Brutal Legacy

by Tracy Going

  I didn’t know where I would begin with the clean-up operation. I could barely move and, with one eye swollen shut and the other no more than a slit, I couldn’t see much either. But as I stepped into my lounge, I could see enough to know that nothing was as it had been left the night before. Nothing.

  It was all as it should be … just a little different.

  Wilhemina, who worked for me, had taken it upon herself to clean everything up, to restore what had been, to purge the place of any evidence of the carnage. All the damaged furniture was upright and in place. All electronic gadgets, functioning or not, were back on their shelves. Broken ornaments had been swept up and discarded. Glassless photo frames were stacked on top of each other and placed carefully to one side. Everything.

  She had done it all.

  It felt as though her creased, faded palms were holding me high and I couldn’t help myself as the tears fell, knowing I didn’t have to bend down and pick up the shattered pieces of my own home, my own life.

  All I needed to do was rest until my son returned.

  He arrived with his father pulling him on, holding his chubby hand tight, steering him toward me. I never asked Alex whether he’d prepared my son in any way or if it was me wearing sunglasses that made him instantly reticent, but he quickly moved in behind his father and turned his head away from me.

  I left him be and instead moved away and allowed them to follow me into the lounge. It was dark, but warm inside. Wilhemina had closed the room for the day, but the heat of the afternoon lingered and a hint of roasted floor polish flushed the air. We sat down, the two of them close together on an armchair and me opposite, on the couch.

  “Remember Mommy told you he had problems?” I said to my son softly. “Well, he has,” I said before telling him at least some of what had happened.

  His eyes opened wide as he watched my lips, listened attentively to the words that flowed from my mouth slowly and simply. His lower lip was caught tight in his little mouth as he blinked back the tears. It had been only one month before that he’d blown out six candles on the blue-and-white racing car cake I had baked and decorated for his birthday party. This was not what I wanted to be telling him now.

  “Mommy, can I see your eye?” he eventually asked.

  “Yes, you can,” I nodded. “I’m going to take my glasses off now,” I said slowly, trying to prepare him.

  As I lifted them from my face his little hand flailed for his father. He dropped his head deep into Alex’s chest, but his words were clear. “Please put your glasses back on, Mommy,” he said. “You look so ugly.”

  I quickly put them back on, my haste belying the hanging heaviness in my heart.

  Alex cradled him gently and then looked at me and asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ve laid charges. I’ll go to court.”

  We were both quiet.

  I looked away. I saw my two ornamental, wooden ducks. I had bought them years before as a reminder of the wild geese that used to fly over our house when I was a child and how my father complained constantly of the mess they made in the pool. Wilhemina had placed them carefully alongside each other on top of the uprighted TV cabinet. They had lost their place on the glass coffee table and both simply sat there, chipped, forlorn and beakless.

  They were a portent to what lay ahead as I became increasingly voiceless and my story was taken from me, but as I sat there bruised and swollen before my son, I didn’t know any of this. I trusted the justice system to be fair and reasonable, and believed that laying charges and going to court was the only way.

  “If it gets too much, you can come with me,” Alex ventured.

  He was referring to his imminent departure. He was about to take a five-year political posting overseas and he was kindly offering for me to go with him.

  “Thank you. I appreciate it, but you know I can’t,” I said, trying to smile. I was grateful for his generosity.

  “Anyway, it’ll be okay,” I assured him.

  “Well, if you need me to testify I’ll come,” he said.

  “No, you won’t need to. I’ll be fine,” I said, believing my own words. “But thank you.”

  It was then that my son found his voice.

  “How did he hit you, Mom? Like this?” and he threw his small fist into the air.

  “Yes.”

  “Or like this, Mom?” he said, leaning forward, flailing his arms in an upper cut.

  “Yes.”

  “But which one?” he asked. “Which one did he do first?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “This one or this one?” he asked again, swinging his hands. “And what happened to the table?” He eyed the glassless coffee table. “Did he hit you before he broke the table?” Then back to me: “Are you sore, Mommy?”

  There were so many questions and I didn’t want to silence him. I knew that his little mind was working furiously, trying to make sense of it all. His world had suddenly become a scary place, unpredictable and unsafe. And it was going to get even scarier with his father leaving the country in three months’ time and him starting primary school. I would need to get him into therapy as soon as possible. As he sat opposite me, silhouetted as one with his father on the armchair, I knew I was his only certainty.

  “Come give Mommy a hug,” I said, opening my arms. “I’m going to be okay.”

  I wanted him to know that, despite the bruised eye, the swollen cheek, the aching heart, I was still his strong, dependable mother, that I was still his refuge. His young, vulnerable life might have been forever changed, but as I pulled his small, blond head closer I silently vowed to do whatever was needed for it not to be forever damaged.

  And I held him tight.

  Fourteen

  “Where you going, Mommy?”

  “Nowhere, I’m right here,” I said again.

