Bone Meal For Roses

by Miranda Sherry

  The PlayStation incident and the recent days of silent strangeness are never mentioned, but the old ease between them is now clouded, as if strung across by a myriad of spider-web-like strands, invisible until a sudden breeze blows and they float up and catch the light.

  *

  The two new computers are the ugliest things Sam has ever seen. They sit on the desk by the classroom door like dark entities from another dimension, sucking power with their black cables and blank, dead screens. On the floor, wired up to the monitors, are two humming black cases, ‘towers’ Keegan calls them in a know-it-all voice. Mrs McGovern starts explaining how computer science is now going to be included in their studies.

  ‘I’m no expert myself, but I’ve found a wonderful online tutorial that you can use to teach yourselves basic HTML, and my husband has organised for one of his interns at work to come in two hours a week and work with whoever is interested. Yes, Keegan, I know that’s you, no need to jump around so, darling.’

  ‘Will we have the internet?’

  ‘Yes, Nate, but we can’t get broadband out here, and there’s going to be strict rules about using it. I’m going to explain those to everyone after break.’

  ‘We have a computer at home, and I already know how to use Word,’ Zama says. ‘Can I bring my files here on a flash drive to copy over?’

  ‘Of course. Perhaps you can teach the others how to use the program.’

  ‘I already know how.’

  ‘No, you don’t, Thuli, you just know how to play solitaire,’ Zama shoots back at her little sister, who scowls.

  ‘Do we have to?’ Sam’s voice is high and panicked. She clenches her hands into fists to stop them from shaking.

  ‘It’s important for you to give it a try, Sam. I’m afraid you’ll be doing yourself a huge disservice if you don’t get to grips with the digital age.’

  ‘It’s the future of EVERYTHING!’ Keegan is still bouncing up and down with excitement.

  ‘Yeah, this is 2006, you know.’ Nathan has never forgiven Sam for her PlayStation meltdown. ‘Not the last century where people rode donkeys and minced about in bloomers.’

  ‘That’s enough, Nate.’ Mrs McGovern places a hand on her son’s head. ‘Now, everyone get back to your desks and carry on with your assignments. We’ll all have a computer and internet introduction session after lunch.’

  During break, Sam leaves Keegan on the jungle gym pretending to be Spiderman and heads back to the classroom. She feels as if an invisible line of fishing gut is pulling her inside, towards those new computers with their smug, rectangular faces.

  She pauses on the threshold of the room. The invisible line tugs. From their corner, the machines radiate an air of menace that seems to pulse out in waves, washing over Sam and making her stomach all nauseous and swishy. She takes a step towards the computers, and then another, and before she really has time to process it, she is standing right in front of them, breathing in their terrible electrical exhalations, ears throbbing from the sickening sound of their mechanical beating hearts. Sam’s own heart is thundering in her chest as she reaches out to pull the wire from the back of one of the screens in an attempt to make the noise stop. Her hand bumps the mouse and the screen blazes to life. Sam gasps, staring, transfixed, into the dead blue oblong eye of the monitor she’s awoken. Her nose is inexplicably filled with the garbage and smoking tik smell of her Poppy days. She can taste hunger and cigarette smoke. Her breath comes in quick little rasps. Sam remembers the television people with their blurred static edges and too-bright colours. She remembers them right up close to her nose, while her mother lay slack and drugged on the floor behind her back. Goosebumps leap out all over her skin.

  It only takes a moment for Sam to clamber up to the special shelf where Mrs McGovern keeps the big fat art book, grasp it in her slick fingers, and approach the computer once more. The smell of vomit and beer and dust is thick in her nostrils now. Yolande’s voice seems to whisper from every corner of the classroom.

  No!

  The book leaves her hands and flies into the monitor. Sam watches it happen as if from a great distance, sees the spine open and the pages flap like the wings of a dying bird, sees the crack shatter outwards from the point where the heavy cover slams into the screen and splits the blue light like a terrible smile.

  ‘No!’ Keegan cries out from the doorway behind her, his shocked voice only raising the volume of her mother’s spectral voice. Sam puts her hands over her ears. The humming hasn’t stopped. The voices are still there.

