Читать книгу The Elephant in the Room - Maya Fowler - Страница 10

Gran let Mom and Dad move into this house when they got married, but now it’s just us and Mom because Dad is dead. It has a room for each of us. Beth and I are upstairs, because she likes to look down on stuff, and Mom is downstairs with Gracie.

Sometimes, when people are being very mean to each other where Laetitia lives, she gets to stay here too, only nobody is allowed to know. Gran will have a heart attack if she hears, and other people might make trouble for us, so we have to hush.

Laetitia’s room is the old pantry next to the kitchen. She has a fold-up bed in there, a rail for clothes and a little black Philips radio. She’s used Prestik to stick a big poster of Brenda Fassie on her wall. She’s always singing, Laetitia, and she’s been teaching us “Weekend Special”, which we belt out on our beach bats when Gracie isn’t sleeping.

I love this house, and I know Gran is really proud of it. It’s where she grew up, too. That’s why the floors creak. They’re old and wooden. The house is painted pink, but it really has two colours, because of the stone. The bottom half of the ground floor is all stone, and stones curve around the tops of the arched windows. Upstairs we have a balcony, which is a nice place to sit when you want to be by yourself. Mom sits up there a lot, mending things, or sometimes just doing nothing, and stares at the sea. You can always hear it from our house, like breathing.

I feel safe, tucked between sea and mountain. In winter the mountain pulls its dark blanket over us early, and some nights, the sea turns to a frothy boiler. Once, the whole of the Brass Bell almost got swept away, and at times like that you realise how lucky you are to be just a little way up the hill.

The house has lots of secret places besides the balcony. Upstairs is a linen cupboard with a little round window in it, just like the one in my room. The smell of lavender sits lightly on everything in the cupboard, and Mom knows when I’ve been in there, because I have the smell. It’s a good place for reading. I can’t read properly yet, but I can look at pictures. I squeeze myself into the corner as far as I can, and page through my story books by the light of the little window. There’s Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and her twelve fairies, Cinderella, The Snow Queen, all books Gran bought Mom when she was little. Everybody is thin and beautiful, with high cheekbones and lots of blusher. They live in a world with snow, magic, everlasting love, pine forests, red squirrels, pink and green sparrows, and greenery everywhere.

The front garden goes down in steps. Gran calls it a terrace, and right in front of the house is a really big yucca tree. It’s super tall and ends in spiky, sticking-out leaves. The stem and branches look like they could explode with fatness. If that happened, I think the whole house would be covered in thick green slime, like what pops out when you squash a caterpillar. Beth and I did that the other day. She stomped, and we both watched the juice squirt out and land against a stone. I had a try stomping, too. It’s OK, because caterpillars are bad. They eat all your flowers, and if you’re not careful, they’ll ruin your whole garden.

Because our street is quiet, we’re allowed to play in it. Even from there you can see the sea, and the mountains on the other side of False Bay. Mom says those are the Stellenbosch mountains.

For us, the street’s more interesting than mountains across the water. But our favourite thing is the dip. This is where the street suddenly goes downhill, and where the tar changes to cobblestones. Beth and I both have plastic scooters that rattle over the dip. I should say rattled – after the neighbours complained to Mom about all the screeching and barking that went with the rattling (and the wailing afterwards, that last time), our scooters have been banned from the street. Now we have to use our God-given feet.

Our neighbours – not all of them complained about the rattling – are colourful. That’s Gran’s word. Anyway, what I like best about them is how they love music. The man on our left plays the cello, and sometimes, late at night, I hear the long notes in the dark. But he’s very shy, and I don’t even know his name. The house on the other side is all stone and arches in front. The woman who lives there is called Annabelle le Roux, and jazz is her thing. She plays records all the time. Gran isn’t sure about jazz, she says it’s like smoking and leads to a Beemian Lifestyle, What Next. But I think the jazz is great, and my favourites are “It Don’t Mean a Thing” and “It’s a Pity to Say Goodnight”.

One of Beth’s favourites is sung by a lady, and it’s called “Paper Moon”. We stand in front of Annabelle’s open window, which is too high up for her to see us. When “Paper Moon” comes on, we shake out our arms and legs to get ready. Beth has made up a dance that goes with the words, and we shake our hips at the part where she sings “treboo treboo treboo” and some other nonsense words. We also mime, but it always gets too exciting for Beth, and then we have to run to the back corner of the garden to perform to the nasturtiums, where Beth can sing at full volume.

“Say it’s only a paper moon,” we sing, our arms making the shape of a big round moon, “sailing over a cardboard sea,” and our hands shiver to show the waves. “But it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me.” Here, Beth gets totally carried away and sings at the top of her voice: “Yes it’s only a candle sky, hanging over a Mus-lim tree, but it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me.” My favourite part is the bit about the honky-tonk parade, though I don’t know what that is or what a candle sky or Muslim tree could possibly be.

