All That Is Left
KIRSTEN MILLER
KWELA BOOKS
In time, we shall be in a position to bestow on South Africa
the greatest possible gift – a more human face.
– Bantu Stephen Biko
To my mother, who gave me love and books.
CHAPTER 1
The cat lies curled in a rectangle of diluted sunlight while all else is cold and cast in shadow. A man sits at the desk below the window. Outside the sky swirls in painted shades while suburban trees stretch upwards like wanting arms, expecting something else. Across the wooden surface papers are strewn, reams of documents and forms and notifications and complications that rise in piles and mean nothing at the end of things. He leans forward and scratches the cat with one finger. She lifts her head and stretches a paw. Her mouth gapes in a yawn, but she keeps her eyes closed. On the lawn outside a grey hadedah needles the ground with its beak.
The surrounding walls hold the summary of the man’s life: a patchwork of photographs fastened carefully, deliberately through the years. There are hundreds of pictures, side by side, above and below. Together they form a pattern across the space and his eyes sweep the surface, taking in the extent of colour and composition, moments of time held captive. He is the magician who can ever still time with the gentle press of a finger, as the shutter closes.
Images of Maya, his wife, dominate the section of wall that is closest to the desk. He likes that she has never cut her hair, that when she works she still wraps it in a loose knot at the top of her head. Because of her work in nature, in taming the soil, her body has never grown soft. She exudes strength in these pictures, but there is still a sense in him that this is her most effective mask.
He rises from the chair, his boots hollow against the drum of the wooden floorboards. In the bedroom he reaches for a small volume of poetry hidden behind the row of books on the top shelf against the far wall. The pages fall open to reveal a wad of two-hundred-rand notes. He tucks the money into the pocket of his jeans, closes the book, and returns it to the shelf.
A soft and urgent pressure strains against his legs. ‘Hey dimwit,’ he says. He picks up the cat and buries his face in her fur. As though she can read his heart she allows him to hold her for seconds before she twists her body and growls low. He eases her to the ground, and she slinks away.
He pulls a small bag from the bottom drawer of the cupboard and stuffs a few simple items into it. Some clothes, a cap, and a second-hand camera retrieved from under the bed. He tries not to notice anything for too long. The red light of the clock radio that has never shown the right time blinks a repetitive warning. Maya’s sheepskin slippers lie discarded on the floor. A pile of books, purchased at the second-hand shop two roads down, waits unread. He takes a jacket from a peg behind the door. From the adjacent peg Maya’s soft white dressing gown drops like a waterfall, almost to the floor. He turns his eyes away.
In the bathroom the floor is wet in places from when she showered earlier. A thump increases inside him, and it takes him seconds to realise that the sound is his own heart beating. He brushes his teeth and washes his face and dries his hands on the rough cotton of the fresh towel. He breathes her scent and folds the towel across the silver rail, straightening the edges, corner to corner.
He places the bag in the kitchen beside the open door and brews a small espresso in the Italian pot on the gas stove. After he’s poured the thick dark liquid into a cup he adds milk from the fridge, heats it in the microwave, and drinks the coffee leaning against the doorframe, watching a weaver bird building a nest in the tree outside.
He imagines Maya coming home each day to this empty house. Her winter boots sounding on the floorboards. The bathroom tap running too long as she repeatedly tries to remove the dirt from beneath her fingernails. The television sound on low as she sits at the coffee table, painting her nails in an attempt to conceal the grime beneath them, the evidence of her hard work. The smell of onions frying in fresh herbed butter in a pan on the stove. The silence, the stillness of the house when she’s lying in their bed, her eyes still open, before sleep comes to take the emptiness away.
When the coffee is finished he rinses the cup beneath a stream of running water at the sink, and dries it with the sun-yellow dishtowel. He places it back on the shelf in the row with all the others. He does this for Maya’s sake, imagining her as she finds a single washed mug on the dish rack after he has gone, and what this might do to her. He picks the bag up off the floor and pauses to steady himself as he looks to the light outside.
After locking the back door, he places the keys in the cubbyhole of the car. The bag thuds down into the boot, and he shifts an empty five-litre plastic container for petrol beside it, patting his pocket for the small rectangular shape of the matchbox as an afterthought.
The cat crouches beside the wall. The writhing of a dismembered gecko tail slows beneath her paw. He goes to her and grips her by the scruff of her neck, and her focus on the lizard tail intensifies. Her eyes narrow, and the paw presses down hard. ‘Stupid,’ he says, and lifts her up by the scruff. Her front legs hang midway, suspended in the air. The gecko tail flinches one last time, like a hooked worm intent on living. The cat peers at Thomas and he lowers her to the ground, abashed. His hand runs from the top of her head to the tip of her tail before he stands upright and climbs into the car. He turns the key in the ignition and the engine rumbles as he revs it into life.
The cat bounds after the car like a shadow or an afterthought. At the end of the driveway she crouches, then springs to the top of the wall in a single movement. In the rear-view mirror Thomas catches a last glimpse of her, her head aloft, as she silently watches him go.
CHAPTER 2
The greats write their names across the sky, while the rest have forgotten how to live. The gulls’ sprawl, the spattering of pigeon wings are the voices of the common, while above it all, suspended from the clouds by their feather tips, the greats wait to swoop and catch us with their words.
Somewhere in the world a woman waits to be caught like that, with words and ideas that might take her away. She imagines herself snatched from the bed on which she sits, taken from the cry of the child in the next room, from the house with tight walls and damp summer air. She dreams of time suspended, a place where her body doesn’t move but where her spirit plays here and there, here and there, like the cockroach that she tried to kill the day before. Flat. To be a creature that darts, parallel to the linoleum, that squeezes into spaces no thought could dare enter.
The partings best remembered are those without closure. No concrete way to recognise the mini-death, the rebirth of another kind of life devoid of the one thing, the one person, who simply disappeared. She was twelve years old on the wall outside the first house where they’d ever lived. Twelve years old and listening to the hissing truck belch and gurgle as it swallowed the furniture, piece by piece. Strange men passing in and out of the house as they deconstructed her life bit by bit, table by chair, box by cupboard.
Her mother fluttered between the white pantechnicon and the old house like a moth, papers fluttering in the sunlight between her fingers. Phototropism. Thomas ran in bursts on strong and eager legs, while Rachel observed them all from her crow’s nest on the wall.
The truck closed its mouth, and moved slowly away. Her mother locked the house and took Thomas by the hand. She called to Rachel where she watched their life being folded away.
‘But what about Grace?’ Rachel asked.
‘Grace isn’t coming,’ her mother said, packing boxes into the boot of the car.
‘We have to wait for Grace!’ Rachel insisted.
Her mother stood upright, wiped a hand across her hair. ‘Rachel, just let it go. We’ve got a long drive. Please, come down from there.’
Her brother’s eyes blinked at her from beside the floral hip. You will dream of Grace all of your life, they told her.