Thula-Thula (English Edition)

By Annelie Botes

Gertruidah Strydom has just lost both her parents in a freak motor-car accident. She returns home from the funeral. Alone. Yet why does she shed no tears? Why is there no grief, only utter relief? Suddenly, for the first time in her life, she is free. The family farm is hers. Only hers. Her father was a pillar of the community - hero of the Border war, successful farmer, church elder and family man. Her mother was the society darling, her tennis parties the toast of the town. Yet at night Gertruidah would lay awake, waiting for the creak of the floorboard, waiting for the doorknob to turn . . . Waiting for a bed-time story and a goodnight kiss for Daddy's little princess. What fairy tales did Gertruidah have to act out by the light of the moon? And what fatherly love was this? Why her fear of the slimy frog? Why her dread of the forked-tongue leguan? What perverted lusts lurked in the darkened Strydom house?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: May 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780624053736

Annelie Botes

Annelie Botes is in Junie 1957 gebore op die plaas Grootfontein in die Kammanassie naby Uniondale. Sy is gedoop, geskool, getroud op Uniondale en het in 1986 ’n onderwyslisensiaat in klavier aan Unisa behaal. Sy was onder meer ’n musiekonderwyseres en kerkorreliste. Haar eerste skryfwerk is gepubliseer in die destydse Brandwag toe sy 18 was. Ná baie jare van stilte begin sy in 1994 aktief skryf. Ongeveer 50 kortverhale en novelles het reeds in Huisgenoot, Sarie en Rooi Rose. verskyn. Sy debuteer in 1995 met die roman Trippel Sewe en later in 1995 verskyn Ribbokvoete, en in 1997 verskyn Klawervier by Tafelberg-Uitgewers, waarvoor sy die ATKV-prys vir gewilde prosa ontvang. Sy is ook bekend vir haar Goeie Môre-rubriek in Volksblad en Van Alle Kante-rubriek in Die Burger, en is ook ’n gewilde gasspreker.

Book preview

THULA THULA

Annelie Botes

Tafelberg

Wednesday, 27 August 2008

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She stands back to study the sign on the gate, rain dripping from her hair. The sign is green, the capital letters white.

UMBRELLA TREE FARM

GERTRUIDAH STRYDOM

NO ENTRY

TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

The pliers feel cold in her hand. She’s glad she made the sign yesterday and painted it. Put it up as soon as she returned from the funeral in town.

She gathers the cut-off bits of wire and puts them and the pliers in the pocket of her black funeral pants. Walks through the gate and pulls it shut behind her. Slips the loop over the hook. Drapes the chain around the frame and the gate post. She clicks the lock into place, her eyes fixed on her bony hands. They seem older than twenty-six years, an old woman’s hands.

Umbrella Tree Farm. Hers and hers alone. No one will come through the gate without her permission. She wants to be alone. For the greater part of twenty-six years she was nothing, with no say over her boundaries. No place was hers alone except for the stone house she’d built deep in the mountains on the overgrown southern slope. And the corner table behind the maidenhair fern in The Copper Kettle, where she and Braham Fourie used to meet for coffee before she cut him off.

She walks slowly to the house, ignoring the drizzle. Inhales the scent of the lavender hedge that borders the garden path. Even in the late winter the garden is lush, flourishing.

It had always been her job to close the gate and keep the Bonsmara cattle out of her mother’s precious garden. When she was small her father turned it into a game. He’d let her out at the gate, then place a peppermint in her hand as he drove through. She always held out her left hand because her right hand was sticky and stank of piss and rotten fish.

When she was older getting out at the gate and away from him was a release. She no longer held out her hand. ‘Take your peppermint, Gertruidah, it’s your reward for the pleasure along the way.’ She stood like a pillar of salt. ‘If you don’t take it, we’ll melt it inside you tonight and then I will be the one eating it. Are you going to take it …?’

She’d take the peppermint and toss it among the agapanthus beside the gate.

At eighteen, when she was in grade eleven, she got her licence and manipulated him into buying her a car. Then she never went anywhere with him again. On Mondays she drove to boarding school alone, returned alone to the farm on Fridays.

And she never ate anything tasting like peppermint again.

When she was small it took seventy steps to reach the bottom stair. Seventy steps of praying: Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon a little child. The steps became fewer as her legs grew longer. By the time she was seventeen she counted fifty and that’s how it stayed.

It’s been fifty steps for nine years now.

