Yolande is lying on the floor by the bath, on her side. Sam creeps in and watches Yolande’s chest moving up and down with each breath. Slow up, slow down. So slow. She waits for it to stop, just like she used to do when she was Poppy, only this time, she wants it to stop.
It doesn’t.
Sam looks around the room. There. Lying on the unwashed bathmat beside Yolande’s messed-up old canvas bag: the empty syringe. Sam tiptoes forward and peers at it, holding her breath, hand on the hilt of her knife, waiting for a movement from Yolande, a change. But of course, there is none. Sam remembers now: this can last for hours, this slack mouth with its stubs of brown teeth, and those eyes showing a rim of horrible white between the half-shut lids.
Sam uses the toilet, wincing at the roar of the flush, and then pauses again, frozen in the middle of the bathroom, staring at that syringe. Her thoughts are racing, and all mixed up with dark streaks that she can feel rippling through her, trailing tattered shadows. How much would it take? How much stuff in her mother’s blood would cause those slow, stinking breaths to stop? Sam moves towards the syringe and then pauses. The ancient leather from the sheath of the old hunting knife is warm against her skin, as if it is part of her. One breath. Another.
Sam gives a sudden gasp, and turns and dashes from the bathroom, ripping the key from the door as she does so. She shuts the door behind her and the click of the lock sliding home seems to drown out her frenzied heartbeat. She slides the key into her pocket, and backs away from the bathroom door.
And now? The bag with her toothbrush still in it tugs at her shoulders.
Now it’s time to run.
Sam heads to her bedroom and stops, confounded by the drawings on the walls, the old school notes heaped up by the bed, and the piles of crumpled, unwashed clothes. Move. She needs to pack and get out of here while she can. Quick. But her body has turned into a heavy lump of dough with a ticking bomb racing inside it. The floor tilts when she takes a step. She blinks to refocus. She takes another.
Move.
Sam jerks forward and starts grabbing things and shoving them into the bag alongside her toothbrush. Her thick fingers grasp and fumble, dropping half of what she collects before it makes it into the bag, and in her panic, she knocks the framed photograph of young Anneke on Sam-the-horse from her bedside table. The picture hits the floor with a sound that Sam seems to feel right inside her skull, as if it’s her teeth that have broken. She picks up the frame and turns it over. The old glass has splintered into a spider web of cracks that radiates out from the centre of Sam-the-horse’s face, obscuring his gentle features behind jagged shards. She thinks of buried Sam in the garden, how he used to visit her in her dreams, how he gave her his name and helped her not be Poppy any more.
I can’t leave him behind. I can’t leave him here with her. A sudden violent sob shakes her body from its heaviness, and she sets the picture back down, taking care not to spill the fragments of glass.
And what about Jem, lying beneath the roses?
If she leaves, then everything that Jem and Anneke built and cared for and loved will be Yolande’s. Sam drops her bulging bag and backs away from the bedroom.
Around her, the neglected house seems to sag beneath its layers of dust. Everything that Jem and Anneke loved.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Sam gasps. She races through to the kitchen and begins a furious hunt for buckets, cloths, brushes and soap. She needs to make it right. ‘I’m sorry, Ouma. I’m sorry, Grandpa.’ She fills the bucket at the tap, blinded by tears, and races through to the lounge. First, she beats the pillows and shakes out the throws, then she brushes up the dust from the rug and the floor. She vacuums everything in sight using wild, frantic sweeps and changing attachments with flustered, shaking fingers.
‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ Sam begs forgiveness as she scrubs the floors and rubs down tables. ‘I didn’t mean to neglect our home. I didn’t mean…’ She empties bucket after bucket of dirty water down the sink and then moves on to the kitchen, cleaning until her hands sting and her muscles ache and she’s raw from weeping, inside and out.
There’s so much to do. Too much. Load after load of laundry waits to be washed. Her clothes and bedding, all the cushion covers, the towels, the dishcloths. She wants everything to be clean, to be done, but it can’t be because the washing machine is in the bathroom. With Yolande.
