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