Читать книгу A Childhood Made Up - Brent Meersman - Страница 6

THE BELGIAN EPISODE

WE WERE TOLD that my mother became anaemic in Belgium, which was why she got seriously sick. The diagnosis made perfect sense to Shirley. She had looked in the mirror and pulled down her left bottom eyelid and found it to be white inside. Our family by then had been vegetarian for some years and she attributed her anaemia to the fact that she hadn’t been getting nuts or wheatgerm in Antwerp. Wheatgerm was a sort of ‘nerve powder’, she said. But on the whole, she blamed Belgium. This was before it became hackneyed to deride the plucky Belgians. Besides, most South Africans back then couldn’t tell Belgium from Bulgaria even with a map.

When we emigrated in 1972, it was the first time Shirley had left Africa. She was to be deeply disappointed. With the benefit of hindsight, she later wrote that leaving Africa had been ‘spiritual death’ and she recounted the whole dreadful Belgian episode. My mother kept a diary throughout her life, but the entries are sporadic and sparse, amounting to about two shoeboxes full of her musings and mostly her reflections on life. I always knew she had a passion for keeping various records, such as our medical histories and lists of important purchases, but only after she died did I read her diaries and reread her letters to me. I often presume to know her thoughts. I have lifted these from her journals and from several hundred drawing books but mostly from what she told me during a great many long and intimate conversations we had later in life, when I had grown up.

‘A dreadful stench drifted around the Belgian cities, a decadent atmosphere seemed to mingle and combine with the pollution,’ Shirley wrote in her diary. ‘The air was stale and dreadful. The only green thing I could find was a Brussels sprout. They don’t bathe. They just eat garlic,’ she told me.

Belgium in the early 1970s lacked many things. Greenery was not high on the list of essentials. Half the homes didn’t even have modern bathrooms. People shared their cramped quarters with a great deal of oversized furniture.

‘I have seen better servant quarters in South Africa than what supposedly well-standing Europeans live in. Antwerp is about as inviting as a stable,’ she wrote in a letter to my aunt.

During the year our family spent in Belgium, we only managed a few touristy things in the first month, nothing thereafter.

Shirley was all aquiver to see the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. At last she was in Europe, and she would visit all those paintings she had only ever seen as tiny black-and-white photographs in the Larousse Encyclopaedia of Modern Art. But what she found at the Royal Museums was how she imagined purgatory would be: galleries full of pernickety landscapes, endless still-lifes with dead pheasants, and over-varnished portraits of boring nobles in black cloaks with white frills. She had never painted, and would never want to paint, as realistically as the old masters.

Then followed a succession of rooms filled with crucifixions, martyrdoms and medieval Virgin Marys. What was she doing there, she wondered. And what were these pictures doing to her mind?

There were lots of Brueghels by lots of Brueghels. No Picassos. Finally she found some Delvauxs. She adored his Pygmalion, which depicted a nude woman embracing a classical statue of a nude man in an eerie landscape. This was also the first time she saw Delvaux’s drawings. Looking at them made her itch to start work again.

In the end, the highlight of the trip to Brussels turned out to be a giant flower carpet of begonias on the Grand Place. By luck, 1971 happened to be the first year the Bruxellois did it. Today it’s an annual event.

On our only other tourist excursion we went to Ghent and visited the fairy-tale Gravensteen castle. Inside was a torture museum with an iron maiden and a dungeon that left Shirley shuddering. She had nightmares all the next week. In one room, there was a hole in the floor through which prisoners had been dropped. The condemned men usually broke their legs on the stone floor two storeys below, she was informed by a neatly printed plaque. Then they were left to starve to death.

My mind still sometimes fills with horrid visions of medieval tortures and death by fire as I am trying to drift off to sleep. Some ‘fairy-tale castle’.

‘The Belgians,’ my mother said, when looking back on that year, ‘are an ignorant, stupid people. They don’t know how to live. They could have a high standard of living, but they’d rather hoard things. The lengths they will go to for their stinginess … Unbelievable! And all they ever talk about is money and the cost of things.’

By ‘the Belgians’ what Mom really meant were her in-laws.

‘They are so very materialistic, and in a brazen, shameless, grasping way. Such small horizons! What a boxed-in outlook on life. Regulated. Conforming. And so petty! Ugh!’ She often scribbled ‘ugh’ next to drawings she made of people she didn’t like.

