Once Upon a Time There Was a Traveller

by Kate Pullinger

  ‘Why are we going to Sea Point?’

  Anna’s feet were planted in first position: heels together, toes apart. Her feet were itching to try a pirouette. They longed to dance or skip or jump from one pavement square to the next. She shut her eyes for a second and wished she was inside the Waldorf, sipping a grenadilla float while the band played ‘Rock Around The Clock’ and people got up and jived, instead of standing here with the south-easter whirling dust and old bus tickets in her face. Except that if she wasn’t here she’d be at school and Miss Smit would be shouting ‘domkop’ because she’d got her Afrikaans homework wrong again.

  Her mother cleared her throat. ‘To see a new doctor.’

  ‘But I’m not sick any more,’ Anna said.

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘So why are we going?’

  ‘Because,’ said her mother, grabbing the brim of her hat which was about to blow off.

  Anna could see their reflections in the window of the restaurant alongside them. Her mother’s straw hat at the top, then her navy-blue, button-through dress, and then her legs going on right to the bottom of the glass. Next to her, halfway down, was Anna’s pink blouse with the puff sleeves, and her grey pleated skirt, and her legs which looked like pick-up sticks, except that legs were supposed to hold you up and pick-up sticks just fell down. She’d played it on the folding table that Sarie carried in from the lounge and set up beside her bed when she was sick. Only Sarie never had time for pick-up sticks because she always had to go and hang out the washing or polish the front steps or peel the potatoes for lunch, because Madam might otherwise give her the sack.

  ‘Because why?’

  ‘Because of your legs.’

  ‘But,’ said Anna, ‘we’ve already seen millions of doctors and my legs are completely better now. I can walk and run, I can even do cartwheels like Yvette van Nie —’

  ‘I know all that,’ her mother said, and gave Anna’s hand a shake as if she wanted to throw it away, except she didn’t let go. ‘That’s the whole point.’

  ‘So why are we going to a new doctor then?’

  Her mother seemed to expel all the breath in her lungs at once. ‘Will you please stop driving me crazy with your questions.’

  The only parts of their bodies that Anna couldn’t see were their feet because the window stopped at their ankles. So she couldn’t admire the thick, white, crinkly soles of her new sandals, or her mother’s high heels that matched her dress.

  Sometimes she would try on those shoes. She’d wait until her parents had gone to work and Sarie was beating wet tea leaves into the lounge carpet as she sang along to pennywhistle kwela on the wireless. Then she’d open her mother’s wardrobe and start with the red peep-toes hiding behind the shoe rack. But every pair she tried was always the same: her feet would slip about in them like fish. She stared at the window and kept her lips shut tight so no more questions could escape.

  The bus arrived and they climbed on. The seats for white people were empty so they marched right to the front and sat in Anna’s favourite place behind the driver. The conductor blew his whistle and the bus began to move. Suddenly a woman with a baby tied on her back in a red blanket ran across the road, waving her hand. The driver hooted and Anna swivelled round to watch the woman jump on as the bus gathered speed.

  ‘Want to get yourself killed?’ said the conductor, but the woman just laughed and gave him her money. All the seats by the doorway were full so she had to stand and hold on to a strap that hung from the ceiling.

  ‘Hoe gaan dit?’ said an old woman with a creased face. She got up, and the woman with the baby took her seat. They went on talking in Afrikaans but it was too fast for Anna to understand.

  Sarie had said hoe gaan dit? when Anna dressed up as her friend and knocked on the door of her room in the backyard. She’d mixed cocoa and water in a saucer and rubbed it over her face, and tied her doll on her back wrapped in the old tablecloth that her mother had given her for dressing up. Hoe gaan dit? Sarie said to her. It meant: how are you?

  ‘You’ll rick your neck if you’re not careful,’ her mother said, ‘and anyway it’s rude to stare.’ She tugged off her white gloves. ‘I can’t believe you brushed your hair this morning.’ Turning Anna’s face towards her, she unclipped her hair-slide, pulled the floppy brown hair away from her forehead and clipped the slide back in. ‘Always untidy, just like your father. Shame you don’t take after my side of the family; just think of Grandma’s curls. Well, there’s nothing for it but a perm when you’re older.’

