Sometimes Janet wondered if the children stood on the other side of the door and heard anything. Not that there was much to hear. Hektor-Jan’s passion was quick. But it was also intense and occasionally the bed would leap in surprise and thump against the wall. Like a bucking bronco, it would arch and jump as Hektor-Jan rode it like a squat cowboy and then he might cry out. Call her name as though he had just lost her in the gloom of the room, and whisper to her, urgent whispers in his gruff Afrikaans voice that spoke to the darkness right in the nape of her neck and filled her ears as he filled her too, filled her with his big, blunt love.
Hektor-Jan, she would respond, all thoughts of the children now driven from her. H-J, she might say, her voice urgent, the only time she might use the Afrikaans abbreviation of his name, an intimate diminutive of his name, but with the hint of a thrilling imperative: Higher.
Here she was with her husband relying on her more and more heavily. She could feel it. Her womb throbbed with it.
And the bed would come to rest and the door would still be closed. And then Hektor-Jan would lie on her, breathless, his breath catching in his throat before he summoned more manly resolve and withdrew to open the curtains with dramatic finality. And Janet would imagine now an audience, not on the other side of the locked door, but seated in a vast auditorium revealed by the pulling back of those curtains. The hush was expectant; they were waiting for her to perform.
Shhhhhh, went someone in the front row – the hiss of the shower as Hektor-Jan began to clean himself all over again. And then came the overture – Hektor-Jan in the shower, singing. And then Janet raised herself on one elbow and squinted into the crowd. Before they could become restless, she would get up and curtsey as her nightie slipped down to cover her, and then she would turn theatrically and promenade to the bedroom door like a chestnut-brown Elizabeth Taylor, small but as saucy as you like, and unlock the door. Dramatically she would pull open the door to check if any or all of the children were waiting there, perhaps ready to gasp or to applaud. Usually they were not there; usually their voices came from the kitchen where they were chatting away to Alice, a soft, familiar murmur punctuated by Alice’s good-natured expressions of surprise or encouragement. The black background music to white suburban South Africa.
Janet turned back to the bedroom, to the chaotic bed and to the audience, which held its breath. But then the bathroom door would burst open and it was her chance to shower. Hektor-Jan would take centre-stage and get dressed, or in this instance, make ready to go to bed. She would exit stage left. Then she would shower dreamily.
When she got dressed, usually in a simple frock. Hektor-Jan would watch her, another member of the large audience, so quiet and appreciative. Or maybe he would observe her like a member of the cast, whilst she, the darling of the show, trod the boards and held the audience captive.
Janet would let the towel drop. It was bunched and knotted over her chest, but she would let it quickly slip down in a rough shimmer to her feet and she would step aside like a small, neat goddess, yielded up by the ripples and woollen foam of the towel. And Hektor-Jan would gaze at her breasts, still firm and fresh despite feeding three children and the prospect of nourishing a fourth. And her trim waist – less severe now – and soft thighs. She might turn to her dressing table and catch a glimpse of her comely midriff in the mirror as she reached for her creams. Hektor-Jan might mumble something as she rubbed the lotions into her body. He might be especially attentive, when, like now, her tanned body was dramatically contrasted by a pair of startlingly white breasts and bottom. It was as though, all the time, she was wearing a swimming costume made of creamy flesh. No doubt, the body that filled the costume was what encouraged Desperate Doug to patrol the border of the gardens with such diligence and enthusiasm. Again, Janet almost mentioned Doug to Hektor-Jan, but then there were children’s voices and Janet slipped on her broekie and bra, nylon stockings and dress. And she was ready, smiling maternally as her three children flocked in to say good morning to Pa even though it was once again actually good-night-and-sleep-tight for him. And then it was Janet’s turn to watch as the action moved upstage, more of a pantomime now, as they all threw themselves onto the bed and onto their father yet again. And Hektor-Jan became a sea monster or a gorilla or a twisting, rumbling earthquake and the game of pin-down-Pa began in earnest. Janet would again open her mouth to warn, to offer motherly remonstrations of gentle caution, but it would all get a bit wild and then, yes, as feared, there would be a bump or a knock and someone would end up in tears for a brief, loud moment. Janet did not mind sharing the stage. But she could sense the restlessness in the audience and one by one, she knew they trickled out, a bit like Hektor-Jan’s warm seed within her. No more Brigadoon; no more Janet Snyman née Ward. The auditorium slowly emptied and instead of murmurs of appreciation or gasps of awe, Janet heard a fly buzz. In the auditorium, somewhere out there as the children snorted and their pa squealed – or was it the other way around – there was a blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz between the daylight and Janet. And then, it seemed, the windows failed and she could not see to C. From row C, the last person sauntered off and the fly buzzed and Janet closed her eyes and put her arms around herself and hugged herself. It was just a fly. She would stroll across the stretch of carpet and open the window. She could not do what Hektor-Jan did and crush the fly with a sudden, startling finger so that its innards squirted like a yellow-white headache across the glass and the poor thing crunched and died in a dirty spilling of itself. No, she would open the window and the fly could buzz off, out across the veranda and into the auditorium of the front garden and over the road and beyond to the Bunny Park where creaking children played on swings and chased the relentless rabbits in the quarter of a square mile of the local park.
