The Shouting in the Dark (5 page)

For a long time there's no answer to her question. When Ella asks it the mother only sighs and changes the subject. Once, her hands fidgeting, she says: ‘My sister Ella had never laid eyes on him, you know, the artist, before he painted her portrait. One day in the tram he stopped her and asked her to sit for him.' Then she murmurs the word
décolletage
.
Décolletage
, she explains, is the word for all that open white skin.

 

The time comes for Ella to start school. In Dr Fry's opinion she is a Late Developer, in spite of her great size. He advises the mother to enter her in something called the Remedial Class instead of Class One. In the Remedial Class, he explains, children of all ages, both Afrikaans and English, are given extra help with their numbers and letters for however long they need it.

Though Ella doesn't know what
Late Developer
means, or
immigrant effects
, or
second-generation war-child
, or
outsider mentality
, or
second-language issues
, or
only-child introversion
, or any of the other put-together words Dr Fry uses when he talks about her, she is made to feel welcome in the Remedial Class. Standing outside her new classroom on her first day, she sees her name tag already stuck on one of the coat hooks by the door. At the moment she raises her hand to knock, the door opens and a small child with a dirty-blonde ponytail steps into the corridor, takes her by the hand and, without a word, leads her into the classroom.

From the first minute Ella decides she will like the Remedial Class. The classroom has tall sash windows for looking out of and a beautiful spreading loquat tree growing just outside. No one speaks much except to themselves – this Ella likes a lot. Even the teacher Mrs Woode mostly stays quiet, walks quietly in amongst the children trailing her long brown hair and soft cheesecloth smocks. A constant babble goes on, in Afrikaans, in English, but it's just the children talking to the fresh air in front of them. Though they may move about without asking Mrs Woode's permission, most of them like to stay put – stay put and pass the time swaying, sighing, occasionally singing. Ella enjoys staring. Mrs Woode lets Ella sit and stare with her mouth open for as long as she pleases.

In the Remedial Class each child has some feature that marks them out, a tic or habit, so by the end of the first day Ella has learned all their names. The eldest girl, Dawnie, who is eleven, sits facing the corner between the metal cupboard and the wall, and buzzes loudly in the back of her throat. Her buzz rings against the metal surface, an effect she likes because across the day she makes the buzz go louder and louder.

Dark Daan, whose cow's lick makes a slash across his forehead, rocks energetically back and forth, all the while whistling to himself. Daan is from a Reclassified family, Coloured in some or other proportion. Ella studies him out of the corner of her eye. If Coloured means flecked with different colours, Daan is no more Coloured than she is. In fact, she's more freckled. Coloured people are burdened by the sins of their fathers, her mother says. No more than I am, Ella thinks.

The two Down's Syndrome children in the group, Magda and Gretchen, are friends, the Mongoloid Mates Daan calls them, the M and Ms. They are quieter than most of the others, eager to please. Of the M and Ms Ella especially likes Gretchen. If ever Mrs Woode has a bad day and is cross, Gretchen reaches for her hand and gives it a squeeze.

And then there's tiny, silent Naomi Salome with her greasy ponytail and bruised-looking eyes, the child who first welcomed Ella, and always comes to sit beside her on the carpet. Now and again, quite suddenly, Naomi Salome puts her head tight between her knees and rubs her face from side to side till her cheeks go raw.

Ella is one of the youngest children so she has a place on the carpet in the front row. In the Remedial Class there are no desks, no tables. She likes being here beside Naomi Salome and close to Daan because they keep to themselves and don't shout out loud.

It's a different story with Stuart, the very oldest Remedial pupil. Stuart has fiery red pimples and hairs on his chin. His habit is to interrupt what he's saying in his ordinary voice with other words like gobs of spit, short explosive sounds in both English and Afrikaans,
poes
,
pis
,
prick
,
piel
,
skyt
,
shit, shag
, and some words Ella has never heard before. It's a rare day that Stuart reaches home-time without a scolding from Mrs Woode for having got no better at controlling himself.

‘I try, Miss, I try-try, but I can't help it,' Stuart hastens to reply without another
pis
or
poes
jumping from his mouth.

