Читать книгу All That is Left - Kirsten Miller - Страница 9

The roar of the engine fills Rachel’s head, hollow bubbles of pressure popping in her ears. The plane hurtles through clouds with no supporting ropes or lines attached. It could drop like a stone from the sky.

‘Chicken mayonnaise or beef and chilli?’ the flight attendant asks. Beside the cellophane that holds the food, a boxed juice stands with a straw on the side, and beside that, a half-sized chocolate bar with the logo of the airline emblazoned on the wrapper.

‘I’ll have a fruit meal, please,’ Rachel says. The flight attendant sporting a mask of make-up shakes her head and tells her that she should have ordered the fruit and vegetarian meals when she made her booking. The woman turns to the next customer and Rachel touches her arm to get her attention again.

‘Could I just have the juice, then?’

‘I can’t open a whole meal box for one juice,’ the woman says. ‘You’ll have to wait for the drinks cart.’

‘I’ll take a whole meal box then.’

She hands Rachel a box of beef and chilli and pushes the trolley further forward in the aisle.

Rachel focuses her eyes on the sky to keep her stomach in place. She opens the box in her lap and takes out the juice. She didn’t recognise how thirsty she is, how little has been in her stomach of late. She drinks in deep gulps. The man beside her smiles and leans into her space. She tilts her head towards the window and tries to sink into the seat. His breath smells of layers of peppermint and garlic and stale cigarette smoke.

‘If you’re not going to have your roll, I will,’ he says.

‘Help yourself,’ she answers without looking at him. She hands him the box with the roll and the chocolate.

‘You live in Joburg?’ he asks.

‘Durban.’

‘Okay. Business then?’

She tries to keep from breathing in too hard. The rankness of his breath overwhelms her. His arm touches her elbow and she moves it off the armrest, to her side. ‘No.’ Her eyes smart, and she blinks. ‘I’m not working … at the moment.’

‘Okay, so you’re wealthy. Or maybe you don’t buy all this women’s empowerment stuff.’

‘My brother died.’

‘Oh my god, I’m sorry.’

He unwraps the food and chews slowly. She hopes that he wants only her food and not her conversation, and she turns back to the window to face the clouds that rise like giant mountains. She thinks that to put yourself through life is like putting a hand through a cloud – that there is nothing solid to hold on to.

The man swallows. ‘My sister died five years ago,’ he says. ‘It’s something that … I think it never goes away.’

She turns back to him and examines his small eyes. For the first time he seems to have blood beneath his skin. There is life there, behind the façade.

‘What doesn’t?’

‘I could say pain, but it’s not that. It’s … the emptiness. The nothing.’

‘How did she die?’

‘She was shot in a robbery. She worked in a shop, in a suburban mall. It was a hold-up, for the cash register. She was caught in the crossfire. Unfortunate.’ He shrugs. ‘She died on the scene. On the floor. Imagine that.’ He picks at crumbs on his lap with his fingers. ‘Your work can actually kill you.’

‘Thomas’s car was found burnt out. There was no body but … we have to presume they took him somewhere, killed him and buried the body. It’s easier to just accept it that way.’

‘Well,’ the man proffers as he squashes the box in his sausage fingers and places it on the small tray table in front of him. ‘There’s always hope. Maybe he’ll come back. If there’s no body yet.’

‘Not much hope in this country.’

‘Not much in any country.’

‘We’re having a funeral for him anyway.’

The man leans back, closes his eyes. ‘There’s not much sense in it that I can see.’

‘What, in a funeral?’

‘No. In what happened to him. When death comes, it makes everything else in this life pretty senseless.’

The aircraft lands and Rachel watches the wing flaps do their work. She waits for the roar of the engine to subside in her ears. She blinks and hears the announcer’s voice. Although she can’t make out the words she knows what they contain and her body jolts with the connection of the wheels to solid ground. She puts her head back. She and this man beside her are together and close for this moment, side by side; for the first and only time in their lives they are not strangers. When the plane ceases to move the seatbelt lights switch off. Eventually the aircraft is almost empty of people, and Rachel stands. The man beside her puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘You know what they say,’ he says.

‘What do they say?’

‘The only way out is through.’ He moves on ahead of her up the aisle. People fill the spaces between them. Soon he is gone from her sight.

‘Lift, lady? C’mon, I can take you anywhere!’

‘No thanks.’

