‘Yes, Sarah,’ Andrea’s mom sighed. ‘We’ll never understand how Anthony’s death affected her. She worshipped him. Andrea’s problems are because of a difficult birth. Forceps delivery. Too little oxygen. She was a ten-pound baby, you know.’
She loved words and saved the difficult ones inside her head. Oxygen. Forceps delivery. Ten-pound baby. There were even bigger words she didn’t understand. Allergic, therapy, genetic, trauma, masturbation. It didn’t matter as long as she saved them. At times she took them out, repeated them silently, so only her tongue moved inside her mouth. At night while ugly things were happening inside her bedroom, she said them over and over. Then she forgot a little about the hurt and the sardine smell, she disappeared from her body and turned into someone else.
It felt good to be someone else. Then she wasn’t like Mr Noman who was no one. When she was Allergic Strydom she had transparent wings and could fly right up to the clouds. Therapy Strydom made a little red-and-yellow wooden boat and oars and rowed right past the crocodiles and river monsters all the way to the sea. Genetic Strydom was Goldilocks’s best friend. Together they picked poisonous mushrooms in the forest and fed them to Snow White’s stepmother. Trauma Strydom was a chambermaid who brushed Sleeping Beauty’s hair while she dreamed. Masturbation Strydom always wanted to be the boss. She didn’t like Masturbation Strydom because he hurt her.
Leaning on her elbow she sees smoke curl out of the chimney at Mama Thandeka’s house across the river at the foot of the mountain. They and Johnnie and poor slow-witted Littlejohn are the last people left on Umbrella Tree Farm: the other labourers’ cottages have stood empty for years. Abel always said the new laws made it impossible to employ permanent workers. But Mama Thandeka and Mabel and Johnnie and Littlejohn have life interest, so they’ve stayed.
Johnnie helps in the yard with Sarah’s flowers and the vegetable garden, the chickens and the evening milking. But he’s old and nearing the end of his life. Littlejohn is already in his late forties and the only things he’s good at are eating jelly babies and singing. What would become of him after Johnnie died used to be Abel’s problem. Now it’s hers. Johnnie mustn’t die. He’s more a father to her than Abel ever was. When she was small she’d go with him to fetch eggs every evening. At milking time she’d carry her little mug to the kraal and he’d fill it with warm milk – although later on milk made her stomach turn.
She must take him to the doctor for a check-up, and Mama Thandeka too.
The other labourers who came to the farm were all contract workers. Fencers, pruners, cattle workers, dam-scrapers, soil-diggers. Abel shipped them in as he needed them. Aside from Johnnie it was she who’d been Abel’s right-hand man. There was nothing she couldn’t do. Irrigating, milking, placing salt licks, checking fences, setting traps for the genets. Slaughtering sheep before Abel sold them all. He was being robbed blind and it was cheaper to buy meat at the butcher, he said.
Abel taught her well.
‘We have to keep her busy somehow,’ she’d hear him tell visitors. ‘Seeing as she’s not independent enough to go to university or get a job overseas. But Sarah and I don’t mind, we love her from the bottom of our hearts.’
No one would believe her if she told them how well he’d taught her another kind of manual and physical labour.
Only Mama Thandeka and Mabel knew who Abel and Sarah really were. But no one would believe them either.
At least Mama Thandeka and Mabel had each other and unlike her and Sarah, who were locked in endless battle, they loved each other. She’d be alone in the house from now on. But not lonely. For the greatest part of twenty-six years she’d longed to be alone. To never hear a floorboard creak or a doorknob turn. Maybe the kudu saved her from a prison sentence because she’d been nearing the stage where she would shoot them both in their sleep.
She hears the phone ring inside the house. Let it ring. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone.
She hears the marsh frogs, hears her stomach rumble. She hasn’t eaten anything all day. Not even a cup of tea after the funeral. She’d kept trying to evade the pitying hands rubbing and stroking her upper arms. People touching her made her shudder.
In her haste to put up the sign and lock the gate, she pulled the truck into the shed and left the shopping bag with bread, tomatoes, bully beef, oranges and Tennis biscuits on the front seat. Mama Thandeka’s medicine and Johnnie’s sugar and jelly babies too. She’ll fetch it later.
She wants her own food. The food in the house is dirty. Maybe she should go ask Mama Thandeka for a griddle cake.
Mabel was in a hurry when she came to the yard this morning carrying the laundry basket with wild chestnut flowers. She had to get home, she said, she had dough rising.
‘Is your mother’s chest better, Mabel?’
‘No. Must be rain on the way. Mama started wheezing last night. I was up half the night, rubbing Vicks into her back. You must remember the chest drops, please, there’s less than a quarter bottle left. Raw linseed oil and Turlington too. And Johnnie wants sugar and jelly babies. He says since Littlejohn ran out of sweets the day before yesterday he hasn’t stopped singing “This little light of mine”, not even in his sleep. Says it’s driving him to drink.’
‘Won’t you change your mind about coming to the funeral, Mabel? I’m only leaving at ten, so there’s plenty of time to …’
‘Forget it, Gertruidah. You won’t catch me in the house of our Lord crying false tears for a man I don’t respect. I’m glad I won’t have to put on the face you’ll have to wear today.’
‘Please come.’
‘No. I must fetch wood before the rain starts. I just wanted to pick the flowers to scatter on the coffins, and only because I loved your mother. She taught me a lot.’
‘You’re lucky, Mabel. She never took the trouble to teach me …’
‘That’s a lie, Gertruidah. She gave up because you kept pushing her away. You never wanted to learn anything from her. She taught me,’ and Mabel nudged the basket with her foot, ‘that where too many wild chestnuts bloom you’ll find nothing but false riches. Fat wallets and lean hearts. Your mother was a good woman, Gertruidah, but your father …’
‘At least he had it in him to give you and your mother life interest in your house, and he …’
‘Life interest? Yes, Gertruidah, he did give me life. When Mama was already on the wrong side of forty and he a whipper-snapper of twenty-six. He owes us that life interest, Mama and me. I’m going now. Don’t forget the chest drops and the sugar and jelly babies.’
‘I need a favour, Mabel. Will you go inside the house and bring me my black pants and my white long-sleeved blouse? My black shoes?’
‘Heavens, Gertruidah, can’t you fetch your own clothes?’
‘I don’t want to go inside the house.’
‘So where’ve you been sleeping the last three nights if you didn’t sleep in the house?’
‘You who’s always spying on everyone, you know perfectly well I’ve been sleeping in the stone house. Bring a clean bra and panties too. And my hairbrush.’
‘Heavens, Gertruidah, do you imagine the house is haunted?’
‘No, it isn’t haunted, it stinks.’
‘I cleaned last Friday, what can it stink of already?’
‘It stinks of Abel and Sarah. Won’t you fetch my things for me please?’
Mabel had brought her things. ‘You must