‘Where you been?’ the old woman whined at her. ‘All day you been gone. Gone and left me with no one.’
‘I went down to the town.’
‘Ja. Every chance you get, you go off and leave me alone. Every chance. But you wait, dolla. Something will happen to me one day, or maybe’ – the eyes hooded, the whine changing to a sing-song – ‘maybe something will happen to you. Ja, dolla, and you won’t be here where I can help you.’
Sarie stiffened and a tiny muscle started ticking in her cheek. ‘All right. Like what?’ she asked.
But the old woman was looking down at her crushed black bodice and pulling it straight, all expression gone from her face.
‘Nothing, nothing. I was just thinking maybe … ,’ she said as if to herself, and jogged slowly backwards and forwards.
The girl shrugged, and turning to a small window drew a scarf from the pocket of her dress. Her fingers shook as she untied the coins knotted in one corner, and dropped them into a cracked vase standing on the sill.
‘I took some oysters down to the hotels. They paid me seventy cents,’ she said evenly.
‘Huh!’ The woman was bent on mischief, and struck again, her voice oily and bitter as cascara16. ‘What you want to buy with it? A wooden arm, maybe?’
And when there was no answer: ‘What’s it like, dolla – love with one arm?’
Sarie whirled. ‘You keep you filthy tongue off – ’
The old woman’s high, screamed laughter filled the room, flooding out Sarie’s words on a torrent of malice17 and triumph. She had struck well, and the girl stood glaring at her, too tense with anger to move: oh, to beat the withered face until the eyes mocked no more and the pink gums were still for ever!
Quite suddenly the laughter stopped. The old body thrust itself forward. The wrinkled, vulture neck stuck out. The chin gleamed wet with saliva. ‘Well, you’ll never see him again. ’Cause what he done they’ll hang him for, one arm ’n all! Ja, my dolla.’
Sarie heard the words, and wanted to tell the old woman she was lying, but the kitchen was all dim, and she couldn’t see the chin any longer, and … It was like standing up quickly after bending in the sun too long. You told yourself not to feel it, but you did. And the old sow wouldn’t stop shouting; it was hard to hear when she shouted like that. ‘ … smashed his head like a snoek, brain ’n – ’
‘Shut up!’
Sarie saw the old woman’s eyes pivot to the door; the flapping jaw go slack; the shrivelled body cringe back into the chair, small, quivering, weak. She spun round and threw herself into her father’s arms, burying her face against his shoulder.
‘Get out!’
She heard the chair creak, and a grunting, shuffling, animal sound that ended at the inner door. Then her father’s hand was on her head, smoothing down her hair, and he was crooning softly as he had done when she was a child.
‘My kindjie, my klein liefste, moenie treur nie18.’
Deep grasping sobs shook her body.
‘What was she saying? Pa, what’s happened to Jan?’
‘He’s in trouble, kleintjie – bad trouble.’
She was too late! Her brain hammered the thought: a man must be allowed to work life out for himself, and only when he needs her can a woman help. But when he was in need of her help, he had not wanted it, and now it was too late.
‘I must go to him,’ she said, pushing herself out of her father’s arms and trying to force him away from the door.
‘You can’t. He’s gone, run away.’
She lifted her face up to look at him, her cheeks shiny from the tears smudged against his khaki shirt. And as he put out a hand to comfort her, she moved away round the table, feeling the fight draining out of her arms and out of her body.
In the corner a coffee-pot gleamed dully against the black iron of the stove. She picked it up and held it tight. It was still warm. Holding it close to her, she opened the lid and closed it and opened it again while the tears dried on her cheeks.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘Jan – I should’ve told you on the boat – he clubbed Old Hendriks and stole his money.’ The words trailed out, empty and defeated. ‘He came back from Cape Town this morning, drunk when he got off the bus, they say. About lunchtime he went to Hendriks’ – two men were there from the hotels buying mullet, and they told the police Jan looked pretty drunk and – and wild. Well they left and then he … ’ His hand flipped in a helpless little gesture. ‘They’re getting a police dog from Cape Town tonight.’
‘And Hendriks is dead?’
‘Nee, nee! Did she say – ?’
The girl spun to face him. Warm coffee slopped out of the pot and down the front of her dress.
‘Then they won’t – Pa, they won’t hang him!’
And in her mind Sarie was shouting. O Jan, Jan I can help; I can help!
And she knew where to find him. Where he would hide when the brandy wore off, and he could see the size of what he had done. Up in the deep cleft in the cliff, screened by a tangle of shrub and vines, and overlooking the lagoon. A place they had played in: cooking mussels, exchanging first kisses – where he had asked her once, when he was just fourteen, to be his nooi, always. Where …
‘I must find him first,’ she said.
Beyond the headland, the grey road dropped to a causeway bridging the shallow, silted mouth of a blind river. Open at high tide, it lapped back into the mountains, with banks rising steep and wooded from broken shores to twin lines of sheer cliff.
When Sarie reached it, the tide had fallen back with the setting sun, and the water lay quiet and dark as treacle. Leaving the road and turning her back to the sea, she moved swiftly from one rock to another; surefooted as a cat; hardly testing a step before shifting her weight for the next. And as she moved, a legion of crabs scuttled away ahead.
Where the broken rock ended, she jumped down to a thin strip of sand and crossed it to a high shelf that jutted out into the water. Reaching up, she explored the slippery face of the rock, feeling for the finger grips they had used as children. Then she stepped on to a narrow ledge and, carefully, moving a hand, a foot, worked her way to the corner and edged past it. There the ledge dipped into the water and ended.
Taking all her weight on her fingertips, she stretched out her left leg and felt beneath the surface for the narrow crack that cut back into the rock.
When she found it, she transferred her balance, stepped up to a higher foothold, pulled herself on to the top of the shelf, and walked along it towards the slope and the deeper shadow of the trees.
Beneath them the dark was close and forbidding, and she climbed fast, digging her toes into the damp loam, and feeling ahead for something to hold, to pull herself up on – roots, tufts of grass, branches – until the cover broke, and she could see the cliff face towering black against the lighter sky.
The blood was pounding in her temples, and the scratches covering her arms and legs were alight with pain. But she stopped only long enough to draw breath and take her bearings. Looking across at the silhouette of the opposite bank, and then down to the curve of the breakers at the mouth of the lagoon, she turned right and stumbled on.
A sudden, slight movement in the bushes ahead stopped her. Something sensed rather than seen. Breath frozen, she pressed herself against the face of the cliff.