The slate stairway fans out gracefully in the distance, a stone column on either side of the bottom step, each topped with a brown clay pot with gypsy roses spilling out from it. For the first time in her life the stairway holds no terror. Because beyond the stairs, behind the teak front door, there’s no one who can possess her body or penetrate or destroy it. No one to trample her boundaries or make her dance naked in the moonlight. The rider who claimed her for his mare is dead.

Respected Bonsmara farmer. Outrider. Bareback rider. Abel Strydom. Her father.

Ten steps. Another forty and she’ll be there.

Also gone from behind the teak front door, the woman who could turn her hand to anything and ought to have known better than to pretend to be deaf and blind. She’s dead too.

Green-fingered gardener. Stalwart of the Women’s Agricultural Union. Pillar of the community. Sarah Strydom. Her mother.

Fifteen steps. Another thirty-five and she’ll arrive at the stairs.

They died four days ago on their way to the Communion service. An accident on the farm road – Abel was never a man to take his time. Judging by the wreck they’d hit the kudu at full speed, its horn piercing Sarah’s heart and pinning her to the back of her seat.

Abel broke his neck.

When police brought the news she pretended to cry.

This morning she buried them in the town cemetery. She’d refused to have their corpses on her land. ‘Bury them in town,’ she told the undertaker after she identified their bodies on Sunday morning.

‘Gertruidah, your grandmother and brother are both in the family graveyard …’

‘I will decide where they’re buried.’ He raised his hand in protest but she silenced him. ‘I want to finalise the arrangements right now – it’ll be at eleven on Wednesday morning.’

She was dying to get back to the farm. To be on her own, to feel joy, to cry over twenty-two broken years. To reach back into the safety she remembered from when she was a little girl who still believed in fairies and the tooth mouse, before she’d begun to fear the turning of the doorknob at night. ‘Do anything you like, just as long as everything goes smoothly. Tea, cake, ribbons, wreaths, caskets, anything.’

‘At least choose the caskets.’

‘Choose them yourself.’

‘But, Gertruidah, the different styles and prices …’

‘You heard me, you choose.’

A large crowd turned up for the service. She knew what they were whispering to each other: So tragic that the Lord called them so soon. Still only in their fifties, with so much to offer the community. The big question now was who would farm on Umbrella Tree Farm and keep an eye on Gertruidah?

She watched dry-eyed as the caskets were lowered into the ground. All she could think of was the chain and lock she’d buy at the co-op before driving back to the farm. Stop at the store for some food. Don’t forget cough medicine for Mama Thandeka. Sugar and jelly babies for Johnnie.

Twenty steps. Only thirty remain.

At the funeral no one but she knew the truth about Abel and Sarah Strydom. Then she looked up and saw Braham Fourie in the crowd on the far side of the grave, his eyes fixed on her. So there were two people present who knew the truth.

She pretended she hadn’t seen him. Once, in her grade eleven year, she’d allowed him to glance inside her secret room – now, like countless times since then, she regretted it.

Twenty-five steps. The halfway mark.

The funeral-goers scattered flowers onto the caskets. But when the basket with light pink wild chestnut flowers reached her, she demurred. She would not offer them a flower. She locked her fingers behind her back, kept her hands away from the grave. Hands that had been too close to Abel Strydom too many times.

‘Go on, Gertruidah,’ the minister’s wife whispered, ‘take a little flower …’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Now come on, Gertruidah …’

They all thought she was stupid. They used to whisper that lightning struck beside Sarah’s right foot the day before she was born. That it had made her slow. After a while they grew tired of the lightning story. Then they said she’d never recovered from her brother Anthony’s death. Later still the story went round that she’d been born with a bladder defect.

Covering up, that was all it was. Let the minister’s wife believe what she liked.

‘Maybe a little flower later on, when everyone’s gone …’

‘I won’t want to.’

The woman sighed and moved on with the basket.

Forty steps. Rain drifts down gently onto the slate stairs.

Looking around her she decided it was best if they believed she was stupid. Better stupid than a slut who shared a bed with her father. Who’d believe her if she told them he’d raped and sodomised her for twenty-two years? There she goes again, they’d say, Gertruidah making up silly stories. Because if there was ever a man of impeccable integrity, a man who’d never do that to his daughter, Abel Strydom was that man.

Then she felt someone behind her pressing something into her hands. A wild chestnut flower. When she looked around Braham stood behind her. She dropped the flower, crushed it under her foot.

‘I’ll wait in The Copper Kettle until two.’

