How to Make a Heart Sick: "Hope deferred makes the heart sick."

By Heather Mac

Hope is a noun, the name of the feeling of positive expectation.
Hope is a verb, the wanting of something to be the case.
Hope depends on a feeling of trust, a presumption that another (the universe or others) will act, with us, on our behalf.
It is 1976 in dusty South Africa. Relentless Hope drives 11 y/o Kate to keep seeking a way out of her abusive life at home with Mom. This same Hope drives the family maid Grace to act against the oppressive regime of apartheid in that is her 'home'. Hope draws the two together in an unlikely friendship.
But stupid Hope, a careless investor of trust, could also bankrupt their souls. What will become of this unlikely comradeship?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Feb 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781922381774

Book preview

Prologue

I was just drifting off to sleep when Uncle John’s voice boomed out, post-hearing-aid loud. 

‘There’s something wrong with that girl. I don’t trust her.’

‘Shh, don’t shout!’

‘What?’

‘I said don’t shout, she’ll hear you.’

‘I don’t trust her. A dark horse, shifty, up to something. Useless. What do you think she wants from us?’

‘I don’t know.’

Nineteen years old, and I may as well have been eleven again. All the feelings I’d had for them ‘back then’ come flooding over me like a too-hot shower. That visit, that year. 

‘IF YOU"RE GOING TO COME THEN COME!’ I raged at the wolf-like memories, not because I was tougher then them, but because I’d already survived them for years, sort of. In shredding me to pieces they were undeniably real. Undeniable. Real.

They’d collected me from the bus station in Inverness earlier that day, behaving like polite strangers. They told me they’d buffed the car and set the formal dining table in my honor. By the looks they gave my jeans and baggy jumper, my ginger curls disheveled from the overnight train trip up from London and the backpack slung over my shoulder, I was obviously a bit of a disappointment, their efforts perhaps judged to have been wasted.

Aunt Annabelle chattered all the way from Inverness to Dingwall, going into detail about this and that, as if she was terrified to give anyone else space to speak for fear of what might be said.

In their cramped but perfectly organised house I tried to smile confidently over a dinner of steak pie and potatoes, yogurt pudding with blackberries, and a pot of tea. ‘Yes, it’s delicious… No, no butter on the potatoes, thank you; but milk in my tea, yes, I do take milk.’

Uncle John, who was mostly silent except for a low-pitched humming between bites, was obviously chewing over more than just his food, because out of the blue he tossed a nail-bomb of words at me: ‘So, the old man finally gave up the ghost then, aye—left you quite a bit of dosh, I don’t mind guessing?’

I’d always been told that speaking about money was a no-no, especially other people’s money. I blushed. ‘Yes, some, a little; well, more than a little, but I’ll only get it later, when I’m older.’

‘What are you doing with yourself, then? Got any kind of education?’

His tone sounded so accusing that I immediately felt hot with guilt. ‘No; I quit Uni. it was the wrong course for me.’

‘Have you a job, then?’

‘Not really—a bit of au-pair work. The family don’t need me over Christmas, so I thought it might be nice to spend time with family of my own—you know, my first Christmas alone and all.’

He wiped his mouth with a large napkin, squeezed the life out of it and tossed it onto his plate. ‘So, you plan to freewheel around till the money’s available, then live like lady muck, without a thought about how hard he had to work to get that money in the first place, aye?’

I couldn’t lift my eyes from my plate, much less think of an answer, so I made sure my mouth was busy chewing while he went on about responsibility and hard work being the keys to a decent life, but it had become impossible to swallow my food without my old friend the gagging reflex kicking in. There was no grace to be found in either of them, no place for me to be anything other than what they had already decided I was. It didn’t take more than a seconds worth of glance for their eyes to tell me that. ‘I need to stretch my legs. Please excuse me.’ 

The look on my aunt’s face warned me that I was breaking the ‘rules’ and exhibiting very bad manners by abandoning their dinner and not helping to clear up after. But I wasn’t in the mood for either remorse or reconciliation as I stole a few moments outside, stamping snow off my boots and slapping it off my jumper and jeans, attempting to quash the overwhelming sense of shame and smallness being in their presence made me feel, and anger and rage for making myself so vulnerable. Eventually I simply had to escape from the cold, back into the fettering air I’d temporarily managed to flee.

