Bone Meal For Roses

by Miranda Sherry

  ‘I know. But aren’t you worried that she’s not studying and stuff?’

  ‘A little, but I’m checking up on her, don’t you worry about that. She has to come in to write her cycle tests next week, remember? I’ll soon know if there’s something amiss.’

  ‘But it’s not really fair that she has to stay home to look after her grandpa because he’s sick, is it? It’s like something out of the Victorian ages or whatever.’

  ‘Look, I’m not going to pretend that I think this is ideal, and I told Sam that when she spoke to me about studying from home, but she’s over sixteen, and she has the legal right to make this choice. We have to respect that, OK?’

  ‘Unless she fails her cycle tests.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Mrs McGovern smiles. ‘Now no more dodging this geometry theorem, Keegan. Come, we’re going to nail this bugger down.’

  *

  The lemon tree blooms, filling the garden with memories of Anneke. Each perfumed inhale hurts. One moment, it is her ouma’s hand on Sam’s cheek, and the next, the click-tick of knitting needles, or the sound of condensed-milk ice cubes clinking the side of a coffee-filled glass. Sam ties her hair up extra tight in the mornings, so that the sight of the silvery strands, caught out of the corner of her eye, will not make her heart squeeze in. There are too many memories out here in the garden, and, without Jem’s usual pottering around and whistling, and making toast for his pilchards every few hours, there’s too much silence inside the house. So Sam, glad of the warming weather and clearer skies, has set up her studying spot in the lookout shelter a little way up the hill. Each morning, after oatmeal and coffee, Sam takes her books and notes and hikes out beyond the boundaries of the garden and up into the wild. She’s become a diligent student since dropping out of Mrs McGovern’s class. She has to be, with so much to prove.

  ‘I’m just going to study at the lookout, Grandpa,’ she says, her voice too loud in the morning hush.

  Today, the smell of sprouting green and white, waxy lemon blossom is undercut with something meatier, something almost animal. Sam clutches her books to her chest and dashes past the rose bed and through the lavender, under the lemon tree, around the pond, and out beyond the deep shade of the greening oak. Her heart hammers as if she’s being chased.

  But then Sam sees something that stops her dead. She gasps for breath, and the books tumble out of her arms onto the ground. There, on the hill, silhouetted against the morning sky, just as he has stood so often in her dreams, is Sam-the-horse.

  She blinks. He’s still there. She steps over her fallen school work and walks a few steps closer. The horse is still there. He’s real.

  You’re never to go over there, Sam, do you hear me? Jem’s voice is loud and clear inside her head, as if he made her promise this yesterday, rather than all those years ago when they’d once climbed the hill together.

  That le Roux is an angry, vindictive old bugger. It wouldn’t be safe. Sam looks back towards the house, but lush garden growth blocks it from sight. She turns back to the horse. Still there!

  Promise me.

  The animal turns its head. Sam swallows. Her mouth is dry and tastes of the grassy dust from the breeze blowing down from the hill. It’s looking at me. It wants me to come closer.

  Before she realises that she’s made the decision to do so, Sam begins to run.

  She scrambles up over the rocky face of the rise, brushing through bushes and jumping over clumps of grass. She forgets to stamp and sing to scare away the snakes as Jem always taught her to do. Up and up and closer and closer. The horse is brown. She can see that now. Is that a scrap of white on its nose? Just as she’s getting close enough to tell, the horse turns and trots away.

  No, wait!

  She speeds up, panting, scratching her calves on thorny scrub and slipping on stones. Wait.

  But Sam-the-horse is moving faster, high-stepping over the rocky ground as he heads around the hill to the far side. Sam sees his tail swish as he saunters out of view. She follows.

  The horse from her dreams is real. Breathing. Alive.

  What other choice does she have?

  *

  Liezette bears down on the stable hand with a purple face.

  ‘What do you mean, he just went?’

  ‘Like I said, missus, he was out at the end of the paddock and then he wasn’t.’ The stable hand is holding the handle of the stiff broom he uses to sweep the stable floor, clutching the wood and twisting it between his dark hands. ‘He a good jumper that one, missus. He must’ve just felt like going out.’