She said nothing, looked at him coldly.

‘Let me know if you need me, Gertruidah.’

Fifty steps.

She removes the pliers and bits of wire from her pocket and sits down on the glistening stairs. She hasn’t been inside the house since she came back from the undertaker on Sunday. She didn’t want to feel the lingering breaths of the dead on her skin, or smell their unwashed clothes. She preferred to sleep in the stone house, although the walk there was long and cold and wet.

The sound of frogs in the distance reminds her that before it’s dark she must go tell the river that the graves have been covered and twenty-two years of torture have ended.

She’d ignored Braham Fourie on purpose. She didn’t need his help, doesn’t need any man’s help. Not now, not ever.

She lies down on the bottom step, feels the drizzle carried by the southeaster spray her face. It is cold but healing.

It’s been a while since it rained.

The first drops started to fall just as the minister was crumbling a clod of soil over the caskets. By the time the closing hymn was sung it was pouring. ‘Nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee …’ If she’d hated Sarah and Abel less she might have cried. But she couldn’t cry any more. For twenty-two years she steeled herself against feeling. Feeling hurts, and she’s been hurt enough.

It hurts when your father shoves a tin canister up inside you. It hurts when the children at school mock you and say you stink. It hurts giving birth to a child of shame under a full moon. It hurts when Braham Fourie goes to a school function with another woman.

After a while you stop hurting. It’s as if you’ve grown scales on your skin and inside your heart.

She rolls onto her side and supports herself on one elbow, licks the rain from her lips. Her pants cling to her legs, icy cold.

She’s never felt this fearless. Or this directionless at the same time. Her head is swirling, like feeling carsick on a dirt road in summer. Muddled thoughts are all she knows. Being told off for being forgetful or for slipping away into her own world – that is normal.

She was in grade one and Miss Robin was calling to her softly. ‘Gertruidah? Look at me, Gertruidah …’

She didn’t want to be brought back to the classroom where she had to colour in and listen and stand in line. Far better to imagine she was on Umbrella Tree Farm playing among the reeds on the river bank with Bamba. Bamba barked and gulped at the water and chased after the Egyptian geese. She picked a reed and drew a house in the sand. The sand room that was her bedroom had no door. No bed, either. She called Bamba to her and they sat in the sand-house bedroom eating crackers. Dry, because butter turned to snot in her mouth.

‘It’s your turn to read, Gertruidah. Go on,’ Miss Robin said and placed a finger on the first word.

‘I’ll read later.’

The other children laughed. They pinched their noses and with their lips formed silent words so Miss Robin wouldn’t see or hear them. Taunts. She stank, they said, and she was stupid. She wanted to kill them.

‘No, Gertruidah, we’re reading now.’

She dropped her head onto her arms, shut her eyes. She wouldn’t read because she knew the book off by heart. She wanted to go back to the river and her sand-house bedroom. Besides, it felt good when Miss Robin talked to her that way. It made her feel that Miss Robin loved her more than the other grade ones. When she listened, or read when it was her turn, Miss Robin didn’t sit down beside her or rub her back or talk to her in a nice quiet voice. But when she refused to read Miss Robin pleaded with her.

At the end of the year when her report arrived her mother stood in the kitchen and cried so her tears fell into the chocolate cake batter. Because she’d failed.

‘I didn’t fail! I’m clever, Miss Robin said so!’ she tried to argue. ‘We just have to go over the reading books again. Andrea, too, Miss Robin says …’

‘I’m ashamed of you, Gertruidah! You’re a naughty girl! Even Matron complains that you pull your nose up at the hostel food and you wet your bed. You’re a big girl, now, but you behave just like a baby who …’

‘It isn’t true! It’s because there’s a leguan who walks down the corridors at night, I saw him myself, he kills children with his tail and eats them.’

‘Nonsense, Gertruidah! There you go making up stories again! I swear, the next time Matron complains I’m going to buy disposable nappies she can put on you at night …’

She plugged her ears with her fingers and ran out of the house so she wouldn’t hear any more. To the river. She would tell no one about the leguan who left the farm at night to walk to town and enter the hostel. Lying quiet as a mouse in her bed, she could hear his guttural sounds outside the room. Matron said it was the hot water pipes, but Matron lied. She would tell no one she was glad she’d failed because it meant she wouldn’t be with the children who mocked her with their silent words. And if she didn’t want to read Miss Robin would sit down beside her and ask her nicely, please won’t you read. She liked Miss Robin.

