem and Anneke reach out to touch one another’s hands in the darkness. Both of them are weeping.

  *

  Poppy wears one of Anneke’s old floral blouses gathered at the waist with another sewing-box ribbon. The clothes she arrived in are clean and dry, no longer soaking in a tin bucket and sending tendrils of brown-grey filth into the water, but neither Poppy nor Anneke has touched them since they were taken from the line. Even Wombo, washed and pegged up by his tiny tail, has been ignored.

  Poppy stands in the garden and waits for Jem to return from his shopping trip into town. He’s been dispatched to buy small T-shirts, underpants, shorts and sandals in a suitable size. It would’ve been easier to have the girl with him, but when he tried to take her out of the garden and through the gate to the bakkie, she’d gone stiff with horror. Jem had looked into those wide, mortified eyes and had set her down, back in the cool green, heading out to do his shopping alone.

  Now Poppy stands as still as she can and closes her eyes. She can hear secateurs going snip pause, snip pause as Anneke deadheads the first of the season’s roses. She listens to the soft plish-splash of the fountain in the herb garden. Somewhere close by, a bird calls in liquid notes. Somewhere far, another answers. She tries to breathe away her gathering fear: this will end. Any moment now, her mother will arrive and caw her name in a gust of reeking breath and wrench her out of this sanctuary and back into hell. Claws of panic scrabble inside Poppy’s throat until, finally, they escape in a shattering scream. The bird goes silent. The secateurs stop snipping.

  ‘Poppy?’ Anneke makes her slow way round the flower-studded bank of greenery to where the child stands, trembling, beneath the wild olive tree. Her tiny legs stick out from the billow of pale fabric like a pair of tweezers. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’ Anneke draws the girl into her arms. ‘We won’t let anyone take you, Poppy. This is your home now.’

  When Jem returns with a shopping bag of new clothes for Poppy, he finds them both lying on the grass, the little girl in a tight ball, and his wife curled around her, her frail body forming a protective cowl across the child’s back.

  *

  That evening, Anneke and Jem sit at the kitchen table while the cried-ou
t child sleeps on the sofa. All that can be seen of her is a tuft of white-blonde hair sticking out from under a quilt that Anneke sewed last winter out of scraps cut from Jem’s old shirts.

  ‘She must be terrified that Yolande will come for her.’ Anneke turns her mug, making circles in a patch of spilt coffee on the worn old oak.

  Since her first glimpse of Poppy’s emaciated, bruised little body, Anneke has been battling to contain her increasing fury. The monster responsible seems to have no connection to the daughter she raised and lost and grieved for. There’s a new hard dark piece inside Anneke where the Yolande-sadness used to be.

  ‘Could that happen, do you think, Jem?’

  ‘Yolande won’t. Unless…’ There’s always an ‘unless’ with Yolande.

  ‘My sister will probably try and get hold of her, you know how Sussie is. And even if she doesn’t, Yolande could change her mind at any time, Jem. You know how she…’ Jem watches the way that Anneke grips her mug, even though it clearly hurts her swollen thumb.

  ‘Annie, when we walked out of that hell-hole, Yolande let us go. She caught my eye and the hazy look vanished from her face for an unguarded moment. I saw relief, I saw acquiescence.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yolande knew what was happening. She let it happen. I know this sounds crazy, considering all the neglect and abuse, but I think she was doing it for Poppy. I think she knew that she was ruining her child’s life. By letting her go she was… was being kind.’

  ‘But,’ Anneke’s voice breaks, and she fights for breath, ‘Yolande was never one for staying kind. She’d always forget her promises, remember?’ For long minutes, they sit in clock-ticking silence.

  Jem remembers Yolande as a baby, chubby-cheeked and curly-lashed, yelling her lovely little head off when she couldn’t get her way. From day one, she’d been unsatisfied with her lot as the only daughter of a pair of aging farmers. Planting compost worms. You’re obsessed with dirt, Yolande declared in disgust. Nothing was ever how she wanted it to be. The farm was too quiet, the village was too small, the local primary school was too boring, the school she boarded at later was too strict. Jem thinks back to an early morning one spring when Yolande was about nine or ten. He’d glanced out of the kitchen window to see her racing around the yard. The cool air was thick with pollen and birdsong, and he’d imagined it drawing back from her furious little fists. Why does nothing ever happen? she’d screamed, throwing her body into ever more frantic spins as if trying to create her own tornado.

  Yolande craved discord, but harmony clung to Anneke and Jem and wouldn’t be budged no matter how many tantrums she threw. She’d left home as soon as she’d turned sixteen and, despite all their efforts, they’d not heard from her again.

  Until two weeks ago.

  Now each of them hope that she’ll stay away for good.

  Jem knows that this is not the first time he’s wished Yolande gone, and a familiar stab of guilt twists his guts. Did we do this to her? Did we make Yolande like this?

  Yolande seemed to have come into the world self-serving, needy, desperate to escape her life and who she was, but that isn’t fair, and Jem knows it. Something made Yolande hate herself so. Her frustration with her parents’ contentedness was the result of something deeper, wasn’t it? It wasn’t really about worms and soil. He glances across at his wife, with that dreamy distant expression she so often wears as if she is somewhere else entirely, somewhere where you’ll never be. He’s spent most of his life trying to get in there with her, into that private secret space, and little Yolande must’ve tried too. Jem shifts in his chair, the guilt is now a taste in his mouth, something that the sugar in his coffee cannot sweeten.

  ‘We can’t do to Poppy what we did to Yolande,’ he says in a soft voice. ‘We can’t leave her out.’

