Читать книгу How to Make a Heart Sick - Heather Mac - Страница 5

An ocean of sunflowers turned their faces to the west, their backs to the khaki colored veld. The landscape was barren and coarse, loomed over by electric pylon monsters that must have needed their long legs to march across a world as flat and stretched-out as the Orange Free State. In the distance, a shimmering pink on the horizon swooped into the sky, a wave that rose and settled and rose again. ‘Flamingos,’—from Dad. ‘They’ll be gone soon, migratory birds.’ I couldn’t have dreamed that such swooping, swirling, ballet dancing birds existed. I tried to collect the images in my mind—yellow, pink, blue and white—to capture some of the beauty for myself. But the enchantment passed in a moment; the day-long journey ended with a right turn at a sign reading ‘Welcome to Welkom’ (‘Welcome to Welcome’), a ridiculous name for a town.

Welcome to the unknown; welcome to the heat and dust; welcome to a new house, a new school, new people; welcome to the same family in a different hell. Welcome. I would rather have stayed in the moving car, chewing up the miles to the comforting drone of the VW engine. ‘What a shit-hole!’ from Steven. A snarl from Dad, grinding through a gear change, flashing Steven a look in the rear-view mirror, ‘You watch your filthy mouth, young man! Can’t you teach your son some respect?’—this to Mom. ‘Spoiled brat! He should be grateful I’ve got a job that provides for him. He’d do well to start learning about responsibility instead of take, take, take. Who just took him on holidays, and bought him a surfboard—wasn’t that me? And paid for the petrol you used running him around all day because he can’t entertain himself for one minute!’ Dad fired the words over my head at Mom.

‘Big deal!’ came from Steven, while Mom turned her whole upper body to face Dad. ‘I’ll pay back every penny you spent on my son, you miserable, selfish man. Look around you; who would choose to live in a dump like this? But we have to, don’t we? Because you’re a wimp who’ll do whatever the company says! A real man would stand up for his family, put them first!’ Mom threw herself back into her seat and turned her face to the window, her shoulders shaking as though from sobs.

Red in the face, Dad set his jaw so hard that I could hear his teeth grind. I felt bad for him; he believed that no-one appreciated him or anything he did for us. I wanted to shout, ‘I do! I’m so grateful for the holiday, for the ice-creams after the beach, the Wimpy toasties dripping with cheese, and the Fun Fair in Port Elizabeth, where I got to go on the Big Wheel and toss balls into clowns’ mouths! I’m grateful for the freedom, and most of all for having you so close by all the time.’ But I didn’t dare say a word. Mom was muttering to herself, just loud enough to be heard, but she may as well have been shouting for the tension I felt, sitting between her and Dad on her big red vanity bag lodged between the two front seats of the Kombi. Welkom was rushing at me through the windscreen, the ocean so far away it may as well have not existed.

The drive here from Paradise Beach had been an awful journey, with none of the happy expectations our outward holiday trip had offered. I’d had to vomit. I’d endured the usual lecture before the journey began: ‘Do not vomit in the car.’ ‘Yes, Daddy.’ ‘If you feel ill, ask for the car to be pulled over and vomit in the bushes where no-one can see you.’ ‘Yes, Daddy.’ But how to judge when the queasiness was going to erupt like a volcano? I wasn’t able to. Despite having been on guard the whole time, hand on the window latch in case, boom! Tomato sauce crisps splattered grotesquely over me, over a box of purple plums, the seat, the floor. I’d only eaten the chips because Dad had bought them for us and I didn't want to make him feel bad; I hated tomato sauce chips.

‘For God’s sake!’ Dad yelled, swerving onto the gravel kerb and screeching the brakes hard enough to make us all lurch forward. All eyes were on me in varying expressions of disgust as bodies evacuated the stopped car, tossing verbal grenades: ‘Gross! Disgusting child, didn’t your father warn you over and over, do not vomit in the car? What’s wrong with you? Why do you go out of your way to ruin everything? Where are the boys supposed to sit now?’

Dad grabbed the box of plums with a Fuck! and hurled them to the dusty ground with such force that the ripe ones splattered, so it really did look as though I’d vomited up a volcano. Orange, purple, red. ‘Gross, that touched my foot! I’ve got Stinky’s vomit on my foot! Get it off, get it off!’—this from Steven, saying he’d never share the car with me again.

‘Fantastic—so you’re walking home, then, are you? Wonderful! I won’t have to put up with your shit, then, will I?’ from Dad. ‘Bastard!’ from Mom. ‘Come over here, sweeties; let those two sort it out. We’re just in the way, as usual.’

I stayed where I was, grateful that the nausea had gone, thinking: It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault, it’s not my fault.

‘Get out of the goddamn car and help clean up this mess, Kate.’

‘Yes, Daddy; I’m sorry, Daddy.’ We tried to clean it, but, as anyone who’s ever vomited in a car will know, no matter how much of the evidence you get rid of, the smell is permanent.

Dad said we’d ‘just have to suffer’. Simon and Steven blocked their noses and scrambled over to the back seats with cries of, ‘Gross! Disgusting! Smelly-Nelly!’