One Monday in her second year in grade one she had to go to the school library where a man she’d never seen before asked her to draw pictures and build puzzles and make sums. Miss Robin called him the school psychologist, Mr Noman. She’d never heard of a name like that. How could a man be Noman?

She wasn’t scared that Mr Noman would push his finger up inside her because her mother was there all the time. On the way to town her mother had told her not to say anything about the bed-wetting and the nightmares. ‘You should never talk about things like that, Gertruidah. Not even to your best friend.’

‘I don’t have a best friend. I don’t have any friends at all.’

She often asked her parents if she could invite a classmate home for the weekend. Maybe then at least someone at her school would like her. But her father always said no. If she asked her mother, she said, listen to your father, he’s the head of the house and he knows best.

At night, when she said it hurt, her dad said the same thing, that it was all for her own sake.

She enjoyed her time with the psychology man. She wished Miss Robin could hear how well she read or the way she knew the answer to every sum, straightaway. She wanted to show him how quickly she could build a puzzle but every time he got up from his chair she could see the zipper in his pants, the library smelt of sardines and she’d hear someone rattling the doorknob. Then she couldn’t count or colour in. She lay down on her arms until he sat down again. It was Anthony’s death that had made her this way, her mother told the psychology man.

That was a lie.

She didn’t understand everything her mom told the man but it sounded as if she was on her side. Her mother talked about wanting to protect her child from digging up things unnecessarily, about time healing everything and not wanting her child to become a target.

Target? Was someone trying to shoot at her? And her mother was protecting her – she felt relieved.

They had guests for lunch that Sunday. She sat in the dark beneath the tablecloth in the breakfast nook. Unseen, she could listen to the grown-ups talk. Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table with Andrea’s mom, grating carrots and cutting pineapples into cubes. Her mother was saying the psychologist had said Anthony’s death was the problem.

That was a lie, the man never said that.

Her mother was telling Andrea’s mom a bunch of lies about what the man had said. But she knew he never said it. Never said she shouldn’t drink green or red cooldrink because it would keep her awake at night. Never talked about a bladder infection or her imagination running away with her. And her mother wasn’t saying a word about how well she’d read or that she’d never once coloured outside the lines.

‘Yes, Sarah,’ Andrea’s mom sighed. ‘We’ll never understand how Anthony’s death affected her. She worshipped him. Andrea’s problems are because of a difficult birth. Forceps delivery. Too little oxygen. She was a ten-pound baby, you know.’

She loved words and saved the difficult ones inside her head. Oxygen. Forceps delivery. Ten-pound baby. There were even bigger words she didn’t understand. Allergic, therapy, genetic, trauma, masturbation. It didn’t matter as long as she saved them. At times she took them out, repeated them silently, so only her tongue moved inside her mouth. At night while ugly things were happening inside her bedroom, she said them over and over. Then she forgot a little about the hurt and the sardine smell, she disappeared from her body and turned into someone else.

It felt good to be someone else. Then she wasn’t like Mr Noman who was no one. When she was Allergic Strydom she had transparent wings and could fly right up to the clouds. Therapy Strydom made a little red-and-yellow wooden boat and oars and rowed right past the crocodiles and river monsters all the way to the sea. Genetic Strydom was Goldilocks’s best friend. Together they picked poisonous mushrooms in the forest and fed them to Snow White’s stepmother. Trauma Strydom was a chambermaid who brushed Sleeping Beauty’s hair while she dreamed. Masturbation Strydom always wanted to be the boss. She didn’t like Masturbation Strydom because he hurt her.

Leaning on her elbow she sees smoke curl out of the chimney at Mama Thandeka’s house across the river at the foot of the mountain. They and Johnnie and poor slow-witted Littlejohn are the last people left on Umbrella Tree Farm: the other labourers’ cottages have stood empty for years. Abel always said the new laws made it impossible to employ permanent workers. But Mama Thandeka and Mabel and Johnnie and Littlejohn have life interest, so they’ve stayed.

Johnnie helps in the yard with Sarah’s flowers and the vegetable garden, the chickens and the evening milking. But he’s old and nearing the end of his life. Littlejohn is already in his late forties and the only things he’s good at are eating jelly babies and singing. What would become of him after Johnnie died used to be Abel’s problem. Now it’s hers. Johnnie mustn’t die. He’s more a father to her than Abel ever was. When she was small she’d go with him to fetch eggs every evening. At milking time she’d carry her little mug to the kraal and he’d fill it with warm milk – although later on milk made her stomach turn.

