She gets up to rescue a bee that is drowning in the fishpond, places it safely into a flower and turns back to me. “Psychopaths, drug addicts, jailbirds, layabouts and now we have the homosexual, gambling boilermaker from Germany. My children have exposed me to every modern aberration.”
“Well, at least there’s Ross …” I say.
Ross is the youngest, the one apparently given to my parents to provide sanity and some relief. He has done his honours degrees in both English and Philosophy, completed a law degree at Oxford College, graduating Cum Laude. Now he is back in Johannesburg, doing a year of law so he can practise as a lawyer here.
So. Ross.
Okay. He scuba dives with ragged-tooth sharks, has too many friends, will stay awake till 5am working and go about bleary-eyed, but apart from these small considerations Ross’ behaviour is hard to fault. He was born with golden hair, and has been golden ever since. We, his older siblings, are all waiting for him to follow in our footsteps and become revolutionaries, badass, beret-wearing, cigar-smoking, rule-breaking banditos. But for the moment, Ross is sane.
My mother shakes her head. “I feel exhausted from all of it!”
“Relax,” I say.
We sit together, staring at the fish as they cruise under thick green water, their long tails like scarves in a temperate breeze. The moon has risen, a small sliver still in earth’s great shadow.
“Anyway, let’s not think about any of it,” she sighs, still staring into the water. “It’s time to eat.”
We go inside into the fragrant candlelight; sit opposite one another at the sumptuous table decorated with my grandmother’s Russian silver. We bless the wine, the homemade bread, we toast to all the absent ones – Evan, Lexi and Ross – and then we eat.
CHAPTER 3
Tentative Grasp
Evan is released from hospital and we drive him slowly home.
He lies on the back seat of the car, vulnerable as a newborn. I keep turning around to check on his slim form, which shows very few signs of life. I have delayed my return to America. I cannot leave my mother alone with this. I should be concentrating on the script I am writing, using the ancient principles of love as explored in the Kama Sutra. I am co-writing with Mira Nair, an acclaimed and multi-award-winning director, considered an über talent, every writer’s dream. But my work recedes deeper into the void. All that matters is keeping my brother on this side of the divide, where we blaze briefly in form, recognisable, understandable, before we vanish into the formless, unreachable, beyond that final border.
We park the car in the driveway of the house called New Place. New Place was the name of William Shakespeare’s house. It is the name of ours too, because my father was a Shakespeare scholar. The Bard saved my father from a savage childhood. His entire family, all five, lived in one room on a railway siding in Arlington, a remote part of the country. They barely existed on the meagre money my grandfather brought in from selling livestock. When he shattered his legs – really badly – my father, at eight years old, took over the business, keeping the books, and bringing in the money to keep the family going. He dreamed about escaping that life, and each afternoon, when the train to Johannesburg pulled into their siding, he would jump aboard and ride that train out of the station, only to leap off before the train went whistling around the bend. He would stand watching, promising himself: one day my train will come in. He eventually hopped on the train and stayed on it, all the way to Johannesburg. He was sixteen, considered a genius, but with not one cent to his name. He became a journalist by day, and studied by night, and at twenty-one he had enough money to buy Damelin, which was an old college in the bad part of downtown Joburg. He revolutionised education in the country, becoming an expert on teenage rebellion and reinvented his life. He returned to Arlington once when his mother died young from stomach cancer; his father was inexplicably found dead soon after. He would not talk about his childhood; it was too painful. I do know that reading Shakespeare saved him. He continued this into his adulthood. Rereading Romeo and Juliet for the twentieth time was a way to spend a quiet evening, and when he bought our place, he decided to call it New Place, the name of Shakespeare’s home in Stratford-on-Avon. There will always be something new, he said. We park the car in the driveway that flanks the long white house. Evan’s illness is new now.
The days are desperate and we cannot relax. Every half-hour I check to see that Evan is still breathing, still alive, as he lies in one of the bedrooms we shared as children. His dark brown hair falls out, leaving itself in wavy traces across the pillow. When he walks, he needs propping up, is insubstantial, a scarecrow left out in a field in the rain. When he sleeps his tentative grasp on life makes his sleep too still, and mine too fitful. The night is long and the morning terrifying, at least until I have confirmed that he has made it through. It’s only when I see the rise and fall of breath that I am able to move through the quiet house and into the piano room, so called because it houses my grandmother’s upright piano, which Evan plays. I open the sliding door. The grass is cold and wet but I have to walk barefoot across this lawn, thick from summer rain. I follow the brick pathway that leads between this park of trees, once a deep donga.
My mother had her first three pregnancies in short succession. Lexi, Evan and I grew up in a tangle, like creepers around one another, a little like the wild land my mother was slowly, with the help of some gardeners, trying to tame. It took the rubble of a whole house to fill the donga. We weren’t afraid of the spiders that were displaced; we were accustomed to the snakes, the spitting black cobras, and we sometimes found them coiled up like black hosepipes in amongst the trees. I trailed one along the brick path, holding fast to the tail before Lexon, the gardener, saved me from being bitten.
And here I am now, an adult, sitting where the donga used to be, now a green haven inhabited by birds. Leaves pattern against sky, half-white up there, addled with clouds after last night’s rain. Tiny insects catch the light to shine silver, otherwise invisible all day. Green knits itself into green. I need a hundred crayons to find the names of all these greens.
My mother calling brings me back into the present. She comes to find me.
“I’ve just heard from the doctor. Evan was wrongly diagnosed! There never was any galloping lymphoma is what he’s just told me.”
We walk around the lawn, my mother exclaiming. She uses fuck as a noun, a verb, an adjective.
Bloody-fucking moron doctor.
I want to fuck him up.
The pathetic little fuck!
It punctuates every sentence:
We never needed any bloody-fucking chemotherapy in the first place.
I’m so furious; I could tear him bloody-fucking apart!
She walks between the fig and the pepper tree, swearing and trying to assimilate this information.
“We need to know exactly what is going on!” I say. Not using fuck.
So we take Evan back to the hospital. We need concrete proof that he does not have lymphoma. He is tested for all and sundry, and the result comes back positive for tuberculosis only, a common ailment brought on by activated AIDS. But TB is easy to manage. It means a few pills. This is all good news. Well. Kind of.
Because doctors have nearly killed him with their drugs, their drips, their probes and poisonous drops, their chemotherapy bags, my mother and I seek out alternative methods. I find a Russian healer. I have never consulted healers before but I am determined to keep Evan alive.
The healer lives near the zoo with his wife. I sit like a stone in the cool, semi-dark room, waiting as Vadim, this Russian miracle worker who says he can cure HIV, examines my brother. A clock ticks, punctuating an otherwise consuming silence. Evan lies in a room off left, behind a