The Shouting in the Dark (22 page)

She tries poking around her tongue-tie with some nail scissors. The membrane is very fine. Wounds in the mouth heal fast, people say. But it's no good. It's difficult to grab hold of the slippery tongue. Whenever she does have it caught, pressed to the side of her mouth, the scissors get moist, slide out of her grasp. She makes a tiny nick close to the tie. The place bleeds like a tap.

Could I have the tie looked at? she asks the mother in the kitchen, then the father at table. A loose tongue never suited a respectable woman, he says darkly.

Getting rid of the tongue-tie, she decides, is part and parcel of her project to shrink her heart into a ball. Without the tether on her tongue she will have to work harder to contain her feelings. She will have to be even tougher on her tiny heart.

The throat specialist who examines the tongue-tie forms his mouth into a small round rosebud
o
. His surprised bifocals wink in the light like Oma's used to do.

A very tight tongue-tie indeed, he seems to shake and nod his head at the same time. He advises a routine severing procedure as soon as possible, yes, on Medical Aid, requiring the basic payment only.

The procedure is carried out under local anaesthetic. Ella watches the specialist's lenses dip and wink in the bright light as he works. There is a crunchy tying-up of stitches but no pain. A clot of blood gathers at the back of her throat. She spits it into a white basin, a modern one, running pink water, fitted into the armrest of the operating chair.

She likes her new, freed tongue. In the car on the way home, though its underside is bristling with stitches, she practices reaching her tongue up to her nose, curling it over and under, making clicks. She can try to speak Zulu now, she thinks, she'll ask Phineas for tips. She'll begin by asking him again about his Zulu name, his family name this time. What is the name they call in registration at school?

After a few days the stitches dissolve and leave behind a small scar, a short plait of thickened tissue under her tongue. She likes this, too, the tingling but tender itch when she runs the scar across her teeth.

It is the Sunday morning after the operation, late summer. The white light has robbed the trees and other standing things of their contours. The shimmering fields and hills are drawn on the sky in metallic ink. Ella and her father sit together looking out of the verandah's invisible fourth wall. She's aware of the open door at her back, the breeze blowing through it.

‘I called you from your endless inane sunbathing to tell you something,' the father says. He barely releases his lips to speak. ‘Been meaning to a while.'

‘Yes?' Just right. As deadpan as she wanted.

‘You're aware,
kind
, many things are changing for you right now. You're growing up fast. Things'll keep changing rapidly for a while.'

‘Well,' she says. ‘So?'

‘Despite appearances you're a clever girl or, anyway, your school reports tell me so, clever, definitely, but also, like I often say, disobedient, unruly, always against the grain, always. You get good marks even so, even in the subjects that matter, Maths, Science. You get good marks in my beloved English, too, but English doesn't matter, not for life.'

Of course I do well
, she responds silently. In her imagination she forms her lips into a
duh
shape, something the
Brady Bunch
kids do on television. Since when did an absence of stupidity equate with following the rules?
Of course
she gets good marks, she wants to say out loud. But she won't help him explain himself. She won't say that if she didn't do well she might as well lie down and cut open her veins with a kitchen knife. Doing well is the way things are; it makes the world steady. No amount of character weakness can take it away.

But the world, according to him, is soon to grow less steady.

‘Till now,
meid
, these successes of yours have come naturally.' He moves in his chair. ‘What I want you to think about today is – be warned. The situation won't last. Soon, very soon, you'll start to slip backwards. The signs are already clear.'

‘What do you mean?' Too late she bites her loosened tongue.

‘I mean that soon, in the not-too-distant future, with you growing up, as obstreperous and rebellious as you are, the boys will start to overtake you, in almost everything. You'll no longer do as well as them.'

‘Overtake?' The word's out before she has time to stop it. What's wrong with her? She doesn't have to talk to him. Remember the memo-pad. Why's she bothering to reply?

‘Law of nature, Ella. Girls at your age, changes happen, they grow more inward. It's not the same for men. At this stage, boys, young men, they come into their powers, they open to the world. Contrary to girls, they see the value of work. Work shapes the world so they devote themselves to it. They start taking over. It's what nature dictates. Women begin to concentrate on the things that come more naturally. The boys, the men, succeed instead.'

