by Máire Fisher
‘Right then,’ Mr Bill says, ‘let’s get going, before they send out a search party.’
‘Oh, Mom. Can’t Noah come home?’ Maddie’s tone is beseeching. ‘Just for a night? We can take him back in the morning. I mean he’s already going to be in so much trouble. Him and Juliet. They could both sleep at our house.’
‘I’m sorry—’ Mr Bill starts to say, but Noah interrupts him.
‘It’s okay, Mads. Really it is. Not much longer and I’ll be home. Back with you, and Mom.’ He looks over to where his father is sitting, quiet and wrung out. ‘And Dad, too. Things are getting better, Mads.’
Now is as good a time to ask as any and he gets his words out quickly. ‘Mr Bill, can I keep seeing Ms Turner, even when I’ve left?’
‘Of course you can, Noah. You can keep coming to group if you want.’
Mr Bill looks at Juliet.
‘I’ll come too,’ she says. Her voice is resigned, full of ‘whatever’.
‘I hope you will, Juliet,’ Kate says quietly, kindly. ‘I’ll phone your mom, meet her for coffee, tell her what a good friend you’ve been.’
Juliet blushes, disconcerted. ‘Yeah, well … Noah here, he’s a pretty good friend too.’
His father gets to his feet. ‘Noah. I—’
‘Don’t worry, Dad. We’ve got time. Lots of time. See you on Sunday?’
‘Sure,’ Dominic says. ‘I’ll go to Greenhills first and then I’ll come on here. Maybe Mom, or Maddie, will come with me?’
Noah hopes his mother will say yes, that she will get used to the idea of Dominic being Gabriel, a man who has a mother and a sister.
That’s quite a stunt your father pulled.
Noah shakes his head hard. There are more important things to worry about than the Dark right now.
His father has told them so much, he’s laid himself bare, hoping they won’t reject him. He’s also had a demon to fight, only his was a mean old man who lived and breathed in the real world. Noah’s demon lives in his head. He thinks of all the steps he’s taken to get rid of it. His mother, Maddie, Ms Turner, Juliet, Mr Bill – they’ve all helped him. All 5 of them.
His notebook is filled with facts, all things he’ll tell Ms Turner … one of these days. Today though, instead of putting it in his pocket, he stands and holds it out. ‘Mom, Dad. You can read this if you want. You too, Mads.’
There’s a startled silence. Still he holds the notebook out.
‘Noah?’ His mother is concerned, but that’s nothing compared to the state the Dark is in. It’s charging up, breathing hard and heavily.
Noah closes his eyes. He thinks of the pile of notebooks in his desk drawer, sees himself labelling a new one to see him through till next Sunday, when his family come to visit him. He sees himself walking up to Ms Turner’s door, knocking and maybe pushing down the handle – just that, 1 movement.
Maybe the voice will be silent, subdued. Maybe it will be frothing at the mouth.
If only you knew, Ms Turner. If only you knew. Our Noah has quite the surprise for you.
The thing is, Ms Turner does. She does know 5 things about Noah – and 5 and 5 and 5 things more, with more to come.
Noah’s hand wavers as his father reaches for the notebook, but he doesn’t change his mind. He lets his father take it.
Maybe the Dark will never fully let go, or leave him alone. For now, though, it doesn’t matter. He will tell Ms Turner more about it, all the parts it’s made up of. It’s shadowy, he’ll say. A shape-shifter. Impossible to hold in one place.
Noah’s dad is holding the notebook, turning it over and over in his hands.
‘Are you sure about this, Noah?’
‘Yes.’ Noah says. ‘I’m sure.’ Then he adds, ‘You can give it back to me next week. At visiting hours, Dad.’
Acknowledgements galore!
First person, third person, past tense, present tense … poor old Noah has been through so many incarnations. At each step along the way there were:
Fourie Botha at Umuzi (Penguin Random House) who guided me through Noah’s metamorphosis with such patience and understanding. Thank you for that, Fourie, and for so much more. Beth Lindop, your kind, unflurried voice is a blessing at the other end of the phone. Fahiema Hallam, thank you for never failing to ask how my writing is going. The care and attention to detail that Umuzi gives their writers is mindblowing.
Frances Marks, my editor. So many emails shuttled between her electricity-starved desk in an unseasonably wet Zimbabwe and mine in a dry, dry Cape Town over many weeks. The Enumerations – what a stroke of genius! Thank you for the title.
