The Woman Next Door (11 page)

‘AM I DEAD?’
Marion asked the glare of light she could just make out through squinted eyes.

‘Marion Agostino, can you hear me?’

‘I’m not dead.’ She couldn’t keep the disappointment from her voice. Her head hurt. There was noise. ‘Where am I?’

‘She’s come to. She’s fine.’ The man had turned away from her.

‘Where am I?’

‘You’re on a stretcher, Ma’am. We’re outside your house. There has been an accident.’

What accident, she thought, but then the events slowly came back to her.

‘The painting?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Where’s the painting?’

‘Something about a painting.’ He’d turned away from her again. The manners on these people.

Marion made to move and a pain shot through her.

‘Ma’am, you need to stay lying down for a while. You’ll be okay, but just stay down for me, please.’

Marion wanted to hit him but found her muscles uncooperative, her body like jelly.

‘The painting,’ she said one last time and woke up hours later inside a dreary room at the Katterijn Guest House.

In a daze Marion phoned reception, half-expecting them to reassure her that the painting was fine, but instead a woman’s voice explained that Marelena had checked her in. Marvelling at how she had no recollection of all this, Marion phoned her daughter.

‘Darling … I see … Not good enough for your own house, I suppose … Don’t start what? … I’m just saying … And I can’t afford here, by the way. Anyway, I can’t natter on, do you have the painting? … The painting … The one from Dad, the … Yes, that one. Tell me you have it … So you didn’t see it? Wrapped. Well, did you check in the … Yes. Well, this is very important, I need you to … What? … Alright, alright, but call me back as soon as you’re done.’

Marion wasn’t an expert and Max hadn’t been one, either, but a friend had advised them. Investment art, he’d called it. They’d purchased the Pierneef some twenty years ago. A genius, the dealer had said. And look at this colour here, the light just in that corner. It was of the land, Northern Transvaal. Charcoal-blue mountains in the backdrop, a line of trees through the valleys, yellow-green grass, shadows and dirt. They had thought of it as a backup plan, but now it was to be her salvation.

The painting didn’t hang on a wall in the house. It took a tour of the cupboards until Marion, first checking with Max that it could really be worth
that
much one day, wrapped it in paper and string and bundled it into the attic.

Marion checked her phone to make sure it wasn’t on silent, that she hadn’t missed Marelena’s call. It was important that she confirm the painting was safe and whole.

Marion didn’t feel up to dinner but she ought to eat, ought not to starve. She lay on her back on the guest-house bed. There was a stain on the ceiling, not a new one; they’d fixed the leak, but left the mark – nice, real classy. This is what it feels like to be an old woman, discarded by your own family. Money. The only thing with the power to bring some respite to old age. And maybe love. Although Max was a bastard and, for all the children she’d gone and had, not one of them gave a toss. Feeling desperate, Marion, staying horizontal, reached for her cellphone and punched out Stefano’s numbers. His mailbox was still full. And his voice-message pointedly unfriendly, as if he’d recorded it especially for her.

The phone rang. Sarah Clarke. As if there wasn’t enough to worry about, now there was the upcoming committee meeting. Should she send out a cancellation email? Sarah wanted to know. Marion fretted. She felt in no state to head up a meeting. And yet there were pressing committee matters. After the claim notice in the
Gazette
, mediations had commenced between the two parties, the Samsodiens and the Von Struikers. Marion had explained to Ludmilla that it was crucial the committee be kept up to date with the events – the outcome of the claim would affect them all. The first mediation had taken place and Marion had convinced Ludmilla to attend the upcoming committee meeting and give feedback. Meanwhile Beulah Gierdien had written another letter. It felt like such sore luck to be indisposed at such an exciting time in the committee’s history. Marion had been head of Talk Shop club in high school several years running and fancied herself an underexposed orator.

‘Well?’

‘Huh?’

‘Should I cancel?’

‘Oh … damn that woman!’

Sarah chuckled.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘It’s not her fault.’

‘Whose – Hortensia’s?’

‘Yes. That you were knocked unconscious.’

