The Shouting in the Dark (23 page)

‘Do you really want to break free, Ella?' Linda cuts into her thoughts. Ella opens her eyes. Market gardens, dark green bush, sugar cane fields skim past behind Linda's head. ‘Oh, yes, I want to break free,' Ella cries back. ‘How I want to break free!'

They pull themselves back into the carriage, close the windows, shake the soot from their hair. ‘One day I'll do it, I
will
break free,' Ella nods earnestly at Linda.

‘'Course you will, 'course,' says Linda. ‘And so will I. After this year we can leave school, we'll be free. But right now I'm thirsty. Why didn't grown-ups ever say wine makes you thirsty? And tastes bad?'

When Ella gets back from her steam-train trips, her father and mother are often not at home. The father is seeing a dermatologist in Durban who specializes in after-radiation skin treatments and other therapies. He drives himself down twice a week, the mother accompanying him. The father calls the dermatologist the lady doctor though in fact she isn't a trained doctor. He says she has capable hands and honest eyes, features many so-called real doctors do not have. Those hands of hers will bring relief from the full-body itches that now afflict him, he has no doubt. Every visit she puts him through deep-pressure body massages that, for a day or so at least, keep the discomfort at bay.

On their Durban visits, the mother tries to make other appointments, with other specialists, see what might be done about the continuing pains in the father's groin and more recently in his back and kidneys, the many ailments that have broken out since his prostate operation and the radiation treatment that followed. The lady dermatologist believes some of the veins in his legs have collapsed, hence the itches, hence also the extreme cold he suffers, the purple mottled skin.

Each and every time however, an hour or so before they are due to set out for Durban, the father tells the mother to cancel. ‘Enough, let them go. Those stupid quacks you like do nothing for me.'

Ella times her steam-train outings to coincide with their absences. She looks forward to the moment she lets herself into the empty house, closes the front door behind her and listens out. Already she knows there'll be no one at home but still it's good to lean against the closed door and feel the silence spread around her like a cool sheet. The rooms are empty, the verandah vacated. There are no voices, no sounds at all.

She goes to change her clothes and brush her teeth. In the bathroom she studies her face in the mirror, surprised each time at how bloodshot the cigarette smoke has turned her eyes, that and hanging out of the train in the wind. The wine makes her groggy but also puts a gloss in her cheeks. She feels warm inside, cheerful, she even looks cheerful. She brings her face closer to the glass. She wonders what Phineas sees when he glances over at her across the herb patch. Would he think she'd look better looking cheerful? Closer up, she sees, the distorting effect of her skew-whiff jaw is less evident. Has he noticed her crookedness? she wonders. What might his idea of a good-looking girl be?

She goes to stand in the narrow gravel passageway that runs between the garage and the boundary hedge separating their property from the Brickhills'. It is her new favourite spot, secluded, out of sight of any window in the house, even the tiny slit windows in the garage wall. Phineas knows the place, too, thinks it safe. He leaves his tools standing here, his rake, his hoe, his spade, leant up in parallel against the mud-spattered wall.

Standing by herself in the passageway Ella swings on the bit of storm-water guttering that slants down from the garage roof at the passage corner. The wine loosens her limbs so she can swing in a bigger arc than usual. Sometimes she rolls her skirt up and tucks it into her pants. She likes how the breeze that always blows along the passage touches the top of her legs. Other times she stands by Phineas's rack of tools and runs her fingers across the handles, the places he has held, the spade, the rake handle, its wood darkened by his sweat.

Not long ago, around the time she began taking train trips with Linda, she tried smoking here in the passageway, practising with a Bic pen holder stuffed with tea leaves. The instant she lit up the father appeared out of nowhere.

‘Forget that rubbish, it stinks,' he said, drawing a cigarette from the Rothman's Plain box always standing up straight in his breast pocket beside his Bic. ‘Try the real thing. A woman who can't handle her cigarette is as bad as a woman who can't hold her drink.'

It would be good to meet up with Phineas here in the passageway someday, Ella thinks to herself. It would be good and it would be easy. Cross paths with him as if by accident. Watch him go for his tools, then circle the house, walk in from the other end. If he were here with her now, if he were here – she tries to imagine. If he were here they'd smile at each other probably. They always smile. If he were here the narrowness of the passage would force them to stand close together. They'd face each other but not touch, not quite. She thinks of leaning towards him, of him leaning in closer. She thinks of her tongue, her new loose grown-up tongue with its crinkly plait of scar tissue. She thinks of the tip of it, how it might be to touch him with it ever so lightly, say on the cheek. As she thinks this, a powerful current surges from her middle, drives down into her feet.

