Pieter’s stitches were simple; Oupa’s emergency operation took much longer. They needed to send him to the Joburg Gen. Willem sent Hektor-Jan home with his family. François’s broken nose could be seen to on Monday, and they would stay with Pa. And Hektor-Jan was to look after the birthday boy and his six stitches.
Shelley’s Secret Journal
The word from Granny’s list for today is INELUCTABLE.
Today was a busy strange day. Oupa got his eye shot out and the left hand side of his head blown up. I shot a guiny fowl which is now in the fridge. Pieter missed everything he aimed at. Oom Koos said I am a natural. That was before the accident and before Pappie hit Oom Franswa. Oom Franswa had let his rifle scrape the muddy ground. Then he left the rifle with Oupa. The mud dried and blocked the barrel and that made the barrel explode in Oupa’s face. Oom Franswa’s face was not as bad. A lesson that he will never forget, Pappie said. Pieter never saw Pappie give Oom Franswa that lesson and Pappie said that I am growing up and better must not tell Mommy. That is why I have written it and I know that you can keep a secret, can’t you Granny? More secrets. I found the secret store in the big cupboard by the washing machine. All the old newspapers are gone and it is full of tinned food. Mommy has bought all the tinned food from Mona Lisa. There is enough beef, pilchards, sweet corn, beans, pears, powdered milk, sugar and flour to last until Christmas. Are you coming to live with us? No one has said anything. Something ineluctable is happening. Even Alice wouldn’t tell me. She just gave me a hug and told me again about her daughter far away in Zululand and how she is worried about her with the trouble that is coming. I thought she would cry but then baby Jock did a little poo right beside us. The new puppy is very adorable! Pappie is hitting it so that we can get some sleep. Maybe if the puppy gets used to that then what happened to Jock won’t happen again. If Pappie stops using the newspaper and starts using his hands I will run into the kitchen and scream and make him stop this time to make sure that nothing becomes ineluctable. Ineluctable is not a nice word Granny. Love, Shelley.
They all slept in. No one went to kerk. There was no soothing singing from the Carpenters. New-Jock was paraded around the kitchen for Alice to admire. Alice had always been uncertain about dear old Jock. But that was possibly because Jock was fully grown when they got Alice. Or, as some might say, when old Lettie handed over the family to her daughter, Alice, like a precious white heirloom. Maybe Lettie, Alice, Alice-Lettie would feel more at home with the squirming New-Jock, who now settled peacefully in the far corner of the kitchen after his antics in the night. Alice-Lettie had to feel Pieter’s stitches and count them carefully. Janet watched Hektor-Jan watching Alice-Lettie’s gentle hands with her pink, intimate palms and her slim fingers as she stroked Pieter’s brow and told him to be a brave boy. She gave Pieter a hug, held him for a long while and Hektor-Jan’s coffee mug hovered before his lips, seemingly lost in thought. They were all watching Alice-Lettie, it appeared, as Janet tore her eyes away from the stunned mug and her husband’s pursed lips, half open, oddly waiting, like Jan van Riebeeck about to arrive at the Cape and discover the strategic port for the Dutch. The girls’ hair was a mess; her own a scratchy tangle. Their pyjamas needed a wash too. Janet’s toes curled on the cool linoleum and Hektor-Jan’s mug waited. When would Alice-Lettie let go of her son. When would Pieter, who never stood still for such a maternal embrace, remember and break free. Janet held her breath. When would Hektor-Jan’s mug remember. Janet’s heart pounded and, still not breathing, she had to stand suddenly, her legs jerking with a life of their own and propelling her from the kitchen, past New-Jock and into the clear sky of the back garden.
