The Shouting in the Dark (3 page)

Most Braemar nights, though, the father is by himself, yet still talks out loud, beats his knee for emphasis, slaps the glass-topped rattan table with its chipped under-layer of mustard-yellow paint, walks to the verandah edge to heave gobs of mucus onto the lawn. He's a lipless mouth throwing out hoicking noises, only, when he's alone, Ella notices, he doesn't speak so much about the good life strung between the clubs, warehouses and docks of the Far East. In these other stories he's not onshore but at sea and at war, on a Royal Netherlands Navy N-class destroyer called the
Tjerk Hiddes
, stalked by enemy frigates. Among the group of old
makkers
he's the only one who doesn't return to the Far Eastern haunts on Once-in-a-Lifetime tours. ‘Who'd want to see it? Whole place was shot to hell.' He's also the only one who saw combat during the War. He alone, he says, Ella listening, was fool enough to give ear to Queen Wilhelmina's call, brace up for the beleaguered fatherland's defence.

‘People think the Royal Navy was all British,' he tells the night sky. ‘They forget the plucky ships of the Netherlands and Norwegian navies, among others, how we mucked in, made our way to Scapa Flow, skirted round the side of the galvanized-steel lid Adolf Hitler had laid over the Continent. How we, too, said
be buggered
to the Nazis.'

The father's war stories begin in the middle of nowhere, break off suddenly, turn like boomerangs and hit Ella, peeping, with surprises. Is it the war, she wonders, that makes him shout like he does? Is he just a cross old seaman missing the good days in the East? What presses him to hurl those angry words at the night? Back in Durban, before she began eavesdropping in earnest, she had no idea he was in the war. Though he's old, fifty-nine last birthday, she hadn't thought
that
old. The war, she'd thought, was ages and ages ago. Hard a-port, he suddenly yells, clanging his sherry tumbler on the table, Emergency front! That's the ticket.
Ach waarom nou, waarom?
he sobs.
Verdomme, Godverdomme
, those dear chaps and lovely girls, and the storms and strafing and busy quays, and remember that consignment of crazy Australian horses for the Sultan of Johore, when they ran amok?

Some nights he calls out so loud that Ella thinks he must be hailing someone. He wouldn't sit and shout at nothing, would he? Could he be waiting for a secret visitor to arrive, she asks herself, someone to recognize at last all that he fought for? We Europeans, we remade the world with our hard work, he spits, and then we gave it up again as if it cost us nothing.

At first now and again, then by the time of her ninth birthday on most Braemar evenings, the father's night watches draw Ella from her bed to the window. She slips into the gap in the curtains, puts her ear to the glass, till he himself gets up, switches off the outside light and goes to bed. If she were ever to quit peeping and lie down, she wonders, would the long-expected secret visitor finally appear? Would he get the message at last that till now he's been refused?

 

International trunk calls come once in a blue moon to Braemar but Ella picks out their throaty pirrup as soon as the ring begins. So far, these trunk calls have always been for the mother, even the ones back in Durban. A relative is ill, or dead; Oma in Oegstgeest wants to talk to her only living daughter, mark some special occasion, the birth of a Royal baby of Orange.

Today, a Saturday, the pirrup breaks into her parents' coffee time on the verandah, so she is the first to the telephone, calling over her shoulder,
Trunk call, trunk call
. She hears the strange whirring in the background you get because of the undersea cables, very tinny and grinding, and then the click,
Hallo? Hallo?
Wie is dat? Irene, Ella?

‘
Ja, ja, met Irene
,' her mother grabs the receiver from Ella's hand but immediately looks crestfallen. It's not her mother, not one of her cousins, but Har's brother. ‘Jan,' she mouths at Ella. ‘Call your father.
Quickly
.'

But the father, too, is already standing by. During trunk calls he comes to stand by, his watch held in his palm.

Ja . . . Ja, Jan
? The brothers don't mince words, or rather Har doesn't. Jan has a few curt lines to report.
Ja, ja
, the father says again, nothing more than
Ja
, frowning hard, then thrusts the receiver back into his wife's hand. ‘Can't make head nor tail,' he says, ‘Can't actually hear a thing either. You talk to them.'

