The Shouting in the Dark (13 page)

Ella watches from her seat as two air stewards hold her mother down in the aisle, scold her like a child. Do they hold something against her arm, a syringe of fluid, a compress? She thinks they do. ‘When a passenger becomes a danger to others – ' one of the air stewards says, glances over at Ella. ‘Sorry,' he says uncomfortably, ‘She must be very frightened.'

Ella looks away, raises the shutter. Out in the night the clouds are on fire.

That moment she looks away, something in her heart hardens and turns sharp. The woman lying semi-conscious on the floor, her open mouth gasping, doesn't belong to her, she decides. They don't belong together. She wants to block her nose at the meaty smell of fear rising from her mother's body.

As if they have read her thoughts, the air stewards draw the mother's arms over their necks and half-drag, half-walk her to a seat behind a curtain at the front of the plane.

Ella pulls out the drawing pad the air stewardess serving dinner gave her. The pad comes along with a pencil cunningly tucked into the spiral binding of the pad. On the first page she writes in English:

Either we fall out of the sky or we don't. Either way, no amount of crying will help.

She reads what she has written. She likes it: it makes sense and sounds wise. She has a picture of their plane up high in the sky, above the clouds, as if balanced on a pinnacle of thin air.

Something about this thought gives her perspective.

She writes a few more things.

Up in the air
, she writes.
Middle of a storm. Inside a bubble.

The effect is wonderful. Anything she writes down, whatever it is, one word after another, turns things quiet. What was noisy evens out, looks suddenly level and smooth.
Mam lying there like a beast,
she writes,
a dumb beast
. The disgust she felt at seeing her restrained ebbs away. Writing, she is both separate from herself and steady within herself. There, over on that side of herself, the part of her that is being written about still feels what, a moment ago, the rest of her was feeling. Here, over on this side, she is writing what happens. Here everything is at a distance but everything at the same time is under her control.

She so much likes the effect of the writing that for the next couple of hours she goes on putting down words with her pencil, words like
zoo
and
beast
and
hate
. Until long after the overhead lights have been switched off, she makes up sentences.
I hate to see her lying there like a zoo beast
. She wonders about the word
hate
. It comes without thinking about it. Maybe she doesn't mean it. But as she puts down the letters
h-a-t-e
it gives relief.

By the end of the Gulf of Guinea storm something new has started. Landing in Luanda the next day Ella stores the colouring book inside her travel belt. The mother is back in her seat, her face pale, her purple eyelids pressed closed.

Later, at home, Ella uses her pocket money to buy a fresh writing pad at
Pentops
, Braemar's stationery shop. She tears her notes from the colouring book and staples the pages into the front of the writing pad so that the pad becomes her notebook. Writing down words in her notebook she knows she will each time feel airborne once again, flying above the world in a jet in the clouds, balanced on a pinnacle of air, as if nothing down there on the ground could hurt her.

 

Things are not very happy right now
, she will write, many times she will write this, always in English.
In fact things are quite bad. Anything I do, I don't do it right. There is a lot of noise. There is shouting from Dad, there is crying from Mam. Since we got back from Holland she cries more than ever before. How can I tell other people these things, Linda or my other school friends? I wouldn't know how to begin. I don't invite my friends home. They wouldn't be welcome. So I write things down. I write also to remember. If I was reading all this about another person, you see, I wouldn't believe it was true.

 

Some days, as she goes about, walks to and from school, lines and word-pictures come to her so fast she must tear strips from whatever paper she can find around to write them down – tissues, bits of newspaper, even the father's old ledgers. She doesn't have time to run for the notebook in her bedroom.
Soft shedding shales of shadow
, she writes.
Leaves spattered against the sky
. And lines done by others, for their rhythm.
She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces through the room. I wandered lonely as a cloud. Sorry I could not travel both, and be one traveller.

In a poetry book at school she discovers a poem called ‘Romance' by W J Turner that sings out to her from its first line. She learns the poem off by heart and writes the best verses into her notebook.

 

When I was but thirteen or so

I went into a golden land;

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

Took me by the hand.

 

My father died, my mother too,

They passed like fleeting dreams.

I stood where Popocatapetl

In the sunlight gleams.

 

The houses, people, traffic seemed

Thin fading dreams by day,

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi,

They had stolen my soul away.

 

She doesn't know where the names
Cotopaxi
or
Popocatapetl
come from but she likes how the words sound strong and difficult. Whenever she recites the poem to herself, walking to and from school, she changes other things to suit her, like
thirteen
to whatever age is right at the time. She can see herself as the orphan-traveller in the golden land, the one without father and mother, the waif-child whom Chimborazo will, no two ways about it, steal very soon away. Chimborazo, she imagines, has Durban Charley's handsome face and long head, as she saw it from under the house, etched against the light. Cotopaxi looks like the ventriloquist in Oegstgeest, but stands as tall as Charley and is equally as dark.

 

At school in Braemar, the annual poetry recitation exercise that draws groans from the rest of the class becomes Ella's favourite day of the year. In her recitation she gets to say out loud some of the best, most rhythmic lines from her notebook. Even some of the groaning classmates get her excitement and cheer her on.

‘Go on, Ella,' they call as she plants her legs at the front of the classroom and waits for silence. ‘Do your thing. Eat the
Oxford English
.'

Their encouragement makes her happy, though she'd never admit it. She knows English well now but still can't get enough of shifting the curious shapes of English words around her mouth. She cherishes old-fashioned
hath
and
doth
in the King James Bible they read in assembly for their softness. She feels loyal to
brick
and
block
because they have hard edges like the playthings they point to.
Brick
and
block
click together.
Box
, too.
Quench
,
Wiltshire
,
tooth
are wedge-shaped; green on top, blue underneath. Dutch words by contrast are shapeless and spongy, beige all over. No one would dream of cherishing them.

