Читать книгу All That is Left - Kirsten Miller - Страница 7

The greats write their names across the sky, while the rest have forgotten how to live. The gulls’ sprawl, the spattering of pigeon wings are the voices of the common, while above it all, suspended from the clouds by their feather tips, the greats wait to swoop and catch us with their words.

Somewhere in the world a woman waits to be caught like that, with words and ideas that might take her away. She imagines herself snatched from the bed on which she sits, taken from the cry of the child in the next room, from the house with tight walls and damp summer air. She dreams of time suspended, a place where her body doesn’t move but where her spirit plays here and there, here and there, like the cockroach that she tried to kill the day before. Flat. To be a creature that darts, parallel to the linoleum, that squeezes into spaces no thought could dare enter.

The partings best remembered are those without closure. No concrete way to recognise the mini-death, the rebirth of another kind of life devoid of the one thing, the one person, who simply disappeared. She was twelve years old on the wall outside the first house where they’d ever lived. Twelve years old and listening to the hissing truck belch and gurgle as it swallowed the furniture, piece by piece. Strange men passing in and out of the house as they deconstructed her life bit by bit, table by chair, box by cupboard.

Her mother fluttered between the white pantechnicon and the old house like a moth, papers fluttering in the sunlight between her fingers. Phototropism. Thomas ran in bursts on strong and eager legs, while Rachel observed them all from her crow’s nest on the wall.

The truck closed its mouth, and moved slowly away. Her mother locked the house and took Thomas by the hand. She called to Rachel where she watched their life being folded away.

‘But what about Grace?’ Rachel asked.

‘Grace isn’t coming,’ her mother said, packing boxes into the boot of the car.

‘We have to wait for Grace!’ Rachel insisted.

Her mother stood upright, wiped a hand across her hair. ‘Rachel, just let it go. We’ve got a long drive. Please, come down from there.’

Her brother’s eyes blinked at her from beside the floral hip. You will dream of Grace all of your life, they told her. Rachel would not accept it like that. Where was the woman whose skin wept all the days she had toiled for their family? Where was the woman who smelled of disappointment and furious love all the times Rachel had held on to her apron, her soap-hardened hands, breathing in the skin and the smell and the songs that told in another language of another time entirely? How would she live with the absence of those hands, that skin and those songs?

We’ll make other songs. We’ll learn other ways of singing. Thomas’s eyes bored into her, but Grace’s were the only songs she had known so far. Rachel hollered, there on the wall. She wept until her mother’s face crumpled in exhausted exasperation, but it was only when her brother’s eyes said to her If you don’t move from there you will never sing again that she dug her heels between the bricks and slid her bottom towards the ground.

Now her feet are bare on the green carpet, tapping a muffled beat, a counterpoint to her own child’s cries and the insects that wait between the cracks until nightfall. She closes her eyes and feels the weight of her skin. She breathes a lifetime back to the moment when there was no child, no green carpet, no heavy air pressing down on her. She can barely remember a time when she was somebody else, someone other than this. She catches a glimpse of another life like a shadow or a wayward ghost, a fleeting shade across the space. And then it is gone.

A sound floats from inside the house, music that isn’t hers but someone else’s sense of a life gone, another place and another time into which she doesn’t fit. A lilting female voice sings as a guitar stumbles beside the melody. She stands, crosses the room, fighting the air to breathe. She closes the door against the child, against the music. She leans her head against the painted wooden doorframe. The sounds have faded but they are not gone – the music, the child, the feet of insects. Only the heat stays with her completely, while she continues to breathe.

The knock comes like a bolt through her memory. Kamal enters the room as though afraid of what he might find on the other side of the door. When he sees her his shoulders soften, but he ventures no closer, and now she won’t go to him. The child’s voice flows into the room and he stands between them in that small ocean of sound. His eyes travel to her across the room but they speak of other worlds, and she can find nothing there that she recognises.

This morning when he reached for her she moved across the sheets, away from him, and left only ripples where her weight had been. Then she felt their differences, encased in separate skins. The weight of experience, of history, of family, the knowledge that she and Kamal are not the same. Since then he’s kept away from her. Now he’s in the doorway, telling her that the child is crying. She looks up and replies that she really doesn’t care.

