Bone Meal For Roses

by Miranda Sherry

  ‘Of course you can. Don’t be crazy.’ Charlie is fully dressed now. He stands over her, looking down. ‘Come on, please.’ He’s trying to keep his tone gentle. ‘Get dressed.’

  ‘But I need,’ it comes out in a whisper, ‘to stay.’

  ‘Shit.’ Charlie turns and paces across the floor and then back again, kicking up little dusty puffs of sawdust with his trainers. ‘Honey, you just can’t. I’m sorry.’ Sam stares at his feet. The wood shavings cling to his laces like fur. ‘This barn, the whole farm… it’s not mine, you know. I’m just sort of staying here and using it, they’re doing me a favour. I’m just…’ He sounds lost, panicked. She looks up, then, and sees that his face is pink with strange bloodless patches around his eyes. ‘I want you here with me every day like always, but you can’t…’ he gulps under the force of her deep-water gaze, ‘stay over.’

  Sam takes shallow little breaths to stop her chest from bursting open. With trembling fingers, she pulls on the blouse, not bothering to brush the sawdust off first. Splinters prickle as she stands to pull on her underpants and jeans.

  ‘Promise me you’ll come back tomorrow?’ Charlie pleads as she hunts down her socks and her hiking boots. ‘I can’t lose you.’ He walks up and pulls her into his arms. The sawdust clinging to her back stabs into her skin as he presses her body into his. ‘Let’s just keep things the way they are, hey?’ She is limp in his embrace, still battling for breath. He turns her around, like a doll, to face him.

  ‘I need you, water-eyed girl. Don’t forget that.’

  She nods. She cannot speak. She closes her eyes as he cups her face in one warm, timber-scented hand. He kisses her eyelids, the tip of her nose.

  ‘We’re OK, aren’t we? You understand?’

  Yes, she nods. I understand.

  But this is just another thing in Sam’s spiralling universe that makes no sense at all.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  AS SOON AS Sam descends the hill and enters the garden, she knows that something is different. The thicket of green and gold seems to throb before her in the soft evening light, pushing her back the way she’s come. ‘I know you don’t want me here, but I don’t have a damn choice, do I?’ she says as she stomps past the pond. ‘It seems that I’ve got nowhere else to go.’ Her back is prickling with sawdust and sweat beneath the weight of her bag with its stupid toothbrush in it. For a moment, she’s tempted to rip the thing off and hurl it into the water, but her knife is in there, the one Jem gave her for her eleventh birthday.

  And then Sam sees the roses.

  This morning, the plants had been healthy, studded with buds and haloed by bees, but now the new buds have shrivelled into sad, crumpled clusters, sagging and soft on their drooping stems. Even the leaves, so luxuriant earlier, hang limp, some even browning at the edges. A dart of fear shoots up from her gut and into the back of her throat, carving a burning scar through her centre. Sam moves past the rose bed and through the herb garden, trying to place the other oddness that persists in the air.

  What? What is it?

  Then she realises that the cicadas aren’t singing. There are no crickets winding up for their nightly serenade. The raucous clamour of the pond frogs, so constant on summer evenings that Sam hardly hears them any more, is missing too. Sam’s footsteps sound too loud in the heavy hush. Her key in the lock of the kitchen door is a metallic clatter, and the hinge screams when she pushes her way inside.

  As soon as she’s in, her nostrils twitch. The smell is so slight that it’s almost lost in the fug of unused rooms and unwashed dishes waiting in the sink, but it’s there, unmistakable: chemical sweat and cigarettes. Breathing it in brings a wave of memory that rises up and crashes down onto Sam, drenching her with the past. She gasps for breath, stumbles, almost falls. She reaches for the edge of the table and grips the wood to steady herself.

  Inside Sam, Poppy shrieks, panicked, dashing from side to side as if trying to escape a locked room.

  Sam makes it to the kitchen sink just in time. She bends over and throws up into that morning’s used oatmeal bowl. She runs the tap to wash the thin mess down the plughole, and then sluices out her bitter mouth.

  Slowly, on unsteady legs, Sam follows the smell into the lounge. There, sitting on Anneke’s favourite chair with her dirty boots pulled up under her and a cigarette in her hand, with her stringy hair and hard expression exactly as Sam remembers them from eleven years earlier, is her mother.

