The fire roars, the dog yelps, people shout, Mom yells, Gracie cries. I can’t think. People are fussing over Beth and trying to stop Sally from licking her face, but Mom, with her cheeks covered in black stuff and Gracie in her arms, keeps jumping up and down and shrieking at me to get down.
“I can’t!”
“Lilith, do you want to die? You will die there – jump!” Mom shouts in a low voice that makes the “die” sound just the way it is, exactly the end, and I’m scared of getting down out of here, but I’m more scared of dying. So I stretch like a monkey and get to the tree. It’s a little less of a stretch for me than for Beth. My hands are sweaty but the bark is rough, so I hold on. The lower branches aren’t close enough for me to reach, so I’m just hanging on. Dangling. Dizzy. I try to get closer to the trunk. Maybe I can climb down it like the island boys on TV. But it doesn’t work. I make it to the trunk, let go of my branch and slip. The long sleeves of my nightie protect my arms, but my knees are burning like a bitch. That’s what one of the boys in my class says. “I’m itching like a bitch.” But I’m burning. When I reach the ground my legs look like they’re covered in strawberry jam, and this makes me scream.
* * *
There is no crystal ball. We asked Annabelle le Roux, and she laughed so much her chains jangled over her huge boobs even though she was standing still. She says the only magic in the room is us three children, because children have wonderful imaginations, and that’s magic.
From Annabelle’s kitchen, with its brown linoleum floor, we can see the firefighters spraying the roof. Parts of it have fallen in. Annabelle scratches around until a tin of baking powder clangs on the floor.
“Ag, now where is this cocoa today?” she asks.
I can see it right on the shelf where she’s been scratching, so I point. She squints her eyes, sticking her neck out like a dog concentrating on a rabbit hole. Her jaw drops and her eyebrows rise as she stares. Then she says, “Ah!” and grabs the container from next to the sugar.
Annabelle hands me and Beth mugs of hot chocolate. She pours my mom something from a brown bottle, and then pours a tiny bit into my mug too. They drink a few glasses together until my mother laughs and laughs so much that she cries. I watch her teeth when she laughs. They’re small and round. Little pearls, that’s what Grampa says when we grin for him to show how clean we’ve brushed our teeth. Mom has little pearls.
“This is for the shock,” says Annabelle, passing around a box of Romany Creams. We each have one. My mom has three.
“Thanks, Annabelle. Sorry, my blood sugar’s taken a turn for the worse.”
“It’s the shock, man, I told you! Here, have another drink,” she offers.
I think Annabelle is also very shocked, because she pours three more biscuits down her own throat.
Almost everything is gone. All our clothes, toys, books, all our photo albums except for the one that was next to Mom’s bed. My baby pictures are gone. Everything that Mom screamed to us about: Don’t mess that up, don’t break that, don’t get that dirty, we need it to last! All I saved is my handbag, and some things I forgot on the stoep this afternoon.
Tomorrow Gran is coming to fetch us. We’re going to the farm. Mom says we need to make a plan, so we have to stay with Gran for a while. So our schoolwork isn’t interrupted. I’m going to standard one after the holidays, so school is serious for me now.
Chapter 11
Beth and I have to share a room. I don’t like it, because she moves around the toys on my bed. They’re Mom’s old toys, and we’re allowed to play with them because ours all got taken by the fire. I’m a little bit too old for soft toys, I reckon, but Beth spends hours arranging them, first mine, then hers, and she screams when I change them. Mom says I must just leave her, I must remember she’s younger than me. She says Beth used to do this at home too, but not so much.
The farmhouse has a stoep that goes all the way around. Two big white walls curl outwards like open arms on both sides of the old stone steps, which have patches of cement. The stoep floor is dark red. Oxblood, says Gran. That bothers me, so I try to tread lightly. I wouldn’t want them to have to slaughter another ox because of me wearing out the paint job.
Two gables guard the house, and the whole stoep is covered with a roof. I hate this, because it keeps the sun out of the rooms, and I need sunbeams. The house is painted white. The walls are brown sandstone at the bottom, the same as we had in Kalk Bay, and there’s a row of stones round the sash windows, like a frame. But this stone feels colder, and the windows rattle in a wind that blasts them with fine sand.
The best game on the farm is finding lots of new places. I like to go exploring, but not far. I always stay away from the beehives and the blue gum trees, and if I don’t feel like going outside, I sit in the kitchen with Gesiena. She makes us tea with three sugars, which we have with doorstop-slices of white bread spread with butter and syrup. Sally, who’s now joined Pietertjie the sausage dog, begs at the door when she sees this, and then Gesiena chases her away.
I feel at home in Gesiena’s kitchen. She lets me eat little pieces of dough when she bakes jam squares, and she teaches me songs. “Little boy, little boy, where are you going?”, “Vanaand gaan die volkies koring sny” and “The more we are together, the happier we are”.
Our room is down the passage from Uncle André’s room, but Mom is between us and him. Sometimes he screams and moans in the night. It’s because he’s not all right in the head. Mom won’t talk about it, but she said war can do terrible things to men, and it’s a terrible way to lose your innocence. I’ve heard her say to Gran that Uncle André is obsessed with innocent things. It’s not healthy, she says. We see very little of him, because Gesiena takes his food to him in his room. She always goes in and comes straight out. He has his own bathroom, so he doesn’t even have to come into the passage much. Still, sometimes he likes to go wandering, and then somebody will bring him back, so then you might catch a glimpse of him. Gran always worries when he goes off like this. She says, “André, you know you shouldn’t be wandering around.” Once I saw her slap him. And then she always goes to her room moaning or sighing and blowing her nose.
They say Uncle André was a difficult child. There was always something wrong with him. He got all kinds of diseases that the doctors hadn’t even found names for yet, but he made it every time. He was good at athletics, but didn’t get very far because he missed a lot of his races due to a nervous stomach. He’d still be sitting in the loo when he’d hear the starter gun go off. He didn’t want to play rugby because the scrum made him feel sick, and getting tackled made him roll up into a ball, which ruined the game because it caused both teams and the referee to laugh like a pack of hyenas – until one day, when the laughing made Uncle André punch his captain. After that, they let him play tennis, but no more rugby.
Everyone was very proud of him when he got As for all his subjects in matric, even after spending half the year in bed. They said he’d do very well at university, but then the war got him first. He’d just turned eighteen when he went.
* * *
Because we are heathens, Grampa has to read us stories out of the children’s Bible every night. After our bath, Mom tucks us into bed, and then Grampa strolls in with the heavy book under his arm.
“Ai-ja,” he sighs as he slowly sits down on my bed or Beth’s. The springs creak, and the blanket feels warm and friendly, like when a cat or a dog curls up on your bed.
In the beginning there was Adam and Eve, but they wouldn’t listen, and then there was a flood and then some people built a tower. Beth and I both cried when a man called Abraham was going to kill his own little boy, but then an Angel of the Law saved Isaac and thus Provided a Ram, all Entangled by the Horns. Then the ram got it instead, and that really made Beth cry. I just frowned and thought what a damn pity that the ram had horns, otherwise the Law would have never gotten him.
The problem with Grampa’s