Then one Saturday she does bump into Phineas in the passageway, genuinely by accident. He's fetching one of his garden tools, she comes walking in from the other end. There was some reason for taking this way around the house but she no longer knows what it is, and it no longer matters.

He straightens up. To go further she must turn her body sideways, sidle past him. She misses the Virginia wine loosening her legs, making their movement smooth. She can either swivel towards him or away from him. She swivels towards him. As she turns towards him he half leans towards her or at least he seems to. His head looms in front of her face, large, bony. She sees his hairline, his close-cut hair, the shiny patch in the middle of his forehead – her eyes close. She can't remember being this near to a boy, a boy's body, ever before. She knows he won't kiss her, it's dangerous, far, far too dangerous – but if she leans towards him? if they are a finger's breadth apart . . . might their noses, their cheeks— ? Her eyes still closed, she imagines his skin, that gleam on it, the tiny raised hairs on his skin, the gooseflesh. He must have gooseflesh because she herself has gooseflesh, sky-high gooseflesh, bringing her in closer . . .

Something will happen to her lungs unless they move. Her chest will cave in, her legs buckle. And then they move. She opens her eyes. She has gone past him. He has leant back against the wall to make room to let her pass. He doesn't look at her but she's sure – she wants to be sure – his lips have dented into a smile.

 

The story in Ella's jotter about the swimmer Mali crossing the Atlantic has petered out completely. The foam-frilled waves lapping over Mali's drenched plaits as she strikes out stalwartly across yet another choppy mile – they're too many. She's no longer interested in impossible adventures like Mali's. She wants to write about love, properly, truly, about love. The green shoot. The scribbled-out words in her notebook depress her. She turns to other people's lines instead, to find feelings that fit in with her own.

At the town library she leafs through a dog-eared copy of Palgrave's
Golden Treasury
, the only anthology of poems they have. Hardened strips of glue scatter from the spine of the book as she reads. Her notebook is in her pocket. When she finds a line she likes she drops down onto the cork-tiled floor and writes it down in her best handwriting.

But there aren't that many satisfying poems around, not for a girl thinking of a boy. The ones that sound good are mainly desperate and mainly by men. The man in the poem is moaning and sighing about a woman who stands at a distance from him, on a height; he's like Heathcliff throwing his wild cries across the distance. Whereas, with Phineas and herself, well, there's no distance, or at least not that kind of distance. She and Phineas mulch side by side in the garden, they are so close her gooseflesh nearly touches him. She makes-believe she can feel the warmth of the glow coming off his skin.

Five of Shakespeare's sonnets are prescribed as a set text for the matriculation exam in English. Ella reads the poems so many times over she has them off-by-heart. There's a good love-energy powering through the lines though it doesn't work for her, a girl. She can't imagine speaking them to someone. Even if she said
thou art more lovely and more temperate
very softly to herself while squatting beside Phineas in the herb garden, she'd sound a fool, a true
idioot
. If she said the words aloud, he'd probably click his tongue in worry. The problem wouldn't be the Shakespeare, it would be her, speaking that way, in her Eisteddfod voice. Phineas knows about Shakespeare. He's studying
Julius Caesar
for his school-leaving certificate. ‘Y'know, I like Mark Antony,' he says. ‘I like his power.' She thinks he uses
Y'know
instead of her name.

Ella tries to write her own love poem, but it turns somehow into a poem more about death than about love. She begins at the back of her notebook. Despite her efforts to switch the poem round it follows its own path, presses forward with its own theme. It even insists on being in Dutch, not English. Maybe the solid dark Dutch words work better with the theme. She calls the poem ‘Strand', Shore.

‘Strand' has two verses and ends on a tail of repeated words. In the first verse a girl, a young woman maybe, is walking along a beach, her footsteps tracing the lacy waterline. She is meant to be thinking about love, the man she loves, but he is not with her and he does not arrive. In the second verse – according to Ella's plan – she sees the man she loves coming towards her, his tall, grey shape enlarging through the sea-haze.

But as things now fall out, the eye of the poem in the second verse takes a different direction. Instead of following the young woman's point of view the poem pans away from her. Suddenly she's seen from high up, as if by a seagull. She is walking the shore, a tiny figure, walking and walking, the waves fanning on the sands in front of her, the waves fanning behind, waves following waves, erasing her footprints in the sand.

Weg

Weg

Weg  . . .

the poem closes – the footprints are rubbed away, away, away.