  ‘So.’ Yolande take a drag of the cigarette, squinting her eyes up against the smoke. ‘Who the fuck are you, and what have you done with my father?’

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  SILENCE.

  Sam can taste her own vomit on her tongue. She stares at Yolande and Yolande stares back. Long minutes pass.

  ‘Are you simple, or something?’ Yolande asks. Her brow wrinkles as she studies the girl. ‘Why don’t you speak?’ The column of ash on the end of her cigarette trembles and then collapses, dropping on to the embroidered arm of Anneke’s chair in a puff of grey.

  ‘You don’t know who I am?’ Sam hasn’t spoken Afrikaans in a long time, and the words feel rough and strange in her mouth.

  ‘Why would I? Clearly things have been going on around here that I was never meant to find out.’ Yolande waves her hand around at the room, leaving a trail of smoke in its wake. ‘My father might be an asshole, but he would never live in a mess like this. I can tell right away that he’s not here. But then, all of his stuff is. So what? What have you done with him?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you.’ Yolande leans over the arm of the chair and grinds her finished cigarette out on the floorboard. Sam stares at the little crumpled thing lying on the yellowwood. It makes her think of a caterpillar with its head staved in. Her own head is spinning. ‘You with your Anneke-braid, wearing my dead mother’s clothes, living in the house that is mine by rights.’

  ‘Yours?’

  ‘Jesus, I’m starting to think you really are simple.’ Yolande picks at one of the scabs at the corner of her mouth, and a bright pinhead of liquid red swells up beneath her fingertips. ‘But no wonder. My mother must’ve been all dried up and finished by the time she had you.’

  ‘Had me?’

  ‘Are you just going to stand there like a moron and repeat everything I say? Yes, had you. I’ve been thinking about this ever since I saw you in Cape Town yesterday. You look just like her, so there’s no other way to explain it. I bet they decided to give it one last try, hey? To have a good daughter, one they could control and mould into another boring farmer, obsessed with cow shit and worms.’ She glances around the room. ‘They didn’t get it right though, did they? I mean, look at this place.’ Yolande snorts out a laugh, and the prick of blood by her lip bubbles out further, quivers, and turns into a trickle that snakes down her chin. She wipes it away with the back of her wrist. ‘It’s been left to rot. Stuff lying everywhere, nothing clean. Looks more like somewhere I might live. Proves we’re sisters.’

  ‘Sisters?’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, say something original, why don’t you?’

  Sam sinks down to sit on the floor. She is numb all over. Dark spots appear and then fade before her eyes. She can feel the bag squashing up between her spine and the wall. Something hard presses against her back. The toothbrush? The knife handle?

  Yolande gets off the chair and strides towards Sam, shedding bits of filth from her decaying boots on to the rug that Sam hasn’t vacuumed in weeks. She crouches down in front of her. She smells sour, like the filthy street in Cape Town. She smells of the same seeping chemical-sweetness that she always did when Sam was Poppy.

  ‘Enough playing dumb, you sneaky little bitch,’ Yolande hisses into her face. ‘You can do that later, on your own time, but for now, for right now, you’re going to tell me what you’ve done with my father.’ She leans in closer and peers into Sam’s eyes. ‘And let me tell you this, baby-girl, if he’s dead, then you’re living in my house now.’

  * />
  ‘Daddy, I don’t want to go to sleep,’ Delia says when her story has been read, and her nightlight switched on. ‘Can’t you stay here with me a little bit longer?’

  ‘Ah, moppet, what’s the matter?’ Charlie smooths the hair back from his daughter’s forehead and bends down to kiss her damp skin. ‘Aren’t you feeling well?’

  ‘Don’t put ideas into her head, Charlie.’ Liezette is leaning against the door frame, waiting to have ‘a discussion’. Her folded arms and rigid expression make Charlie think that an awake Delia might be preferable.

  ‘I’m not sick, I’m just…’ Delia scrunches up her nose, pokes a chubby hand out from beneath the bedding, and beckons him closer. ‘I’m scared, Daddy,’ she whispers into his proffered ear. Although Charlie is pretty sure she’s just stalling, the words send a strange chill down his spine, at odds with the bubblegum sweetness of the junior toothpaste on Delia’s breath.