The taxi driver retreats to the door of his cab. His smile fades and she averts her eyes to avoid the needy pleas of the drivers haunting the airport doors.

A green car pulls up alongside the curb. The door is flung open and a woman, thin and angular, steps out from the driver’s side. Her dark waist-length hair flies backwards as she moves around the car. ‘Maya,’ Rachel says.

When they finally let go of each other, Maya snaps open the boot of the car and heaves the long suitcase into it. As the vehicle manoeuvres out of the brightly lit airport, Maya leans across Rachel’s lap and pulls at the latch of the cubbyhole. Her bony fingers fold around a pack of cigarettes and a blue lighter. With a practised hand she withdraws a cigarette from the pack and lights it, then places the box and lighter in Rachel’s lap. ‘Have one if you want,’ she says.

‘I haven’t smoked in years. I’ll be sick.’

‘Whoever thought I’d be smoking again.’

‘If there was ever a reason to start, this must be it,’ Rachel says. ‘Can’t think of a better one.’

A truck veers out of the next lane without warning and swerves in front of them. Maya hits her foot hard on the brake and hoots and gives a middle finger to the driver as she pulls out and passes him again. She leans forward with her cigarette dangling from her lips and places both hands on the wheel, concentrating on the lights of the traffic that penetrate the darkness. Her face glistens behind hair that hangs as a curtain half-drawn. Rachel sees that it is neither the lights nor the bright traffic outside that illuminates her face and makes it glisten, but that her cheeks are wet with tears.

‘They haven’t found him yet,’ Rachel says.

‘Of course they haven’t fucking found him. They’ll probably only pull his case file out of a drawer in five years’ time.’

‘I can’t imagine what you must be going through,’ Rachel says.

Maya looks at her with eyes round and heavy-lidded and Rachel wishes she would look at the road ahead instead.

‘You can’t imagine? He was your brother. You’re going through it too.’

‘My brother. Not my husband.’

‘You’ve known him since he was born.’

‘Your future’s just been obliterated.’ Rachel stares out of the window, trying to imagine the face of her own husband.

And then she realises that her lips are moving and her mind knows what she should say but her heart doesn’t believe it, doesn’t believe in any future when she thinks of the face of the man to whom she is married. She doesn’t know what love is, any more. She doesn’t have any words left, even for the man she is joined to.

At the house the stillness crushes with the gravel beneath their feet as they walk the path to the kitchen door. ‘How can you still bear to live here?’ Rachel asks.

‘How can I not?’ Maya says.

‘What if he just walked through the door?’

‘He’d better bloody not. Not after what I’ve been through.’

Rachel thinks that she is only half-joking.

There are flowers everywhere in the sitting room, formally arranged in bouquets beside the television and on the mantelpiece and looser collections of wild bunches, the ones Thomas would have liked, on the floor and on the table.

‘Not really my thing, flowers,’ Maya says as Rachel moves into the room. ‘Not like this anyway. I like them in the ground. Think how much money is in this room, in the form of these fucking flowers.’

‘Maybe the flowers aren’t for you.’

‘Thomas is dead. He can’t even see them. It’s a waste. He would’ve hated them.’ Maya’s shoulders rise and fall. ‘How the hell did it happen, Rach?’

‘How do you know he’s dead? Maybe … maybe he is locked up in a room somewhere. A prisoner, or …’

‘I’m sick of people fucking saying that. He’s dead. I can feel it in my bones. I know he is. I have to believe it now. It’s the only thing I can do.’

‘I could always picture myself alone,’ Maya says as she leaves the room. From the kitchen her voice is raised so Rachel can still hear her. ‘But not so early in my life. Not like this. I thought I could choose. I thought I might choose, one day. But there aren’t any choices, are there? Everything just happens to us. We grin and bear it. Or just bear it.’

On the wall to the right of the television set is a picture of Thomas on a rockface, gripping an overhang with strong, sure fingers as he looks up at the obscured summit, the world sprawling below him. Rachel remembers the day it was taken, long ago, before marriages and children, before contracts and home loans and mowed lawns and responsibilities, before they had anything to spend their salaries on apart from their own leisure and entertainment. Before life had brought them a kind of endless ambivalence.

He could have fallen then, she thinks. She wants to say it aloud, that just to live still feels like a risk every day. It is true. Anything can happen, to anyone. At any time.

Maya comes back into the room with a plate of sandwiches and coffee on a tray, accompanied by the cigarettes and lighter. She sits down on the couch opposite Rachel. ‘How are Kamal and Jack?’ she asks. Though her mouth is smiling, her eyes are glimmering and watery.

