by Tracy Going
My fingers were icy as I gripped the edge of my seat and he flattened his foot on the accelerator, flying down First Avenue West. I screamed as he shot stop streets and cleaved pavements, and then slammed on brakes just millimetres from garden walls, stalling, reversing, lurching forward again, then picking up speed, his voice filling my car, his words reverberating in my head: “I’m going to fucking kill you.”
I was still crying and pleading when he opened my garage door and accelerated into the concrete columns of my garage, screaming, “Tonight you’re going to die.”
As the columns collapsed and the front of my car crumpled, I bolted, screaming, down the road, but he caught me by my hair and hauled me back, into my house. He locked the front door, unplugged the landline and took my cellphone apart. Then he dragged me down the passage to my room. It was there that he held me captive through the night. Him and me. He the raving, frothing captor; me the captive, the hostage.
“If a word of this comes out you’re dead,” he said, running his hand across his throat, his fingers gliding across his neck like a sharp knife through ribbon. “And you have a child … six months, one year … I’ve got time,” he said, winking, reinforcing his threat.
“You know you’re pathetic,” he shouted.
“Yes,” I said.
“You know you’re nothing.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You know I can kill you right now, you cunt,” he hissed, his hands hard around my throat.
“Yes, I know,” I said, the words hoarse and dry.
“Say sorry, you bitch.”
“Sorry.”
“I always wanted to fuck a TV presenter … and you weren’t worth it.”
There was no end.
As I lay pinned to my bed with him looming above me, and as the torment continued relentlessly, it all started falling into place. At the launch, we’d been sitting with a former national soccer star turned radio and TV commentator when he’d seen someone he knew. It had been so sudden that I hardly noticed him disappear into the throng. I’d glanced up to see him greeting a man I’d never seen before. They shook hands. They grinned. They patted each other on the shoulder. They seemed delighted to see each other. Then the lights strobed and they were in darkness. I looked away. He was gone only a short while. And when he returned he was someone else.
I had fallen hard for the other man, the smart, funny, creative, talented one. Not the one with the mouth of a sailor, sordid and sour. The one who took my son to harvest fresh mussels off the rocks and carefully cleaned them of their grit, sand and debris. The one who bought books about birds and pointed them out to my boy as they fluttered by. And flew paper jets with him too. But that one was no more. Had he even existed?
It had taken a while for me to put the bleak picture together.
In the beginning I had been completely unaware. If I didn’t see him for a few days, I never questioned it. If he came and went, I accepted it and actually valued it as a delightful detail to an unhurried courtship. But when he moved into my home, I soon became very aware of his flipside, his behaviour increasingly odd and erratic. The stories became more bizarre. Burglaries at work, his phone switched off, gone for a day or two at a time. I started suspecting. I started asking questions.
“I don’t do fucking narcotics,” he said.
But I wasn’t so sure.
“I’ll be home now,” he said late one afternoon. But he wasn’t.
By midnight I had visions of him lying alone in a gutter, overdosed, desperate or dead. The next day I trawled the streets trying to find him. I didn’t know where to look. I didn’t know anyone in his life. I had never met them. But still I tried to find him.
It was another two days before he loped through the front door, his head hanging low. He bled out his story. Yes, he was an addict. It had been a momentary and regrettable relapse. He was a broken man. He needed me.
Please, another chance.
We had been together for five months and I had been prepared to give it more. I was prepared to give it another chance.
Now I was going to die. Here, a hostage in my own bedroom.
I didn’t want to die.
So I did all I could to stay alive.
I wrote the letter he made me write. I wrote it word for word as he throttled it out of me, as he dictated it, me admitting to my insanity and apologising for having accused him of being a drug addict.
I struggled silently against his grip each time he wrenched my fingers from my wrought-iron bedpost and dragged me across the bedroom. I knew to anchor myself, push myself down, my heels scuffing the polished parquet floor in protest, knowing that if he got me back to my car he would drive me to my death.
