Alarm Girl (8 page)

Robin wanted to go, even though we had only been there a short time. There was a bus waiting at the market. This time it wasn’t so crowded. I said to Zami It’s so sad about your granny and your mum and your sister. Robin
gave me a dig and said Don’t get involved. The whole journey I kept thinking about Zami’s mother’s dying wish. I was thinking what your dying wish was. Robin doesn’t look after me. He doesn’t do anything with me except be mean. When I asked for my scarf back he threw it at me and said Have your stupid baby scarf.

I was trying to remember what were the last words I heard that came out of your mouth. I think it was Night-night.

When we arrived back at the village near Dad’s all the little children were holding our hands and laughing. They ran away when we got to our gate. Zami stayed behind to talk to Lindisizwe and Dad came storming out of the house looking really angry and wearing smart trousers. He shouted because he had been looking all over for us and he didn’t know where we were. I told him we went into the village and he said we were only allowed out of the gate with him. It felt like we were his prisoners. I said Why are you wearing that outfit and he said I haven’t finished with you, young lady, but it will have to wait because there’s a surprise for both of you indoors.

Whenever anyone says that, I think the surprise is going to be you. We went indoors and there, sitting on the sofas, were Nan and Grandad. It wasn’t you. Robin said What the –? and his face was like in a cartoon when the character looks and then looks again and their eyes go ginormous because they can’t hardly believe what they are seeing. Dad said Now we can all be together
as a family for Christmas. It was Christmas in three days’ time but it didn’t feel like it and Nan and Grandad didn’t feel like Nan and Grandad because they looked different in Africa. Grandad was all shy and Nan’s hair was all big and standing up where she’d back-combed it like she does when she wants to give it body. It was weird them being there – as if it wasn’t really and truly them. Dad tried to put his arm round me but I didn’t let him. He said Sorry I got so angry, Indy, but you have to understand there are different rules here. Neither of you had your phones with you and I didn’t know where you were.

Nan said she couldn’t believe the place Dad had and wasn’t the garden lovely. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt I had never seen before. It had a big white bird on it and the sleeves had white beads hanging off. You never get to see her arms normally, but in the summer you do and they’re all freckly. It was summer here even though it was Christmas. That’s a colourful top you’re wearing, Nan, I said, and she said to Dad She doesn’t miss a thing which is what she always says about me. How about that dress of yours, that’s new, she said, and she noticed Robin’s new T-shirt too but she didn’t say anything about my shoes so I knew we would have an argument about wearing them to school. She bought her bird T-shirt at the airport when they were waiting for a lift. Dad said Sorry about the wait and Robin said Africa Time and everyone laughed. Nan said Don’t I get a kiss then and me and Robin had to kiss her and
Grandad. Then we all went and sat on the big sofas. Dad said Both of them are doing so well, meaning us, and Grandad said we were lovely kids. I know that, Dad said, but you’re doing a good job is all I’m saying and I want to thank you. No need, said Grandad, and he wouldn’t look at Dad. They were all talking as if they didn’t know each other and none of us were looking at each other. I was looking at my shoes which were all dusty from the village and I couldn’t wait to clean them. Dad was talking about all the things we were going to do while Nan and Grandad were here, like safari and posh restaurants. We were going to an island with a prison on it the next day. Nan said it was very generous of Dad to pay for their holiday and he said they were welcome any time and it wouldn’t cost a penny.

There is a narrow white line running around his neck, where his necklace goes. If you lift up his necklace you can see what colour he would be if he lived in England not in South Africa. It would be the line to cut along if someone was chopping his head off.

WIND RATTLED THE WINDOW
frames and whistled through the thin walls of the rented cottage. Karen could feel its draught as she stood at the main bedroom window watching trees bend. In the moments when it paused she could hear Ian talking with the children in the room next door.

‘When adults get fed up or tired they don’t cry like kids cry, do they?’ he was saying.

‘Why not?’ Robin asked.

She heard Ian hesitate and the wind, too, held its breath, like a child crying, gathering energy for the next wail. ‘Because they’re grown-up, I suppose,’ he said. ‘It’s the kids’ job to cry, but the grown-ups have to soldier on.’

