Janet looked at him.
Eileen-the-Understudy stood in a pose of embarrassment. My God, she murmured, I am so sorry.
Janet’s fists hung on the end of her arms. It had been said. Not so much said, but certainly implied. With what skill had Eileen-the-Understudy managed cheerily to say, at the perfect volume and pitch, neither too loudly nor too softly, but with just the precise measure of clarity and projection so that Derek-Francis could not help but hear, How’s the bump. And she had actually patted Janet on the belly, in case anyone – Derek-Francis, for instance – had missed the point. The bulge. The bump.
Things that go bump in the night. Janet’s tell-tale bump now telling its own sudden tale as the rehearsal bumped to a halt in the night.
Janet stood there, the centre of sudden attention.
Enid Blyton’s Noddy – the trouble with Bumpy the dog. Didn’t A.A. Milne’s Tigger bump into anything and everything. Mr Bump and his bandages. Janet stood there, a caricature, a cartoon figure of shame.
When were you going to tell me. Derek-Francis seemed to shove the script at her as the other actors looked on. Frank van Zyl’s face mirrored her own. Embarrassed. Stunned.
I – said Janet.
She – said Eileen-the-Understudy.
We – said Derek-Francis.
When is it due, said Frank. He was living up to his name. Honest and up-front. Like her bump. But wasn’t he her other half, her second self.
Early August, said Janet.
Early August, Derek-Francis almost squealed.
They were due to perform mid-June. The show had been scheduled for mid-June, just before the July school holidays.
Eileen-the-Understudy trembled. Her hand sought Janet’s hand, but did not find it at first. Derek-Francis’s script flapped, like a white fowl in its death throes. Was he going to pluck out her pages, pull her from the part, tear her apart. Janet’s breath came quickly and she pulled her hand away from Eileen-the-Understudy as though stung. Janet wanted to grasp her belly, cling to her baby, as the entire cast stared at her, the centre of so much gravity.
Gravely, Derek-Francis said, Well.
The mound of her unborn child swelled. Well, his voice was a deep pit. Would she fit. Would she fall.
You know, said Frank suddenly.
What.
The cast played tennis with their eyes, following the ball from one to the other.
We could –
What –
Well, we could –
Spit it out –
We could use it. Make it part of the performance – her character.
Her character –
Play it for laughs –
Laughs –
Do I have to spell it out, Frank’s voice was strong and clear. He moved to stand beside Janet.
People again thought that they were seeing double – mixed doubles.
Don’t you see, said Frank. We could ignore it, her condition, entirely. Pretend it wasn’t there.
Pretend, said Derek-Francis faintly. Pretend.
Let the audience fill in the gaps, for laughs, said Frank.
Gaps. Laughs, Derek-Francis wavered.
Bonnie Jean, so big and bonnie, would have to get married. Her bounty. Her bountiful nature. But we wouldn’t say a word, and yet there it would be, she would be, right in front of them, so obvious, with her big bump.
They were all overdue, said Janet, finding her voice in the burgeoning sense of hope. My other children, all very late. My mother laughed –
It might just be the answer, Frank van Zyl snapped his fingers. This could be really good. Brigadoon with a bit of social realism.
The cast gasped at his brilliance. Brigadoon. Social realism.
The pages of the script again rose in a fluster and flew to Derek-Francis’s temple. They whirled around his head like thoughts.
Frank, he said. Frank. The pages circled, homing pigeons without a coup in the world. I am afraid that is the whole point of the play. Brigadoon is not about fucking social realism. It’s the very opposite of social fucking realism.
The cast gasped again. This was dramatic. Such swearing.
Frank laughed. His hand reached out and took hold of Janet’s hand. He held her.
The pages floated down with Frank’s soft laughter.
Derek-Francis’s brief tempest was spent. Yes, he said, Okay, yes, I see. It’s the 1970s, he said.
Frank squeezed her hand secretly.
Yes, Derek-Francis seemed to be thinking out loud. The audience would see her bump and understand, and all the singing about coming home to bonnie Jean would assume a much broader context.
And, suddenly, after a pause, he was laughing.
