The Shouting in the Dark (25 page)

But here the mother is saying Ko, Ko, Ko. ‘Ko, everything seems to be coming out of him, the moods, rages, everything. There's no stopping it, Ko. It's as if there's an internal sickness, not the prostate, but something else, forcing its way out.'

Ko tries to say something back but the line to Madagascar or wherever must be crackly. ‘What was that you said, Ko?' she shouts. ‘Old before our time, is that what you said? Old, was it, or sold?'

 

In the window of Big Dave's the father sees a second-hand fibreglass motorboat on sale, R 50 only. He buys it on the spot.

‘Nothing like burning up some petrol,' he says to no one in particular at dinner time. ‘Nothing like being on a boat on a bit of water.'

The motorboat is a smart little vessel, white, lightweight and portable, with a single cross plank for its lone skipper and perhaps one passenger squeezed up beside him.

Big Dave takes the boat out to Victory Dam in his truck and leaves it in the free concrete area to the side of the marina ‘for your convenience'. So Mr B can go and use his new boat whenever he feels like it.

The outboard motor for the motorboat however is extra. In fact it costs ten times as much as the motorboat, and must be picked up at a later date from Big Dave's second cousin's husband's motor workshop. This is something which the
For Sale
sign in the window didn't enlarge on, but the father pretends to ignore the discrepancy. If he's been done out of a bargain, whether by Big Dave or anyone, he'd be the last man in the world to let on.

‘Can't wait to have that swell and rock of the water under my feet,' he says the Sunday they drive out, the mother, the father, Ella and Bogey, to unite the motor with the motorboat.

It doesn't suit him to act cheerful, Ella thinks sourly in the backseat, Bogey panting wetly into her face. Pretending to be cheerful the father only ever ends up sounding displeased. Why'd she come on this mad trip? – only because the mother begged. The boat's a mad idea, in her opinion. Sit up in it anything less than straight and it'll capsize. And the father these days doesn't sit up straight.

En route they fill the outboard motor at the BP station with one-and-a-half cans of lawnmower petrol. The sunlight smashes down on their bent backs. It's a hot winter's day. A searing wind is blowing off the hills.

‘It'll be like burning hell out on the water,' says the mother. ‘Don't kill yourself with this boat, Har. Please spare me that.'

Like the lawnmower, the outboard motor is started using a ripcord. But for over a year now the father hasn't been able to start the lawnmower on his own. He has relied on Phineas. Some able-bodied man at the marina, he'd hoped, buying the boat, might be able to lend a hand launching it. Till today however he hadn't bargained for the fact that the boat is in every way a solo affair. It comfortably seats only one person. And that means the motorboat's operator must be inside the boat sitting on the transverse plank to start it.

Ella offers to place the boat in the water at the jetty. Her sandals are already off. Isn't it fibreglass, light as a feather? The mother holding Bogey in her lap watches from the car, her hands occasionally raised in exclamation marks of exasperation. See, Ella points out, you hold it steady, Dad, and I get it going. Then I jump out into the water, hand it over to you.

But the father is unconvinced. He doesn't want her to go shooting off on her own across the dam like an
idioot
. It's not the risk of losing the boat but the danger to others out on the water. ‘A boat like this, any boat in fact, it's for people with experience.' His shoes are still firmly on.

The following Saturday the father and Ella take Phineas with them to the Victory Dam marina. The mother stays at home with Bogey. Phineas no sooner took off his school blazer this morning and laid it folded by the garage door than the invitation popped from the father's mouth. Since the day they wrote the letter to Mr Brezhnev Ella can't remember him looking so bemused.

On the way to the dam Phineas sits in the backseat of the car, in Ella's place. She's in the passenger seat. The whole way no one says a word but every minute of the journey she can sense him there behind her, his height blocking the light of the back window, his bony knees digging into the back of her seat. At the BP station they stop and collect an extra can of petrol. The petrol they bought last weekend sloshes untouched in the outboard tank. Again no one says a word. Again the sun beats down. When they get back into the car it's very warm. Ella thinks she can feel the heat spreading out from Phineas's body.