  ‘But where? Good grief. What does my father pay you for?’

  ‘To clean and care for the horses, missus.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ Liezette knows she’s being unreasonable. She knows that this young man with his frightened brown eyes and twisting hands cannot be held responsible for a horse that decides to bolt, but the idea that Rolo might be gone for good makes her want to double up in pain. She marches out of the stable and into the fresh air of the paddock. Her father’s four other horses are eating grass at the far end with an air of studied innocence. What do they know about it? Did they gang up on the new guy? Do something to drive him off?

  She shields her eyes from the sun and scans the pinstriped vineyards, revolving slowly on the spot and searching for his brown bulk amongst the rows.

  ‘Rolo! Come here, boy!’ Her voice cracks, and Liezette is horrified to realise that she wants to open her mouth and bawl, just like Delia does when something she wants is taken away from her. She’s seconds away from stamping her foot. Coming back home seems to be reversing things, turning her into a spoilt little girl again. And now Rolo’s gone.

  Liezette storms across the paddock and grips the rough wood of the split-pole fence so that splintery bits jam into her skin. From here she can just make out the hump of Charlie’s barn and the brown hill rising up behind it. She spots some sort of movement at the bottom of the hill. She strains to see better. The shape disappears behind a clump of trees. She holds her breath, waiting. There! The shape is now on the farm road and moving fast.

  ‘Rolo!’ she calls, and the shape speeds up, resolving itself into the unmistakable figure of a horse. Coming towards her, racing back to be with her. She scrambles over the fence poles to get to him.

  *

  Sam stops running when the absurdity of her fevered horse-chase finally crashes through her hope.

  She’s all the way on the le Roux side of the hill and the animal, which she now realises cannot possibly be Sam-the-horse, is out of sight, no doubt trotting back to wherever it is he belongs. She fights for breath, coated in sweat that stings in the new scratches on her legs, and so dizzy that she has to sink to the ground to stop from falling. She lies on her back at the foot of the hill. The empty blue sky spins above her. Her legs are shaking. Everything is shaking.

  I really thought it was Sam.

  She fights to suck in air, then curls up on her side and sobs.

  It is here, wedged in behind a boulder on the le Roux side of the hill, surrounded by scrub and with a clump of grass pushing into her spine, that the truth finally catches up with Sam. It opens its inescapable jaws and swallows her down into its hollow throat.

  I am alone.

  There is no dream horse on the hill, no ouma in the lemon-blossom breeze, and no grandpa, with a backpack of sandwiches and sun block, who can stand at her side.

  *

  After a long while, Sam sits up. She rests her aching forehead against the warm bulk of the boulder, and when she raises her gaze, she’s shocked to realise that she’s been right up close to one of the le Roux farm buildings this whole time. A few metres down the slope is an old barn with peeling plaster walls and a tin roof and wide open doors.

  Someone could’ve seen me!

  She peers over the boulder and blinks to clear her salt-raw eyes. In the barn doorway, lit by the mango-coloured light of the late afternoon sun, Sam sees some sort of sculpture carved out of glowing
wood.

  No, it’s not a sculpture. She ducks back behind the rock, heart racing. It’s a person. Has he been there the whole time?

  Sam knows that she should creep away before the glowing-wood-man looks up and sees her. The best thing to do would be to wriggle backwards to that thicker clump of bushes that she passed earlier and sneak out of view. But for some reason, she doesn’t. Instead, she holds her breath and peeps out again.

  The man is wearing jeans, but no shirt, and the sweat on his bare arms catches the light in such a way that it looks as if his flesh is morphing into the gleaming piece of timber in his hands. The man is not motionless as Sam first thought, he’s polishing the piece of shaped and sanded wood with a rag, using tiny movements to work it carefully into the curves. Every so often, he dips the corner of the cloth into a can of what Sam figures must be some kind of oil, bending low over his work so that his brown hair flops down and she cannot see his face.

  As Sam watches the man’s muscles slide beneath his skin, a strange hot swish of blood rushes beneath her own. Down from her head to her soles and all the way up again, pooling with a warm liquid feeling somewhere in her centre.