‘
Hallo
, Jan,' the mother says pleasantly but loudly, pressing the receiver up against her mouth, ‘Sorry, we must speak up, it's a bad connection. Could be our wires, storms somewhere. Har,
niet doen
, the connection will go totally.' The father has dropped to his knees at the skirting board. In his hands is a loop of white flex. ‘Har's doing something, Jan, the loose wire – '

Ella hunkers down beside him. She sees his funny pad thing that her mother calls a truss bulging out at his side. She makes sure no part of her is touching it. ‘Nothing doing, nothing doing,' the father murmurs, his glasses on the end of his nose, his callused thumbs massaging the loose wire loop, then suddenly gripping it tight, pressing it to the skirting board where the staples have come loose.

‘
Ja, ja
,' the mother says excitedly, ‘Yes, that's clearer, yes. Har's somehow playing aerial. Say that bit again, Jan.'

‘Don't you people get it?' the father whispers at the wall. ‘We're a long way away from one another, don't you see? The string of sound connecting us to Europe will always be snagging at some or other point . . .'

‘Your mother's what-not, yes,' the mother repeats after Jan, ‘In the attic, top drawer, small parcel with Har's name . . . Contains teaspoons, from the feel . . .? Left them for him when he was in Singapore . . . Send them out to us, or hold? What do you think, Har,
hold
?'

The father's fingers have begun to tremble, Ella sees, so tightly is he holding the wire, pressing it hard and tight to the skirting board. She sees the whiteness of his knuckles, the bloom of his skin-warmth on the wall. Through the receiver, through the wire, her uncle Jan's voice still buzzes.

‘
Ja
,' the mother is saying, ‘I'll tell him, I know he missed . . .'

Hold
? Jan hollers back again,
Hold
?

Ella imagines the round word
Hold
whirling over from her Uncle Jan's mouth to where they're crouched here on the floor. She sees it rolling along the thin black cable laid on the sandy seabed of the Bay of Biscay, the Gulf of Guinea, the Skeleton Coast . . .

Har!
shrieks the mother,
Har!
He has dropped the wire and left the room, swearing something. Ella goes after him. She hears the mother return to the receiver, her murmured apology. From the door of the living room she sees the father standing at his desk, his hands arched on the desk-chair's back, the knuckles still dead-white.

She steps back quietly, lets herself out onto the verandah, the two untouched cups of coffee still standing there on the glass-topped table, her father's, her mother's. She sits on the verandah's edge, the sun like a burning hand on the back of her neck. A sound of hard breathing and the father is suddenly beside her. He hooks his insteps over the verandah's edge, as he likes to do, and begins to rock on his heels.

‘Such a weasel whine on the face of Old Europe,' he snaps at the sky, rocking, ‘So querulous, so snivelling. Oh, our long-lost Har – we're spending our precious money to tell you, by trunk call no less, our mother left you some old bric-à-brac. Why not just say it plain? That's all you get, brother, nearly forty years after the event. Guilt money, such a call, utter waste, costs twice as much as the
kut
-spoons are worth.'

Ella shifts her eyes carefully to the father's face. His eyes today are starey, far bluer than normal, as if emptied out. Is he drunk? she wonders. Even for him, it's very early in the day to be drunk.

‘Why plague me with their links to their past, eh Ella, that's what I ask?' He uses her name but it's not her he's talking to, she doesn't think. ‘That's not the past I want,' he says, rocking harder.

Ella moves away to the shade of the hawthorn bush beside the verandah, to where she can watch him between the branches without being seen. He stays put where she left him, glaring so hard he's almost squinting. He takes his glasses off, polishes both lenses on his shirt, then puts them back on and squints some more.

‘Yes, my Ella' – again he surprises her – ‘There are some I
would
like to speak to if I could. But not the most expensive trunk call nor the longest cable could get me a connection to them. Singapore 1940. All the friends. The happy ship, '44. Then Durban and you, Ella,
you
. The Singapore friends don't visit enough to tire of speaking of all that.'

His eyes sweep upwards, fix on the hilly horizon of his view. He tightens his tie – though he's freelancing, every day he still wears a tie. He takes his glasses off a second time, rubs his eyes.