I put my knuckles to my mouth and was quiet when he stalked up and down the passage, his eyes burning, his breath hot, stabbing repeatedly at his phone calling the Sunday Times night desk, then The Star, threatening to destroy me.
“I have money. I have power. You have nothing. Nothing!” he screamed.
I looked at him when told to, but mostly I looked down – and that was when I prayed … Please God, don’t let him kill me.
I agreed with him, nodded and apologised.
I spoke, supplicated and was silent.
I stayed awake.
I didn’t sleep.
I did all I could not to die.
By the time the sun was up and its cold light trickled weakly in from the north, he was exhausted. It had been nine and a half hours and he was spent.
I heard him on his phone in the lounge, calling someone to fetch him.
It was hard to believe it was over.
But when I heard my dog, Garp, whelp in pain I knew he would finally be gone.
“Get out of my fucking way,” he snarled as the front door slammed behind him.
Eleven
“Sorry, my girl, but there’s nothing much I can do.”
“But you have to do something, Dad!” I wail.
“What? What can I do?” he shrugs, dragging the limp body of the dog across the tar and off the road.
He leaves it there. Dying. As if that’s what one does.
Perhaps, many years later, my father would feel some of that pain, the ache of losing a beloved companion, when he found his own border collie floating in a lagoon with a brick tied to its neck. Maybe he would remember when, with dulled reflexes, he had been too slow to avoid the collision. Maybe he would hear it again: the thud, the dying whimpers. Maybe he would think of a child, of a family that lost its dog. Maybe not.
His breath, fusty with beer and tobacco, touches me as he leans forward and shuttles into first gear. It lingers over me like lukewarm death.
“Let’s go,” he says cheerfully, giving me a conspiratorial wink.
I turn away. I refuse to let him see my tears, drops of despair, as he accelerates past the butchery, past the panel beater, past PPC Cement, under the bridge, into Pretoria.
My father is taking me back to boarding school. I am thirteen years old.
There was no English high school in Brits so we scattered ourselves between Rustenburg, Potchefstroom and Pretoria. I had chosen an all-girls’ school in Pretoria. It was a magnificent institution, one with a fine reputation, but I had not been guaranteed automatic access. I had needed to apply.
My interview had been anticipated for a while. I had been excused from school for the day and, as the sun brought its promise from the east, I had sat there, poised before my mirror, steadying my excited and anxious thoughts. I had selected my best-fitting school dress the night before and was dressed and almost ready for breakfast. I was ironing my curls with my hands when my father’s words serrated the warm, buttery air and flattened the sizzle of eggs being fried in the kitchen.
“She will not be going!”
The morning sun plunged through the sky. My hands stilled.
I heard my mother set the frying pan aside and ask innocuously, “What do you mean? Why?”
“She’s not going!” he sa
id again. “Why? Why?” he sneered. “Because I said so, that’s why.”
I was well aware of my father’s meanness, knew it all too well, but still I was taken aback. We had been talking, planning and plotting this interview for months.
What now?
I listened.
“She will be going,” said my mother, deliberately placing the frying pan back onto the stove.
It was the first time I had heard her defy him. It was a bold defiance. And as the air once again swelled with heated butter, its acrid aftertaste already burnt my tongue. I knew, like with any contemptuous act of disrespect, that there would be consequences.
After breakfast my mother and I made our way to Pretoria, mulling over possible questions and answers to my impending interview. The headmistress, Miss Mullins, was reputed to be formidable, as formidable in height as she was in presence. And as she opened the door it was her feet that I saw first. They were huge. They were long and narrow, encased in shoes I had only seen the Queen wear.
And I knew what shoes the Queen wore as she’d featured in many a tale over family lunches. My aunt, Margaret, had been chosen to present King George VI’s wife, Queen Elizabeth, with flowers during their royal visit to Bechuanaland (now Botswana) in 1947. This oft-repeated story left me with a visual of my aunt, a seven-year-old slip of a thing, leaning over royal shoes as she offered her delicate bouquet.