Sam stands outside the bathroom door once more, and pushes against the wood, listening to the feeble metal lock jiggle in its slot. Too flimsy. She needs a barricade, bars of iron, concrete blocks…
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
AFTER A RESTLESS night, in which he could feel Liezette’s fury pouring off her rigid body and over his in numbing waves, Charlie is up and showered and out of the house as the eastern sky turns from charcoal to pink.
In the quiet cool of the workshop, the chair he started making yesterday with such vigour looks raw and a little alien. Charlie gives it a wide berth, and sipping sweet coffee from the flask he prepared in the farmhouse kitchen, he begins to tidy the workshop, sweeping up sawdust and oiling his tools and lining them up neatly.
Through the open double doors, the day brightens and warms. He goes out and waters the garden that the water-eyed girl planted for him. The fresh new stalks on the lavender bushes bend beneath the spray from the broken watering can, releasing their clean, tingling scent. He breathes it in and stares at the peculiar arrangement of the plants, turning his head this way and that to try and devise the logic of the pattern, but there doesn’t seem to be any. He gazes up at the brown hill. No sign of the girl herself yet, but it’s early. She’ll come.
Charlie goes back inside the workshop and sorts the offcuts by size, and then by type. It’s getting warmer. He stands at the door again, eyes on the hill. Behind him, the pieces of the new chair wait to be smoothed and worked, impatient to be assembled into something solid.
It’s OK, she’ll be here soon.
*
As the morning sun seeps into the valley, Sam finally falls into an exhausted sleep. She half-sits-half-lies, slumped and shattered against the wall outside the bathroom door. The door itself has undergone some changes: a thick plank of wood has been inexpertly sawn to fit beneath the handle, jammed between the lever and the floor, so that anyone trying to open it from the other side won’t be able to budge it. The rough plank is further held in place by the back of a low bookshelf, which has been emptied of its books and dragged into place and then refilled for maximum weight.
Beside the makeshift barricade, Sam sleeps and dreams.
She dreams of the spider that she once caught and held captive in an empty glass jar, only this dream-spider is different. It has strings of lank hair on either side of its arachnid head, and its limbs are thread-thin and mottled. The abdomen is shrunken too, like a yellowish raisin. The spider tries to find a way out of the jar, scrabbling with its terrible legs on the inside of the glass, scattering spider hairs and leaving smears that look like brownish blood.
Dream-Sam hides the jar beneath the shrubbery, just as the real Sam did, over a decade before. But it is not enough. She can still hear those spider claws sliding down the glass. She tries to bury the jar, digging deeper and deeper into the ground until her scraping uncovers a large, grey bone. Then there are more bones. Suddenly, she’s sitting in the midst of a buried skeleton. Large curved ribs, vertebrae like sawn logs all in a row, and a long-nosed skull with vast sockets where the eyes would once have been.
A horse. Sam-the-horse.
No! What have I done?
Frantic, she tries to bury it again, to make everything right, but there’s not enough sand, and Sam-the-horse’s eyeless skull stares back at her, no matter how hard she tries to cover it up.
*
‘What the fuck?’ The screech wrenches Sam from her tormented sleep. She blinks at the piercing daylight. Her body aches. Pins and needles dance through her stiff limbs when she tries to move.
THUD.
Why was I asleep on the floor?
THUD.
Yolande.
Sam is wide awake now. The door handle rattles, banging uselessly against the wooden plank as Yolande tries to open it from inside.
‘What have you done, you mad little bitch?’
The air smells of sun-on-soap from Sam’s furious cleaning the night before. She takes in big gasps of it, trying to clear her muddy head. In the dark, awful hours before dawn, barricading the bathroom seemed to be the only possible action she could take, but she didn’t think any further than that. She couldn’t. What now?
The books judder inside their shelves as her mother pounds on the solid wood of the door. After a while, they stop. In the ensuing silence, Sam can hear the throaty whoop-whoop of a hoepoe outside in the garden. Jem’s favourite bird. She folds her arms around her legs and puts her head on her knees, pressing her forehead hard into the bone.
