by Tracy Going
I have been at boarding school for eight months and even though I find refuge in that beautiful heritage building among that group of gangly girls, I still find myself battling homesickness. Some days the feeling of longing and the sense of displacement are all-consuming, but fortunately it is a common thread between us all. We find ourselves trying to be big and brave and when that doesn’t work out we turn to each other for words of comfort.
But the routine of an organised day offers something of a great distraction as we are roused to the surface early each morning by the matron, waddling down the passage, her broad hips undulating in the dim light.
“Wakker word!” she shrieks, her cacophony reverberating across the entire boarding house. “Wakker word, meisies!” each word emphasised with a footfall, one flat foot after the other, hitting the cold tiled floor. All the while clanging her polished brass bell.
As early-morning wakings go, it is nothing short of sadistic, but the hours go by quickly and soon we’re exhausted from a full day and, drained, we’ll slip back into bed.
When night falls I feel safe, the only sound disturbing the dark the occasional vehicle as it accelerates down Park Street, past Loftus Versfeld rugby stadium, and into the distance. I am no longer wetting my bed or biting my nails. But sleep never comes easily and once lights-out is called and everyone has settled in, I creep to my window and, with the weak beams from the street light diffused over my shoulders, I fold myself into the sill, hold my book up high and envelop myself in words. As the night hours drain away, I page past the guilt that prickles like an invisible scar when I fret for my brother and my sister.
And what of my mother – who is looking out for her? Who will pass her a pillow if she is made to sleep outside again?
Twelve
“Hurry,” I urge.
“I’m coming!” my sister calls, her voice swept away by the wind.
We are both clutching our blue berets to our heads with one hand, holding the hemlines of our green school dresses down with the other as we rush to catch the double-decker bus into town. The next bus will only arrive in thirty minutes and by then it’s too late.
Our laughs are strangled by the warm, dry air as we swing ourselves into the bus and gallop up the stairs to get a good spot at the top. There we collapse onto the blue leather seat, breathless and giggling as the bus lurches forward. It is the best place to sit, enthroned as we are on the apex of the world. It’s just the two of us, peering down, scanning the landscape as it changes and shifts around us. And, sitting up high, we gloat at our good fortune. It’s a Friday afternoon and we have been granted a special privilege. We have permission to leave the school premises. No one else is permitted out. It is our very own personal triumph.
Boarders are only allowed off the school property once every half-term – the promise of a two-hour excursion that keeps us all on our best behaviour for weeks, lest the privilege be taken away. As soon as the permissions book is signed, best friends set off in groups of two, socks slipped suggestively below ankles and skirts hoisted high above knees, to rush through to the Hatfield shopping centre. It really isn’t enough time to keep an eye out for any passing schoolboys, to shop, and then wait for a lull in the queue at the only coffee shop. But once seated, our orders are standard, so it isn’t long before a freshly baked waffle is placed between us. With our heads close together, we diffidently divide the waffle in two, squarely split the spoonful of ice cream and carefully carve the clump of clotted cream crushed beneath hundreds and thousands, hanging heavy like a cascade of colourful confetti. And if that isn’t enough, each of us sips at a double-thick milkshake between those doughy mouthfuls, oozing stickiness as the sugar-crystal topping melts. It’s red, green, blue, white and yellow seeping into each other, our very own sodden syrup of decadence. We savour every single moment, knowing it is a long month until the next two-hour outing.
But there we are, my sister and I, out and about, travelling in triumph, conquering the day while all the other girls are caged behind perimeter walls, sweating it out at compulsory sport. The two of us, on a bus flooded with afternoon sunlight that is broken only intermittently by the scrape of a jacaranda branch as it scratches and grabs at the window as we roll by. The sun, a tree, the sun … light, dark, light, dark … all the way into Arcadia.
Once off the bus, we march two blocks down before turning left into a side street, then a short distance on it is up a few stairs into a nondescript building for another counselling session. We aren’t here for group therapy, though. We’re fortunate enough to be having private sessions with an Alateen addiction counsellor, all part of the Al-Anon fellowship providing support for teenagers from alcoholic homes. It is the first professional intervention and support we’ve ever known. No one had ever spoken to us about our father’s alcoholism before. In fact, it is a subject everyone prefers not to talk about. Who would we go to anyway?
I knew not to phone the police. It was more than once that I had crept into the dining room in the darkened dead of night, to lift my fingers to the black telephone on the sideboard, and make a call to the police station in Brits.
“Please come. My dad is hurting my mom,” my voice small and soft as I’d whisper into the handset.
It was always the same loud response in a thick Afrikaans accent: “I’m sorry, young lady, but it’s a domestic issue. Our hands are tied.” Then, “There is nothing we can do. Sorrie.”
It didn’t matter how much I silently sobbed.
Our neighbours, the Tellings, were just as helpless when they found me frantically banging on their door. They were already asleep when I arrived. I had taken flight in my pyjamas and felt no pain as the rough stones ripped at my bare feet. The brutality of the beatings had increased over the years and I knew my mother needed help. So I ran. I ran as fast as I could in the black of night, guided by the stars above me, to get to their house, one long kilometre away.