Many years later I would receive a gold-embossed calling card from the Master of the Household commanding my presence at a reception in Durban, at the Royal Hotel, to meet with Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh. It was a splendid and intimate affair with only about thirty invited guests so I got to see those handcrafted, calf-leather shoes with my very own eyes.
The Queen presented often in my childhood memories. As the story went, my grandparents were once invited to Buckingham Palace so that my grandfather could be presented with a CBE, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, for his service to the Empire. My grandmother had scoffed at the thought of having tea with the Queen in her palace. I remembered her words clearly.
“For goodness’ sake,” she’d said, “who has time for tea!”
My grandmother was also a headmistress but I never saw her wearing queenly shoes.
I tried not to stare at Miss Mullins as I folded my neck backwards to look into a face that seemed awfully far away. Her blue-rinse was lacquered high and added to her steepness. I had never seen a woman so tall, nor so chillingly elegant. Her welcome, however, was warm and her greeting gracious. But as I trailed her lingering rose scent I was relieved not to be seated in the plush armchairs that demanded attention as you entered, majestic and stately in their flushed floral. It was easier to be polite, and sit tall and not swing my legs, as my hands rubbed at the cushion of the carved hardback chair. My mother was enthroned alongside me. She too was sitting tall, straight and polite.
I had been forewarned to mesmerise Miss Mullins with my brilliance and to sound intelligent. I had arrived armed with invaluable information from those who’d gone before me. According to rampant rumour, the headmistress was not impressed with either the Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys series as a choice of literature, preferring something a little more erudite. It was also reported that she had little tolerance for the frivolity of the Arts.
“So what type of books do you enjoy reading?” she asked, leaning forward from behind the biggest desk I’d ever seen.
“Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys,” I said.
“Aah … And what would you like to be when you grow up?”
“An actress,” I mumbled.
“Mmm … And what sport do you prefer?”
“Athletics.”
“We don’t run here. Ladies never run.”
Oh no. This was not going well. At all.
But I couldn’t lie.
There was no need to glance sideways at my mother to know that her eyes were blazing bright, her cheeks rounded, rigid with forced radiance, giving me that now-is-not-the-time-to-let-me-down smile. I preferred not to see her disappointment, so instead I stared straight ahead at Miss Mullins.
Once my interview was over my mother requested that she and Miss Mullins speak privately. Outside her office there was nowhere to sit so I settled myself down on the stairs and tucked the flounces of my green school dress neatly around me. I looked back at the office door, which was closed. The door was tall and imposing, just like Miss Mullins. The ceilings were high, floating far above me. The walls echoed their whiteness onto the columns that stood stately, as if holding the secrets of yesteryear and the airy allure of tomorrow.
Two girls, much older than me, made their way up the stairs. They were also in green, not bottle-green like me, more of a sunlit green, fresh, like a breeze chasing the flowers from a jacaranda tree. Both were clutching satchels, hemlines well below the knees and belts pulled tight into their waists. I pretended not to see them and instead turned to the portraits framed on the walls. All the girls pictured were wearing the same uniforms I’d just seen. There were lots of them, black and white, caught in the crystals of time and stored in the present.
I watched the two girls as they headed away from me. They laughed. They walked quickly. They knew not to run. They left no prints on floors that were polished to a shine and, as I sat there, I noticed there was not a scuff mark anywhere. I’d never seen a school like this before and I knew I wanted to be a part of it.
My mother’s eyes were red and puffy when she finally made her way out of the office. We never spoke of that conversation.
It was three weeks later that we received the letter. My mother arrived home brandishing the envelope, with its open, serrated edge, and presented it to me as though the contents were a surprise to all. I had been accepted.
My father was enormously proud. He grabbed me to him and he hugged me close.