‘They’re fine. Kamal sends love,’ Rachel answers. But it isn’t true. She didn’t give Kamal the space to send anything. She sits and takes a cup between her hands, but she doesn’t drink the coffee. She puts the mug to one side. Just a sip would make her sick. She can picture herself alone, too.

The cat walks into the room on soft paws. She arches her back and sits on the floor like a carved figurine. Maya calls to her with a whistling sound, but the cat narrows her eyes and looks away.

‘I still can’t get used to the thought that you have a child,’ Maya says. ‘It’s so strange.’ She looks up from the abyss of her own cup into Rachel’s eyes. ‘I want to get to know Jack,’ she says. ‘And Thomas … Thomas never got to see him.’

‘There’s not that much to know,’ Rachel replies. ‘He’s still so small.’ She pauses and wonders how much of the truth she can tell. ‘My old life feels strange to me now. The time when there was no Jack.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Twenty-five months. Almost.’ Someone else might have said he’s two and a bit, but Rachel doesn’t think like that. She counts only the weeks and months as they pass, and she knows that time really ticks by very slowly, minute by endless minute.

Maya pushes the plate of sandwiches across the table. She takes one for herself and, leaning back in her chair, bites into it. ‘Will we see them on Saturday?’ she asks.

‘Kamal will fly up if he can get his mother to babysit. It’s difficult to have Jack out of his normal routine.’

Kamal loves Durban and its heat. He walks naked around the house when the summer envelops the suburbs and gets trapped between the still branches of trees. He sits at his desk and works in the unbearable evenings without clothes on. She suggests air-conditioning, but he hates the idea of an artificial cold. Sometimes the rains come, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes she lies beside him on the bed with the covers off and the fan’s blades racing on the ceiling above them. In the early days of their life together, she’d lie naked beside her husband at night. Then she’d enjoyed the different tones of their flesh pressed together. Later she’d started to wear a cotton vest and a pair of shorts to bed. Clothes made her feel secure, as though her flesh, craving a boundary, could be contained, held together by the weave of cloth.

Rachel eyes the sandwiches and imagines sinking her teeth into the comforting mixture of baked bread, soft yellow cheese and crisp lettuce, combined with the tart sharp tang of the tomato. Her mouth waters for wanting, for hunger and comfort, but she can’t bring herself to do it.

‘You must eat something,’ Maya says, as though reading her mind. ‘You must eat or you’ll fall over. Look at you, you look like a twig. Snappable.’

‘I’m fine. I ate on the plane,’ Rachel lies. It borders on bizarre, she thinks, this need to feed. Nobody tells an overweight person, You’re too fat, you must stop eating. That would be rude. But to try to feed someone up is acceptable, noble even, and a sign of concern.

There is something else between them. The food sits as a side issue. Maya hesitates, taking a breath. Then she says, ‘Rachel. Max is coming.’

Rachel stares at the sandwiches.

‘He’ll be in the city for a week. I told him he could stay here.’

Rachel looks up. ‘I know,’ she smiles. ‘He emailed me.’ She takes a sandwich, then stops herself and puts it back.

Maya’s forehead folds in puzzled creases. ‘I didn’t know you were still in contact.’

‘We’re not. I … I suppose he thought he should check with me.’

‘I hope it’s okay. That it’s not too weird between you.’

‘Max is a married man. I have a husband and child at home. Please Maya, I haven’t seen him for years. Why should I mind?’

‘His wife’s not coming. She’s staying in New York, with the children.’

Rachel says nothing. She looks back at the picture of her brother ascending the cliff face. Besides the flowers it is the only evidence in the room that Thomas ever actually lived there.

‘Rach? Are you sure you’re fine with that?’

Rachel lets out a sigh that ends in a laugh. ‘I don’t really have a choice.’

They don’t speak of Thomas again, but he is there in the picture and in the air all around them. Rachel has a strange feeling that at any moment he might walk through the door. If he is dead now she doesn’t know what the concept means. Maya must have been living with this feeling all the time, living with the dead half-alive in her head, watching his ghost walk through the door again and again and knowing each time that there is no parallel universe or place from which he is watching. That he is not coming back, no matter what.