‘Hey?’ Yolande tries a different tone, but the rage is barely concealed beneath the wheedling. ‘I know I freaked you out arriving out of the blue, yesterday, but honestly, I just want to talk to you.’
‘So then talk.’ Sam’s mouth tastes bitter, like a burnt pot that’s been left to soak in used dishwater.
‘Open up, first. Let’s discuss things like adults.’
‘No. You can talk from in there.’
‘Ooh, aren’t you big and brave when you’ve got a locked door to hide behind? Not so simple now, are we?’ Sam says nothing. She presses her forehead harder into her knees. ‘You tried to make me think you were, but you can’t fool me, you know. I can see right through you.’
‘No you can’t.’ If you really could, you’d know who I am, Mother.
‘Oh yes, acting like the little madam, all country-sweet and good as gold, but you’re just a whore like your big sister, aren’t you?’
‘What?’
‘Takes one to know one, baby-girl. I saw that guy giving you money the other day in Kloof Street and I had to laugh because despite Jem and Anneke’s best efforts, you’re just like I used to be, hey? Turning tricks for cash. Screwing around with married men.’
Something wild swoops through Sam’s belly. Fast down and then up again.
‘Married?’
‘Oh my God.’ Yolande yelps out a high, delighted laugh. ‘You didn’t know!’ The laugh becomes a hacking cough, and then a laugh again. ‘Poor little fool. I could see you were all moon-eyed over the guy. Probably think he loves you, don’t you?’ In place of a beat, Sam’s heart gives a little shudder in her chest. ‘Yes, he’s married. Even a halfwit knows what a wedding ring is.’
If she closes her eyes, Sam can feel Charlie’s hands on her skin, his warm-rough fingers, gentle then strong, then gentle again. She can feel the ring he always wears, a thick band of metal that, until this moment, was just another part of Charlie, like a fingernail, or a freckle. Her breath stops and then starts again. You can’t stay over. Acidic bile burns the back of her throat. She swallows it down.
‘Not just married, he’s got a kid too. A little girl, I’m guessing, judging by the colour of the kiddie seat in the back of his big fancy 4 x 4.’ A kiddie seat. Sam can see it now, so clearly, with its grubby plastic buckles and collection of unidentifiable crumbs on the chair cushion. There was a plush bunny lying beside it too, once pink but now faded and hugged to a dusky grey. How is it possible that none of this registered before?
‘I hope you charged extra for that little sex-trip to Cape Town with Mr Daddy-man.’ Yolande’s gleeful voice seems to be coming from a very long way away. ‘When I was tight and fresh like you, I used to make them pay for my time, even when we weren’t fucking—’
Sam scrambles to her feet and runs from the voice and the door and the smell of soap. She bursts out of the house and the hoepoe, which had been pecking for morsels in the clover beneath the roses, flaps up and away into the sky, a flutter of russet against the blue.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHARLIE ITCHES ALL over. He wipes the sweat from his face with the back of his wrist and squeezes his eyes shut. They sting. The workshop seems too bright: full of glancing planes of reflected light and blinding pools of sun. He takes another drink from the water bottle at his side and gets a mouthful of sawdust along with the lukewarm, plastic-tasting liquid. He forgot to close the top. He spits out tiny bits of wood, and then tries to pick the rest off his tongue with fingers that are already coated in a fine layer of the stuff.
She’s not coming.
‘Fuck.’
He flings the water bottle away from him, and it flies through the air sending vivid droplets spinning in a wild arc. Charlie doesn’t see where it lands. He’s staring, again, at the timber in his hands. The cut-outs for the complex dovetail joint he’s been trying to work on look like something Delia might make if she picked up his tools. He wouldn’t have done much worse if he’d gnawed the thing with his teeth. He raises his arm to send the ruined piece of wood flying after the water bottle, and then restrains himself.
Stop acting like a petulant child, Charlie.
For the first time, Charlie realises that he admonishes himself in Liezette’s voice. Has he always done that, or is it just a recent thing? Still gripping the offending piece in his fist, he walks towards the double doors. The endless zither of invisible cicadas make the brown hill seem as if it’s sizzling beneath the sun. He glares at the boulder that Sam used to hide behind in the early days. Maybe she’s hiding out there, afraid to come to him after yesterday’s misunderstanding?