‘Soldier?’ Indy’s voice now. It cut Karen to the core.

‘Sometimes Mum feels like being quiet, doesn’t she?’ Ian explained. ‘Sometimes we all do. And we just have to leave her be.’

She moved quickly away from the bedroom window and went downstairs. There was a sensation of being followed and she knew what the feeling was. She knew not to look back over her shoulder.

Rain spattered on the coals. It was ridiculous to light a fire in summer but the cottage was freezing. This holiday was a disaster. Several times they had bundled the children into waterproofs hoping to walk to a nearby beach, but each time the weather had turned them back. Today they had spent the day indoors trying to play board games, but at four years old Indigo was too young for most of them, so Ian had made her a shop underneath the table where her merchandise, comprised of their own belongings and random items from around the cottage, remained on display. They had put the kids to bed early – it was still light – and now the evening stretched out ahead of them.

‘Robin wants you to go up,’ he said, coming into the room. There was a glass of wine in his hand but he hadn’t poured one for her. She was afraid he was reaching the limits of his tolerance. He had been earnest and patient in his bid to understand why it was that she could become rigid – petrified, almost – but soon he would demand that she account for her behaviour. She had a vision of him with an enormous ledger in which he would list his complaints and ask her to explain herself.

There were no answers she could provide. The sums wouldn’t tally.

‘It’s not helping,’ he said. ‘The way you’re being.’

Rain whipped the windows. Time slowed. When he spoke, his voice sounded unnaturally loud, and yet she knew he was speaking normally.

‘The kids are feeling it and so am I,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

With his question came the rushing sensation she had been dreading. With his words it gathered momentum, like an urgent beast that had collapsed in pursuit of her, and now staggered to its feet. It thundered towards her with frightening speed. Its weight was immense, this bull in the china shop of her mind. If she didn’t talk about it or address it by name she could keep it at bay, but if she made eye contact she would be done for. If she acknowledged it, it would come for her, like an animal from the wild that, once allowed into the home, would ingratiate itself perhaps, and appear tame, but
nonetheless retain an awesome and frightening power that it could unleash without warning.

She held Ian’s gaze, willing him to sense the energy in the room.

‘Robin wants you to go up,’ he said once more, and a great gust buffeted the house. Something fell from the roof and clattered to the ground outside the back door. Ian sighed and turned away from her.

She climbed the narrow staircase and found her children motionless in their beds.

‘I don’t like this house,’ Robin said.

His limbs were in outline under old-fashioned sheets and blankets. The room smelt of mildew and a dream-catcher hung limply from the lampshade, its tendrils thick with dust. She and Ian had visited so many other places – stunning places, full of colour and noise and heat; how had they had ended up in a damp holiday cottage where dreams become clogged in deposits made up of strangers’ skin cells?

The wind shrieked and she was afraid the flimsy walls might crack and topple, afraid she herself would crack and topple. She imagined plaster and bricks tumbling around them, burying her and the children. The weight of the debris compressing her head from all sides would be a relief, balancing out the heaviness inside her mind.

Or perhaps the ferocious wind would catch the cottage and fling it into the sky. A powerful funnel would whisk all four of them into a vortex, swallowing
them whole. Or else it might explode, the owners of the cottage having planted a bomb timed to go off at precisely this moment, combusting outwards, windows smashing, bright splinters of glass piercing her from all sides, slicing her skin and spiking her eyes, gashing the palms of her hands, stabbing her. The bedroom came back into focus. Her skull tightened; imagined wounds throbbed. The eiderdown on Robin’s bed was one of the old-fashioned kind, its shiny, silken material cool under her fingertips. Its barely-thereness was intolerable. She knew what she must do. What she must do was go downstairs and drop a glass on the stone floor of the kitchen, lacerate herself. It would release her, if just for a while.

She stood up quickly from the bed, heard what must be her voice say goodnight.

‘Why do we have to live here?’ Robin asked.