“Mr Telling, please, you need to help us. He’s going to kill my mother.”
“Let’s first have a cup of tea,” he’d said, pulling the cord on his gown tighter.
I didn’t want tea.
There wasn’t time.
I needed to get back to my mother and my brother and my sister.
But I sat there, at the pine table, gripping the pottery mug and drinking the sugared, white tea that Mrs Telling had made for me. It was all calm and quiet by the time Mr Telling eventually took me home.
It seemed there was no one to turn to.
I knew that not even my grandmother would intervene.
We had been staying with her for the December holidays when I ran into her kitchen.
She, my Gan, was standing at the stove in her blue, patterned dress, neatly belted at the waist, stirring her famed oxtail stew. My father’s grunts and my mother’s howls of pain were braising the afternoon air.
“Gan, please … do something.” I was crying, my words desperate and rushed.
“I can’t,” she said.
“But you’re his mother. He’s hurting her. You have to do something!”
Her gold watch, the one my father had given her for Christmas a few years before, a laced handkerchief folded tightly beneath its thin strap, caught the light as she turned her deep-set eyes toward me.
“There’s nothing I can do,” she said, her words clipped and clear. I had never heard her voice so cold.
The steam of the simmering oxtail stung my throat.
We were on our own.
It was only at boarding school that I learnt otherwise.
Miss Mullins, the headmistress, made it quite clear that her tall, imposing door would always be open to me. She might have been a mother to none but she was deeply committed to ‘her girls’. She especially took broken girls to her side, and guided them, and nurtured them, and loved them in her own queenly way.
That was how I got to know Ana.
Ana was three years older than me. She had the saddest eyes I’d ever seen; they were watery blue with ed
ges of steel grey. She was one of six, the only daughter, and it seemed there wasn’t enough love to go around in her home. Her life had been one of neglect and disinterest and, after being raped, her world had completely disintegrated – and so she ran away. I had never known that a life could be lived in such pain. All she wanted was for someone to care for her. And Miss Mullins did. She cared. She cared so much that she obtained special permission from the school governing body and brought the much older Ana into the junior boarding house.
Ana knew that she mattered to Miss Mullins, but even that wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be. Her hurt was too deep. She was wild and, some might say, almost savage, viewing the world around her with a deep, unsettling suspicion. Her blonde hair was short and coarsely cropped, as though someone had carelessly taken a pair of scissors to her head and hacked at her locks in clumps. She was always in her navy-blue school jersey, oversized, long and baggy and hanging well below the hemline of her dress. Her sleeves were always pulled down too, her fists clasping the edges of her jersey, hiding the scars on her wrists. Those scars would be added to while at boarding school.
She was considered reckless and stubborn and many of the girls were scared of her. But she became my friend.
It was an unlikely friendship because there wasn’t one iota of the rambunctious rebel within me. I was not defiant. I was tamed. My role was always to broker peace, to be the easy, compliant one. Tantrums and self-expression were provocative. Besides, my mother had too many problems of her own; I knew there was little place for mine.
But knowing Ana taught me one thing: that I was not alone. Her story of sadness gave me some perspective of my own life and I found an acceptance and an understanding that I had not known before. I admired her bravery, the conscious decision she had made to survive when she chose to live another life – one on her own and on her own terms. I also admired her courage, which was especially evident when she came home with me for a long weekend. I thought that was particularly plucky. No one ever came home with me. My house was not a place for friends.
She called it her Safari Farm Weekend after a visit to the cheetah and wildlife centre close to our home. Perhaps for her it was a meeting of kindred spirits with those wild cats, together, all of them, viewing life through hooded, slit eyes. Ana couldn’t leave them to lie around lazily; she liked to push boundaries and clearly wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass her by. She was determined to draw those wild cats closer to her, to see whether she could lure them from their languor and rile them into action. I watched as she grabbed at the mesh fence and rattled it, taunting and teasing them to come closer. They responded as one. They turned to her, dropped their heads, and with icy intent silently broke through the shrubbery, a pack of predators stealthily stalking toward her.
It was the first time I ever saw Ana lose her nerve. As the largest of the cats lunged forward and landed with all its might, bending the reinforced steel fence into her, Ana catapulted as high as she did far. She was still exhaling the residue of its skanky breath and about to dust the sand off her when she approached the adjoining enclosure. As she leaned forward, choking on her nervous laugh, a cheetah cub stuck its paw out and hooked her takkie with a tiny claw. The ensuing scuffle attracted its lactating mother. I suspect a cheetah cub lost its claw that day as Ana leapt for lasting safety.
She left a void in my life when she matriculated, but her departure coincided with my sister’s arrival at the school – that, in itself, a great relief. Only my brother remained at home. It would be another year before he too would be sent off to boarding school. Thoughts of his safety gnawed at me. I knew he was angry, afraid, and resentful after having been on the receiving end of so much of my father’s violence and self-hatred. My brother, regrettably, would never know the comfort of a similar bolstering hand of support.