Annabelle wears too many earrings and long, flowing robes and capes in purples and wine-red, something between Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood, except that she’s too old and fat to be in a fairy tale. There’s always lots of silver clanging jewellery brushing against the velvet. A woman like this can’t be trusted. Gran says she’s probably hiding a crystal ball and other heathen bits and bobs in the back. Even when her records aren’t playing, she’s making music just by walking around. So that’s why I like her, even if Gran has her doubts.

“She has chipped nails,” I once heard Mom say to Gran as she peered over her teacup. Mom’s own nails are always bright red, and she does them almost every day. Not just her fingers, but also her toes. We aren’t allowed to use her nail polish; she says that she’s a grown-up, and for her to go out with naked toes is far too naked, but for children it’s different. A lady must take care of herself, she says. She will sit with the painting for hours. Red is a difficult colour. I know, because I tried it once in secret. It’s impossible to hide when you make a mistake. If Mom paints over the lines, she says “Damn” and wipes the whole nail on a ball of cotton wool.

Me and Beth, we like to watch. We hold our breath and hover over Mom.

“Don’t hover!”

Mom usually doesn’t say much, but when she does it comes out really fast, “Don-tovr.” She’s too busy concentrating to look up, but she knows we’re there. We move just a little bit back, and then stare again. I always start breathing through my mouth, trying not to give us away, and that’s when I do.

“Get back, you’re cramping my style,” she says. Then we go back a tiny bit, and watch. Her hand slips and she paints her skin.

“Damn,” says Beth.

“Get out of here!” shouts Mom, so we do.

Laetitia goes to Annabelle’s house after work sometimes. We see her taking off her doek and uniform, and she laughs with Annabelle and dances to the jazz. I’ve never seen anything like it. She calls Annabelle by her name and drinks coffee out of proper mugs, not an enamel one that gets kept under the sink. We see this as we peep through the window, but it’s our secret. Not even Beth will tell Gran, because then our chances of seeing the crystal ball will be ruined forever.

* * *

I love my room, with its little round window. On the other side is a big window, from where I can see a tree, with birds hopping around in the branches. The little window is my secret friend. I feel like it lets me see things that other people can’t, because it looks like a peephole, and it’s high up, where no other window would be. I have to push a chair up against the wall to look out of it properly, but sometimes at night I lie in bed and look at the stars until I fall asleep.

On Gran’s farm, the stars are much brighter. The sky doesn’t look foggy at night, like it does at home. We visit Gran and Grampa at Easter time, and sometimes over school holidays.

Grampa is very old, but still likes to farm. He cuts his beard short, and it makes him look like he’s always smiling. He walks around with that smiley look, but the way he pushes his hips forward makes his skinny bottom look even flatter. His bony shoulders look bonier because he pulls them up, with his neck sunk into his body.

Sometimes soup lands in his beard, and then Gran says, “Hendrik!” and Grampa smiles and pretends he can’t find his serviette until Gran says, “For heaven’s sakes!” and sticks her head under the table. But, once, Gran told Gesiena to crawl under the table to find it, and that was the last time Grampa lost his serviette. Now he feeds scraps of food to Pietertjie the sausage dog and sometimes slips up when he says grace.

He’s always doing funny things like that. One time in church they were saying a thing called the Creed, and instead of saying that Jesus sits at the right hand of God, he said by mistake that Jesus was sitting at the right hand of Pontius Pilate. This made him laugh for the rest of the service, only he had to pretend that he wasn’t laughing, because of all the people, and because of Gran, who fed him a Halls to calm him down.

“Ooh, the old madam gave me a fishy eye,” he says, and winks at me. Gran isn’t allowed to know that he calls her the madam.

Grampa snores very loudly. Gran even has to wear earplugs to bed.

“Nothing will wake that man,” she complains. “He snores like a tractor, yet gets a peaceful night’s rest, night after night.” She shakes her head. “And the way he eats!”

Once she’s started with her list of Things, you know you’re going to be listening for a while.

“Seconds for him, every night, and the pudding!”

Gran doesn’t approve of Grampa, because she doesn’t really like anyone to enjoy themselves too much.

The other problem with Grampa is his language. He uses some terrible words, and Gran doesn’t like that one bit. She doesn’t say anything when he does it, but then afterwards she talks about it. So when he swears, we watch Gran, and she looks at us with big eyes and a tight mouth, and she closes her fists in a “You see what I’m talking about!” kind of way. There’s one dreadful word that Grampa uses, that Gran never even notices. He says it a lot, and Mom has told us it’s such a terrible word, we must never ever say it. It’s the k-word. Beth wanted to know from Mom if it’s worse than fuck, and Mom said, yes, definitely, but never say that either.

