The Shouting in the Dark (9 page)

Dr Fry prescribes Valium pills. The mother resists the idea, but only for a while. From the magazines she reads she knows that Valium is a new wonder medicine, especially for women. It fixes matters to do with nerves, upsets both big and small. Yes, she knows, she should rather be trying holistic therapies, yoga and breathing and so on. Her family back home is devoted to an organic lifestyle. For generations they've been
Reformhuis
pioneers. But her family back home has backbone, staying power. They also have each other, whereas she, here in Africa, of those alive, is all alone. By herself, the mother says, she doesn't have patience for natural remedies, farmhouse vegetables, eurhythmics, reading auras, finding her astral body. Her sleepless nights have driven her over the limits she may once have had.

‘I'd go for the quick-fire solution, Irene,' the father says in English, crisply, as though the doctor were present, ‘Whatever feels best for you.'

He's agreeing with a decision she has already taken, he knows, and Ella knows. Already she's heard her halving her Valium pills with a nail file in the bathroom, the broken dragees pinging. Half a pill, she must think, is 50% less damaging for one's soul than a whole.

Late one winter's night her mother's spit is suddenly wet and cold on Ella's cheek, ‘Sleep, Ella, sleep. I heard you stirring again.' Ella squints blearily into the darkness. Was she really awake? The mother is crouched on the floor, at work with her nail file. Thump, goes her hand, then her head rears up. ‘Never mind,' she says, and presses a whole pill into Ella's palm. She sees its pale yellow triangle as trim as a sweet's, a neat
v
like an arrow stamped on each flat face. ‘Take a whole one. It's only your first time. It'll definitely help you sleep.'

Ella swallows the thing without water, lies back down. She barely has the chance to pull the blanket tight around her shoulders. One minute she's stretched on her back as she was before, with her contraption in place; the next minute, snap, she's asleep.

She wakes dreaming of a button, her finger on the snooze button of her alarm clock. The button, she sees squinting, is embossed with an arrow sign, another
v
.

Ella hears the father in the kitchen rattling the carousel toaster with its four turning flaps. ‘Where's Ella?
Waar is ze
?' he mutters loudly to himself, using English strung together with Dutch, a comfortable mix he wouldn't try talking to her directly. ‘Already it's very late.'

There's no sound from the mother.

Ella creeps to the window, draws open the curtains. The winter sunlight smacks her in the face. It plants a streak of neon-green in the centre of her field of vision, slightly to the left. She cannot look at this streak. She knows that, should she look at it, her brain will shrink to a single point.

If the mother is feeling anything like this, she thinks, then she will still be fast asleep in bed.

That whole school day she keeps her head down, protects her raw eyes from the sun. She has followed her mother's directions to the letter, she has done nothing wrong, but still she feels ashamed, deeply ashamed;
vernederd
is the Dutch word, lowered, brought low. Never again, she knows, will she be able to raise her head or peel her eyes off the ground. Some mean thing has been let into her skull that she herself allowed to get in.

At break-time she stands as usual with her classmates, Linda, Jerri, Mandy, on the edge of the playing field, scuffing the grass and chatting. Except today she's not chatting. Today, her brain wants it to be night-time. Why's the sky so very bright? she wonders. How come she didn't notice before how hard the sun beats down? Don't look at the neon-green streak, she tells herself. It will draw her in if she looks at it. It will crush her head into pieces.

Behind her fringe she steals glances at her classmates. There's something different about them, she suddenly sees. They're from another world, a normal world, not like hers – a world divided into day and night, sleep and not sleep.

‘My mother gave me a sleeping pill,' she wants to tell them, Linda especially, who has smiling eyes. ‘It was stronger than I needed. It has ground my brain into a mash.' But she's too proud to admit to these dark things: to confess that she can't do the natural thing, sleep, on her own; that her father's night-time rants have stolen away her rest; that her mother, too, has killed her sleep.

So she adopts a new nocturnal life and a new secret, the secret of how many of her nights are topped with a round dot, her pill. This new secret is heavier than the secret of her mother talking to the portrait; heavier even than the secret of how much she wishes, when her father's rages possess him, when he's shouting in the dark, spitting
rakker
and
schepsel
– that she could put a hand over his mouth and squeeze his face somehow, squeeze so hard that he'd never shout again.