By and by though, Ella grows grateful to Stuart. Without meaning to he teaches her some important English words. She hears what the word is for the wobbly thing boys have between their legs and girls don't, the thing Stuart himself likes to hold in his fist through his clothes when he isn't shouting. She knows what to say to Mrs Woode when Naomi Salome has a bad stomach and dirties her pants, which often happens. Stuart's Afrikaans words aren't as useful but, still, she saves them up. They make her think of her father's talk on the verandah at night. How words can be shot out like bullets.

The Remedial group begins each day singing clap-along songs. After that, Ella is allowed to sit by herself and draw for as long as she likes, it doesn't matter what: a grille gate, a toad like a whale, a child with tiny limbs. Then, in the hour before lunch, Mrs Woode writes short English words like
Bat
and
Dog
or
Mat
and
Pot
on the blackboard. She invites the class to say the words along with her, clapping at the same time,
Bat
!
Dog
!
Dog
!
Bat
! – as if it was a game. This is Ella's favourite lesson. She likes being the only one who can say all the words.

‘Exactly the method the Rudolf Steiner school taught back home in Nederland, that you'll be taught when next we go and stay,' the mother says one afternoon from the kitchen door, catching Ella skipping to the chant,
Bat
!
Dog! Mat! Pot!
‘Do you remember, the Vrijeschool I pointed out to you, on the Scheveningseweg? That was my school, too.'

Ella lets her skipping rope hang, nods. She remembers the great mound of the dune behind the Vrijeschool that went almost as high as its top gable. She waits for Mam to say something more, something about the Remedial Class perhaps, now that she's mentioned school, but she retreats back into the kitchen. If the Remedial Class is to help children say the words Mrs Woode writes on the board, Ella wants to ask, what is she doing there, when she can say all the words? No one has yet said a thing to explain this – not Mrs Woode, not the mother or the father.

The problem can't be to do with her English, she tells herself. The father has dealt with her English. He's been her coach since the time they stood looking at ships in Durban. ‘English! English!' he shouts if ever by mistake she slips into Dutch. English is the world's finest language, he says in his growly Dutch accent, mangling the English vowels. It's a world-conquering language, zesty with England's sea-power. I'll have you speak the Queen's English, Churchill's language. You speak anything else and I won't hear you. Consider yourself lucky to be growing up in this English province of Natal. Why else, after the war, did I choose to live in this one strip of South Africa where the Union Jack has always flown high?

At night the mother reads Ella stories from English books in her broken English. The father tells her to. Ella's eye races ahead. She is listening to her mother but at the same time she's reading the words she recognizes further down the page. Under her breath she tries out the longer English words, the ones with tricky swishing sounds her blunt tongue can't quite push to the front of her mouth, like
pars
ley, or
this
tle, or Li-
tull
Bo-
Peep
.

When she's been in the Remedial Class a month or so, Ella begins to rock in time with her classmates sitting on the carpet. She notices this off-hand, not minding. She especially likes rocking when they're chanting words. Rocking, she feels a part of the group. She feels so much part of the group that when she catches sight of herself in the hallway mirror at the end of the first term it's as if the widow's peak in the middle of her forehead, that she gets from her father's side, has stretched into a hound's-tooth wedge just the same as Daan's.

In the playground Ella and Naomi Salome go off by themselves. They coast up and down the corridor between the tennis courts holding hands. Like Naomi Salome, Ella keeps her eyes to the ground. Nothing can touch me, she murmurs to herself as they pace, Nothing, nothing, nothing at all. She's saying the English word
nothing
, with the tough
th
, not the easy Dutch
niets
.
Niets kan me raken, niets
, it sounds too sharp and piercing.
Nothing
is a proper magic chant to ward off evil.
Nothing, nothing, nothing can touch me.

A week before the end of the winter term Mrs Woode catches Ella reading ‘Goldilocks' from the
Golden Story Book
to Naomi Salome in class. They are in their usual place on the carpet. Naomi Salome has laid her head on her crooked knees. Bending down, her sharp nostrils distended, Mrs Woode asks Ella to explain in plain language what exactly she thinks she is doing.

