by Gerda Pearce
Simon, dying.
Time, thinks Gin, is all I have left.
48. VIVIENNE
“How is she?” asks Michael. They are walking in his back garden, along the stretch of lawn, smoking. The day is settling into evening, the sun has already deserted this part of the house although its warmth remains.
Viv casts a glance to where Gin and Abbie sit inside at the kitchen table, going through Abbie’s cardboard box from Issy. The door is closed, and they cannot hear her conversation, but Viv hesitates nonetheless before replying. “Okay, I think. She slept almost solidly that first week, as if she couldn’t get enough. I think she’s truly exhausted by everything that’s happened over the last year.”
“Only a year,” grimaces Michael. “God.”
“Yes,” says Viv. She stops, strokes the bark of a tall conifer. Nick had loved Michael’s garden, she remembers. She does not want to think of Nick.
Viv had taken Gin home, put her in the same small room with its view of the mountain, and had helped her unpack. Clothes, a toiletry bag, a book. Viv read the title Somehow We Survive. How very appropriate, she had thought, picking it up. She opened it, stopping at a random page, a random poem. Oxford, January 1965.
…in this Godforsaken place,
my soul lies naked, and alone.
What words can fill the emptiness?
What words can take me home?
It tore into her. What words could fill her emptiness? There were none. Not after Gabe, not since Jonnie. Once, she had thought Nick’s words could. No one as beautiful as you, he had said. Not even close. But these words in front of her, these words as old as she, had reminded her that words can also tear us apart.
She tells Michael of the day she had taken Gin up to Rhodes memorial.
They drove up the side of the mountain, up the well-wooded path. They ate egg on toast swallowed down with tea while the sun climbed overhead. The city was a haze below, a submerged Atlantis. After breakfast, Viv bought a cheesecake heavy with Cape gooseberries to take home for the girls, and they walked beneath the shady branches, admiring the Roman columns of the memorial to Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist, coloniser of continents, who would claim and name a country, a man whose shadow was said to fall from the Cape as far north as the Zambezi River.
Gin put her hand on the smooth curves of the carved lion, stroked its stone mane. She started to talk, her face away from Viv, held up to the sun. She told Viv how everything was muddled inside her head. Times, dates, places. Everything felt wrong, she said, inconclusive, and it was all she could do to get through the day. She pushed food down, and it stuck in her throat. Everything, even the slightest thing, felt too much. She described to Viv how her house in London had got dirtier and she had to leave it, letting the dust settle into the corners. She could only keep herself clean, Gin explained, but no amount of scrubbing helped and she would leave the bathroom feeling grubbier than when she went in, and the next day she had to get up and do it all again.
Viv did not know what to say. What words could fill the emptiness? After Gabe, since Simon, since Ellie? She wanted to say she was sorry about Ellie, how awful that must be, how she knew something of what it was like to lose a child, but Gin had started to speak again, her voice faint.
“They say the dead can still hear. If that’s true maybe I ought to speak to them. Maybe I should speak to the walls, into the air. But if I were to speak aloud, to Gabe, to Simon,” she kept quiet for a second, “what would people think?” She looked at Viv. “You’d think I was mad.”
Michael draws deeply on his cigarette. “She’s not mad,” he says, “just grieving. It’s good she’s telling you these things, starting to get it out. Is she still having the recurring nightmares?”
“I don’t know,” replies Viv, “probably. Sometimes I hear her crying in the night.”
“Yes, that happened to me also in London. Sounds like she’s still having them. Did she tell you about Simon wanting to tell her something, before he died?”
Viv nods. “Yes. I thought I knew what it was.”
He looks at her, surprised. “You did?”
“Nick told me Simon was getting divorced. I thought that maybe it was that – I told Gin.”
“When?”
At Miller’s Point they had sat on the rocks washed with foam, watching the fishermen bring in their catch.
“I don’t know why,” said Gin, as she spoke of Simon, “but I always believed we’d last.”
