Aware of her presence and obviously frightened by her, the hatchling makes an attempt to get up and move away. He briefly struggles to stand, then gives up. He shuts his eyes and with great effort turns his head away from her, allowing whatever will happen next to happen. He probably thinks that she will harm him and it saddens her to know that he has reconciled himself to this fate. Life is cruel. What an unfortunate lesson to learn so young.
It is something she too has come to accept – being reconciled to her fate. Her life with all its disappointments, the most recent being a dissertation that remains unwritten after three years and a PhD that remains unearned after six years. She wonders if this is all there is to life, this being reconciled – which may or may not be better than the waiting. Waiting to fall in love, utterly and stupidly. Waiting to finally knit something (perhaps for someone) from the piles of wool her grandmother has sent her over the years. Waiting to realise one of those magnificently unrealistic dreams she had as a child – becoming a world-renowned ballerina all the way from Africa; a five-foot four-inch supermodel; a devoted wife of an equally devoted husband who is, quite naturally, an architect ...
The hatchling is no bigger than her thumb. She can actually see the movements of his still-beating heart. He is dark. Dark grey with scattered tufts of downy feathers, like loose clumps of soft-grey cotton wool. One tuft rests on the top of his head – a Mohawk – giving his face a rebel-like quality. His tongue is sticking out. Do birds have tongues? Well, either way, she will have to remove him from harm’s way. She rummages through her bag looking for something to lift him with. She finds a recently received postcard with a picture of the Victoria Falls on the front. The postcard is from her once-upon-a-time sister, Genie, who has scrawled on the back, in her elegantly undulating handwriting: ‘Remember, there will be the time of the swimming elephants.’ Krystle has no idea what that means. Genie has always been … cryptic, but she is grateful for the card nonetheless because she can put it to good use now. As gently as she can, but probably not gently enough, she lifts the hatchling off the ground.
Chink-chink.
She carefully, as carefully as she can, places him among some shrubbery where the sharp and ever-watchful mother can see him. She has not done much, but hopefully it is enough. His soft-grey tufts of downy feathers flutter and for the first time she realises just how windy it is. Is that what precipitated his fall? His unforgiving environment?
Chink-chink.
Will the mother come to protect him? Will she stay with him or fly up to the nest? Can the mother carry her baby back to the nest? Is she strong enough? Krystle has so many questions. Why does she know so very little about birds?
She has done the best she can. She will have to leave it at that. She walks away quickly, not looking back, not wanting the feeling to overwhelm her, even though she knows such concern is already too late.
She has only just put down her handbag in her apartment, when she decides to go back and check on the hatchling. She finds him having moved off the postcard onto the cold, damp earth – perhaps of his own volition, perhaps propelled by the wind. The mother is nowhere in sight. Probably returned to the nest. Is it because Krystle touched him? Well, she cannot just leave him alone, can she? There is nothing else to be done. She will have to take him off the cold, damp earth, out of the wind and into her apartment.
She returns to her apartment and prepares a place for him. She has lived in the same apartment for six years and has never had a visitor – never invited anyone in, never taken the trouble to make someone feel welcome, feel at home. This is all alien to her. What would make him – he who is broken – feel safe? A warm place. She increases the room temperature. What else? A container that will not be constraining, that will actually allow him some freedom to move and breathe. She immediately finds a small fruit basket. Perfect. She lines it with soft tissue paper. He will need further protection in his new, unnatural environment. She finds a suitable cardboard box, but she needs to make it cosy. She places some of the balls of wool that her grandmother sent her in the box. At last they have come in useful. She remembers the mother’s sharp, metallic chirp and immediately thinks of the scatting Ella Fitzgerald as a substitute. She shuffles through her playlist until she finds the song ‘Mr Paganini’ and presses play.
Soon she is outside again, attempting to transport him, via the postcard, safely into the comfortable container. Her hands tremble, overwhelmed by a sense of urgency. To her dismay, the postcard has become entangled in the shrubbery. She attempts to lift him up. Was he this fragile and frail before?
