Bone Meal For Roses

by Miranda Sherry

  ‘Seriously?’ Keegan nods. Nathan picks at a scab on his elbow. ‘Crap.’

  ‘Two of them were coming out of the Super Saver and that’s why Sam fell and hurt her hands.’

  ‘Which two?’

  ‘Driekus and Morné.’

  ‘Oh God.’ Nathan’s face loses some of its colour. ‘OK then,’ he says, nodding his head towards Sam, ‘I guess she can game with us if she wants.’

  Sam dries her hands on a wad of crumpled loo paper and follows Keegan into the lounge. She stops short when she sees the black blank face of the McGoverns’ television against one wall. It’s the first one she’s seen since she stopped being Poppy. Her mouth goes dry. Her legs feel funny.

  ‘You’re going to have to wait your turn, Sam.’ Nathan is holding a plastic device with buttons on it that reminds Sam of the long-ago Game Boy that Karel once gave her. ‘You can play with Keegan after this but I’m going first.’ Sam runs her tongue over the new, perfect tooth with slightly frilly edges that grew in when the chipped one fell out. Her ears are making a whooshing sound.

  ‘Have you played PlayStation before? It’s awesome.’ Keegan’s face is flushed and eager. ‘I’ll show you all my games. If it wasn’t for this thing, Nate and I wouldn’t survive the summer holidays.’

  ‘Are you…’ Sam’s mouth is having trouble shaping itself around words. She can taste road dust. ‘Are you going to switch the TV on to play?’

  ‘Well, duh. Obviously,’ Nathan says and points the remote. The screen bursts into light and colour and Sam reels backwards. ‘Welcome to the summer sanctuary,’ Nathan grins, pressing various buttons on the gaming console. ‘Make yourself comfy. Those bloody boarders can’t touch us in here.’

  All of a sudden, Sam is on the ground staring upwards. The McGoverns’ lounge carpet has softened her second fall of the day. Her eyes swivel sideways. There are little fuzzy dust balls under the couch.

  ‘What the heck!’

  ‘Sam, why are you on the floor? Did you faint?’

  ‘Hey, is she crying?’

  Sam rolls over and crawls towards the door, desperate to get away from the blue flicker and the onslaught of sound.

  ‘Come back, Sam, you can’t go out there, those boarders will get you.’ She’s barely breathing. She scrabbles for the doorknob, and then, at last, she’s out in the yellow-layered brightness of real daylight. She crawls down the steps till there is grass beneath her body. Living, prickling grass. She drops her face into it and gasps sharp, green-smelling lungfuls of air.

  ‘Sam?’ Keegan’s voice is a whimper from the front steps. She looks up into his wide, shocked eyes. ‘What was that?’

  ‘I don’t like television.’ Each word is wrapped in a sheath of ice.

  ‘What? Are you nuts or something?’

  ‘Or games or consoles or anything… like that.’ Sam sits up and checks the palms of her injured hands. Her breathing is calming down now, and she can no longer feel her heart thump.

  ‘But it’s the best, you haven’t even tried—’

  ‘Go back inside.’ Sam gets to her feet. She’s a little wobbly, but her gaze is steady, cold. Keegan takes a small step backwards. ‘I’m going to wait out front for Grandpa. He’ll be here soon to take me home.’ The word ‘home’ brings the scent of lemon blossom and compost. Roses, pond mud, coffee and condensed milk.

  ‘Your grandpa won’t be here for a while. Remember, we were going to play because it’s the last day—’

  ‘I’ll see you next year when school starts, Keegan,’ Sam says, and then she runs.

  Keegan wants to call out that he’ll play outside with her, wherever she wants, even if the boarders come, but she’s already disappeared around the corner of the house. His hands feel numb. His mouth tastes strange.

  ‘Sam?’ he calls, but it’s only a whisper. He realises, with a dropping heart, that he’s not going to follow her. It’s not just the boarders he’s afraid of, or the uncomfortable memory of his friend crawling, sobbing, to the door, it’s the way her too-pale eyes changed so fast. From water to ice.

  *

  On Christmas Day, Sam sits wedged into the front seat of the bakkie between her grandparents. They’re going to a Christmas lunch with the extended family at Sussie’s house.

