The Shouting in the Dark (17 page)

When the father is out of the dining room Ella switches the Philips radiogram on low, twiddles its short-wave dial, presses her ear to the woven plastic speaker. Between the high-pitched whining noises there are ghostly mutterings and whirrings, sometimes sudden bursts of speech, hard, staccato. But, though she holds her ear as close as she can, there are no words that she can understand, no clear message about what's going on.

Three weeks later Phineas returns, his expression as withdrawn as ever.

‘You weren't involved with those rabble-rousers, were you, Phineas?' the father asks at their iced-water break. Ella stands close by with the water glasses. ‘Those kids torching the classrooms, ruining the good things given to them by the government, that wouldn't be you, would it? I wouldn't have thought so.'

Phineas gives the father a quick glance, shrugs. ‘I had good references, boss,' he says. He doesn't meet Ella's eye but once again his lips dent deeper in.

‘So,' says the father once Phineas has gone home, ‘Phineas wasn't part of it,
meid
, as I thought. Those schoolkids were egged on by a bunch of troublemakers, Soviet saboteurs, I'd wager, or maybe just ne'er-do-wells, like they say on TV. Individuals are moving in amongst them who mean no good. You be careful, Ella, you're highly susceptible. You steer clear of such people.'

Ella quits reading the newspaper. Nothing in the paper adds up, not in the way you'd expect, where truth means one thing and false means the opposite. She loses interest in her syllogisms. It's too easy construing them when what you read and hear doesn't match what you see around you. The newspapers call the protesting schoolchildren a rabble and a mob, as if they were animals hunting in a pack. But she can see from the one photograph the
Natal Witness
prints that they are teenagers the same as her, wearing school uniform like her own. One or two of the handwritten placards they carry say
Viva!
in wobbly letters – the same letters as she'd make if painting a poster in a hurry.

After a fortnight or so, news of the riots dries up. The police, the television news announces, have imposed law and order. But, Ella puzzles, her father has always maintained this country had law and order from the word go. Why then should it have to be imposed? And that's not all. In bed she hears, till late at night, the wail of police sirens in the direction of the township across the valley. The sounds come faintly yet clearly through the darkness. At school children prone to hay fever cough and splutter through their lessons. It's a particularly dusty winter, say the teachers, but Ella thinks differently. She isn't prone to hay fever yet there's something odd in the air, she too can feel it, something dry and ticklish salts the wind blowing from the township. It stings her eyes, closes her throat.

In place of the newspaper Ella on her towel in the sun reads girls' fiction and teenage romances, any book with a pink spine. She also reads Anne Frank's
Diary
. Her cousin Lieke sent it over for her fourteenth birthday. Ella knows what Anne Frank feels staring at the sky from her attic window, dreaming of escape. Most other books she gives up on, books about Africa or South Africa especially,
Jock of the Bushveld
,
The Story of an African Farm
. Nothing in these books adds up; nothing corresponds to where they live. The history books in the school library have whole whited-out sections. ‘Don't ask me what should be in there,' Mr McDonald says, more gruffly than usual. ‘If I told you my guesses I'd lose my job.' The blank pages, Ella thinks, look like plaques on a war memorial yet to be filled with names.

Of the girls' books, Ella so far has read the Heidi, Anne, Katie, and
Little Women
books four, five times over, plus
A Girl of the Limberlost
,
The Little Lamplighter
. She has read also the Brontës, small dusty Everyman books from the town library. But she liked these books more when she still believed she was an orphan like Anne, Jane and the rest. The only Brontë book she doesn't like is
Wuthering Heights
. Characters like Catherine and Heathcliff who make themselves ill with their tirades put her off. She wants to tell Heathcliff to stop tearing at his clothes and pull himself together. He'll get used to his life without Cathy.

Little by little Ella forsakes questing Jane and the other lonely but courageous girls in scrapes for the beautiful clinging heroines of Mills and Boon, Denise Robbins, Barbara Cartland. In romances nothing at all corresponds to the world she lives in. No one even pretends it does. Everywhere you look there are only English gardens, beautiful English girls with heart-shaped faces finding English love in English gardens.

The weekends of being fourteen and then fifteen pass slowly. Saturday morning to Sunday evening is a sea of time. She draws up timetables, fills each hour with something to do. Bake coconut ice. Read. Make ice-cubes. Sleep. Snip split-ends. Eat ice-cubes.

Whatever she's doing, she keeps a Mills and Boon within reach, propped up beside her recipe book, spread under her head as she enlarges her freckles in the sun. Reading romances while crunching ice-cubes fills up the time like nothing else.