Ella ends up liking her headstrong poem, more or less, but puts it to one side. She still wants to write about love. She squints sideways at the scribble patterns in the front of her notebook, unravels some of the words and lines she has written there and joins them together. A poem, a kind of haiku, begins to fall into place.

 

F
i
rst love.

In the g
a
rden, the gift.

P
arsley,
s
age, t
h
yme, ora
n
ge peel.

The cool shade along the hedgerow.

 

The poem's no good but still it captures everything. She doesn't scratch it out. Time spent with Phineas encrypted in word-pictures. Every letter of his name contained within the lines – and, more, every letter of her name embraced also, both in
p
a
rs
le
y
and in
or
a
nge pe
el
. The two names jumbled up and mixed together and then fattened with black ink. She must be going soft in the head with love though, because every time she reads the poem she feels weepy. Her heart, after all her efforts, has not grown very small.

The father stockpiles his winter bonfire in secret. When Ella comes round the corner of the house that day, he is standing on the earthen mound in the back garden adding the finishing touches to a tall wigwam of firewood and kindling mounted on a base of bricks, a cigarette stuck between two fingers. Beside him, in spite of the oil shortage, are three large cans of the petrol normally used to fill the lawnmower. It's a Sunday afternoon, the time when the mother takes a long nap. Spotting Ella, the father raises a slack hand, as if giving the signal for a Guy Fawkes show, that doesn't much excite him, to begin.

She approaches slowly, ready at any minute to be warned off, but the warning doesn't come. Alongside the basic bonfire ingredients, she sees he's made a pile of his photograph albums, the ones with black pages in brown leather-look cardboard covers successively entitled
Har B: Singapore, I, II. Har B: Tjerk Hiddes I, II.
The four albums, as far as she last knew, were standing in numerical order alongside
Mathematics for the Million
on the bookshelf near his desk.

‘Not for you, no, not yet, maybe never,' he said years ago, one day when she reached up to touch them.

The albums are balanced on top of a large Old Brown Sherry box crammed full of paper junk, ledger books, old newspapers, cardboard folders in faded colours marked with the looped initials
GB
,
G
for Gerhardus, Har. Out of a corner of the box juts a green Chinese paper lampshade. ‘Enough kindling for a good blaze,' is the first thing he says when she faces him across the firewood. His gnarled knuckle taps the screw-top of a petrol can. He must've poured about a can-full over the wood already. The air's acrid with the smell. Mysteriously he now switches into Dutch, ‘You've come at the right moment.'

It's an invitation to a conspiracy, that's obvious. She has stumbled upon his covert operation, so he has no choice, must invite her on board. She says nothing, only stands up straighter.

He takes a match from the Lion matchbox in his shirt pocket, the box poking out like a pot belly beside the pack of Rothman's Plain. With a thumb pressed to the base of the match, he strikes it, bends forwards, throws it from waist-level onto the wood.

The match catches the kindling almost at once, but still he follows it with several more, until the rising flames begin to dance around his hands.

‘Look how it burns!' he laughs out loud, in English, his body still bent.

She points at the Old Brown Sherry box. ‘You want to put that on?'

His finger is at his fleshless lips: not yet. ‘The fire is hottest when it's mainly grey coals.'

A white column of woodsmoke stretches up from the fire into the windless air. Something about the thickening of the column gives him the signal to begin. He squints up at the rising smoke, checks around the garden, then reaches for the album at the top of his pile. He opens to one of the pages he has marked with neat spindles of newspaper. Swiftly, methodically, he begins to pluck photographs from the triangular white fasteners fixed at their corners, then throws them into the fire in bunches. There's no mistaking his desire to see them reduced to ash, these 2×3 inch black and white windows onto places with palm trees where, as far as Ella can make out from this angle, everyone wears starched ironed cotton, sharply etched pleats. She watches them whisk past, pictures of men in boxy suits posed beside chunky 1930s cars, women in pale tea-dresses standing in groups of two and three on a crowded marine parade.

Who were they, she wonders staring, these cheerful young men and their female companions, presumably friends and colleagues of the young Har B? What future were they looking ahead to as they stared into Har's chunky Kodak with their pale forthright eyes? Whatever they thought then though, today they are posing in vain. Their time is over. A running ribbon of ash crumbles the edges of their fine colonial outfitter suits.

‘Dead, all dead,' the father says, his hand winnowing, chucking, winnowing. ‘All gone, all gone.' He tosses the denuded album carelessly to the ground, as if the memory of how he kept it for decades sitting on its shelf has been blotted out.