  Anneke touches his work-rough hand. ‘Don’t start that guilt stuff again, Jem. Don’t. We need to be here for this child, right now.’ They both look over to the wisp of blonde hair sticking up over the quilt. ‘We loved Yolande, we gave her everything we could. We didn’t leave her out, Jem.’

  ‘But we did.’ Jem knows he did. He knows he resented the intrusion of the difficult demanding child on his Anneke-devotion. And although he could never say it, he knows that Anneke in her gentleness, in her quiet dreaminess, without ever meaning to, leaves everybody out.

  *

  In a little over two weeks, the purple stripes caused by the bakkie’s seatbelt digging into Poppy’s collarbone and fleshless thighs start to fade, and when they do, they take her other old bruises along with them, leaving her clean-skinned and new. One warm afternoon, Anneke holds out Poppy’s old clothes and motions to the kitchen dustbin.

  ‘Shall we chuck them?’ Poppy nods. She still hasn’t said a word. ‘You want to do it, my love?’ Another nod.

  Poppy takes the tatty rags from Anneke and hurls them into the bin, looking up at her grandmother for reassurance that she’s done the right thing. At Anneke’s smile, Poppy dashes off into the house and returns with the pink sandals. With a nervous look over her shoulder, and just the very beginnings of a grin, she sends the shoes into the bin as well. Wombo stays, but Poppy hides him away in a drawer, unsure of his place in this new bright world of warm wooden floorboards, patchwork scatter cushions, and green green green.

  *

  After three full weeks, one doctor’s visit, and worried conversations held in hushed tones as the girl sleeps, Poppy finally breaks her silence.

  Anneke is stirring their breakfast in a pot on the stove while Poppy sits, quiet and motionless, on a pile of cushions that Jem attached to one of the kitchen chairs with a length of old pantyhose so that she can reach the table. The shaft of morning sunlight that slices across the room is so bright on the girl’s pale hair that her whole small self seems to blur and glow.

  ‘While we wait for your oatmeal to cook, would you like to see the flowers you’re named after?’ Anneke asks. She knows not to wait for an answer. She turns down the heat on the stove and holds out her hand. The girl slides off her chair and follows her grandmother outside onto the path where a row of Iceland poppies flaunt their end-of-season flowers in a showy display of tissue-paper petals. Tangerine, lemon and hot pink.

  ‘These are poppies. Your namesakes. Aren’t they lovely?’ Poppy’s soles are growing chilled on the flagstones. She rubs one bare foot against the warm top of the other.

  Beneath the blowsy blooms, the hairy poppy stalks remind Poppy of Karel’s legs. All those dark strands poking outwards. She can still see his calves, pale and skinny, protruding from the horrible grey shorts he always wore.

  ‘See, that’s a bud, just waiting to become a flower.’ Anneke points to the swollen hairy oval hanging from the end of one stalk. At the sight of it, Poppy gasps, dashes off along the curving path and disappears into the depths of the garden. Anneke, who is having a good day, follows slowly behind.

  She finds the child standing at the edge of the pond, staring across at the little wooden grave marker in the furthest corner of the garden, beneath the old oak tree. The wood of the marker has rotted away and been replaced many times since it was first dug into the soil, and each time, the carving of one word has been done anew.

  ‘That?’ The girl points towards the grave marker and speaks in hesitant English. ‘What’s it say on there?’ She’s speaking!

  ‘It says “Sam”.’ Anneke keeps her voice level, careful not to scare that little voice away again by making a fuss of the fact that Poppy’s silence has finally been breached. ‘It’s to mark a grave.’

  ‘Someone dead?’

  ‘Something. Yes.’

  Over the years the large mound of soil has sunk and dissolved into the carpet of periwinkles, clivias and arum lilies that grow wild in the shade of the oak tree. The flame-coloured clivias are no longer in bloom, but the arum lilies are crisp and white against the dark green, like freshly ironed linen napkins that have been folded into flutes for an elegant dinner party.

/>   ‘Who was Sam?’

  ‘He was my horse,’ Anneke answers. ‘My very best friend. He was buried there when I was fifteen.’

  ‘Horse.’

  ‘Do you know what a horse is?’

  ‘Yes.’ Poppy makes a little motion with her hands as if holding a set of reins, jogging them up and down in a mimed trot. Clearly another lesson learned from the TV. ‘What colour?’ she asks, picking her way through the reeds to edge around the pond towards the far corner.

  ‘Brown. With a white bit on his nose.’ Anneke remembers exactly how it felt to kiss that white bit: the tender, velvety skin on the flare of Sam’s nostrils, and the scent of chewed grass and dust and horse sweat in her own.

  ‘Did you love him, the horse?’

  ‘I did.’

  The child walks around the wooden marker three times, as if performing a ritual. Each time, her toes catch on the periwinkle stems that snake between the lily plants, the dark leaves and blue flowers twitch. She runs her fingers over the letters in the rough wood and then turns to look at Anneke.

  ‘Ouma?’ The word is halting and new in her mouth. ‘Can I be called Sam?’

  ‘What, instead of Poppy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Short for Samantha?’

  ‘No, just Sam. Only Sam.’

  ‘Are you sure? It’s more of a boy’s name.’

  ‘I won’t be Poppy any more.’ Her mouth twists. ‘I can’t be. Any more.’ One heavy rain storm, the girl imagines, and those fluttering petals will end up bruised and broken in bits on the ground.

  ‘It’s a big decision, changing your name.’

  And then there are those hairy bits. That horrible oval bud.

  ‘Please?’

  Anneke leans hard on her walker and gives the child a long look.

  ‘You really don’t like Poppy?’

  ‘I hate it.’