Later she lies in the darkness, her limbs aching in the cold. She knows the root of this sleeplessness, that it is not about Thomas, but is instead the price of her control. When she is sure that she can hear Maya’s breathing in the next room through the open doors, Rachel rises from the bed and wraps her cotton gown around herself and finds the kitchen in the dark. She closes the door and at the flick of the wall switch light floods the room.

This is where she’d stood and talked with Thomas about what was important and what was not. Family things – their mother’s illness or financial arrangements or how their lives had changed over the years, now that they were both adults and living apart with separate lives. She hadn’t seen him much in recent years, after a whole childhood of togetherness, a shared youth. Time in London and then the gradual decline into a life watered down: one house, one life, one husband, one wife. They spoke less on the phone and over time they discovered that there was less to talk about. When their mother died they’d held on to each other and cried because both knew without words that the one person who’d tied them to their past was gone. The remaining two of an immediate family. They might have grown together, but instead they grew apart.

She fills the kettle and pushes the red switch to heat the water. She opens the fridge door and peers into it. Signs of her brother are here, signs of a man who was part of a couple and who had a life apart from hers. Preserved red peppers stuffed with soft cheese, sesame crackers and tubes of green wasabi paste. He’d never eat it now. Their childhood had been one of plain chicken on white rice and rough lettuce salads. These current exotic tastes are Maya’s influence on her brother, over time. Who is Maya, this woman he lived with and loved, with whom he shared a bed and all his private moments? Are such foods her choice, or did Thomas develop a more discernible palate in time, when he began to earn so much that most of his income turned out to be disposable? He’d begun to tell his stories through pictures early in his life, through the images that he captured on the street with a cheap manual camera. By his mid-twenties he was winning awards and publishing coffee-table books and everybody wanted to commission him, to interview him, to pay him small fortunes for his work. He was good, there was no question of that. More than this, he was a man who knew his own value. He created his life through his self-belief. Again and again, he had done what Rachel never could.

The switch on the kettle clicks and she retrieves a mug from the cupboard and cuts thin slices of ginger to go with her boiling water. She takes a spoon from the drawer and eats three mouthfuls of Greek yoghurt from the fridge. As she swallows she feels the coolness on her throat, she imagines the calcium that will feed her and something in the movement of swallowing and the comfort in the act of eating makes her at last feel something close to calm.

* * *

Five years old over breakfast. Five years old and poached egg on toast with hardened yolk that wedged and tightened in the throat and would not go down. ‘Sit there until you’ve finished your breakfast,’ her mother said.

‘I hate egg,’ Rachel replied.

There was a phone call and her mother left the room. Thomas slipped off the chair on his side of the breakfast table. He lifted his plate of scrambled egg and toast fingers. He moved across the kitchen floor to the door out back and on the outside, just to the left of the doorframe, he bent and scraped his breakfast into the dog’s bowl. The cross-bred golden retriever wiggled and squirmed and slapped her chops until the boy moved away. The dog devoured the nutrition meant for Thomas in a single gulp. Thomas returned to the table and placed his plate there. He climbed back onto his chair and drank his chocolate milk.

‘You can’t do that,’ Rachel told him. ‘You can’t give your food to the dog.’

‘She’s hungry,’ Thomas said. His eyes told her, Food is only necessary when you need sustenance. Sometimes the stomach tells you that eating without hunger is pointless.

Footsteps sounded in the passage and their mother returned. ‘Good boy, Thomas. You’ve eaten all your egg. You’ll grow nice and strong. Now we have to wait for your sister.’

Wait for your sister. Your sister’s slow. Your sister’s late. Your sister’s not quite there yet. Thomas grinned and caught a maternal kiss on his head for his blue eyes. Rachel choked on her egg and felt the bile in her stomach rising, rising, until it reached her eyes in undisguised tears.

‘And crying’s not going to help you, either,’ her mother said.

An hour later when the egg was gone, Rachel asked for chocolate milk. Instead her mother poured filtered water from the jug and handed it to her. ‘Thomas needs his milk, he’s a growing boy,’ she said. ‘Too much milk will make you fat.’

She took the full glass outside and watered the flowers in the sunshine, where daylight played between shade and the spaces to hide.

* * *

In the morning Rachel says to Maya, ‘I’ll help you in any way I can. Just tell me what you need.’

Maya is eating toast and answering phone calls between mouthfuls, and somewhere Rachel’s words are lost amidst Maya’s chewing and the phone’s ringing.