To add to the sound of the child and the music there’s the shrill cricket-cry of the telephone in the hallway. It startles them both and she looks at him, tells him that he’s closer. He retreats from the room and the ringing ceases. The child stops crying but the music continues.

She wants to close the door again, to shut herself off from them, but before she can move he’s there, his eyes on her as he says that it is Maya, it is her brother’s wife, on the telephone.

She picks up the receiver and hears Maya say, ‘Hello? Hello? Rachel, are you there?’

The child begins to cry again. Kamal curses in an ancient accent. He goes through to the bedroom with their son in his arms and Rachel shifts the receiver to the other ear. ‘Yes, I’m here,’ she says. ‘Sorry. It’s Jack, he’s impossible at the moment.’

‘The funeral’s on Saturday,’ Maya says. ‘Simple, in the Gardens. No church.’

‘Okay,’ Rachel pauses, unsure of what she wants to do, unsure of what is expected of the sister of a dead man. ‘Are you sure you want to do this? Are you really ready?’

‘I know people will think it’s about the money.’

‘I don’t think that.’

‘The money means nothing. The court might not even grant it. I need to close the chapter, Rachel. I can’t keep wondering if my husband is suddenly going to walk through the door.’

‘It’s only been six months.’

‘Six months of hell. Nobody says it, but I think even the police suspect the worst.’

‘There might at least be some insurance.’

‘I don’t want anything, Rachel. I have two hands and a working body. I can make my own money. Forget money. All I want now is my peace of mind. I want my life back.’

‘And some memorial in the garden will give you your life back?’

‘Don’t start – you, of all people.’

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean …’

‘He was your brother! Don’t you want closure too?’

‘Of course. I just … I just don’t want to call him dead when …’

There is a softness in Maya’s sigh. It remains between them, suspended.

‘I’ll book a flight,’ Rachel says eventually. ‘When do you want me to come?’

‘As soon as you like.’

‘You don’t want to be alone right now?’

‘Are you kidding?’ Maya says. ‘The house feels so empty.’ Then, as an afterthought: ‘If you can bear to be here, Rach.’

I can’t bear to be anywhere, Rachel thinks, but she doesn’t say it aloud.

All day she moves around the house, touching objects to make herself remember, holding things in her hands as though such random acts can bring back time. ‘She wants to make him officially dead,’ she tells Kamal when they pass each other in the passageway.

‘It’s been a long time, Rach,’ he says in return.

‘She wants to have a … a wake, or memorial, or whatever …’ her voice fades out to nothing.

‘I think we all need that,’ Kamal says. ‘Maya can’t go on with no end point. You need some kind of full stop.’

‘What I need is to know is if he suffered.’

‘What will that help? If he’s …’ Kamal stops, mid-sentence.

‘Say it.’

‘Dead. If he’s dead, he’s dead.’

‘Do you think he is?’

‘I can’t imagine that he’s not.’

Later Kamal takes the child to the shopping centre for milk and bread and afterwards to the park where he sits alone on an empty bench. Jack toddles on the grass at his feet and scrunches crisp leaves in his small fists. Rachel stays in the house all day, and she doesn’t think of them at all.

Kamal lies beside her, stealing the air from the night. She’s awake, her body stuck in a heavy mattress, longing to dream. Kamal’s neck has thickened since their marriage; now it blocks the passage of air in his sleep, night after night. Her eyes feel the grit of the morning not yet come to light, a saltiness at the back of her throat that is the taste, the bitter spice, of stolen rest. He breathes and she waits. She waits for sleep, for morning, for the will of her muscles to rise. She waits for the child to cry in the next room or for something to call her. She can count the seconds according to the steady metronome of his breath. It renders her immobile.

She wants him to place the weight of his arm on top of her, to root her to the bed so that she can’t move, so that she knows her place beside him. Instead he breathes and dreams without her in an intensity of colour with which she can’t compete. She turns to face his back. She watches the summit of him and wonders about men and mountains, and what it takes to move them.