Slinking past the lounge where they now both sat bolt upright watching the late news I hid myself in the dusky pink and unnaturally tidy guestroom that smelled of mothballs and electric-blanket-baked bed. I’ve made a terrible first impression, no, they never liked me anyway…Why did I come, humiliate myself like this? The same words rolled through my mind on constant replay until the aching tightness in my forehead warned me to turn my thoughts outward, to focus on the warmth, the smells, on assuring myself I’d be OK. 

That’s when Uncle Johns voice, the wolves charging in its wake, had boomed through the walls, the shut door and torn into my heart. I’m shifty.  I’m useless. They still think I’m a liar. Ice-cold, razor-sharp gnawing and gnashing. Come on then, come on, why don’t you just finish me off for once?!

Chapter One

The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved. Mother Teresa

New Year’s Eve 1975 found me ready to give fate or chance a crack at making my life better. Greedily I clung to embers of hope in my soul. I nurtured them all that day, rehearsing how I wanted things to work out in 1976: I’d be loved; I’d be popular; I’d be beautiful and happy. My eleventh year on earth would be a wonderful year.

The day started off in the best possible way, with the grown-ups actually smiling at each other! ‘How about a family picnic down by the jetty? It’s a beautiful day, perfect for throwing in a line or two—what do you say, boys?’ Dad was sitting at the breakfast table with us, actually talking to us, planning to spend the day with us! 

Please, Steven! I crossed my fingers, silently willing a positive response from him. Please, please, don’t muck this up! Say yes!

‘Nothing’s open in town today anyway, sweetie,’ Mom said, before Steven could utter the negatives already etched into his face. ‘We may as well do something other than hang around here all day. And there is the party to look forward to tonight.’

‘Do I have to?’ Steven groaned—actually a positive response from him. Yay! I exulted inwardly as Simon, Mom’s angel, sunnily suggested wave-riding instead of fishing.

The summer breeze that always crept over the coast around 11 a.m. found our picnic scattered over a chequered rug that was sheltered and shaded by an old canvas windbreak—crisps and drinks, cookies and sandwiches for grazing on, suntan lotion, towels and hats. Mom was in a good mood, baby-oiled and brown-skinned. Lithe from long walks along the beach, she lay sunbathing in one of her tiny bikinis, reading her magazines, seemingly enjoying the admiring glances of passers-by.

We kids rode waves on our polystyrene boards, though I didn’t venture out to the breakers where the boys were being bumped and tossed along by what were, to me, terrifyingly enormous surges of menace. I paddled around in water no deeper than my knees, careful to keep out of the way of the whizzing boys as they crashed toward the shore. I noticed Mom taking photos, now and then, from behind her magazines and Courtleigh Satin Leaf cigarettes. Dad stood a little way off, casting and reeling in the light bouncing from the water, the sun brightly obscuring him, melding him into the scenery, so I had to shade my eyes to be sure he was still there.

It was as though happiness stretched our family toward some unpredictable breaking point. With that expectation in mind, I soaked up the pleasures of the day, every now and then smiling at Mom for reassurance that all was still well with us. ‘Thank you, Mommy. I love you, Mommy.’ 

But not all days were good just because we were on holiday. At times the wind blew gales off the ocean, keeping us cooped up in the coastal cottage we visited once a year, or rain brought dreary boredom in the place of swimming and playing at the beach. And in that year—1975—our holiday suffered a particular underlying tension: just before leaving to come on holiday, we’d moved all our belongings from our home in the Transvaal to the Orange Free State for Dad’s work. ‘I don’t know how you can do this to us!’ Mom had hissed, wailed or demanded, depending on her mood, on the weather, or if Dad was going fishing or not.

‘It’s not my choice, for God’s sake; it’s what’s called a promotion. I’d expect you to be supportive, maybe even proud of me, for once,’ Dad had said, repeating, in the various ways possible, the same thing over and over. ‘You have a choice, by the way—if you don’t like it you can leave!’ Dad spat the word ‘leave’ often that holiday: either Mom could leave, or he’d leave; or he’d slam the door, saying, ‘I’m leaving now, can’t take another minute of this shit.’ He would punish us all by taking the Kombi for the whole day, leaving us stranded in Paradise Beach.