  Grandma nearly got herself killed one day when her bus drove off while she was getting on. Anna didn’t know if she had fallen into the road with her head cracked open like a walnut, and if the ambulance had raced up with the bells ringing, and if her blood had splashed into the gutter like the day the water main burst. Grandma lived in America so Anna couldn’t ask her. And when she’d questioned her parents they said: don’t be morbid. ‘What is morbid?’ she asked, and her father said it meant unwholesome or sickly, and her mother clapped her hands and told her it was time for bed. But when they wanted her to be careful about climbing on buses, or washing her hands after swapping comics at bioscope on Saturday mornings because you don’t know where they’ve been, they would say: Remember what happened to Grandma.

  The bus was slowing down in heavy traffic. Anna wiped the window to look at the flower sellers who squatted among the buckets of red and pink and purple flowers overflowing the narrow alley. A few yards further on, the bus came to a standstill outside OK Bazaars. Her father had bought a bag of hot chips in the basement which they ate with their fingers, and he said it was a poetic experience but don’t tell your mother because she doesn’t go in for poetry.

  ‘That window is filthy.’ Her mother clicked open her new tan handbag. It was made from the skin of an ostrich and had tiny pimples all over where the ostrich’s quills had been pulled out. ‘Clean yourself up now,’ she said, shaking out a blue hanky, the spare one she kept in her bag for emergencies.

  ‘It’s not dirty,’ Anna said, giving her hand a quick wipe on her skirt to be sure.

  ‘What’s this then?’ Her mother caught hold of her wrist, spat on the hanky and rubbed it over Anna’s hand and fingers.

  Dirt was dangerous. Dirt made you sick. Flies could kill you. If you got polio you would die or end up with one of your legs shorter than the other and have to wear a black boot for the rest of your life. When she was sick her legs hurt so much she couldn’t walk. She had to stay in bed and wasn’t allowed to be a Raggle Taggle Gypsy in the school concert at the end of term. The doctor came every day. He stuck needles in her arms to siphon her blood into little bottles which he took away for testing. Her father bought her treats on his way home from work as a reward for being so brave: acid drops, iced zoo biscuits, little bags of sherbet with liquorice sticks to dab it up. She gave him her word of honour not to make a mess on the sheets.

  ‘You see?’ Her mother held up the smudged hanky in triumph. ‘That’s the proof. So don’t you deny it, my girl.’ She rolled the hanky into a ball and stuffed it in the pocket of her bag.

  The ostrich bag, swaddled in tissue paper, lived inside the wardrobe when it wasn’t being used. On the same shelf lay the birthday present from Anna’s father: a silky black dress that looked like a petticoat which her mother never wore.

  Anna had lingered in the passage after breakfast on her mother’s birthday. Through the half-open bedroom door she’d seen her pull the dress over her head, and her father shake out a pair of stockings like golden shadows. Her mother sat down on the bed, the black ribbon straps of the dress slipping off her bony shoulders as she leaned forward to gather each stocking in turn and ease them on over her feet. Anna watched her smooth out the wrinkles to the tops of her legs, stand up and press the thickened welt into the little clips attached to her step-in. Then she straightened and looked across at the mirror on the wardrobe door, the folds of the dress she’d hiked up falling back over her thighs, all
a shimmer in the morning sunlight. Her mother was staring at herself, it seemed to Anna, as if the woman in the mirror with precise, yellow-waved hair and sea-blue eyes was not her at all, but someone she had never seen before. ‘You’ve got better legs than any of your precious ballerinas,’ said Anna’s father, who was standing close behind. He wound his arms around her mother and began to kiss the side of her neck. ‘What do you want from me, Arthur?’ she said in a low voice. ‘Don’t you know who I am after all these years?’ He moved away, thrusting his hands in his pockets, and did not answer. She began to take off the dress. Her father started for the door and saw Anna standing in the passage. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. She said that she wasn’t doing anything. ‘Then go and get ready for school.’ She told him that she was ready already. ‘In that case, go help Sarie clear the bladdy table, for chrissake.’ Anna always took care to fold the petticoat dress exactly the same way her mother had folded it, and to set it back on the shelf in exactly the same place.