Now almost every night before bedtime her mother comes to stand at her bedside.

‘Ella, are you asleep?' she whispers. ‘Please, be asleep.' In her hand is the bottle of Valium pills clicking quietly together.

But Ella is rarely asleep. Most times when the mother comes in she has just jumped back into bed, her skin clammy from leaning against the window.

Then, across the next few hours, their waiting game unfolds. Ella lies still on her pillow. In the bedroom or in the passage the mother from time to time sighs loudly, signalling she's awake. Ella could have a pill just by making a small noise.

To help pass the time, Ella tells her way through her favourite lists, the capitals of the world, the names of the stars within the Zodiac and the Southern Cross. Then, when these run out, the best saved till last, she memorizes her favourite thing – the paintings she has seen on their visits to the Netherlands, to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. She pieces the paintings together, the blocks of colour and then the tiny details, the turned-over glass tumbler, the bowl of oysters, the twisted ribbon looking as if someone had dropped it in a rush.

It's a good exercise, hardly difficult. She sees versions of the pictures close-up every day. Her mother has fixed postcard reproductions of the Rijksmuseum's most famous paintings to the inside of the toilet door. Why not dream, she says, make-believe these beautiful things lie somewhere close to this godforsaken Africa?

Rembrandt's painting
The Night Watch
is Ella's favourite of the postcards. She herself observes after all a kind of night watch, a
nacht wacht
. In bed she remembers each one of the faces in the
Night Watch
crowd, the man on the edge of the painting beating his drum, the witchy girl in yellow. A buttery golden colour bathes them all. Rembrandt must've known that night watchers get cold, she thinks, that their blood runs slower in their veins, that they'd appreciate the fire burning here in front of them. She likes how the man with the extended arm is holding his hand towards the blaze.

Some nights she's exhausted enough to slip off to sleep in the middle of her lists. But these nights aren't routine. Worst is when the Dutch clock in the hallway strikes twelve and still she's lying open-eyed. Now she must take a gamble. Either she makes a noise and receives her pill, which means she'll be clumsy in the morning but not too drowsy. Or she waits till later, still hoping to drop to sleep but failing, till at last she must give up, signal for her pill, invite in another dazed day.

Three nights out of four she settles for Valium around midnight. Now and again, if she's very wide-awake, there's also temazepam, a new kind of pill Dr Fry gives her mother to alternate with the Valium, for her more agitated nights.

‘There,' her mother says, lightly touching her shoulder as she swallows her pill, ‘Sleep now, you will go to sleep.'

And so Ella does, each and every time. Her mother can spend all the hours she likes with the portrait and she'd be none the wiser. Her father can shout and cry on the verandah and there'll be no one at all to watch him.

The temazepam however is a different story. The temazepam brings waking dreams etched in silver. On mornings after a temazepam, impish creatures with elongated faces dance in the corners of Ella's eyes, but, when she turns to look at them face-on, they break up like mercury droplets and dissolve away.

Ella learns to manage the new regime of pills. Some nights she pretends to swallow her pill but instead saves it under her tongue till her mother has left the room. She stores the pill in her pencil case for another night, a worse night, when she might need two pills. Other times she succeeds in lying awake till three or four in the morning, without inviting a visit. She falls asleep just as dawn is breaking. To her surprise she can better cope on two hours of unassisted sleep than after six hours on Valium.

But the regime lasts a month or so only. One night the Valiums she stored in her pencil case have gone. The pill she once slipped into her tissue box has disappeared also. It's as if a giant fist has punched the air from her lungs. Till daybreak she lies staring dry-eyed at the ceiling.

At breakfast, the mother stares dumbly at her empty plate. The father is seized by an unusual lightness. Browning the toast well on both sides with the carousel toaster, he raises an eyebrow at Ella, glances in the mother's direction. ‘No one at home, it looks like?'

Ella drops her eyes, won't rise to the invitation.

But she cannot look at her mother either. She knows that mask-like expression too well, the hanging jaw, the sudden jerks of the neck. She, too, has performed those whiplash head-turns following the impish temazepam ghost.