This caused Steven, my fourteen-year-old bully brother, to wail, ‘He ruins my life—I hate him!’ The lack of transport kept him from the surfing beaches, stuck at home with Mom, Simon (a year younger than me) and myself. Mom would try to make it up to the boys by walking them to the local cafe for chocolates and chips. I was the odd one out; they called me ‘Stinky’ or ‘Ugly’ when Dad wasn’t around, leaving me to do housework as punishment for being myself. I was used to it, but still wished to belong, and for Mom to change her mind and love me.

The same house that took the sting out of life—that gave me Dad’s presence and with it a sense of safety, meaning I could breathe a little more freely, play a little more happily and at times even feel the warmth of the sun right down into my heart—was sometimes a prison, trapping me with the boys and Mom. It squeezed the breath out of me as I tried to be invisible to them in the confined space of holiday hours that could be interminably long. ‘Make the beds, Stinky.’ ‘Brush my hair, Stinky.’ ‘Wash the dishes, Stinky.’ ‘Punch me, Stinky! I said punch me, you wimp!’ ‘I can’t stand the sight of your ugly face; sit in the corner and don’t you dare turn around.’ ‘I’m so goddamn lonely and depressed, Kate. Life with your father is hell!’ ‘I’ve got a headache, I need a massage before you go to bed. Yes, like that; God you’re good at this. Now kiss me good night.’ She’d twist her nose away from the smell of me, my Mom, twisting her lips to the side so I couldn’t contaminate her with my germs; I had to kiss her contorted cheek every night of my life, holidays or not, so I could go to bed knowing my place in the world.

That was normal life for me, but something came over me that holiday. I wasn’t prepared to hang around and take whatever they had to dish up for me any more. I took to slipping away when I was supposed to be hanging up washing; or I’d climb out a window when banished to my room. I’d be gone until the sun set orange over the mountains in the east, or at least until Dad and the Kombi growled up the drive again. I filled the hours hanging out with—or at least alongside—the Afrikaans boys, who ran in packs, free from the constraints of the English kids, who had to be near their parents at all times and have their feet shod in appropriate footwear. The Afrikaans boys ran barefoot in the veld or by the river, hair bleached golden as the dunes they careered down, shirtless in khaki shorts. I stole one of Dads t-shirts to wear over my swimmers on the days I spent with them. I hid it in a copse on the side of a dune, along with a bottle for water and a couple of tins of whatever I could lay my hands on so I wouldn’t starve. My copse had a little clearing in the center, a patch of sand that looked up at the startling blue sky. I’d hang my ‘good’ clothes on a branch and lie on my Dad’s t-shirt watching clouds scud across the patch of blue, finding faces and figures amid them before they vanished, and listening out for the gang of boys.

When I couldn’t find the boys, I’d wander around on my own, attaching myself to any strays I came across, whether human or animal. Sometimes I watched our house from afar, hunkered on my haunches until I got pins and needles, like a spy, waiting for Mom and the boys to head off to the shops so I could find a way back inside to steal some food and dance rebelliously across the kitchen linoleum to the latest hit buzzing around in my brain.

Inevitably I’d cop a good yelling from Mom each and every time I tried to sneak back inside each evening, but I copped nothing worse because Dad was there, my secret yet visible shield. Mom tried to enforce a rule that all windows were out of bounds to me, but I ignored the rule all summer—the windows were my access to the world, to freedom. No matter how many times I copped it for ‘running wild’, ‘blatantly disobeying’, or ‘acting like a wild animal’, the lure of escape was impossible to resist.

‘Where the hell is the tin of tuna I bought just the other day? Kate? Kate, did you take the tuna?’

‘No Mommy.’

‘You took the tuna, didn’t you? What kind of animal are you? What ten-year-old steals a tin of bloody tuna? Now what the hell am I supposed to make a tuna salad with?’

I did take the tuna, and I took the can opener too, so there! ‘No, Mommy, I promise, Mommy, I didn’t take the tuna.’

