The Shouting in the Dark (19 page)

Ella and her mother sit at the kitchen table, sorting through a pile of the finger paintings she did back at the Vrijeschool in the Netherlands. Cousin Lieke sent the pictures in the small parcel containing Oma's effects. They'd been stacked in her attic along with the mother's winter coat. Lieke has asked to keep hold of the winter coat.

The mother pulls a messy brown painting out of the pile, an outline of the African continent.

‘What muddy colours, Ella. I'm surprised they let you use them. In my day at the Vrijeschool, we only ever painted using yellows and blues, spiritual colours.'

Ella remembers squeezing the lettering into that ear-shape of Africa, how she tried to keep the red paint from running into the brown. ‘I like the picture, the shape.'

‘Maybe, but the colour's depressing. According to Rudolf Steiner's teaching, you see, everything's imbued with spirit and that's what we reflect in our painting. Lightness, fluidity. We are spirits before we come to this earth. Did you know that, if we believe Steiner, human souls choose their parents before they are born?'

‘That's mad.' It's out before she can stop herself. She can hear her father's scorn lacing her words. ‘What about unwanted children, unhappy children? Did they choose their parents? Would I've chosen you two if I'd been in my right mind, my unborn right mind?'

Hurt darkens the mother's face like a bruise: ‘
Hou op nou
, Ella. I don't like to hear you talk that way. Those are bad, cruel words, you know it.'

But Ella cannot stop. Suddenly she's seeing something in a clear, un-muddy way, something about how choices loop up in chains, about how one choice follows another in a continuous unbroken sequence.

‘If I chose you two,
if
I did,' she says, ‘Maybe it's because
she
, your sister, had already chosen him. And before she chose him, her dead babies, those babies Dad told me about, that you've never mentioned, they chose
them
, the two of them. It has to be that way, their choices shaping my choices, my choices joining up with theirs, else it makes no sense. As for me, I'd rather have my soul staying unborn than the thought of choosing the two of you. Especially him.'

‘You watch yourself,
meid
, or you'll end up sounding as cross as he does.' The mother folds her arms. ‘You don't speak about your dead aunt's sorrow like that. Anyone's sorrow for that matter. You're not your father. You don't have the war to blame.'

She turns the paintings face down, carefully smooths them flat.

‘His blue eyes,' she next says, ‘He had beautiful blue eyes. I think my sister Ella chose him for his eyes. You may be right there, she chose him. I didn't choose him. But even now, every morning when he opens his eyes, no matter the night before, they look newly washed.'

‘And the red bags under the blue eyes?'

‘Ella, I insist you stop.' The mother makes a sound like a suppressed sneeze. ‘He read, think of that, think of what that meant to me, to us, us girls from a
beschaafde familie
, a civilised family. He had no formal education beyond school but he had stories to tell. He'd seen the world. His world was bigger than mine.'

That night Ella finds a new perspective on her long-hoped-for but till-now-impossible orphanhood. In fact, she decides, leaning on her sill, staring at the stars, she can still be counted as an orphan, or anyway half an orphan. She is born of one dead mother and one live one. She belongs to Africa, her live mother, like her father says, and she belongs to her aunt, the dead one, the woman who fell in love with her father's blue eyes, the mother-aunt who conceived the other babies and prepared the queue for her to join.

Her so-called parents she can leave out of the picture. Her father himself has said it. Their lines of inheritance to her are cut.

 

The father has always been a zealous economizer. In all things he contrives to cut costs, close to the bone as he can. He goes to the supermarket by himself in order to hunt down bargains: day-old bread priced down to 5 cents is one favourite; a pack of chicken bits at quarter the price of a pack of chicken breasts of similar weight is another. There's a surprising amount of meat on a chicken wing, in his opinion.

Now, following the prostate operation, his zeal is sharpened. He wants a new challenge – to slice in two the family's spending on non-essentials, the little treats with which the mother sentimentally coats her African life, imported biscuits from Holland, doilies and decorative candles for the house. Let's see how lean life can go. The mother is under instruction to keep a ledger notebook in which non-essential expenses at various shops, the Dutch delicatessen, the continental butcher, Ada's Hair Salon, are recorded in red.