Ella can feel her cheeks and mouth stretch, adjust, trying to find a camouflage, an expression of exaggerated surprise.

‘I'm serious, my girl,' he shakes his cheeks at her. ‘I'm giving you advice to bear in mind. Mark my words, as boys grow up, their brains better their bodies, overcome them. For girls it's the other way about.'

But brains have nothing to do with changing bodies, she wants to say, cleverness is inbuilt. She has a man's head on her shoulders, a reasoning brain, her father himself has said it.

‘So from now on, be on your guard, but give way.' His mouth pulls into a discouraged line. ‘This is what my ripe old age teaches me. The boys'll overtake you.'

Ella's nails dig into her palms, her bare toes grip the earthen flags. She knows she should leave the verandah now, right now. The breeze of the open door flows over her back. But no, she cannot leave. She must hit back. Every bone in her body rejects his advice. She must settle for second-best? She's a girl, that's all she can expect? Is he trying to goad her somehow? Is this, God forbid, a jibe about doing the garden with Phineas? But, no, his face is an unmoving mask.

‘Why are you telling me this?' she asks, her voice low.

‘Why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because I want you to be forewarned. I want you not to give up all of a sudden when the boys surge forwards, as nature dictates.'

‘You think I'll give up because I'm
only
a girl?' Still the words spring into her mouth from nowhere. ‘Is that why you don't ever tell me things, because I'm
only
a daughter? Those stories about the war I hear from my bedroom window – yes, I do hear them. You don't entrust me with them because I'm a girl?'

He waits a while before speaking. She gets up, then can't move from the spot. Standing up to him – yet again it took something from her. She struggles to catch her breath, feels the blood whining through her pulses.

‘
Kind
, no, that's not true. To whom do I tell my stories – a few old friends? If I don't tell you my stories, it's because you're— ' He pauses a long while. ‘Because they're not for you,' he finally says. ‘They're not your world. How many times have I told you my world is closed to you? It's over, and thank God. My stories have nothing to do with the advice I'm patiently trying to give you.'

‘But they have everything to do with it, everything!' Her ears ring with the sound of her own voice, high-pitched and screeching. ‘You tell more than just your old friends your stories. You tell your new Braemar friends. I've heard you. You write your monthly letters to your brother, though you won't talk to him on the phone. You want to put things on record for Jan, you say. But not for me.'

‘
Meid
, listen to yourself. Who'd want to share private matters with you, when you talk to people like this? Truly, your perversity is extensive, it runs in every direction. I'm telling you to rein it in. You only demonstrate the value of my advice. Don't denature yourself, that's what I'm telling you. Act the young woman. Perversity isn't attractive. Splitting hairs, scoring points, and then in that horrible chainsaw voice, it's not attractive. Don't be an unnatural woman, hard and unforgiving, like many women in your mother's family. Don't go resenting men for the qualities that make us who we are.'

Something snaps in her mouth, she feels it go, a stitch, but no, her stitches have already melted. ‘Perverse!' she manages to get out, ‘Unnatural!' Her tongue contorts to breaking point. Another word, two, three, she's got to spit them out, refute him, but then a bubble of blood, warm and salty, wells from her mouth.

The father reaches across, presses his hand to the side of her face, pushes her to the door. The blood runs over her chin.

‘Get inside,' he hisses, pushing, ‘You're soiling the floor. Go, clean yourself up. How are you my daughter? At times like now, who'd want anything to do with you? You're an ungrateful
loeder
, as I've always said. It exhausts me, your infinite waywardness. You're beyond my help.'

‘Who needs your help?' she gargles. ‘
I
don't. I don't need your help.'

He releases her face, flicks his hand and wipes it on his trousers.

‘If I'm not your daughter,' she breaks out again, ‘then you're not my father. So why don't you just go and die properly, like you always say you will? Then I can show how little I need your help.'

The father pushes her a second time – a harder push, to her arm, held, sustained. She staggers a little, gets over the threshold. The verandah door closes behind her, the glass panes rattling.

