by S. L. Grey
“But it’s not just my mind, Carla. I’ve never experienced anything like this before. I’m not someone who goes wandering around in the grip of vivid hallucinations.”
Carla doesn’t respond, and I read something judgmental in her silence. I need to prove—to her, to myself—that I didn’t just cook this up. Then I remember: I push my hand into my trouser pocket, and, yes, there it is. I pull out the knot of blond hair I gathered. It’s quite a big skein, more than I remember brushing off my clothes, but there it is—proof that something happened, that I didn’t completely imagine a windy conversation with a long-haired girl.
“Anyway, it’s high time I called Marlies.”
“Marlies?”
“I’ve told you a hundred times, Mark. My Dutch friend. The sangoma. She calls herself Gogo Thembi now.”
I remember now. Ever since the burglary, Carla’s been threatening to have someone over to our house to cleanse it of the evil spirits. I thought she meant just a regular woo-woo spiritualist, but it’s Marlies the Dutch witch doctor. “What’s she going to do? Chase away our trauma with chicken bones and a hunk of Gouda?”
“You should open your mind a bit.” Her voice is cold; my flippant remark seems to have offended her. “That’s your problem right there. Eighty percent of this country uses sangomas for all manner of problems. You don’t have to be so fucking superior. This is a legitimate form of therapy. She can cleanse your house. Cleanse you.”
The liberal offense she’s taken provokes me. “Since when are you the champion of African traditional medicine? Last I heard, high-fat low-carb was going to save your life, make you a better you.”
“Oh, fuck off, Mark. I’m trying to help. You have darkness in you—legitimate darkness, I know—but wouldn’t you like relief? Since the attack everything’s just become worse for you—and your family. Wouldn’t you want to try anything to help alleviate your situation?”
“Christ, Carla. We don’t need a fucking cleansing. I need some sleep.”
“You never ask for help. That’s another of your problems, while we’re on the subject.” She laughs. “But there are many people and many structures out there to help us when we’re in need. The human family is vast. And it’s good, Mark. Can you bring yourself to believe that?”
I don’t say anything.
“Anyway, despite what you might think, African healing is not magic; it’s not witchcraft. It’s a philosophy, just as valid as any other religion or secular philosophy. Just like them, it’s a therapeutic system, offering us solutions when times are hard. Nobody believes in real ghosts, but just like your priest or your therapist or your secular European atheist philosophers, sangomas can help you to chase down and understand your dreams, offer you life advice, help to exorcize your psychic ghosts.”
Her argument is convincing, if only because it relativizes everything into a mash of inoffensive spiritual comfort food. “What suddenly makes you the expert?”
“I saw a documentary the other night.”
I snort out a laugh. “Even if I did agree, we can’t afford it.” My refrain. “I’ve just taken out another overdraft to pay for Jan’s bloody alarm system. Anyway, Steph’d never agree to having someone like that in our house.”
“Don’t you worry. I’ll convince her. I’m very persuasive, you know. Especially when it comes to what’s best for you, my friend.”
—
When I get home later, it’s to find Carla in my living room, drinking the Meerlust Geoff gave me at my UCT send-off, watching my TV.
She looks me up and down, as if I’m the unexpected intruder. “What have you done to yourself?” she says.
“Where’s Steph?”
She looks at what I’m holding in my hand. “Why don’t you put that away and clean yourself up?”
I go through to the kitchen, turn on the kettle, and put my parcel in the box in the pantry, then come through to wash my hands and arms in the bathroom. In our bedroom, I dump my shirt in the hamper, put on a clean tee, and go to rejoin Carla in the living room. But as I step into the hallway, I see Steph backing carefully out of Hayden’s room. She turns and startles when she sees me. For an unguarded moment her face is blanched and her eyes wide; then she gathers herself, frowns, and beckons me into the kitchen.
She folds her arms, stands ten feet away from me—as far as possible in this room. “Where’ve you been?” she says.
“Who invited her over?” I hiss.
“She invited herself over, of course.” She doesn’t bother to lower her voice. “Where have you been?”