  ‘Sam, how could you? What have you done?’ Keegan rushes to the monitor and touches the cracked plastic as if ministering to an injured animal. Blue light haloes around his finger and static crackles.

  ‘Stay back, it’s going to get you,’ Sam implores, grabbing onto Keegan’s arm and pulling to try and get him away from the danger.

  When Keegan turns to look at her, the confusion and despair on his face jolt her from the past and back into the sunny room. She can hear Mrs McGovern’s footsteps, and Thuli’s singing outside the window. She lurches backwards, gasping for breath.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—’ but Keegan’s back is towards her again, he grabs the mouse and starts clicking urgently, checking if there’s damage that goes deeper than the crack in the screen.

  Sam watches the little squares open and close on the blue screen in response to the movement of Keegan’s fingers. Blood rushes from her face, and she sways on her feet.

  ‘You’re going to be in big trouble for this, you know that, Sam.’

  Sam sinks down to her knees, tears pouring down her cheeks. Big trouble.

  They’re going to send me back.

  *

  The afternoon light drapes the garden in golden bands, and where it catches a rose, the bloom seems to glow as if each petal is alight. Sam stares at the brand new yellow one that just unfurled its petals this morning before she went to school and saw the computers. Before she ruined everything. Her whole body feels as if it is filled with dark, claggy mud. She can barely move her legs to take a step. Her hand, when she reaches out to touch the new petals, which look like they’ve been carved out of butter, is almost too heavy to manoeuvre. You’re going to be in big trouble for this, you know that, Sam.

  Sam’s hand drops to her side, leaving the flower untouched. She’s so absorbed in her misery that she doesn’t hear the noise Jem makes as he pushes Anneke’s wheelchair through the clover towards her, nor his careful footsteps as he walks away.

  ‘Mrs McGovern phoned, Sam.’ Anneke’s voice is gentle. ‘She’s very worried about you.’

  ‘Worried?’ Sam is not expecting this.

  ‘She said you weren’t yourself.’ Sam can smell the flowery-powder smell of Anneke’s skin lotion. She closes her eyes for a moment to block out everything else but that. ‘She said that the Sam she knows would never vandalise a piece of classroom equipment. She said it was as if you went into some kind of panic at the sight of those computer-things. What happened, my love?’

  ‘Are you going to send me back?’ Just whispering the words makes Sam’s legs go weak.

  ‘What? No! Of course not. I’m just trying to understand.’

  ‘The computer screen – all electronic screen things… they…’ Sam stares so hard at the yellow rose that it seems to unfold further in front of her, ready to swallow her into its golden centre. ‘They remind me.’

  ‘I see.’ A warm wind picks up and gives the branches a gentle shake.

  ‘And it’s like I’m there again.’

  ‘Well then.’ Anneke nods to the roses. ‘Which one are you going to choose?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘To remember that you’re not back there, that you’re not Poppy any more.’

  ‘A rose can help me do that?’

  ‘Pick it very carefully, concentrating hard all the while on the fact this is a special rose. You then put it in water, and watch as it fades, and each petal that browns and falls represents a lit
tle more of the old Poppy-life falling away. When it is done, and the rose is all gone, you will know that you can face the computers and the cell phones with nothing to fear.’

  ‘But I still won’t like them.’

  ‘That’s fine, you don’t have to like them, as long as you don’t try to destroy them. Or allow them to destroy you.’

  As Sam stares at the roses, her breath comes more easily and her hands stop trembling. The white ones look clean like just-washed linen, and there’s a big orange one that’s going pink at the edges, like a sunset, but it’s the newly opened yellow rose that calls to her. She points it out to Anneke, who nods, indicating the pair of secateurs lying in her lap.

  ‘And then tomorrow morning, before school, I want you to come out here and pick another bunch of roses. A big bunch.’

  ‘Why?’ Sam pauses, secateurs at the ready.

  ‘To give to Mrs McGovern, along with the apology letter you’re going to write tonight after supper.’

