The Shouting in the Dark (2 page)

Here on the high rim of the African shield, on the shoulder of land that the great continent at its south-eastern edge hefts up from the deep-blue Indian Ocean, Ella has a garden that feels magical. The garden lies at the back of the square bungalow where she lives with her short father Har and tall mother Irene. Its centrepiece is a patch of kikuyu lawn surrounded by hydrangea bushes canopied in morning-glory creeper. The hydrangea bushes make a good shady hideaway and an excellent lookout. If Ella worms her way through the bushes to the perimeter fence, she can see down into the dark river gorge beyond, which is home to a tribe of grey monkeys. Some days the monkeys come up to peep through the wire fence. As soon as Ella sees their wet black eyes at the wire she runs to drag the washing off the line. The monkeys like to steal clothes, socks and underpants especially, to put on and wear as hats.

One Christmas holiday Ella uses broken bricks and two old blankets to convert the natural hidey-holes inside the hydrangea bushes into a secret den with two green cave-like rooms and a winding passage in-between. In the closeness of her den she talks out loud to her Dutch ragdoll Zeeboo. She also talks, but more softly, to the friend called Friend who lives in amongst the hydrangeas, whom no one can see but whose voice she can hear reply. To Friend she chants the funny half-Dutch, half-English rhymes that jump into her mouth from nowhere as she skips in the small yard beside the kitchen, beneath the sighing casuarina trees.

Under the bungalow is another hideaway, another level within the garden, a sandy cave dug out between the concrete support-struts to keep the rooms above cool. No one but Ella ventures into this breezy place, not even the gardener Charley, though his hoe and rake are stored here, the handles lying close to the grille gate so he can reach for them without entering. Charley says the area is bewitched though Ella doesn't think so. The one time he points, exclaims, ‘Look,
ntombazane
, right there, that thing dancing!' she squints hard at the empty air but can see nothing.

Ella likes the space under the floorboards for how roomy it feels, how its dry sandy floor is good to sit on. She likes that whenever she plays here Charley keeps watch at the grille, making a tall shape against the light – just as if, she thinks, he was her big brother. She tells the Afrikaner children who play in the street she has an older brother called Charley, eighteen years old, but when they laugh and say that the only Charley they can see around is the Zulu boy, she clicks her tongue at them and walks away.

From the eastern edge of the garden is a clear view of the Indian Ocean. After work her father, still in his ink-stained bookkeeper's shirt and navy blue Lukes Lines tie, likes to stand here in the shadow of the casuarinas and follow through his binoculars the movements of the merchant ships and tankers from distant lands lying in the roadstead outside Port Natal harbour. He presses the binoculars right up against his black-rimmed glasses. Looking at the ships, trying to read their flags and signs, he feels freer and happier, Ella can tell. He's back in the days when he worked with ships in those same distant lands, so he says. And she, standing beside him, trying to make out with her naked eye the ships his binoculars are pointing at, feels freer also. The air around her father feels somehow lighter when he gets out his binoculars and looks at ships.

Her father has the same freed look on his wrinkled face when, on occasional Sundays, never often enough, he takes her down to the docks to see the ships at close quarters. Side by side they stand on wharves stained pearly with oil and watch the big square cranes silhouetted against the Bluff unloading their containers. They watch the tugs steaming out to dredge the sandbank and the trains rolling up to the very edge of the quays, the deckhands flinging ropes around the iron-ringed capstans as if lassoing them. He points out the different flags of the world flying from the ships, so she can learn them, the ones from the East especially, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Ceylon. His narrowed eyes behind his thick glasses trace the rows of containers stacked on the ships' decks, as if he were matching the loads against the figures in his blue-lined bookkeeping ledgers.

One day they see a group of stevedores shoulder a coffin made of packing-case slats down a gangplank. ‘They'll be glad to get rid of that,' he shakes his head. ‘Bad luck to have a stiff on board.'

