Devin held her head to the side when she heard his voice, and I thought I heard a quick intake of breath, like a kind of gasp. The door behind her remained shut.
‘What?’ she said, the word clipped, defensive, afraid.
My father hesitated; I saw the tremor in his indrawn breath. Then he exhaled, his face settled on a certainty. ‘Your sister and I are going for a walk,’ he said. ‘Tell your mother we won’t be too long.’ He held out his hand towards me. I sidled over to him and took it. I knew which side of the family I belonged. ‘We’ll see you later. Come on, Monkey. Let’s go.’
Devin said nothing. She stared at us both, with a look on her face that scared me. She was a frightened deer, that door behind her now closed. She was caught, with nowhere to run.
Samuel pulled me with him and we left her there, that ghost, standing alone and adrift outside that room, that hole at the bottom of the stairs.
As the front door clicked softly shut, I jumped and giggled and ran ahead to the end of the property and the big gate. He kept his steady pace and he met me there; we left the grounds and he took my hand and our feet made a rhythm on the concrete pavement. Above us the sky leaned in too close, dense and grey and threatening. I could feel the specks of first rain on my bare face and I shivered and held my father’s hand more tightly. He pulled me close and walked with his arm around my shoulders to keep us both from the cold. The mountain was a dark charcoal above us, in one of its moods and it had sent down the wind to tell us so. I breathed the cool crisp air, I breathed in the smell of him.
We walked until we found the tall building that was a hotel countless storeys high and the base of it was dark and low and contained a movie house, three cinemas with three different films to choose from.
We chose a western and Samuel bought us popcorn and a roll of wine gums from the cinema’s sweet counter. I clung to his jacket as we went into the dark cinema; the movie had already started and I trusted him to be my eyes and to find our way and our seats in the dark. I didn’t understand the plot of the film and Samuel ate most of the popcorn, but I sucked on the wine gums, trying to make out the green ones in the dark to discard them on the floor, and I watched Clint Eastwood scowl and smoke and screw up his eyes against the glare of the desert sun. Samuel laughed in places where I did not understand what was funny, but I laughed with him anyway. He was quiet, with his eyes glued forward and sometimes he exclaimed or jabbed me in the ribs and grinned down. I nodded in bewildered agreement each time. It was warm in there. I could smell the thick, cheap perfume on a woman in the row behind us. I chewed on the salty husks and unpopped seeds from the bottom of the popcorn box when the sweets were finished. Halfway through I was thirsty and needed the toilet, but I jigged my knee and held on tight and waited until the film was over and the lights came on before I said anything to Samuel.
He waited for me in the foyer outside the toilets. From the way he was leaning with his leg up and his foot against the wall I thought in that moment that he really imagined himself to be a cowboy.
Outside the rain sleeted down in soft white sheets, and the mountain and the rest of the city was obscured by a cold white mist.
‘We’re not going home just yet,’ Samuel said as he stood on the steps and considered the downpour.
‘Mom could fetch us.’ I said. ‘There’s a payphone in the movie house.’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Samuel said. ‘Let’s go and have some coffee until the weather clears up.’
We went back into the base of the hotel and took the lift and found a lounge with white-covered chairs around tables layered with cloth. We sat and Samuel ordered two cups of coffee and two doughnuts with white glazed icing.
‘I don’t drink coffee,’ I hissed at him when the back of the tall impeccable waiter was turned. My feet didn’t touch the floor on those white chairs.
‘First time for everything,’ he said, and winked at me.
I didn’t like the bitter taste, the sourness that remained on my tongue when the coffee passed down my throat. Samuel spooned two heaps of sugar into his and drank it down without pausing between mouthfuls. We were both more cautious with the doughnuts. They looked like something from the glossy pages of a recipe book and we were too scared to eat them. I touched the top of one, and licked at the icing on the tip of my finger. Samuel pushed his plate over to me. ‘You have mine,’ he said.
‘It’ll take me ages to eat both.’