‘I have to go to work,’ Maya tells her. ‘I’ll be back this afternoon. I have a meeting with Sizwe after five. He’s doing the poetry on Saturday but he’ll come to the house so you’ll meet him then. You remember Sizwe?’

‘I’ve never met him.’

‘Thank god for Sizwe. He’s the only person who’s held himself together through this nightmare. He’s been a rock.’

‘Can I organise anything?’

‘I don’t think so. We won’t have any flowers. Obviously no coffin. Without a body it’s pointless. A short memorial at the Botanical Gardens with the spoken word performance, and then tea in the functions room to end off. Simple. People can come back here afterwards for a drink if they want to. Thomas wasn’t religious anyway. There’s not much to do, though thanks. I need to get to work now.’

‘You’re working, Maya? Through this time?’

‘What else is there to do? Sit at home and mope? I think I’d go mad. It would be the end for me.’

When Maya is gone, Rachel walks the map of the house, her bare feet hollow on the wooden floorboards. She hates the sound. There is nobody left here. If she waits, no one will come, not until the afternoon. She can’t eat and because she can’t eat she can’t sleep. Escapism through either is impossible. She moves from room to room. The weight of her body connects with the floor and she listens to her own footsteps. She knows that now she truly walks alone, now that her whole family is gone, the family that was with her at the beginning have all vanished into the earth or into the ether and here she is, still walking the world, this country, this city and this house. Here she is alone in this room where she now stands.

The last time she was in Johannesburg she was with Kamal. They had come for a wedding, the nuptials of a girl from Kamal’s family on his mother’s side whom everybody knew to be too young, too soft, too impressionable still to tie her life to another’s so soon. As the girl put on the headdress, hitched up her sari and staggered around on stilettos, a smile spread on her face as wide as the future.

‘Marriage is a strange choice for someone as young as you are,’ Rachel had said, studying the intricate henna patterns on the girl’s hands.

‘Marriage wasn’t meant for the old and ugly,’ the girl answered, leaning backwards on her heels, almost collapsing. ‘I’m ready.’

Rachel held Kamal’s hand during the ceremony in the giant hall. She took his beautiful brown fingers and linked them with her own as the rituals played out. Kamal looked down, surprised, at the top of her head. They rarely held hands any more. But it wasn’t just that. Love changed, and love changed people. With marriage sometimes came the need for more space, less touch. It was as though the wedding itself was the melting pot for human hearts, and the rest of time afterwards was about learning to live alone again.

After the wedding she’d watched Thomas and Maya closely. Then she’d thought her theory all wrong. Her brother still touched his wife as though they were new lovers. He put his hands on Maya’s shoulders, she clung to his waist. They retained a physical affection that was still publicly demonstrated, something that seemed naturally lost to couples with children. Children brought something else to a marriage, and equally took something away. Childlessness preserved an innocence, some kind of affection. Thomas and Maya still clung to each other for comfort, for entertainment, for companionship, and they still had conversations that sustained themselves through content, rather than arguing or drifting into meaninglessness. Sometimes Rachel believed that relationships could recover from the ravages of family and domestic life. Sometimes, once the glue of the children no longer held, she thought there might be nothing else to fall back on.

Sometimes Kamal spent the night away for work, and she revelled in the solitude his absence brought once Jack was fed and asleep. She spent more and more time at the park, in the shopping malls with Jack in the daytime. She began to resent it that Kamal worked from home, although he had built their house, although he had made their lives comfortable, although he still tried to reach for her in the private spaces of their relationship. But even in the dual conspiracy of the marital bed she had felt their separateness growing. She turned from him and feigned sleep because she wanted most desperately not to share it any more, but to claim her own body back.

She had fed Jack from her breast until she felt sucked dry, until she stopped consuming nutrients enough to allow that he might benefit from her body. Rather than give it away, rather than share it all around, she wanted to withdraw her own self to make it invisible, to make her body disappear. She wanted to fly back in time, back to cold grey streets where she could walk forever and never meet a person who knew her, or who would want anything from her. Now she was connected to people and an extended family that she barely understood. Now she was expected to come up with presents and dinners and visits to people she would never otherwise have chosen, if she had not chosen Kamal.

Would Jack grow up and wonder if his parents were happy? Was this a phase that would stretch on through time until they were old and Jack was gone from the house, until their lives remained half-lived and they must decide if there is still enough of a bond between them to go through with it, all the way into old age? Perhaps they would continue to dream of another kind of life – one that would become increasingly impossible to achieve with every passing day.