She drew her father-in-law as an apeman carrying a club. He looked Cro-Magnon but without the ability to paint the Lascaux Cave. His bottom lip was always jutting out in a disapproving sulk. ‘A niggardly, covetous, parsimonious wretch,’ said Mom.

Meanwhile, my grandparents – Bopa and Boma – couldn’t make head or tail of this daughter-in-law of theirs. Who would want to buy her crazy paintings? If she was such a great artist, why couldn’t she illustrate books or paint postcards and sketch people’s portraits on the Groenplaats for a few francs like normal artists? Why was she incapable of doing anything that might make money?

In her defence, my father unwisely cited Van Gogh and how he had only managed to sell one picture in his life before his genius was recognised.

‘Van Gogh cut off his ear and ended up committing suicide in an insane asylum. Is that the kind of person you have married?’ asked Bopa.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ my father said.

‘Why must she insist on painting rubbish?’ said Bopa. Shirley must go and get a ‘real’ job and earn her keep, not sit at home and paint black people, he said. What kind of a lazy, rotten mother was she to his grandchildren?

Boma wanted to know why Churley (that was how she pronounced Shirley) couldn’t get a job as a typist. Churley had done that in South Africa before marrying her son, hadn’t she? But my mom said that the Belgians had rearranged the keys on the typewriter and because she didn’t speak Flemish or French her shorthand skills were also useless in Belgium.

Boma said that since Churley was obviously an idiot, she should become a charwoman; as it happened, she knew someone who was looking for domestic help. She and Bopa could babysit me.

My grandparents did next to nothing to support our family during our time in Belgium. However, they did enrol Paul-Henri, aged seven, in a Catholic school. Unfortunately, the nuns at this school were very religious. Brought up atheist, we didn’t have a clue about their Roman Catholic rituals, and we didn’t speak French or Flemish. Paul-Henri wasn’t naturally studious to begin with. His first year at school in South Africa had been at a Holy Cross Convent and it had been difficult, and there he was taught in English. He’d done well in ballet, but he’d needed elocution lessons. The only upside to Belgium was he no longer had sneezing fits.

Paul-Henri was lost. The other kids targeted him. He must have been an object of derision – an illiterate, heathen vegetarian from Africa. The teachers didn’t have enough imagination to understand what was happening inside an intercontinental child displaced by some ten thousand kilometres. A few teachers would have vaguely remembered kids that had come from the Congo in the 1960s, but they had at least spoken the language. I doubt Paul-Henri himself understood that he was grieving for the loss of his friends and his home. He must have felt utterly betrayed, a feeling I think he would struggle to shake in life.

My mother took on his anguish. She ganged up with him against his teachers and the school. This didn’t help us to adjust, but she didn’t want to be in Belgium either anymore. She told us about the Spanish Inquisition and how the Catholics burned women and Joan of Arc alive at the stake. Don’t believe a word those nuns teach you, she said as she dropped my brother off at the school gate. She was terrified they would fill his head the way they had filled the galleries in the museum with religious claptrap.

I remember watching Paul-Henri disappear down a stone archway into a distant courtyard. My mother was holding my hand and I sensed her heartache. We stood a while, even after he’d vanished from view. As time would have it, he would again very much vanish from my view. I have not seen him for the past twenty-six years.

I recall the two of us playing among hundreds of pigeons on the Grote Markt and being in a kind of rapture as the birds sat all along our arms and even on our heads and pecked bread from our hands. Their beating wings didn’t frighten me. But much of the time in Antwerp, I was frightened out of my wits. I was in an alien home watching my mommy rapidly unravel, although I didn’t fully understand that at the time.

Papa was at work all day, working even longer hours than he had in South Africa, yet we never had any money. Our new, but ancient, apartment had no bathroom. My father reverted to garlic; he also found the Belgian beer irresistible. My mother, a stickler for cleanliness, wouldn’t go near him anymore. She had to bathe herself and us kids in a tin tub in the middle of the lounge floor. The water had to be heated in batches on the stove. The stove had to be fed anthracite. The anthracite had to be hauled in a hessian sack up six flights of stairs. The typical Belgian staircase is steep, like a ladder. There was no lift in the block. Africa was civilised enough to have servants for the white working class, my mother said. Her back, which wasn’t good to begin with due to a fall from an unfamiliar horse when she was a farm girl, would never again fully recover from this coal-lugging ordeal. Bopa had no sympathy. Every Belgian woman could do this; what was Churley’s excuse? He said that at thirteen my great-grandfather had been put to work underground in a coal mine, working ten and a half hours a day for one franc.