‘That's just our garden help,' the father thumbs over his shoulder at the entrance-gate to the dam. ‘Come to help with a difficult engine.'

The uniformed black man at the boom throws a gloomy frown at Phineas, waves them through.

Phineas has probably never been to Victory Dam before, or any watersports resort for that matter, Ella guesses. However he embraces the experience as if he's never done anything in his life other than launch small unseaworthy boats in dams. They park at the free area beside the marina, he spots their motorboat straightaway, the small flat one. He points, looks at the father for confirmation, swings the outboard motor out of the boot.

‘That's my boy.' The father emerges from the car at a 90 degree angle, his fingers grasping his sides.

Phineas carries the boat into the water, his trousers rolled to the knee. He examines the steering stick, checks the starter mechanism. Ella stands at the water's edge shading her eyes, her bare toes in the mud. The snide thought comes from nowhere, taking her by surprise. How he manages it, she thinks, pretending he's in charge when he probably can't even swim.

She sees Phineas turn back to the shore, his hand resting on the motor. She waves, he doesn't. His eyes aren't looking for her. He finds the father standing on the jetty watching him, the water just wetting his shoes, the extra can of petrol in his hand. Phineas raises his arm, then leaves the boat dobbing by itself, strides through the water, bodily picks up the father, strides out again, plants him on the motorboat seat still holding the petrol can. There and back in an instant. Then, lightly, so lightly the boat hardly rocks, he vaults up, levers himself in behind him. He is sitting in the bottom of the boat, his head and shoulders just visible, the peaks of his knees.

To start the outboard motor, the ripcord must be pulled out to its fullest extent, again and again. The father could never have done it by himself. Phineas twists back, then leans far forwards like a rower, twice, three, four times. Finally, with a throaty cough, as if recovering itself, the boat shoots out across the dam, its comical round stern lifted out of the waves, pointed to the surrounding hills, the shirts of the two skippers billowing like spinnakers.

For an hour Ella watches the two of them, the father and Phineas, trace white circles on the glittery surface of Victory Dam, a few widening loops in one direction and then a figure of eight and a few loops in the other direction. Round and round they go as if it was the best lark in the world, as if there were two and not just one teenage boy in the boat acting silly. Once she sees them stop for Phineas to refill the outboard tank. The boat rocks crazily. The second time they stop it is dead close to the shore, the petrol's all used up.

She waits for the waves to push them far enough in, then wades out to drag them to the jetty. The father looks about as windswept and pleased with himself as Phineas. He's experiencing discomfort, she can tell, he's white about the eyes, but his lips aren't tightly pulled. As for Phineas, she glances at him only long enough to check that it's exactly as she thought – he has eyes only for her father.

At the jetty Ella leaves the two men to bring in the boat. She waits for them in the car. The whole way home she doesn't speak. The father talks to Phineas about outboard engines. As they draw up at the house Phineas's knees dig deeper into her back. Does he lean forward, as if wanting her attention? She keeps her eyes fixed on her lap. She will show him, she tells herself. He has turned away, sided with her father. Well, let him find out what that's like, what a cosy place that is. She will be closed to him now, utterly closed. She will clam herself shut against him.

It is the father's first and the last excursion on the motorboat; Phineas's, too.

‘The thing uses too much petrol,' the father says out of the blue a few days later. ‘It's a waste of time and money. I'm selling it back to Big Dave. I can't be taking Phineas out to Victory Dam every time with the excuse about a difficult engine. The men on the gate will start to object.'

Something around the father is seriously off, Ella is sure. The off-thing taints his eye-whites, which are yellow and glassy. He has no lips whatsoever; they're permanently pulled in behind his teeth. He sinks a bottle of Old Brown Sherry a night but four times out of five it does no more than reduce him to silence. The intercom drill is a long way in the past. The stories on the verandah are so far off it's hard to think they once happened, that she didn't make them up. He plays music on the Philips gramophone, American jazz, creaking groaning songs to which he tunelessly sings along, until the mother begs him to stop.