  ‘Of what, Dells?’ She looks up at him with very wide eyes, and then shakes her head. ‘Tell me. It’s OK.’

  ‘Of the lady in the trees.’

  ‘What lady?’

  ‘The one with the long, white hair,’ Delia whispers, and Charlie goes very still. ‘Granny didn’t see her and says she’s not real, that she’s just my imagination, but if she’s not real then I saw a ghost even though it was the daytime.’

  ‘A ghost?’

  ‘She was standing under the plum trees.’

  ‘When?’ Charlie asks. Delia swivels her large eyes towards where her mother waits in the doorway. ‘When did you see the ghost lady, Delia?’

  ‘When you were in Cape Town the other time.’

  ‘I’ve already told Delia there’s no such thing as ghosts.’ Liezette is losing patience. ‘Come now, lovey, time to say night-night.’

  ‘And what did she do?’ Charlie whispers to Delia.

  ‘Nothing. She just stood there, and then next time I looked she was gone.’

  ‘Stop encouraging this ridiculousness, Charlie.’ Liezette strides into the room and straightens the bedcovers, tucking them tightly under her daughter’s chin. ‘We’ve already had this discussion at length.’ She switches off the overhead light and the room glows pink from the My Little Pony nightlight on Delia’s bedside table. ‘Haven’t we, Delia?’

  ‘Yes,’ Delia admits.

  ‘And what did we learn?’

  ‘That Jesus won’t let there be ghosts, so it’s not real.’

  ‘Exactly. So there’s nothing to be scared of.’ Liezette takes Charlie’s arm and tugs at him. ‘You just need to pray to Jesus if you’re scared and then nothing bad can happen to you.’

  ‘Really, Liez?’ Charlie asks, eyebrows raised.

  ‘Yes.’ Her eyes glitter in the rosy dimness, challenging. ‘Now have you said your prayers, Delia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well then. Nothing is going to hurt you. Now say night-night.’

  Charlie kisses his daughter and then follows his wife out of the room and down the passage towards their own bedroom.

  ‘Jesus?’ he asks when they’re safely out of earshot. ‘Since when did he start playing a significant role in the raising of our daughter?’

  ‘Since you’ve had better things to do,’ Liezette hisses at him. She closes their bedroom door behind her. Her eyes now look flat and gunmetal-hard. Charlie sits on the edge of the bed. He’s still feeling shaky about Delia’s white-haired lady in the trees. The water-eyed-girl. It had to have been. This is getting out of hand.

  ‘OK, so what did you want to talk about?’

  Liezette sits down beside him with a sigh.

  ‘My dad.’ The fury has leaked from her voice. She sounds exhausted. ‘He’s got this idea in his head that we’re going to take over the farm so he and Mom can move to Hermanus.’

  ‘What? That’s nuts.’

  ‘I know. I said the same thing.’ Liezette puts her hand on his arm. Her palm is very warm. ‘He just can’t seem to get it into his head that I’ve married an artist, someone with a real calling. He’s been trying to undermine our whole way of life ever since we got here.’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh, Liez. He’s just old-school. The guy must be worried about the future of this place. It’s understandable that he wants it to stay in the family after all the work they’ve put in.’

  ‘Why the hell are you taking his side?’

  ‘I’m not taking any side. I’m just saying.’

  ‘Well don’t. You’ve no idea what you’re talking about. You’re never bloody here.’

  ‘Oh God. This again. I’m not working enough, then I’m working too much. You want to live out here with your parents, and then they’re wrecking your life because they’re too involved in it. You can’t have everything both ways, babe.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Charlie. That’s so helpful. How kind of you to explain it all to me so clearly.’

  ‘Liezette—’

  ‘No, this is all bullshit. Everything has become screwed up since we moved out here.’

  ‘I thought you were loving it?’

  ‘Again. How would you know? You’re never around.’

  ‘Right. So what are you saying then?’

  ‘I’m saying we should make plans to move on. There’ll be some serious money coming in from this exhibition. We can put down a deposit on a house. A nice one. Maybe in Claremont or something. We need to start thinking about schools for Delia and…’

  Charlie’s mouth has gone dry. It feels as if someone’s stuffed it with grit and dust.

