Still, she sometimes dreams about him with disturbing clarity. Dreams about the tiny birthmark on his forearm or the time his toenail fell off after his toe got caught in the mouse trap; dreams about a birthday cake shaped like a tractor, with the icing in John Deere green and yellow. When she wakes up, her eyelashes are wet and her heart heavy. But even in the wasteland of her most distant memory she knows it’s not Anthony she’s sad about. She’s sad about something inside herself.
No one ever told her how Anthony died. But she heard all about it all the same, whenever Abel and Sarah fought. Especially if Abel was drunk. He was seldom drunk out of his mind but when he was, he was uncontrollable, mad. His rage lasted until it gave way to sorrow; only then would he grow calm.
No matter how it started, every fight ended up being about Anthony’s death, which was why she knew far more than they realised.
Stupid Gertruidah.
If they only knew how clever she was.
The rain has gone; the wind has died down. The mountainside lies wrapped in a thin skin of fog. Aside from the frogs there’s a holy silence, as if the earth is holding its breath. The smoke has gone at Mama Thandeka’s house.
She walks to the shed to fetch the shopping from the truck. Water sloshes inside her shoes and her funeral blouse clings to her breasts. She won’t take the food inside the house. She’ll store it on the shady side of the water tank and cut the bread with her penknife. The penknife has often come to her rescue in the veld.
Her father brought the knife back from an agricultural tour to Switzerland in 1992, when she was in grade four. The date is written under the flap of the leather pouch. It was the same year she asked her teacher if she could take the class’s dictionary back to the hostel for the afternoon. She wanted to look up the meanings of allergy, therapy, genetic, trauma and masturbation because they’d been milling around her head for so long.
‘Why are you looking for those words, Gertruidah?’ the teacher had asked, her eyes wide.
‘Because.’
‘Don’t lie to me, Gertruidah, why those words?’
‘I dreamed about them.’
She could tell the teacher wasn’t going to leave it at that but she didn’t want to talk – her dad said she mustn’t talk. So she imagined there was a slime sausage in her throat and threw up on the teacher’s feet. Throwing up was easy if you thought of a slime sausage. Then the teacher got all concerned about you and let you have your way. Someone being concerned about you felt good. Being allowed to take the dictionary to the hostel made you seem important.
Allergy. Sensitivity to allergens.
Therapy. Treatment for illnesses, disorders.
Genetic. Regarding the genesis of something.
Trauma. Injury, scar.
Masturbation. Sexual self-gratification.
She understood little of it. It made her think of when her father branded the Bonsmaras. Although she felt sorry for the cattle she wished she were a cow so she wouldn’t have to sleep in her bedroom at night. The mark from a branding iron healed after a while but the things that took place in her bedroom made her sick.
When she opens the door of the truck, the smell of oranges hits her nose. She feels light-headed from hunger, and from thinking in circles, calling up images of the past. From uncertainty over whether the things she remembered were the truth. Could they have happened differently, or in a different order? How was she able to retain such big words for such a long time? Could she really read when she went to school? Was her memory shaped by a child’s understanding or had she coloured in her childhood with the knowledge, insight and skills of an adult?
What difference does it make, the when and where? Because nothing and no one can clear the fog of memory from her mind. The fright things. The night things. Moving shadows like tree branches against the dull curtains of her most distant memory. Or like giant hands. Sometimes there are smells and sounds. Could she have imagined it all?
No. Thinking that she was imagining things was what her parents had wanted her to believe.
Despite being washed by rain her arms feel dirty where the people at the funeral tea touched her. When she places the shopping bag on the base of the water tank, the phone rings again. What if it is Braham? She remembers his whispered words beside the grave: Let me know if you need me …
She needs him.
She doesn’t want to need him.
She takes the Victorinox from her pocket and polishes the red handle until it shines.
The year she got the Victorinox was also the year her mother dragged her out of the church one Sunday and gave her a hiding outside because she’d sung ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ so loudly. She never looked in the hymn book because to sing from the same book she’d have to stand close to her mother. She didn’t like her mother. It was better to keep all the hymns inside your head so you didn’t have to stand close to your mother.
Then her mother took her outside and said she was mocking the Lord if she sang ‘Polly shine your boots and shoes’. She hadn’t done it on purpose. It was what she’d heard the grown-ups sing. From then on whenever they sang ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ she ran away to Umbrella Tree Farm in her head, to sit by the river and talk to the creatures great and small.
The next September when her mother’s twin sister Auntie Lyla came to visit she brought her a hymn book of her own. She liked having her own hymn book. She liked reading the words herself, and not having to stand close to her mother.
She was thrilled about her Victorinox with the red handle and the black leather pouch she could hang from her waistband.
‘Come,’ her father said, ‘sit on my knee then I’ll show you what the knife can do. The Swiss are master knife-makers. This one is called a Victorinox. Over here!’ He slapped his knee as if she was a dog and he was ordering her to jump up against him. ‘No one at school will have an expensive Swiss army knife like yours.’
She didn’t want to sit on his knee. Didn’t want to!
But the red-handled knife was beautiful; she’d wanted a penknife forever.
And she only had to sit for ten minutes, even though it was bad. During the day, when the sun shone and someone might be around to see what her father was doing, it was different from the night. At night she didn’t sit on his knees; at night she knelt on hers.
At night she shouted, ‘Ouch!’ Loudly, so that her mother might hear. ‘Ouch!’ It stung where he slapped her bare hip and told her to be quiet. He said it was the place where her babies would come out one day and he had to make the hole bigger or her babies would get stuck inside her tummy. He said it was a father’s duty.
But she didn’t want to have any babies, ever. She didn’t want the hole to be bigger. She wanted Bamba to curl up at her feet, wanted her Lulu doll in her arms, wanted her mother to hear when she called. But no one cared what she wanted. No one knocked before they came into her room, and she wasn’t allowed a key. It was different at the hostel where you had to knock before going into someone’s room and you had a key for your locker in the study hall.
Her father said she couldn’t have a key for her bedroom. Her mother said her father knew best, but she knew she was lying. And her father lied too, but you couldn’t tell grown-ups they were lying.
‘Ouch!’ she screamed into the mattress.
Screaming didn’t help. No one heard.
She turned into Sleeping Beauty, asleep for