Desperate Doug turned his anxious gaze to her garden. It’s like this, he said softly. I look out over your lawn and the flower beds and I see patches of darker green and I think of weeds and I worry about you. Because, he paused, eyeing her over his shears so that his words might carry more weight, because if you let the weeds grow then they will spread.
Desperate Doug pronounced each word separately and cataclysmically: If – you – let – the – weeds – grow – then – they – will – spread.
His warning – it was a warning, not just horticultural hocus-pocus – hung in the midday sun. It came from on high. It was spoken over the blades of his shears. It was wrung from his heart and his lips trembled.
Your life is like a garden, he carried on, and we are like gardeners. His lips twisted at the thought. Ja, man, we are actually like garden boys, believe it or not. We can decide what to let grow, and what to pull out. But we cannot let the weeds take over, can we.
Janet felt it was time to move. A response was being called for. She managed to nod her head. Weeds were bad. Black-jacks were not good.
Desperate Doug glanced towards Janet’s house. Do you know what Higher is doing right now, he suddenly asked.
His direct question, almost an attack, came as a shock.
Janet was suddenly a little girl once again, under fire from her fierce mother.
Do I know what Higher is doing right now, she repeated, a favourite stratagem which so infuriated her mother. I asked the question, Amelia Amis would become angry to the point of hissing, like a kettle about to boil over. What I require is an answer and not – she repeated the negative, close to hysteria – not the repetition of my very own interrogative.
Desperate Doug did not become hysterical. He just seemed really sad. He looked like he could take his own life right then and there on the points of his shears and Janet found herself wishing that he would. There, the guilty thought was out. If only –
I suppose he is in the bedroom; Desperate Doug looked at her fiercely. He made it sound somehow filthy, as though Hektor-Jan were skulking or lurking, as though a bedroom were a den of iniquity, a hotbed of filth and sweat and –
I suppose you have been outside with Solomon whilst Higher has been inside alone –
Desperate Doug left the sentence dangling on a precipice. Janet felt giddy with the sense of illicit possibility. They both knew that Hektor-Jan was not alone in the house. That he was in the house and Alice, a housemaid, was also, by very definition, in the house too and had been in the house with her husband all along except when she appeared with their tea.
What time did Alice bring you your cup of tea. Desperate Doug seemed to be echoing her thoughts. He seemed to be inside her head snipping away at the neurons and dendrites – the delicate rhododendrons of her thoughts even as those thoughts branched out in her mind. No, he was spreading weeds, the very weeds he supposedly abhorred.
She stared wordlessly at him. Her voice, when it came, when it made its way out of her soft throat, was her own. There was no sense of bonnie Jean now. Brigadoon was banished; this was Benoni.
Desp-, Doug, she coughed up his name and he immediately took pity.
Look, he said, I just ask. He stood up straight now. He raised the shears in a gesture which was expansive, which seemed to evoke the neighbourhood and embrace them all as though he were performing a civic duty. I just ask. As your neighbour. As someone who cares. I mean, look at Eileen, he nodded across the garden to Janet’s other neighbour.
Janet turned, startled. Then she faced Desperate Doug again.
Look, he repeated with passionate emphasis. I just don’t want to see you get hurt.
He was almost tearful, or passionate. Look – I – just – do – not – want – to – see – you – get – hurt –
And once again Desperate Doug parsed the sentence into weighty fragments, bits that were almost too heavy to bear and they slipped through her fingers and dropped at her feet and hurt even her toes.
Then Desperate Doug glanced behind him suddenly and said, Sorry, gotta go. And as he was swallowed by the wall in quick sections, his voice still came hissing to her. Look to your husband, he said. For God’s sake, look to your husband.
And she was left standing there, peering at the concrete sections of the wall, each panel one foot high, six panels of concrete slotted one on top of the other. She thought that she might have heard Noreen’s voice – or was it Nesbitt making a strangled sound.
Before she could ponder this further, Alice appeared in her bright pink apron and matching dress and doek with Solomon’s lunch and another mug of steaming tea. She smiled at Janet as she walked past, en route to the singing Solomon whose voice still filtered through the leaves of the pampas grass. Janet tried to return her smile. It was a brave effort, not completely successful, and then Janet had to turn away, back to the large fact of the six-foot wall.