Dad ignored them, plainly furious with all of us—‘drink-breaks-at-petrol-stops-only’ and ‘no-food-in-the-car’ kind of furious. I supposed he wanted to punish us, but it was all my fault, of course.

That was when Mom made me sit on her big red vanity bag between the two front seats, so the boys wouldn’t have to deal with the ‘stench’ of me. Every so often she’d bend her head to my ear and whisper-hiss, ‘Psycho,’ or, ‘You know where you’ll end up? Tara!’ She pinched and hissed no matter how still I sat in order not to attract her attention. I knew better than to cry, or flinch, or react to her behavior, because there’d be even greater hell to pay later, when Dad wasn’t around. I knew from experience that it was always best to let her do whatever she wanted. What I never learned was to stop hoping that Dad would notice, react, stop her, but he just stared at the road ahead as though he could drag the Kombi along faster with his eyes and make us all disappear behind him.

When we pulled into the drive of our new home on Doring Street, I wanted to cling to Dad with all my strength; I wanted him to protect me from the yuck I could predict. But the grown-ups exited the car from their opposite doors, into their opposite worlds, leaving us kids stuck in the middle for a moment, as if we, too, had a choice. The reality was that there was no option but to leave the bubble of blue and white and stumble into Mom’s world.

Mom commanded everything to do with our lives. Dad’s world was work, safari suits, long socks, hair combed back and a tidy car. Any time he spent at home was taken up arguing with Mom about money, among many other things, then finding places and ways to disappear. I adored him from a distance, feeling a passionate kinship with him in terms of how little Mom could ‘tolerate the sight of’ us. I admired him for slamming doors on her, storming out of the house and not coming back all day. He stood up to her in ways I never could. I felt deeply ashamed of how often I betrayed him by being Mom’s confidante, by agreeing with all the nasty things she said about him and never ever standing up for him.

That night the bedraggled evidence of our beach holiday was left in the Kombi for our maid, Evelyn, to sort out. She clucked and clicked in Xhosa, in no way disguising her disgust despite using a foreign language. She was to be leaving us soon, and her sister Grace was to take her place as our servant.

Grace was already on hand to ‘learn the ropes’. She looked as though she’d just been roused from a deep sleep, a kapalana roughly knotted about her waist, hair standing up everywhere, arms folded across her chest in a gesture of defiant rebellion. ‘Thank God we made it, Evelyn! I missed you! Been no kind of holiday for me at all, taking care of this lot on my own.’

‘Eish! Madam.’ An inclination of the head from Evelyn: I sympathize with you—but not really!

‘Make sure the car is emptied properly.' Mom’s long fingers enveloped the back of my neck. ‘She vomited everywhere again, so make sure to wash it out and get rid of that revolting stench. And do it tonight, hey! By tomorrow it’ll be ten times worse, in this heat.’ Mom released her grip on me, but my freedom was short-lived, as Evelyn restrained me by the arm.

‘You! Go fetch a bucket and hot water!’ She stuck her head in the Kombi. ‘Siess!’—one word that conveyed a multitude of accusations.

Grace cast her eyes over me as though inspecting me through the same lens of general distaste. She sniffed, turning away as though I wasn’t worth noticing.

I was grateful for a definite course of action, for something to do that would keep me out of Mom’s firing line. She hated it when I didn’t anticipate what she expected, which was most of the time; it felt much better to have a specific job. I always helped Evelyn anyway, because it got me into Mom’s ‘good books’ by proving to her that I knew my ‘place’. Evelyn knew my place too, and in the age-old order of picking on those lower in the pecking order than yourself, she enjoyed bossing me around, having someone to take her frustrations out on. The boys went off to their rooms, to do whatever they liked.

The chores done, it was bath-time, wash-hair time, cut-and-clean-your-nails time. It was important to be presentable for school, especially for a new school, the Convent School that Mom claimed to be the only one in Welkom that would take me because I was so ‘bad’. Mom anticipated that I’d get ‘proper discipline’ there, which worried me. I’d been on the end of a lot of discipline at my old school in the Transvaal, and none of it had been pleasant. Could things be even worse at the Convent School? Standing on my tippy-toes on the edge of the toilet bowl, I could see the sky full of stars through a blurry, slit-eyed bathroom window that was otherwise too high for anything other than ventilation. I sent silent wishes up to the stars, wishing for a kind teacher, friendly classmates, and, most of all, a friend.

I’d started wishing on the stars when I was eight, wanting my Dad to come home from wherever he’d gone for business trips that seemed to last weeks upon endless weeks. I’d had a spot in our old house, a large window that overlooked the veld from the landing at the top of the stairs. Sitting there, I used to watch the stars break their way through an orange-brown sunset, usually around dinner time. The boys would be downstairs, eager for food, and Mom would be chasing Evelyn along with cries of, ‘The boys are starving, Evelyn! Didn’t I tell you to put dinner on at four? You people, you can’t follow the simplest instructions!’

I’d turned to wishing on the stars for the things I hoped magic could bring my way because reality was something I just couldn’t change—I was too weak, too little, just a girl.