‘I know you did, goddammit. Just because your father’s around, you think you can do what you like, don’t you?’ she hissed, shoving me up against the kitchen door, her fingers around my throat. I knew she wouldn’t hurt me enough to make me cry out with Dad in the house. I badly wanted to meet her fiery gaze with all the defiant belligerence a girl could muster, but I had enough self-preservation to keep my eyes trained over her shoulder.

Nothing mattered on New Year’s Eve, though; not a thing. The night stood alone as a gateway to happiness, a crazy hope-can-run-riot night of freedom and fun. New Year was all about new starts and positive expectations. I assigned the potential for magic to the night, promising the universe that I’d be ever so good in 1976, ‘Cross my fingers and hope to die,’ if only the year would be good to me.

Back then it was a tradition that English-speaking families on holiday in Paradise Beach gathered at our neighbor's place—Uncle Tom’s—with our arms loaded with alcohol and food as fuel to party in the New Year. Our day on the beach had been carefree and fun, with only the slightest niggle at the end when Steven had snapped his board and Dad had lost his temper at the ‘carelessness’. He’d thrown his fishing rod in the car and ordered us to pack up; ‘I’ve had enough of the lot of you.’ That was right after Mom had spent ages talking to a passing man about something or other; I’d noticed Dad glancing over at the two grown-ups, and casting over the rocks instead of into the sea, ending up with a snapped line and a lost hook and sinker.

But tonight I put the tension of the afternoon aside and wore my favorite dress, a fluffy pink toweling number with a bunny pocket in front, which I planned to stuff with sweets at the party later.

‘Don’t you dare embarrass me tonight, you hear? None of your shenanigans; we all want to have a good time for once, without it being ruined by you.’

‘Yes, Mommy.’

Despite her warning and the stern looks she cast my way as we headed over to Uncle Tom’s, I silently hummed a happy tune and imagined myself skipping, my dress bouncing around my legs. Real skipping would have been ‘attention-seeking, low-class behavior’ and would, at the very least, have attracted Mom’s long red nails to dig into my shoulder with a sharp pinch. 

We walked sedately, my family and I, Dad a few steps ahead, separated from us as though he didn’t belong to us, a bottle of whisky in one hand and wine in the other. The boys, with neatly parted blond hair and button-up shirts, were ‘starving’, eager to tuck into the plates of food that no doubt awaited. Mom, balancing a plate of mushroom vol-au-vents, tripped along in her high-heeled sandals, glowing, all blond haired and brown skinned in a yellow sundress that filtered the last rays of sun to show off her long skinny legs. I ignored Steven mocking me that I looked like a shrimp, my skin sunburned red under the pink fluffiness of the dress. ‘Or a pig! Ha-ha! Oink, oink, snort, snort!’ It was New Year’s Eve, party-time, disappear-into-the-night time. I twirled under Uncle Tom’s large hand as he patted me on the head, pointing us in the direction of a table groaning with food.

Uncle Tom’s holiday home was unlike ours in every way, a mess of driftwood, shells, fishing rods, beer cans and bottles of brandy. He’d made no effort to tidy up, just arranged chairs around a fire-pit in the front garden, thrown open windows and doors so that folk music bubbled over every corner, and enveloped us in his world of careless abandon. Almost.

Mom hovered by the food table. ‘God alone knows what that’s supposed to be; I’d rather die than offer up a plate of mush like that.’ She passed judgment on the food as though she was an expert—putting others down always seemed to make her more confident. She dished up cocktail sausage rolls and tomato sauce for us kids, keeping herself busy, holding a vantage point from which to criticize the other guests: ‘Look at that tart! With a figure like that, she’d be better off wearing a tent.’ I knew I had to stick close by her until she felt comfortable enough to chat to another adult on her own. I just hoped it would be sooner rather than later.

Tent Lady squished me out of the way, reaching for a vol-a-vent and groaning with delight at she quaffed it and then another. ‘Oh, God! These are dee-licious!’ she exclaimed, inviting Mom to give one a try.

‘Oh, I made those, actually. So glad you like them.’

That was my cue to escape, to investigate and take in all that the night had to offer.