“Therapy. Traffic was bad.”
I can see her clenching her jaw, forcing herself not to respond, not to accuse me of anything, not to start anything while Carla’s here, but she can’t help glancing at the clock on the wall. It is after nine.
“Is Hayden okay?” I ask, trying to deflect her.
“Jesus, Mark. No, she’s not okay. She’s completely unsettled. She can’t get into a deep sleep, and I think she’s becoming sick again.”
Not for the first time today, I worry that Steph might be making Hayden sick, or at least that her anxiety is having a bad effect on her.
“Listen, Steph,” I say as Carla comes through from the living room and stands in the kitchen doorway. “Maybe you’ve been here in this house by yourself too much. We could put Hayden in day care. Maybe it’s time we should think about finding a job for you.”
—
When Marlies the sangoma rattles up to our house just before noon two days later, I’m not in the mood. And she does rattle—her beaded bracelets and dangly necklaces and the cloth bag draped over her shoulder hammer against her drum as she locks up her Kia on the roadside and crosses, ignoring the shout of a couple of stoned homeless people who’re leaned up against the neighbor’s wall.
I watch her through the front window as she opens the gate and then stops. She puts down the drum and her bag and frowns up at the house. Under her beaded headband and her long skirt, she seems to be about my age—late forties maybe—squat body, a clutch of drained and unkempt pale hair scraped out of the back of the headdress. She seems to sniff the air for a minute, wobbling slightly on her legs as if standing in a gentle tide; then she picks up the drum and bag and turns away, back to the gate, where she stops again, undecided.
I help her choose. Now that she’s here, there’s no point in her leaving, is there? I open the door and call out: “Hi. Marlies?” I can’t bring myself to call her “Gogo Thembi.”
She looks at me and scans me with the same hesitant eyes as she’s used on the house.
“Everything okay?” I step down from the porch toward her. “Can I give you a hand?”
“No,” she says.
“Are you going to come in?”
She takes a deep breath in and follows me, muttering something low under her breath—whether in Dutch or isiXhosa or Elvish, I can’t tell. I let her in the front door, and she closes it behind her, as if she’s the one who’s ashamed of this transaction. She puts her things down in the hallway and puts her hands on her hips and tracks her eyes around the entrance.
“Your wife and child are out, yes?”
“Yes,” I say. One of the rare things Steph and I have agreed on lately is that Hayden definitely doesn’t need to be involved in this.
“Good,” she says. “It’s better for the small one not to be here.” For a moment I’m lulled into a sense of normality. I looked at the documentary Carla recommended on YouTube, and apart from some sensible comments from a professor of anthropology—where Carla picked up her semi-convincing arguments about philosophies and therapeutic systems—nothing about the suburban sangomas themselves inspired any confidence. It all looked like a ridiculous act to me, aging hippies indulging their need for drama and ululation, sprinkling their middle-class diction with explosions of Eish! and Wena! and Aikhona!, phrases they picked up from the Madam & Eve cartoons they read with their herbal tea when they’re off duty. And of course the rural elders wh
o trained them just did it for the easy money. Why wouldn’t they? There’s an ex-postman from Liverpool who’s now a sangoma; his British pounds must have done his trainer’s village a lot of good. There was a vegetarian sangoma from Sandton on the show, who had the trainer slaughter the goat and the chickens for her.
So far, though, apart from the getup, Marlies is behaving like a normal person, not putting on an act. She seems convinced about herself, which helps me ease into this charade. Let this be an experience I can open myself to; it’s like listening to somebody else’s story for a while; that’s all.
She’s now started to wander off, and I trail her into the living room. “But your other girl,” she says, staring at the photos on the bookshelf and at the beading around the ceiling. “She’s still here.”
My mood turns immediately. Fucking Carla. She must have told this woman my whole bloody history. When will she understand that it’s nobody’s business? “No, there’s no other girl.”
Marlies doesn’t bother to turn to me as she says, “She’s the one you need me to take away.”
No. No. There’s a pull inside me, like a hook going in and ripping out.