Janet was numb. The grey concrete glared at her. The rhododendrons above her shivered. She had to move. She had to get out of the way so that she did not have to smile at Alice as she returned to the kitchen, to the house –
Janet almost ran across the lawn to the willow tree. She reached out and parted its weeping fronds. She slipped through the soft branches into the haven of delicate green. Her lounger was still there, but she could not sit down. She stood in the perfect bower. If the beautiful tree were a wig, a gorgeous hairdo of silver and lime, then she was hidden within the crown of its thoughts. She lifted her arms, reached up for a moment into the lovely space created by the tree. But then she had to hold the hanging branches; she had to drown in the soft fronds, bury herself in the embrace of their gentle arms. These men, oh, these men. She was showering in those branches, washing herself in the streams of their refreshing green as though to rid herself of the half-fears and suspicions that had sprayed over her, had spouted from Desperate Doug’s mouth right into her. Janet clung to the branches, supported by them. Alice would have delivered Solomon his lunch by now. Alice would be back in the house by now. It was getting close to the time when she, Janet, would need to fetch little Sylvia from nursery school and then she would leave the house and her sleeping husband in Alice’s care. Alice would be alone in her wonderland. In the streaming, cool, green leaves, Janet tried her best to wash those thoughts from her mind. It was not fair. It was simply not fair on her dear, dear Alice. It was no good.
She stumbled blinking from the tree. Just when the pool was being fixed now another worry nagged at her. Would she never be free. Always this worry. Janet sighed. The tingle in her gut stretched back a long time. Indeed, how long had it taken her own mother to relinquish the aspirations with which she haunted Janet, her little daughter. Amelia Amis had got it into her head one summer holiday – between working on papers reappraising Eliot’s social realism – George’s rather than T.S.’s – and ‘The Narrative Intrusions of Thackeray: a Riposte to Roland Barthes’ – that her daughter’s poetic sensibilities required developing. That if she was not going to practise her times tables with Lettie, well, then, she would jolly well have to submit to a regime of creativity. If not numeracy, then literacy. How old was Janet, nine, ten –
Eleven, Janet’s small voice informed her mother, who said it was about time that Janet learned to express herself in proper alexandrines and to realise that vers libre in actual fact demanded restraint. How she forced her to notice things, to gaze upon the world with a poet’s eye. At night, across an indigo sky, a bat is not a bat, it is a shred of torn umbrella, a flitting pipistrella. You did not steal the plums, you were sorry that you ate the plums that you were keeping. You did not eulogise true love but rather did not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments across fourteen lines. Rhythm could be regular or sprung. Amelia Amis and her metronome repeated the admonishment in careful time. Do not, my child, offend me thus, her mother wagged her finger in pointed time. Maybe that is why Janet read English at the University of the Witwatersrand – it was the least offensive option to her mother. M
aybe it was a way of trying to understand her mother.
Mother, so what do you think of this essay. Please cast your eye over this essay before I hand it in. Maybe it was just a severe lack of imagination. The wrong rite of passage. One that took her deeper into perplexity which had very little – or everything – to do with poetry. Poetry was a form of paranoia – fear made flesh, it seemed. Her mother was no poet. She was a critic. She and her red pens. Her pile of perpetual essays. Her disdainful sneer, her clear eyes that stared into space, past her daughter, through her daughter. Then back to the flick of ink, red spikes, bloody black-jacks.
What made her mother tick. Did her mother know.
And now, thrown up in her face by a Desperate Doug, there was again the fear – currently so clear and sharp – of being hurt and of hurting and of not understanding. Just like a child. Just like the crack. But, while she had Solomon and they had tackled the crack, what could she do with the seams of doubt, impossible seemings, that now criss-crossed her heart and mind. She was no poet. She was not an academic. She was a housewife married to a policeman. She was the mother of three children.