Every year her recitation from Hopkins, Hardy, Frost, ensures her nomination as Braemar School's representative to the annual provincial Eisteddfod down in Durban's City Hall. She stands in two categories, Poetic Recitation and Speaking One's Own Poetry. For the Own Poetry category each year she weaves her scattered lines of verse into two stanzas in her notebook, a collage that is always about nature but set in a world nothing like the warty lands around Braemar.
A country lane fringed with trees. A towering indigo mountain. An ocean wave churned to cream.

It's good to go down to Durban in a teacher's car, to suck in the humid air and see the big white sky suspended like a lamp over the Indian Ocean. She gives her parents a vague excuse about litter picking at school, doing homework at Linda's house. What the father might say about her recitation hobby, no matter the prizes, she hasn't wanted to imagine. Total rubbish, he'd probably bellow,
je reinste flauwekul
, a waste of the teachers' time. What good can possibly come from that unruly mouth?

Each year for five years she brings home the gold certificate in both categories of the competition. The certificates she stuffs behind the books in her bookcase. The thrill is in the competition alone, the speaking and then the winning.

The sixth year that she participates, a Durban boy reciting Mark Antony's speech from
Julius Caesar
wins the gold certificate and she the silver, for Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan'. Her Eisteddfod career comes to an immediate end. That's it, she decides, it's over. Never again will she try so hard for such poor returns.

The night she fails to win the Eisteddfod she creeps as usual between her curtains, looks hard at her father talking to the invisible audience on the lawn. Does he have word shapes in his head like she does when she chants poetry? she wonders. Seeing how he loves the English language and reads his
Roget's Thesaurus
for pleasure? Peering, she tries to make believe she can see the sounds that come from his lips, the dark brown Dutch curses, the silvery chains of English sound, the jagged blood-red and purple bursts of his late-night sobbing.

 

On Sunday mornings the family takes the mother's new dog Bogey for walks in the pine plantations that cover the hills above Braemar. The pine plantations give the mother the same sublime sensations as the Veluwe in the Netherlands, her favourite woods. ‘Can't you feel it?' she carols to the husband and daughter already trailing in her path, ‘These resiny smells, how they brace the lungs?'

The mother acquired Bogey from a dog rescue with the aim of bringing him up as a walking companion, to replace dead Rex. An eager-to-please spaniel mix, Bogey will help her feel safe in the woods. So far however, though she's had him several months, she hasn't yet gone out on her own walking the dog. The pine plantations may be resiny and bracing, but they aren't exactly the Veluwe. The Veluwe doesn't have, for example, that ravine that cuts through the middle of the forest here, an alarming cleft plunging for several zigzag miles through the uplands, or the dense indigenous forest that flourishes in the shadowy depths of the ravine. At Ada's she has heard there are Bushman paintings in the depths, writhing ochre and white shapes that lour from the overhanging rocks.

On the family's walks Bogey from time to time gets wind of stirrings in the ravine's depths and sets off over its rocky edge, kicking up dust. But his barking gives the wildlife, if any, early warning. All too soon he returns empty-jawed, scrambling crestfallen through the undergrowth. The mother dusts him down, tells him to behave, stick to the pine-covered uplands. Not for them the
oerwoud
, that ancient forest down there, all its horrid, coagulated primitive life.

One Sunday, on the final lap of their walk, within sight of their parked car, Bogey disappears. They hear him sliding and crashing in the undergrowth at the lip of the ravine, where there's a dry waterfall bed. Then there's stillness, just the sound of the pines. Even the cicadas suddenly fall silent.

For a while the three stand listening to the silence, the pines. Then the wind changes direction and they hear Bogey's thin whimper. Ella picks her way over the rocks to the lip of the dry waterfall bed. The mother follows, the father a step behind her.

Ella cranes into the ravine and sees it, perched on a needle of rock rising out of the depths, a great bird of prey with a yellow eye and a grey hooked beak. On a sandy ledge some metres below the bird crouches Bogey. The two look frozen into place, the whimpering dog and the bird of prey on its ledge.

Ella recognizes the bird. It is a lammergeyer, one of the endangered predators, big as a young baboon. They can lift whole lambs high into the air, she knows, and crash them onto the rocks below, then swoop in to feed on the animal's remains. The bird lives only here and far away in the Himalayas.

Bogey's whimpers die away. As he falls silent, the mother starts sobbing. ‘Bogey, O Bogey,' she cries, ‘
O, mijn lieve hondje. O moeder
, Ella,
moeder!
'

Ella's nails cut into her palms. From the mother's aeroplane frenzies she knows how fast the volume of her anguish can build.

The bird leaves its perch. Ella, the mother and the father fall as one to their stomachs. With a metallic whisper of its wings, the bird makes a lazy swoop in the air, over the ravine and back again, to a rock just above where the dog cowers. The mother yells. The father rams his balled hand into her mouth.

For a moment the air is still. A second swoop, lower this time, just overhead, and once again out over the valley. Ella looks across and sees stamped on the blue sky above the ravine's lip the bird's feathered gauntlets, the talons beneath.

The mother grunts, gagged by the father's hand. ‘
Hou op Irene, hou op
,' he mutters in Dutch, ‘Stop your noise.' A dark stain spreads across the seat of her skirt.

Ella wriggles away from them, as far away from the mother's wetness as she can go. From her new position there's a clearer view down into the ravine. The lammergeyer has returned to its rocky needle; Bogey is still squashed flat on the ledge.

‘
O
,
O
,' cries the mother in her throat, more softly. ‘
O Ella, moeder
.'

The lammergeyer waits, the sunlight glitters on its eye.

‘Never really bargained for the life of an African bush-whacker,' the father whispers, crawling up beside Ella.