She must take him to the doctor for a check-up, and Mama Thandeka too.

The other labourers who came to the farm were all contract workers. Fencers, pruners, cattle workers, dam-scrapers, soil-diggers. Abel shipped them in as he needed them. Aside from Johnnie it was she who’d been Abel’s right-hand man. There was nothing she couldn’t do. Irrigating, milking, placing salt licks, checking fences, setting traps for the genets. Slaughtering sheep before Abel sold them all. He was being robbed blind and it was cheaper to buy meat at the butcher, he said.

Abel taught her well.

‘We have to keep her busy somehow,’ she’d hear him tell visitors. ‘Seeing as she’s not independent enough to go to university or get a job overseas. But Sarah and I don’t mind, we love her from the bottom of our hearts.’

No one would believe her if she told them how well he’d taught her another kind of manual and physical labour.

Only Mama Thandeka and Mabel knew who Abel and Sarah really were. But no one would believe them either.

At least Mama Thandeka and Mabel had each other and unlike her and Sarah, who were locked in endless battle, they loved each other. She’d be alone in the house from now on. But not lonely. For the greatest part of twenty-six years she’d longed to be alone. To never hear a floorboard creak or a doorknob turn. Maybe the kudu saved her from a prison sentence because she’d been nearing the stage where she would shoot them both in their sleep.

She hears the phone ring inside the house. Let it ring. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone.

She hears the marsh frogs, hears her stomach rumble. She hasn’t eaten anything all day. Not even a cup of tea after the funeral. She’d kept trying to evade the pitying hands rubbing and stroking her upper arms. People touching her made her shudder.

In her haste to put up the sign and lock the gate, she pulled the truck into the shed and left the shopping bag with bread, tomatoes, bully beef, oranges and Tennis biscuits on the front seat. Mama Thandeka’s medicine and Johnnie’s sugar and jelly babies too. She’ll fetch it later.

She wants her own food. The food in the house is dirty. Maybe she should go ask Mama Thandeka for a griddle cake.

Mabel was in a hurry when she came to the yard this morning carrying the laundry basket with wild chestnut flowers. She had to get home, she said, she had dough rising.

‘Is your mother’s chest better, Mabel?’

‘No. Must be rain on the way. Mama started wheezing last night. I was up half the night, rubbing Vicks into her back. You must remember the chest drops, please, there’s less than a quarter bottle left. Raw linseed oil and Turlington too. And Johnnie wants sugar and jelly babies. He says since Littlejohn ran out of sweets the day before yesterday he hasn’t stopped singing This little light of mine, not even in his sleep. Says it’s driving him to drink.’

‘Won’t you change your mind about coming to the funeral, Mabel? I’m only leaving at ten, so there’s plenty of time to …’

‘Forget it, Gertruidah. You won’t catch me in the house of our Lord crying false tears for a man I don’t respect. I’m glad I won’t have to put on the face you’ll have to wear today.’

‘Please come.’

‘No. I must fetch wood before the rain starts. I just wanted to pick the flowers to scatter on the coffins, and only because I loved your mother. She taught me a lot.’

‘You’re lucky, Mabel. She never took the trouble to teach me …’

‘That’s a lie, Gertruidah. She gave up because you kept pushing her away. You never wanted to learn anything from her. She taught me,’ and Mabel nudged the basket with her foot, ‘that where too many wild chestnuts bloom you’ll find nothing but false riches. Fat wallets and lean hearts. Your mother was a good woman, Gertruidah, but your father …’

‘At least he had it in him to give you and your mother life interest in your house, and he …’

‘Life interest? Yes, Gertruidah, he did give me life. When Mama was already on the wrong side of forty and he a whipper-snapper of twenty-six. He owes us that life interest, Mama and me. I’m going now. Don’t forget the chest drops and the sugar and jelly babies.’

‘I need a favour, Mabel. Will you go inside the house and bring me my black pants and my white long-sleeved blouse? My black shoes?’

‘Heavens, Gertruidah, can’t you fetch your own clothes?’

‘I don’t want to go inside the house.’

‘So where’ve you been sleeping the last three nights if you didn’t sleep in the house?’

‘You who’s always spying on everyone, you know perfectly well I’ve been sleeping in the stone house. Bring a clean bra and panties too. And my hairbrush.’

‘Heavens, Gertruidah, do you imagine the house is haunted?’

‘No, it isn’t haunted, it stinks.’