Our apartment was freezing. The sky was eternally overcast. As they say in Antwerp, if it isn’t raining, it is about to rain, and then they shrug. But Shirley couldn’t bear being deprived of the light she needed to paint.

She had cried, standing on the back deck of the MS Randfontein, as she watched her beloved Table Mountain sink into the sea, not knowing if she would ever see it again. And that was before ‘the Belgian episode’, when she still had great expectations of her husband’s country.

We crossed the equator on 26 August 1971. My father told the South Africans on board they would feel the bump.

Shirley had spent quite a bit of the voyage in our cabin with debilitating seasickness. Lying on the bed, she thought of her nineteen-year-old father in 1918 crammed into the hull of a British troop carrier with thousands of men in hammocks, half of them vomiting. But she had such high hopes for Belgium – a kingdom full of opportunities and a haven for artists. She dreamed of finding new inspiration in breathtaking art galleries, of setting up a studio and holding stimulating soirées with European painters and sculptors, of at long last meeting people who would understand her work and not snigger at nudes. My father had told her Paris was so close they could go shopping on the Champs-Élysées on weekends.

But now she found she didn’t even have a decent space to paint, no easel and no desk, only a few sticks of furniture that my father had bought from my grandparents – yes, bought: two beds, a table and a few stools to sit on. The apartment was hardly big enough for one of those horrid little Belgian Griffons or monkey-dog Affenpinschers she had glimpsed eating pralines at tables in fancy Antwerp restaurants. Her paintings and most of her things were still in wooden crates in a cargo ship somewhere on the Atlantic.

The neighbourhood was overcrowded. The stairwell was cluttered with gawking, gossiping women who she had a sneaking feeling were openly chatting about her in their incomprehensible Brabantian dialect. ‘Like a bunch of macaws,’ she said. And when men spoke Antwerps they sounded sloshed; the lurching vernacular punctuated with what sounded like painful yelps as if their toes were being pinched by narrow shoes. As for the shopkeepers, they were not only unintelligible but also unfriendly. She didn’t recognise anything on the shelves and they either refused to or didn’t speak English. They had never heard of an avocado pear. They hated Marmite.

She continually suspected she was being diddled. Belgian francs confused her; there were seventy-one of them to a South African rand. Foreigners reminded the people of Antwerp of those who had invaded and stomped all over their country and they didn’t like it – the Romans, Norsemen, British, French, Austrians, Spanish, Germans. In Belgium, where anybody from more than ten kilometres away is a foreigner in any case, Shirley had no friends, no relatives and no doctor she could count on; only her in-laws who pecked at her day in and day out.

This was the first time in her life she had experienced such naked hostility, she told me, for my grandparents hated her passionately. Nothing she did was right. They even criticised the way she folded socks. They complained she was wasting money by keeping the lights on. She was forced to buy candles. They resented her using the gas for hot water to wash underwear and socks, never mind the amount of water she boiled for all that tea she drank. They wanted her to get a menial job and give up painting. They couldn’t understand that taking such a job would be committing ‘personality suicide’, as my mother put it. Her relationship with her in-laws soon broke down completely. She didn’t even answer the door anymore when Boma came. I remember Boma knocking and calling while my mother hid with me in the back room. I didn’t like Bopa or Boma either. I recall my grandmother as a buxom woman, yet without any maternal quality, and inseparable from her handbag. She called me Brentjie. Ugh!

‘Divorce her!’ my grandparents told my father. They would look after us grandchildren. Maybe they would do a better job this time than they had with Willy. They called him Willy (after William Paul), not Paul. They didn’t blame Willy entirely for being such a failure. His mother admitted for the first time they hadn’t educated him enough. Willy hadn’t amounted to anything more than a factory worker and he had married a disaster, an African who couldn’t even fold socks properly. They, on the other hand, had money in the bank and owned a furniture shop, named the Red Star, after the famous New York-Antwerp ocean passenger line. They also owned a forest somewhere. Bopa said money did grow on trees and wood was safer than a pension fund. Bopa loved the idea of his oaks and beeches in a forest somewhere getting bigger and bigger every year and putting on more and more wood for him to harvest later. And it was all being done for free! By sunlight!