Viv, reminded, had told her what Nick had said. Gin had put her head in her hands and wept. Viv sat and could only wonder whether they would live their lives again, knowing what they would be given, knowing how the moments of happiness, so brief, seemed unequal to the pain.
“But then she said it couldn’t be that, because he said it was something he should have told her years ago.”
“Ah, pity,” says Michael. “But still, that must have helped her. To know, I mean.”
Viv shrugs. “Maybe, I’m not sure. It could make it worse, you know, knowing they maybe had a future after all.”
Michael nods. He looks sad.
“But maybe you’re right,” she adds, “I did notice that after that she started wearing a sapphire ring.”
“Yes, I saw it. You know, she wanted me to get rid of that ring when I was in London. I’m glad now I didn’t. It must have helped her, Viv. And hopefully this trip will help her too. It was good of you to come. I take it you had to pull Abbie out of school?”
Viv nods, stubs her cigarette out on the wall. “Yes, but it’s only for a bit. I thought it would do us all good. To see you, get away. For Abbie too.” She tells Michael of their time with Issy.
He listens, smoking quietly. When his cigarette is finished, he lights another one for himself immediately, offers her one. Viv starts to decline, then shrugs, takes another one, lets him light it for her. She inhales, blowing smoke into the air. It seeps into the air, slips away through green fronded branches.
“Abbie’s a lovely girl,” he says. “She looks a lot like –”
“I know,” laughs Viv, “everyone thinks she looks like Gin. So much so, when we’ve been out and about, everyone thinks she’s Gin’s daughter, not mine.”
Michael chews his lip, and suddenly Viv has a sense it was not Gin he thought Abbie resembled. Maybe he was about to say Gabe. She regrets interrupting him.
As if following her train of thought, Michael asks, “Have you been out to the farm yet?”
“No, I thought tomorrow maybe.” Abbie has made progress, she says, telling him of how before the trip she would always refer to Gabe as my real father whereas only yesterday she said my dad. “I think he feels more real to her now, you know?” She waits a moment before admitting to Michael that it is possibly harder for her to go to the farm than it is for Abbie.
He puts his arm around her shoulders, gives her a quick squeeze. It is so dark in the garden that the light from inside the house is bright. “Shall we go in and see what those two are up to, then?”
Gin looks up as they enter, gives them a small, sad smile. Abbie sits with her face fixed on the table, seemingly uninterested in their entrance. Her mussed hair straggles in front of her face, a hairslide doing little to hold back its thick fall. She is sorting through photographs spread out across Michael’s kitchen table. Viv sits down next to her daughter. Things have not been easy between them. Viv had tried to make reparation for that day in the sunroom, but Abbie had remained recalcitrant. Jonnie’s departure meant the girls inevitably spent more time at home. And they were alone more often, given the increasing time Viv had spent with Nick. It had been time she was reluctant to curtail. Until that day in his office.
Again she must turn her thoughts away from Nick. It still hurt. To her credit, Abbie had shown no delight at the break-up. Viv wonders about her and boys. Kayleigh, although younger, is already popular. Already, suspects Viv, a heartbreaker. But Abbie does not talk, does not give up information willingly, and Viv had tried t
o respect that. If she is honest, she knows she feels uncomfortable with the subject, and it had been easier not to push or pry.
She puts an arm around Abbie, who shifts slightly but does not shrug her off.
They have been talking about Gabe, realises Viv, the reason for the sorrow in Gin’s smile. She wonders what Gin has told her. About his decision to go to the Army, about his decision not to leave? Perhaps it would have been better had Gin left Abbie with what she already knew. Must she subject Gabe’s daughter to what torture he must have endured, enough to make him take his own belt, attach it to the bars of his window, and pull it tight around his own neck? Must Gin tell Abbie how she and Issy had to go and fetch his body from the police? How it had to be released, like an exhibit in a court of law? Viv had always wondered what had become of the belt, the strip of leather that in desperation had become his release.
Gin leans over to pull her own box forward from beneath the table, tears off the thick tape that Issy had sealed it with. She starts to pick it up.
