The Shouting in the Dark (21 page)

Night after night she wakes sweating from the same shadowy dream. She doesn't remember the unfolding of the dream, only its final moments. She's at the bottom of a concrete stairwell, with damp stains on the walls like in the photo-comics, her jotter pressed to her chest, under her t-shirt. There are security policemen in balaclavas surrounding her. They have no badges but still she knows they're policemen and she knows what they're up to. One has her by the hand and is pulling her towards a white van standing by. Worst of all, she's falling into line; she's letting herself be pushed into the van like a lamb.

She lies wide-eyed in bed and tries to think. Puzzle through what might happen if her bad dream turns real. What'll she do when she's dragged from her bed into the white van, from the white van into court? What'll she say? When she comes before the magistrate, when on the strength of nothing more than her father's testimony they charge her with troublemaking, sedition, sabotage, she must have a defence to hand, a believable story. But the problem is that she has no story. She has only the silly adventure tale about the girl, Mali. She has no confession to make, no outside information to give. ‘I worked these things out for myself. I never thought the African schoolchildren were up to no good.' How lame. How can she stand up to cross-questioning when she has no story?

She must make up a defence, have it off by heart. Engrave it on her memory like her Eisteddfod poems.

Yes, that's right, she practises, no one has influenced me, no one. My father's accusation is wrongful: he's a false witness. I implicate no one but myself. Think of it this way, she recites. If in any situation you were made to feel the underdog, wouldn't you then identify with all underdogs, wherever you found them?

But how useless it sounds! She sees herself standing in the magistrate's court telling her story, a row of fed-up faces staring across a polished table. She knows she will fail to convince them, the magistrate and his secretary, the witnesses. She will be found guilty as charged.

At breakfast the mother runs her thumb along the dark rings under her eyes.

‘Why not give it a rest for a while, Ella, all the argumentation? You're getting nowhere with it, either of you. You'll never change his mind.'

She puts her face out of reach of the mother's hand.

‘You don't know half of what goes on. He's always the one to start. You're never there to see.'

‘I can hear it all, unfortunately. The bedroom is well within earshot, as I'm sure the neighbours know, too. And I see how exhausted he gets. You're wearing him down, you know that, don't you, at a time he needs his strength? He has many problems now, the circulation, the groin, the waterworks. The weak heart's the least of it. I won't have you wearing him down.'

Hard and shrunken as Ella's heart now is, there is one place, secret, loamy, where it won't go smaller. A strong force pushes at this place, a green, growing shoot that came up quite suddenly and every day stretches taller. This desire to touch and be touched, this sticky persistent desire – this hunger to be beside, against, another body, it threatens her determination to make her heart small.

Touch, touching, being touched – almost all the time, whatever she's doing, reading on the lawn, sitting at her desk at school, Ella tries to imagine the touch of this other body, this face bent to hers. She imagines the hand on her hand and the warm arm leading up from the hand. And, no, it isn't a nameless hand she imagines, or a faceless body. She can see the hand clearly. She can see the arm leading up to the brown sinewy shoulder. She can almost feel this breathing body here nearby her, beside her, close – so close its presence tightens her stomach like a fist.

These two hands, she doesn't mistake them. These two hands in her daydream are ordinary everyday hands, she knows them well. These hands with their long thin fingers are used to pressing tiny seedlings into the earth. She has seen them often, patting the wetted soil around the slender green stems.

It happened before she properly saw it coming, this strong nameless feeling that has grown between herself and Phineas, this lovely dangerous thing. Phineas is, after all, the gardener, the native, the African garden boy. But she herself is African as well as native – way back she proved it. She is flesh of the flesh of all other African creatures and wild things. She and Phineas are of the same flesh.

On Saturdays, Phineas's day in the garden, the father bans Ella from sunbathing. She contrives other ways of being outside, secretly in his vicinity. With the father keeping more to the house, this is often possible. She hangs about and weeds, clips borders, finds jobs that don't get in his way. She's near enough to him to be able to sense his movements around the garden, spot bits of him coming around corners, his hands on the wheelbarrow's handles, the sharp crease that forms in the back of his knees as he bends, hoes.

The thing between herself and Phineas, Ella knows, doesn't come only from her. It's something between them. It has grown from the look they shared that first day she gave him a glass of water. She sees how he tips his head in her direction when she's outdoors. Even the nape of his neck when she moves about the lawn seems alert to her, as if he's always about to turn around to see her. The look they shared that day planted a seed from which this strong green shoot has sprung.

Phineas asks the father if he can please come to work an extra afternoon, Wednesday as well as Saturday. He wants to earn more money to help his family, he says. Plus the garden can do with some extra assistance. Ella overhears his request, feels herself blush.