She shifts to the edge of the bed, and makes the move to the floor. Tiptoeing across the carpet, she shudders at the squeak of the door handle, but his snoring continues, uninterrupted. She closes the door behind her; she’s out, and she’s free.

Jack’s room at the end of the passage looks over the garden. Rachel keeps the blue-and-white train-print curtains open at night. She wants her son exposed to as much natural light as possible. She read somewhere that natural light maximises the production of the sleep hormone melatonin. She dreams that a perfect child would wake up with the sun and close his eyes when the moon rises.

She stands at the edge of his crib as Jack continues to sleep, just like his father. In the darkness she can barely make out his form. From the soft sounds and the shape of the mound she knows that he’s there and breathing. She remembers Thomas in his cot. Her mother’s child. She remembers their mother’s cry of surprise when he smiled for the first time, though it was not at her or at anything of the world.

She looks at Jack now and thinks of another time, a place that has slipped away from her. She doesn’t know how long she stands there. When she leaves the room she thinks it must be possible that a lifetime could pass, and in the end it would feel like only a few hours.

Beside the child’s room is the study, and on the desk a computer sighs like a sleeping beast, a medieval dragon waiting to be called. There’s a photograph beside it, her father and mother, she and Thomas as small children in black and white, smiling blithely into the sun.

She sits in the high-backed office chair. Her right hand manipulates the mouse over wood, light on the screen and a soft breathy whine from the box beside it. She opens the email programme from the selection of icons scattered on the screen, and clicks the button to Send and Receive. Four new messages, waiting to be read. The first is an advert from Kamal’s bank, offering a financial loan for a substantial interest rate. There’s a short sympathy mail from an old school friend who received news of the memorial, and a catalogue from a national chain store selling everything from Apple computers to zebra-striped couches. Then, for a moment, nothing moves – not in her eyes or the muscles of her hands. Her mouth doesn’t open or close and her breath remains even and still. Inside her appears a vision of the past, a time when she had another name. She had the same hair and eyes though her skin was smooth then, her body more rounded, but it is a vision of a time when all of her life was different.

19 Feb 20:46 Max Adams Re:

The subject line is blank. Now, after all the years, Max returns as a message on the screen. She hates it that Thomas has again brought Max into it. She wants her own obliteration of the world to be untouchable. She thinks that she could leave now, she could go back to the bed, to her breathing husband and the time that stretches out like the dark ceiling above them. She positions the arrow over Max’s name with a small movement of the mouse. Her breath draws involuntarily inward as she clicks. The opened message is short and to the point, and more disappointing than she can imagine.

From: Max Adams

To: Rachel Naidu

Cc:

Subject:

Dear Rachel

Flying into Joburg on Wednesday. Maya has offered me accommodation. Hope that’s okay with you. See you soon.

Love

Max

Max. If she believes the words there they descend on her as a time warp, the three letters of his name negating everything that surrounds her: the chair in which she sits, the computer and the desk, the child in the next room and the man who breathes and sleeps in the bedroom beyond.

Love. What right does Max have to sign the message in such a way? He who has been gone so many years, his presence nothing but a ghost that has slipped in and out of conversation. Nothing but an idea that has lessened too, now a simple flicker of the heart, like a moth’s wing beating from time to time. Her mouth draws in, tightening the skin on her neck. Max’s idea of love was never the same as hers. Once he’d told her about a film he’d watched, featuring a high-bred woman from a wealthy family and a labourer without many prospects. They never married but over the years they saw each other repeatedly, each time falling back into that same passion despite the years, despite the husbands and wives and lovers and children and commitments that passed through their separate lives. Is that what Max has imagined for them? That they would meet again through the years, while he went on to do other things, love other women? They were not the same people. Max’s kind of love has never been her kind of love. Now, after all this time, he sends her love because perhaps his heart is bigger than hers, but her response to it is still acute.

She hates it, this intrusion. She wants her grief for herself, and to be left alone with it.

She gets up and leaves the room. In the hallway she types four digits on a control panel on the wall and waits for the long beep as the alarm demobilises. In the kitchen she flicks a switch and the darkness is banished in spasms of fluorescent light. The kettle is a quarter full and she turns it on and waits in her pyjamas for the water to boil. Through the window the soft green light of dawn spreads slowly upwards into a charcoal sky.