But not to digress, Bopa conceded he hadn’t been the greatest parent. Bopa had broken Willy’s nose when he was ten years old. He had been a prizefighter and he lost his temper and forgot he was punching a tiny person. He should have just locked Willy in the coal cellar for a day and night without food as he normally did. His only child irritated him, especially his deformity.

My father was born with a harelip and a cleft palate. Bopa would tease his kid mercilessly by mimicking his lisping speech. Little Willy ­spoke a bit like a deaf person. Bopa didn’t like being seen with the boy in public, couldn’t wait for him to be old enough to grow a moustache over that lip of his. Maybe Willy wasn’t even his. When Willy was still a child, Bopa told him he had got the harelip because he was damaged as a foetus when his mother tried to abort him, but sadly it hadn’t worked. When my father told me this, he was holding back tears. It was so obviously untrue – he knew it was a story his father had deliberately made up to hurt him – and yet part of him still believed it.

Boma repeatedly failed to protect her child from her husband. Now she still appeared to look at Willy with that deadly combination that is pity and guilt. But Willy had gone off and made two boys of his own and they were noticeably brighter than anyone else in the family. They were also physically perfect. If he got the children early enough, Bopa thought they might even be good with money one day. Now, if Willy just divorced that stuck-up Churley person … At the very least, they told him, he should admit that his marriage was on the rocks.

‘For once in your life do something that pleases us!’ said Boma.

Willy was turning forty soon, but he still couldn’t hit back at his father, who towered over him. My grandfather was a sinister man and a miser of legendary proportions. Bopa even kept the shells of mussels after he had eaten their squishy insides. ‘You can’t just throw all that away,’ he said. ‘It is most of the mussel!’ In Flemish he almost sounded convincing. He kept the empty shells in big black bags in the cellar next to other big black bags filled with old clothes and thousands of stamps torn off envelopes from all over the world ­– Belgisch Congo, Ruanda-Urundi, Frankrijk – collected when he worked for the Belgian Customs. The myopic fools in the public service had let him have the used envelopes for free. If he hadn’t done anything about it, the shells would have been thrown away too! He was sure he would find a use for them one day. Someone would invent something that needed mollusc shells and everyone else in the world would deeply regret having thrown all those mussel shells away during a lifetime of recklessness. When the stench started to seep upstairs into the dining room, Boma quietly disposed of the bags. Bopa knew of this treachery, of course, but he said nothing. He would bide his time and use it as proof of her deceitfulness when it suited him.

He was tired of Boma criticising him. He hadn’t forgotten how a year back she had dared to accuse him of coming home drunk and reversing their car into a ditch. He was adamant that he had in fact parked the Citroën on purpose in the ditch. He refused to tell her for what purpose. Only he knew. His bottom lip pouted. Bopa knew how to keep a secret and he had an especially long memory. He had been a leader in the Resistance during the war and in all those years his wife hadn’t even known what he was up to. He was a hero with medals. In World War I he had been a cavalry officer. He’d caught a bullet in one of the charges and since then always wore a black leather glove over his fist, which he would thump on the table for emphasis.

‘Spoiled, spoiled, spoiled,’ he said. Thump, thump, thump. It hurt.

Who did Churley think she was, Bopa wondered aloud. Wanting avocado pears! Where did she think she came from – Brussels?

‘That woman is spoiling your children. Filling their heads with art. Is she mad? They don’t even play sport.’

He had never spoiled his child like that, and his son had been an only child. No, he’d put Willy to work at age thirteen after the war, delivering furniture on his tricycle. He’d thought he might as well make little Willy useful since his schooling was interrupted in 1943. The schools closed after not-very-brave American pilots carelessly off-loaded two hundred tonnes of bombs that they were supposed to have dropped on a factory. They flew too high and most of the bombs landed instead in the crowded Antwerp neighbourhood of Oude God (Old God). The American bombs fell on four schools. Among the thousand dead were two hundred and nine Belgian children under the age of fifteen. After that, no more school. The German factory, however, resumed work a month later.