‘Good.’ He leaned forward, laced his fingers together, looked at me then shifted his eyes to the side. ‘Listen, Monkey. I need to go and do something. I think it could be good for us. I’m feeling good today. Lucky, you know?’
I felt my nose wrinkle as my mouth puckered. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
‘Stay here. Don’t go anywhere until I come and fetch you again. You’ve got something to eat and here—’ he fished into the pockets of his jeans and pulled out a two rand note. He placed it flat on the table and pushed it across at me. ‘… buy yourself something to drink. Coke, or a juice. Something you like. You don’t have to drink that coffee.’
I looked at the money. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’d take you with me but they don’t allow kids. I won’t be long, Monkey. Just wait for me. I’ll fetch you soon, I promise.’ He stood. He didn’t take his eyes from me. He wanted my permission, but I was only a child and I couldn’t give him that. And he didn’t ask for my blessing or for me to wish him luck. I watched his back as he left the room.
I sipped the coffee slowly until it was cold, and stared at the doughnuts on the plate in front of me. I didn’t know if anyone was watching me, if anybody wondered what a small kid could be doing in a hotel guest lounge with two doughnuts all by herself, but I didn’t look up to find out. The waiter walked past me twice and I shrunk into the chair, hoping to become invisible, or that he hadn’t noticed the time slipping by. Hotel guests came and left, old ladies with blueish hair who smelled of powdery flowers and something else stale and musty beneath. Businessmen in suits who lingered over newspapers made me think of Uncle Marshall, and then of Devin at the bottom of the stairs. I blinked, twice, to push the thoughts away.
I saw the rain stop outside the window, the white mist cleared and the world beyond was washed clean. It was still wet out, but at least we could walk home. The light faded. Everything took on a dull touch of blue.
I thought of my mother, waiting at home. I wondered if she’d woken up yet from her afternoon sleep, if she wondered where we were or when we were getting back. I watched the second hand of the round clock ticking on the wall, and I watched the waiters watching that clock too, counting the minutes before the hands found five-thirty. I wondered if they went straight from serving tea and coffee and cake to serving supper, without a break.
There were no other children in the room. My feet were crossed and my hands fidgeted, unsure what to do with themselves. I took a doughnut off the plate and my teeth sunk deep into the sweet doughy bread. I chewed and felt the crumbs of icing that remained on my lips. I waited. I waited for Samuel.
The clock on the wall said a quarter to six. The waiters were at the windows, rolling down the blinds, eliminating the remains of the day from the hotel. There was nobody left in that neatened room but me, the freshly arranged furniture, and the staff. The two rand note was still on the table and I wondered if it was too late to buy a Coke. The second doughnut waited on the plate along with me, untouched.
A hand fell onto my shoulder, big and bony and a shade lighter than my father’s. I looked up. The man had sandy hair and a big nose and he was dressed in a khaki suit.
‘Are you going to sit here alone all night?’
I shrugged. I didn’t know what to do. I bit my lip and tasted the blood, but it was better than the sound of my own tears.
‘Don’t be nervous,’ he said, ‘I don’t bite. But you can’t stay here. We’re packing up now, getting the room ready for dinner. Do you know where your dad went?’
I shook my he
ad.
‘That was your dad you were with earlier, wasn’t it?’
I nodded. I didn’t know where my words had gone. I wanted to speak, but it felt like I didn’t know how and my thoughts wouldn’t come together. I looked at the money on the table and wondered if I dare take it back. It was Samuel’s money after all. The waiter who had first served our coffee and doughnuts came over and removed the plate with the remaining doughnut from the table. He dusted the crumbs with his other hand and eyed the two rand note.
‘Rick, when you’re done there take this kid into the foyer; let her wait there for the guy, wherever he’s gone.’
I stood up. I didn’t want to go with any stranger, but I didn’t want to stay in that room alone either. I picked up the money and I squeezed it in my hand, and walked towards the door.
‘Is that a boy or a girl?’ I heard the waiter say.
‘Girl, I think,’ said the man in the khaki pants. ‘Looks more like a frightened gecko if you ask me.’