But it's a tough call making time move more quickly. There are weekends when Ella lying on her towel in the sun could yell out loud for something to do. She thinks of crazy impossible things – like painting
Viva!
over and over on her classroom walls; or even walking to the township. She'd like to find out about the place where the strange winds blow. She thinks of locating Phineas's home, knocking at the door, maybe meeting his family, the elder sister she's imagined he has. She might ask to join in with them,
him
, with what they're all doing. ‘Let me come on one of your marches,' she could say. ‘I've seen these soldiers in Luanda . . .' Isn't she herself an African schoolchild? Couldn't she be counted as one of them?

She thinks of the heroic and forbidden things Anne Frank got up to, sitting with her diary in her cramped Amsterdam attic, hoping for a future. She thinks of Anne's minders, the Dutch people who looked after her family, how it must have been hiding people on the run. Even Tante Suus, the mother says, helped her older brothers in the Resistance shelter Jewish refugees: she opened the door to them at dead of night; let them creep in under her bed to catch an hour's sleep. Even bossy but ordinary Tante Suus. She tries to imagine Tante Suus and her brothers in bed hearing the fugitives stir just beneath them, under the mattress, their quiet but harried breathing. There was more to their lives than lying in the sun reading romances, eating ice-cubes, writing stupid letters into the void.

She thinks of her Aunt Ella and the village trading store she planned to open somewhere on the Lowveld. She sees her in her midnight-blue dress fast-pedalling a bicycle down a tussocky track, her long hem hooked up over her elbow, the tall Blikman and Sartorius typewriter loaded in her front basket. No-nonsense Aunt Ella, always happy to try things out, wouldn't she have done something like this, set out to the local village in order to type up letters for people? There she is, plonking the typewriter down on a tin chest in the dusty street, checking the ribbon, lining up her paper.

So, what's it to be, she looks up at the person standing at the head of the queue, his face like Phineas's, a gleam on his forehead: a greeting to your grandma, a
proposal of mutual benefit
to the Soviets to help the fight for freedom, justice – whatever makes Phineas's eyes cloud over when the father asks why it is he's been away?

The father invites Ella on a drive back to the ravine where Bogey met the lammergeyer. ‘There's something important I want to show you,' he says, as they leave the house, testily, as if she might refuse. He repeats himself as they get out of the car at the edge of the pine forest, close to the lip of the ravine. ‘It's very important – to safeguard the future. So keep it to yourself. You've reached an age where I must be able to trust you.'

What he wants to show her is not outdoors as she'd thought but in the car itself, the boot that he now opens. He lifts up a notebook-sized item wrapped in a soft beige dust cloth and, without a word, places it in her hands.

The object inside the beige covers is smooth. The dust cloth slides over it. The shape is like a myth, recognisable, unflinching.

‘A gun?' she says through a dry throat, her false question echoing strangely. The barrel is already lying along the length of her hand.

‘Yes, a Colt 45, more to the point. Royal Navy issue. We all carried one, just in case. I've had it cleaned. One of Tom Watt's friends. Also bought these bullets off him. We'll load it and try it out, give you some shooting practice. To claim the new republic, we must be prepared to stand up for it, defend it. Even the women and girls.'

‘Shoot here? Now?' She looks down at the soft blue-black of the gun in her hands, across at the thick weave of forest down in the valley. She remembers lying in the dust there at the ravine's edge, in line with the gogga and the lammergeyer.

‘Yes, here, now,' says the father, as if he remembered nothing. ‘We fire across the ravine. I'll show you what to do. It's not difficult once you get the hang of it. The important thing is to squeeze the trigger as if it was putty.'

‘But . . . what if— ? Are we allowed?'

‘Of course it's allowed. There's no one about. It's perfectly safe. The ravine is just empty air. We have a right to defend ourselves, practise self-defence. You never know where a threat to your safely is coming from. As the recent events showed. The black especially, he can turn quickly. Whites, too. But blacks are closer to nature than whites.'

His hands busy themselves with the gun, sliding, knocking back, clicking into place.

‘Not everyone turns. Blacks or whites. Phineas wouldn't turn.'

‘Don't be so sure,' he looks down the gun barrel across the ravine. ‘In blacks the primitive is closer to the surface than in the white.'

She sees him squeeze the trigger but the sound is still a shock, the reverberation clacking around the walls of the ravine.

‘Your turn.' The gun is back in her hands. She follows his instruction, remembers his movements. ‘That's right, legs a little apart, good and stable, hold the thing out in front of you, straighten your arm. Take aim, that taller tree across the valley. It's a powerful weapon you've got there. Respect it, think seriously when using it. '

He didn't say enough about the kickback. He himself, short as he is, hardly registered the impact. Ella pulls the trigger towards her and the noise seems to knock her sideways, only it was the gun itself, leaping like a live thing in her hands.