Now Ella discovers that, if her brain felt crushed before, it was a dummy run only. This dull-red pain that throbs all day inside her head, breaks up her thoughts, forces her to speak slowly – this is the real thing. She thinks about taking a day off school – but no, it's beyond imagining. She must not be weak, she must not give way.

In bed she contrives a way of binding her arms to her sides with her skipping rope to give the old feeling of being strapped down. Getting this right requires a bout of wriggling and rope winding, for which she uses her elbows and teeth. At the end of the process she's tired enough at least to want to lie still. She stuffs tissue into her ears so as not to hear her mother's creaking. Well swaddled, she runs through her list of star names till, suddenly, it's morning, she has slept. She sleeps four hours at a stretch, then five, six, seven. She no longer nods off in class.

One effect that doesn't wear off is that the world seems louder than it was before. Sounds have a sharper edge. An unexpected noise slices like a razor blade into her ear. For the first time she's aware of how loud they are together, their small family of three, how
big
their voices, especially the father's. The tidy streets of Braemar feel too puny to contain his loudness. No matter how hard her father tries to sound English and soft-spoken, he booms like a Dutchman. Every word he says sounds furious. The librarians at the town library hear his voice coming from a distance and disappear up ladders to re-shelve books.

Frith Fouché, whose mother is a librarian, tells the story at school.

‘Poor lady,' Frith says the librarians whisper amongst themselves. ‘To have Himself around all day to deal with. No wonder Mrs is a bit wound up.'

Ella wishes she could make common cause with the librarians and disappear up a ladder. Because if her father's loud at large in the world, how much louder isn't he boxed inside the four walls of their house?

One morning the father's new friend Major Tom Watt gives him a frosty reception in the queue at the butcher's. That evening he stands behind his chair at the dinner table glowering, his white-knuckle hands arched on the table's edge, his breath dark-yellow with cigarette smoke and bile.

‘Couldn't get him to talk to me about a thing,' he frowns at the leathery chop the mother lifts onto his plate. ‘No matter how I tried. This man who has enjoyed my hospitality, my Old Brown. I asked what he made of our Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster as a successor to state architect Verwoerd. Was he sufficiently firm? A worthy custodian of our dream of a white republic? He kept looking away. Finally, at the till, he asked me to “tone it down”. Be more measured, he said. Measured! Was the burden of history too heavy for him? I asked. He scooped his change into his pocket and made off. These English, I tell you, they may be the pillars of this society, but when they decide to dodge an issue, they're weasels like the rest of them, slippery as hell.'

He bends down to his plate, discerns for the first time a fine charred line running along the length of his pork-chop.

‘What's this? Burnt again!' he drops heavily into his chair. ‘When will you women ever get it right? Irene? So little I ask. Fresh chops purchased this very morning at the butcher's, and now look!'

He stabs at the chop with his knife and it skids off his plate onto the table, trailing grease. The mother picks up her napkin, leaves the room. ‘
Moeder
,' she whimpers to herself as she goes, ‘
Mijn Ella
.
Mijn moeder
.'

‘
Idioot
,' the father bellows at her back. ‘What earthly use do you people have? You give me nothing, you two, only take. Just like the rest of them, those Dutch, succubi all of you, sucking the lifeblood from my veins.'

Ella quietly puts down her knife and fork, yet still catches his attention. ‘You keep quiet, you dumb staring
idioot
no better than your mother,' he roars, white spittle gathering in the corners of his mouth. ‘It beats me utterly. That you women can't get right even the few things you're good for. Like homemaking maybe. Like maybe giving a man an embrace.'

In the reflection in the dining room window Ella sees herself seated between her parents' places, the father's on the left, the mother's on the right. The window has no curtains because her father likes to follow the last of the sun sinking behind the rolling western hills of his view. From her seat she can read the titles of the books in the bookcase behind her mother's empty place.
A Town Called Alice
in a battered cream cover to the left of a blue
Plain English Grammar
and beside that the green
The Cruel Sea
. One title in particular always catches her eye – the biography of a famous soprano Oma once gave her mother. The title is printed on the bottle-green binding in silver.
Am I Too Loud?