A rogue photo drifts to the edge of the embers, close to Ella's feet. It shows a glossy-haired woman by herself at a café, wearing a panama hat too big for her, pitched half over her left eye. Ella makes to edge the toe of her shoe over the photo but the father suddenly starts, glances across. She freezes. With her foot she shoves the photo into the base of the fire.

He turns now to the faded folders marked with his initials, upends one over the middle of the fire, lets its contents spill out.

‘All gone, all gone,' he repeats, ‘No use to anyone. All dead, all gone.'

‘Ko isn't gone, you aren't gone.'

‘Gone in all but body,
meid
, and the body'll soon follow.'

Updrafts scatter some of the blackened photographs onto the grass. Pale ovals of faces stare up from half-incinerated pictures. The father takes a rake and roughly pulls the fragments back towards the flames.

‘Come,' he says, poking her side with the spine of a fresh album, ‘Lend a hand. Don't stand there goggling. You know how I hate it when you goggle. Everything must burn, the marked sections especially. Tear the whole page out if necessary, tear chunks of pages.'

He pours more petrol. The flames sizzle lower, flare again.

Ella rips at her first album,
Singapore II
. A fistful of paper and photographs comes away in her hand. She doesn't bother about the marked pages. There's a satisfying give and tear as the seam along the album's spine splits open. She sees more palm-lined streets, more people in groups dwarfed by dense banks of vegetation, tall trees, creepers, flowering shrubs, a large open green. There are pictures of docks and pictures on board ship, many pictures on board ship, snapped from various angles on deck, on the gangplank. She sees three women in wide skirts sitting on the wooden barrier to a paved esplanade, two are European, one is Chinese or Chinese-looking. They are all three waving. The Chinese-looking woman might be the person in the picture with the Panama hat. She has the same wide smile.

‘All this?' she asks, holding the album open at the photograph of the women.

‘All of it,' the father says without looking. ‘Don't throw from up high, will you, don't let things scatter. Make sure it burns. All of it must burn.'

He feeds the contents of a second folder into the fire. The stack of opened green and blue air letters fans wide as it descends, one style of handwriting unfurling from the next. Straightaway the bonfire doubles in size. The heat is tremendous. She keeps on with the photograph albums; the father sticks to the folders. Most of the folders are filled with letters, she sees looking across. One folder is stuffed with newspaper cuttings, from Australian papers, it seems, the
West Australian
, the
Northern Territory News
. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the familiar words
Tjerk Hiddes
and then also Fremantle, Geraldton, Darwin, Carpentaria, East Timor. She wants to say, Look! but then it is too late. The folder's in flames. A brown mirage billows at eye level. The late sun's glow backlights the rising heat.

The face of a woman with crimped hair and pencilled eyebrows falls from her hand, whooshes high into the air, wafts back down. Caught in the fire's heat, her glossy smile crumples in an instant, as if she were suddenly in tears. Who was that? Ella wonders. It was a different face from the one in the Panama hat. Was it perhaps the wife before Aunt Ella, the first or the second, if she's not mistaken, Edith the English rose? It wasn't the woman in the portrait.

But there's no time to think. As the photograph dissolves in mid-air the father hoots out loud, a weird, feverish sound. It sets them both off. With renewed energy they swoop at the diminishing load of paper junk in the Old Brown Sherry box, ram the fire with their offerings, hoot, yodel. The father quits his pretence of trying to be quiet. Keep watch, Ella reminds herself, be careful. The times when he's exuberant things can quickly go bad.

From the back of the last photo-album she's shaking over the fire falls a single thin leaf of paper, a pale blue air letter. It wafts down so slowly she can read the printed-on stamp, 1950 something. She could pluck it from the air without him even noticing. Her eyes meet the back of his head bent over his box, his hand on the Chinese lampshade. She holds her breath, quickly takes the air letter, shoves it up her sleeve.

At some point deep into the burning she sees the father's To Do memo-pad curve its way into the blue flames. The pad must've been at the bottom of the box. Though the mirage over the fire warps her vision, she'd spot the shape of it anywhere, that plastic ring-binding turning through the air. For an instant she allows herself a silent whoop of freedom, as if caught on an updraft like one of the drifting photographs. But then she catches the father's look. In the glare of the mirage he seems to cock his head and wink, not directly at her, but at someone standing behind her, as if to say to this third party, Take care, we're not alone. It's the same when he looks in the direction of Aunt Ella's portrait, yet not quite at it, to the side. Or when, after a night of rowing, he smiles into the distance over the top of the carousel toaster at breakfast. Everything's meant to be all right again but at the same time nothing is.