Things have become a lot less noisy than at any time Ella can remember, but she doesn't like it. Though she has no particular goal in mind she begins to cross off the days on Ada's Hairdressing calendar in the kitchen. At some point soon this'll all be over, she tells herself, this long-drawn-out winter season, this feeling of things out of place. June with its chilly evenings has already turned into brisk July. The winter may be dragging its feet, but it's moving on.

She sends her poem ‘Strand' to a literary magazine called
Poort
run out of the University of Pretoria. Till now she had not the vaguest notion of what a literary magazine might be but her new Afrikaans teacher Miss Wispansky, a tiny Polish divorcée, puts her on to the idea.

Miss Wispansky is the only teacher at the school who has a university degree. She's the first person Ella has met, apart from her headmasters, who has had an education beyond the teacher-training certificate. She's also the first person she's met who only ever wears black. From Miss Wispansky's classroom door trails a silky tail of Chanel No. 5 perfume. On her noticeboard are pinned postcards of the many foreign places she has visited: Paris, where she says she met her first husband; Amsterdam, where she met her second; Zanzibar, where she went on her most recent holiday. It's possible to lose in Zanzibar even a heart kept under lock and key, says Miss Wispansky mysteriously. Ella begins to look forward for the first time in her school life to compulsory Afrikaans.

Till recently she spent Afrikaans lessons reading under her desk the few children's books in Dutch there are in the school library, but Miss Wispansky's arrival has changed this. Miss Wispansky adores languages, including choky old Dutch, including even mixed-up pidgin Afrikaans. She says she collects them like other people collect stamps or butterflies. Her degree from the University of Pretoria was in both Afrikaans and Netherlands. The course structure recognized that the younger language stood on the shoulders of the older. At her second husband's expense she studied the two for the price of one. I was happy to humour him a while, my blond Boer, she says, I was happy to take on his language as well as its mother.

The day Miss Wispansky finds Ella reading Netherlands books under her desk in Afrikaans class, far from being put out, she claps her hands with enthusiasm. Would you like to write your finals in High Dutch? she asks: it's still possible, far as she knows. She begins to set Ella Dutch grammar exercises and comprehension tests. There'll be creative writing exercises to follow, she promises, as a reward, provided she gets her answers right.

Ella brings her notebook to school, the one in which she wrote her poem ‘Strand'. The pages with bubble-writing about Phineas she tears out and burns just like the air letter in the scummy girls' toilets using Linda's matches. For her first exercise in creative writing she rules a line under the final
weg
, then begins notes towards a new poem, something about a doll's house maybe, mending or dismantling a doll's house. Miss Wispansky walking the rows of desks catches sight of what's already there at the top of her page.

Try
Poort
, she suggests. A special schools issue of
Poort
is coming up. Ella should consider sending in a couple of poems like that one. She'll help her if she likes, type them up. Catching Ella's look Miss Wispansky explains how a literary magazine works, how anyone at all can send in material, even unpublished writers, it doesn't matter how young or inexperienced. She herself once had something in
Poort
, a translation of a short piece by Tolstoy. Yes, that's right, did she not say before? – she knows a bit of Russian, too.

Ella's issue of
Poort
– the one with ‘Strand' in it – arrives in the post in the second week in July, the first Tuesday of the winter break. She crosses off the days in the kitchen calendar.
Poort
is a handsome sixteen-page production printed on ivory paper with a dark grey mottled paper cover. The print is sans serif: Ella knows about font styles from Miss Wispansky. Against the ivory paper the lettering looks slightly blue.

