Then she would become Sleeping Beauty.
The sting of the spinning wheel needle would fade away.
The drop of blood disappear.
She was asleep in a castle in a land far, far away, on sheets of the purest white. While she was Sleeping Beauty, everything stood still. Even the king and the queen turned into statues. Nothing stirred – not the steam rising from the plates of food, the flames in the fireplace or the palace curtains. Sleeping Beauty slept and waited for the prince to wake her with a kiss.
She waited a very long time.
By this morning the paint on the sign was dry and she drilled holes in the corners so she could put it up when she returned from the funeral. From today onwards no one will ever possess her body again or have a say about what she does on her own farm. No one but she will fasten the lock and no one but she will open it.
NO ENTRY
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
She sits down on the base of the water tank. With her Victorinox she slices the tomato and opens the can of bully beef. The phone rings again. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone. Even less go inside the house. Her cellphone is in the truck, its battery flat. She doesn’t care.
The clouds have gone and the late afternoon sun washes the fog on the mountain in light pink. It’ll be milking time as soon as she’s done eating. She’s told Johnnie until the rain stops she’ll take care of the milking herself.
She stows the remaining food inside the shopping bag, grabs a handful of Tennis biscuits and walks to the kraal to milk Freesia. She plans to pour out half the milk for the chickens and take the rest to Mama Thandeka and Mabel. There’s no need to keep milk in the house: she doesn’t touch anything that’s whitish and wet. Milk, maize porridge, cheesecake, white sauce, cream, floury apples, yoghurt, cottage cheese. Gertruidah has to be the only child in the world who throws up if she eats ice cream, she once heard one of the tennis women tell her mother. Sarah had laughed: Gertruidah was just fussy.
Licking an ice cream cone was the worst thing in the world, she’d wanted to say – but didn’t, because it wasn’t true. There were worse things. The smell of a sardine sandwich. Watching her father suck the marrow from the bone in the Sunday roast. Raw egg white. Standing on a slug and feeling the gluey slime between your toes.
And the worst thing of all, the thing she couldn’t tell anyone about.
It was best to say nothing. Then there’d never come a day when you had to drop your gaze before Braham’s at the table behind the maidenhair fern.
Freesia lows when she enters the kraal carrying the milk bucket and stool. The white spots on her Friesian hide are tinted pink by the evening light. ‘I’ve missed you, Freesia. I have a lot to tell you.’
She cannot talk to people, only to cows and frogs and to Bamba. They will never betray her.
When she’s done milking and puts the bucket aside, Freesia playfully nudges her. That means she’s itching. Or perhaps it’s her way of saying goodnight.
Did anyone ever tuck her in and wish her goodnight, sleep tight? It doesn’t seem possible. And yet she has a memory of her mother lying beside her at bedtime and, sometimes, Anthony in his striped pyjamas on the end of the bed. Lying in the crook of her mother’s arm and looking at pictures of pumpkin coaches and a shoe full of children while her mother read. She remembers the scent of her mother’s powder and that lying in her arm had felt good.
But perhaps she remembers wrong.
Had being powerless against Abel been an illusion? Had feeling powerless been an escape or had she been programmed to believe sex with your father was normal? Vaguely she remembers bathing with him when she was small. He’d build a tower of bath foam on top of her head and they’d laugh so much her mother would come to see what was the matter. Him washing her tiny body, everywhere, without it seeming wrong. Falling asleep in his lap while he cleaned her fingernails with his penknife. Being carried to bed and kissed goodnight. No nightmares while she slept.
Sometimes she played a wedding game under the wild olive tree. She wore her mother’s high-heeled shoes and her father was the make-believe groom. She’d marry him some day, she said. He laughed and tossed her high up into the air. Brought her berries and sour figs after he’d spent two days in the mountains looking for cattle.
Then Anthony died; her mother went away to the Women’s Agricultural Union conference and everything turned bad. Back then she believed the things fathers did were right because they were fathers. That all fathers turned the doorknob at night. That it was part of loving, like picking you up and giving you a piggyback and playing catch in the yard.
And yet she never talked about it with other little girls.
Are you born with the knowledge that something is wrong even if you don’t know?
She recalls a Friday. Leap year, 2008.
In her shirt pocket, Grandma Strydom’s ruby ring, brought out of its hiding place in the cake tin in the stone house. In her mind she moved the vase with wild chestnut flowers aside and reached her hands out to Braham. It is leap year, she said, will you marry me? A thousand times she heard him say, let’s go to the magistrate’s office right now.
Dreams. Dreams of travelling to France, to the Saint Claire Church in Avignon to visit the chimera of a fourteenth-century poet. It had been Braham who introduced her to Francesco Petrarca. Dreams of turning Umbrella Tree Farm into a prickly-pear farm. Of travelling to Yorkshire to sit at the grave where the poet Sylvia Plath’s journey ended. Of being wheeled into a hospital theatre for an operation to repair her weakened sphincter muscle. Of playing in the final on Wimbledon’s Centre Court and winning. Of marrying Braham.
Without dreams, no matter how far-fetched, she would’ve ceased living long ago. Simply collapsed and died. Dreams carried her away from the horrors.
Her mother’s voice telling guests: Gertruidah exists in an imaginary world and, what is worse, she believes the things she makes up. I can’t bear to think what’ll happen to her when Abel and I are no longer there …
Leap year, 2008. She recalls the swampy February afternoon heat when she got out of her air-conditioned car outside The Copper Kettle. Braham’s car was already there. She was tired. All week long Abel had taunted her with a toy he’d ordered from America on the Internet. A black rubber thing, covered with tiny tentacles. Repulsive.
‘Get some KY jelly when you go to town,’ he’d ordered the night before. ‘Batteries too.’
She would kill him, she swore. ‘Get it yourself.’
He got angry and shoved the rubber thing up inside her. She pressed her face into the mattress and became someone else. A faceless woman on a train to Avignon. Through the train window she watched the vineyards and linden trees covered with tiny yellow-green flowers slip by. She must take a jar of linden honey back home for Braham. Because he was the sweetest thing in her life.
When the faceless woman got off the train, she heard the bedroom door close.
She stood under the shower to wash away the mess. But the water couldn’t reach inside her unclean heart.
Braham would detest her if he knew. When he left her bedroom at night did Abel detest her too?
‘Hi, Braham. Sorry I’m late.’ She slid into her chair behind the maidenhair fern. ‘I had to go to the co-op for teat salve and laying mash. And there’s my mother’s endless shopping list …’
‘I’m glad you’re here. You mustn’t turn