You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (16 page)

‘So you've been down to the river?' he asks.

‘Yes, eh . . .' and the dots of hesitation hang like a row of fireflies in the dark until I find my voice to continue. ‘It must have been quite a flood. I barely recognised the place. I had some trouble trying to find the gorra but then I remembered the big tree and the gully.'

Father says, ‘The gorra's been gone for nearly a year now. We even get our washing water from the dorp. Nice to get a good lather with soapsuds. I'm surprised you found the gorra; that whole bank's completely washed away. Did you go beyond Blouklip? From there you can just about recognise the old gully.'

‘No.'

‘Then you lined up the tree with the wrong gully, I think. Yours is the recent one made by last year's flood.'

Perhaps I ought to go to Blouklip now, but in this whirling dust I fear for my sinuses. It will be better indoors. I join Aunt Nettie in the kitchen where she dries the dishes but she clutches the dish towel to her chest when I offer to help.

‘No, you have a rest today,' she says. ‘But don't forget, my child, wherever you lodge – with a nice family of course – to always help with the work. Don't just sit in your room with your books. A girl should help to keep the house tidy. And when you meet a nice man you'll have the experience of housework.' She winks awkwardly.

‘Yes,' I say, and wander off into the sitting room where dust lies thickly spread over all the surfaces, inviting the calligraphy that will expose the polished wood beneath. On which of these surfaces would I write my guilty secret? I would not dare. Not here where Mother sat in the late afternoons, after the wind had dropped, her voice rumbling distantly through the phlegm, her mouth opening and closing frog-like as she snapped up the air. Here she sat to recover her breath before dusting, her asthmatic breathing filling the room, her face uplifted as if God squatted just there, above, on the other side of the galvanised iron roof. And inside, below, always the tap-tap of the roof as the iron contracted, tap-tap like huge drops of rain falling individually, deliberately. But drops of rain would sizzle on the hot iron and roll off evaporating, hissing as they rolled. So merely the sound of molecular arrangement in the falling temperature of the iron. Even now that ceilings have been put in, still a tap-tap that stops and a silence followed by a tap-shudder-tap for all the world as if she were still sitting there gasping for breath with her God just on the other side.

Aunt Nettie bustles in with the duster.

‘Unbelievable all this dust; how it gets in I'll never know. I don't know why your father doesn't move somewhere cool where there's also grass.'

She dusts well, with a practised hand – that is, if the criteria for dusting are indeed speed and agility. Her right wrist flicks the duster of dyed ostrich feathers across surfaces, the left hand moving simultaneously, lifting, before the duster flicks, and then replacing ornaments. Feathers flutter across the glazed faces of Jesus, the Queen Mother in her youth, Oupa Shenton and the picture of an English thatched cottage in the Karroo headed with the flourished scroll of Home Sweet Home. There is no hesitation in her hand. She removes dust just as she has removed from her memory the early years as a servant when she learned to dust with speed. Not that she would ever lose sight of those attributes that lifted her out of the madam's kitchen, the pale skin and smooth wavy hair that won her a teacher for a husband.

Aunt Nettie caresses her hair with her right hand as she passes with the duster into the bedroom. What will I do next? If I were to follow her, I'd land back on the stoep where they sit in the cooling afternoon.

‘I think,' I shout after her, ‘I'll go down to the river again.'

‘Yes Meisie,' she agrees, ‘and then come and rest with us on the stoep. The wind is lying down and soon it'll be lovely outside.'

I sprint past the others and Father shouts, ‘Be careful of puff adders. They often come out when the wind drops.'

What nonsense! He did not stumble over the words. He has, after all, said it before. No doubt he will say it again. Or fabricate some other dangers: lions in the veld,
man-eating plants, and perhaps it is not awkwardness at all, not simply a desire to drop sounds into the great silence between us. It is the father's assertion that he knows best.

Their words, all their words, buzz like a drove of persistent gnats about my ears. I no longer have any desire to find the gorra. I have done with sentimental nonsense about water spirits. They have long since been choked to death. The fissure of the river offers mere escape.

Ignoring the path, I scramble down the bank and remain sitting where the sliding earth comes to rest. Before me, between two trickles of water, a mule brays. It struggles in what must be a stretch of quicksand. Transformed by fear its ears alert into quivering conductors of energy. With a lashing movement of the ears, the bray stretches into an eerie whistle. It balances on its hind legs like an ill-trained circus animal, the front raised, the belly flashing white as it staggers in a grotesque dance. When the hind legs plummet deep into the sand, the front drops in search of equilibrium. Then, holding its head high, the animal remains quite still as it sinks.

Birds dart and swoop through the pliant Jan Twakkie branches, and a donkey stirs from its sleep, braying.

He did not say, ‘Beware of the quicksand.' Not that I would ever tell what I have seen in the river today.

B
EHIND THE BOUGAINVILLEA

The papery panicles of bougainvillea rustle in an unexpected play of breeze. From the top of the whitewashed wall it tumbles, armfuls of exuberant purple blossom. And below, the group of people stir, shift from one buttock to another, shake an ankle or ease a shoulder before settling back into a sprawling cluster of bodies. Except for the faces, turned to meet the scrunch of my shoes on the gravel.

I pull an ambiguous face so that it can be seen as either greeting or grimace. This is after all a doctor's surgery and I could well be in pain. I am abjectly grateful for the response, which I take in with a careless glance. Some purse their lips but nod, others mutter or grunt their greeting and smiling young child pipes a clear, ‘Môre Antie' at me.

I hesitate. Father's words repeat in my ears. ‘Oh you'll find it very different now. It's not the old business of waiting in the yard; there's even a waiting room for us now with a nice clean water lavatory. Not that these Hotnos know how to use it, but ja man, I think you'll find the Boers quite civilised now.'