Janet could not see the fly as it rocketed off into grateful oblivion. The fresh warm air touched her cheek.
Nee, nee, jou blikskotteltjie, roared Hektor-Jan as Pieter started tickling his toes, aided and abetted by his sisters. The rumpus was reaching its final stages. Janet could scuttle from the room knowing that it would all end in a few more minutes. She could run to Alice before any of her Humpty Dumpties fell and broke their crowns. And Alice would shake her head and utter an expressive Hau! as they both raised their eyebrows at the folly of the Master, the Baas, who always got the children so excited. The two women would share a moment of head-shaking disbelief in the Baas – such daring disbelief – as his operatic baritone thundered from the bedroom and seemed to mock them all the way down the corridor.
Too late, Janet remembered that Alice was not back yet and that another pile of washing-up would greet her in the kitchen. She would need to cream her hands as soon as she finished doing the dishes once the children had had their breakfast. She must remember to get the cream out of the bedroom before Hektor-Jan dropped off and it was too late to enter Bluebeard’s lair as he rumbled in his sleep like a submarine in the deep or a human bomb made of large muscles and hair.
Janet sat down in the breakfast nook. Like the fly, her mind roamed free. She wondered what had happened to Alice. Solomon was due back on Monday. Maybe he would know. Now there was no Emily next door to ask. Janet wondered whether she had had her baby yet, and where.
Zululand, perhaps.
And from the Valley of a Thousand Hills in Zululand, her thoughts flew inward and she felt for her own child blossoming within her. And then she gave a small start. How easy it was to live with the crack. It was the first time that day that she had remembered the crack. Janet sat stunned. Her flesh turned cold and she gave a slight shiver. One hand reached instinctively for her belly, to hold and to protect. Even as she sat there, she knew. She knew that it was getting worse, that the crack was not going to go away. And then it came.
As inevitable as gravity, as ineluctable as water or as certain as the buzz of flies came the cry of a child hurt in the rough and tumble of a silly game. She knew it. She could have told them so. There was Hektor-Jan’s gruffly whispered app
eal not to upset Mommy, but there was the insistence of Pieter’s pain. Or was it Shelley’s. How a child will scoop up its agony in shaking hands, holding it up like a bright badge to pin to its chest and loudly proclaim what a bad, naughty, poo-thing the universe is. Look! Look, Mommy – why was it always Mommy – look what has happened to me, poor me, poor little me! And there she was – Mommy – having to lavish sympathy on the bearer of such proud pain.
Janet stood up. The sobs came limping down the passage. Let it be just a bump, or a small scratch from a loose and careless nail. No breaks. Please. No bent limbs or cracked crowns. Janet did not feel that she could face a broken bone so early in the morning, so early in the year. This was supposed to be a good year. Hadn’t Hektor-Jan said so, but a few days before, at Doug and Noreen’s. Had he not raised his glass of 5th Avenue Cold Duck and toasted 1976. Had he not raised a glass to no more oil crises. Had he not welcomed the birth of Essay Beesee – SABC – and the infancy of South African television. And hailed the country that had given them life and a big blue sky and healthy children – although Janet had wished that he had not been quite so explicit about the healthiness of their children when Doug and Noreen had but a dog. That was a little awkward, but otherwise it was a good speech. And now there was Pieter, crying his heart out and holding his hands over his jaw. And there, too, was Sylvia, a satisfied shadow as her older brother was mewling like a baby and she was not.
Pieter. Janet mustered all her sympathy to wrap around her son.
Pieter sobbed into his hands.
Let me see, said Janet. But he would not remove his hands from his face.