The cast caught up. A broader context, and their laughter swelled to become a broader context itself, so broad that it spread its collective arms wide and embraced Janet, and Frank, and Derek-Francis with his script and all Eileen-the-Understudy could do was put in a second-rate performance of oh-how-unexpected-oh-my-goodness-me-didn’t-that-turn-out-well-I-am-overjoyed-really-I-am-which-I-shall-demonstrate-by-hugging-Janet-embracing-her-bump-and-bloody-all.
Thank you, Janet was tearful after the commotion. They were all late, she said again. There is no reason why this one should be any different, is there. And they reassured her that no, in all likelihood, this next one would be exactly the same.
The rest of the rehearsal went well. They cracked on. All for one and one for all.
Didn’t that go well, said Eileen-the-Understudy in the car as they drove home in the chilly night. It was early May and winter was drawing in. Where had the time gone.
Where does the time go, said Eileen-the-Understudy again, as Janet sat silent beside her, a betraying presence in the passenger seat.
Shelley was late, said Janet. And Pieter. And so was Sylvia. All very, very late.
Just as well, said Eileen-the-Understudy. Just as well.
And they shivered and rubbed the windscreen with their sleek gloves. The glass was almost clear by the time they arrived home.
Do you need a hand, asked Eileen-the-Understudy as Janet eased herself from the car.
You have done quite enough, Janet managed to say as she shut the door.
Janet did not wait for Eileen-the-Understudy to drive off. With her hand clasped to her belly, she almost strode up to the front door and fumbled with her keys before slipping into the warm womb of the house.
Flustered and feeling confused, she followed the strands of Lettie-Alice’s – no – Alice-Lettie’s muttering radio and said good night. She locked the back door after Alice-Lettie and tried not to think of the pool at the bottom of the garden, the pool, that now lay swaddled like a strange present, a cocoon or a mummy, wrapped in its tarpaulin of sorts. Keeping out the leaves of late autumn, preventing prying eyes, saving the situation for another day. It had been her idea. Aided and abetted by Solomon, and another trip to the Italian hardware store, the best in town. Hektor-Jan had not said a word. He had no time. His job was keeping him so busy. Big things, he muttered sometimes, Big things, man. He did not like Alice-Lettie’s radio, even though it spoke in black tongues. The news, when it came, was agitated. Alice-Lettie knew when to switch it off. He did not want that in his home.
But he could not switch off his dreams. And Janet tried not to listen to him talking in his sleep. As she wandered the house in the murmuring mornings, cold now, she often longed to be snuggled up in bed beside the great mound of her husband, wrapped up like the pool in the duvet that was no longer new, but warm and soft and leaking secrets.
Now it was her turn. Hektor-Jan was at work and it was time to climb into bed alone with her bump, and to forgive Eileen-the-Understudy in her silent prayers.
In the dark house, the tiny glow of the bedside light, left on by Alice-Lettie, was the only light. Janet tiptoed down the passage, pausing at each door, making her way like a moth towards that light. Silence floated from the children’s rooms. She wished that she could scoop it up, so soft a
nd fluffy, and take it with her to bed. So different from Hektor-Jan’s troubled sleep and her own thick-coming dreams and maternal worries.
Then the light flickered in the passage as someone moved in front of the bedside light. There was someone in the main bedroom.
Janet froze in the cold passage. Was Hektor-Jan home early. Had his nightshift been cancelled. What could be so wrong to change his schedule.
She could not move, not even to send a protective hand to her belly. The light flickered as whoever it was moved about the room. There was a quiet cough. An odd sound.
Her children. Their safety. The only thing instantly within reach that might possibly help was the narrow-but-heavy mirror on the wall down the passage. Sick and suddenly shivering, Janet tried not to stumble. She turned, her legs worked and her hands eased the rectangular mirror off the wall. Her sharp reflection reached up to carry herself. Even in the gloom, her image was true and startlingly clear. Her face was a gash. Her mouth, a wound of surprise. Alice-Lettie was a wonderful maid, but Janet wished that the mirror had not been so highly polished. Like some strange thief, she carried herself to the bedroom, the narrow mirror raised in violent anticipation. She would have to attack. She would have to bring herself smashing down on whoever was lurking, creeping in their bedroom.