This cannot be happening. He is falling again. He lands on the ground with the quietest thud. Her heart skips a beat. His does not.
He opens his mouth and lets out a long, silent scream.
‘I know, I know.’
She carefully manoeuvres the postcard out of the shrubbery and gently puts him in the container. He rests his head on the edge of the container. Eyes shut, beak firmly pressed together, stubborn-like. It occurs to her for the first time that he is a fighter, perhaps even a survivor, a rebel with a cause. She takes him into her home.
She goes to bed early and cries herself to sleep. The buzzing of her vibrating cellphone wakes her. Marcus. She does not answer it. She goes to check on the hatchling. Still alive. Thank God. Please don’t die. Please don’t die. Please don’t die. This is not a prayer. This is a request. She does not do prayers, though she believes in God; she simply learned a long time ago that he does not answer hers.
She watches the dawn break in a blur. All she can hear is the sound of her own heart beating and her occasional sniffle. She checks on the hatchling. A blur. Blinks. Sees him clearly. Chest goes up … then down. Breath. Life. Thankfully, he is still there. She was right about him. He is a survivor. A rebel with a cause.
‘I called earlier about a hatchling; a California towhee,’ Krystle says to the impossibly tall man wearing hospital scrubs and adjusting his glasses behind the desk on which she carefully places the box. The man automatically reaches for a notepad and a pen.
‘Name?’ He blinks at her and does not even attempt a smile.
‘Mr Paganini.’
The man blinks again. ‘First name?’
‘I didn’t give him one.’
The man frowns.
‘Oh, you mean my name? Krystle Masuku.’
The man’s frown deepens.
‘K R Y S T L E,’ she spells as he writes, ‘M A S U K U.’
He briefly looks in the box, then picks it up carefully and walks away with it.
‘One hatchling, California towhee, for the incubator,’ the blinking, unsmiling man says, going through swinging double doors.
‘Number?’ A voice says from within.
‘She named it. Mr Paganini.’
‘She named it?’
Krystle does not know what to do. Is that it? Is that all there is to it? Should she have taken a picture? She should have taken a picture. Without a picture she might forget him. And she does not want to forget Mr Paganini.
Her phone rings. Marcus, yet again. She ignores it.
The blinking man comes back through the swinging double doors. He readjusts his glasses. Then he comes to an abrupt stop in the middle of the room and frowns. He is obviously surprised to find her still standing there. ‘Was there something else?’ he says, patting his pockets as though the something else might be found in them. ‘Did you want your box back … the postcard?’
‘Box? Postcard? No. No, I … ummm. I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.’
‘Xander Dangerfield.’
‘You have the name of a superhero,’ Krystle says before she can stop herself.
He smiles a surprisingly dazzling and dashing smile. ‘Are you in need of rescuing?’ he asks, this time not blinking. His eyes meet hers and he holds her gaze. ‘A damsel in distress?’
It is Krystle’s turn to blink. Rapidly and repeatedly. Is he flirting with her? Does he think she is flirting with him? Is
she flirting with him? ‘I’ll … call to check on Mr Paganini. Thank you Xander … Dangerfield,’ she says, happy she can find something, anything, to say as she blindly searches for the door, suddenly feeling trapped and very, very disoriented by a feeling that is not in the least reconciled.
Frantic to have something to do, she finds herself clicking on her cellphone. You have nine new messages. First new message … Thankfully, she is out the door.
‘I need to go home. I need to be with her.’ Krystle listens to these sentences over and over again. ‘I need to go home. I need to be with her.’ The rest of the message she cannot take in. How can Genie – her once-upon-a-time sister full of love, life and laughter – be in a coma? ‘I need to go home. I need to be with her.’ Rewind. ‘I need to go home. I need to be with her.’ These last two sentences she understands perfectly. That is her brother, Marcus, casting himself, once again, in the role of hero.
