KIRSTEN MILLER
The
Hum
of the
Sun
Kwela Books
1.
Within dreams we awaken, and in our waking we dream. Zuko dreamed of singing, but when he opened his mouth there was no sound. He moved his lips. He made shapes that might have formed words, but the utterances that emerged were soft, too guttural, and more like a warble from the throat of a thrush than any song an eight-year-old boy might sing.
Because his mouth wouldn’t move in the way he wanted it to, he took the plate at his elbow and tipped it onto the cold stone floor. The crash sounded, a satisfying smash. A sound that seemed to say, I am here, I am in the world, I have something to express, something that might be a song, if only I could sing.
His capable sounds were reduced to this: the plate, the crash. Enough to summon his mother, Yanela, and bring her running in a way his voice never could.
Yanela hesitated in the doorway as though she might change her mind about the broken crockery and the breakfast and the boy who sat at the table with the voice that wouldn’t work. A beam of sun lay on Zuko’s arm like a blanket. The warmth emitted a frequency like a sound. His lips pressed together: “Mmmm.”
“Zuko.”
If it were possible to utter her name too, he would. Mmmama. Mama. How many times had he tried? How many times had she held his face inches away from her own, her lips softly expropriating that sound, urging him to repeat it? Mmma-Mma. Ma. Ma. Eight years already. He was never more certain than now of his own inadequacies. The biggest yet: his inability to call his own mother by the name that sealed their bond.
“Zuko!” Ash appeared at the door, summoned by the splintering sound. “Shit,” he said.
“Don’t use that language in front of your brother,” Yanela said. “Here, help me to clean it up.”
“He should do it. He broke the plate.”
“He doesn’t have any shoes on. Please, just get the dustpan.”
Zuko wanted to say that he was barefoot because his shoes hurt him. His feet had grown and the old brown canvas pushed too hard on his toes. But they didn’t ask him. And even if they had, he wouldn’t have known the words, or how to say them in any kind of answer. Instead, he put his fingers into the thick air, and they wavered like a conversation in the light of the dusty sun.
Later, he lay on his mother’s bed beside his brother, clutching the yellow plastic seahorse he’d picked up on the road outside the house. It was a cheap toy that might have fallen out of a child’s bucket on the way home from the beach. A small and insignificant cartoon creature – so incidental. An accompaniment to a full day of laughter and conversation and the gentle teasing of a family enjoying a picnic together in the afternoon sun after exploring rock pools. The rounded yellow plastic lay cocooned in the cage of Zuko’s fingers. In convoluted sounds, Zuko told the seahorse the things on his mind. The seahorse stared back at him, eyes wide, smiling without judgement or any attempt to unravel the boy’s sounds. The creature didn’t move or try to get away. Its surprised eyes stared, constant and wide. This thing is mine, Zuko thought. He studied the shape of the seahorse, the focused black pupils and the constant expression. It listened to him always, silent and accepting. Zuko clung to the animal and its plastic consistency, believing that nothing would ever change.
2.
This is what Ash remembered. The whitewash of the cold wall. Summer nights too hot to sleep. Insects crawling the breadth of the pillow. The noises that came when the stranger stayed over. Her sighs, his groans.
From the shadowed space on the other side of the wall, Ash thought that they were only exercising, late at night. He’d seen older boys on the mapped-out field beyond the settlement of river houses. Young men who worked their bodies, shaping their torsos into the kind of flesh that youth bestowed and took for granted. The goal posts were imagined, drawn onto the ground with chalky paint that washed away in the summer rains. The way they pushed themselves up from the stubbed grass with bulked muscle arms, their legs prostrate at a forty-five-degree angle, dark skin glistening, eyes focused and hard. When he was eight, Ash longed to be like them, sweating and pushing and striving towards a goal, each exercise session a feat of physical perfection. At night, he lay wide-eyed in the dark, listening to his mother and this stranger from the city. He mapped their movements in his mind as he imagined how they perfected their push-ups, turning over with the bedsprings, marking time like a metronome. He didn’t know that to each other, their bodies were already perfect. He didn’t know that the strides they made towards a greater fitness were incidental. In the summer weeks that year, when he swam for hours in the brackish river water and baked like a fish on the dry bank, the stranger and his mother had made each other happy. They had, in addition and inadvertently, also made his brother, Zuko.
After Zuko was born, the stranger stayed around more often. They played together like a family beside the river with a ball the stranger had brought for the smallest boy. At first, when the child began to walk, the stranger coaxed Zuko to kick the ball. Zuko tried. Gradually, though, he seemed to lose interest. Gliding white clouds distracted him too often. He frequently looked away from the ball at a passing bird, or a shadow that hovered like an egret across the lawn.
“What do I call him, Ma?” Ash asked Yanela.
“Who?”
“The man who comes here.”
“Call him what you like.”
Ash had thought she might insist on him calling the stranger “Baba” or “Pa”. He looked at his mother as she hung washing in the front of the house. His sister, Honey, played inside with a rag doll, and Zuko skirted between the hanging sheets at their mother’s feet.
The man was an outsider in their lives; any word that meant “father” felt too familiar.
“What do you call him?” he asked.
His mother took a peg from her mouth and used it to secure a small T-shirt in the wind. “Dom. Or Dominic. I like the whole of his name.”
“What does he call you?”
She cast him a fleeting glance. “Yanela,” she said. “Sometimes other things as well.”
“If he was a real father he’d be here all the time. He’d live with us.”
“That’s not true. Lots of real fathers don’t live with their children.”
“Did your father live with you?”
“Yes. I wish you’d known him, Ash.”
“Why?”
“Because I loved him very much.”
“What happened to him?”
“A car hit him one night, on the main road. After that I didn’t have a real father any more. And since then, there has always been something missing.” She picked up the empty washing basket and took it inside. Zuko followed silently on small bandy strides behind her.
In the kitchen, Ash helped her stack the dishes from the rack onto the shelf. “What are we, Ma?” he asked her.
“What do you mean?”
“What kind of people are we? Are we brown people? Or black people?”
“Look at your own skin, Ash,” she told him. “And decide for yourself.”
“I’m darker than Zuko,” he said. “And darker than Honey. But we speak everybody’s languages.”
“We’re everything, Ash,” she told him. “We’ve got different people in us. Our ancestors came from both sides of the sea. But you were born here. I was born here. Your grandfather was born on this farm when it was a working farm. He had calloused hands from working. We’re African, Ash. Don’t let anyone tell you