She exhaled in a rush, more spots dancing before her eyes and coffee dripping down her front, her knuckles white and sticky. Then her diaphragm pulled with a shudder and she breathed in the green grass, the giant mauve lollipops of the agapanthus, the late scent of Doug’s rhododendrons and the heraldic shimmer of morning glories from the far back wall. The complex symmetry of the verbena blossoms was radiant behind the razor spray of the pampas grass with its assegais of feathery stalks. The garden heaved itself at her. Was she reassured. Was she mocked. Did it terrify or delight. No longer did she seem to know or understand. And all she could hear was the soft sound of Alice-Lettie’s voice and the ghastly hiss from the Kreepy Krauly that lay wedged on its side, slurping dry air and sunshine. The desperate suction pulled Janet from where she stood and the garden tilted to roll her towards the pool. Janet yielded. Her legs jolted her across the lawn that pitched with fairground gravity. And there, gasping on its side, a helpless, fatally wounded appliance, was the Kreepy Krauly. It was caught in the mouth of the crack that had drained the pool dry. The crack had a fringe, possibly a moustache, of split and ragged concrete – all of Solomon’s handiwork shredded – and it gaped now more than three feet wide. The pump in its safe housing strained as the Kreepy Krauly gulped in air, a dying wildebeest in the implacable jaws of the crack. It was carnage. Janet’s half-full mug smashed on the slasto at the edge of the pool, little white fragments sheared off into the gleaming pit, shatteringly, dazzlingly white, before some of them bounced into the crack and were gone for ever. The stain of coffee welled and spread around her bare feet, making her toes sticky with sweet, brown blood. And even as Janet sank to the ground, sitting in the small patch of Nescafé, she saw how the sides of the pool had given way and how the crack was beginning to sidle up to and jab into the ribs of the garden. It could only be hours, minutes before the crazy paving around the pool finally cracked and the dark gap sprang into the lawn itself. Janet pushed herself back, away from the edge and saw the last of her coffee slip into the strained patterns of the slasto and vanish. Quicker than evaporating, more insidious than the tongue of a dog, the coffee drained away, giving up the ghost. With a howl, Janet scrambled backwards and clutched her stained nightie about her, as though the crack might run up her legs. Fighting to her feet, she turned and ran into the gentle embrace of the willow tree. Her hands clasped at the weeping fronds. Her fingers knotted themselves in the pliant strands. She seemed to throw herself into the maternal tree and she hung there, gasping, sobbing. The child within her writhed and dangled too, and, in the background, deeper than any womb, came the black and snaking crack. It was an umbilical cord, was it not. It pulsed with life and death, did it not. Janet buried her head in the soughing branches and cried soft leaves like tears.
She could see it. She knew it. The thoughts branched out wildly.
Solomon’s stoical surprise on Monday morning when he was presented with his tea and the crack. The children slipping through her fingers as she tried to tell them to keep away from the bottom of the garden. They would go precisely where she said to keep away. They would take the puppy. New-Jock might leap into the crack and exhume the bones of Jock with a cheery bark. Shelley would stare and stare, fathoming some hidden depths, no doubt, and Alice-Lettie, Alice-Lettie would eish and turn to Hektor-Jan for solace and support. Desperate Doug would have some ripe riposte, a sphinx-like smugness, and Eileen-the-Understudy would be ever so bright and brittle. Her father would be sad that he had never been told and her mother would bristle with some acerbic comment designed to pierce her skin and make her crack. And Hektor-Jan would come home –
That is where Janet faltered. Alice-Lettie would turn, her face tilted upwards as Hektor-Jan came home – and then what.
But it was Sunday. The day of rest and of Karen Carpenter. However, there was neither rest nor the Carpenters.
Hektor-Jan was going to see his father. She should go with him. The children would whine if they could not play with the puppy, and she would have to ask Alice-Lettie to stay behind and not go to her church. Maybe Alice-Lettie could accompany Hektor-Jan whilst Janet lay down in the kaya surrounded by the scent of Lifebuoy soap and dreamed of old maids and a life in Zululand.
But that did not happen.
Alice-Lettie did go to her church, but Janet did not leave the children. Hektor-Jan did visit
Oupa and came back much later that night. Janet killed four birds with one stone. She said a fond farewell to Hektor-Jan, dismissed Alice-Lettie and phoned her father. She took the children at long last, for the first time in 1976, to see their grandmother. There was no one, save Doug, to spy on the crack. It could lie there, squirm there, do what it wanted. She was sick of it. She felt that there was every chance it would go away if it was ignored. Perhaps she had been giving it too much attention. Time to fight fire with ire. Put the crack on the rack. Make it go away. To hell with the crack.