If Marcus is once again the hero, that can only mean one thing. In this story – this story, which is not make-believe; this story, which is not child’s play; this story, which is all too real, in which Genie ends up in a coma – Krystle is the bad guy. And there is no escaping that fact.
ESME
And just like that, all of a sudden, they are that thing again. A family.
A family that does not include her, Esme.
There is the grandmother, Eunice. The father, Dingani. The mother, Thandi. The son, Marcus. The daughter, Krystle. The adopted daughter, Genie. And that’s it. The family unit. Complete. They have barely spoken to each other for almost three years, ever since that business with the jacaranda trees and Thandi leaving for Belgium. But now Genie has brought them together again.
They, the family, as a unit, have decided after many phone calls that they will all go home to be with Genie.
No one has bothered to ask her, Esme, if she would like to join them.
They have, rather conveniently, forgotten that she loves Genie too.
Years earlier, Esme had opened her eyes and been surprised to find herself sitting in the front passenger seat of a tiny car. An alien was talking to a DJ on the All Hit Radio Show. A woman’s voice was laughing infectiously.
Esme was confused. Where exactly was she? Karen Carpenter’s voice started singing ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’.
This was all too disconcerting.
The last thing that Esme remembered was Krystle at the airport saying, in her characteristically sarcastic way, ‘Welcome to Africa’ … and the stifling and oppressive heat.
Now, next to her a young woman was driving, hunched over the steering wheel. She was … colourful. She wore a patchwork dress and a multi-coloured scarf, but her colourfulness was more than that. Her hair was the colour of flames and created an amber-brown Afro-halo over her head; she had dark, smooth skin with a glow and sheen to it; her mahogany neck was long, graceful, and supported her head at an impossibly acute angle. She had high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes. She looked like something that an artist would draw – incongruous, features exaggerated, but somehow beautiful, perhaps more so because so very different, so very original, so unique.
‘My, aren’t you a picture?’ Esme had said, looking at the woman.
The woman looked at Esme and smiled at her – a radiant smile. There was a gap between her two front teeth. ‘Goodness, where are my manners?’ the woman suddenly said. ‘I’m Imogen Zula Nyoni. Almost everyone calls me Genie – friend or foe. You can call me Genie, too. I am …’ An expectant silence filled the air. ‘What am I?’ Genie asked Krystle and Marcus through the rear-view mirror.
‘Our once-upon-a-time sister,’ Krystle replied.
‘I like the sound of that. I am their once-upon-a-time sister,’ Genie said, smiling with satisfaction.
‘Mum and dad adopted her,’ Marcus said, attempting to make things clearer.
‘But it didn’t quite take,’ Genie said, with her radiant smile.
‘She left us to be with Jesus,’ Marcus said, with something hard at the edges of his voice.
‘I see I’m still unforgiven,’ Genie said, looking at Marcus in the rear-view mirror, the expression on her face difficult to read.
‘Oh. So you’re a Christian?’ Esme asked.
‘A Christian? Oh, good god, no! Definitely not. Christians are too hypocritical for me. I like to call a spade a spade – even if I’m the spade.’
Although she had divulged quite a bit about herself, Esme felt that she still had not quite got hold of Genie, who, although present, colourful and bright, seemed oddly ephemeral. Genie seemed to be on the verge of disappearing just as easily as she had appeared.
‘Don’t bother trying to make sense of Genie. No one can make sense of Genie,’ Marcus said, sounding uncharacteristically angry.
Suddenly the car screeched to a halt and Genie jumped out.
‘Are we good, do you think?’ Krystle asked Marcus once Genie was out of the car.
‘I think so,’ Marcus responded.
Esme was sure they were talking about Genie. But what about Genie? She could not help thinking there was something beautifully tragic about her. Something secret that had made Marcus never tell Esme about her.
Genie got back in the car, clutching a bouquet of red and yellow wildflowers.