‘Way off course,' says the father. ‘Looped into the valley. You've got to keep your eyes open when you take aim. And hold steady. Remember, you're defending yourself, think of that. You're guarding your country, everything it stands for.'

He works his way through the box of bullets, two more for him, the rest, four, for her. By the eighth bullet her arm is aching, her eyes smarting. ‘You take it,' she pleads.

‘What did I bring you here for? For pleasure? No, this is your lesson,
meid
, your chance to show what you're made of.'

She steps away from him, hauls the gun to eye-level. But the trigger seems to squeeze too soon, before she is rooted and steady. This time the kickback really does throw her off her feet, against the father's thigh. The gun slips out of her hand. He stumbles as he reaches for it, rights himself before she does. Even so, the barrel touches the dust. Straightening up she catches his frown.

‘I'm sorry I wasted your time,' she says as they get into the car.

‘You wasted my time and all my bullets,' the father says. He rubs the gun with the cloth, then puts it in the glove compartment. ‘What a fool I was, thinking a child of your mother could forget its weasel nature. Well, mark my words, the day will come when you'll remember this. When you'll want to stand up and be counted, defend what you believe.'

 

Oma dies one midwinter's day when it's high summer in Europe. After the father has calculated the funeral expenses he finds there isn't a bean left over, not a
stuiver
, for the mother to fly back. The funeral service was so very tiny, Tante Suus, ailing herself, tells them in a short trunk call. Just the staff from the nursing home, a few nieces, Cousin Lieke. The mother drops tears into the receiver, strokes Bogey in her lap. The father stands by with his stopwatch, his hand clamped on the telephone's connecting wires. ‘So, so sad I couldn't come,' the mother whispers, staring hard at the back of her husband's head.

Over their morning Douwe Egberts on the verandah the mother reflects out loud. Without being able to bid farewell, she says, it's hard to believe her mother's no longer alive. She's missed her these many years now. Well, now this missing feeling'll never end.

Ella lying on her towel can't think of Oma as either dead or alive, maybe somewhere in between. It's long ago that she last saw her. When she remembers Oma she thinks of her bifocals, how they winked in the light when she moved her head. She remembers practising her ventriloquism for her, sinking her voice into her chest and rumbling it, Oma clapping.

The mother takes to reading newspaper obituary columns. She begins with the back pages of
The Natal Witness
and
The Mercury
. The black-lined notices from the Netherlands papers she saves till last. Twice a month an old Vrijeschool friend sends out the papers by surface mail, rolled into parcels like packs of toilet roll. The mother works through the packs methodically. The political commentaries she sets aside for the father.

When it's someone in their teens who has died, a ‘beautiful angel', ‘snatched from us', whose ‘smile will never fade', her voice catches, choked by a hiccup. She computes the young person's age from the dates given in the notice, shakes her head over the bridge suicide, the accidental drowning, the tragic suffocation, the bravely-fought illness. She reads in full the Patience Strong poem about the new star in the sky. She hiccups again. She's seen too much death in her life, she shakes her head, too much. The loss of her beautiful sister aged just thirty-eight. Her father's premature death to pneumonia, a few months after her sister. The long fading of her mother . . .

Her arm crooked over her closed eyes, Ella in the sun imagines the obituary notices streaming from the mother's mouth as if they were the black typewriter ribbon unspooling from her Blikman and Sartorius typewriter. The notices belch from her mouth in an inky knot, tumble over the verandah flags. The father, as far as she can tell, doesn't let the dark stream that unspools at his feet concern him. Now and then she hears him spit his coffee grounds into the grass.

He's especially silent, Ella notices, when the mother mentions her sister. One morning she refers to it directly, the black-lined death notice published in the
Haagsche Courant
in the early 1950s. Ella hears the thin crackle of the Netherlands papers. The
Witness
is made of cheaper, softer newsprint.

‘Look, Har, another dead person in their thirties, here, from Delft. Cancer took her too, a woman around her age. A very casual notice, in my opinion. Though we could barely see for grief at least we did a good job with the obituary, all those years ago. Do you remember those lovely lines, from Roland Holst?'

‘How could I?' The father's voice sounds deeper than normal though he speaks in Dutch. With the mother during the day he uses Dutch. Ella rolls her head in the direction of the verandah. ‘You never sent me the death notice. What I do remember is putting her on a plane back to Nederland to get therapy. Some Indian nursing orderlies here at Louis Botha airport provided a wheelchair to get her from the building to the plane. They conjured that wheelchair out of nowhere.'

‘You didn't tell me before,' the mother says softly, the newspaper crisply rustling, ‘You never got the notice? I'm sure we sent it.'