  ‘I can’t leave the workshop,’ he blurts out. Liezette looks at him, startled. ‘I mean,’ Charlie swallows, ‘I am doing great work out here. I don’t want to risk messing with that.’

  ‘It’s you doing the work, not the place.’

  ‘But…’ I need her watching me.

  ‘You said the same thing before we moved out here, remember?’

  ‘I know, but there’s something here that… It’s… I don’t know if I can do this anywhere else.’

  ‘Since when did you become so superstitious, Charlie?’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, let’s be honest, Liez. This has nothing to do with me and whether I’m superstitious or not. You just want us all to do what you tell us to, don’t you? Move, stay, leave, it’s all the same, as long as we’re doing what you want.’

  ‘I only want the best for—’

  ‘Well I’m sick of you calling all the fucking shots. We’re staying. That’s final.’

  ‘Oh, now you’ve decided to grow a pair, have you? Well done you.’ Liezette stands and marches to the door. ‘Well, seeing as this is my family home, and we’re here because of the generosity of my parents, have fun making that stick.’

  *

  The heels of Yolande’s boots go bam-bam on the yellowwood floorboards and then thud-thud on the carpet. Up and down, down and up she walks, back and forth, to and fro, stepping on a folded-up piece at the edge of the carpet each time she crosses it. Sam is still sitting on the floor against the wall. One of the straps of the bag is cutting into her shoulder. She keeps thinking about shifting it around and digging her hand in to grab her old hunting knife, longing to feel the comfort of its worn handle in her palm, but she hasn’t moved.

  ‘I remember this place, you know,’ Yolande says. ‘Me and a guy called Hendrik used to come here and smoke grass and snog, once upon a time. He used to drive me out here on the back of his crappy old motorbike.’ She rubs her hands up and down her arms, hard. She looks at Sam, lights another cigarette. ‘In those days, it wasn’t a precious little hidey-hole with nice wooden floors and things, it was just an abandoned old wreck. You could still smell horse piss in the stables. There were mice. Mouse shit everywhere.’

  Yolande laughs. It’s a terrible, broken sound. Sam looks at the floor. Inside her, Poppy curls up into a tight ball.

  ‘It’s fucking funny, you know: my sainted folks moving in here and living their feeble little soil-encrusted lives in the very same spot where I
first got high and lost my virginity.’

  Bam bam, go Yolande’s boots. She’s walking faster now, and rubbing her arms so much she’s leaving red, angry marks on her mottled skin.

  ‘Don’t think just because I’ve shared my little memory with you, that I’m letting you off the hook, kid,’ she snarls into the silence. ‘I’m going to get you to tell me where my father is.’

  Sam doesn’t move. She watches. She remembers the signs of Yolande’s itch. It is as if no time has passed at all since she last watched her mother pace up and down a dirty room: no years of Anneke’s cuddles and cakes and roses in vases, no Jem reading The BFG and showing her how to plant cuttings and prune fruit trees. Without realising it, Sam has raised her fist to her mouth and is sucking the same knuckle she used to bite when she was Poppy and Yolande was itching.

  Soon, Sam knows, Yolande’s itch will be too much. When that happens, Yolande will take something to make it better, and Sam will get a chance to think.

  Bam-bam thud-thud thud-thud bam-bam.

  ‘Fuck.’ Yolande gives her upper arms an even more vicious rub. She tugs at the skin beneath her chin. She hunches her shoulders up and then down again. Itching. ‘Where’s the bathroom in this shithole?’

  All Sam has to do is wait.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  FROM HER SPOT on the floor by the wall, Sam can see that Anneke’s cuckoo clock now reads ten to midnight. She’s been rigid and motionless since her mother went to the ‘bathroom’ half an hour ago, but now she forces her body to move. At last, she’s able to take her sheathed knife out of the backpack and tuck it into her belt. On stiff, uncertain legs, Sam tiptoes from the lounge and up the passage. The bathroom door is closed. A strip of light glows beneath the wood. Sam watches for flickers of movement in it, but the light stays steady, undisturbed. Sam’s breath comes in short, ragged gasps. She holds it in and leans her ear against the wood.

  Silence.

  She tests the handle and it moves beneath her hand. Carefully, she pushes the door open. The bathroom smells of old sweat, beer-stained fabric and the faint reek of vinegar with something sweet behind it.