‘The flame lily. Our national flower. Welcome,’ Genie said, giving the flowers to Esme.
‘Thank you,’ Esme said. ‘I’m sorry about your parents,’ she added, wanting to give Genie something in return and finding that she only had condolences to offer.
‘What about them?’
‘I thought that … since you were adopted …’ Esme hesitated.
‘Oh … My parents did not die. They flew away,’ Genie said, flashing her radiant gap-toothed smile again.
And Esme believed her. Believed that Genie’s parents had flown away. Believed that Genie herself could, at any moment, at that very moment even, let go of the steering wheel and fly away. Simply fly out of the window towards the sky and become a multi-coloured ribbon in the sky, a rainbow, a wondrous thing to behold.
Esme looked at the flowers. Flame lilies. They resembled frozen flames and were shockingly beautiful. How could she not love the shockingly beautiful creature who had given them to her – Marcus’ and Krystle’s once-upon-a-time sister, Genie?
Esme has been married to Marcus for twelve years. Has been with him for fourteen years. His parents attended their wedding. Were there for the birth of all three of their children. They had even attended her graduation from college and her graduation from law school.
But now, after many years of making her feel part of the family, they have closed ranks, leaving her, Esme Masuku, out in the cold. A mere in-law, an outsider.
It was their beauty that had seduced Esme and made her, almost from the start, want to be a member of the Masuku family. It was after she had married into the family that she saw them for what they really were: fragile to the point of being brittle. They were delicate and sensitive to the touch. The Masukus were like a glass menagerie; beautiful to look at, perfectly, meticulously, painstakingly put together, but always just a breath away from shattering. They needed to be handled with care, and she has been careful.
Even now, as she places a black suit discreetly at the bottom of Marcus’ suitcase – just in case – Esme is being careful. She knows that the possibility of Genie’s death is a reality that the Masukus are yet to acknowledge, if not to themselves then definitely to each other.
She lays out the pair of jeans she likes best on him, a T-shirt made of good breathable cotton, perfect for travel, a pair of broken-in loafers (‘skoeners’, he calls them), underwear, socks and his favourite leather jacket.
So this is how her husband will leave her. These are the clothes he will be wearing and this is the suitcase he will be carrying when he walks out of her life.
Marcus, bless him, is blissfully unaware that this is their ending. But Esme knows that if Genie dies, then Marcus, her hus
band, this man forcing himself to whistle nonchalantly as he takes a shower, is never returning to her.
She knows this because she knows things that Marcus does not know about himself. He does not know that he moves away from her in the middle of the night while they are asleep; that he has asked her more than once while deep in the fog of sleep who she is; that when he wakes up with a start it is always after calling out ‘Genie’. He goes in search of Genie every night. He does not know this about himself because in the morning all is well again. In the morning he is her loving husband. In the morning she tells him nothing of what has happened during the night. In the morning she moves beneath him, above him, beside him until all he knows is one name – Esme.
Esme enters the bathroom, undresses, steps into the shower and kisses Marcus, stopping him mid-whistle.
This is how she will let him go.
What was it Genie had once said to her? ‘My way of loving him was to let him go. Your way of loving him will be to keep him. It was not easy to let him go. I dare say it will not be easy to keep him, but I have every faith that you will, and you need to have that faith too.’
But Esme has long understood that she has Marcus during the day only because he is with Genie in the night – in memories, in dreams, in fantasies, in nightmares. If Genie ceases to exist, then what is to say Marcus will come back from the only place he knows he can find her – the night?
MARCUS & KRYSTLE
Marcus is, of course, facing the wrong direction, cellphone to his ear. Krystle’s cellphone vibrates in her hand, but she does not answer it.
‘We travel not to reach a destination but to arrive with love, in love, to be with those we love.’ This is what is printed on the back of his T-shirt. Deep stuff. Not something she would readily associate with her brother.
The Theory of Flight Page 18