Everything gleamed in the foyer of the hotel. Somewhere in that mist outside was a house that held my mother and my sister. It was cold and it was late and almost dark. There was a woman in a red uniform behind the light wooden desk of the foyer. The waiter who’d brought me to the reception waiting chair went over to her and said something soft and she nodded without looking up from what she was writing until he left, back to the dining room to set up for the hotel guests’ supper. Her hair was wound at the back of her head in a dark tight knot, sleek and secure. She looked perfect to me as she glanced in my direction from time to time with a kind smile. The clock on the high wall that reached all the way up to a tall ceiling said that it was half-past six. I didn’t want people looking at me, conspicuous as I sat perched alone on the waiting chair. I told myself I wasn’t afraid; that Samuel would come back for me eventually.
When he emerged from around the corner, a loose grin lifted the side of his mouth. He whistled in a way I hadn’t heard in a long while, since I used to wait for him on the roof of a house beside the sea in another place.
‘All right, Monkey?’ he said, as though he’d been gone ten minutes. The woman with the hair bun was watching us, her pen held in a moment in the air above an open book. She caught my eye when I looked back at her and she winked. She held a thumb in the air at me and I gave her a thumb back. Thumbs up for Samuel and his return.
We walked home in the dark. I knew the smell that wafted from his jersey from when I was small. The scent of crowded, smoky places with little air passing through. His breath was sour as it landed with his words; too many cigarettes crammed into a short time over too many bottles of beer. He walked fast, and my legs could barely match his pace. I said nothing, just listened to him speak about the hands played and the cards lost and the types of men who’d been standing around the same table. I kept up beside him and he was happy, oblivious to his own struggling breath. It was dark and it was cold, the streets wet and glistening, but Marshall’s house was rapidly approaching.
We stood at the front door and he winked at me as he slid his key quietly into the lock. There was no escape from my mother’s sharp ears. She heard the sound and she came at us with an attack of words. ‘Get to your room,’ she told me. ‘I’ll deal with your father in private.’
I slid past her, guilty that I had been party to my father’s sins, but relieved that I was to be spared the brunt of the blame. I looked back at them both and listened to her words coming at him like spears, short and sharp, while Samuel grinned through them as though he had a secret bigger than she could ever know. As she spoke and offered him no space to reply, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of notes. My mother stopped mid-sentence. Her mouth fell silent and we both stared. There must have been a pile of at least fifty crisp, clean hundred rand bills. Back then it was a fortune, way more than he’d ever earned in a month. She looked at them. She looked at him. He placed the pile of money on the telephone table beside her elbow and moved past her into the house. He pursed his mouth and from his lips there came that same tune that we’d both heard before, night after night, and in another time entirely.
Twenty-Three
I worshipped her even then. To say that she was beautiful would be simplistic, for beauty is that which is simultaneously fragile and vulnerable, and can only be destroyed. Devin, unlike her beauty, will last, walking this earth as a ghost until I am laid to rest. Even then she will go on somehow, in the life of my daughter and my blood, though Hayley will never know the nature of the ghost that haunts her. Beyond beauty, the questions I asked myself over the years focused on our differences and marginalised any part of us that was the same. There was the obvious, that my short straw hair gave me a rough edge, and my skinny limbs turned me into a creature that was something androgynous. The silk-gleaming hair covered my arms and legs like the sparse down on a newborn chicken, my freckles bridged my nose from too much time in the sun but left the skin behind them pale as ever. I was milk and she was honey, but my triumph was that I was the sun around which Samuel orbited, while my sister remained the cool and elusive moon.
I see it over and over, a scene from which I cannot stray. Her head in his hands, and she lying on the carpet, broken.
‘I found her like this,’ he said. ‘Quick! Call an ambulance!’
Somewhere in the house a telephone rang and the shrill interruption smashed the core of my thoughts and I died right there, alongside my sister. I saw her hair tumbled about her head like seaweed adrift in an endless ocean and her body was shrivelled and thin as though she’d been floating for months, years even, without food or nourishment for herself. I wanted to lift her from the carpet, but my arms were too soft for her weight and I wasn’t large enough. There was always anger before the deepest part of forgiveness, but I couldn’t even grant her that.