  He didn’t want to be alone and neither did I. I longed for the sweeping comfort of my aloneness, but I still didn’t want to be on my own. I was seeing shadows everywhere. They were morphing over my garden wall, taking shape outside my windows, knocking on my door and fleeing down my passage at night. They were dark, fluid and insidious and I couldn’t get away from them. I was seeing them all around me.

  He had been arrested as soon as he set foot in the police station but, despite the conditions of the restraining order, had been released on bail almost immediately. I knew he was close – I suspected he was staying a few blocks away – and I was afraid of what he’d do next. He’d warned me to fear for my life. And I did.

  I also feared for my son’s life, and I didn’t want him back at pre-school just yet. The teachers knew of the latest developments, just as they’d known for a while that only I, or his father, could collect him at the end of the day. But now, after all that had happened, I wanted to keep him close to my side and always in sight. I tried not to hold on too tight, but sometimes I felt like I was drowning from the fear and as the blackness seeped to the edge of my vision and I gulped desperately at the air, I sealed us in.

  I shut the windows and closed the curtains. I locked the doors. I had burglar bars installed and caged us in behind rods of steel. I had my house number painted boldly on my exterior wall for greater visibility so that, if needed, the security company could find me quickly and easily. In the months ahead I would eventually feel it necessary to sell my car, move house and nestle a borrowed firearm beneath my pillow, but for now Wilhemina moved indoors and my son moved into my bed. He was too afraid to sleep in his room, alone, and I was too afraid to let him.

  I knew I needed to escape the fear, reclaim some sense of safety. I knew I needed to silence the noise because when the darkness gave way to the light and then slipped back into the black, there was no respite from the visions. It was all I could think of and I was aching from the terror and the tiredness. I needed to put my head down on a pillow far from my life and close my eyes to the recurring images. I needed to let the bruises heal, allow the pain to dissipate. I needed to sleep. I needed to eat. And I needed to ge
t away. So when John mentioned he was going to Kenton in the Eastern Cape for a week I decided that my son and I would accompany him.

  John loved to drive. It was as though the stresses of the day tumbled from his shoulders when he turned the key in the ignition. He was a man entranced by the steady, slow vibration of the accelerator beneath his foot and was not averse to taking a scenic alternative in his attempt to extend his driving pleasure. We’d been on holiday in Kei Mouth a few years earlier. It had been a great family holiday of boating, river cruises, water sports, fishing and illicit braaiing on the beach. John was driving us back to where we were staying when what I can only imagine was a flash of inspiration struck him wildly and spontaneously, for suddenly instead of turning left, he turned right, taking us all on a long journey into the unknown. After many hours of winding roads and mountain passes and wanting to throw up from motion sickness I made an oily comment from the back seat about seeing the Mozambican border up front. John was not amused and promptly swung the car onto the first turning we finally came to, one that was signposted East London. He said not a word to anyone all the way home. So I learnt to ask John where he was going before I climbed in behind him. But mostly all roads led to contentedness for John and I was not surprised when he announced he’d collect us at the end of his work day and we’d journey across the country through the quiet of night. John wanted the road to himself. And I was glad of it too.

  It was just the three of us in the car, but still I kept my face hidden. My son had not seen me uncovered since he’d asked me to put my sunglasses back on a few days earlier. The large bump on my forehead was still swollen and ugly and the blood that had seeped into the tissues deep under my skin had left my face a livid purple-black. I preferred not to see myself either. I lay hidden in a duvet on the back seat, behind my black lenses, and left it to John and my son, who was sitting tall upfront, to fill the interior with their chatter as I closed my eyes behind the layered darkness and searched for silence.

  As small towns tend to be, Kenton was quiet, gentle, soothing, and our week soon settled into a healing rhythm. It was only time that would rub the bruises away and ease the pain. Wading through the rock pools and ambling slowly along the beach, the distant waves spraying their soothing saltiness were restorative and the days passed by smoothly. As October drifted into November, it was chilly but despite the cold the clear green waters of the Kariega River drew my son enticingly. It was good to watch him mindlessly swim the current and cross backwards and forwards over the lagoon as he frolicked, diving in and out of the ripples. The hours passed safely on the beach sheltered by the dense Euphorbias with their gnarled leaves oozing a milky, caustic sap.

  We spoke a lot, my son and I. I tried to answer his questions simply and clearly.

  “Mommy, where is he?”

  “He’s in jail,” I said, hoping for a gust of wind to sweep my lying words away.

  Over the days, his fear slowly subsided and finally he asked to see my eye. He looked. He touched. He talked. And I held him close.

  “Can I put the cream on your eye, Mommy?” he asked.

  I let him lean in and apply the ointment, bravely playing doctor in his attempt to take charge of his own ruptured world. I allowed him his adopted role, knowing it would only be for so long. I would put a time frame to him being my carer. Living beyond his years was not a burden I would allow him to carry. My pain was my responsibility.

  Dabbing at my swollen cheek, gently patting at my bruised eye, his small hands on his mother’s battered face took me back to another time, to another place. I remembered my mother’s pain, I remembered the responsibility I took on my shoulders during those brief futile conversations.

  “Please, Mom, please leave him,” I plead.

  “I can’t … You don’t understand … I love him.”

