The Shouting in the Dark (27 page)

When I die, don't mind it, he said. Well, look at her now, not minding. Even more than not minding, making sure. See the mother wringing her hands – I should've done this, he might've done that – raking over things: all of it is pointless. He's dead and they have shot of him: his voice, the heavy push of his hands, his hatefulness, it's all gone. He doesn't warrant raking over. He wouldn't have wanted it either, but that's not her concern. Nothing about him concerns her any longer, nothing about him matters. She owes him nothing. She was no more than a mark in the margin of his life – well, what of it? That life's now over, she can throw away the page.

The world is all before her, she's read this somewhere. She likes the sound of it. The world is all before her, there's no need to look back. For a long time she was burdened but now she's free, freed, unexpectedly free. Freer than any time before in her life. To the mirage over the crematorium chimney she says: There you go, past tense, silent at last. I can follow my own interests now and your hatefulness won't prevent me.

Till the end of the winter holiday Ella sits up watching late-night television. There is no one to tell her to go to bed, to stop drinking the father's Old Brown Sherry in slugs straight from the bottle. The mother has doubled her tranquillizer dosage, she sleeps a great deal. Give me just a few weeks, she says, till I feel less awful about everything that's happened, less guilty. That she didn't
see
how ill he was, for so long . . . what a stoic he was . . . What a tyrant, Ella thinks. She sits out on the verandah in the second rattan chair, Ko's, the one facing the father's. The house at her back feels empty and peaceful. The odd off-thing that weighed on the atmosphere has evaporated away. The interference on their television set has miraculously cleared also.

Phineas has given notice. The Saturday following the father's death, a cousin almost as tall and gangling as Phineas dropped off a scrawled note on a muddy piece of torn-off jotter paper.
I am very busy with my matric.
He hasn't shown up since. The Brickhills say he's also given notice there. Will he know about the father? Ella imagines so. The cousin will have said.

Phineas's torn-off jotter paper Ella folds into the back of her poetry notebook. From time to time she takes it out to study the looping handwriting, the tall letters pointing in all directions. Not exactly a testimonial for a potential boyfriend of steady character, she imagines the father's voice saying, then feels ashamed. On the second or third examination she finds on the back of the paper a single word written faintly in pencil,
Solomon
. Could that be Phineas's real name? she wonders. Has he perhaps tried to send her a message? His real name wasn't Zulu after all?

She's not sure why she keeps the note. To remind herself she's better off without him around, those movements of his mouth you never knew were proper smiles? To assure her that, yes, everything's turning out for the best?

Phineas's departure stretches her feeling of freedom wide. She sits on the verandah without worrying about bumping into him, how to fix her eyes, her legs. The garden is vacant, the verandah is quiet. There's no need to take account of anyone at all.

Yes, let's face it, she thinks, looking out across the lawn, since that day in the garage, when he decided to be the father's right-hand man and tell her what to do, or that following Saturday, when he grabbed her by the wrist yet warned her to come no closer – the zest went out of being with Phineas. Those two Saturdays showed what's now confirmed. Though she loved him he threw in his lot with her father. Despite occasional appearances he didn't love her as much as she dreamed.

Wherever they may meet in the future, she thinks, even if it's far away from the house, still the father and his rules will be there, standing between them. At the beginning, when first they exchanged looks, when she plotted going over to the township to join in with his friends, his marches, there was enough of whatever it was between them to ignore this. But that time passed. In those distant days she had dreams about helping Cuban soldiers, copying her relatives in the Dutch Resistance, sheltering people on the run. What was she thinking of? The father, everything he stood for, would always be in the way. Phineas himself said it that day outside the garage. He confirmed it out on the water at Victory Dam.

On the surface of course, if they met somewhere in the future, somewhere else, say, far away from South Africa and its laws, it might feel like just the two of them. They might talk properly for the first time. He might explain about his work back in the township. He might tell her at last his real name. She might ask him to say hers, which he never did. He never called her by her name.

But still the father would be there, the third in their conversation. He has thrown them on their guard for ever. Even if she ran into Phineas now – say he came back to pick up the grey school jumper he has left behind in the garage, folded like his blazer always was – if he came she'd have to talk about the father, she'd have to compose a sad face. She pushes the thought away, somehow it's very tiring. She wants to sit here in Ko's chair, quietly by herself, free of ghosts, the memory of a photograph dancing in the updraft over a bonfire, the feeling of the empty space at the back of the bookshelf where the Colt 45 once lay.

It is her responsibility now to mow the lawn, weed the flower beds. Working here and there in the leafy, overgrown corners of the garden, she finds white tufts of the father's hair, the blown leavings of the past year's haircuts gleaming half-luminous in the early dusk.