“I knew she’d get in.”
And so it is that he’s driving me back to school after a weekend out. I keep my gaze out the window and as I stare into the darkening middle distance my thoughts are stormy. I hadn’t wanted to drive with him. I had begged my mother to take me, but as she explained, she needed to stay home with my brother and sister. And now a dog lay dying, discarded along the side of the R514 like a dirty, disused dish rag.
It was never my choice to be in the car with my father when he’d been drinking. But somehow I so often was. Perhaps he enjoyed the company or maybe he thought that by making it a father-daughter outing we could pretend, and then it would be as if I only imagined the blot in his eyes.
I knew that look well.
“Are you coming with me or not, my girl?” my father would announce without any preamble.
“Where you going?”
“Are you coming with me or not!”
If my mother were nearby I would implore her with my eyes.
She’d busy herself.
We both knew. My compliance safeguarded us all.
It was a short journey to the golf club along the tar road. A few turns and we were there.
Once there he’d assure me that we wouldn’t be too long.
“I’m just going to have one, my girl,” he’d say. “Just one.”
But it was never just one.
With a flourish, my father would present me with my first Coke. The waiters, who all knew my name, would bring me the second Coke. And even the third. Sometimes I would be given a packet of Simba chips – smoked beef – or some peanuts.
Then, as time strained the day, I would sit by myself, alone, trying to ignore the discomfort of the hard, unyielding concrete step numbing my bottom. At each creak of the dark wooden door, I’d look up, confident that it would be him at last. When it wasn’t, I’d leap to my feet and peer into the gloomy darkness of the bar, trying hard not to gulp in the sluggish air, hanging heavy with sweat and stale cigarette smoke. I’d lean in, tall on my toes, and wave my arms wildly, hoping he’d notice my blonde head as it bobbed about, to remind him it was time to go
home.
Sometimes he would notice, and remember. Other times not.
But my eyes were always there to meet his liquid look when he eventually staggered out, unsteady on his feet. Then buoyed with beer, he’d clumsily crush me to his side, circling his arm around me as though we were craftily colluding as one.
“Come, my girl, let’s go home,” he’d announce happily. As if it had only been a brief stop.
Then we’d begin the treacherous journey home.
We never took the fast, tarred road back. Instead, we’d painfully negotiate the dirt road, my father trying to stay upright behind the steering wheel as we drifted from one side to the other, shadowing the winding river canal. I knew we were almost home when we turned right, lurched over the narrow bridge, and passed Multiplant nursery.
He’d wink at me with a knowing, “We’ve made it.”
I would nod reassuringly and pretend to be won over even though I was sick to my stomach.
My mother never asked how it was.
There was no need.
I am relieved to finally get out of the car when he drops me at the hostel. I quickly make my way to the prep room and seat myself for the mandatory Sunday-night prep session.
After a weekend out, we are expected to write an urbane thank-you letter home, highlighting all we’d particularly enjoyed. We sit there, one behind the other, our heads bent, frantically scribbling letters of thankfulness. We are only to be excused once our letters are written, the envelopes sealed and handed in to the teacher on duty. My pen is poised but I am unable to do it. I am unable to enthuse as I sit there tormented by the images of a dying dog. So I fold a piece of blank paper in an envelope, address it to my parents and hand it in. It is a simple plan. I’ll retrieve it from the post before breakfast. But the next morning the messenger has beaten me to it and all I see is a bare space where plumped envelopes once stood.
They are all gone, gone like black cats in the dark.
A letter of ungrateful nothingness has been mailed to a letterbox in Brits.
There is nothing I can do so I make my way to the dining hall.
I soon forget the dilemma of my ungratefulness, as my mouth begins to itch with the cloying, sweet, coppery smell of the loathed fried liver and onions. I choose instead to spoon sloppy porridge into a bowl as I nudge myself in between my friends. We are a group from all over, daughters of farmers, businessmen, miners and diplomats.