She opens to the title page,
Poort
, then reads through the Table of Contents. ‘Strand' is by itself on an odd-numbered page towards the end of the booklet. She leafs her way slowly towards it and there it is, standing on a page by itself, the whole poem, with her very own name at the bottom.

weg

weg

weg

is set out in an indented column. At a squint – the thought comes to her for the first time – the words look like a line of footsteps in the sand.

The pleasure of seeing her very own words in print grabs her by the collarbones and pulls her upright. She stands a while taking it in, the independent look of the writing on the page, all detached from the notebook it once came from. She closes the booklet, opens it again. The words are still there. She slides the booklet in and out of its brown envelope. Over and over she strokes the ivory smoothness of the page, the surface of the poem,
her
poem. She sniffs its coolness. Does anyone ever get used to this amazing, braced-up feeling? She wishes she could speak to Miss Wispansky, that she could tell someone, anyone, that here, in this booklet, strange but true, is her poem, her very own words set out here on this page.

In the absence of Miss Wispansky she takes
Poort
to show to the mother and the father. She hears them talking in the living room. The mother at least will recognize it as a piece of craft.

She finds the two bent over the television, the father tapping the screen with a puzzled finger. Just his darned luck for the thing to go fuzzy, when for a change, it being a World Cup year, there's something on TV to watch. The Netherlands team this time is doing well. Already they have beaten Iran, Austria, Italy. Against his better judgment he's now following their successes. Degraded though the Netherlands nation is nowadays, when it does succeed at something, when the old fighting spirit of the intrepid Dutch comes out, the spirit that built the old fort at Trinco, he's happy to cheer along.

Ella approaches with
Poort
tucked up high under her arm, almost hidden, in case at the last minute she decides not to bring it out. She looks from her mother to her father. Then something takes over, her elbow crooks, her hand reaches for the booklet under her arm.

‘Look,' she says, her voice clanging raucously in the air, ‘I have a poem, here in this book, I've had a poem published.'

‘What was that?' the father brings his eyes close to the television screen, as if the pattern of dust on its grey surface might tell him what the matter is. He switches the set on, then off again, on, off. The mother stoops behind him, peering also.

Ella tries to open to the page. She should've marked the special spot just like the father marked his photo-albums, with a spindle of paper. She turns on too far, turns back again. Her poem was fourth from the end, no, fifth.

‘Here it is.' She rotates the page round, holds it out, points to the
weg weg weg
tail. The mother takes the booklet but Ella keeps her hand on it. She slants it so that the father, still standing bent, can see the page also.

‘Is that a poem? By you? When did you do that?'

‘It's my own work. I had a poem published. My teacher sent it in for me.'

‘But it's in Nederlands, Ella, why's it in Nederlands?' the mother asks in Nederlands, peering closer. ‘I thought you were good at English, not Nederlands.'

‘In Dutch you say? A poem in Dutch? What rot is that?' The father grabs the book and his glasses drop down his nose. He brings the page up to his face but cannot read it. ‘Is this what you get up to when you hang about goggling on your towel? This is what you produce, these few words? Poetry in Dutch? What rot, I say. What double rot.'

‘It's not rot, it's something I did.' She can hear her voice begin to rise. Hit back, she thinks. How badly she wants to hit back. ‘You shouldn't say rot. Say sorry for saying rot.'

Suddenly she sees how her hand might ram the father's glasses up onto the bridge of his nose, her fingers crushing the glasses, his eyes behind the glasses. Make him see. She snatches the book back so hard his arm jerks.

‘Ella, Ella,' the mother pushes her away from him. ‘Your father, look, he has many things on his mind. I want you to be kinder.'

‘Kinder? Who must be kind? All I can hear is that man telling me off for writing rot.'

‘Exactly so,' the father bursts out, ‘Rot, just rot. Quite right this man is telling you off. Poetry is rot, in whatever language. It's rot that you're bothering with poetry, also with politics. It's pure bloody Chairman Mao I hear from you. You do maths, you do science, you do right by your family. You don't go behind our backs, wasting time with rot.'

