Maybe he doesn’t have to.
Sam starts to formulate a plan.
Two days.
She’ll be ready.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHARLIE HAS BEEN driving for close on an hour, and is approaching the vast rocky backs of the Du Toitskloof mountains when he hears the noise. At first, he thinks there’s something wrong with the engine, but the knocking seems to be coming from the back of the van. It can’t be. He packed so carefully, wedging the pieces against one another and jamming rolled up bits of bubble wrap in the gaps to prevent slipping and rattling and possible damage. He glances at his rear-view mirror, adjusting it so that he can see the little window behind the back seats, a pane of glass between the back of the cab and the cargo area of the van. At first, he can see nothing but a dark block reflecting the inside of the cabin, but then suddenly, a pale flash of movement. His guts drop in fright. He focuses on the road ahead for a moment to steady his nerves before daring another look.
Jesus!
A face appears in the glass for an instant, and then is gone again. Charlie’s heart halts and then gallops. He looks again. Yes, a face, and a set of slender knuckles rap-rapping on the glass. It’s her! It’s the girl from the hill with the eyes like water. What in the name of all that is holy is she doing back there in amongst the furniture?
Charlie pulls over onto the side of the road. He switches off the engine and waits for his heart rate to slow to something approaching manageable. He climbs out onto the tar, taking a moment to steady himself on his shaking legs before walking to the back of the vehicle, bracing himself against the wind of the highway traffic rushing past and the hot dry breath of the air that pours down the sloped rocky backs of the mountains ahead.
He opens the back of the van.
‘Hello?’ He is dry-mouthed, and it comes out as a whisper. A pause, a rustle of movement, and then a hand appears around the back of a bubble-wrapped chair. A hiking boot pokes out, testing for a solid spot, and then the pale leg, as, a bit at a time, the girl twists and clambers her way out from the barricade of the Water-Wood Collection. ‘Watch it,’ he cautions when it looks like she’s going to ding her head into the edge of a shelf.
After the close darkness of the van, the scrub-covered ground seems to race away towards the edges of the distant horizon with dizzying speed. Sam grips the hot painted metal of the van door and waits for the vertigo to pass. She can’t look at Charlie yet. She shades her eyes and stares back down the ribbon of highway in the direction that they’ve come. It’s the first time since before Anneke died that she’s been so far from home. She feels floating, free, untethered. She turns to Charlie with a laugh of delight in her throat, but gulps it back down when she sees the look on his face.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ he demands. She blinks at him, wordless. Charlie crosses his arms across his T-shirt. She can see patches of sweat bruising the fabric a darker blue beneath his armpits. I thought he’d be pleased. The only words she can think of to say are Don’t leave me here, but she holds them in.
To Charlie, in the brittle highway sunlight, suddenly materialising from out of the back of le Roux’s van, the girl seems even less real than she ever has before. He resists the urge to prod her shoulder to prove that she isn’t a figment of his imagination. ‘Hey?’ he asks, his voice softer this time. ‘Why did you hide in there?’
Sam can’t understand why he is asking. Surely it’s obvious? He was leaving her alone again and she wanted him not to. She wraps her arms over Anneke’s old cotton blouse, the one with the tiny lilac flowers printed on it, and looks down at her feet.
‘Come on, then.’ Charlie marches to the passenger door and swings it open. ‘I guess you’d better sit up in the front with me.’
*
From her seat beside Charlie in the front of the van, Sam watches the mountains draw closer. As they drive deeper into the valley, the stern flanks of scored rock rear up like waves of earth on either side of the road. Looking up at them leaves her breathless. Back home, the space between the mountains is wide and undulating, and the peaks themselves are soft, bluish and distant, but these mountains are front-and-centre, in your face, a challenge.
She’s leaning against the passenger window, gazing up, and so is not prepared for the sudden swallowing dark as the vehicle hurtles into the mouth of the Huguenot tunnel. Sam gasps in surprise, and then smiles, mesmerised by the ribbons of ceiling lights curving away ahead.