Why are they sitting outside in the yard? I move past the
group to the open door at the end of the wall. With one foot on the raised threshold I crane my neck into the room. The walls are a brooding eggshell. Above a row of empty chairs a Tretchikoff Weeping Rose leans recklessly out of a slender glass to admire her new-born tear, perfect in plastic rotundity. Artfully the blue tint deepens into the parent blue of the plastic frame. My shoe scours the threshold in hesitation and my eyes rest on the smooth primrose crimplene suit of a woman motionless in her chair. Her hair flicks up above her ears in an iron-induced curl that will never bounce in the breeze, and she stares at the framed picture of a woman in yellow on the opposite wall. Her dress is a darker yellow, sunnier, and her hair, the colour of ripe corn, flies away in fear of being eaten by a heifer with amorous eyes. Has she seen me? She reverses the nylon-clad legs crossed at the ankles and her right hand starts to move up and down as she beats off the heat. Below her gaze a man studies the smoke ring he blows into the heat. A large briefcase stands clamped between his shoes. Under his trousers his calves bulge with the effort.

The floor is a highly polished parquet in which blurred reflections shudder portentously and I no longer care. It is in any case absurd to pretend that I have assumed this as my position for waiting. I turn and meet the thousand eyes of those squatting in the yard. They have been watching. They register the tension of the moment by shifting and scratching as people do who ease the discomfort of waiting. I settle on my haunches against the wall and open my bag for a book but cannot bring myself to haul it up. Such a display of literacy would be indecent. Instead I draw up a paper handkerchief and ostentatiously blow my nose.

A child starts whimpering and tugs at its mother's skirt but the mother stares resolutely before her, tracing with her
eyes the untrammelled path of a red ant. A large woman in a blanket reaches over to the child. ‘No, no,' her voice lulls, ‘it's too hot to cry. You'll scare away the breeze.' But the breeze has already gone. A whimsical movement of air in a day so hot and still that it dropped in shame. Only the bougainvillea still whispers its fulsomeness as the blossoms settle into place.

An old man coughs and coughs, clutching at his chest with both hands. Eeeh, he wheezes, and Eeeh, a chorus of voices sigh in response, lifting him high so that his chest loosens and his head nods mechanically until the next bout of coughing.

Under Father's arm a Rhode Island Red hen squawked, her feathers fluffed with anxiety, her tilted head pressed against his chest. A darning needle gleamed in his right hand.

‘Won't it hurt?' I asked, wincing. The orange eyes screamed a silent terror.

‘Yes, but she'll feel so much better. You get to know the symptoms and it's just a question of picking off the horny growth at the tip of the tongue – kuikenpiep we call it – you just remove it and pour salt on the wound to disinfect and she'll be right as rain within a day. Only the females tend . . .' but his words were gobbled up by the hideous cry of the bird whose feathers turned to foam as she raged to escape.

‘No man,' he reverted to my condition, ‘you must see Dr van Zyl about that pain in your chest. A clever chap that van Zyl. He got you through rheumatic fever when you were only five or six. Then he was only a young man, fresh from school. Do you remember?'

I did. I remembered the silence, the half light of drawn curtains and the sunlight crowding into the sateen pattern.
Diamonds drifting into curlicues lifted with light from the dull pink of the fabric. Outside the chickens quarrelled or announced their eggs listlessly in the heat. On the bed like a stove, the heat pressed and seared my joints and Mamma dabbed with spirit lotion, cool as the voice of Jesus. Then the doctor came with creaking sandals and hairy legs.

‘Don't stand there like a stuffed owl in the dark; get some light into this place,' he bellowed at Mamma, and heehaw, he threw back his head in appreciation of his simile.

When he left with a screech of wheels, Mamma coaxed the curtains back across the window and the feverish diamonds glowed like rubies in the afternoon sun. I drifted off to the sound of the turkey cock dragging his boastful wing in the dust. Otherwise such silence that I knew the hens had resolutely tucked their heads under their wings.

‘Yes, I'll make an appointment,' I agreed.

Father looked up startled and his arm slackened so that the fowl leapt down with a deafening cackle.

‘I don't think you can make appointments, not yet. This isn't Cape Town, you know. You just go along and wait. But there's a lovely waiting room with a modern water lavatory.'

‘Oh, I don't know that I want to spend the day waiting for Dr van Zyl to tell me that I have bronchitis.'

‘Why not? You're on holiday and no one minds waiting for a doctor. Your health, my girlie, is as important as your books. Anyway, you can always take something along to read. Doctor will make a proper diagnosis and give you some antibiotics to clear it up. And the waiting room's nice and clean and modem, no need to spoil your best clothes sitting in the dust.'

I heard again Mamma's voice as she slapped the sewing out of my hands. ‘No backstitching on a hem, you careless
child. You'll just have to start again; nice girls don't do slovenly needlework.' And the snip-snip of the scissors as they lifted a square from the perfectly new dress she drew out of the trunk. Sprigs of yellow mimosa, the furry edges of pollen dust drifting into the cream of the muslin.

‘Start on the plain edge,' she snapped and sat down with her hawk's eye trained on my stitches. But the stuff, a heap of crushed mimosa, rilled under her rings as her fingers plucked nervously at it. So that I dared to say, ‘It's nice, why don't you want it any more?'

‘I wore it once,' she said, ‘spent the whole day making it and wore it the very next day when I woke with an asthma attack. I couldn't stand there waiting, felt too bad, so I lay down right there in Dr van Zyl's yard.' She pushed the dress away. ‘It's stained, all along the right side,' and her mouth twisted into lines of disgust as she tossed the dress into the trunk. ‘A decent chap, van Zyl, said, “Make way for the old girl,” and saw me first that afternoon.'