As her feet curled along the carpet, silent and fierce past the children’s bedrooms, Janet wished that her policeman husband were home. He had a gun. He knew what to do. Hektor-Jan would face this head-on. Not head on as she did, with her face angled in glass, about to smash herself, rising up from the silver pool of the heavy mirror. What if the intruder were armed. She had only the mirror and her two hands. She came to the shuddering rectangle of the light in the doorway.
Janet took a deep breath. Ready to dive in. Her knuckles tightened and she raised the mirror a little further. With the strangest, sickening sense, she tried to throw herself into the room. She thought that she had the element of surprise. But it was she who was surprised. It was she who was shocked. The mirror gasped with fragile glass as she almost brought it smashing down on little Pieter’s stunned face.
Mommy!
Pieter!
Their cries – shock – came simultaneously.
Pieter fell back towards his father’s side of the bed. He dropped the Bible from the bedside table in a splash of white pages. Janet clung to the mirror that was still raised and ready to smash. Ready to crash down on the intruder’s head and give him a thousand pieces of her mind. Sharp and silver, like a shower of cold fish.
Pieter, said Janet with tears in her eyes, and lowered her square face onto the bed. Let her reflected self fall to the bed, a soft ploff onto the duvet so different from the silvery splintering that was going to come. The mirror lay on the bed, a bemused ceiling of rectangular light. Pieter just stood there, petrified.
Mommy, he said again. He said it sorrowfully.
Now Janet could move. Unburdened by the mirror, her silver self, she could walk around to Hektor-Jan’s side of the bed and take up her small son in her arms. She could press him to her warm belly, and try to hold him close even as the mound of his unborn sibling pushed him away. They both shuddered.
Pieter, she said again. What are you doing.
Nightmares, dreams, she offered him excuses as her eyes took in the open drawer, the fallen Bible, the side of Hektor-Jan’s bed that was never touched. Where his gun was kept when he slept, and where his magazines lay flat beneath the mattress, their images of contorted women pressed down by his weight, their siren mouths silenced by his heavy length, their orifices calling, their orisons unheard. Maybe they had awoken little Pieter. He was nine now. Almost double figures. But he had opened his father’s bedside drawer and had taken out the Bible, not the boobs, the bums, the breathless yearning.
Pieter, she repeated.
Uncle Doug, he said. Solomon, he said, and –
And all that spilled from his lips was, Uncle Doug and Solomon. That was all. He did not say the names again, but bit them back, tried to take them back into his mouth by biting his own lips, but they were said.
Popping up in their very own bedroom was Desperate Doug. No rhododendrons required now, it seemed. Just a small boy, vulnerable, impressionable. What. Why.
Uncle Doug, Janet started to say, but then she stopped. It was not fair. She would not interrogate Pieter. She would take it up with Desperate Doug. Tell him how she might have smashed the hall mirror on her own son. How her sudden fear had set her heart racing and how she now felt sick to the pit of her stomach and she could feel the new baby tugging at the line within her, wanting to know why. Why the sudden adrenalin. Why the thumping heart.
Get to bed, she said to Pieter.
He did not need a second invitation. He was gone in a flash, leaving her to pick up Die Bybel and close it. She looked down at the dark seam, the well-thumbed section of the Psalms. Part of her wanted to open the book, to see what her strange husband spent his time reading, and she sat on the bed, on the layers of glossy women, who had sneaked all the way from Germany thanks to Phil Wilson and his Jumbo 747 and the fact that he was not searched by Customs, it seemed.
The Lord fills the earth with His love, Psalm 32 offered in plain Afrikaans.
O blessed are those who fear the Lord, she wiped the pages to Psalm 127.