Let me have a look, she said patiently. I can’t help you if you don’t let me have a look.
Sylvia stared at her brother, her mouth open and beginning to frame a smile. Janet tugged at Pieter’s arms. That provoked a horrible squealing sound. Sylvia was beaming by now. Janet could just tell that she was grinning from ear to ear.
Pieter, Janet was getting cross. Pieter!
He let her tug his hands from his jaw. He was strong, surprisingly strong, but he let her move his hands from his face and there was his swollen jaw and his weeping eyes, smeared with tears. His face was red from all his rubbing.
It wath ath athki – it wath ath anthkident – it wath a mithtake, explained Sylvia’s voice from around her thumb.
Thumb out, thank you, said Janet as she bent and grimaced at Pieter’s jaw.
What happened, she asked him. Can you open it.
Pa, he started to wail again, Pa –
Pappie hit Pieter’s mouth, came the helpful clarification from behind Janet’s knees. By mistake. Sylvia was surreptitiously trying to peer up at her brother’s injury – as well as making a poor show of hiding her joy and her thumb.
Thank you, Sylvia, Janet snapped as she tried to prise open his mouth. It really was swollen.
He wouldn’t stop, Shelley’s measured, older-girl voice spoke. Pa told him to stop, but he didn’t stop. It’s his own fault. Now Pa is upset. He has shut himself in the loo.
Open your mouth. Janet gripped Pieter by the shoulders. I said open your mouth.
With a shuddering moan that drew gasps of appreciation from Sylvia, Pieter opened his mouth. Shelley withdrew silently.
More. Much more, Janet inserted an initial finger and felt for fragments of teeth, any sudden splinters or the slippery gush of blood.
There, Pieter gagged a sound. Dere.
Janet stopped. There it was: a loose tooth. Of course, it may already have been loose, although the little boy did seem to be in some pain. And there was some blood.
Pa, spluttered Pieter. Pa.
Your father did this, Janet said.
Are you going to thmack Pappie? Sylvia said. Are you going to get the wooden thpoon? Are you going to teach Pappie a lethon he will never forget? Are you going to – ?
Sylvia, Janet used her time-to-shut-your-mouth-or-die voice. It did the trick.
Pieter’s mouth jerked open and Sylvia’s snapped closed.
Yes. One of Pieter’s little molars was oddly loose. If she touched and wiggled it – Pieter let out a magnificent scream. A scream worthy of the end of civilisation. If Alice was anywhere this side of Zululand she would have heard him. She would be hurrying back home to them.
Sylvia’s mouth opened once again and her thumb fell free. Shelley came running back.
Pieter sat down on the floor, a deflated husk of a boy – all that remained after the almighty scream.
Try to rest it, said Janet wondering where she kept the bottle of TCP. Stay there, she said to Pieter as she went in search of the medication. It was going to be a long day. She could tell it was going to be a long day. Pieter would milk his injury for all it was worth. He would require love, solicitous wads of her cottonwool love packed around his lithe body for the rest of the day. Her tiny son. And now her husband trapped in the bathroom, imprisoning himself in the bathroom. As soon as she had given Pieter the medicine, she would coax Hektor-Jan out of his little prison. All this, and not a line, not a word had she learnt for Brigadoon. Janet stopped.
For a second she did not know how, why. She almost scratched her head. She inhaled sharply.
She was standing at the foot of the pool.
She was standing, muttering, staring at the pool.
Did she think that the medicine for Pieter’s pain lurked in the crack at the bottom of the pool. Why had she made her way here. It seemed as though it were some compendium of ills, a seam of distress, which ran through her life, her day, her pool.
Janet did scratch her head. It was whole, complete.
She looked at her toes. And at the water level which again had dipped. And at the crack that lay sullenly at the bottom of the pool. And yes, it was starting to come even further up the sides. Dear God, it seemed even wider and was definitely longer.
Janet turned away from its magnetic pull. It was a compass needle pointing to true horror. No matter where she was, she felt her insides turn and realign with the crack in the pool. Yes, it was going to be a long day. And, no, she had never forgotten about the crack.
The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He leadeth me in green pastures and into the en suite bathroom where the quiet waters lie. Ja, man, though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, yet I fear no ill. For Thou art with me and my Beretta and bullets comfort me still. And the knife rests securely between the Old and the New Testaments.