‘Don’t be naïve, Sarah, of course it is. Whose else fault could it be?’

They opted to postpone the meeting for a few days.

Marion ate her dinner, glancing, worriedly, at her phone every few minutes. No Marelena. Had she forgotten, or was she avoiding giving her bad news. Marion found it difficult to call her and find out.

After the lousy meal she walked down the guest-house corridor, her footsteps dampened by the carpet, which was in a colour she had no name for, mildewed in the corners. Her skin crawled. Literally, as if it was crawling away from the onslaught of ugliness. Since she’d arrived at the guest house she’d seen the back of the head of a guest and a couple at dinner – too in love to notice that they were in a dump. Apart from those encounters the place was deserted.

Marion reached her door and her cellphone rang. The lawyer. Marion walked into the stifled air of her room and took the short call, updating her on what her ridiculous life now hinged on – a pathetic string of insurance claims.

After the lawyer, Marion dialled Marelena’s number but it just rang; she didn’t leave a message. Her stomach knotted, but she couldn’t work out whether that was the regrettable meal she’d just eaten or fear. If the painting was destroyed, maybe she could make a claim. Except there was no record of the painting. Which was why she’d concocted the idea to hide it from the sharks in the first place. Now the lack of a record of the painting meant she couldn’t claim for it. Anyway, even if she could claim for it, the sharks would get that in the end. Since the botched attempt at Peter’s funeral Hortensia had presented a solid wall, with no holes for Marion to slip a request for a favour through. Why was she stalling when so much was at stake? And around and around and around. Why didn’t she, Marion, just die? Why couldn’t something kill her – she’d lived long enough, surely.

In another year she would be eighty-two. Her parents had died before then, living separate lives in the same old-age home, quiet in their bitterness and hate. Why couldn’t she have followed their example? Why did she have to live longer? What was the point anyway? You can’t die, but you haven’t got the money to live properly, the money to act as balm to your misery. What was the point of it all? You needed money – life was much too glaring without the shade of lots of cash.

Marion left the lights off, she walked to the dresser. It wasn’t yet properly dark outside and some light beat its way through the washed-out curtains. The photograph on the shabby surface looked at her, its frame scuffed, a scratch through her father’s face, but otherwise fine. Apparently Agnes had gathered the stuff into a small box. The same box Marion found upon waking up at the guest house. That and a hurriedly packed suitcase of clothing and toiletries. Why had she taken out the portrait and put it here on the dresser? Here where her parents could watch her the whole time. She smiled. What did it matter where she put it, they would always be watching her, regardless. And although divided in almost everything else, her parents, dead or alive, watched their daughter with the same singular emotion – fatigue. She’d made them weary.

Marion remembered the information, hard and small like bird droppings, that she massaged out of her parents, but mostly they had nothing to say about where they had come from. When they claimed not to remember she understood, even at four, that they were lying. And in the easy logic of children, lying became an alternative to remembering. It became a thing in the world. The way walking had become a thing. The way words and speaking had. Lying became something else to master.

Marion knew some things about the past. She knew that her parents felt lucky to have got away when they did from a Lithuanian village they never named for her. They settled in District 6 in Cape Town, her father learned English and encouraged her mother to do the same. He traded well and soon could afford to move the family out to Wynberg, where Marion had the experiences that would become her first memories. She grew into the kind of girl who liked ribbons, but only brown ones, and she hated wearing shoes and preferred not to brush her hair.

Marion knew her mother disliked the fact that they lived not far from Mortimer Road where the shul stood. She disliked that she could see the roof of the shul from the kitchen-sink window, where she spent most of her days standing. Having moved away from the most horrifying danger, her mother would have liked very much never to see another shul or say another prayer. Like closing your eyes so the monsters can’t see you.