  ‘Do we have to?’ Since the last day of school and the awful PlayStation incident at Keegan’s house, Sam hasn’t left the sanctuary of the garden. During the long hot afternoons, while Jem and Anneke have napped beneath an old whirring fan in their curtained bedroom, she’s been playing alone in the cool corner by the pond. Nourished by the long-dead body of Sam-the-horse, the oak tree is a sprawling wonder of knotted branches and dense foliage, and in the relief of its shade, wearing a bridle made from plaited wool that she scavenged from Anneke’s knitting basket and a pair of torn pantyhose tucked in the waistband of her shorts as a tail, Sam has spent her summer pretending to be a horse.

  But there’s no tail and bridle in evidence today. Sam has been buttoned into an unfamiliar dress, and Anneke has brushed out her braids so that her hair falls, hot and heavy, down her back.

  ‘It’s unavoidable, my love.’ Anneke pats Sam’s leg as the bakkie lurches over the humps and bumps of the dirt road leading into town. ‘You know what a fuss Sussie made the last two years when we opted out. Your gramps and I are in enough trouble as it is, living out here on our own as we do.’

  ‘Yup, we don’t want to start World War Three.’

  The backs of Sam’s bare legs are glued to the baking seat after only a few minutes.

  ‘Do they have a TV?’ Anneke and Jem share a glance.

  ‘They won’t put it on today. It’s Christmas lunch.’

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘We’ll make sure.’

  Sussie and her husband François live with their youngest, unmarried son, Gerrie, in what once was Anneke’s parents’ old home. Their elder son, Franz, his wife, and their two boys live in the adjacent plot, but they’re here today. Everyone in the world is here today, it seems to Sam. She clings to Anneke’s arm as they approach the house. Under Sussie’s command, the front lawn is snooker-table-smooth. Inside, the floorboards gleam, and the scatter cushions on the sofa look like they’ve been arranged using a spirit level and measuring tape. The large Christmas tree has wire arms covered in green plastic needles, and sports a perfect arrangement of baubles and lights. There are no bare spots, unlike the decorated mini-cypress at home.

  Sussie, dressed in lime green slacks with a floral chiffon blouse to match, swoops at Sam, kissing her hello on the lips as she does with everyone. Sussie’s under no illusions that Sam enjoys this, but she’s making no more allowances. Enough time has passed for Sam to stop being offish and mopey and to join the loving ranks of the family. Sussie embraces Sam for a little too long, trying to squeeze some affection into the strange girl. She knows it’s in there somewhere, because the child clings to Jem like a limpet. In Sussie’s fragrant grip, Sam is on fire inside with the urge to squirm.

  ‘See? We came.’ Anneke smiles at her sister. ‘Now you can stop losing your mind about “not having the whole family together”.’

  ‘Sussie’s a true collector,’ François agrees. ‘She gets ants in her pants if she doesn’t have a full set.’

  ‘We still don’t,’ Sussie mutters, leading them through into the lounge. ‘There’s someone missing, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Don’t, Sus.’ Anneke flashes her sister a dark look. ‘You’re not to mention her. You promised.’ The dense silence is filled, edge-to-edge, with Yolande’s unspoken name. Sam is sure she can smell cigarettes. She pushes herself as hard against Jem’s ironed shirtfront as she can.

  ‘Come on now, it’s time to get festive.’ François banishes the hush. ‘There’s a present for you, meisiekind,’ he says to Sam, pointing her towards a pile of brightly wrapped boxes beneath the tree.

  The sight of the shiny parcels reminds Sam of the very first birthday she celebrated with Anneke and Jem, f
our months ago. Last year, Sam hadn’t known about birthdays, but after singing songs and watching her classmates blow out candles at Mrs McGovern’s, she realised that she needed one too. Because her real birth date was unknown, Sam chose her own, picking the twenty-third of September, the day that Jem rescued her from Pretoria. Anneke had made a delicate vanilla cake sandwiched together with rose-petal-flavoured cream and topped with eight candles, even though they couldn’t be absolutely sure that this was the right amount. When Sam saw it, she’d burst into tears.

  ‘Ag, my love, it’s all right,’ Anneke had whispered as she held her close. ‘You’ll find that sometimes even sweet things taste better with a little salt.’