‘Burn, baby, burn,' she now says loudly. She must put away somehow the sight of that odd wink. ‘Dad, wait, a second, there's something – ' she steps away from the fire, darts to the kitchen door. Within moments she's back from her bedroom, her notebook with its fattened scribbles tucked under her shirt, folded into a newspaper for camouflage. ‘Just a bit more kindling,' she shouts, holds her arms up high, drops the loaded newspaper into the heart of the fire, where the coals are dark orange. She agrees with her father. Let it all go up in flames. What better place to safeguard her secrets? ‘Dad, can we do this every Sunday?' And then she sees.
Oh no
. As the burning newspaper curls back and chars, it's the recycled jotter with Mali's story in the back she finds burning, not her ink-blotted notebook. In her hurry she pulled the wrong book off her bookshelf, stuffed it into the newspaper without looking. She feels suddenly dizzy. A swirl of smoke sears her eyes.

‘It's not every Sunday we'd have this much good stuff to burn,' her father says. ‘But you've done well,
kind
, for a change, you've been an excellent help. You're too wilful for your own good, perverse in the extreme, but today it was of use. I want you to take care to step in and help at other times too, when I'm no longer around to assist you.'

Ella feels her hot cheeks flush up redder.

The bonfire takes nearly three hours to work its way through the father's photographs and papers. At the end, capitalizing on the fine blaze, he adds the skeletons of the ripped albums. A white medallion forms on the burnt ground, shiny with melted glue. The charred frame of the Chinese lampshade pokes up from the ashes like a skeletal top hat.

‘This afternoon I took the opportunity of using those hedge-cuttings Phineas did to burn some waste,' the father says lightly at the dinner table that evening. His face is clear, his eyes unblurred.

The mother nods but makes no other reply. Her eyelids are still swollen from her nap.

Later under the bedcovers Ella reads through the air letter she secretly plucked from the bonfire. She takes her bedside lamp in with her. Several times she pushes back the covers to listen out, check no one's coming. There are two different kinds of handwriting on the air letter – she holds it close to her face. There is the letter proper which is in a fine sloping hand; then a few lines in a darker ink dashed across the bottom right-hand corner. The careful, awkward phrases of the formal letter take up only half the page. A friend in Singapore has heard of Har's loss, his dear wife's death from cancer. That he could not be with her at the end, it's such a great sorrow. The signature is two Chinese characters, two complicated nets.

The darker scrawl across the bottom of the page says more. The Durban address on the air letter has been written in the same heavy irregular hand. It's someone who seems to know Har well, one of the Far Eastern
makkers
. The friend writes that just the other day, at the start of his holiday in their dear old Singapore, he bumped of all people into Nancy Leong. He was wandering across the
padang
Har'll remember so well, nothing doing, and there she suddenly was, just as if she'd been shadowing him, the splendid Nancy with her fine Chinese eyes, remember, how she presided over the trellised verandah of the Great World? We always did wonder what'd happened to her, after the War. Well, here she was, in the flesh, looking much as she ever did, and very sorry to hear your news.

Why not write to her, Har? The scrawl ends on a question. She really did still seem to feel for the old days, and, God, that incomparable voice of hers, like whipped cream. Only her hair was different, shingled like a European's, a little like that style you find in Durban, you know, the women at your club. It made her look familiar, if you get my drift, with the dark eyes, short hair, the waves set close to her face. You'll allow me to say it, she looked not unlike . . .

Ella pushes the covers down to her waist, scrunches up the air letter in her hand. The name scrawled at the bottom of the paper is indecipherable. Her cheeks are once again red-hot. Why did she take the letter? She shouldn't have read it. She should've let it go into the fire along with the rest, her father's things, those drifting photographs, her jotter . . . Her incriminating notebook, too, that should have gone, though here it still is, she can feel it, its flat hardness right here under her pillow.

She lies staring at the ceiling, eyes wide-open. Whenever she closes her eyes she sees again the brand of the bonfire behind her lids. She hears the mother stir softly in the main bedroom, her father go to bed at last. She waits another hour, then puts on socks, tiptoes to the living room. Tonight the light below the portrait is off. She resists looking across at its blue rectangle. In the darkness she pats her way along the wall, reaches her father's bookshelf. Yes, here are the gaps where the photo albums always stood. She locates the fatness of the King James Bible. She pulls the book out and it's as she suspected. The Colt 45 in its cloth is gone from its hiding place. It can't have joined the files in the bonfire, she's almost sure. How can you burn a gun? But the weapon has left the house, of that she's certain. The bonfire is tied up somehow with its going.