‘Hey?’ he calls, but only the cicadas sing back. He loosens his grip on the chewed wood and it falls to the ground with an empty clunk.
‘I need you,’ he whispers.
*
Out in the garden, Sam drinks long and deep from the borehole tap. The water tastes like stone. She splashes her face and then the back of her neck, gasping at the shock of cold. She can hear her mother calling from the bathroom. The cries alternate between scalding acid curses and saccharine offers of peace and reconciliation, but Sam is numb to both. She feels strange and disconnected, as if she’s coated in cotton.
Sam dries her wet hands on her blouse and wades through weeds and overgrown shrubbery before coming to stand at the base of the hill. She looks up. Her lookout shelter is still there, long last used, and needing some repair work on the roof. Perhaps she can stay in it until…
Until what?
Until Yolande withers away like the spider in the jar?
Is that how this is going to end?
Sam gives a shudder, and as she does, the merciless truth seems to rattle free. She staggers backwards, stumbles, and sits down, hard, amid the ragged undergrowth. There’s no escape from this. Charlie is married, he has a child, he is not coming for her, not going to rescue her, not going to love her and marry her and take her away from the awful secret that’s sinking into the soil beneath the rose bushes, nor the woman that wails inside the barricaded bathroom.
Charlie belongs to someone else.
Sam knows, with a sudden cold clarity, that she can never climb that hill again. Her mouth opens wide, but instead of a cry, all that comes out is a voiceless rush of escaping air.
*
Yolande jams her face against the open bathroom window. It’s small and high up, with mottled glass and steel burglar bars, but if she stands on the closed toilet lid, she can just see a slice of garden through the gap. Her cheekbone aches from where she’s pressing it into the frame, and her vision swims with green, giving her light-headedness an otherworldly, underwater feel. Even a rat-burglar couldn’t get out of this. Her mouth is dry and her chest achy. In her canvas bag on the floor by her feet are her rig, matches, the remainder of her stash, and three cigarettes. Just three.
That’s all.
Three.
‘Goddammit, you lunatic, let me out of here!’
In reply, a guinea fowl somewhere close by squawks like the rusty hinge on an old farm gate. The soun
d reminds Yolande of endless, featureless afternoons spent waiting for her parents to do something more interesting than play with mud.
‘Shut up, you retarded bird.’ The guinea fowl does not shut up. It continues its mindless calling. To drown it out, Yolande starts shrieking too. The high, fractured sound doesn’t seem to come from inside her at all. She feels as if she’s pulling it out of some other, wilder dimension where beasts with frayed wings flutter through the dark, and is sending it streaming out of her mouth. Now Yolande’s loving it. It’s powerful. A rush. She shrieks louder, throwing back her head to allow the sound freer passage through her throat. Her ears hum and her head spins and she clutches the bars of the window to keep from sliding down on to the toilet seat.
Behind her closed eyelids, black figures whirl on talon-toed feet. Yolande is so engrossed in their shadowy dance that she doesn’t even realise that her shrieks have become words, words that pour through the window and into the garden until they stain the sky:
‘I want what’s mine. What have you done with my father? What have you done with Jem? Where’s Jem? Where’s Jem?’
*
‘Where’s Jem?’
Sam is on her knees with her face pressed to the ground and her hands over her ears, but it doesn’t help. The sound of her grandfather’s name throbs through the valley, loosening the soil beneath her, shaking the trees till their shocked leaves spin from their branches.
‘Where’s Jem? Where’s Jem?’
Sam crawls on her hands and knees towards the house and the source of the noise, scraping and splitting her skin on stones and stems. She grinds her teeth together, so hard that her temples pulse, but the sound keeps coming and the answering call is rising inside her, straining to be let out.
‘Where’s Jem? Where’s Jem?’ The banshee howl seems to be drawing Sam towards it. She gets to her feet, moves faster, run-stumbling towards the high little window in the dove grey wall.
‘Where’s Jem?’
Bone Meal For Roses Page 26