In Bird by Bird Anne Lamott says that the third stage of writing and editing is the dental draft, ‘where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.’ Thank you for checking mine so meticulously, Anna Hug and Rhonda Crouse.
Jacques Kaiser, after your wonderful cover design for Birdseye, now this stunning cover for The Enumerations. Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to the story. You got to the essence of the characters and read their situations so well.
Writing a character with ocd is a challenge. It’s not one I intended to take on, but Noah appeared in the early pages of another story and wouldn’t leave, even when I told him it wasn’t about him. So there he was, and there were his 5s. Once I knew he was going to be the main character, I started reading and researching. OCD manifests in so many ways, but once again, Noah showed me his own obsessions and compulsions.
Thanks to Professor Dan Stein, the Head of the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at uct; Dr Ulli Meys, an eminent child and adolescent psychiatrist; and Richard Vergunst, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at Stellenbosch University with expertise in neuropsychology, abnormal psychology and clinical psychology, for their professional views on OCD. I discussed with them a range of issues, including their views of the symptoms of OCD, current medication treatments for OCD, and whether touch can be appropriate in a psychotherapy session.
I also happened to mention to my friend Colleen, when she was in South Africa on holiday, that I was writing a book about a young boy with OCD. She told me that when her daughter, Hannah, was seventeen, she was in one of the best residential clinics in Germany for adolescents with OCD. Hannah is twenty-three now. Colleen and Hannah, thank you for sharing how the novel worked for you both, a mother–daughter team. Our two-hour Skype session was wonderful on so many levels: to watch as you looked back on tough times and described how they became happier, to hear how you both coped, and, sometimes, to hear one or the other of you say, ‘I didn’t know that.’ Hannah, thank you especially for your drawing of the hectoring, bullying monsters who took hours away from your day, telling you how to do things, telling you off when you didn’t get it all absolutely right. Hannah learnt how to overpower her OCD and fear and now leads a fully normal life. When the monsters do start their rumbling (as sometimes they do) she is able to turn her back and carry on.
As an editor, whenever someone asks me to provide feedback on their writing, I always suggest that they ask friendly readers first; people who love reading, who belong to book clubs, who are also writers. If you ask friends like these to read your work and respond to specific questions, you receive a wealth of truly precious feedback, from toning down on the horror, to dialling back on the slapstick, to building up characters, or, indeed, slimming them down. It’s also a really great way of finding out what worked well for readers, an important question that we often forget to ask. So dear friendly readers, from the bottom of my heart, thank you, one and all! My younger readers: Dan Fisher, Ashleigh Butcher, Lara Featherstone; my older ones: Joan Adams, Anne Bennett (double thanks, Anne!), Christine Coates, Frank Doolan, Tracey Farren, Daisy Jones and Chantal Stewart. Your insights helped to shape Noah and his families both at home and at Greenhills.
Bits and pieces of this story developed at workshops and at writing retreats facilitated by Chantal Stewart.
Thank you for carrying the flame passed on to you by Anne Schuster, our beloved writing teacher and friend, and for inviting me to share facilitation with you. The next best thing to writing in a workshop is watching other writers scribble at speed.
Willa, one of my most beloved characters in The Enumerations, appeared in a magic barn during a Stanford Barn Writing weekend. Many thanks to Rahla Xenopoulos for creating such a fine place for writers to write their socks off! Willa is not the only person who has made it onto the page there … and certainly won’t be the last.
Talking of Willa – such a welcome arrival, quite late in the novel – I wanted to make sure that everything about them was appropriate. My subsequent research led me to Priscilla’s Services (priscillasservices.wordpress.com), a South African company based in Gauteng that caters to the needs of the transgender (in its broadest sense) community, whether crossdresser, transgender or genderfluid. Daniella, one of the partners of the company, was kind enough to talk to me for an hour. They also took the trouble to confirm that a seventeen-year-old, non-binary South African in 2013 would definitely be using they/them/their/themself as personal gender pronouns.
I wrote so much of The Enumerations at Ellie’s Deli in Noordhoek, my writing home from home. The staff there always make me so welcome and are quite happy to have a writer take up a whole table for a morning. (A maxim worth repeating from novel to novel: always tip well!)
So yes … acknowledgements galore, with the last and most important to come. Dan and Kieran, who will always own the hashtag #bestsonsever, and, of course, my husband Rob, who encourages his writing wife, even though she is yet to make any sort of fortune from her novels. Thank you, my darling. The next one will be easier …
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