They don’t speak of Thomas again, but he is there in the picture and in the air all around them. Rachel has a strange feeling that at any moment he might walk through the door. If he is dead now she doesn’t know what the concept means. Maya must have been living with this feeling all the time, living with the dead half-alive in her head, watching his ghost walk through the door again and again and knowing each time that there is no parallel universe or place from which he is watching. That he is not coming back, no matter what.
Later she lies in the darkness, her limbs aching in the cold. She knows the root of this sleeplessness, that it is not about Thomas, but is instead the price of her control. When she is sure that she can hear Maya’s breathing in the next room through the open doors, Rachel rises from the bed and wraps her cotton gown around herself and finds the kitchen in the dark. She closes the door and at the flick of the wall switch light floods the room.
This is where she’d stood and talked with Thomas about what was important and what was not. Family things – their mother’s illness or financial arrangements or how their lives had changed over the years, now that they were both adults and living apart with separate lives. She hadn’t seen him much in recent years, after a whole childhood of togetherness, a shared youth. Time in London and then the gradual decline into a life watered down: one house, one life, one husband, one wife. They spoke less on the phone and over time they discovered that there was less to talk about. When their mother died they’d held on to each other and cried because both knew without words that the one person who’d tied them to their past was gone. The remaining two of an immediate family. They might have grown together, but instead they grew apart.
She fills the kettle and pushes the red switch to heat the water. She opens the fridge door and peers into it. Signs of her brother are here, signs of a man who was part of a couple and who had a life apart from hers. Preserved red peppers stuffed with soft cheese, sesame crackers and tubes of green wasabi paste. He’d never eat it now. Their childhood had been one of plain chicken on white rice and rough lettuce salads. These current exotic tastes are Maya’s influence on her brother, over time. Who is Maya, this woman he lived with and loved, with whom he shared a bed and all his private moments? Are such foods her choice, or did Thomas develop a more discernible palate in time, when he began to earn so much that most of his income turned out to be disposable? He’d begun to tell his stories through pictures early in his life, through the images that he captured on the street with a cheap manual camera. By his mid-twenties he was winning awards and publishing coffee-table books and everybody wanted to commission him, to interview him, to pay him small fortunes for his work. He was good, there was no question of that. More than this, he was a man who knew his own value. He created his life through his self-belief. Again and again, he had done what Rachel never could.
The switch on the kettle clicks and she retrieves a mug from the cupboard and cuts thin slices of ginger to go with her boiling water. She takes a spoon from the drawer and eats three mouthfuls of Greek yoghurt from the fridge. As she swallows she feels the coolness on her throat, she imagines the calcium that will feed her and something in the movement of swallowing and the comfort in the act of eating makes her at last feel something close to calm.
* * *
Five years old over breakfast. Five years old and poached egg on toast with hardened yolk that wedged and tightened in the throat and would not go down. ‘Sit there until you’ve finished your breakfast,’ her mother said.
‘I hate egg,’ Rachel replied.
There was a phone call and her mother left the room. Thomas slipped off the chair on his side of the breakfast table. He lifted his plate of scrambled egg and toast fingers. He moved across the kitchen floor to the door out back and on the outside, just to the left of the doorframe, he bent and scraped his breakfast into the dog’s bowl. The cross-bred golden retriever wiggled and squirmed and slapped her chops until the boy moved away. The dog devoured the nutrition meant for Thomas in a single gulp. Thomas returned to the table and placed his plate there. He climbed back onto his chair and drank his chocolate milk.
‘You can’t do that,’ Rachel told him. ‘You can’t give your food to the dog.’
‘She’s hungry,’ Thomas said. His eyes told her, Food is only necessary when you need sustenance. Sometimes the stomach tells you that eating without hunger is pointless.
Footsteps sounded in the passage and their mother returned. ‘Good boy, Thomas. You’ve eaten all your egg. You’ll grow nice and strong. Now we have to wait for your sister.’
Wait for your sister. Your sister’s slow. Your sister’s late. Your sister’s not quite there yet. Thomas grinned and caught a maternal kiss on his head for his blue eyes. Rachel choked on her egg and felt the bile in her stomach rising, rising, until it reached her eyes in undisguised tears.
‘And crying’s not going to help you, either,’ her mother said.
An hour later when the egg was gone, Rachel asked for chocolate milk. Instead her mother poured filtered water from the jug and handed it to her. ‘Thomas needs his milk, he’s a growing boy,’ she said. ‘Too much milk will make you fat.’
She took the full glass outside and watered the flowers in the sunshine, where daylight played between shade and the spaces to hide.
* * *
In the morning Rachel says to Maya, ‘I’ll help you in any way I can. Just tell me what you need.’
Maya is eating toast and answering phone calls between mouthfuls, and somewhere Rachel’s words are lost amidst Maya’s chewing and the phone’s ringing.
‘I have to go to work,’ Maya tells her. ‘I’ll be back this afternoon. I have a meeting with Sizwe after five. He’s doing the poetry on Saturday but he’ll come to the house so you’ll meet him then. You remember Sizwe?’
‘I’ve never met him.’
‘Thank god for Sizwe. He’s the only person who’s held himself together through this nightmare. He’s been a rock.’
‘Can I organise anything?’
‘I don’t think so. We won’t have any flowers. Obviously no coffin. Without a body it’s pointless. A short memorial at the Botanical Gardens with the spoken word performance, and then tea in the functions room to end off. Simple. People can come back here afterwards for a drink if they want to. Thomas wasn’t religious anyway. There’s not much to do, though thanks. I need to get to work now.’
‘You’re working, Maya? Through this time?’
‘What else is there to do? Sit at home and mope? I think I’d go mad. It would be the end for me.’
When Maya is gone, Rachel walks the map of the house, her bare feet hollow on the wooden floorboards. She hates the sound. There is nobody left here. If she waits, no one will come, not until the afternoon. She can’t eat and because she can’t eat she can’t sleep. Escapism through either is impossible. She moves from room to room. The weight of her body connects with the floor and she listens to her own footsteps. She knows that now she truly walks alone, now that her whole family is gone, the family that was with her at the beginning have all vanished into the earth or into the ether and here she is, still walking the world, this country, this city and this house. Here she is alone in this room where she now stands.
The last time she was in Johannesburg she was with Kamal. They had come for a wedding, the nuptials of a girl from Kamal’s family on his mother’s side whom everybody knew to be too young, too soft, too impressionable still to tie her life to another’s so soon. As the girl put on the headdress, hitched up her sari and staggered around on stilettos, a smile spread on her face as wide as the future.
‘Marriage is a strange choice for someone as young as you are,’ Rachel had said, studying the intricate henna patterns on the girl’s hands.
‘Marriage wasn’t meant for the old and ugly,’ the girl answered, leaning backwards on her heels, almost collapsing. ‘I’m ready.’
Rachel