“Hang on,” I start to say, but she’s opening her cloth shoulder bag, muttering under her breath.
“We need to appeal to the ancestors, ask them what is their plan.”
I don’t want Zoë erased. I never want her to leave me. That is not what I want. I hurry up to her, trying to ward her back into the hallway without touching her. “Let’s leave it, you know. It’s fine. It was just something my wife wanted. You can go. Let’s do this another time.” I’m battling to keep my voice calm.
Finally she looks up at me, just for a moment, and says, “It’s out of your hands.” Then she moves over to the far corner of the room, whispering gently under her breath as if trying to seduce the shadows.
My body tenses and my mind starts to focus in animal instinct. She’s become a direct threat to my child. The hook goes in again, rips out more of me. But still, somehow, I can’t bring myself to touch her, to wrestle her up and throw her out of the house. It feels somehow as if she’s protected.
So I stand in the doorway and talk, my fucking solution to everything. I try to raise my voice, try to sound authoritative. “Listen,” I say, “this is our home and you must leave.”
But Marlies is not listening. She’s squatted down and has started burning something, her voice now beginning to rise into an unintelligible gibber. “Did you hear me? You need to go.” I approach her, but the smoke she’s making is thick and acrid, shit smelling, and somehow I can’t find my way through it.
At the same time the witch stands and waves the burning leaves under my face, now yelling something, her eyes rolling back, the vibration from her lips and chin rippling down her whole body. The sound from her chest is too low, too loud, and I need to back away. I gasp, sucking in a lungful of smoke, which causes me to gasp again. I have to breathe it out but my chest is ground into a spasm and the smoke has broken into my body. I can feel it invading every cell.
And now there’s something wrong with my eyes, because I see flashing lights against gray fog and shapes forming out of the mist. There’s the shambling shape of a hunchback, a man in ancient clothing grasping at a stab wound in his chest. A metal face lurches at me, clanking open to reveal only a skull. The waxen skin of a Nazi soldier comes too close to my face, the smell of rot trailing it as it passes. A broken man swings a hatchet at a small, cowering figure. Three large men in balaclavas shout orders as they thunder down the wooden hallway.
This is not real. I’ve seen this before. It’s just a memory.
And as if I’ve willed it away with my affirmation, the fog clears to reveal my living room, almost as it was, but now dark, when the morning sun was just shining in. As the last drapes of fog clear, one shape remains standing. A small girl. She looks at me, cocking her head.
It can’t be, but it is.
I look behind me. The witch doctor is gone, but I can still hear her sobbing gasps. The smoke is still in the air, but now it smells sweet, like incense.
Zoë is staring at me, angry, deep blue rings around her eyes, a smear of vomit over her chin. And now she winces and starts to cry, as if something she loves has been crushed in front of her. The hook pulls inside me again, and I know she’s feeling the same thing.
I go to her. “It’s all right, sweetie. I won’t let her take you away from me.”
But she’s looking through me, to where I was standing before, talking over me as if she can’t hear me. “I must show you something,” she says, in a voice that’s not hers, the sound of it grating through pain-clenched teeth. I hear a knocking sound coming from behind my ear.
I follow her as she leads me through to the kitchen, pushes the swollen door into the pantry.
She opens the cardboard box I’ve been using, the one I’ve stashed behind the gas bottles for winter. “What have you done, Mark?” she says.
I look down, into the box. “I wanted to make you better. I wanted to bring you back, love.”
“No,” she says. “It has to be alive.”
Chapter 20
Steph
“Mumma, everything smells bad.” Hayden scrunched up her nose the second we walked through the front door. Mark and I had decided that it was best for her not to be present while Carla’s sangoma did her thing, and now that the car was fixed, I’d taken her to the beach and then to Pick n Pay for the afternoon. I wished now that we’d been able to stay out longer, but she’d become testy in the supermarket, the day’s heat making her irritable. And she was right: the whole house reeked of burned sage or whatever crap the sangoma had used to “cleanse” it.
Mark emerged from the kitchen, mumbled a greeting, and dutifully helped me with the plastic grocery bags. He looked furtive, as if I’d just caught him watching porn.