‘Reading, Mrs Woode.'

Mrs Woode straightaway flushes up but Ella can tell she isn't accusing her of anything.

‘See, Naomi's listening, Mrs Woode. I'm reading a story to Naomi.'

‘I do see that,' Mrs Woode says, and swishes her tasselled Indian skirt back over to her desk. ‘Come here, Ella.'

Mrs Woode opens the
Picture Bible
on her desk to a random page, the opening of Exodus, the story of Moses. ‘Try reading this.'

Ella reads, ‘
And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein.'

She's word perfect, except for slurring
therein
. She knows she made no mistakes, though Mrs Woode says nothing. As Ella reads she directs her quiet thinking look out of the window, at the loquat tree.

At register the next day Mrs Woode touches Ella's shoulder, beckons her to her desk. ‘Ella, this morning we're going to send you upstairs, up to Class One,' she tells her, then swivels her round to face the group. ‘Time to say Good-Bye.'

‘Good-Bye,' Ella says, repeating after Mrs Woode, ‘Good-Bye Every-One.' Dawnie, Daan, Naomi Salome, Gretchen, all go on doing their usual things. No one bothers to look up.

 

‘What's a Late Developer really, Dad?' Ella asks in her best English one early spring day in the car outside Ada's Hairdressing Salon. She and the father have dropped Mam off for her monthly perm. The mother pays for Ada's using Oma's trust fund so he drives her over in good spirit, remembers to bite back the usual remarks about cost.

It's been a while since Ella left the Remedial Class but still her father and mother have said not a word about it. At some point earlier they thought she needed Special help; Dr Fry thought she had
Effects
; but now they no longer think so: is that it? Ella's not certain. There's that glance of her father's, over in her direction and then off again, it gives him away, even now, there in the rear-view mirror when she asked her question, as if he can't ever quite get used to this skew-whiff creature that has cropped up somehow in the back seat of his car.

‘What's a Late Developer, Dad?' she asks again.

‘Late developer, early developer, who can say?' he eventually replies in English, reversing the Volkswagen Beetle out of the slantwise parking bay outside Ada's, his blue eyes in the rear-view mirror averted. ‘If you're thinking of development late or otherwise,
meid
, if you want to be developed, to come forward and be counted as a good citizen, one thing you can do is drop that stupid look you wear, like now, that fixed face, it puts people off. A developed face is a pleasant, open face.'

Ella remembers how Mrs Woode in the Remedial Class let her sit and stare. From the hallway mirror she knows what happens to her face when she forgets herself and stares, when her mouth hangs open, her eyes go glassy.

‘Cheer up,
schat
,' says Dad's Singapore friend Oom Ko on his visits, mussing her hair. ‘No need to put on that glary look. I don't bite.'

‘Underdeveloped, overdeveloped.' The father in the driver's seat warms to his theme. He takes a sudden detour from their homebound route, pulls into the big parking lot alongside the Wimpy Bar and lights up a cigarette from the Rothman's Plain packet in his pocket. ‘Overdeveloped
and
underdeveloped,' he says, blowing out smoke. ‘Both at once. Or maybe we can call it mis-development which is when you – and I mean you – act as silly as a young child but headstrong and obstreperous, too, talking to yourself, ignoring others, especially your mother, wilfully, like some American teenager. You make sure you don't turn into one of those,
een akelige brutale meid
, a truly miscast thing. Cheek is very ugly in a girl.'

Ella searches for his eyes in the rear-view mirror. His face is veiled in smoke. She's not familiar with some of his words, the English words, not the Netherlands.
Obstreperous
? Even
cheek
.
Cheeky
was what her father called Charley. She looks over at the oval Wimpy sign which is flashing though it's daytime. On, Off, it goes. Pause. On, Off. The Wimpy is new in town but she and Mam and Dad aren't likely to visit. They're not the kind of people who eat out, her mother says. If the Braemar white riff-raff go – what of it? They haven't been brought up to know what proper food is.