  ‘OK,’ Sam says. One corner of the sky is turning indigo. She turns back to the butter yellow rose, takes a deep breath, and makes the cut.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BY THE TIME Sam’s next ‘made-up’ birthday comes around, the lemon tree blooms with such exuberance that there are more pale stars than green leaves on the thorn-spiked branches, and the centre of the garden vibrates with a permanent halo of bees. Every corner of the evening garden is perfumed by the lemon blossom, and beneath the tree, the scent is so powerful that Sam can feel it at the back of her throat. Even inside, from her spot on the bedroom floor, her head swims with the sweetness of it, and she has to pause mid-drawing because the brown pencil crayon almost slides from her fingers.

  Sam is drawing another horse. Her bedroom walls are already rustling with tacked-up pieces of paper featuring her artwork. There are horses with peculiar perspective problems, different length legs, necks that are too short, and others far too long, and manes and tails with such volume as are never seen in nature. Stuck to the wall beside her bed is her prize work so far: a painstaking copy in pencil of the photograph Sussie gave her last Christmas. She never managed to get Anneke’s face quite right, and now her ouma’s skin looks grey from all the rubbing out, but Sam feels she can forgive herself for that because her rendering of Sam-the-horse is almost perfect.

  Today, she is drawing a dark-haired girl on a chestnut horse riding through a white-blossomed orchard. That one sighting of the ‘laroo-girl’ has stayed with Sam ever since her first, raw spring in the valley, and even now, years later, she’s determined to try and capture something of that moment. She has no idea if the laroo-girl from the far side of the hill still rides her horse, but Sam still aches to be her: half human, half animal, an otherworldly thing of strength and speed.

  It’s her birthday tomorrow. Sam knows that she won’t get a horse. She knows that it’s impossible. Ouma is so sore these days, and Grandpa so bowed under the weight of her pain, that Sam didn’t even think to mention that she wished for one. If, by some miracle off-chance, a horse were to turn up, where would they keep it? They’re living in the stables already.

  Perhaps Sussie and Oom François could keep a horse at the main farm, but how would she get there to visit it? Sam is secretly glad that Anneke has been too delicate for that bakkie ride lately. At Sussie’s there are always too many questions about school and pointed comments about church, and worried looks at Ouma and hugs and kisses and more kisses till she wants to scream.

  It’s been two months since her ouma last went out in the bakkie, and the memory of that trip is a sore place in Sam’s world, like a scab that won’t heal because she keeps picking at it. Jem, Sam and Anneke had been on their way back from the big hospital in Paarl, and the bakkie cabin had felt like a small core of warmth in the middle of the empty Karoo road. Although it had been too dark to see the granite mountains rearing up on either side, Sam could feel their presence beyond the windows: cold and distant. Observing. At each bump and curve in the road, her ouma had sucked in a soft hiss of pain-breath.

  ‘What did the doctor say, Ouma?’ she’d asked.

  ‘Ag, my child, don’t you worry yourself about it.’

  ‘Are you going to get better?’

  ‘The problem with my sickness is there is no cure, my love. My silly old immune system is attacking itself. It has decided that I’m an intruder in my own body.’

  ‘But you said maybe they could do an operation, or something?’

  ‘They did, but they don’t recommend it any more. The surgery might be too much for my system to take.’

  ‘It could make you worse?’

  ‘It could.’

  ‘Oh, Ouma.’ Sam had found Anneke’s hand in the dark and covered it lightly with her own, feeling the swollen balls of Anneke’s knuckles like the humped backs of tok-tok beetles beneath her palm. She’d imagined the beetles eating away at the stuff inside Anneke’s joints with their serrated mandibles. Relentless.

  ‘But they gave me different pills. Stronger ones. I’m sure it will be better.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Sam echoed.

  ‘It will,’ Jem had added in a too-loud voice.

  There in the confiding dark, the words that Sam had been afraid of speaking for so long suddenly leaped up the back of her throat, and out:

  ‘If something happens to Ouma, if there’s only Grandpa to look after me, will she come back?’

  Her grandparents had exchanged a look. An invisible twine of tension seemed to twist and wind its way between them, tightening everyone’s throats.

  They’re scared too! Sam had thought. They’re scared Yolande will come back.

  But then Jem had said: ‘We honestly don’t know where Yolande is or what she’s doing now. We feel bad about it, Sam, but ever since you came to live with us, we haven’t tried to contact her again.’