  ‘It’s enough to make you sick, the state of this bus.’

  Anna’s eyes followed the toe of the navy blue shoe which was pointing at each of the cigarette butts on the floor, and at the trail of wet left by a brown bottle rolling around under the seats.

  ‘I’ve a good mind to complain to the City Council, but will they listen? Ha.’ The bus began to trundle forward again. Her mother frowned over Anna’s head at the street. A couple of dronkies with battered felt hats jammed on the backs of their heads were staggering about on the corner, strumming banjos, crooning fragments of some long-forgotten, half-remembered song. ‘No one cares about anyone else these days,’ she said, ‘they’re all in it for themselves.’

  When Anna was sick, her father cut holes out of an old grocery box and set it upside down over her legs like a bridge so nothing could touch them, not even the sheet. Joko Tea Unequalled for Flavour and Strength it said on both sides of the box. Her mother closed her eyes and murmured that this was the last straw. ‘But,’ said Anna, ‘there isn’t any straw in the box like there is when it’s had peaches in it or guavas.’ Her mother covered her face with her hands as if she was counting to ten for Anna to jump out of bed and run away and hide.

  They reached the crossroads. The policeman in white gauntlets beckoned them on and they turned left. Anna’s feet began to jiggle up and down as the bus rumble-grumbled out of the city towards the sea. The shops, the people, the slow-moving carts and lorries were all left behind, and suddenly they were going at such a lick she couldn’t even count the palm trees on Beach Road.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about. The doctor only wants to ask you a few questions.’ Her mother’s voice had gone all dry and papery, the way it did when she’d had it up to here and had to go and lie down in the bedroom with the curtains drawn.

  Her mother wanted her to be a famous ballerina when she grew up, and the ballet teacher did say that Anna had useful legs. The teacher also told Yvette van Niekerk that she had perfect feet. The trouble with Yvette, said her mother, was that she had a vivid imagination. Anna’s name was a compromise. Her mother had set her heart on Anna Pavlova, after the Russian ballerina, but her father was determined to call her Anna Livia Plurabelle who was a character in Finnegans Wake, his favourite book. In the end they settled on Anna Olivia Pandora. A compromise, her father explained, was what people ended up with instead of going to war.

  Her mother inspected her watch, then delved into her handbag. She brought out a gold compact and fluffed powder over her nose and cheeks, ran a lipstick across her mouth. Anna wanted to press her fingers into that powder and make her cheeks all smooth and pink like her mother’s cheeks. She wanted to turn her lips red with her mother’s lipstick.

  Soon she would see her favourite, her very best thing in the whole wide world and universe. They were getting nearer and nearer. Please don’t talk to me, Anna thought, and she wished that her mother could see this thought inside her head. The bus slowed down on the next bend and there it was, shining like a castle in the sea.

  The lighthouse. Her lighthouse.

  Her mother squeezed her arm. She was holding out a twist of barley sugar. Anna crammed it into her mouth and turned back to the window to stop her mother spoiling everything, like when she burst into her bedroom in the morning calling, ‘Anna, it’s time to get up!’ in the middle of a beautiful dream.

  The lighthouse was her castle, her ship, her best friend; it was sailing round the bay right next to her; it was keeping her company.

  ‘He says it won’t take very long. Are you listening, Anna?’

  Sometimes you could hear the foghorn at Mouille Point warning those in peril on the sea. This was also the name of a hymn sung in school assembly. The foghorn sounded like an animal with a sore throat, a great big lonely animal with a bellow so loud it drowned out the noises of people talking.