She combs through the garden, collecting every bit of hair she can find. Mixed in with leaves and dirt, there is almost enough to fill a Spar bag. The first weaver-birds of the spring have not been thorough in building their nests. Where does all the cut hair in the world go? she wonders, holding the bag up to the sunlight, the greyish clutch of hair inside. Imagine, if everyone had a lifetime's burden of hair blowing about the world . . . It's not a comfortable thought. All that scattered hair means she can't ever be certain he's gone, the earth's cleansed of him.

Behind the mound where they stoked the bonfire she digs a hole, not a deep hole, it just needs to be a hole, and buries the bag of hair. In subsequent days, mulching, weeding, she confirms she did a good enough clearing job. There are, as far as she can see, no more bright white hairs blowing about the garden.

The father, the organized bookkeeper, died at a good, efficient time, during the school winter-break, the recess before the matriculation exams. Ella did not have to take time off either for his final illness or for the funeral. The day before school re-opens Mr Kessler the headmaster telephones to speak to her mother.

‘She is indisposed,' Ella says, ‘I'm happy to talk.'

The head wishes to put an offer to her. She need not come back to school immediately. Should she wish to cite her bereavement, her matriculation exams can be delayed till January, even next June.

She has never heard anything so stupid, though she doesn't say so.

‘Think about it, Ella. It's worth waiting until you feel ready to take the trophy results that have always lain within your reach.'

‘Thanks, but no thanks,' she says firmly.

Of course she will be back to school tomorrow. Indignation fires her cheeks. Of course she will be writing her exams. They are in four weeks' time? Fine, she knew that already. She has been planning to write them all along.

‘Your dear father would have wished it, I'm sure,' says Mr Kessler.

‘No, I wish it,' she says. ‘I don't think he cared one way or another.'

That new spring Ella enters an international scholarship competition. If she wins, the scholarship will take her to another country within the English-speaking world for an extra year of schooling, a bridge to university, or, at least, the great universe of grown-up life. The first stage of the competition is to write an essay on the topic,
The Effect on me of X
, where X is either a film or your favourite book.

During the dead days between her matriculation exams, she writes her essay. She describes how she was saved from being a Valium-addicted loner by the never-say-die spirit of Anne Shirley in the
Anne of Green Gables
series. Though the story is mainly made up it's surprising how real it sounds. She sails through this stage of the competition. Her essay, the acceptance letter says, though it had its eccentricities, was suitable and deserving.

Interviews follow, rank upon rank of interviews, first in a white-washed Tudor-look country hotel outside Braemar, then in the Imperial Hotel, Durban, then in a very grand beach hotel outside Durban, in Umhlanga Rocks. There are also written tests, an aptitude test, a language test. These she writes at school, in the hot, empty days leading up to Christmas.

At each step of her interview path experts with differently sized glasses peer at her over clipboards held at a secretive angle close to their chests. The set-up is all too familiar. She's back in Dr Fry's consulting room, back with the foot specialist in Durban. She knows she'll be found wanting. It has happened before. Essay writing is one thing, scrutiny by experts is another.

But by some miracle she clears the hurdles they set. The day before Christmas Eve a call comes. Her mother is once again in bed. A Scottish voice at the other end of the line puts a wonderful question. Would she like to spend her scholarship year in the land of Anne of Green Gables?

Ella asks the voice to repeat the question, though she had no difficulty understanding it the first time. She just wants to hear the thing said all over again.

The mother takes the long-delayed decision to return to her motherland. With her dear husband gone, her daughter in transit, there's nothing to keep her on this benighted continent, this lightning-prone ridge. She'll take her sister's portrait back to where she, Ella, always really belonged, where the light and the temperature won't corrode the paint.

The house is sold, a cash sale. Nothing is said about the Braemar property's vulnerability to lightning strikes. The charred tree trunks were long ago cleared away. The sale raises enough to buy a second-floor apartment in what the mother calls a good area in The Hague, not far from various concert halls, close to a leafy park.

Bogey goes to the Brickhills next door, a happy arrangement for all parties. The Brickhills lost their old fat dog to a heart attack a month or so before the father's death. Only a hedge's breadth away from his old haunts Bogey will feel right at home. One afternoon the Brickhills' maid Eunice comes to take away the doll's house. She has four children at home who'll like to play with it, she tells Ella, and that's not counting her late sister's two she also looks after. She carries the house away on her head, the dust sheet folded on her crown as support, the furniture rattling about inside. The roof she holds in her big muscular arms, squeezed to her chest, Phineas's grey school jumper draped over the eaves.