Although he knows it’s absurd, Charlie has been half expecting the girl to vanish the moment they enter the tunnel, perhaps unable to leave the landscape that conjured her into being, like one of those hitch-hiking highway ghosts he’s heard of in suburban myths. But she doesn’t dissolve, she’s solid and breathing beside him as they plunge deeper into the black heart of the mountain. It’s time to stop kidding yourself, mate. The girl is real.
And alive, and very young.
Away from the barn and the smell of sawn timber, Charlie finds her new human-ness alarming, and he’s plagued by the questions he knows he should’ve asked months ago. Who is she? Who has she left behind to be with him out here on the road to Cape Town? Parents? Is there going to be a big stink when someone discovers she is missing?
‘Hey,’ he says, breaking the silence.
‘Yes?’ She turns to Charlie, her eyes luminous green in the electric yellow of the tunnel lights.
‘Is this OK, your coming with? You’re not going to… get into trouble?’
‘No.’ She smiles and shakes her head. ‘Everything is fine.’
‘Right.’ He swallows, adjusts his grip on the steering wheel. ‘Good.’ All the other unasked questions bank up at the base of his throat, solidifying into an unmanageable lump.
Sam reaches across and touches his denim-covered thigh. She can feel the vehicle’s engine thrumming through his muscle and into her hand. Here in the mountain, with the garden and the rose bed so far behind her, she starts to believe that she can be new. She can be more than she’s ever been. Maybe Charlie will love me like Grandpa loved Ouma. Maybe he will ask me to marry him one day. It’s a luscious, ludicrous thought and she almost laughs out loud at the loveliness of it. I can live with him on the other side of the hill and none of that old stuff will matter any more. She moves her hand over his leg and on to the zipper of his jeans and draws it open and, with the burning heat of her fingers, feels as if she is melting him, moulding him, making him hers.
*
Sam is not prepared for the claustrophobic busyness of the City Bowl with its stinking strings of traffic and knots of people waiting to cross the road at each intersection. She shrinks back from the car window at the onslaught of Cape Town, open-mouthed, trying to take everything in: the docks, with their massive stacks of shipping containers and swinging, metal-necked cranes, the buildings that jostle for space and soak the narrow streets in shadow, and the people. So many faces and eyes and arms and moving mouths. The frantic-seeming churn of humanity and progress and commerce clings to the hem of the famous flat-topped mountain and pulses and breathes beneath its stony gaze.
‘I’m going to drop you off somewhere so you can look around and chill. I’ll give you some money to go and get lunch.’ Charlie’s voice is casual, but she can see his knuckles are white on the steering wheel. Drop me off? The words make Sam think of swaying from the end of one of those giant metal hooks on the tip of a crane, waiting to fall into the hold of a ship.
‘Can’t I stay with you?’
‘Look, I’ve got business to do, lots of boring stuff to discuss with all sorts of people.’ Charlie works at keeping his voice level with reason, like when he’s trying to get Delia to do something she doesn’t want to. ‘It’s not… possible.’
Charlie is going to have to double back to get to De Waterkant, but better that than the girl being spotted by anyone from the gallery or the shop. He drives her all the way up Kloof Street to where the cafés and bars are clustered. The mountain looms above them, watchful.<
br />
‘Here?’ Sam whispers in horror as he pulls over and takes two blue hundred-rand notes out of his wallet. Charlie waves them in front of her face to get her attention, and when she turns to him with huge, frightened eyes, he forces a smile. He presses the bills into her limp hand and folds her fingers over.
‘You can get a drink, something to eat, whatever.’ Charlie’s tone is carefully casual as he points to a vibey café where a dreadlocked waiter in too-tight pants squeezes between the tables set out on the pavement. ‘Sit there and chill and wait for me. I’ll collect you when I’m done.’
Sam battles with the catch on the passenger door. She glances back at Charlie, imploring him to change his mind, but he’s watching the traffic, looking for a gap.
‘Promise you’ll come back?’