When the cup of black tea is warm in her hands the morning emerges. Soon Jack will be up and wanting his breakfast, and the rest of the day will be stolen from her. Only these times, the early hours, give her something for herself. She wipes her cheek and places the empty cup on the counter. She returns to the study and sinks again into the leather chair. Now she activates the browser and uses a search engine to locate the website of a local discount airline. She types in a credit card number from memory and books a single seat, one way, on a flight to Johannesburg.

She tells Kamal much later, when she’s feeding Jack his supper in the kitchen. Kamal is peeling onions over newspaper and paper towels. Rachel watches the side of his face, the movement of his hand as he rubs his eyes against the sting with the back of his bent wrist. She is dressed carefully in pale jeans and a soft jersey. Jack opens his mouth and she tries to spoon apple and blackcurrant yoghurt into him, but somehow it ends up on his chin.

‘The funeral’s a week away,’ Kamal says.

‘I know, but I need to be there now.’

‘You need to be here. With me and Jack.’ He looks at her. The knife hangs loosely from his hand. ‘We can all go together, on Friday.’

‘I need to be with Maya. She’s Thomas’s wife.’ Rachel holds the spoon out, willing Jack to take it from her and feed himself, but his hands are pulling at his small clothes.

‘We’re your family too, Rachel.’

‘You can drive up on Friday if you want to. Or Saturday early. Leave Jack with your mother.’

‘Why do you have to go so early?’

They both look at her, the child and his father.

‘Because my brother is dead,’ she says.

It is the morning of the day she is to leave. The bedroom curtains fall to the ground. Six-thirty. Kamal moves his arm to shut off the sound of the ringing alarm clock. Rachel swings her legs over the side of the bed and rises first, before him.

In the bathroom she drops a rooibos teabag into the basin with the hot tap running. When the water is the colour of jewelled amber she turns off the tap and splashes her face in a hopeful belief that some component of the tea is anti-ageing. She brushes her teeth and smooths out her skin with thick cream, and returns to the bedroom.

Kamal is upright now, on the edge of the bed, his hair at odd angles to his head. He rubs his face with large hands to clear his vision, pushes his fingers like a coarse comb backwards through his hair.

Rachel takes white underwear from the cupboard, a pale sleeved pullover and a long skirt, and goes back to the bathroom, closing the door between them.

When she is naked, she hesitates. She retrieves the bathroom scale from where it is tucked beneath a pile of towels that are waiting to be washed in the linen cupboard. The scale clunks down on the floor and she stands on it. The relief to her is immeasurable, like a cigarette to a smoker, like heroin to the addict. She knows the motion of the numbers behind the needle and it comforts her. She knows the sound as the numbers swing to find their place. She knows the excitement inside herself as the digits blur and the moment waits and it’s as though she’s a punter willing on the winning horse to cross the line. Back and forth the numbers swing, while the red needle marker decides on the verdict, and there it is. She’s failed. She’s sure it’s wrong, she bends over and aligns the red needle with zero. She steps on the scale again. There is no mistaking it. Two kilograms up.

She dresses slowly, her face a wall of chiselled marble. Kamal comes into the bathroom to shave. He sees the scale and looks at her face. She sees the creases etched into his forehead, the deep lines in his cheeks that have come about from a pliable mouth. Kamal always finds it easy to smile.

He shakes his head. ‘You’re not doing this again.’ He’s not smiling now. He looks tired.

She wants to throw herself against him, to collapse into his arms if she knew he would have her there. Instead she says, ‘Don’t look at me like that.’ She turns to the mirror to examine her skin.

‘I’m not criticising you, Rachel,’ he says. ‘I’m just tired of your games. You’ve got a child now. You can’t be selfish. You can’t play with your health.’ His accent deepens when he speaks to her, as though he becomes more of himself. He starts to sound like his mother, and less like he ever belonged to her.

‘I’ve got a child? Since when did our child become mine?’

He laughs in an attempt to lighten the air around her.