She stood, unleashed by the gentle willow tree, yet moated by the green lawn. She had to move, she had to change her clothes and fetch Sylvia, and yet she dare not take a single step. What if she stumbled into the bedroom and came across a scene. What if Alice were not hoovering and Hektor-Jan not simply sleeping. What if Alice were sleeping whilst Hektor-Jan were hoovering her. Janet stood in anguish, her body a lonely tower in the garden. What if she, like the Lady of Shallot, peered out – or in – and off flew the web and floated wide and what if the bedroom mirror crack’d from side to side.
Before she could stumble across a Goblin Market – more terrible Tennyson – the back door opened and Lettie – no, Alice – came straight across the grass, her pink apron unsoiled, her dress trim and straight. No sign of Hektor-Jan.
Madam, called Alice, Madam, the little one, Sylvia, and she came right up to Janet and pointed to her wrist, to the watch that she did not have but which signalled time’s winged chariot hurrying near. Janet tried to nod. She tried not to throw her arms around Alice in sudden relief, to clasp her to her breast and to beg her forgiveness. With a hasty glance at the brooding rhododendrons, Janet stifled a cry and, instead of reaching out to Alice, raised her hands rather to her own head.
Thank you, Alice, she managed to say as she held her relief intact and tried not to weep. Thank you, Alice.
My Madam, replied Alice gently, still standing there. She would not leave until Janet had begun to move. She knew Janet too well.
With a last glance at the neighbour’s wall, Janet stumbled forward guided by Alice. Behind them, Solomon emerged carrying his tin plate and mug, still humming. And from within the dark heart of the rhododendrons, a pair of eyes watched their every move. Janet could feel their amused malevolence.
Even as she and Alice went to fetch Sylvia – Alice agreed to her plea to accompany her – Janet felt the gaze of those eyes. Even as she watched Shelley and Pieter eating their sandwiches after they had walked home from their little school up the road, she knew they were watching. Those eyes called to mind the strange book covers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Anthony Burgess. Eyes which loomed, which leered, heavy-lidded or brightly, with strange white sclera and black and pointed pupils: constricted or weirdly dilated. Janet realised that eyes were nothing but cracks in the face. They were bright holes which winked to a slit, a fleshy, eyelashed crack, every few seconds. She opened her mouth. She closed her mouth. She tried not to scream.
Hektor-Jan awoke and played with the children.
Alice cooked supper and breakfast.
They ate and refused the children’s requests to watch more television at Uncle Doug’s.
Hektor-Jan left for work and Janet supervised bathtime and bedtime stories. Pieter remembered some homework he had buried in his schoolbag, but Janet told him to save it for the morning. She closed the last page of the last Enid Blyton and offered up the last kiss. Be good for Alice, she whispered. Mommy is off to her rehearsal again tonight and the children murmured sleepily – except for Pieter who chanced his arm with another request to stay up. But Janet was already on the trembling foothills of the Scottish Highlands and filling her ears were the thick-coming sounds of going home, home, home, going home to bonnie Jean. Ye wee rascal, she patted Pieter’s confusion on the head and told him to sleep for a hundred years. Then it was time to freshen up with more make-up, another dab of perfume and to find her bag and her script. What a sudden flurry of seeking! But then she ran into Alice who was holding both her bag and the script.
Dear Alice. Janet laid a grateful hand on her arm. I won’t be late, she called quietly as she left, and from the kitchen came the soft sounds of Alice’s radio.
Shelley’s Secret Journal
Today’s word from Granny’s list is INDECIPHERABLE.
Mommy is indecipherable. I am sure you agree Granny. I think you told me that not so long ago. She calls Alice Lettie. She jumps when you talk to her. I asked when we can visit you but she did not say when. She can’t find things and she won’t let us play in the back garden. Alice won’t let me ask her why. What do you think Granny? Maybe it’s the stupid play? Or maybe she knows what actually happened to Jock? And I am getting really tired of Pieter and his nightmares about the blacks. I think he thinks he is in a play like Mommy’s big drama. Love, Shelley.
Janet escaped from the house into the chirping twilight. She scurried next door to Eileen-the-Understudy who was waiting in her car. With excited giggles, they were off. What a relief. After such a day, what a relief. Janet could begin to breathe again.
