“He’s there!” Mom shrieks, and the car jerks forward like flicking an elastic band. “Hold on, Sanusha – the next turn I see, I’m going for it!”
Going for what?
I hold on to my car seat. Tyres squeaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllll. Mom’s screaming. I’m screaming.
The car goes round and round.
Then we hit something. Hard. Glass falls over Mom in a big shower. She’s covered in blood. Bright red like my jersey.
I’m not in my car seat. I’m lying near Mom, but I don’t know how I got here. My arm hurts – it’s hanging funny like a sleeve.
Mom’s eyes look strange, but she’s breathing so she’s not dead.
“Mom? Mom?”
She doesn’t say anything.
1, 2, 3, 4 …
“Mom?”
Shouts and some lights and some people running. They open up the door at the front.
… 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 …”
“You okay, little girl? We’ve called an ambulance.”
I point at Mom with my good hand. “She’s not dead,” I say. “But she was going for it.”
Thea: Not dying easily
The first time I was in hospital, Mother told me to “be polite” and “not say anything about how it happened”. So this is what actually happened. (I did not knock a kettle of boiling water over my legs as my dad told the nurses.)
They’d put Robbie in the ground that day. He didn’t get the bench he wanted and I was forced to wear a frilly dress I hated. I’d wanted to wear jeans and a T-shirt that said “Little Sister” because Robbie liked it. Used to like it.
“Don’t give me any uphill today of all days, young lady,” Mother said, ripping off my jeans so hard she scraped the skin of my bottom with her nails.
I held my arms across my chest, guarding the T-shirt, but Mother was much stronger. I thought she was going to hit me and that was the end of it because when I put my hands up to my face, I lost my grip. Mother took my scissors from the pencil box on my desk, and she made me watch as she sliced my favourite T-shirt into shreds. Piece by piece dropped into the dustbin as I howled.
“You’re not a little sister any more, Thea. Now wear the damn dress. And shut up.”
Dad came into the room, saw what was going on and walked out again like he always did.
Mother pushed a vest over my head while I stood still, wanting her to get away from me. The skirt of the dress was a horrible green, the colour of baby poop. It had white buttons all the way down the top to the waist, and white lace ruffles in circles all round the skirt. I looked like those crocheted dolls to cover toilet-paper rolls Nana had at the farm. But the farm was Robbie’s favourite place, so I tried to reassure myself by thinking about that.
After he got sick, Robbie used to sleep for most of the long drive to get there, his head on a fat pillow, his mouth half open. I’d watch the lights over Cape Town as we left home in the early hours of the morning, yellow puddles flicking and trees waving spooky hands in the wind. Further on, the mountains were like giant dinosaurs with spikes, their heads lifted in our direction. When the road straightened out, it rolled out to the horizon, like it went on forever. Finally, the car would slow, then bump over railroad tracks and along the fence I could see the heads of Gramps’s ostriches painted pink and orange by the dawn. Like they were welcoming us.
I’d shake Robbie awake, gently, gently. He wouldn’t want to miss this – he loved birds and he even kept a list. Like Dad, he knew how to recognise birds by the way they flew, or the shape of their tails, or the colour of their beaks. I couldn’t tell the difference, but I was quite happy to follow him around, gathering feathers for his jewelled collection box from India. He even had a vulture feather, which was almost as long as my arm, and certainly wider. Mother used to comment about the germs.
When he got even sicker, he couldn’t have that box in his room, and I wasn’t allowed to visit either, in case I brought in bugs from school. Robbie gave me the box for safekeeping, and I recognised this as the honour he’d intended.
One of our favourite things to do at the farm was to visit the ostriches, although we were never allowed near the adult birds without the grown-ups being near. Ostriches are very protective parents, sharing time at the nest as their eggs incubate; if you looked like you might come close, a kick from one of them could kill you. Of course, Uncle Ray and Gramps didn’t let the ostriches keep all their eggs. They had a special shed at just the right temperature, so that the babies had the best chance. Like Robbie, ostriches are sensitive and prone to catching all sorts of diseases. But they die easily, which is how they differed from Robbie, who had taken all this time before he had finally given up.
And today we were going to say goodbye for good.
The funeral was in Mother’s church, with big stained-glass windows reflecting coloured lighting on the pews. It was completely full, because Mother and Dad had a lot of friends and Robbie had been dying for years. These were the same people who, for the previous eight weeks as things were nearing a close and a nurse had moved in, had left our kitchen counter at home piled with dishes of food: lasagnes, boboties, stews and cottage pies; Tupperwares of cakes, biscuits, cupcakes and fudge; and pies, lemon meringue and apple cobbler in CorningWare dishes we’d have to return.
Robbie had been expected to lie on the couch and receive people. His skin was mustard and his body thin, but he had a huge belly from all the water his system couldn’t get rid of. Robbie’s hair, however, had grown back thick, curly and dark brown. Each visitor had been allotted five minutes.
The whole process had exhausted Robbie, and when I asked why he didn’t just tell Mother, he said, smiling, “Oh, Thea – it gives her something to do.”
I think perhaps I hated it more than he did – all those do-gooders stealing my last weeks with my brother.
As the service went on, I looked at Mother and Dad. They were holding hands tightly, a rare display of affection. Gramps had slid in next to me, and I felt the pressure of his suit leg next to my skirt – still a comfort. He touched me lightly on the hand, then looked ahead, trying to stop himself from crying.
Afterwards, grown-ups I didn’t know and some I did patted me on the head and glanced at me with big, sad eyes, but when they looked away they talked about ordinary things – how the weather was so perfect for winter, and have you heard that Sandra and Freddy finally got married, after all these years.
I was standing on my own when the reality began to hit me.
I’d got used to Robbie not playing outside with me, but even from his bed he used to look at me and say, “Hey, Thea? Why’re you looking so miserable? I’m not dead yet.” He read me stories and, when he was too sick, I’d sit next to him and tell him about school and Annie and his friend Tony, who was still the school marble champion – even though we knew for a fact he stuck Prestik on his shoes to steal marbles when people weren’t looking. “My idea,” Robbie once told me, and I thought he was super-clever.
When we were finally back home I tried to break away from the guests, even Annie, who’d come with her parents. When Gramps coaxed me to eat something, I shook my head and walked to the bottom of the garden, where the tree house was, shimmying up the trunk in my baby-poo dress. In the corner of the tree house, I traced my fingers over the initials Robbie had carved. The T was better formed than the R – he’d battled to get his pocketknife to do the curves as the blade kept snapping back in. This was our equivalent of Robbie’s bench – a view over the mountain and a quiet place to think. Through the window, I watched the people milling about. I knew that they’d all go home and forget about us. The food deliveries would stop and I would be stuck in this silent house with no Robbie, and just Mother and