It All Goes Wrong

By Etna Muller

Twelve-year-old Amy is devastated when her parents move from Cape Town to Windhoek. She misses her old life and finds Namibia so boring. But everything in Amy s life is changing and things that she took for granted are being swept away from her. As she struggles to make friends and fit in, her loneliness is intensified by difficulties at home. When Amy hears about girls disappearing, she takes no notice until someone she knows goes missing ...Will Amy be next?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordweaver Publishing House
• Release date: Dec 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9789994582051

Book preview

Wilma

1.

The plane starts moving. Through the small window I see the terminal where Leah and I said goodbye a short while ago, hugging each other and sobbing. My hands grip the armrests and I try to swallow down the lump in my throat.

Let there be a problem before we take off. Let there be clanging and smoke. Let the pilot announce, Ladies and gentlemen, no more flying. Please go back to the lives you have lived before.

But the plane keeps on moving.

My father is reading a newspaper as if it is just another day.

The plane turns. And stops.

Time freezes.

We speed down the runway and climb up, up, up into the unknown. Goodbye, Cape Town. Goodbye school. Bye, Leah. I stifle a sob. Coco, behave yourself and don’t bark too much. Leah’s dad will take you to the SPCA if you annoy him.

The cars and buildings on the ground get smaller and smaller. There’s part of the mountain. The sea. The island.

It isn’t the end of the world, Amy, for heaven’s sake. We’re just moving to another place, Mum said to me last night. People have to move away from home for all sorts of reasons all the time. To work or study in another country, even on another continent. There they and their families get on with their lives. You will find a new friend, like Leah, in Windhoek.

I won’t find another friend like Leah. We have known each other since we were babies. We went to the same pre-primary school. Started together in the same class in Grade One. Giggled together about the same jokes and promised each other to stay friends until the day we die.

It’s not just Leah, Mum. I love my school. Why can’t I stay in the hostel and visit you during school holidays?

She raked her fingers through her hair, looked up at the ceiling and sighed. You are just a bit too young for that, in my opinion. Wait until you are twelve. Then we can discuss it. If you still want to.

Through the window I see the coastline, the circles and rectangles of fields far below. I work out in my head. Thirteen days left of December, thirty-one days of January, twenty-eight, wait, twenty-eight or twenty-nine? Next year isn’t a leap year, so twenty-eight days in February. For March only twenty-three days, as my birthday is on the twenty-third. I say the numbers again to myself, and count up the days. Mental arithmetic is the best part of my best subject at school, but I’m not that calm so I have to repeat the exercise a couple of times to check if my total is correct. At last I am satisfied that I have the right answer. Ninety-five days, then I turn twelve. Ninety-five! It’s ages and ages.

The mental exercise has made me feel more in control of myself. I look around. Half of the plane is empty – any person in his right mind will fly to Cape Town during the hottest time of the year and not the other way around. We have divided our family of four up into twos as there are only three seats on every side of the aisle. My mother and Jacob sit on the other side, right next to the aisle, and my father and I sit on the left with an empty seat next to my father.

Oh, no, my father says, Amy, listen to this. He holds up his newspaper.

I’d rather listen to my iPod – there’s the chime from the cockpit telling us we may do so now. I’m not interested in small talk when my whole world is collapsing.

This girl, he says, pointing at a picture, is also eleven.

So? There are zillions of eleven-year-old girls all over the world.

She is missing, he says.

Oh.

And these two girls are also missing. They are also eleven; no, one is twelve. Look, all of them are pretty.

I give the pictures a quick glance to be polite.

Amy, you are as pretty as any of them. Prettier.

I shrug. All dads think their daughters are the prettiest. I know what’s coming.

He clears his throat. What must you do when a stranger stops next to you in the street and asks for directions?

I knew it. The drill. I sigh and say, I mustn’t talk to strangers. I must walk away, fast. I must say in my head that the stranger can use his cellphone or GPS, and or he can drive to a petrol station and ask anybody there. Can I listen to my iPod now, Dad?

Yes, of course. He sounds a bit offended, but accepts defeat, folds the paper and hands it to my mother across the aisle over the head of Jacob. She is a better audience; her face shows alarm and anxiety and she makes gestures, pointing at the paper and then at me. I turn my head to the window.

Later, when we have flown over the big river and Dad is sleeping after his second whisky, I take the newspaper my mother has sent back to him and turn the pages to the report on the missing girls. I’m a bit puzzled – why were my parents so stressed when children disappear all over the world every day?

Disappearances A Mystery, the headline says. The first paragraph below in bold makes my eyes go wide. The girls are all from Namibia. Why didn’t my father say so? I feel a coldness creep up my arms, and it’s not the aircon. Namibia is where we are flying to, where we are going to live from now on.

I look at the photographs. The three girls are all as old as I am. And all have long hair, like me. The police say that generally most girls who go missing are girls who run away from home. But these girls did not run away, they say. They are younger than the average age of girls who run away. And these girls are good girls, happy girls, who do well at school and have good friends of the right sort. The last girl who disappeared had just written her exams, she always got excellent marks and was looking forward to her Christmas holiday.

That’s why the police find the disappearances a mystery.

2.

I stand quietly in the opening of the glass sliding door leading out to the patio and watch my mother and father near the swimming pool. He is pouring wine into her glass; she is looking up at him. I position my camera. It will make a good photo, the two dark romantic figures against the red and orange of the setting sun. An outsider who sees this photo would never guess they were so angry with each other in Cape Town, that my father moved out and they seriously considered getting a divorce.

Click, click, click. They don’t hear me, because Jacob minus one front tooth is splashing in the pool.

I go in and open a new folder inside my personal file on my father’s laptop. What name shall I give it? Perhaps New Beginning. Or Plan B. Plan A was the divorce, but the trial period was a disaster, so they decided to try out Plan B: to move as a family to Namibia, the country of my mother’s birth, and work on their marriage.

New Beginning sounds better, more promising. I transfer the pictures from my camera to my new folder, open them and look at them critically. Not bad. My dad looks good because he is a good-looking man with his dark hair and eyes. My mother looks better in the pictures than in daylight; her too pale face and the dark circles under her eyes don’t show on the photos and the couple of pounds she lost because of the near-divorce plus running around to do all the packing while my dad held farewell parties at the office makes her look super slim. Jacob is totally hidden behind splashes of water.

There is an email from Leah – she has not forgotten me! I open it and smile. She writes about all the fun they had on the beach and how they went to a mall and she ends her letter saying she misses me very much. I bite my lip, and type a reply.

Hi Leah

Windhoek sucks. My reasons:

1. It hasn’t got a beach.

2. I can’t watch my favourite soapies on TV. The guesthouse has a TV, but not SABC. The receptionist says one needs a special antenna to watch SABC.

3. It is awfully hot. If it wasn’t for the aircon above the laptop I would have died of the heat.

4. There are no kids in Windhoek. Genuine. It’s scary. Very scary, because kids do disappear here. It’s written in the newspaper. But the paper only tells about three girls so far, and I think they should update their facts. I can’t remember having seen one kid of my age, or of any school-going age, since I put my feet on the ground at the airport.

5. It is soooo boring here. I play computer games. Jacob stays in the pool. He even wants to eat his meals