The pulse of hate in her is stronger, denser than any she has felt before. It swells like burning oil down her arms, into her hands. If she could, she wouldn't only crush his face, she'd flatten his head against the wall, she'd flatten his stupid mouth, his stupid words. She doesn't care how ill he is. Her head trembles on her neck, her skull feels as if it might burst. She's standing on a thin and fragile edge. On one side of this thin edge is a clear, open track. Walking this track she knows means tucking the book under her arm as before, turning her back, leaving them to the television. It means walking out of the room with a measured gait. Of course she didn't expect the father to like her poem, she'll say to herself as she goes. Why would it please him? He has never read a poem in his life. Who in his view ever published writing who is respectable and decent other than Winston Churchill, and he had a good excuse?

On the other side of the thin edge though is a tempting softness. Her head trembles on her neck. On this other side everything is giving, it's giving up, giving way at last. Yes, she's the rotter he takes her to be. Let her act the rotter. On this side she can already feel under her fingers the soft givingness of pressing his head to the wall, bringing the glass paperweight in the shape of a dockyard crane there on his desk against his cheek; the even greater givingness of laying her hands around his throat, of squeezing his gulping Adam's apple inwards –

The father is suddenly yelling. His hands grab at his neck.

‘Look at her, Irene, you're my witness, did you see, the fire in her eyes, how she raised her hands? Oh she did, yes she did.
Loeder
, to rise up at your own father— Who'd want to be your father? To feel that serpent's look— '

The blow comes hard to the side of Ella's face, jolts her lower jaw sideways.
Poort
falls to the floor.

‘You two, no more, I won't have it.' The mother has the father by the waist.

Who did the blow come from – the father or the mother? Ella stands looking at them, her left ear ringing. The mother's on her left, the blow seemed to come from the left. Then she sees the father's face. He's crimson. The hand he's nursing on his knee is crimson. He stands bent over, glaring.

Again her hands itch to move, grapple him down properly this time, take that shouting throat down. She wants to tell him, ‘Listen,
listen
, for once— ' Then she sees the expression in his eyes and suddenly she has nothing left to shout.

The angry light in the father's eyes is as blue and cold as ever, but it is also dull, dulled, almost out.

The same instant the fight drains out of her muscles. The stinging in her cheek has already faded. There's no point striking him, there's nothing in him to strike at. When she wanted to grab him just then she wanted to crush out of him what she hates. But what she hates adds up to nothing, or next to nothing. His rage has turned into a small creeping thing that can only say rot, rot, rot.

Poort
is lying face-down on the floor. She picks it up. Its fall has ironed a deep crease into the page with her poem on it. She closes the magazine, takes it to her bedroom. She doesn't want to open it again. The damage to the perfect page is too difficult to look at.

 

When the father's dying finally comes it comes quickly, this show they have been rehearsing for so long.

After all that was said about the intercom at school it is the mother and not the daughter who takes the call from the hospital that Wednesday morning during the mid-July school break. Earlier in the day the father drove himself down to Durban for new tests. Something still the matter with the waterworks, he mumbled at breakfast, grimacing.

The mother's face as she turns from the phone is ghastly. The tumour lies like a stone in his bladder, she says, the kidneys are riddled. Days not weeks, they say, just days.

But Ella doesn't believe it. Though a cold claw fastens on her neck, she shrugs it off. Can't be true. Things don't always turn out as you hope they will. The father will get through this, he always does. He'll outfox them; he'll smash his fist on a desk somewhere and shout his way through. It can't be true that she'll be rid of him, well and truly and forever rid.

She makes a vow to herself. Here and now: at this moment. Vow. At this moment that she's running from the phone to the bathroom to fetch her mother's tranquillizers – never forget. Never go back on this, she vows to herself, this moment when he's after all still alive. Even when he's dead, do not let a veil of forgetting drop over this. Never forget how bad it's been, that being rid of him can only bring better things. Never forget that for years you looked forward to his death; counted the days; could not wait. Never forget that looking forward, or regret it.