First love
, she wants to write in her notebook. She puts the story of Mali to one side. She has reached page 71, way over the halfway point. Her notebook comes back into its own. She keeps it under her pillow at night. By day, she slides it in alongside her Mali jotter between the
Anne
books on her bookshelf.
The first sign of my first love
, she writes.
In the garden. The look in the garden. The smile.

What's she doing? She draws her hand back, scribbles out the words she has written.

But the force driving her hands can't be restrained.
The second sign
, she writes. She really must write this down. She's fed up of being a single solitary cell of a person, a single cell with a tiny constricted heart.

This amazing feeling. When he looked over from his side of the flowerbed, when I looked over from mine.

But no, how can she write these things? These bare naked words, they're asking for trouble, begging to be pried at. She draws her hand back.

A passion for the garden boy
. Who'd be so mad as to leave evidence?

Then her hand creeps back to the page. She must write something down.

The second sign
.
Down at the clinic
.
In our different queues
.
This incredible thing
.

He looked over from his queue, I from mine, at the same moment. The same place at the same time.

First love, she wants again to write. Her hand doesn't move. Isn't first love about being at the same impossible place at the same unlikely time? Isn't that what those Mills and Boons in their different ways were all saying?

Cholera is reported in the African township, three or four cases, with one fatality. The provincial authorities advise the inoculation of the whole of Braemar including the white inhabitants. The contaminated river touches the communities on both sides, the Europeans on the right bank, the Africans on the left.

The mother invites Phineas to accompany them to the clinic in Braemar. Free inoculations are on offer in the African township like in town, but, you never know, Phineas's family may not allow him to go. Especially now that he's working all his extra time in their garden, there may not be the opportunity.

As soon as they arrive at the clinic however, there is a problem, the obvious problem. The main Braemar clinic normally sees only white people. The mother didn't think. The big-bosomed nurse leans across the dispensary ledge rigged up on the lower half of the clinic's stable door. Loudly and slowly she outlines the delicate situation to the mother, as if she did not know English.

Phineas and Ella wait at the car, each leaning at an end, Phineas at the boot, Ella at the bonnet. She doesn't look over at her mother, won't see her being made to squirm. She watches instead how Phineas is making his shoes yawn by prising the loose sole open along the kerb and then folding it back under his heel. He waggles the sole and gapes it at an acute angle, its yawn stretching into a smile. He makes this shape once, twice. Ella smiles, Phineas for an instant smiles, sucks in his cheeks.

The mother returns. She explains that the clinic has been so kind as to agree to set up an extra queue. The official one, the white one, is over here, lined up at the dispensary door. Phineas's queue, comprising the black clinic workers and Phineas, is over on the other side of the clinic yard. They are creating it only because of the emergency. The makeshift dispensary point is that pile of cardboard boxes topped with a plank.

For an hour they wait their turns in their respective queues. Phineas's queue is short but slow-moving, Ella and the mother's long but relatively fast. The scratchy inoculations seem to take more time when it comes to black people.

As things work out, Ella and Phineas reach the inoculation point at the same time. She'll write it in her notebook.
Destiny plaiting us together. The second sign. This incredible amazing feeling.
She looks over at him at the same instant he looks over at her, then they both step forwards. He closes one eye, a slow wink, a sign of solidarity. She's aware of the inoculation going in, the tiny scrubbing brush of serum pressed into her skin, but the sensation is at a distance. At the instant the pain flares up her arm she thinks of Phineas's wink.

Now that Phineas works extra time, the rule about Ella reading on the lawn applies also to Wednesdays. She conjures another way around the father's rule that still means being around Phineas. She thinks up a garden project, something that will legitimately allow her to be outside. She clears a strip of red earth along the side of the house and sets about making a herb garden, a small one that won't require too much digging. The seedlings she buys at the vegetable stall in town, sage, rosemary, thyme, a mixed box, using her haircutting money.

She digs out the patch one Sunday afternoon when she's alone in the garden. The delivery time for the seedlings however she can do nothing about. A garden supplies truck drops them off the following Wednesday before she gets home from school. She finds Phineas already in her patch of opened ground, mulching compost into the clods of soil, the boxes of seedlings laid out in a neat row on the grass. He has followed her train of thought, she's sure of it: he gets the pretext of the garden-within-the-garden. She can't help smiling at him, directly into his face.

From then on, every afternoon that he works, Phineas gives some of his time to the herb garden. The father and the mother notice nothing of this. The cleared patch is in a good, out-of-sight position. And Phineas's work elsewhere in the garden never falls short.