“Here, Gin,” says Michael, “that’s too heavy for you. Let me get it.”
Gin already has it halfway in the air. As Michael reaches for it, it slips in her hand, and tears, the bottom pulls apart, and its contents spill across the table and the floor. They all start to help pick up the scattered items that Issy had set aside for Gin.
Gin kneels on the floor, files through some envelopes, sorting them into one pile. Michael kneels beside her. One envelope is grubby and stained, with no markings on the outside.
“Gin, what’s this?” he holds it towards her for her consideration.
Gin looks up and her eyes close briefly as if from pain, but when she speaks her voice is steady. “That’s Gabe’s suicide note.” Her eyes meet his directly.
A terrible hush.
Michael’s hand drops and he sits back heavily on the floor. He runs his free hand through his hair. For a long while he and Gin look at each other, saying nothing.
Eventually, Gin speaks. “You can read it if you want, Mikey.”
Viv sits, frozen. Her concern is for Abbie, who is looking at Michael with a weird expression on her face. Michael rubs at his eyes, blinks hard, looks down at the envelope. Gin shuffles over to him on her knees, sits herself next to him and leans against him.
“I miss him,” he says quietly. He looks up at Viv and then back at Gin.
She nods. They both look at the envelope. It shakes slightly in Michael’s hand.
She touches his forearm. “I’ll make us something to drink.”
“I’ll do it,” Viv says, rising from the chair, eager to have something to do. “Tea or coffee?”
“Coffee… strong,” says Michael. He stands, leaves the kitchen, taking the letter with him.
Gin stands also. She comes over to Viv, touches her arm. “You can read it too, if you want, Viv. There’s not much to explain it.”
Viv turns to her, and hugs her tightly. For a while they hold each other. I must not cry, thinks Viv, for Abbie’s sake, for Gin’s. I have shed too many tears over Gabe, I must not cry.
Viv is scooping rich Brazilian roast into the cafetière when Michael appears at the door of the kitchen. They all look up at him. His face is streaked with anguish, and his eyes narrow against the light in the kitchen. In his hand he clutches the letter.
“What?” says Viv, seeing his expression, the spoon of coffee in the air.
“Gin, Viv… this isn’t – this isn’t what you think it is.”
49. GIN
That day, remember. That day, a Monday. A Monday as blue as his eyes. With the phone down, the silence was as intense as its siren moments before. Moments, long enough to change a life, but not a love. Bring back a love, but not a life. Back into the kitchen, she watched the dinner burning, those moments on. Since then, since him, before those moments. A slow anger began to burn. Burning like the dinner, slowly.
Gabriel.
Wednesday, she sat waiting. Waiting on the hard pine of a police bench. Waiting for her sister Issy to exit the room behind the door in front of her. Beyond its heavy varnish lay the pale body of their brother, dark purple bruises around his neck. Somehow, Gabe, her brother, full of life, was dead. Dead, he could be released. Alive, he had been a prisoner of the State, an Army deserter. A dissident, a dissenter, a disgrace.
The door opened. Isadore stood there, framed in stillness. Ashen, bereft, despite the illusion of calm; long, auburn tresses held in check, with wisps twisting, writhing free to stand out stark, Medusa-like, against the pallor of her face. Gabe had nicknamed their elder sister Isadorable, and she could deny him nothing. Issy it was who had to call, to organise, look after things, cover for their mother’s eternal incapabilities, their father’s devastation. And Issy who must take him home.
Thursday, they sat together on the plane, with no words for each other. They sat, staring ahead, two sisters whose thoughts lay with the coffin below them in the hold. Above the clouds, the sun still shone. They descended through the puffy mist of them, hanging over their home-town. From the air it might have been pretty. If passing over, one might have imagined it peaceful, idyllic even, this untouched town banking up against the dunes, great swathes of sand meeting the tumult of ocean spray. Red rooftops baking on any other given day, heat spilling upward from the tainted tar of roads edged with dust. But not that day. That day it sat cold, bleached of colour, shunned by the sun. As it ought. Fitting that the life be withheld from that airless little cesspool. Fitting that her brother’s death took with it the light.