‘Of what use are those people in Nederland to me?' He squints quizzically into the distance through his rubbing fingers. ‘Of what use for that matter,
verdomme
, is Nederland? Couldn't they have said all that in a letter? And I'd have said dump it in the bin. None of it's any use, not now, not ever. When the people one truly – Dead and gone, long forgotten.'

He shoots a sullen suspicious look over his shoulder. The mother, her face scarlet, has appeared in the frame of the French windows. In her hands is a wooden tray bearing two fresh cups of coffee, a sugar bowl with its mound of white sugar, a silver spoon with the triple-X crest of Amsterdam on the handle.

‘So you finished at last, bawling down that telephone wire?' The father again faces the hills.

‘It was all over when you took your hands away.' The mother puts the tray on the rattan table, sits down. ‘It just became noise. I had to apologise for you. You walked off.'

‘They'd said plenty, it was enough. Enough of that useless past, that useless so-called fatherland. Who wants all that back? I don't. Never asked.' He thrusts an arm at the sky. ‘This is the country I want.'

‘But I do, Har, I haven't left all that behind.' The mother leans forward in her chair, smooths her crimplene slacks down her long thighs. Her expression has turned pleading. ‘So rarely I get the chance nowadays, to speak to your
familie
, let alone my own
familie
. . . It's important to me, you know, our families, my country, a parcel left in the attic by your mother. Though it may not be important to you, it's important to me.'

‘Important, my fat arse,' he sits down, looks at her. ‘Some forgotten bits of junk turning up years after her death, what rot. When at the time, nothing was left me, remember? Not a letter or motherly billet-doux or perhaps, is it too much to ask, a few guilders? Out of sight, out of mind, that second son, disappeared somewhere in the Far East. Almost it makes me think they want something from me. Yes, no doubt about it, that's what they're thinking, let's get something from him, the white man in Africa, living like a king. Let's give him something to soften him up. Some silver teaspoons, how very Dutch! What a waste of time when, like I was just now telling Ella, real enterprising people, they look to the future, the good country that we're building right here in Africa, where only white men need apply.'

So he
was
talking to her? Ella finds a wider gap in the hawthorn bush to peer through. The twigs press into her face.

‘As for my people in the East – all dead.' He thrusts his hands through his comb-over and the white hairs stand out from his head in tufts. ‘If it weren't for the war I'd've stuck with them, the Chinese and the expats, the only Dutch worth knowing. Those in the so-called fatherland, bah, forget them. What did my fatherland give me after the war, when I most needed it? Nothing. Your beloved sister, our beloved, she was one of the few. She understood – how strangers can be friends like no others, the lotus smells sweeter than the rose . . .'

The mother scrapes back her chair. Her head is down, but, as she turns to the French windows, Ella sees her crinkling cheeks, her grimacing mouth.

‘Even looked Chinese,' the father begins to stutter, ‘That black hair, those gimlet eyes. Not the first but certainly the best beloved, eh Ella? Looked like the people I knew best – '

He may be using her name, Ella thinks, but he definitely isn't talking to her. He also isn't talking to the mother, who has vanished, leaving her tray on the table, the four coffee cups, the sugar bowl.

‘No gift can make up for it,' still the ragged words come, ‘Everything that disappeared . . . How can they ever understand? When they have their stupid lives . . .'

He begins to hiccup, then suddenly steps off the verandah, almost as if he stumbled. He looks up, straight at the hawthorn bush, at her face in the gap between the twigs. His eyes lock with hers and her heart begins to race.

‘What are you staring at,
loeder
?' he calls out. ‘Don't think I can't see you there, goggling like a moron. Step out, come on, show yourself.'

She steps out. Her fists are clutched so tight that she cannot feel her hands and a tingling runs up her arms. The pounding in her skull makes her ears go blurry.

‘Look at her,' he walks up closer. ‘The un-daughterly thing. Never trust a person who stares like this,' he grabs her chin, his fingers clench, ‘But who never looks another person in the eye. How often must I tell you? This stony face is
not
welcome
in our house.'