“So?” I said, hefting Hayden into a more comfortable position on my hip. “How did it go?”
He shook his head. “Exactly as you’d expect. I have no idea why I agreed to it.”
“We agreed to it.”
“Yeah.”
“The place stinks. What did that woman use in here?” And why did you let her?
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
I slid Hayden into her chair, promised to make her cheesy pasta, and started to unpack the groceries. I pulled at the fridge door, but it wouldn’t open—it did that sometimes. I gave it an almighty tug that almost caused it to fall on top of me, and this time the door flew open, exhaling a foul whiff of vinegar and spoiled meat. The source of the rotten meat stench seemed to be a half-finished packet of bacon, which shouldn’t have gone off so quickly, and the vinegar stench clearly emanated from an opened tub of pickled herring I didn’t remember buying. And that wasn’t all. A bottle of tomato sauce had spattered its contents over the vegetable drawer, already drying to a sickly crust.
“Did you do this, Mark?”
“Huh?” He was miles away again, frozen mid-move as he packed spaghetti into the cupboard.
“Did you move stuff around in the fridge?”
“No. Of course I didn’t.” He sounded irritable, annoyed that I’d jolted him out of his thoughts. “Why would I?”
“Well, someone did.” I stepped aside so that he could look at the damage himself. Fucking Carla. It had to be her. It would be like her to show up when the sangoma was doing her thing. She wasn’t one to miss the action.
He showed no surprise at the mess. “I’ll clean it up.”
“How did it happen, though? Did Carla—”
“Not now, Steph.” He looked meaningfully at Hayden.
“Mark—”
“Someone must have knocked against the fridge during the”—he flapped a hand above his head—“the cleansing.”
“It looks deliberate to me.”
He didn’t answer, merely rooted the bleach and a clutch of rags out from under the sink.
While I made Hayden’s food, he dogged
ly picked through the fridge, pulling out the trays and rinsing them under the tap. It seemed to me that he was deliberately avoiding looking at me. I had to ask him twice if he wanted something to eat, and he mumbled something about eating earlier. The smoky stench had erased my appetite.
Hayden picked halfheartedly at her pasta and yawned. “My tummy feels funny, Mumma.”
Mark chucked the cloth he was using in the sink and approached her. “You want to come watch a movie with Daddy?”
I couldn’t tell if he genuinely wanted to spend time with her or if he was looking for an excuse to get away from me. She nodded and yawned again, and stretched out her arms to him. Somehow I stopped myself from snatching her from him, and instead leaned against the kitchen counter and listened to the opening track of The Lego Movie. I couldn’t face clearing up. I wanted to convince myself that the sangoma’s juju, or whatever it was, had worked, that the house was now free of its taints, but the mess in the fridge had shaken me. It had to have been Carla, but I couldn’t quite believe that of her. The smoky odor wasn’t receding; if anything, it was getting stronger. And I still couldn’t bring myself to open a window.
I peered into the living room to check on Mark and Hayden—they were both staring blank-faced at the screen and didn’t notice me spying—then returned to the kitchen and opened my laptop, hoping that the house swap site would have finally responded to my furious email about the Petits’ behavior. It hadn’t. Nor had the book agent got back to me, although that was understandable, as she’d had the full manuscript for only a week. I daydreamed idly about book launches, picturing (to my shame now) Carla seething jealously in the back of a crowded bookstore. Maybe, I thought, I should use the time to join a temping agency. Mark had mentioned something about me returning to work in front of Carla two days ago—he could’ve at least waited until she was out of earshot. Restless, I made myself a cup of tea, then surfed around on the internet for a while, telling myself that I’d hunt for a job in the morning. The spectacularly handsome real estate agent we’d spoken to in Paris had said his boss wouldn’t be able to help us with our inquiries about the Petits for another week at least, but I couldn’t see the harm in sending him an email. I dug in my bag for the business card and sent him a message explaining who I was, that I was looking into the history of the Petits’ building and was curious about why it was empty.