He hunts down sleep like a wounded animal. The ambiguity disturbs him: it is sleep which is wounded. It is a scurrying tarentaal freshly shot, and it runs and bleeds in the thick mielie field, not to be caught. He has no dogs with him. No Voetsek or Bliksem or Boggeroff or Moffie or Swart Gevaar or any of the others. Dogs from the good old days. Dogged by his past and by the present. Hektor-Jan sighs. His right hand is still clenched. That was close. Just before he and Janet got intimate, when they entered the bedroom, he had stood on it. Dank die Here – Thank God – he had stood on it, not she. How would he explain away the adult tooth that lay on the bedroom carpet with its bloody roots, a shred of gum still trailing from its long, cracked roots. It was one of the back teeth. Fed up to the back teeth. This tooth had followed him home. How the hell had this tooth followed him all the way home. He could only assume that it had spat through the air and had fallen into the turn-ups of his trousers. It had hitched a ride home. And when he got changed, it must have jumped out. And there it had lain, chewing on the beige carpet, lying in wait for the unsuspecting foot so that it could bite back. Inflict some pain of its own. Allawereld. Liewe hemel. What was the world coming to when you are hunted down by stray teeth in your own home. He had scooped it up just in time. He had held it tightly in his fist, even as they had had sex. Even as the children romped on his ribs and attacked his toes. And then, in the chaos of fun, he had tried to escape Pieter’s clutches, the fumbling of his son who sensed something in his father’s hand and had tried to get it. Nee, Hektor-Jan had rumbled. Nee, my seun. But little Pietert
jie had insisted like a stupid puppy. He had laughed. Laughed in his father’s face and panted and lusted after the fist with the tooth trapped inside and Hektor-Jan had shouted and writhed and flailed and had caught his own son on the jaw. It was almost as though the tooth was seeking out a new jaw. A new day, a new dawn, a new jaw. It wanted to go home. But he held it. In his hand he had the whole tooth; nothing but the tooth in his hand. He would not let it go. He had never wanted it to fly from that poor bastard’s mouth. Or had he. Had he tried to impress the little major, the quiet man with the soft voice and merciless, pale-blue eyes. Indeed, had he teased it from its original owner, had he coaxed it from him in a paroxysm of blood and rasping phlegm. His knuckles ached from the effort. A human face is surprisingly hard and resilient. And now those self-same knuckles were still tightened whitely around the tooth. It was going nowhere. And he was not going to sleep. Janet had come to knock on the bathroom door. At first he thought it was a pounding headache or an echo of the knocking, the ironic knocking that he used to warn the men that he was coming, coming to get them and that they had better be ready to tell him, tell him all that he wanted to know. Not to waste his fucking time. On this earth we have but three-score years and ten and he did not for one moment want to spend any more time than was necessary. But that was a lie, a white lie. For this, he had all the time in the world. He was made for this. Why, had not the Lord his God given him a body that was indeed a battering ram. Was he not the proud possessor of the biggest biceps and – magnificently – the greatest capacity to induce terror. Was he not the vanguard of civilisation. Did he not carry in his mighty hands the precious flame of white South Africa, of law and order and civilisation amidst these savages. He saw what they did with their pangas, their assegaaie and their sharpened bicycle spokes. He knew what the ANC could do to Inkatha, what Inkatha did to the ANC. He knew the hostels and the townships. As a policeman, he had patrolled them. They had been on his beat – and beat was the operative word. These savages needed to be beaten. Without the strong arm of the law, there would be chaos. What he now did in the interrogation rooms of the HQ of the Boksburg-Benoni Riot Squad, well, it was absolutely bloody necessary. No fear, no respect. No respect, then chaos is come again. The riders of the apocalypse would howl through the white suburbs. There would be looting and pillaging and raping. So, in his right hand, in some strange way, the bloody molar comforted and disturbed him in equal measure. Like the witblits in the car which both quickened his heart and dulled his nerves. In his restless sleep, he wondered where he might hide it. The children put their teeth under their pillows. The tooth fairy took the tooth and transformed it into a shiny silver ten-cent piece. He would bury it under the mattress with his stash of magazines. Maybe some tooth fairy would oblige. But, when he got up and raised the mattress, he could not let go of the tooth. He stood for a long time in the dark room staring at his tight fist. It could have been Pieter’s tooth. It could have been the tooth of his very own son. But for the grace of God, he might have hit his son’s jaw and knocked loose a little white tooth. The colour drained from his face. His hand ached. The tooth bit into his rough palm and now his jaw began to throb. For the life of him, he could not think what to do.
The Crack Page 8