Now that the house is sold the mother sets about packing up the furniture. Every stick of it that she brought out with her will now travel back as it came, in wooden chests like zoo animals, the painting of her sister in its own special slatted box. The father's few bits, the table he made on his carpentry course, the Chinese lamp-stand with its kitsch jade glaze (that somehow has lost its lampshade), the ugly tea-chest from Singapore, the horrible saggy rattan furniture – these things she will leave behind. Cheap-looking stuff like that will not look right in the Hague apartment with its picture windows.

She writes home that it's not necessary for Cousin Jan-Kees to come and help her. The father may once have insisted on this, she tells Ella, but he didn't reckon on her pride. She has too much pride to lean on family charity. Nor does she need to. She'll manage everything fine, even the flight. The new tranquillizers the hospital doctor prescribed are excellent, they knock you right out. The whole journey through the sky she won't be aware of a thing.

Ella helps the mother pack up the house. Her responsibility is the father's things plus her own bits. His clothes she packs in empty melon jam cartons and lines the filled boxes at the gate, four of them, with his one smart jacket laid on the top, his Royal Netherlands Navy uniform folded underneath it, for Eunice to carry away that evening after she finishes work. Apart from the clothes, there's little else of the father's to tidy up. Funny, the mother says puzzled, looking at the lined-up boxes, I could've sworn Har had more than that, a chess set maybe, those photo-albums of his, the ones with brown covers?

Her own things Ella puts in a square tin chest bought at Big Dave's for R 50, the price of the father's motorboat. Her notebooks and the carbon copy of the letter to Brezhnev she spreads in the bottom as lining. She tells herself she will buy fresh notebooks in Canada. She adds her pair of built-up leather shoes and the father's beetle-bored chess set, which she has kept hidden under her bed, the chess set his brother Jan gave him when he set out for Singapore. Beside the chess set she places his sherry glass, unwashed, the sticky lip-marks still on it, and the Wilhelmina Cross for War Service in the Royal Netherlands Navy she unpinned from his uniform.

Linda's father offers to store the chest in his garden shed, to wait until such time as she will return to South Africa. The day she hands over the chest he grabs her chin and makes her look into his face. ‘You'll be back, won't you, young Ella? You're our ambassador now, you know that.' She cannot nod because of his hold on her chin.

But she will come back, she knows. She isn't lying. She's nothing if not an African. The father said she was, more or less. He sealed her destiny, her African genealogy. You stand at the start of a new line, he said, or words to that effect. It was one area where they saw eye to eye.

 

In Canada, in the leafy suburb of Toronto to which the scholarship board assigns Ella, it is like being born anew. She lives in a two-storey wooden house on a maple-lined street with a family: two soft-spoken people, the manager of the local petrol station and his wife, whose son and daughter are both at college. Ella becomes their ward, their live-in on-loan child. During the weeks she is an only child just as before, but at the weekend she has two borrowed siblings: George, an engineering student with grime under his fingernails who restores old cars; Emma-Leigh who's at drama school but unsure about continuing.

Here in Canada, in north Toronto where the gardens have no fences, Ella feels free to be whoever she likes. However, she prefers to keep things simple, so she chooses the most straightforward way to be. She will be just a teenager. She will be a teenager in jeans with over-plucked eyebrows, looking like most Canadian girls her age, but one who has the outstanding talent, so her new Canadian schoolmates tell her, of speaking the Queen's English. It's perfect being this way. Everywhere she goes, she's taken at face value, as an ordinary Canadian girl who speaks copybook English.

With the stamp of ordinariness safely upon her, she risks a few less-than-ordinary things. She joins an evening poetry group organized by the Attic, the local bookshop on Main Street. Her poem the group most likes, called ‘Haiku', is about a black and white photograph melting in the updraft from a bonfire. She also enters recitation competitions across Ontario. She travels from east to west across the vast province, from Thunder Bay through North Bay to Ottawa, with her declamation of ‘Kubla Khan'.

Using slides donated by the South African Tourist Board she develops a slide show that she takes around schools and debating societies in southern Ontario. The slide show stuns its audiences with ten minutes of spectacular landscape photographs marinaded in golden sunshine. She clicks her way rapidly around the carousel, with minimal commentary: see the purple hills, the towering mineshafts, the river valleys clotted with poplars, the wide white beaches. Then she switches on the light and tells her blinking audience: ‘That's the dream the Tourist Board wants you to believe, but the reality is different. The reality is hatred and here are the details. During the student riots two years ago, to give just one example, the police used so much tear gas that, a few miles distant, your eyes smarted and ran. My eyes smarted and ran. The police fired on unarmed schoolchildren, boys and girls my age, one of them I knew— '

After her slide shows people break out clapping, raise eyebrows at her courage, or is it her foolhardiness? How will she ever return to South Africa? they ask. Shouldn't she take more care?