Uncle Tom’s parties weren’t refined or quiet affairs. A few hours in, the adults were crinkly from sitting about all evening, their voices loud, the ladies laughing a lot—even Mom, holding a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I tried to hang in the shadows and keep my voice down so Mom wouldn’t notice me and call me over for a ‘talking-to’. Usually we kids ran around the neighborhood playing hide and seek or Trolls, intermittently filling our bellies from the abundance of treats on offer.

But that night Steven and another boy, who seemed to have grown to double his size since the last party, weren’t in the mood for childish games. They were more interested in getting their hands on some alcohol and disappearing to a secret place to drink it. ‘Hey, Stinky, go find us some beer and bring it here, but don’t let anyone see you, hey!’ Steven was obviously the leader of the two, the other boy hanging back but looking excited.

‘No. I don’t want to.’ I had courage that being in a crowd afforded; I could walk away.

‘Do it, Stinky, I’m warning you! Or I’ll tell Mom you’ve been showing those Afrikaans boys your tits all summer.’

The other boy laughed, a brainless cackle that had me hot with shame and anger. I picked up an empty beer can and hurled it in their direction. It whizzed past them and landed with a clatter near the adults, near Mom. She looked into the shadows, and, as though she could see me, delivered a bone-shivering ‘look’. A ‘look’ usually meant she’d caught me ‘in the act’ of something, maybe being ‘attention-seeking’, or just too happy. A ‘look’ usually meant: ‘Freeze! I’ll get you later.’ 

‘Fucking idiot!’ Steven said, but as the other boy was there, he didn’t punch me or push me over, but stalked off into the dark with his friend in tow. I wasn’t sure whether Mom had seen me or not. For a time I stood where I was, on pause, until she turned back to her wine and cigarettes. Unpause—play! The more Mom drank, the freer I was to forget about her. When she started laughing in her husky, smoky way, I felt I could dance around the fire right in front of her and she probably wouldn’t care.

Even Dad seemed relaxed, sitting with his knees wide apart and a smile for whoever leaned over to talk to him, his face glowing warmly in the firelight. I’d included myself in a game of hide-and-seek with some of the other kids, though I wasn’t sure whether they’d meant to include me or not. I wasn’t exactly popular, especially because I was the only girl known to hang around with ‘rock-spiders’, a group of Afrikaans boys who ran around barefoot, tramped through the dunes ‘hunting’, and generally didn’t care what kind of messes they got into. I both did and didn’t mind the other kids thinking me odd, but there was nothing I could do to change it, so I attached myself like a satellite to the games the English kids played. In truth the games were just cover for me to do what I liked for a night, and a major part of doing what I liked was eating what I liked. I spent a fair bit of time ‘hiding’ under the food table, squished up against a wall with food in my mouth, eavesdropping on the adults.

My Dad’s accent, though always obvious, was more pronounced and thicker than ever, almost as though he was in competition with Uncle Tom to show off his Scottish roots. The conversation revolved around sunburn and how best to treat it, the ‘native situation’, and what a cock-up the Boers were making of their stand against communism on the subcontinent. Someone mocked Dad about our move to the Orange Free State, saying, ‘You’ll have to learn to praat die Taal, Ian; about bloody time!’

To English-speaking South Africans, the Free State was the heartland of Afrikanerdom, of religious people who disliked ‘foreigner influence’, especially that of the English, the perpetrators of genocide against the Afrikaners during the Anglo-Boer War. No-one dictated the rules that divided white South Africans from each other; rather it was a ‘given’, an idea assimilated and accepted, just like apartheid. We English speakers thanked our lucky stars that we weren’t ‘black’ and that we weren’t Afrikaans, because being white and English meant we benefited from apartheid without the association of guilt that hung about the Afrikaans—or so my Dad’s behavior implied. And he was extra innocent, being Scottish and all.

‘And what’s all this about bloody Wilson being a communist spy? Will we even have a country to go back to if the commies have a foot in like that? Effing commies, taking over the world. If we can’t keep them out, I can’t see the Boers holding them back, what with the blacks fighting alongside them up and down Africa.’ Disheveled, slurring men found their voices on topics rarely spoken of in our day-to-day lives.