On hot afternoons Ella sits in the shade of the gatepost with the mother's Ridgeback dog Rex. She has a boy's short haircut and freckles on her nose. She and Rex survey the goings-on in the street, the Zulu cleaners gossiping over their crochet work on the grass verge, the Afrikaner children kicking stones. Those children aren't of our standing, says Mam, so Ella isn't allowed to play with them. Listening hard, Ella tries to discover whether she can follow the cleaners' Zulu. When her father has visitors from the good old days in the East she also tries to follow the English that's mixed in with their Dutch. Zulu is as softly up and down as English, but English is more mumbling. Afrikaans is very mumbling, but the words are sometimes like Netherlands, so she gets it better than Zulu.

At home there are no opportunities to learn Zulu, only English from Dad. Because they are Dutch, that is, foreign and civilised, the mother and the father don't employ a black servant. Irene is fresh out of Holland, fresh off the boat, people say. She's all high colour, long arms, long gangly legs. In her few years in South Africa the foreign hasn't yet rubbed off her. She says she wants it to stay that way. Charley doesn't count as a servant, in her opinion, because he works outdoors.

The mother likes Charley. Some mornings she drinks her coffee with him out in the kitchen yard. Early on, she asked him questions about the ins and outs of gardening in this hot, sticky strip of coastal South Africa. Charley mostly advised her to avoid overwatering the flowers, especially down here within the rain-belt of the African shield. More recently, they've moved on to talking about his family, his hopes for the future. He often mentions his many aunts, his mother's sisters, how all of them are teachers. He confides that someday he aims to become a teacher like his aunts. As Charley and Mam talk, Ella hangs about behind the windy-drier listening, dangling her skipping rope.

One morning the father catches the mother in the act, the misjudgement, stupidity, trespass, he doesn't quite know how to put it–– With Charley standing by, shuffling, still holding his coffee mug, the father spells out to the mother in Dutch, right here in the yard, that whites in Africa don't consort with natives, no, not even when they're good workers like Charley and aged just eighteen.

‘In this country it isn't for blacks to aim high. That's the country's strength. It's for the white to aim high. Blacks can't aim high, they don't have the mental power. Charley is being plain
brutaal
drinking coffee with his Madam. Cheeky, Irene,
brutaal
, setting himself above his station. Don't encourage him.'

The mother puts her hands on her hips and puffs out her cheeks but makes no reply. Ella keeps out of sight behind the windy-drier.

At the end of the month, the father releases Charley from his employment. ‘Self-respecting Europeans should avoid relying on black labour,' he says.

Ella pushes further into the hidden hydrangea passages in her garden. She finds a tiny den so deep inside the bushes not even the monkeys would be able to find it. Here she takes off the funny built-up shoe that's meant to correct her wonky left foot. Most of the time it doesn't bother her, but it gets sweaty in the heat. Though Charley's gone, she still wishes she had an older brother, tall and caring like he was, but she makes do chatting with Friend.

The next Christmas they move house. They go fifty miles inland from Durban to the dormitory town of Braemar. The father takes early retirement from Lukes Lines, the American shipping company he has worked for as a bookkeeper without promotion for all of his fifteen years in South Africa. He says he's had enough of the sea. He doesn't want to keep living in the past. He'll set up now as a freelance bookkeeper, take part-work from some solid land-based companies, nothing as binding or soul-destroying as before. Durban reminds him wherever he looks of the days of his youth, the happy years spent on the lip of the Indian Ocean. Ella thinks of his face when they're down at the docks and doesn't believe him. How he can be tired of Durban when saying
lip of the Indian Ocean
makes his straight-line mouth turn up at the sides?

The first time Ella and her mother see the neat streets of Braemar and their new house is the day they move in. The father settled for the town and then the house, a tidy bungalow on Ridge Road, after a single sighting during a Sunday drive on his own. He can't have stuck around long that first time, Ella thinks, or he might have noticed that, by way of waterways, Braemar has no more than a narrow ribbon of dry riverbed clotted with eucalyptus and poplars and, a few miles downstream, a shallow reservoir called Victory Dam.

But this is what I like, the father again assures them, the fact that Braemar with its well tarred streets lies a world away from ships and wharves.