  All those times out on the veranda with me listening as she speaks, watching her as she inhales lightly on her forbidden cigarette. Cigarettes that she hides at the back of my dressing-table drawer for me to retrieve when asked. We sit as co-conspirators, on the white wire-mesh chairs, looking out over the veld, as she divests herself of some of her hurt, her words weighty, her breathing shallow. When we hear my father weaving up the road, she scurries back inside to brush her teeth and to remove the evidence of her offense. I rush back inside too, the wire mesh from the chair imprinted down the backs of my legs like a latticed grid, red and itchy to the touch.

  And now all these years later, making our way down the beach, occasionally settling down on the sun-baked rocks, all the time soothing my son’s fears while allowing my own body to heal, I was determined not to relieve myself of the responsibility of my life and the choices I had made. My son would not be my crutch. He would not be my confidant. He would not be the keeper of deep, dark secrets.

  But, as it turned out, there weren’t going to be many of those. Deep, dark secrets. It was all soon to enter the public domain.

  We were driving back from Kenton when I got the call. We’d passed through the Karoo, through Colesberg, and were on the long, straight stretch heading toward Bloemfontein when I answered my phone.

  “Hullo, it‘s André here. From the Sunday Times.”

  A journalist! Oh my god.

  Why would a journalist be calling me?

  “Yes,” I said tentatively.

  “We’re doing a story for tomorrow’s paper and I’d like your comment.”

  A story … tomorrow’s paper.

  “Yes?” I stuttered, the word coming out strangled.

  “It seems there was a fight. Your boyfriend says you lunged at him with a knife. That you stabbed him in the foot.”

  “He what?” I breathed, trying to make sense of his words. “He says I lunged at him? With a knife?”

  “Yes, a knife.”

  “But that’s not true!” I cried.

  “Well, that’s what he said. So that’s what we’re printing.” His words were final.

  This time I couldn’t be by myself. I needed someone with me. I phoned my friend Robyn as soon as I got home. She came and sat with me through Saturday night. She waited with me until the early hours of Sunday, until the sun cast its pre-dawn web, bringing no warmth to the new day, and then she drove me to the closest garage a few blocks away. A 24-hour petrol station that would receive the morning papers long before the neighbourhood stretched awake. I was sitting low in the passenger seat when she made her way through the breaking light into the store to purchase an early edition. My red eyes followed her as she picked up the paper, paid and strode back out, the newspaper tucked firmly under her arm. But when she passed it to me, I couldn’t take it.

  Instead it stayed on her lap and only once we were back in the sanctity of my lounge did she unfold it from its thickness and rouse the damning words from the page.

  ‘Knives come out for TV Star.’

  Those were the headlines. Big and bold.

  “A love battle between television personality Tracy Going and her boyfriend is heading to the courts,” she read out loud. “The thirty-year-old from Brits claims [her boyfriend] beat her, then trashed her home in Parkhurst, Johannesburg. But he claims she stabbed him in the right foot with a knife, causing lacerations to his leg …”

  Robyn’s words fractured and faded into one as she read aloud. I had stabbed him in the right foot, causing lacerations to his leg? How? How was that even possible? How could I have stabbed him in his foot? He had been wearing his brown suede shoes. Lacerations to his legs could easily be explained because he’d been wearing shorts when he clambered through the shattered door after my neighbour and his son had kicked it in. He must have scratched himself on the way out. But stabbing? In the foot? And where was the knife?

  Her words filtered back in: “… had stitches in his foot.”

  Stitches!

  How did he get stitches? When did he get stitches?

  I sat there. Raw. It felt as though each word was tearing at me, ripping open my wounds, leaving me to look down at
pink flesh blackened with ink. Dark thoughts swirled around in my head as I considered all that had happened and what might lie ahead. But if those printed words tore at my being, they also reinforced my decision to take meaningful action. It was not so much that my resolve had been intensified, but more that I could not walk away.

  That was now no longer an option.

  The rest of the day was fraught with despair and tears. The hours passed slowly, the night bringing no calm either; my thoughts gnawed at me and my nerves rendered me ragged. I tried to quieten my mind, knowing that I had to be in the studio early the next morning. It would be my first day back at work. But I tossed and turned in my attempt to calm my fears, my shame, my sadness, myself.

  I was just drifting off – finally – when the phone shattered my unrest.

  Now what?

  I glanced over at the numbers flicking red on my bedside table.

  00:40

  Well past midnight.

  I felt my way down the passage, rushing, needing to answer before my son was woken by the noise.

  “Hullo?” I whispered, holding the handset tight between my trembling fingers.

  “Drop the fucking charges or I’ll destroy you publicly,” he snarled, his voice rough and hard.

  “Leave me alone,” I said. That was all. And replaced the receiver.

  Official announcement of my birth

  My father and me

  At the lagoon in Kenton, Eastern Cape

  My first day of school outside the first house my father built

  The twins, a family friend and me in our bath that doubled up as a swimming pool on sweltering days

  The second house my father built

  With my grandparents

  In the outfit I bought in Durban