‘I cleaned last Friday, what can it stink of already?’

‘It stinks of Abel and Sarah. Won’t you fetch my things for me please?’

Mabel had brought her things. ‘You must wash your hair, Gertruidah. You can’t go to the funeral with it all greasy. I’m going now. You must be strong today.’

At the far end of the lavender hedge Gertruidah caught up with her. ‘Thank you, Mabel. For the flowers. And for …’

Then Mabel reached out her arms. The scent of bruised lavender wrapped itself around them where they stood, half-sisters from the seed of the same man.

‘Drop a bloody big rock on his coffin, Gertruidah, and tell him I say thank you for the life interest.’

She sits upright. Her hands are blue from the cold, her wet pants draw a black outline for her thin body.

Down by the river the frogs have become a massed choir. For years now the river has been her church. After she discovered the Quaker book in the town library she stopped going to church or Sunday school. On Sundays when it was time to leave she’d run away. Then Abel would chase her, catch her and bundle her into the car. On the way there she’d be sick on his best suit. During the service she’d kick and kick against the pew in front of them until Sarah gave her leg a sharp rap. Then she’d cry blue murder while the minister recited the Ten Commandments. Or she’d deliberately pick her nose. Insist on going to the toilet during every service. Cling to the pew in front of her when it was time to split into groups for Sunday school.

She didn’t want to. She wouldn’t. She hated both the church and God. He left her alone in the dark, even if she prayed all night long. He allowed her father to sit in the elders’ pew and made her mother an important woman in the parish. Why didn’t He punish them if He was so clever and could see everything? What was the use of wedging the toe of a shoe underneath her door and asking God to keep it shut? What was the use of telling her mother about the ugly things if Sarah just slapped her shoulder and told her to stop making up stories?

The library book said Quakers didn’t believe in ministers or churches. So maybe being a Quaker was better because being a child of Jesus didn’t help one bit. The book said Quakers just sat quietly and waited; for what, they didn’t know. That was what she wanted to do: sit by the river and wait for the noise inside her head to grow silent. But it never did, it just got more muddled every day.

One sports day at school she went to hide under her father’s truck. She didn’t want to run in the relay race. Her petermouse hurt because the night before her father had wanted to pretend her petermouse was a stew pot and he was cooking a baby marrow in the pot. Then he stirred and stirred the baby marrow. It felt a little nice and a little sore. In the morning when she peed her petermouse stung so badly she pinched off the stream. Now her petermouse itched, and she wouldn’t run in the relay. From underneath the truck she could hear the women talking on a blanket beneath the blackwood tree.

That child’s behaviour must be the bane of Abel and Sarah’s lives, they said. Abel says he can’t chase after her in his best suit every Sunday. It’s easier to leave her with the maid, she’s so disruptive in church. Sarah says she’s safe wandering in the mountains because the Jack Russell looks after her. But I’m not so sure … Here it’s time for the relay and she’s vanished without a trace. What a life she must lead Abel and Sarah. She was such a cute little girl too, but after Anthony was killed she changed overnight …

She didn’t preach to the frogs, just sat on the sand and listened to the voices inside her head. Sometimes they sounded like horses’ hooves or dry leaves. Sometimes she heard a clock ticking inside her head even though there wasn’t one for miles. Then she cried. And cursed. Scrubbed her hands with sand until they stung and she thought at last the smell of fish was gone. Or she wrote words in the sand with a reed and erased them again.

Sharing her words with other people was a struggle because there seemed to be a raw sausage stuck inside her throat. To forget about the sausage and because she didn’t want to be a stew pot, she wrote more words and sentences in the sand.

Erased them.

Wrote.

Erased.

One Friday afternoon after matric she and Braham were sitting at the corner table in The Copper Kettle, hidden behind the maidenhair fern. If the corner table was taken, she waited until the people left. Only the corner table would do. She didn’t want to feel surrounded or trapped, she wanted to sit so she could see the restaurant door. She needed to know where the door was in case she had to escape.

‘People are talking about us, Braham.’

‘In a small town everyone’s always talking about everyone else.’

‘They say you used to be my teacher and you must be crazy to …’

‘Let them say what they like.’ He stroked her knuckles. She yanked her hand away. ‘I want to sit with you. Other people don’t bother me.’

She took the pen out of the plastic bill folder and scribbled on the back of the bill in tiny, barely legible letters. She used only the letters in her name. Tired. Gathered. Tirade. Drag.