‘You guys don’t know what you’re talking about, man!’—the latter from Tent Lady’s husband, who’d lurched up out of his chair, sloshing his glass of brandy and Coke. ‘You come here, throw yourselves around, take our jobs, our money and then eff-off back to your queenie while we Afrikaners try to keep the blacks from destroying this country. We made this country; without us you wouldn’t have your fancy jobs in the mines or holiday houses in the sun, so lekker and different from ‘back home’; but what do you give back, hey? Effing judgment!’

The adults squirmed a little, having forgotten the lone Afrikaner in their midst. ‘Like true colonials, what!’ Uncle Tom mimicked a pompous English accent, and everyone laughed, except Tent Lady’s husband, who seemed to falter between rage and drunkenness, and who finally sank into his chair with a raised glass of surrender. Dad poured him another shot, and the shoulders of the grown-ups around the fire visibly relaxed as they melted into the arms of their chairs or their partners at the diffusion of tension.

I saw Dad glance over the fire in Mom’s direction, but she flicked her hair and turned to Uncle Tom with an enormous smile. ‘Tom, be a dear and light my ciggie for me, would you? I seem to have misplaced my lighter. I’m a simple South African; what can you expect?’

She may as well as have slapped Dad, by the way his head jerked to face the man by his side, pretending to be engaged in his story. It was always like that between them, with Dad looking for Mom’s approval and then withdrawing in the face of her coldness. I wished he’d notice that I adored him—I wished he’d adore me back—but most of the time it was like I didn’t exist. I felt as sorry for him as I did for myself; maybe a bit sorrier, because I knew all the horrible things Mom said about him behind his back. The expats around him on New Year’s Eve 1975, on the very tip of Africa, felt themselves to be adventurers, conquerors staking their claim for Her Majesty in the Afrikaans heartland. A little of that seemed to infect Dad’s usually-withdrawn self as he toasted Uncle Tom and those around him: ‘Sod it! Here’s a bottle and an honest man. What would ye wish for mair, man?’ I made my way out from under the table to find the children who hadn’t found me.

We children spent the later part of the evening dressing our Kombi in streamers and an assortment of ready-to-trash Christmas decorations, preparing it to cheer out the old year and proclaim, ‘The New Year has arrived!’ Steven must have found alcohol somewhere, because he took control of us all in a jovial way that wasn’t his usual style, sending us to hunt for paper, string and sticky tape, or whatever else could be found to dress the Kombi like a massive present. It was always surprising to me that Dad let us decorate the car in that way, as he was usually so particular about order and tidiness. We never got to travel in Dad’s car—the ‘work’ car, the one he got polished every Saturday and vacuumed every Sunday afternoon—because Dad refused to ‘abuse’ his company car the way ‘others’ did. He was a stickler for obeying the rules, for being seen to be doing ‘the right thing’. He’d bought the Kombi because it had vinyl seats that couldn’t be ruined by messy children, especially on the twelve-hour trips down to the coast from the Transvaal, and also so there was enough room for Evelyn, our maid, to come along too, so Mom could ‘relax’ on holiday and not have to ‘slave away’ over us. That year we were maid-less because Evelyn and her sister Grace had been left to unpack the boxes from our move and to keep our new house and its belongings safe from burglary. Maids and burglary were two things we took for granted. 

With the clock ticking down the last seconds of 1975, the grown-ups loudly called the countdown, and we kids jammed our sunburned bodies into any available corner of the Kombi, holiday-fever-pitched and high on sugar and up-till-midnight adrenaline. Dad took the wheel and we set off to announce the arrival of 1976!

Happy New Year! Dad intermittently sounded the horn while Steven sat by the open sliding door, golden hair whooshing about his face, jangling a large brass bell that appeared on the scene every New Year’s Eve. Breathing in the dark salty sea-smell that whipped around us, I glowed inwardly at the thought of being my father’s daughter, my father being the provider of our magic carpet of fun. My Dad, my hero, was tipsy on the ‘wee dram’ he’d been sipping all night, blue eyes twinkling under a thick wave of disheveled black hair, an almost empty bottle of scotch wedged between his solid thighs. (Mom loved to comment that I’d inherited his ‘thunder-thighs’, made for ‘kick-starting Boeings’.) The last slug of the bottle was being kept for sharing with the first person of color we might come across on our journey. That was my Dad’s