‘Can't he see I'd be dead but for these things?' she moans.

‘
Hou op
, Irene. Your endless
gezeur
! When, ever, are you denied your pleasures?'

To make savings on family grooming, the father invites Ella to cut his hair. Now that she's so tall, towers over his head when he's seated, she can put scissors to his crop. She can go in any old how, he isn't vain. However she goes in, she'll be cheap. And there's another advantage. Lately he's been suffering pains in his legs and arms, the old complaint, sudden tweaking pains due to bad circulation, nothing to do with the prostate. It's tough to sit for too long in one spot. The
kind
can be made to go faster than a barber.

This fortnightly economy, he calculates, will save the family up to ten rand a month, the price of twenty-five cans of Bully Beef. Bully Beef from Argentina, a taste acquired in his Navy days, is his basic measure of saving. If he lets Phineas go home early, he saves four cans of Bully Beef.

Ella tucks a dish towel into his collar, wets her comb in a glass of water, as she has seen the haircutter at Ada's do.

‘Style doesn't matter,' he instructs. ‘Just shorten it. Slice your way through.'

She thinks of cutting and sewing cloth in Domestic Science. She knows about bias cut as against basic trim, how back-slicing works in relation to scalloping. She understands the different ways in which skeined materials like hair move under the shifting angles of a blade. But the father's hair is coarse and wavy. And her scissors are paper shears he has sharpened on his grinder.

Taking a breath she scythes into the thick tonsure over his left ear. Then she blunt-cuts her way round. His back quiff springs under her hands like steel wool. The silky comb-over she feathers, then layers and fluffs the edges where it serves as his fringe.

She makes a more or less decent job of it, setting aside a step-cut or two behind the ears. She can tell it's not bad because the father looks her in the eye. Let's see, he says, if you can do it again next time.

For days after the haircut the white tufts of the father's hair blow about the lawn in snowy flurries till, she imagines, the wind distributes the stuff across the town like seeds.

The second time she cuts his hair, two weeks later, she's about to bring the scissors to his head when he comes out with a strange word. What was that? She leans forward.
Atro-piss
? She raises the scissors.
Atro-piss
, he blurts again. This time she didn't mistake it.

Atro-piss
? she wants to ask. Is it a medium-intensity Dutch swearword, like
rotzooi
, unlike
sodomieter
? But she keeps quiet. She clips the hair on the back of his neck.

Not long after she finds out more. She finds out the father has granted her a special position, a status all her own. One day during silent reading at school she is paging through a reference book on mythology and, there, the name jumps out at her. Atropos, it says, is the fiendish Greek Fate who severs the thread of life with her abhorred shears. Atropos is a daughter of the night, a shape of gathering doom.

To the names
succubus
and
loeder
, which she shares with the mother, the father now adds this one,
Atropos
, which is entirely hers.

The haircuts become a fortnightly Saturday morning fixture carried out without words after coffee on the verandah, before Phineas shows up for work. The father triggers the event by flourishing the paper shears in the air like a starter gun and snipping them. ‘Atropos, Atropos,' he says. Ella runs to get the dish-cloth and the comb.

Late one night following a haircut Ella hears the father stammering to himself in the passage outside her bedroom. There's a thud, the sound of a body slumping. She checks her watch, nearly midnight. It was long ago her mother went to bed.

‘What is it?' she whispers through the crack in the door. Silence. She draws her back up straight, grips the door handle tight, cranes into the darkness.

The father is crouched on the passage rug, his left leg splayed awkwardly to the side, as if he has fallen very suddenly to his knees. He is clutching the carousel toaster to his chest, a screwdriver in his hand. He sibilates a word,
Atropos
could it be, or maybe just a Dutch swear word? His voice is very indistinct. She bends down, reaches for the screwdriver, but he pulls it away. Sherry pulses off him in syrupy waves.