‘Of course!’ He turns to her then, gives her a reassuring smile and a brief touch on the back of her wrist. ‘I won’t be long. Just enjoy yourself.’
‘Can’t I just wait in the van?’
‘Please, babe, I need to get a move on. We’re holding up the works.’
Sam climbs out onto the kerb. The tar at her feet is greasy and emits a sour sort of smell in the sunlight. Everything smells. Her nostrils flare at the city cocktail of frying food and traffic fumes and garbage.
‘See you soon,’ she says in a small voice, and the moment she closes the door, Charlie revs and pulls off and away, joining the other cars to snake up the hill.
She stands on boneless legs and watches him go, clutching the money in a quivering fist.
PART FOUR
THE SPIDER IN THE JAR
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
YOLANDE DRAGS THE back of her arm across her nose and wipes the resulting wetness off on her jeans. She’s stoked about these jeans. She found them in a bedroom in a crappy little hole that she snuck into in Belville last week, and unlike most she scrounges, which are far too roomy, these fit nice and snug. Probably belonged to some kid. She’d taken a cell phone too, and a not-even-close-to-being-gold necklace that was hanging over the spotted mirror. The cell phone was an old Nokia. Barely worth selling, but still. A few rands is a few rands and – oh, that’s more like it!
From her spot beside the dustbins, just up from the café, Yolande can see the telltale blue of a couple of hundreds being passed from hand to hand through the front windscreen of the big, dusty van that’s just pulled up at the kerb. The van’s licence plates tell her it’s from a farm out east, just like she is. Yolande wants nothing to do with anything from the valley, but…
But those hundreds.
Who’s holding them now? Just a scared slip of a girl with country bumpkin clothes and dirt on her clumpy boots. Easy-peasy. Yolande grins, even though she can see the girl is gripping those buggers tight. She lights a fresh cigarette and waits to see what the bumpkin will do. Yolande takes a small step closer to get a better look, and as she does so, something cold and terrible slips down her spine and freezes her limbs and threatens to squeeze her guts out, to make her shit herself, right here on the street. In her ‘new’ jeans.
It’s the hair. The hair the hair.
No one else in the world has hair that colour, that silver.
The hair.
Long, braided, fat like an albino snake hanging down the centre of the girl’s back.
Mama.
The word slams into Yolande’s centre, right into the bits that she thought had all hardened up and dried out. My mama.
But her mama is dead. Remember? Thanks to the message she got years ago from her old busybody bitch of an aunt, she saw the hole they put her in with her own eyes. She’d hidden herself at a distance and watched them bury her. Yolande’s blanked a lot over the years, but my God she remembers that. She even saw her father, tall in a dark suit, standing beside a child. She remembers how it felt to suddenly know that Anneke, the old cow who saw fit to push her out into this horror-show of a world and then spend the next sixteen years retreating from her, was no longer. She remembers laughing. She remembers that she was not really laughing. She remembers the hollowness that now hurts, all over again. Maybe they lied to her? Maybe she’s not dead after all?
But no. It cannot be her mama.
Of course not. She’s too young, far too young. Barely a woman even.
But.
Yolande bites her lip, tasting bitter chemical snot and ash, and watches the girl as she takes her first cautious step towards the café. A corner of a blue hundred pokes out from between her fingers, but Yolande is no longer interested in the cash. All she can see is the very living likeness of her dead mother walking to a table and sitting down. Facing her. With that face. The same.
The hair.
Not possible. Not not possible. What have I taken today? What could it be that’s making Yolande hallucinate, making her see ghosts from her past? The shit she smokes is supposed to do the opposite, for fuck-sakes. It’s supposed to send the ghosts scuttling back to their wide valley with its fruit trees and bare blue hills.
Yolande steps back to the safety of the dustbin, sliding into the shadow to watch without being seen. She does her little tricks, the ones she uses to tell real from not-real in the too-bright, slidey stupor of a high. She takes a big drag of her cigarette, holds it in, lets it go. A special pinch here. More this toe, move that finger. Close the eyes, open them. Look down, look up.