For a second she feels deflated. Through the silver sunlight searing the glass in the door she sees him standing, only an arm's length away, his back turned to the house. Against the shimmering hills he looks insubstantial, as if you could break him up with a single breath like a dandelion clock. But so what? She hates him. His smallness is deceptive. Because of him the screeching demon comes and jumps into her mouth.

 

A steam train runs three times a day along the branch line that snakes through the green hills connecting Braemar to the surrounding Midlands towns. The branch-line serves the local condensed milk factory. The last train every day transports shiny crates of condensed milk to Durban, the tins stamped with bright blue pictures of fat Friesland cows.

For something to do during the school holidays, Ella and Linda travel with Linda's mother into Maritzburg, the largest of the neighbouring towns. Linda's mother works in John Orr's department store on Church Street. The girls while away the morning looking at the clothes shops, the accessories mainly; the accessories are cheapest. Sometimes they use their pocket money to buy 7-inch singles from the record shop, Boney M, Diana Ross, Gerry Rafferty, Billy Joel. They sample sweets from the clear plastic tubs with hinge lids at the Pic-‘n'-Mix counter in OK Bazaars. At the chemist they use the nail varnish testers to paint their nails, each nail a different colour. Linda carries nail polish remover in her small wet-look plastic handbag, so they can remove the colour before they arrive home.

Around noon, they make their way to the railway station. At the bottle store on the station corner they pool their money to buy a 59c bottle of sweet Virginia wine, each time the same bottle with a screw-top just like Old Brown Sherry.

‘Watch here,' Ella boasts to Linda as she takes the first slug on the pavement outside. ‘This is how my dad tanks it down.'

The wine sloshing noisily in their empty stomachs, the girls buy single tickets for the 12.30 steam-train back to Braemar, then sit and wait on the dusty concrete platform. The train is often late. The Maritzburg platform is wide and long and for some reason is meant to be famous, maybe because it's so wide and long. The wind here is always blowing, eddying discarded plastic bags into the air and twisting them about.

The second time the girls take the train they cadge a cigarette from the group of hollow-eyed white men who sit on the brown platform benches, waiting aimlessly for a train that never seems to arrive, at least not for them. After this they always try to cadge a cigarette. The men offer them the lit cigarettes they are smoking, not cigarettes from the packs in their pockets, but the girls aren't fussy. Hoisting themselves into the puffing train, their high heels chafing, the burning cigarettes held between their brightly manicured fingers, they feel grown-up, carefree, on top of the world. If ever the waiting men try to get closer, give them a leg-up, follow them in, they dash to the nearest empty carriage, their legs fast, strong. They snib the door latch shut, collapse into the soft cracked seats, giggle fit to burst at their so-easy escape.

‘Don't you wish there were a couple of guys for us here, though, Ella, some nice guys, not always these old geezers?' Linda one day says.

Ella looks up surprised, mid-giggle, suddenly lost for a reply. Funny how she hadn't noticed before. How they never meet boys their age. But she hadn't noticed of course because there's only one boy she thinks of, only one. Not in a hundred years though, not in a thousand, could she tell Linda his name.

The train begins to blow steam. The disappointed men come knocking at the window, make disgusting shapes with their mouths. But Ella and Linda turn their heads away, still giggling, drain their wine bottle, share the last of the cadged cigarettes. They are so carefree, so independent and rebellious! As the train begins to move, Ella turns back, puts out her new loose tongue at the now-running men.

Beyond the station, around where the houses disappear, they open the carriage windows and hang their heads out, Linda from the front window facing backwards, Ella the other way about. Laura beats time against the glass and they sing in chorus, as loud as they can, ‘I want to break free, oh how I want to bre-eak free!' Ella closes her eyes against the wind and tries to make-believe it's Phineas here in the carriage with her, hanging out of the opposite window
. Let's escape somewhere together
, she imagines whispering to him. Would she have the courage, if he was here? She has the courage to stand up to the father, doesn't she? She sees the two of them, Phineas, Ella, tracing together the escape route across Africa she's already traced for herself, across Okavango, the Mountains of the Moon, Kilimanjaro. They're in the Volkswagen Beetle and from the back trails a banner saying something powerful –
Freedom
, perhaps; maybe even
Viva!