Those Friday afternoon sessions with the Alateen counsellor become an enveloping embrace for me and my sister as we share our experiences and gain some insight into the chaos around us. All we had ever known was the determined pull of either my father’s drunkenness or his sobriety. We were always teetering on the abyss of one state of his being or another, floundering in the bedlam of uncertainty, unpredictability and the constant unknowing. It was like a clock that was constantly ticking, its pendulum unevenly weighted as it oscillated; a perilous delay between each tick and tock. We lived in flux, anticipating its inevitable unhinging. And more and more unhinged it was becoming, too. Eventually his sobriety would slip through the chambers of time and be relegated to his past, but back then we still hoped for positive change and the addiction counsellor’s words offered critical counsel.
She was not what you’d expect of a counsellor. There was nothing cute and cuddly about her. She towered above us, tall and angular, and could quite easily have looked Miss Mullins in the eye. When we shuffled into her office, she needed to only take one or two self-assured strides across the thin carpet to reach and greet us. Her smile was engaging, albeit slightly lopsided as her head was always down, tilted, as though she seldom had need to look straight ahead at others, which meant that her thick fringe kept falling forward and she was constantly flicking it back.
As she sat at her desk, surrounded by colourful, animated self-help posters that had been stuck haphazardly on the walls with Prestik, she encouraged us to speak. She gave us a voice as she listened, heard and asked. She became our soft place to fall. She encouraged us to live in the present and accept that we were helpless to change our circumstances. She took us through the adapted twelve-step programme and offered us the Alateen literature that taught us that our father’s compulsive drinking was a disease. A dreadful disease. Debilitating and all-consuming. But it was a disease from which we had to learn to emotionally detach ourselves. She reassured us that we were not the cause of his drinking or his behaviour and that we could not control or change him – only he could do that. She emphasised that the only control we had was over our personal choices in life and that we needed to develop our own potential, despite what was happening at home. She told us that we alone were responsible for our futures and that, ultimately, it would be up to us to write our own stories one day. Her words resonated deeply. But I already knew my story. I was going to be an actress or television presenter, I would write a book one day – and I would never be beaten up.
Thirteen
It was Sunday. The first day after he beat me. Monday would be the second day after he beat me. Not that I consciously counted the days – it would simply become the way I defined myself and my life.
Before and After.
He had taken his hands and divided my life into what was and what would be.
Sunday was the first day – the first day of the After – and there was much to do.
I knew I couldn’t languish in my childhood bed all day, overwhelmed by the pain pulsing through me, not just the layers of sharp physical pain, but also the intense hollowness of hurt deep inside me. My sadness and soreness needed to be set aside. I needed to phone my new clients and inform them that I couldn’t present their corporate video the next day. I needed to contact the radio station and let them know I wouldn’t be in for the foreseeable future. But most importantly I needed to speak to my ex-husband Alex.
“What’s wrong?” he asked immediately.
“He beat me,” I said, my words distorted and muffled as I tried to say them aloud.
“Beat you? How bad?”
“Bad.”
It was not easy to talk but I asked that he keep our son with him until the early evening so that I could get back to Johannesburg to salvage my home before he came home.
Alex agreed.
“Don’t worry,” he said quietly. “We’ll do this together.”
We’d been apart for three years already. We’d only been dating a few months when I fell pregnant almost seven years earlier and had decided that marriage was the best way forward for our child. We’d uttered marriage vows lightly in the quaint Old Fort Chapel in Durban, knowin
g that this wasn’t going to be a lasting union. We’d got divorced three years later, one lawyer between us. He’d gone to court alone and had consoled me over the phone afterwards, listening calmly, as I sobbed dramatically.
“It’s over, Alex. It’s a phase of our lives that’s over.”
All those years later and, as we parented our son together, Alex was still an integral part of my life. I had introduced the two men, but Alex had taken an instant dislike and found him arrogant and condescending, especially after he demeaned Alex at my dinner table one night. I had dismissed it all as incidental rivalry, a clash of egos.
But Alex was aware of at least some of what had happened. He knew I had a restraining order in place. He had seen the damage to my house and my car and we had spoken previously about my safety and the safety of our son. I had assured him that I had everything under control. Clearly, I hadn’t.
My mother and John drove me back to Johannesburg. It was eerily quiet when we turned into my street. There were no longer any police vans or security vehicles parked along the verge.
John pulled up along the pavement, in front of the white wall with its locked exterior door and its open, gaping centre. The wooden panels hung in splintered shards and greeted us like an open, snarling mouth. I couldn’t bring myself to enter through its beckoning emptiness and chose instead to go through my garage and shuffle past the concrete columns that had been rebuilt only a week earlier. They were standing dull and dreary, yet to be repainted.
My footfalls were heavy as I stepped into my entrance hall, dreading what I’d see before me. I hadn’t been able to look the night before, but I knew of the destruction.