With every explosion that the little Fiat produced, Janet’s heart lifted. She began to hum Top of the World. What would Karen Carpenter do. What would bonnie Jean say. Life was good, damn it. New-Jock lolled amongst the giggling children in the back of the car. Why, Janet felt that she might even be able to withstand the slings and arrows of her outrageous mother.
The care home was quiet.
It preserved a thick somnolence in the heat of the day. Breakfast trays had long been forgotten and lunchtime not yet remembered. The loo rota was well underway and they stood waiting on the stone corridor for Mrs Ward to be returned to her room. Even the duty sister was nowhere to be seen and they had smuggled in New-Jock with impunity.
Grandpa was visiting too. He was suitably impressed. He held the squirming puppy to his face and giggled like a little Pieter as he was thoroughly washed by New-Jock’s pink tongue.
It’s been a long time, he kept saying as he helped his grandson to hide with New-Jock behind Granny’s curtain. It has been a long time. And his grey hair, which had faded even more and which badly needed a cut, fell over his eyes.
Janet and her girls retired into the corridor again; the boys waited inside.
Where was Granny.
She arrived slowly, as though she were leading the nurse on a grand tour. And here, her manner seemed to suggest, is a room, a fascinating example of a quick conversion from some functional part of a nunnery to my home. Yes, just off this flagstone corridor with its faux-gothic arches and its orange-red brick – vaguely reminiscent of Hampton Court in Middlesex – you will find the sunny cell in which I now reside. I say sunny, but it is only the busy old fool of the morning sun, which peers through my curtains and makes of my room an everywhere, a nowhere. But only for a very short space of time, the sun. Otherwise, there is not much to recommend it at all. In fact, I would advise you to give it a miss. I am only waiting here to be fetched. It will not be long. They will come. Three quick winks of the left eye, that’s the signal. Then I shall have to bid you a fond farewell and do keep your sterile hands off me. Off me, I say. I shall brook no argument. Will you let go.
Janet’s greeting caught in her throat as her mother was delivered, muttering and unseeing, to her room. Her petticoat trailed from beneath her skirt and one heel had escaped from her special Scholl shoe. She shuffled past them on the arm of a smiling, nodding nurse and she scowled at them as though they were intruders in her corridor, her life.
Granny, Shelley said once the nurse had escaped.
Amelia Amis MA stood beside the chair that crouched next to the bed. She seemed buried in her clothes, as though they were too big. Nothing seemed to fit: not her skirt, not her shoes, not this room. But then she took a breath and tried to draw herself up, as though to begin a lecture on a more difficult perception of Spenser or Smollett or Swift. To gird her loins in the face of undergraduate apathy. Such sportsmen and women, these South Africans, but dear God on high, could they not read a little more widely, a little more deeply. What a rift, a wrench it was to cross the equator, to leave so many dreaming spires in the more cerebral hemisphere –
Janet reached out a hand. She had heard it all, at home and at university. And the curtains twitched, stage left, and into the room sprang Pieter and the puppy, and Grandpa.
Surprise, they yelled, Grandpa every bit as wild as his grandson with the six stitches from his ninth birthday bash.
Sylvia squealed with delight and Mrs Amelia Ward shook. For a moment, Janet thought that she was going to strike Pieter, open up the gash on his forehead, but then the puppy yelped and from somewhere deep inside her mother came an answering call. A smile broke out across her mother’s chilly features and her hand leapt to her face in an expression of delight.
My dear boys, she said to her grandson and her husband. My dear chaps, and she blushed and held out her hand to their faces, the puppy unseen and untouched.
Look, Gran, Pieter shrugged off her searching fingertips and shoved New-Jock at her. And then Mrs Ward was all oohs and aahs, stroking the dog and beaming at the boys.
Happy New Year, Mother, Janet said.
It was Pieter’s birthday yesterday, and look at his head, said her father.
We’ve got a puppy, said Sylvia. She took over the holding of New-Jock, while Pieter displayed his wound as though it had been acquired at great expense in battle.
And we have a present for Pieter don’t we, Granny, said Grandpa and he produced a neatly wrapped box that he gave to his wife. Mrs Ward peered at the box and then she began plucking at the Sellotape. No, no, said Grandpa and he handed her the card instead and gestured to Pieter.