  ‘We used to try and get her to get help for her drug problem, we tried to get her to go to a special hospital to help her get clean, but she never wanted to, and then she made sure we couldn’t get in touch with her so she wouldn’t have to listen.’ Anneke’s voice had been soft, and Sam had to strain to catch her words over the engine. ‘When we saw what she had done to you, we stopped trying.’ There’d been a silence filled with engine noise and wind and then: ‘She is no longer my daughter, Sam, only you are.’

  ‘She was Poppy’s mother. Maybe,’ Sam replied. ‘But not Sam’s. Only you are.’

  Beneath the wheels of the old bakkie, the road suddenly turned from tar to earth, and Jem had slowed down to try and minimise the jolting.

  I don’t want Yolande ever to see me again. I want her to think that I’m dead. Sam realised that she’d been holding Anneke’s hand too tightly, and quickly lessened her grip.

  ‘Promise me I can stay with you, Grandpa.’

  There had been a pause and then: ‘We promise, Sam.’

  The rest of the drive had been spent in silence.

  Now, on her bedroom floor, Sam breathes in the lemon-blossom scent and colours in a section of flank, and then pauses to listen to the noises coming from the kitchen. She’s not allowed in there this evening because Jem is making her a surprise for tomorrow. Sam knows it’s a chocolate birthday cake because she saw Ouma writing down the ingredients and instructions in a slow, careful hand and handing it over to Jem when she thought Sam wasn’t looking.

  *

  Jem has never baked a cake before. His entire front is covered with flour, and there are sticky strings of raw egg on the floor between the table and the dustbin. He wants to ask Anneke if he’s supposed to sieve the cocoa powder, but when he cranes his head to look into the lounge, her eyes are closed. He decides to sieve it anyway, because the brown stuff comes out of the tin in stuck-together clumps. All the while as he works, there’s a small fluttering deep in his belly, as if an insect with sharp wing-cases and clawing legs is trying to burrow its way up through his intestines towards his throat. Jem takes another sip of coffee from his sticky, floured mug to try
and quell the feeling, but it soon comes back. It always does. Jem knows that it’s here to stay.

  *

  ‘Koewee!’ Rattle, rattle goes the garden gate. When Jem pulls back the latch, Sussie marches in and gives him a big hug. Her youngest son, Gerrie, makes his way through the gate behind her.

  ‘Hello, Oom!’ Hug, kiss, pat hand on Jem’s back goes Gerrie. Sam watches from her spot by the herb fountain, bracing herself for her turn. ‘The chair’s in the back of the bakkie. Shall I bring it in?’

  ‘After coffee, my boy, after coffee. Come on in.’ Jem has always had a soft spot for Gerrie. He is careless and jocular and full of undirected, enthusiastic ambition, all of the things that Jem wasn’t when he was that age. When Jem fell in love with Anneke, he had only one goal: to be worthy of her. That meant that he had to be worthy of her land too, and of the rows and rows of fragrant fruit trees that flourished on it. Having grown up in Cape Town in a small city home, he felt he needed to make himself bigger to fit the vastness of the valley. Big enough to take on the massive task of running the farm with her. Now, he has just one small corner of it to look after, but the pressure on his shoulders is larger than ever. Her last years, in this garden, must be beautiful ones.

  ‘Jeez, would you look at this place!’ Gerrie’s eyes go huge when he takes in the full glory of the summer garden. ‘It’s like a frigging fairy kingdom in here.’

  ‘And there’s the fairy herself,’ Sussie says as she spies Sam lurking in the lavender by the fountain. Despite looking the part with her pale-morning-sky eyes and cascade of creamy hair, Sussie notes that the fairy in question is scowling like a troll.

  ‘No, seriously, look at this place,’ Gerrie breathes in wonder as he walks along the slate paths between the exuberant flower beds. ‘And look at the old stables!’ He stops dead and stares at the undulating old plaster of the walls, now painted a soft dove grey, interspersed with large wooden-framed glass doors that all lead out into the courtyard. ‘You did this, Oom? It’s better than one of those fancy-pantsy B&Bs in Albertville and such. You could charge a small fortune for city folks to come out here and stay for holidays. And weddings!’ His voice gets higher and higher as each new thought occurs to him. ‘People would be killing themselves to have their wedding in this garden. Killing themselves, I tell you.’