Love and fear, she almost smiled. Her life in the Psalms at her hands. Was she 32. Would she live to 127. She thought not. She sat with the Bible open along the dark line. Pieter needed tucking into bed. Desperate Doug required careful interrogation. And why Solomon. The mirror must be returned to the wall in the hall. Janet sat there on Hektor-Jan’s side of the bed. The mirror lay at her side. Janet put down Die Bybel. She leaned across and peered in at her second self, who looked up at her with a strange expression and a face lined with weariness. Then her eyes turned inward as her unborn child pulled at her, pulled then kicked.
And – his neighbour’s voice dangled, enquired, as he came home. It was dark now. Dark and cold with the thin Highveld air chill and sharp. His breath steamed and his fingers ached. He wanted to get inside. How did this thin man-next-door bear the dark mornings. Why did he lie in wait. Hektor-Jan closed the car door quietly.
I have not left it out, he confessed.
Doug’s side of the wall was silent. Resentful. Look, his voice came quietly, I am only trying to help. Help, you know.
Hektor-Jan knew. He said so.
So, what are you waiting for, said Doug.
Hektor-Jan’s hand felt inside his pocket, searched for the warm knife. Steel, which glowed with the heat from his body.
So, what are you waiting for, said Doug.
Janet and Alice-Lettie watched Solomon from the kitchen window.
What has happened, asked Janet.
Solomon made his way across the garden. The grass was yellow now, killed by the black frosts and as blond as her children’s hair. It clung to their shoes with a strange static electricity and was prickly to the touch. It would be a while before the rains came back.
His feet, said Alice-Lettie. His feet are very bad.
I can see that, said Janet.
And she could see the large shadow. Faithful New-Jock loped behind Solomon. He loved the garden boy in that earnest, undiluted way dogs have. Janet sighed.
Solomon limped to the end of the garden and bent over the pool. He made sure that the wide tarpaulin was secure, that the tent pegs that they had fashioned from lengths of bent wire were still in place. Janet noticed that he did not lift the home-made cover. He was careful not to set the crack free. Instead, the pool stayed warm and snug beneath the tarpaulin that kept out the dead grass and any stray leaves. Surely, it had stopped. Surely, with the hard ground and the fierce cold in the June nights, the crack had stopped. Maybe it had even shrunk. But the tarpaulin looked stretched. Even strained. As though it was being pulled apart or about to split with news. Janet pressed her lips together. It seemed as though the pool was pregnant.
They wa
tched Solomon hobble behind the pampas grass and disappear.
His feet, said Alice-Lettie. Something is wrong.
Yes, said Doug.
Ja, said Hektor-Jan.
Are you sure.
I keep it only in two places. Die Bybel. My trouser pocket. It is not in those two places.
Doug was silent. I told you so, the darkness seemed to imply.
Hektor-Jan stood by the car – the door was still open, like a wing.
I am sorry, said Doug. Wragtig. I hoped –
Was Hektor-Jan sorry. He did not say a word. Maybe he was angry. He closed the car door quietly. Firmly.
Today is Tuesday, said Doug. It might be a good Tuesday. You have the garden boy today. Tomorrow he disappears.
We have the boy today, said Hektor-Jan.
Then I tell you what, said Doug. This is what we shall do –
I am not tired, said Hektor-Jan after his breakfast-supper.
Janet sat opposite him, her hands perched on her mound. Alice-Lettie washed the dishes quietly behind her. The crockery made gentle thunks and resonant plonks in the deep sink. Hektor-Jan looked tired. But his mouth said that he was not tired. Today, after a busy week, a week that he had said was a very trying week, he claimed not to be tired. His eyes came down from Alice-Lettie’s back, back down to her. She tried to smile.
Darling, said Janet. She wondered whether she should stretch out a gentle hand and touch his hairy arm, stroke his wrist where the hair squeezed out from beneath his favourite tracksuit top and lay squashed under his watch.
He looked down at her hand, which touched him. Then he looked back at her. His mouth smiled, but his eyes were hard and did not smile. His mouth said, I love you, but his eyes said, Who are you.
Janet withdrew her hand, confused.
I have a penknife, his lips were moving now. The sounds came all the way across the kitchen table. She frowned. Finally, an image of a knife, Hektor-Jan’s knife, appeared in her head.
The Crack Page 27