Luckily, by the time the bombs fell Willy could already read and write and, most importantly, count, so when the war finally ended Bopa figured there was no good reason to send him back to school. He could earn his keep instead.

Before anything left the store, Bopa always made customers pay up front and told them delivery was included. In fact it was free – he didn’t pay Willy. As one might expect of a failure, the kid broke or scratched the furniture during delivery and then usually blamed the cobblestones. He was also hiding his tips from Bopa, even if it was only nougat.

But Bopa thought Paul-Henri and I ought to get a proper education. Secretly, he missed the war, but Belgium was in peacetime now and the grandchildren had a bright future, not like Willy. The sooner they started speaking Flemish the better. He’d even help pay for their education. But Churley had to be stopped. She was setting the children against him, filling their heads with poison, telling them their grandpa was some sort of ogre. How else could you explain the day little Paul-Henri pulled the chair out from under him just as he sat down? And everyone laughed at Bopa on the floor. Paul-Henri fled the room. Boma could not stop laughing.

‘He was just joking, a practical joke, Pa,’ said Willy.

‘What was so funny about it?’ asked Bopa, his lip bulging and his eyes moving closer together. ‘Pauli has a mean streak,’ said Bopa, something he could appreciate.

‘He’s only seven, Pa!’

‘Seven and a half,’ said Bopa.

Willy was beginning to realise that he may have made a mistake moving back home, even though Belgium did have colour television and beer – hundreds of different beers. Maybe the taste of beer was the real reason he’d returned, and he had simply been lying to himself when he persuaded his wife to move to Belgium with promises of Delvaux, Magritte, Peter Paul Rubens and shopping in Paris. He had been homesick for a home that didn’t exist and parents who didn’t love him. Shirley didn’t even like Magritte. Too stiff, she told him. But she did like James Ensor, the Oostender. She saw Belgium through Ensor’s eyes – a macabre carnival of masked, hostile, grotesque relatives. Europe was supposed to have been her liberation. South Africa was backward – a country full of people who had never been to a proper museum, who thought Picasso was a type of cheese, who blushed when they saw Michelangelo’s statue of David. South Africans also made fun of Willy’s Roquefort sandwiches at work, didn’t understand how to treat a potato, and only served mussels in tins. Belgium just had to be better.

Willy even had some fond memories of the war. He too had been heroic back then. As a ten-year-old, he and his school friends had committed acts of sabotage, jumping on the back of German army trucks and throwing out loaves of bread to his friends running behind. Until one day, when he leaped onto a Blitz truck and a huge Alsatian nearly bit his head off. He fell and skinned his knees on the cobblestones. The German had got wise and put a guard dog in the back to keep the bread away from hungry civilians. The Belgian children went back to starving. The German occupiers gave them only the peels from their potatoes, and the civilians put sawdust in soup to fill their tummies. Coffee was made from acorns.

At home, Bopa hung a sausage above the table and Willy and his mother were allowed to rub a piece of bread on it for flavour. ‘Don’t rub so hard, that sausage has to last the war,’ said Bopa. But at night of course Bopa sneaked into the kitchen and cut a thick slice for himself and ate it in the dark. He had to eat; he was important; he was part of the national Resistance. Anyway, nobody at home would dare to ask why the sausage seemed to be getting shorter. ‘It’s shrinking in the air,’ Bopa volunteered.

After the war, like many others, it seemed Bopa found it impossible to give up his thrifty ways. Nearly thirty years later, everything in Belgium was still calculated to the gram.

My father berated himself. How could he have so easily forgotten why in the first place he had run away from his parents to the extreme southern tip of Africa? When he had left home, he hadn’t known a thing about Africa except what he had read in Tintin. He’d been prepared to cross crocodile-infested rivers, battle hostile pygmies and risk being cooked by cannibals – anything to get away from Bopa and Boma.

The Gestapo were kinder than his parents. He remembered a soft-spoken young SS officer he was summoned to meet in the principal’s office when he was a schoolboy. This was shortly after the occupation had started in 1940. The Nazi was so much more tender than his father. There was something feline about his sharp, handsome features. He was the first person to genuinely care about little Willy’s harelip and not be repelled by it. He touched Willy’s lip gently with his finger. He asked if anyone else in the family had suffered from a harelip. His mother? His father? Any grandparent? The officer was concerned about them too, you see. Willy shook his head. He didn’t tell them about the abortion attempt. The SS officer smiled. Nothing hereditary then; just an accident of birth and no reason for Willy ever to be ashamed about it.