‘The grind at Lukes Lines was a living hell,' he says in his loud voice, as if to convince them, ‘whereas here, from this verandah open to the sky, you've a picture of perfect freedom. In Durban, remember, the verandah was the size of a porch, low-eaved, dark. Here the wide world itself spreads out at the verandah's edge. See how the terraced lawn goes down the river valley, how the green fields stretch to meet the misty-blue horizon. Here you can gaze like a king upon miles of rolling Zululand hills. I worked myself to pieces for that view,' he adds, slapping his knee. ‘The best highlands farmhouses on the continent would envy it. It's a verandah for a westerner, an Englishman – and mind you say verandah and not
stoep
like a Boer.'

But Ella's mother isn't convinced. Rural Zulu Braemar is too far from Durban's concert hall and shops for the lamps in her eyes to stay alight. ‘I've lost everything coming here, Har,' she tells the father every day, handing him his morning coffee on the verandah, ‘I've lost my life.'

‘You think only of yourself,
mens
,' he mutters, scowling. ‘How you go on. We lost the light of our lives long ago, the day our beloved Ella departed from us. For a change, spare a thought for parties other than yourself.'

As for Ella, ever since the house move she misses Friend. Friend somehow knew the gardens up here on the African shield would have no bush, so she stayed put in Durban.

 

In Braemar, once night falls, strange wild cries leap from the father's mouth. Swaddled in a scarf of Rothman's Plain smoke, he sits on the verandah as if keeping watch, a tumbler of brown liquid on the rattan table beside him. The words he once spoke to the starry sky in his ordinary voice, back on the porch in Durban, now come out as shouts, raw noises that tear at his smoker's lungs. ‘
Idioot
,' he shouts, ‘
Klootzak
! Keep on, now, keep on!' The mother leaves him to it. After dinner she goes straight to their bedroom, tugs the door closed behind her with a click.

The father's noises pull Ella to the window. She can't help herself. She's seven now, almost eight, far taller than she was back in Durban. She can see over her bedroom windowsill. She likes to go over and watch as he keeps watch, to see how the hills fade into the dusty purple sky and the first white stars flare out like distant beacons. Then, at an invisible signal, the sounds begin to come from him, the groans and sudden ragged shouts, the swearing, choking, spitting.

Some nights, the sounds settle into the shape of stories, flashes of tall tales. When the friends from the East stay over, Ko Brink, Henk Vroom, Koen Zwemmer, Pim Faithfull, mostly one by one, sometimes in pairs, the mother long in the bedroom, the father calls up tales of their former days and doings. He tells of the roaring times they shared in the distant ports whose names Ella now knows – Singapore, Calcutta, Rangoon, Jakarta, Colombo. ‘How hard we worked and played,' he says, passing round the Old Brown Sherry bottle. ‘And never were the worse for it, were we, we sturdy cogs in the wheels of those great, continent-spanning European shipping companies that the war smashed into pieces?'

The listening friends know the stories well yet each time ask to have them again. ‘Old chap,' they say, ‘Remember that day?' ‘Tell us again— ' And the father turns in their direction, towards Ella's bedroom window, his voice sliding into sharper focus. ‘Well, yes,' he says, ‘You remember, it was in the Great World Club and that crazy Commodore, trying out the foxtrot . . .' He turns away and his voice dissolves into the dark, mixed with night-time noises, trucks droning on the highway to Durban, the sharp barks of distant dogs. The unfamiliar names burr in Ella's ears. ‘Pfah, the cheeky fellow yelped, spinning my boater into the bay, Colonial Outfitters, Kalverstraat, Amsterdam – we don't wear that kind of thing out here!'

And the friend, Henk or Ko – mainly it is Ko – leans back in his chair, head to one side, a small smile sitting in the corner of his lips, as if trying to coax the story to step out from behind a screen and come forwards to greet him.

What a life you have out here in Africa, Har! the friends musingly say late at night, the father growing hoarse. What a terrific berth you've found after the many years of graft. Bah, the father rumbles back, Put your sunshine where it belongs, up your
gat
. Sunshine gives poor Irene migraines, reduces even lusty Zulus to zombies. Look, Ko, Henk, Africa is a shit-hole. It drives white people mad, even the Soviets. If they arrive sane, their senses all too soon go into reverse. I've survived in Africa because I've lived exclusively on this civilized southernmost edge. Here alone we old colonials can rebuild the white republic.