Friday, his funeral, and she felt grief stir inside her. A chilly Friday morning. The whole town would be there, thought Gin. Scandalised in their small-mindedness. Come ostensibly to grieve, commiserate, but voyeurs all, come to feed like vultures off another’s pain, to add some snippet of delightful gossip, barely masked as shock or sympathy, to their dinner parties on sticky evenings after days unchanged for thirty years. Unheeded, the revolution sat dormant but growing, on their doorstep, feeding off their ignorance and blinkered self-indulgence.
The church on the hill lent no atmosphere. Stark-white, with standard spire, it sat apart, opulent with newness. The wind off nearby dunes blew harsh and unforgiving. Below in the damp hollow shrouded by trees, lay her grandfather’s grave. It depressed Gin, the thought of his body lying there, rotting in the moss. They were all alike, the graves. All slabbed with the smooth white pebbles of death, and many adorned with flowers encased bizarrely in round bowls of glass, as if with preservation of the blooms to deny the decay of bodies beneath. All things must of nature change. But here, this town, like so many others, sat, resisting progress or evolution, stubbornly stuck in its way of life. Adventure may have brought their ancestors to that country, that town, yet any lust for change seemed to have been bred out of their blood.
The church was large, yet full. Irrespective of motive, there was a hush to any petty whisperings as they filed in. Gabe had been so young, so full of potential.
Gin watched her mother greet the crowd, like an actress taking an encore. How could she? Rachel McMann was starchedly beautiful, a dark rose on display, her thick black hair pulled severely off her forehead. A fat diamante cross dripped from a necklace. She leant heavily on Jacob’s arm. As always, Jacob, her refuge and her flight from pain.
Gin’s father, stooped, walked behind his wife, with Issy on his arm; his son’s death had aged him in a day. They entered the church ahead of her.
Somehow, she was detached, held from them, outside still. Someone was talking to her now, and she had to be polite. There was a while yet before the service would start, the organ still hummed its mourning drone.
And there he was. Simon.
This was what it took to bring him back to her.
A year, almost a full year of silence.
There must have been rage against him inside her, but she could summon none. He looked thinner, in a suit that would once have shifted unfamiliar on his frame, but he wore it well, used to the big c
ity, the hospital meetings with registrars and consultants. Gin must have stopped to stare. As if he felt her eyes on him, he turned from the two young women at his side. They had been at school with her and Gabe, but their names walked with them into the church. A certain catatonia had hold of her limbs. She looked down at her arms, as if they did not belong to her, willed them to move.
Gabe was dead.
This was Gabe’s funeral.
A scream of denial built in her chest, some kind of truth finding purchase on her mind. No dream of horror, no nightmare.
Almost all were in the church; a few late cars rushed up the drive, then halted, driving more slowly at the gate, mindful of the presence of death.
A blonde woman stepped out of a champagne-coloured car, pulling at her skirt. Her skirt too short, her blouse too tight. A man, overweight, followed; he had the look of a businessman, thought Gin. His lips, she noticed absently, were thick and wet. He licked them, looking pointedly at Gin. Gin was openly staring, and rude with it. She was trying to remember the woman’s name, her mouth moving soundlessly around unknown syllables. They had been in the same school year, she recalled vaguely, but she could not remember her name. The woman gripped Gin’s hand.
“I’m sorry, hey,” she said, with an Eastern Cape accent.
Gin looked at her blankly.
It was Simon who answered, who had come up to them. “Thank you,” with sincerity. It was Simon who shook the man’s hand, steered him in the direction of the church door. They murmured pleasantries in parting. The woman was smiling. She was smiling. Flicking her hair flirtatiously, looking up at Simon, eyelashes thick with mascara. Gabe was dead. And yet she smiled.
It registered suddenly: Sandra de Jongh, the girl who had fallen in the horse manure.