  A line of industrious ants begin marching their way over her calf, but she’s unaware of the tickling of their tiny legs. Then, suddenly, the man stands up and turns and goes back inside, too quickly for Sam to see anything but the wings of his shoulder blades and the hollow of his spine bisecting his broad back. Sam waits, biting her lip, but the glowing-wood-man doesn’t return.

  She waits some more. Nothing.

  Get moving, Sam. You need to get back and now’s your chance.

  Sam inches backwards from the boulder and then dashes to the next clump of cover. Slowly at first, then speeding up as she gets further and further from the le Roux side of the hill, Sam heads back home.

  *

  That night, Sam dreams she hears the repeating screech-cry of a martial eagle echoing through the house, high-pitched and urgent. She follows the sound, walking through into the dream-kitchen. The room is empty, but the sunlight streaming through the kitchen window is butter-yellow. She holds her hand up to the light and it’s so dense that her fingers look as if they’re coated with it. She could place them in her mouth and suck the sunlight off them as if it was pancake batter. She touches her finger to her lip and a low throb pulses out from the tip and down her throat, dropping into her belly and then further. She squirms, gasps. Almost wakes.

  But the dream is not done yet.

  There, in the middle of the kitchen table, is a small wooden carving of a horse. Sam picks it up. It is warm against her palm. The wood grain swirls across the miniature creature’s flanks. Its eyes are mere notches gouged out with a carving tool, but the moment Sam looks into them, she can feel herself falling.

  She wakes before she hits the floor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  YOLANDE THE RAT-BURGLAR has worked her way along the coast, picking what she could and selling it on and smoking it up or spiking it in, and now here she is in the mother city. The mother lode. Cape Town is rich with ignorant foreign tourists and big spenders and rat-pickings, but it’s dangerous too. Lots of cats out here, and packs of rangy dogs with gold in their teeth and hard eyes.

  Yolande returned to Port Elizabeth after making sure that her mother was dead and in the ground for good, but ever since then, she’s felt something tugging her westwards, inching her back in the direction of the valley. She feels the pull, despite the fact that her father, with his too-straight back and silver hair, was clearly still alive. Just thinking about him makes Yolande feel itchy and uncomfortable, with a hollow hurt in the middle that she’s in no mood to investigate. Even from here in the city, with the ocean in the wind and the shelter of the massive flat mountain at her back, Yolande can sometimes catch it on the air: Karoo dust and fruit sap spiralling down from the farmlands that lie to the north-east. The smell sings of childhood frustration, of straining at too-tight leashes, but there’s something else in it now, a yearning. Yolande is plagued by an image in her chemical-sickened dreams of a pair of brilliant gold rings, one of them alive with sparkling stones, on a mud-spattered, swollen-knuckled hand.

  I want what’s mine. What’s owed to me.

  But the old man with his disappointed sneer is not going to let her get near them. Nope, Yolande’s going to have to wait, but that’s OK, she’s got other plans brewing, rich, juicy plans, and she’s not going to let a stinking breeze stop her from making Cape Town her bitch.

  For the past few nights Yolande has been scoping out a place right on the side of the ‘oh-so-special’ Table Mountain. The neighbourhood is not her usual hunting ground. It’s far too fancy. Yolande has learned that it’s easier to take from those who have so little that they’re not equipped to guard it too fiercely. A phone here, an old wallet there, that special something someone working double shifts has saved up for months to buy. Even if there’s only one paltry item worth taking in a break-in, Yolande nabs it and then sells it, and then buys her medicine: something brown and sticky to spike, or something white and crystaline to smoke. She’s going to be able to stock up good after tonight. Get a room for a few days. Suck up the goodness and float away.

  Yes, tonight she’s ready for something bigger. She’s been planning this, hiking through the City Bowl and up into Higgovale each night for almost a week. It’s a posh suburb filled with angular modern houses hugging the mountainside like sparkling gift boxes propped up on stilts, all nicely wrapped in their electric fences and alarms and armed response signs, brimming with iPads and Xboxes and lovely little shiny things in drawers by bedsides. Yolande knows that the wrappings tend to tear with time, and after a while nobody realises that there’s a hole at the bottom of a fence, or a broken branch resting on a wall post, or a sensor that’s lost its war against the raging Cape winds and has become disconnected.