‘You never asked. Your wonderful family didn't send a letter till after she was dead.'

Her father standing on the rutted runway at Durban airport, Ella tries to picture it, the short, bow-legged man with the angry forehead saying a last goodbye to his wife. How do you say a last goodbye? She and Oma never managed it. She sees him standing there beside the wheelchair, sentinel-straight, his square hand cupped on her shoulder. And she, the woman in the wheelchair – Ella imagines her in her midnight-blue gown – she squints up at him silhouetted against the searing Durban light, her relentless inescapable brown eyes.

They forgot to send him the death notice, so he says. Ella turns this surprising new fact round in her thoughts. The death notice that, when all's said and done, brought the two of them together, the mother and the father –
this
mother, the younger sister, and the father – he didn't ever see it. She watches see-through sun-flecks drift across her vision. And then, a year or so later, she imagines, after the exchange of a few blue air letters, he, the father, the widower, Har, set out back to the Netherlands – is that how it happened? He set out to claim his death notice from his dead wife's family? At which they put him in the way of the younger, pray-to-God-healthier sister instead.

Ella picks up her Mills and Boon. She'd like to find a Mills and Boon in which a hero was consecutively married to two sisters. She'd like to be able to imagine in more detail how it was when her bow-legged father turned up on the doorstep to claim his second bride from the same household. But Mills and Boon doesn't stray that far beyond the beaten track.

 

Some evenings when the news is dull and there is no roll-call of dead soldiers, the father on his circular walk from the verandah via his desk to the television and back, tells himself a story. Ella hears the Old Brown Sherry bottle out on the verandah begin its rattle, the screw-top lid its scraping. She sees him sidle past Ella's portrait without looking at it. He pretends to read something scratched on the blotting pad lying on his desk. He sidles back past the portrait. He comes over to adjust the placings at table. In front of the television he clears his throat.

‘I mean,' he blurts, ‘Those lovely chaps, all of them dead. Scandalous, it was, scandalous. That's what I mean.'

No one has said a thing one way or another, but still, several evenings a week at dinner, he must before sitting down say what he means. Ella bends her eyes to her plate. The mother sits upright in her chair, poised for flight, the heels of her hands pressed against the table's edge.

‘The treatment our dead received, none of you can understand.' Already he's at top volume. ‘Those toffs carrying on about how
relatively small
the sacrifice was, fellows who wouldn't know the arse from the elbow of a gun.' He casts a look at Ella. ‘And we, fresh off our beloved
Tjerk Hiddes
, the salt still in our ears, Jan Bakker and I, and dear old Schilperoort, the eternal hanger-on, taking the train straight from the East India Docks to Liverpool Street Station. It was there we saw the rotters sizing up the end-of-war casualty lists. Those lists wallpapered the news kiosks under the arches. I mean it – wallpapered. Pink-cheeked as the day they were born, the rotters were, never saw an hour's military action in their lives.

‘Jan and I stood reading for ourselves, peering, the print was so small. “Oh,” says the pink one nearest to me, “It's a lot but you'd think there'd be more, after a six-year war.” Saying this
lul
to a man he could see from the uniform was fresh back from his own Royal Navy. I felt my fists go up.' The father's fists go up, he punches the air. The mother ducks her head. ‘Jan grabbed my arms. So I used the weapon of my best English instead. “You fuck off, you stupid Englander,” I said. “What do you know about war,
idioot
? When did you last leave this island of yours to find out? What do you know of the many men who after what they have seen are alive in body, dead in spirit?”

‘The pink pair was already backing away, but I couldn't resist a final missile, my most priceless
Nederlands
curse to follow my best English.' The father sits down heavily. ‘“
Wees gesodomieterd
!” I told them roundly. And translated for good measure. “Be arsefucked, you
klootzakken
, you dirty testicles!”'

‘Har, Har!' Mam begins her loud breathing, rattles her knife and fork. ‘How will decent society in Nederland ever receive us back if you teach the
kind
language like that?'

‘Back, back, always back with you, you fantasist,' the father says more quietly, pushing away his cold plate of food. ‘Back to the fatherland, bah! What did my precious fatherland ever give me – for all my loyalty, my service? Once it had used me up my fatherland vomited me out on the trash heap of the world,
gesodomieterd
, without a guilder to my name.'

One evening after the Liverpool Street story, Ella follows the father onto the verandah. ‘You and Mam,' she tries to get the words out fast, ‘If there's a reason why you always, you know, talk about dying – ?'

A wordless noise. The father opens his mouth in front of her face, corkscrews his finger at the side of his head.

‘A reason,
idioot
? Don't you listen? Doesn't it
stand to reason
?'