She stretches her arms up, slowly, testing as it were their materiality, their flexibility, then rises to one knee, placing a foot on the ground. Nothing can hold us back now, she declares. Think of us as ready-mades, and that is an advantage not to be sniffed at. So there you are: a shoulder to the writing wheel, a pen filled with black ink, and Bob’s your uncle.
Unbelievable. Where does the woman, barely risen from dust and mildew, get her confidence? Clearly, she is one to be watched, one not past elbowing the others out of the way and taking over. If only she knew that I could house them in little more than another pondok – of another order, yes, but the house of fiction within my means, with its rusted tin roof, may be no less leaky.
The older man, the pale, slight poet rocking to and fro, should know better, should know that having a ready-made subject does not guarantee a work.
If they are my responsibility, I have no idea how to proceed. If I stamp my feet in frustration, insist that I will not be bullied by phantoms, it is also the case that my idyll of battling with garden slugs and nursing tulips slain by vernal gusts grows dimmer by the second. Foolish, foolish me. I should have crept away, not have peeped, listened in, or spoken. Before I can say humpty-dumpty I find myself tied to this desk, a Procrustean bed, with no more than a bag of sweets for comfort. Beside me a mound of wrappers grows. No question of kidding myself that an epiphany will rise out of the crackle of cellophane and foil; rather, an unsightly crop of spots has appeared across my forehead. Sweet Jesus, am I to be propelled backwards, awkward and pimply, into adolescence? Whilst these my subjects bully and bluster their way out of history?
Let me start with the poet in the corner, muttering about poppies and charms, he of the eternally boyish looks and slight frame, a pair of crutches tucked neatly under his arm as he rises to his knees. Pure trouble, even as he averts his eyes in modesty, so that I push back my chair and grope for the stash of fortifying chocolate sweeties in the drawer.
I favour the dark variety, at least seventy per cent cocoa solids, ones filled with keen, candied ginger, sharp enough to kick-start things. It is also, if not mainly, for the lovely silver and gold foil wrappings – the luxurious treasures of a child of the bundu – that I buy them at all. Perhaps I ought to drop the actual sweet straight into the bin, given that I eat only out of the habit of husbanding resources, of waste-not-want-not frugality. But as far as achievements go, that would not be so staggering, so why deprive myself? It is the wrapper that brings lasting joy and makes the mouth water. The extra, outer cover of cellophane is for delaying gratification; for holding up to the light, for seeing the world momentarily through pink, blue or green before scrunching it up. Then the quarry: silver or gold foil, metallic paper I hold down with the left thumb, firmly rub with the right index finger until the rectangle is returned to an original, pristine state. Ta-dah! Voilà! Ecco! There! Now the perfectly smooth foil can be folded meticulously into a solid strip, a band to be wrapped around my finger like a wedding ring. When I tire of touching of smoothing of tightening of stroking, the band drops on to my desk where it leisurely lets go, uncoils somewhat, but holds on to the memory of having once been a perfect circle. There! The rings settle into the intimacy of a growing pile on my left, may even hook into each other. Call it procrastination, but it does no harm; in my book this counts as an achievement, could be the precursor to who knows what.
I ignore the hm-hm of Mary clearing her throat, her scornful hiss of Sugar!, ignore the impatient shuffles and mutters of the others. Being a dab hand at foil rings is of no interest to them. Better than sitting on my hands, I reckon, for it is a start of sorts. Look, I am at my desk, once more like the child learning to form her letters, filling her page with wobbly ABCS. And here is material proof of my presence: strips of curved foil each bearing the shape of a band, a ring, something accomplished with my hands. Perhaps I should start by filling a page with his name, the poet’s, which would be to name the project. Then wait for the letters to stir, in the manner of the mound on my desk, coils of silver foil easing their shoulders, unfurling their sugary history.
The woman stirs. My history is one of salt, she hisses; as for sugar plantations … I wave her into silence with new, gingered strength, but she leans forward, elbow comfortably on her raised knee. Just start at the beginning, she pleads, no need for anything fancy. Our stories are connected, so I’ll fill in the gaps.
A history, then, of our man the poet, who binds together these phantom creatures and in whose interest they have gathered here. ‘His story’, as we feminists of the 1970s called it, scorning etymology, dismissing the history of the word, and not caring about being thought ignorant of Latin. Years before that, when the nineteenth century was new, our young poet, the punctilious scholar busily copying documents in Edinburgh’s Old General Register House, would have bristled with irritation at such sloppy ways, but och see, if he can’t mellow over the centuries what would be the point of living on and on and on? Even if it is only in what he still fondly thinks of as the colony, whereas in his beloved Scotland he has long since been forgotten. (In truth, he never made much of a mark even when he lived there; or rather, such mark as he had made in Blackwood’s’ treacherous literary circles is best forgotten.) His story it may be, but all will be thrown up in the air as others throw in their tuppenny’s worth, as events arrive in who knows which way, out of order, not unlike my shiny sweet wrappers hooking up higgledy-piggledy with others, and how should I presume the wherewithal to straighten things out?
Strange, thinking of him now as my subject. (How a queen must clutch her throat and shudder at the thought of subjects, even as she goes on to tilt her head, and wave, and pat her pearls and smile graciously, regally, at those very entities.) Be gracious, I upbraid myself, sans pearls. So I salute my subject, the poet with weak lungs, and tilt my head at the keyboard. Now, to lunge into his story, the story of a dead white man. Of which there are so very many, quite enough really, and there’s the rub, but Mary, ever the meddler, interrupts in a voice grown stronger that that can be dealt with later; indeed, that the man would agree to deal with the problem himself. He wants out as much as I do, she says confidently. Then louder, proudly: He is, has always been, the Father of South African poetry.
I note the twitch as he raises his head, holds it as if listening for an air to creep upon the waters of time. And I have to lean in to hear as he rasps, But … not … known … in Scotland.
Oh yes, unmistakably the voice of one who has never wanted for ambition, who became even more fired up once he came to believe in a brave new world free of slavery. No need to fret, Mary soothes, addressing the man, helping him up. We’re here for you. Over her shoulder she says, Together we’ll turn the story into a devil-may-care whistling of women, and she winks at me. Which I find only mildly encouraging.
History/His story: anachronistic it may be, and now mellowed, but all the same, the poet senses a way out in the insertion of that superfluous ‘s’ in hisstory. He is not ungrateful. Mary and the young man have kindly, heroically taken on the project of restoring him to the wider world, by which he means Great Britain, but where after all would they have been without him? Indebted, they are his, have in a sense, in their different ways, been made by him, and it is his story, one of which he has every reason to be proud, so there must be a way of wading boldly through the centuries to arrive at it, shape it and present it to the world.
A memorable start it was too. No schoolboy could forget the auspicious year of his birth. Even there on the Scottish Borders, on the banks of the Tweed, all the way across the Cheviots, the tenor of his life was set by the whiff of liberty, equality, fraternity that drifted over from Europe, settling like a fine mist around his cradle. Seventeen eighty-nine, the year of revolution, a year in which to foresee the end of slavery and fine-tune the limited enlightenment of his land, usher it into the bright light of liberty for all. History, his story, made, then unmade and now to be remade, and he sees that in this woman’s reluctant hands it will become inseparable from theirs, the stories of the other ghostly figures in whose making he had had a hand; and thus, with these allies by his side, a story to be packaged anew, cast in yet another light.
Inseparable for sure, Mary interjects in a voice