  And now, she’s found her mark. She crouches down in a scrub-filled hollow on the other side of the road where the ground drops down. Mountains, she’s discovered, even the ones featured on postcards, are full of hidey hollows for rats. It’s cold with the wind whistling down the rocky flanks, and her dirt-coloured balaclava is doing double duty tonight. She digs into the pocket of her jeans and pulls out a baggie containing three crushed up Thinz tablets. Compared to all the substances she’s snorted and smoked and sunk into, these are not going to do much, but they’ll keep her alert and thinking. Extra ratty. Rat tabs. She smiles again and her scab pulls and she snorts up a quick fingernail of gritty powder before sucking the remains from her finger. The bitter chemical taste pulses at the back of her throat as she folds up the baggie and slides it back into her pocket. The car, one of those big poser 4 x 4 things that rich assholes like to drive these days so that they can sit up high and look down on the regular people, moves off. Yolande watches the cherry-red glow of its tail lights moving off down the road and around a bend. She’s been waiting for this. She flexes her rat-fingers and darts across the street.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SAM FEELS THE familiarity of Mrs McGovern’s classroom wrap itself around her like a comfortable old sweater that she’d forgotten she owned. She’s back here to write her first test, and even after weeks away, everything is as it always has been: the caramel colour of the pine desk beneath her papers and the way that particular patch of sky looks through the window. The smell is familiar too: a chemical sweetness of Xylene whiteboard markers mixed in with the lemongrass essential oil that Mrs McGovern believes helps to keep the mind alert, and beneath that, the particular foot and armpit aroma of boy.

  The boys responsible for this are fidgety in Sam’s presence. They’ve got tests to write too, but neither of them is going to do very well. Dale is to her right, his elbows spread wide on his desk, rumpling his papers. He stares at Sam without pretending not to, until Mrs McGovern taps his desk and gives him a stern look. Keegan, to her left as always, darts little glances as if taking surreptitious sips of something cool and
delicious.

  Sam is too nervous about the tests to notice. The stakes, she believes, are high. She bends over her papers with an intensity that makes her even more watchable. Her study regime was going just fine until she betrayed her grandpa and followed that horse to the other side of the hill. She’s been trying extra hard, but yesterday, she couldn’t stop herself from going back there and spying on the wood-man again. He was inside the workshop, so she’d had to creep out from behind her boulder and stalk closer to watch him. The memory of it makes her shift on her chair and she momentarily struggles for breath. She grips her pen tighter. Concentrate.

  *

  ‘Well, Sam, you certainly haven’t been skimping on your studies.’ Mrs McGovern smiles at Sam over the top of the completed test paper. ‘I’m going to mark this properly tonight, but it looks good at first glance.’ She slides it onto the pile. ‘How are you feeling about tomorrow’s algebra and biology?’

  ‘OK, I guess.’ Sam shakes out her right hand which has gone stiff from all the writing. ‘I want to ask you something about this one thing in algebra, though.’

  Keegan waits while Mrs McGovern helps Sam with her equation, and is still lingering close when Sam starts packing her things back into her backpack for the ride home.

  ‘You’re going already?’ Keegan tries to sound casual.

  ‘I need to get back—’

  ‘To be with your grandpa. Of course.’ The word ‘grandpa’ seems to hang in the air and vibrate. Sam can almost see it. Mottled red and charcoal grey. She battles with her bag, which keeps snagging on one corner of the file she’s trying to jam into it.

  ‘Yes.’ She can suddenly smell roses. There are no rose bushes in Mrs McGovern’s garden. Her mouth goes dry. ‘And to study for tomorrow.’

  ‘How’s my old computer treating you?’ Keegan tries again.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘If it ever gives you crap, just let me know and I’ll come and take a look at it for you.’

  ‘Oh, Keegan, Keegan, Keegan.’ They both turn, startled, to see Nathan slouching into the classroom. He was already tall before he left to go to university in Cape Town at the beginning of the year, but now he seems to almost brush the ceiling with his carefully asymmetrical haircut. ‘Don’t you know the way into a woman’s pants is not through her keyboard?’