The house in Wynberg had not been large. It had a tin roof and thick white walls that were always rough and cool to the touch. There was a leak that never stayed fixed and a half-step up into the kitchen that Marion banged her foot against on a weekly basis. Once, running for an unremarkable reason, she knocked her foot on the step hard enough to bleed. Her mother put on the plaster. Girls don’t run, she said. Girls never run. There were many versions of the same admonition. Girls don’t chew gum. Girls don’t whistle. What did girls do? Marion once asked her mother. The question stumped her mother for a few seconds. She was shelling peas, she was showing Marion how to shell peas. Girls crossed their legs when they sat. What else? Marion had asked. Again a long silence. Girls shelled peas.

That Marion undid her mother had always been evident to her. You don’t need to be an adult to understand the concept of ‘bothersome’; you don’t have to be able to spell it, either. From very early Marion realised she could upset things. Her unsweet self remained so, despite being clapped in pressed lace blouses that became almost instantly unpressed, and dainty velour booties that never stayed clean. She realised that she was failing. She failed to be petite, failed to enjoy pink. She failed without trying. In just waking up, walking in a straight line, opening her mouth to say something, she could annoy her mother. And because she wanted love – what six-year-old did not? – she said quiet prayers to a God her parents never introduced her to and tried to negotiate with him to garner more favour. She learned how to sit still. She made a point of mastering how to shell the peas.

Time outside the house was what Marion enjoyed most. Inside was cloistered, regulated. From the age of eight she was allowed to walk up the street if her mother was on the stoep. This was her favourite thing. Marion counted the houses and she talked to them. Little whispers, little secrets that no one else had to know. And it was her love affair with those houses that made the one story that both her parents would go on to tell friends, or even just anyone they met. For instance, when Marion, much later, graduated from university, her parents, already divorced, came to the graduation dinner. They used whatever bravery they possessed to survive each other’s presence at the event. Even though they sat apart, Marion heard them at the exact same time telling the people they were sitting next to the exact same story. We once asked Marion what she wanted to be when she grew up and she said a house. We told her she couldn’t be a house, because a house was a thing and she was a human. She cried for a while. And then later she came to us and said she’d decided what she wanted to be. We asked her what. And she said – a human house. It always brought laughs, the story. When she was younger Marion hated to hear it, but as her parents grew old and dutifully told the story at every opportunity they could, she understood it was a kind of anthem for them. Like a psalm. Her parents were both uptight people. Marion had never seen them hug or kiss each other. Her mother touched Marion’s skin to scrub it, her hair to tidy it, her cheek to de-smudge it, her bum to smack it. Her father touched nothing, except on the odd occasion he would lay his hand on the top of her head, although Marion never understood what that was for. Much much later, only when Marion had children of her own, did she understand that for her parents the story, the remembering of it and the telling, was a deeper kind of touching.

She spent childhood managing herself. Despite sincere attempts, she frequently couldn’t help stepping over the lines her mother so carefully drew out for her. Her parents seldom had gatherings at the home, but there was one dinner party Marion remembered – not the reason of why, and not even who was there and how many. She recalled that it was a stressful occasion for her mother, who spent most of the evening in the kitchen and cried at the end after everyone had left. Marion remembered wearing powder-blue with frills, her mother in heels that she couldn’t walk in and her father quiet but smug. Marion remembered the actual meal. Delicious. And she, all of six years old, remembered feeling compelled to utter a sentence into a silence that presented itself: Ma said black is the same as Kaffir.

A few of the guests tutted their disapproval; mostly people laughed as if Marion had told a joke. Regardless, after everyone had left her mother gave her a hiding. Smacking her daughter was easier than feeling ashamed.

Adolescence was a tug-of-war. Sometimes it seemed like Marion was in fact a little lady, the kind her mother required her to be. And other times she burst out from the stitches, tore the seams.

When Marion was eleven, old enough to make accusations and old enough to know fear when she saw it, she asked her mother. Why hadn’t they given her anything – not even a religion, not even some uncles or aunties, nothing to remember, no rituals? The question had come from a place of loneliness, from a feeling that three did not really make a family.

Her mother decided to talk about something she’d never spoken of. She told Marion that she – Marion – was born on the twenty-first of June in 1933. Marion, of course, knew this already. When she interrupted to say so, her mother raised a hand in a gesture that was unfamiliar and so, for this reason, Marion hushed and listened.