‘Be a good boy and work hard at school. I hear you are an excellent student,’ said the kind German. He gave Willy a piece of chocolate and removed his name from the sterilisation list.

It was the first time anyone had ever told Willy he was excellent at anything.

Willy was a tall, lanky boy who won diving medals at school, but this was nothing to his father, the boxing champion who had triumphed over the Walloons. When Willy came home with 90% for an exam, Bopa would say, ‘You got 10% wrong! Again!’ When he got 98%, Bopa would say, ‘See – you’re not perfect.’ He’d been top of his class but in the end he had only a primary school certificate to show for it.

Now he was back, and he discovered that the Belgium he’d returned to was highly qualification conscious and competitive. Belgians chose their subjects and careers at an early age and were set on a path; one didn’t chop and change. There were a lot of skilled people about and Willy had been away for twenty years. It wasn’t going to be easy to get a promotion; he didn’t know anyone. At least in South Africa he had been better off than most of the population just because he was white. His pale skin had been more than half his qualification, pink harelip and all. But he had liquidated everything to get our family to Belgium. We were stuck. And now, his wife had collapsed in bed with migraines. He decided he’d better have a beer.

Late one afternoon, my mother slumped in a chair. Years later she would describe the onset of a migraine to me, how it was usually triggered after tiny white lights started flashing, then formed yellow zig-zag lines. On this occasion, in Antwerp, she said, she could see my little face through the lights, but she struggled to focus her eyes. She couldn’t get up. She panicked. She thought she might be having a stroke and was about to drop dead in front of her child. She was shivering. I watched her crawl across the floor to get to the bed. I didn’t cry.

She kept repeating to me, ‘I’ll be all right, I’ll be all right,’ but at the same time she was thinking, ‘The poor darlings are still too young to be without a mother. Why did I have to die in Belgium?’

The lights had grown into a big interrogation lamp in her head that winced on and off. Someone was trying to strangle her. She knew who. Her legs were trembling, even as they were stretched out on the bed. Her palms had started sweating. What had she done wrong this time? Why was this happening to her?

I clung to my mommy’s forehead. There was no phone in the apartment to call my father, and I didn’t know any of our neighbours.

Shirley tried to stay calm. Her eyes closed. She coughed and a jet of pain shot through her head. The headache part of the migraine had struck, and she knew it wouldn’t release her for hours.

Willy found her in bed when he got home. I was sitting beside her. Paul-Henri was missing; he hadn’t been collected from school. Hopefully, the school had called my grandparents because they had a phone. Now Willy felt horribly guilty for coming back so late. He’d stopped for a beer on the way; one became three. Understandable, since he had a lot of problems that needed thinking about. He was going to miss Belgium and beer and television, but it had become obvious to him that somehow he had to get us all back to Cape Town. What a disaster. He’d failed again. But there was no way he was going to let Boma and Bopa get hold of his children. His wife was ill and there was no life for him without Shirley. He loved her so much. Who else would want him? Yes, he did get approaches from other women, but none of them actually wanted him. Shirley had a gift, an extraordinary talent. He was committed to both of them – her and her talent. Shirley was the mother of his children. She had to get better.

‘I love you,’ he said and took her hand. ‘I love you, and we are going home. I don’t know how, but somehow I’ll make it happen. I promise.’

The migraine was barely fading when she smelled the beer. Her husband was holding her hand. She wanted to speak. She wanted to tell him the kids hadn’t been fed or bathed but the big interrogation lamp in her head stopped her getting the words out. Then she realised Paul-Henri wasn’t there and fear gripped her by the throat. She saw the grandparents had arrived. They were after her children. The Catholics are always after the children. She was terrified she was going to lose her kids, the way her firstborn had been taken away from her years before. Now they had come for Paul and Brent. They were standing at the back of the room with their arms folded – Boma in blue bloomers, Bopa in his black trench-coat and hat, both of them with their bottom lips jutting out. Her soul was invisible to them; only the mould into which they wished to press her and bake her was of any importance to them. What was it they wanted her to say? She started shouting and screaming at Willy. ‘Tell them to get out! They are not touching my children. Get out! Get out!’ But nobody in the room appeared to hear her.