‘We don’t live here,’ she replied, speaking slowly, as if to a foreigner, or as if she was the foreigner.

‘Are we going back to our old house?’

‘Of course.’ She made her way to the door. ‘This is a holiday, isn’t it? We’re just staying here for a little bit.’

‘Why?’ Indy’s voice came from the other bed.

‘Why?’ She hesitated. Glass shards waited for her. ‘To see what it’s like.’

She switched off the light. Her children were two humps in the dimness of the strange room.

‘To see if we like it?’ Indy asked.

‘Yes.’

There was another shape in the room too, indistinct in the gloom but vivid in its malignancy.

‘I don’t like it,’ Robin said.

Her mood was infectious. She was infecting them all with it. She mustn’t wait for the house to explode or a storm destroy it or a tornado carry them all off into blissful oblivion; better for her to leave now, or when it grew dark. She could walk across the headland to the edge of the cliff, throw herself on the rocks.

‘Dad says if the weather’s better tomorrow we can go to a beach where there’s lots of sand,’ she said. The words were so thick in her mouth she had trouble moving her tongue around them.

‘I don’t like sand,’ Indigo said.

‘We’ll be going home soon,’ she said, trying hard to make her voice sound like it should.

She went back downstairs.

‘How were they?’ Ian asked, coming into the kitchen.

‘Okay.’

‘Christ knows, I’m trying,’ he said.

She stared at a glass she held in her hand, willing it to fall from her fingers.

‘I get nothing from you,’ he said.

Her fingers remained tensed. She couldn’t seem to loosen them. The glass remained whole. She couldn’t even summon up the will to break something.

‘You know what,’ he shouted before he managed to control his voice, ‘if you don’t feel like talking or being part of this family, just let me know.’

He reached for the cardboard sign he’d made for Indy’s shop. It hung on the back of one of the dining chairs and had the word
Closed
written on one side,
Open
on the other. He yanked it off the chair and looped it around her neck with
Closed
facing outwards. ‘Closed for business, right? Let me know when you’re open.’

His earnestness was gone, and his handsomeness, too. His voice was loud and his short hair made him look like a thug. He left the room and she remained, feeling like a dunce, in the corner. She had to keep still, because of the brute that was coming for her. If she kept still, the bully might not see her.

‘It’s not new,’ she said.

‘What’s not new?’

He was in front of her but they were no longer in the kitchen. She didn’t know what had happened to the glass that was in her hand. She didn’t know what had happened to the kitchen.

‘The feeling inside comes further out,’ she said.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘You’re just annoying me now.’

She wanted to tell him about a time before she knew him, but the words were too frightening and would summon the beast, which was what she was trying to avoid.

‘I just want to be a normal family,’ he said, breathing hard.

She had no idea how long they had been sitting on the sofa. She looked past him, checking the room for
clues. The fire had burned low in the grate. His wine glass was empty. She could hear him trying to regulate the amount of air he was taking into his lungs.

‘Let’s give up,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back.’

She let out a little moan.

‘What’s keeping us here? We don’t have to stay. Karen!’

He gripped her tightly by the wrists and shook her. She allowed herself to be shaken. She wanted him to shake her, in the hope that he might be able to shake her out of herself.

WE WENT ON A FERRY
to the island where Nelson Mandela was a prisoner. In the car on the way Nan and Grandad and Dad were all talking about his funeral. Grandad said people might start rioting and Nan said they didn’t riot when he was alive because he suffered enough. She said even though she didn’t like Nelson Mandela’s tactics when he was a terrorist it was dreadful to be locked up for so long. Dad didn’t agree that he was a terrorist and Nan said We’ll agree to disagree then, shall we, Ian? That shut him up. If she calls him by his name like that he goes quiet.

Robin couldn’t believe we were going to the actual prison where we could stand inside Nelson Mandela’s real prison cell. Lots of other people were going too and it was in the middle of the sea. Everyone felt sick on the ferry because of the waves and the engine smoke.
Grandad tied my scarf around my face like a cowboy which was good because all I could smell was their house and no one could see my face, only my two eyes. Robin puked in a bag.