Granny Bobbeh tries to comfort me, but she can’t fill the space Ma and Pa left behind when they drove away. She fusses and clucks, presses me to her heart, whispers in my ear. She pulls me onto her lap and folds me against her smell of apples. She croons, promises Ma and Pa will come back soon. I don’t believe her. Days and nights and more days pass.
Sometimes Aunty Anita gets a headache. She lies in a dark room all day, her eyes closed tight against the pain.
‘It’s just a headache,’ she says. ‘It’s just a bad headache.’
No one knows, but inside her head something grows and grows and, when she dies – too young, too soon – she leaves my cousins all alone, and Granny Bobbeh has to be their mother.
I want Ma. Quietly I open the closed bedroom door.
‘Ma?’ I whisper. ‘Ma? Where are you, Ma?’
In the dusty light filtering through from the passage, red and green jewels gleam across the straps of my aunt’s high-heeled cork sandals lying abandoned on the floor. I’ve never seen such gorgeous shoes, the way the coloured stones glow and wink.
Ma’s nowhere to be found. I cry all night. Mope all day. Refuse to eat.
‘I want my Ma!’ I wail.
Granny Bobbeh folds me in her arms. ‘Soon …’ she promises.
I whimper against her sweet smell. I don’t believe her.
Two weeks later, Pa and Ma with my baby sister on her lap come back to fetch me in the Studebaker.
I’m afraid they’ll leave me again.
I refuse to speak for half of a long year and I start to build walls within walls; bulwarks against loss and abandonment. Deep, wide ditches to hide in.
Birthday Party in the Drakensberg
‘It’ll be your birthday soon …’ Ma closes the oven door. The hot, sugary smell of biscuits drifts into the kitchen. ‘Pa and I think it would be lovely to go away on holiday before you start school next year.’
‘Is she also going to come with us?’
Ma shakes her head.
‘Your sister’s going to stay with Granny and Grandpa MJ again, so it’ll be just the three of us. We’ll have a lovely time climbing in the mountains. You can learn to ride a horse there – wouldn’t you like that?’
Our bedroom in the mountains is in a round hut. Ma says it’s called a rondavel. Just the three of us, like it used to be. The sun shines on my head. The tops of the mountains look like a dragon’s teeth. That’s how they got their name, the ‘Dragon Mountains’. Pa says they’re much higher than the Grootberg on Grandpa and Uncle Leslie’s farm.
I can hear the wind at night, twisting through the high, stony peaks. The room smells sweet from the grass on the roof. Ma says it’s called ‘thatch’. Geckos lie motionless against the white-washed walls. In the day, the sky is bright. The sun shines on the rocks, bounces off the windows of the hotel and the little, round huts clustered around it. Pa wears shorts and sandals, smokes his pipe on the steps outside. Sometimes he just likes to hold it in his hand, the cold bowl cupped in his big palm. Ma wears frilly sundresses with big pockets and white sandals with platforms and straps. At night she wears a dress of glittery silver, like a spider’s silk. She looks like a fairy queen. She tucks me into bed and they go to the hotel to dance. Anna makes our beds in the rondavel in the mornings. At night, she sits wrapped in a blanket on the cement step outside the door, promising to keep me safe.
In the mornings, they take me to the stables. I’m learning to ride on Bessie. ‘She’s very patient with children and beginners,’ says the groom, Johannes. ‘No, madam, sir – your little girl will be fine – we’ll look after her!’
Bessie’s coat is brown. She shines like Pa’s shoes after Isak’s polished them. She’s got long bristles on the sides of her pink nose. Her mane is black; it looks soft but it isn’t, not really. When she walks, the saddle on her back creaks. I like the sound; I think it’s talking to us. I go for long walks on Bessie. Johannes holds the reins. We plod through the high grass under thorn trees, along the paths around the rondavels and the hotel, my head nodding and bobbing along with Bessie’s, the saddle creaking, the long blade of grass in Johannes’s mouth getting shorter and shorter. Ma and Pa are walking in the mountains.
Ma buys me a necklace of little red and white daisies. It’s made of tiny beads. Each daisy has a small yellow bead in its centre. Each one is perfect. She fastens it around my neck.
‘It’s so beautiful, Ma – I’m never going to take it off!’
My fingers keep reaching, searching for it.
Before we left home, Ma baked and iced my birthday cake. She put it in a big cake tin and, when we arrived at the rondavel, she slid it under Pa’s bed to keep it safe. The legs of the iron bedsteads stand flat on the cement floor. Marta wouldn’t like that.
‘Can’t I just have a little look, Ma? Just a quick, little one, then you can close the tin and I won’t look again?’
‘No, you can’t. I want it to be a surprise for you on your birthday – promise me you won’t open the tin?’
‘But won’t the tokoloshe steal it, Ma?’
‘Don’t talk rubbish, there’s no such thing as a tokoloshe,’ Ma says. ‘Your birthday cake is going to be a surprise. Don’t touch that cake tin until I say you can!’
I spend hours dreaming about my fifth birthday cake. I’ve had a Humpty-Dumpty cake and a frog-fishing-on-a-green-cake, with a hole in the middle for a pond. I’ve had a tortoise cake, and a birthday cake with two fat red mushroom candles in the middle. I can’t wait to see what this one will look like.
Ma says I’m too young to walk around alone. She’s afraid I’ll get lost.
‘In case we’re not back in time for lunch,’ Ma says to the head groom at the stables, ‘would you send someone to walk Jennifer back to our rondavel after her riding lesson?’
I’ve made friends with all the children at the stables. They shout and jump up and down – everyone wants to walk back with me.
Their faces are dusty. Some of them have little white streams of dried snot under their noses and sleepy-sand in the corners of their eyes. Their teeth are square and white. Knots of grass and small twigs are stuck in their hair like tiny tinktinkie nests, and their clothes are all the same colour – dirty-dark and greasy and trailing a thick, unrestrained smell of smoke, of feet and earth and wildness behind them. The girls touch my long hair, tie and untie the bows of my ribbons. Stroke the small tortoises on my shirt. Their fingers leave streaks of dirt. I don’t care – they’re my friends.
We speak Afrikaans. When I forget, they look at each other, their faces blank. They shake their heads.
‘Eh-eh. Praat Afrikaans, kleinmies!’
Ma says I must speak Afrikaans all the time so that I’ll be ready for school next year. Marta and Isak always talk to me in Afrikaans – it’s easy; I know how it sounds.
I’m going to offer my visitors tea and cake like Ma does.
‘Who wants cake?’ I shout. ‘My birthday cake’s in a big tin under my Pa’s bed.’
My friends are clapping and laughing, crowding around the open door. They won’t come inside.
‘No, you must come in! Wait – I’m just going to fetch the tin …’
I slide under Pa’s bed. Balls of fluff, dry leaves and grass have banked up in the dark corners. The cake tin left a path in the dust when Ma pushed it against the far wall. I remember Marta’s warning just in time:
‘You must be careful when you get under the bed,