‘You just don’t spend enough time with him.’

He pulls the plug in the basin and puts the wet teabag aside, letting the jewelled liquid go. He runs fresh water from the tap and lathers up his face. ‘I work every day to feed us all,’ he says. ‘Try living without me and the work I do.’

‘If I only had the chance.’

If he hears her he doesn’t respond.

‘Sometimes I think you don’t want me any more,’ she tells him. She makes a pretence of creaming her face again, plucking stray hairs from her eyebrows. He says nothing. He moves the razor across his cheeks and she watches as pathways are made in the snow of the cream on his skin. ‘I can’t even remember the last time we had sex,’ she tells him. ‘Or a conversation.’

He turns and holds the razor midway between his shoulder and his jaw. ‘What do you call this?’

‘This isn’t a conversation. This is me talking to a wall.’

His eyes are stone. Not the cool grey-blue of seaside shale but a deep, penetrating brown. Hardened lava close to the liquid burning at the centre of the earth. ‘Look at you,’ he says. ‘Listen to you. I’m too scared to touch you in case you snap in half.’

She stares at his reflection through the mirror. His words bring her back to where she is.

‘I have to wake Jack,’ she says.

‘Rachel.’

She pauses at the bathroom door. ‘What?’

‘Your brother may be dead. Don’t try to kill us, too.’

In the kitchen she sits with the child in his chair and the kettle boiling, cereal on a spoon in her hand. Kamal comes in dressed in a brown shirt and pale jeans. He flicks the switch on the wall and the steam subsides, disappearing back into the kettle again.

‘Thanks,’ she says.

When he’s made her tea he brings it over, and places the mug on the window sill. He moves his hand to her face and holds her chin. It forces her to look at him. ‘What are you doing today?’ he asks.

‘No plans. I’ll go shopping for the week, so you and Jack will have enough to eat while I’m gone.’

‘Hey,’ he says softly, ‘I know it’s hard.’

She thinks of his architect’s studio downstairs, the place that swallows him whole every day. This man who is nothing like her knows everything that she is, discovers always what is hidden.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asks.

She looks at him. His eyes are on her. He wants to see where she’s hiding and something inside her gives towards him, yields to him momentarily. The child takes the spoon from her hand and waves it in the air until there is porridge in his hair and on the floor.

‘Like I could float away,’ she whispers.

He takes her to the airport in the evening. They travel the whole way there without words. The big roads twist through the suburbs and she watches the houses change the further away from the nucleus of Durban they go. There is the clean suburban tranquillity and then the neat RDP structures that sit like boxes on the hill, and further on are the makeshift informal settlements where any construction material at all will do. What random hand of fate decides where we end up in life, she wonders as she watches the local world spin by. Why are the rich and the poor viewed almost as separate species when we love, hate and bleed the same, when we carry the same prejudices? Why is one woman’s fate to be a domestic worker all of her life, and another’s to pay for the services of that worker, all of her life and with little chance, ever, for those roles to reverse? Why is transformation essentially an academic term, when the majority of those affected never experience anything different from what they know? Why is status mistakenly judged by what we have, where we live, the way that words are formed, shaped in the mouth? Why, when we are all born with a brain and a heart and two hands?

When they arrive at the airport Kamal pulls into the drop-off zone and the engine idles without turning off.

‘I feel like you’re leaving me,’ he says, looking ahead.

‘Take care of Jack.’ She fumbles in her bag for the identity document that will confirm who she is when she collects her ticket.

‘I’ll see you on Saturday. If I fly up I might ask you to fetch me.’

‘I won’t have a car,’ Rachel says. ‘You might have to catch the Gautrain.’

‘You could organise something. You could borrow Maya’s car.’

Rachel looks at the tarmac.

‘Don’t shut me out.’ His voice is soft and low, but his eyes are elsewhere, watching an aircraft cut through the sky.

‘Thanks for the lift,’ she says. She leans forward, and kisses him on the side of his face.

‘Rachel,’ he says. ‘Don’t leave me, Rachel.’

His words float on the moment before they dissipate. Already she’s walking away from him, a small and fragile shape of cloth and bone and hair.