At breakfast today the toaster's carousel brackets got jammed. He has, it seems, set out to fix them, but his glasses have slipped down his nose and his eyes stare blue and unfocused at the appliance. Pointlessly he rattles the toaster handle. She sees why his speech is choked. A handkerchief is balled in his mouth.

‘Dad, what is it?' she asks again.

He spits the handkerchief into his hand, then suddenly begins to talk, a gargled mix of English and Netherlands. His
moeder
, she thinks he says, the one woman who loved me, today, can you believe it, she would've turned one hundred years old.

Ella leans down towards him, he leans away from her. She pulls back. Touching him isn't a risk worth running. As the closing door puffs a thin column of air onto her cheek, he begins to swear under his breath. ‘Heartless
kreng
, ungrateful shit,' she hears him mumble, ‘Cruel Atropos.'

This time she's sure. He said
Atropos
and not an unfamiliar swear word. The word came at that instant she closed the door.

 

At school every student is given a pocket-sized Bible, a special gift from the American Bible Society.
Good News for Modern Man
in a green, wipe-clean plastic cover. ‘Look,' Ella extracts the book from her satchel that evening. She stands in front of the television and holds it in front of her father's face. ‘Something for nothing. I thought you'd be pleased.'

‘That's rubbish for nothing,' he says, and knocks the book out of her grasp. ‘You chuck that in a parcel for charity, or in the
pul
. We don't have Bibles in this house, certainly not bad translation Bibles. The cheats and lies of Christianity aren't for us. The King James Bible is the only translation we accept. It's a very fine piece of good English. You put that piece of shit in the
pul
.'

Ella slowly picks up the Bible. She places it on top of a mound of coffee grounds in the kitchen pedal-bin, to protect it from the greasier rubbish lower down. This is a terrible thing to do. The librarian at school teaches them to treat books well. Her father follows her to the bin. She can feel his breath on her neck. His hand comes down on top of hers, presses the Bible deeper in.

Late that evening he calls her to the verandah. For a change, she can see, the Old Brown Sherry has softened his mood. His cigarette quietly smokes in his hand.

‘
Meid
,' he says, ‘Go to the bookshelf there by my desk, and fetch down my King James Bible, the one I had when I was at sea during the war. It's beside
Mathematics for the Million.
Or the
Roget's Thesaurus
. A plain black book, the gold lettering on the spine nearly worn away. There's a thing in there I want to show you. About how death's syncopated by words, beautiful English words.'

The father's special bookshelf – she's allowed to touch? She swallows her surprise. Didn't he just ask her to put the gift Bible in the bin?

‘Go on,' he prompts, his eyes on the hills.

Her hands when she holds the book out to him are shaking, can't help it.

He keeps looking ahead. ‘Turn to the fourteenth chapter, Book of Job.'

She leafs through the middle; the pages riffle smoothly. She finds
Ezra
,
Nehemiah
,
Esther
.

‘Hurry up.' He reaches to take the book from her. ‘You should be able to find a page quicker than that.'

She looks up. Here it is.

‘Good. Then read. Chapter Fourteen is what we read on board ship, when one of the chaps had fallen. Sometimes it was given even to the Dutch boys like me to read.'

‘
Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble
,' she reads. ‘
He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not
.'

She stops for air. She took that second sentence too fast, on a single breath. Stupid. When he's trying to tell her something she must stay steady. She remembers the story of the Japaner warship, the fallen chaps, the six in their sailcloth – she's eavesdropped on it a hundred times. But her hands still shake. It's what she just saw, couldn't mistake it. The Colt 45 in its beige cloth tucked there behind the King James Bible on his shelf.

Hearing him shift in his chair she resumes. ‘
But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?
'

The father sits like a stone. At the end of the chapter she expects a fresh request, something choked, blurted, but there's nothing. His shoulders are hunched. The bags under his eyes glisten in the verandah light. She leaves the Bible on the table. She doesn't want to put it back. She doesn't want to slide it up against the gun lying snug in its gap behind the books.