Have you learned your words, Eileen-the-Understudy asked and Janet nodded furiously in the passenger seat. And you, Janet asked her tall friend. Eileen-the-Understudy grated the gears and rounded a corner quite sharply and Janet wished that she had curbed her enthusiasm a little.
Yes, Eileen-the-Understudy said brightly. I have learned both my lines. I am word perfect!
Janet blushed quietly.
She was grateful for Eileen-the-Understudy’s hand on her arm as they skipped into the Rynfield Primary School hall. For the hand which squeezed her arm as Frank van Zyl turned to greet them, and to become Janet’s attentive shadow. And Derek-Francis again simpered up to say what a perfect couple they were – Janet and Frank – and wasn’t kismet a remarkable force. Why, we pit our strength against oceans of troubles and out of the blue a solution comes – just wonderful. Beautiful kismet. And then Janet was alone with Frank and they stood waiting for the last few members of the cast to arrive.
There was a theatrical cheer as the final person – the bumptious friend of the romantic lead, the one who did an amazing American accent – leapt through the double doors of the little school hall. And then they were off.
Derek-Francis had them start with a run-through of the opening scene when the village awoke after one hundred years had passed, and, apart from the two Americans and the girlfriend back home, they all yawned and stretched and did a very passable impression of collective torpor and stupefaction. They were so caught up in their slumbers and then their languorous stretching, that they did not notice the groundsman who materialised out of the dark night and stood watching them.
It was only Janet, so attuned to the pressure of such scrutiny, who gave a little yelp of surprise as the uniformed black man rattled his keys against his thighs. Then, amidst the knots of white folk waking up from prolonged unconsciousness, the black man stepped into the hall and demanded to know once again of Derek-Francis if it was for two hours that they were going to be busy. There were one or two grunts of surprise – who expected sudden black men in Brigadoon for God’s sake – and a very thin woman squealed and clasped her hand which the groundsman had almost trodden on.
But Derek-Francis was very good, very firm this time.
Some of the men had a word with him, our director, Eileen-the-Understudy breathed, a
nd it seems to have worked. We can’t keep being interrupted can we – we have a show to put on.
And that seemed to be the vocal consensus. No more silly interruptions, who does he think he is. For crying out loud. But no one had to cry out loud. Derek-Francis did a very good job of giving him a flea in his ear. They could all hear the flustered exclamations coming through the open door which let in not only Derek-Francis’s hissing, but also a constant flutter of insects too.
Then it was back to Brigadoon as the mutterings of the groundsman receded into the night and the double doors were slammed shut.
After the more physical stretching of the waking-up scene – repeated three times – Derek-Francis got them all together to do some elocution practice. He wanted authentic Scottish accents and for the next half-hour they chorused words and phrases like Bairn, Sporran, Och, Do ye not know and Phantasmagorical in rich and rolling voices that exalted every last fruity nuance of the ripe r sounds and made a confection out of every vowel, so different from the flat, more leavened accents of the typical South African. There was hearty laughter and Derek-Francis conducted them with gentle exactitude. Yes! he began to cry as they neared the end of that half-hour, Yes, yes, we are getting somewhere! Now we sound like we are in the Scottish Highlands, yes! And there was a cheer from the men. And the women threw their hands to their mouths and squealed again, but with joy this time. They began to grasp the certainty that the Rynfield Primary School hall would indeed be transformed into Brigadoon. Their little project had legs, someone said, and would walk all the way. There were more giggles and Janet tried to concentrate on the prevailing joy and not the image of the play stumbling uncertainly like Sylvia used to, like a toddler making its way in the dark to the little school hall whilst the black gatekeeper rattled his keys and lurked in the wings. The image of the tiny play, almost plaintive, brought her close to tears, but then Derek-Francis was ushering the chorus and the other main characters to the adjacent music classroom where his friend, a gifted pianist, was waiting. It was Derek-Francis’s little surprise and he introduced the neat man, Rupert, with a great flourish and Rupert bowed. Then Rupert sat behind the piano and was still before his fingers attacked the instrument and the opening number burst into the room.
The Crack Page 19