Ella shakes her head firmly, thanks everyone for their support. Like at the Eisteddfods, she enjoys lifting her voice for an audience, seeing the lights in their eyes shift, brighten. The difference is that now she's talking not of England and tree-fringed country lanes, as at the Eisteddfods, but of South Africa, anger, resistance, ‘freedom one day soon'. The soldiers in free Africa, they were the boldest people she had ever seen. Telling her tear gas stories, she thinks of them. She thinks sometimes of Phineas. The thing he said that last time. We submit or we fight.

Following her talk at the golf club in Barrie, a stooped woman in a Toronto Maple Leaves shirt and shiny trainers intercepts her at the door. ‘I can't help asking myself, my dear,' she whispers, ‘what background are you? Jewish? You must have something ancestral. Why, otherwise, would you be so furious?'

At her north Toronto high school Ella is enrolled into the Ontario Grade 13, for which three subjects are required. She takes four, Mathematics, Further Math, English, Greek Philosophy. Greek Philosophy is an extra but she likes it almost as much as she likes Math. Greek Philosophy is made up of straightforward observations about the world linked into logical chains she can agree with completely, the taken-for-granted things that back in Braemar she wrote in her notebook and thought she had worked out all by herself. Everything is water, everything flows. You never step in the same river twice. Life proceeds by number, in patterns. If
x
is
y
and
y
is
z
then
z
is
x
. All things are linked and proportionate to all other things.

She earns pocket money by cutting her school friends' hair and tutoring English grammar and maths after school to children in younger classes. Some of her pupils are Vietnamese boat people who have no English at all. With the first dollars she earns she buys at the Attic Bookshop a book whose title calls to her from the shelf:
White Man, We Want to Talk to You
. The book is banned in South Africa, the cover says, though it's all about the country. It has some good ideas about how the place might be improved. When barriers exist between people like they do in South Africa, the author Mr Herbstein says, you must pull them down before you talk. She believed nothing different before she ever read the book, and is happy for Mr Herbstein to agree with her. His book makes good plain sense, unlike
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, which is the second book she buys with her pocket money.
Lady Chatterley's Lover
is also banned in South Africa but its agitation and blather puts her on her guard.

Not long after she finishes reading
White Man, We Want to Talk to You
she joins the three-day Fast Against Apartheid campaign organized by the local United Nations group operating out of Wantage County Hall not far from her school. She finds it's not so difficult living on fruit juices and flavoured ice-cubes. After all, she has had the practice.

At the break-the-fast meal, she falls into conversation with a tall African-looking boy called Ivor Dearlove whom she knows from Further Math. Ivor, it turns out, is originally from Cape Town. In the year of the school riots his father, a headmaster in a Coloured high school, openly gave his support to the striking students. He had to take his family into exile in Canada to avoid arrest. Ivor says this matter-of-factly, as if it had cost them nothing: they pulled up their roots and shook off the clinging soil and now are happily settled in Ontario. His older sister has had a baby here. Recently he won the position of first trumpeter in the school orchestra.

She and Ivor see Bette Midler in
The Rose
together at the local movie house and have a milkshake afterwards. It's her first proper date with a boy; it'll also be her last date with Ivor. Looking at Ivor's face across the rim of her milkshake glass she can't help thinking of Phineas, comparing Ivor and Phineas. She can't help remembering how smoothly Phineas's skin stretched over his cheeks, how his bones glowed through his skin. Ivor's skin isn't smooth and his shave is uneven. How her breath caught, how that charge travelled down from her throat to her feet, she remembers, when the gleam of Phineas's smile came up from under his brow.

But the story of Ivor's family gives her a boost, it backs her up. It's good to look to the future, to turn from the past. Ivor's family has done it. The world lies all before them, before her. Things that were once important and real are now far-away, the deep blue Indian Ocean, the stars of the Southern sky. The craggy grey stone of Upper Canada has come in place of the African shield's red rock. But she knows that these faraway things, though she sometimes misses them, have not vanished. Only the smaller things, the things that were sad or difficult, those
are
gone forever. That scorched medallion of sticky earth at the back of the house in Braemar. The white hairs blowing about the garden. The hand on her face, pressing. Things she doesn't ever want to think about again but that sometimes, though more and more rarely, crop up uninvited in her thoughts.