Pieter reached out and took the card from Mrs Ward, who smiled at him, but may have been a little put out. Her card was gone. Now opened by this small boy.
Then Pieter unwrapped the old Meccano set – the one that belonged to Grandpa and which still was perfect in its faded box.
There were oohs and aahs, and Shelley had to see. Pieter hugged both his grandparents.
Many happy hours, Grandpa said smiling up at Janet. Many happy times.
Pieter wanted to start playing with it immediately. Not in here, said Janet and both boys were crestfallen.
Shelley stood silently. The room was crowded and she looked like she was twitching. She had something in her eye, poor girl, and again Janet offered the silent prayer that her daughter did not follow her grandmother, that she make her own happy way in life.
They all sat down. Janet beside her father on the bed, the children with New-Jock on the floor. Mrs Ward occupied the solitary chair, queen of the sparrows in this parliament of fowls.
She pulled at the skin on the back of her hands as they all chattered and chirped. The news came thick and fast. Janet’s voice was part of the chorus. They said what happened to poor Oupa, passed on Pappie’s regards, described the previous day’s exciting presentation of New-Jock and the drama of Pieter’s fall, as well as the birthday cake and even the little picannins that they had seen once again. If Janet were a child, she might have breathlessly imparted the perceptions of Meneer Yuckulls, described his gleaming mouth from whence such unpleasantness came, and maybe she would have spoken of the crack. But she saw her mother’s strained face and how the old woman tried to calm the picking, picking of her hands. Hands that picked hands. Her father reached out from the bed and took the closest hand in his own. Mrs Ward looked up at him from the depths of the children’s voices, and smiled. She remembered. She seemed to remember. Mr Ward beamed and Janet’s heart nearly broke.
The children gabbled on as Janet wondered if it all came to this. The touch of a familiar hand and a soft smile. Did it matter if Doug thought that Alice-Lettie –
Who the hell was Doug.
And even if –
As long as there were hands to touch, loving skin, was that not world and time enough. Eternity in a touch and an answering smile.
New-Jock was now ensconced on Mrs Ward’s lap. She looked down in disbelief. Her lap had sprouted a dog that squirmed and shed the finest of hairs, little lines that would run down her skirt for days to come and join the faint blotches and smears of future meals. And the smell of him would remind her of their visit and she might discuss hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves in the catalogue ye go for men speech with the rather disappointing cluster of old folk whenever they were next taken out and aired in the common room.
We shall definit
ely visit this coming week, Janet said to her mother.
She would like that – you would like that – her father was eager to say. We always like a visit.
Fine, said Janet. And I shall give you a haircut, Dad. I’ll bring my scissors and things next time. Or you could pop around.
I know you are busy, said Mr Ward. And I see Mommy twice a day.
The diminutive pressed at her heart again. Her mother. Mommy.
Saturday, said Janet. With the kids.
Mrs Ward did not get up. She did not look up. She stared at the warm spot on her lap, where New-Jock had wriggled and squirmed and shed his hair.
And Janet wondered why Shelley threw herself into the car and refused to speak all the way home. The strange girl clutched at her buttoned cardigan, silly apparel in the warm weather, and seemed to want to dig herself right into the depths of her seat as though she had stomach cramps, as though her stomach were square and hard. Maybe it was starting. So soon. Becoming a woman. Janet would need to talk to her again.
Later that afternoon, just after Pieter had swallowed his Disprin with great ceremony, and Janet was wondering whether she could sneak a moment on the couch with the Carpenters, the gate in the low front wall creaked and there was Doug – who the hell was Doug – with Noreen in tow. Why. What would Doug like to say now. What would he imply in front of his wife and her children. With a dark vein pulsing in her heart, Janet realised that neither her maid nor her man were at home. They were out. Not together, surely. But both out. She opened the door, her chin set at a careful angle. Whatever he had to say, she would take on that chin. Who the hell was Doug.
They had come with Pieter’s birthday present. Doug held up Pieter’s bright present like an offering. They had remembered. No one was home yesterday, not until late. They had not wanted to disturb.
The Crack Page 25