Marshall was speaking and his mouth was a hole, a cavern from which there surely must have been many words. I knew that there was a sound in the room, but it came too much, too fast at me; I drowned and disappeared beneath it before the words slowly came to light.
‘The phone,’ Marshall was yelling. ‘Get the goddamn – phone!’
My feet must have carried me into the hallway, one step after the other. It was there and it rang and the sound made me cover my ears, but my hands couldn’t make it stop.
‘Get the phone, Catherine!’
The ringing stopped and the telephone sat there innocent and waiting for a different kind of tomorrow, where talk might be about tea or where my sister could play tennis. I stopped and thought about the blood while I stared into a void too deep for me ever to find the bottom. All I knew was that from now on, every time I believed that I could go on and live towards the light, I would remember standing in this hall and seeing that silent phone.
It rang again, forcing me to pay attention. I looked down at it, placed a hand on the smooth surface of the receiver and put the telephone to my ear. It muffled the world and channelled a voice I knew and I had no idea how to answer it.
‘Hello? Monkey, is that you? What are you girls doing?’
A whisper forced its way through my throat and I knew as I spoke to my father that she was there on the other side of the wall and in the arms of the enemy. Lying there in that pink shirt and on her arms and on his carpet were the stains of her blood.
‘What is going on?’ Samuel said. ‘Is your mother there?’
‘Please come home,’ I said, and began to cry. The receiver was wet before I put it down and I wondered if the inside of the wires would grow mouldy with my tears.
Her wrists were bandaged with a rough off-white cloth, her arms resting above the blankets on either side of her body. There was a book on the floor beside the bed upside down, the pages reaching upwards to be read, but the reader had lost her place. I slung my school bag off of my back and let it fall on the floor beside the door. I tried to move forward. The afternoon sun came in through the window and cast blocks of light across the carpeted floor. I had to step over the
se to get to her. Beyond the window I could see the sky. Deep and intense, I’d walked beneath it alone all the way from the bus stop. The green carpet reminded me of a sea of grass, the blocks of sun the islands on which I stood.
Her face was pale, ashen, and I thought it was from loss of blood, that most of it had drained from her wrists.
My mother was downstairs. She’d stayed home from work for the day to be with my sister while she recovered, and her presence in the house made me afraid. I left the kitchen as soon as I could to avoid being party to the thoughts that set her grim mouth, her distant eyes. I thought that she might blame me for this, along with Samuel, at least. I would only be in the way. She didn’t notice that I ate no lunch, and I knew that today she wouldn’t ask me if I’d done my homework. I might as well have been invisible, and it was a feeling that I found I didn’t mind, so long as I could get away.
‘School was okay,’ I said to Devin. ‘Some people asked me where you were.’
‘I don’t care. I don’t care if you told them.’
I crossed the sunny divide and sat at the edge of her bed. ‘I didn’t tell them. I don’t want anyone to know either.’ I stretched out my legs and I touched the edge of the up-turned book with the black tips of my shoes. ‘Why did you do it, Dev?’
‘He was still here this morning.’
‘Who, Marshall? Has he gone?’
‘Yes. I hate him, Cat. I wish we still lived in our own house.’
‘Is that why you tried to kill yourself?’
‘No—’
‘Because of him?’
She nodded, her lips tight. I looked away when I saw her chin tremble.
‘That’s a stupid reason, Devin, you know that. There’re just a few years left here and we’ll be grown up and then we won’t have to live here any more. That’s a stupid reason to want to die.’
She sighed and pulled herself back from the edge of tears, and I brushed a wisp of hair back from her face. Each curl was perfectly and naturally formed, as though a superior designer had gone to work on her from the start. Her eyes were leaf shaped and slightly slanted, pulling the skin tight over the protruding cheekbones. She hadn’t moved her hands. It was as though they were useless, and they lay beside her body like two dead fish.