  After the cake, Sam had unwrapped a pale turquoise jersey which Anneke must’ve knitted in the dead of night because Sam hadn’t seen even a scrap of turquoise wool around the house, and a book called The BFG which Jeremy reads to her before bed every night. They’ve almost finished it for the second time.

  None of these presents look like books, but Sam pretends to be pleased when she unwraps a plastic-faced baby doll wearing knitted booties and a pink, floral dress.

  ‘Thank you, Auntie Sussie and Uncle François,’ she says, and braces herself for another round of kissing.

  More family members arrive.

  Crackers, fairy lights, carols blaring out from a sound system somewhere, lots of talk in Afrikaans about Jesus. Sam’s head swims.

  Sussie’s grandsons are loud and large. Sam is startled to recognise the younger one, Morné, as the boarder with the mielie-silk leg hair who terrorised her and Keegan in Main Street the other day, but he seems oblivious of the fact that their paths have crossed. He barely looks at Sam, focusing only on eating as many of the wrapped chocolates from a bowl on the coffee table as he can.

  Soon, the room is full to bursting with big people with shiny faces. Sam dodges their uncertain attempts to get her to engage, and clamps herself onto Jem’s side because Anneke, surrounded by her sister and her family, seems oddly unavailable all of a sudden.

  At last, Sam manages to slip away. Compared to the bright colour of the festive front rooms, the rest of the house is cool and dark, and she’s able to breathe better. In the corridor leading to the bedrooms, she comes across a wall of framed family photographs, and challenges herself to find all the ones featuring Anneke. It’s easy. No one else has their shared white-blonde hair. Even in the black and white pictures, it glows like a silver halo around her grandmother’s head.

  In one photograph, Anneke is holding a little baby girl with brown curls. Sam’s stomach lurches when she realises that she’s looking at her own mother. She reels back and then moves along the display, preferring the pictures from a time when Yolande wasn’t even thought of. She stops. Hanging low, just at her eye level, is a black and white photograph of a young Anneke with a horse. Sam lifts the picture from its hook and carries it to the light of the window to study it better. Her grandmother looks about fourteen. She sits astride the animal with her head resting on the elegant curve of its muscular neck and her smile lighting up the world. It’s Sam-the-horse. It has to be. He is just as she imagined.

  ‘Your ouma loved that horse.’ Sam jumps, startled to find that Sussie has been watching her from the doorway. ‘And the horse loved her right back.’ Sussie steps closer. Sam’s fingers tighten on the frame. ‘The two of them together… it was a special thing, I tell you.’

  ‘I’m sorry I took the picture down. I just wanted to see it better.’

  ‘I’ve an idea,’ Sussie says. ‘Why don’t you take that home with you? That way you can look at it whenever you want.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘To keep?’

  ‘Why not? Christmas is all about giving, after all.’

  ‘Thank you, Aunt Sussie.’

  It’s only later, as she clutches the framed photograph to her chest on the drive home, that Sam feels uneasy. She’s pretty sure that no gift comes from Sussie without hidden costs attached.

  *

  That night, Sam-the-girl dreams of Sam-the-horse. He comes to her in a blur of wind and whipping leaves so that she’s not sure where his mane and tail end and the rest of the world begins. He is huge, a monolith of smooth brown warmth rising upwards. He lowers his massive head and she touches the swirl of hair between his liquid eyes.

  Sam wakes up at that moment. She lies still, with the orange gold of early morning glowing through her bedroom curtains, and tries to will the dream to return, but it is gone.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SAM WAKES TOO early on the morning of her first day back at school. She touches the framed photo of the girl-ouma and her horse which now lives on her bedside table, and then kneels up on her bed to open the curtains. She blinks, rubs her eyes, blinks again. There are a thousand white butterflies streaming across the pale sky like petals blown from a smashed up bridal bouquet. Sam watches, breathless, until the last fluttering insect has flown out of sight.

  After they’re gone, she tiptoes through the house and lets herself out of the kitchen door. There’s a dead butterfly lying in the centre of the path. Sam picks it up as carefully as she can. Its tissue-thin white wings are veined with a tracery of brown. She looks up into the quiet sky. There’s nothing but blue.

  Later, in class, when Mrs McGovern tasks her and Keegan with drawing something from nature, Sam places the dead butterfly on her desk and copies the pattern of its wings into her workbook with soft, reverent strokes of her pencil. Just remembering the mass of fluttering creatures makes her whole body feel charged.