One evening at the old house, engrossed as I was in begging the stars to send Dad home, I made a double mistake: I whispered my wishes out loud. I didn’t hear Simon before he’d bounded up the stairs two at a time. ‘Who’re you talking to, Stinky? Yourself again? God, you’re weird! Mom, Kate’s talking to herself again.’

‘I’m just making a wish, that’s all.’

‘Who’re you wishing to, Stinky? The goddamn veld? You’re mad! Mom, she’s making wishes to the veld, now!’

‘No, I’m not. I’m wishing to the stars. It’s just a wish; I’m not mad.’

‘What stars, idiot? That over there? That’s a streetlamp. Oh, my God, you’re wishing on a street lamp!’

By then Mom had arrived. ‘Didn’t I tell you to wash your hands for dinner? Didn’t I? Then what the hell are you doing, talking to street lamps like a lunatic? What were you wishing for, a brain?’ They were standing so close, pushing me by their presence into the glass of the window, looming over me with sneering looks; if they’d been dogs they would have bitten me.

‘I was just wishing for Daddy,’ I whisper-blurted, with no idea how to defend myself.

‘Wishing for your pathetic father? You seriously think he gives a damn about you?’ Long fingers poked my chest. ‘No-one gives a damn about you! Least of all him. He never wanted you—you’re a useless unwanted little girl, get that through your thick head.’

I was trying to back away from her to escape the confines of glass and bodies. Mom grabbed me by my shoulders. ‘Get away from me! You revolt me; get out of my sight, and you can forget about dinner!’ With that shove I began falling, banging against stairs, crash landing on the tiles below, my head full of stars, like in the cartoons. I could hear Mom shouting at me, ‘Get up, you little actress, stop your attention-seeking and go to your room.’

I guess she and Simon stepped over me to go to dinner. I couldn’t see, felt awfully nauseated, and couldn’t even stand up, let alone walk, so I crawled to my room, grateful to find my bed and rest my head. I lay there, petrified that Mom would come back, petrified by the thudding that knocked against my skull and blind eyes, petrified that I’d vomit in my bed.

Later, Mom woke me, forcing me into my pajamas. For a few days afterward she was calm and smiley, but by then I knew better than to think that Mom had remorse, that she’d done her worst and things could only get better. By then I’d learned to be grateful for a respite from her anger, all the while remaining vigilant against whatever might happen.

I turned from the narrow bathroom window, sighing at the memory. It was stupid to be still calling out to the universe’s magic when it sure hadn’t made any difference to my life so far. Embarrassing hope. Shameful life. Simon’s bathwater lay slumped, murky with soap, shampoo and probably even pee, inert and uninviting. At least it looked deep enough to reach my waistline. I figured it was best to get it over with before my time was up. A quick slide of the bum, balancing myself with one hand and covering my nose with the other, and I was underwater, peaceful, alone, fuzzy curls twirling about my face— ‘Strawberry blonde,’ a nice lady had once said. ‘Mousy,’ Mom had replied. ‘She looks like Annie, from the movie,’ the lady had said. ‘Just a ridiculous number of freckles,’ Mom had countered.

In the bath I closed my eyes and pretended I was dead, daring myself to hold my breath long enough so that I’d faint and never breathe again. I wasn’t brave enough to die, and I was even more afraid of being caught with bathwater higher than my knees—big rule: I was not to have bathwater above my ankles! Mom would inspect at random times, as though she needed reassurance that she was depriving me of something that only the boys deserved. Raising myself from my potential grave, water cascading down my back, gasping for air, I pulled the plug to watch the precious secret water swirl down the drain. Glug! So what if I hadn’t washed? So what If I hadn’t shampooed my hair? Nobody cared, and I’d always be ‘Stinky!’ no matter how much I tried to scrub myself away. Jealousy made my toes curl. Simon was Mom’s favorite child, her angel, Steven her second favorite; she hated me. I felt I hated the boys. Hated them! I hated myself more for not being good enough to love.

Having moved into the new house just before the holidays, I wasn’t familiar with it yet. I didn’t know where the floorboards creaked or whether doors whined. I managed to dash down the hallway to my room without being noticed, blind for the moment it took my eyes to adjust to the murky light of not-quite-dark. Mom was always up on new trends, whether fashion or interior decor— those were the things that mattered most to her, after being thin. My room reflected her taste in modern trends: a black bed; a geometric doona cover; meanwhile, a poster of Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford, two of Mom’s ‘favorites’, had been stuck to the wall above my bed. I’d have preferred David Cassidy, myself. I had a way of passing the time while I tried to hide in silence and invisibility, a way of disappearing into a place where I could do as I pleased, which also mitigated against being busted doing something that might anger Mom. All I needed was a picture. The poster served as well as any other picture from a magazine or book: it became a doorway into another world. I was the one in the red cossie, with the beautiful piled-up hair, whom Robert Redford had just rescued from a freak wave. He was carrying me to my house by the edge of the beach, where he’d build a fire to warm us, and we’d roast marshmallows and think we were the luckiest people in the world! But I couldn’t get into my fantasy; I was on edge. There were too many foreign sounds, no routine yet to judge movements by. Welkom.