Once, after a bout of rain, locusts attack the sage plants. Ella stands plucking the voracious bodies off the already skeletal leaves and Phineas is suddenly beside her, shaking his head, clicking his tongue in sympathy. He shows her how to pinch the damaged growing points with her thumbnail. Another time she finds him thinning out the parsley seedlings that have grown tall and bushy because of the storms. Whenever she comes upon him in the herb patch he is hard at work. His hands invite her to join in, demonstrate with firm gestures what to do. As they work, the two of them don't speak. There's no need to speak. Speaking will only draw attention. His arm's alongside her arm, their hands dug into the very same soil.

In her notebook Ella records the stage-by-stage development of the herb garden, but without writing Phineas's name.
Planting
, she writes, alongside the date, then
thinning
,
sprouting
,
weeding
, each time alongside the date. Careful, be careful. She wishes she could show him the notes, so he could see how much they've been together, how much they've done. But the book never goes outside with her. A notebook outside would only invite questions.

Something is between them, something is definitely between them. Sitting at her notebook she draws capital letter
P
in bubble script at the top of each page, then scribbles the letters out. She transforms the scribbles into cloud patterns, inky bunches of balloons, so inky you cannot read what lies beneath. The danger she's running is very great, she almost can't imagine how great. But the feeling can't be put away. All the time it presses at her, this hunger to be close to Phineas, to involve him in herself. She squats down and watches him rake between the rows of plants they have just weeded. The green shoot sprouting under her ribs unfurls and stretches up to her neck. She takes the watering can from him and wets the borage they have put in to replace the savaged sage plants. The green shoot drives its roots down through her groin to her knees.

The third sign of my love,
she writes.
His gifts.

My love gives me gifts.

Sunshine
.
Oranges.

These words she doesn't scratch out. So what? she says to her reader on the sly, your suspicions reflect badly on you alone. Who can find me out from what I've written? Who can name my love?

Walking into work from the township Phineas likes to pick up the bits of dried orange peel he finds in the road. Orange peel dropped on the tarmac in the hot summer sun within hours makes dried-up orange chips. By the time he gets to their house he has collected a palm-full, now and then a pocketful.

During breaks from weeding, he digs into his pocket and shares out his orange peel. The pieces of orange lie curled on his palm, each with its papery underlay of pith.

She picks up a piece of peel with the tips of her fingers, taking care not to touch him. If she touched him – she can't imagine . . . The green shoot would run into her brain and bump up against her skull.

There must be a huge amount of this stuff lying about on the streets of Braemar, she says, looking down, You manage to find so much. Children must peel and eat oranges as they go about.

They don't know about the treat they leaving for others, says Phineas, else they will collect what they drop and take it home.

He shows her how best to eat the peel. He puts an orange chip to his lips, waits until she copies him. Then he nibbles the edges of the peel, wetting it, moving it round till all the edges are wetted.

At last, when the peel is soft he pops the whole thing in his mouth and sucks it like a peppermint. She does the same. It's the most surprising treat. The chip floods her mouth with orange pulp sweet as juice.

Now that they're talking a little her courage swells.

Phineas, she says, what's your real name, your Zulu name? You must have a Zulu name. He smiles, shakes his head. No, he says, no Zulu name, I don't have a Zulu name. My name is Phineas. You must do, she says, what is it? What do they call you at home? They call me Phineas he says, you know, Phineas from the Bible. Who was with the prophet.

On Sundays Ella takes her notebook with her to sunbathe on the grass, looks at the many new words and lines scattered across its recent pages, the special inky cloud patterns that steam up from them. She loves writing the words, even if she scribbles them out later. Writing, she notices, fuels her courage, dulls her sense of danger.

On her towel she daydreams sometimes about Phineas being here, what he might do if by apparent mistake he turned up to work on a Sunday. She imagines him creeping up behind her to give her a surprise, putting his hands playfully over her eyes like she has seen Aileen the girl-next-door do with her boyfriend. She hears him reading out the words she has written, even the scratched-out ones.
My first love
, he reads. Am I really your first love? She sees him smiling into her eyes. 'Course you are, she whispers, so why don't you tell me your real name?

 

As far as Ella knows, she has succeeded so far in keeping one of her true physical defects hidden, even from the mother. The
Winkler Prins
encyclopaedia calls it a tongue-tie, a
gebonden tong
. A thread of flesh winged by a thin membrane attaches her tongue to the floor of her mouth.

Till now, the tongue-tie hasn't bothered her much. With some English words it has even helped. To make difficult sounds like
th
her tongue has already been in position, laid fatly across her mouth behind her teeth. But lately, shouting at the father, the tongue-tie has been strained. The pointy bit rooted to the floor of her mouth feels thinned and pulled.