  ‘That’s beautiful, Sam.’ Mrs McGovern places a large, important-looking book beside the girl’s work and taps the page. ‘Here’s some more about butterflies, if you’re interested.’

  Keegan scowls at Sam from behind his own drawing. He’s done Superman battling a Ninja Turtle. Turtles are from nature, aren’t they? Sam catches his eye and glances away, fast. Last year’s PlayStation incident has discoloured the air between them, and neither one is sure what to do about it.

  At lunch break, Sam is slow to leave her desk. In the past, she and Keegan would’ve dashed off to play something involving superheroes (Keegan has always been the ideas-man behind their games) but now she’s not sure if this is still on the cards, or even if she wants it to be. Keegan, hovering in the doorway, has just built up the courage to ask her to come outside with him, when Zama strides up to Sam’s desk.

  ‘Hey, that’s a really good drawing.’ She adjusts her glasses and takes a closer look at Sam’s pencil butterfly.

  At thirteen, Zama is the eldest pupil in Mrs McGovern’s care, and she wears her seniority, along with her flower print skirts and coloured T-shirts, with an air of quiet entitlement. Sam has been enchanted by Zama since she first saw her, but it’s the older girl’s sturdy-framed spectacles that she covets most. If Sam also had to wear glasses they would help hide her eyes. Sam’s eyes, she’s realised, are too light and strange-looking to be fully acceptable. Pools of reflective water hiding goodness knows what in their depths – Mrs McGovern once described them, but Sam doesn’t want water-eyes. She wants brown serious eyes with fringes of curly black lashes like Thuli and Zama.

  ‘I didn’t know you liked art,’ Zama says, and in the face of her up-close, spectacle-wearing awesomeness, Sam can only manage a nod.

  ‘I’ve been doing extra drawing lessons. Do you want to see my portfolio?’ Zama spots Keegan waiting in the doorway. ‘Unless you want to go…’

  ‘No.’ Sam can’t look at her old friend. Her face has gone boiling hot. ‘No, it’s fine. I’d like to. See.’

  Only after Keegan has turned away does Sam look up to watch him leave.

  *

  For the next two days, Sam spends her break times with Zama, looking through her portfolio and watching over her shoulder as she turns the pages of the fat art book filled with glossy coloured prints that Mrs McGovern keeps on the shelf. Zama’s unexpected attention makes Sam feel all pu
ffed-up and special, but she wishes they could be special outside, rather. She tries not to fidget, but she aches to be in the wind and the sun with her shoes off and her feet in the grass.

  On the third day, as Sam is poring over a picture of a painting that seems to be nothing but blurry strips of colour, Zama reaches into her bag and pulls out a dark plastic oblong. It beeps. It has a screen that lights up, and buttons. Batteries. Buttons. Bile. Sam freezes. She tries not to look at the cell phone. She forces her attention back to the book. The colours on the page blur, and her eyes are drawn to the menacing device with its rows of neat buttons sitting on the desk between them. In an instant, she’s back in Karel’s filthy lounge. She feels the horrible slick warmth of his fingers touching hers as he handed her the Game Boy. All the time and distance between that moment and this seem to melt into nothing.

  ‘Why do you have that?’ The apricot jam sandwich that she had for lunch is trying to crawl back up her throat.

  ‘My cell? It’s so I can SMS my mom to tell her when to fetch me from all my extra classes and stuff. Thuli’s getting one for her birthday this year, but you’re not allowed to tell.’

  Sam has to concentrate really hard not to drop the heavy art book as she places it on the desk. She rises to her feet. ‘I’m going to go outside now.’

  The bright outside pulls in tight around her, slamming into her senses and banishing the sick feeling in her gut and the taste of metal on her tongue. Above her, the sky is a clean, perfect arch of blue. She throws her head back and searches for the flicker of a white butterfly wing, but there’s only the pale grey shape of a very high-up aeroplane heading towards the mountains, the sound of its passage lost in distance.

  Sam spots Keegan across the mowed green square of lawn. He’s stomping with miserable resignation around in the flower bed amongst the cool strappy leaves of the agapanthus. Keegan’s face lights up when he sees her approach, but he quickly checks his grin. The look he gives her instead is cautious, questioning.

  ‘Let’s play,’ is all she says, and then they do.