  ‘Will you look at me when I’m talking to you,’ said her mother, and her stockings hissed as she uncrossed her legs.

  Anna turned away from the window and gazed at her mother’s face and then at the ostrich handbag on her lap. Ostriches had thin legs and only two toes on each foot but they could run faster than anything. She used to run faster than Yvette van Niekerk but now Yvette could run faster than her. How did an ostrich become a bag with a pocket and a zip and a little mirror inside? She wanted to look out of the window again because any second now the lighthouse would disappear back down into the sea where it came from, even though her mother had once told her that buildings didn’t move, it was impossible, just made-up nonsense in her head. But she couldn’t look because her mother was watching her.

  ‘Sit properly now,’ her mother said, and smoothed Anna’s pleats over her knees. ‘This new doctor just wants to talk to you. It’s about your legs.’ She slid her gloves back on, pressing them down between her fingers. ‘He wants to talk to you about why you couldn’t walk. Because the hospital says all the tests are normal. Do you hear me? They said that every single one of those tests is completely normal.’ She tore the gloves off and struck them against the ostrich bag. ‘It’s proof, Anna. It’s proof there is nothing wrong with you.’

  Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and so are you. That’s what her mother wrote on the first page of Anna’s autograph book when her legs were hurting and she couldn’t walk.

  ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ Her mother’s blue eyes were tunnelling into Anna’s grey eyes. ‘When you were lying in bed with that grubby box over your knees you weren’t ill at all. There was nothing whatsoever the matter with you.’

  Anna stole a glance at the window. The south-easter was blowing the palm trees this way and that. It was blowing sea spray against the glass.

  ‘Anna?’ Her mother’s eyes were watering. ‘Anna, why won’t you listen to me?’

  It had gone now, the lighthouse had gone back down under the waves. Anna knew that, even though she was looking into her mother’s sea-watery eyes and not out of the window at the sea. She knew it without checking because she didn’t need to check. Because the bus had finished driving around the bay and was zooming straight along Beach Road; and soon it would be passing Rocklands and the swing park and the Pavilion, and then they’d be there.

  The Elephant in the Suitcase – Deepa Anappara

  Nirmal whistled as he shovelled, but he was not feeling cheerful. His head throbbed from the summer heat and his spine ached from bending down. He had hoped to dig a six-foot-deep trench around his house by nightfall, but a day’s work had only resulted in blisters on his palms and a shallow ditch that even a child could cross. His mouth tasted of dust and disappointment.

  A Malabar thrush picked up the feeble notes of his whistle, as if telling him not to give up. It was an old habit of his, this looking to the forest for signs. In his first year as a forest guard, a pair of mottled wood owls had kept him awake with their eerie howls one night and, the very next morning, the deputy ranger had turned up outside his quarters with the news of his moth
er’s death.

  He stopped digging to look for the whistling thrush in the canopy of trees surrounding the house. But the bird was nowhere to be seen. He aired his khaki shirt, which patches of sweat had plastered to his skin. A squawking flock of parakeets descended on the tree-tops. He wondered if he would be safer up a tree. His ditch would deter neither wild dogs nor elephants.

  The shovel on his shoulder, he jumped over the ditch and headed back to the house, dry leaves crackling under his feet. His makeshift home in the forest looked grimmer than ever before. Paint peeled off its brick walls. The wooden shutters meant to cover the front windows hung loose like broken elbows. But what pinched his heart was the sight of the iron bars on the windows, which a bull elephant had bent out of shape the previous night.

  Nirmal had just about fallen asleep when he heard the unmistakable crunch of branches being snapped into two. He tiptoed to the window, looked out and saw a lone elephant shaking the jack-fruit trees in his garden, its ivory tusks beaming in the moonlight. He crawled back to his folding bed, shivering in spite of the heat. Tried to be still. Prayed to all the gods he could name. But the elephant sought him out; charged against the walls of the house, and twisted the metal bars on the windows with its trunk, trumpeting so ferociously that even the always raucous crickets fell silent. In all his years in the forest he had never seen anything like it.