She’s still there. The girl. The hair.
If it isn’t Anneke, if it isn’t her mother, which it can’t be, because she’s dead, and because this thing is too fresh and new and babyish, then who is it? Why is she wearing Anneke’s face, her hair? My God, her fucking blouse. I remember that blouse. I hated that blouse.
The child at the funeral, standing beside Jem, holding his hand like a daughter.
Yolande remembers now. The child’s hair had been pulled tight into two, neat braids with black ribbons on the ends. White silk against black velvet.
Yolande slides down against the wall and onto the pavement. Her unpadded bum bones jar against the asphalt. Her head is splitting, her temples burning with white fire. Something nags and scratches and screams inside her.
There’s something she’s supposed to remember about the child, the girl a few metres away, but she knows she cannot.
Who?
Who is the girl with the hair?
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
AS CHARLIE PROMISED, he is not gone long, an hour forty-five at most, and when he returns to Kloof Street and takes the seat opposite Sam on the pavement café and reaches out to take her hand in his, she comes back to life. Her skin pinks and glows, and after sitting rigid, like a frozen doll, she softens into the back of the chair at last.
‘What have you eaten?’ Charlie asks and when she shakes her head nothing, he calls the waiter over to order toasted sandwiches for the both of them.
After the barrage of fawning from the gallery owner and the interior designers and all the other folks in their immaculate outfits and expensive haircuts, all of them stroking his Water-Wood Collection, sighing over each curve, Charlie feels vast and powerful inside his ragged jeans and faded T-shirt. Knowing the part she played in those pieces, he feels particularly tender towards the girl with the water-blue eyes. He knows, now, that he needs to take care of her, keep her sweet, keep her at his side when they get back to the workshop so that beneath her gaze he can make more of the stuff they want, more of the stuff that makes him feel worthy and alive and part of the world. For some reason, she is the key. He reaches across the small table to brush a wisp of hair from her face and she leans in to his touch like a cat.
‘Forgive me for leaving you here when you didn’t want me to. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK. You came back.’
‘They loved the pieces, by the way.’
‘Are you going to make more?’
‘Sure hope so.’
‘Then we’d better get back.’ She smiles, and it makes her look older, somehow.
‘Lunch first. I’m starving.’
‘Me too.’
‘Why didn’t you order something while I was gone?’
Sam wraps her fingers around her empty glass. The hell of the past two hours has dissipated in Charlie’s protective presence. With him right there, across the table, with that brown soft piece of hair falling over his eyes, it’s as if she was never terrified and confused and bereft at all. It’s like a dream she’s forgetting already.
‘I had a Coke,’ she says, and Charlie smiles.
‘It’s a start, I guess.’
*
‘In Cape Town, you say?’
‘I’ve told you already, Dad. Yes. He’s delivering the final stuff for that exhibition.’
‘Right.’
‘You know what? I’m really sick of you constantly implying that my husband is a loser.’
‘Implying?’
‘Tertius.’ Antoinette interjects in a placating tone. She ladles a heaped spoonful of mashed sweet potato onto her husband’s plate as if doing so will slow his anger with stodge. ‘Come now. Not at the dinner table.’
‘She’s the one you need to tell that to.’ Le Roux points a fork at his daughter. ‘She’s spoiling for a fight. You know how she gets.’
Liezette waves away her mother’s freshly refilled potato spoon. Her own plate is a spare selection of green vegetables and two lamb cutlets. No carbs are allowed anywhere near it.
‘I’m right here, you know, Dad. You don’t have to refer to me in the third person. I’m not twelve any more.’
‘Nope? Well you’ve got no more sense now than you had when you were, my girl.’
‘He’s cross with me, Ma.’ Liezette pouts at her mother like she did when she was little, hoping to get an ally. Delia, fingers deep in her own sweet potato portion, watches with unblinking eyes.
‘You will be too, Antoinette, when you hear what she had to say to me this evening when I mentioned our little idea.’
‘Oh,’ Antoinette says in a soft voice. ‘You had the talk.’
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