* * *

Today Grampa is wearing wellies because it’s raining, but usually he farms in funny-looking shoes he calls brogues. He polishes them with brown Nugget every day. He also has newer ones for town and church. The neighbours laugh at Grampa’s shoes. They say it’s an English affectation of his wife’s, but Gran really doesn’t care what Grampa has on his feet, as long as they can be wiped clean on a doormat.

At bedtime, Grampa gives us a hug. His beard has a soft scratch to it, like dry leaves. It smells like coffee and chocolate. Some people say his beard makes him look like the Duke of Kent, but he says no, the Duke looks like a Scottish terrier, so he doesn’t think so.

Sometimes Grampa sneaks up on us, but it’s always a joke. “Oh-ho-ho, you’re your mother’s child,” he says to me when he finds me with my hand in the biscuit tin. And then he pours me a glass of milk to go with my biscuit. It’s thick and creamy, straight from the cow. We sit down together, me with my biscuit and milk, him with his black, sludgy coffee that looks like tar and tastes as bitter as aloes, and he tells me stories about the farm and its people. Sometimes Beth finds us in the kitchen, and then Grampa offers her a chair, a snack and a drink, and then we both listen.

Grampa loves this land of round hills and small dams. He says his roots are stuck in it, same as the blue gum tree’s roots. And the blue gum didn’t start off here, either.

Grampa tells us why his father moved here almost a hundred years ago. “The sheep, they vrekked one after the other,” he explains. “It’s a difficult life when you can’t feed your animals. Because then you can’t feed your family either.” He sucks on his pipe.

“In our family, we know about starvation,” he says. “When your greatuncle Abie got back from the war” – and here we pull faces, because we know what’s coming, but pretend we’ve never heard it before – “he was so hungry from starving all over North Africa and Italy that the first thing he did when he got home, was eat.”

That doesn’t sound too bad, but wait –

“Your great-granny prepared a feast of boerekos. Roast lamb, potatoes, sweet pumpkin and rice. And old Abie put away most of the roast in one sitting, and died three days later because his body couldn’t handle food any more.”

“Least of all, Great-grandmother’s food!” we finish the story.

“But shhh, don’t tell. The rest of the district thinks he’s a war hero, died in a POW camp,” and with this comes the wink, and of course Beth and I love this. Because secrets are fun.

This isn’t the only secret in our family. There’s also the story of Grampa’s other brother, Uncle Klaas. But this is not a story we hear from Grampa. This is a story that comes from picking up stompies. The problem with Uncle Klaas, they say, is that his voël was so itchy. Then, one day, they found him behind a stone wall, consorting with a man called Skaap, which was like breaking two of God’s laws in one, and then Uncle Klaas had to go away. He went to Australia, because everyone knows that’s where heathens go. I don’t know what a voël is, but obviously it causes lots of problems, and I can only hope I don’t have one of my own.

* * *

It’s mainly because of Grampa that I like going to the farm. But getting there isn’t so much fun. In summer it gets so hot in my mom’s Beetle that the seats stink, and my legs sweat against them. Beth has a weak stomach, so sometimes the smell and the twisty road make her want to throw up. This usually happens on Sir Lowry’s Pass, where you can’t really stop, and then my mom shouts at me to open Beth’s window, which is hard to do because I’m strapped in at the front seat, and Beth is in the back. I have to hang all the way over my seat like a jolly monkey, and usually I have to unclip my seatbelt, but I have to help her because I’m the eldest and Mom’s driving.

When we’re travelling to faraway places, we all fight at one time or another. Gracie and Beth fight because one has more space than the other, or one of them got the shady side of the car. Luckily, I’m out of those fights. But then my mother decides it’s tea time, which means it’s my turn to fight – with the flask. I hate this so much. Grown-ups are always wanting tea, and I just can’t understand it. I’ve only been doing it for a short while now, because Mom says I’m only just big enough to work with boiling water. She says I’m so clever, and I’m so good with my hands, and that’s why I get to do this special thing to help her. But I don’t like it one bit. You have to get the mug out – it’s a red enamel one – and then put the tea bag in. Then you have to wrap the mug in a tea towel and hold it between your legs, and fish the flask out of the basket. It’s heavy, and the top takes forever to screw off. Then you pour very, very carefully, and hope the road doesn’t get bumpy. Then it’s the three sugars. And the milk, which is kept in a cooldrink bottle.

Mom is always very worried we’ll get hungry, so she packs stacks of sandwiches in an old Dairymaid ice-cream tub. She makes cheese and tomato, peanut butter and syrup, or apricot jam and coconut sarmies.

It’s a lucky thing Beth has started eating different kinds of food again, otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to have any of this. For a while, she ate only red food. It was all red apples, red jelly babies, tomatoes, toast with strawberry jam, spaghetti with All Gold tomato sauce. In the end she was really jittery, and she could never sit still. The grown-ups were worried about her, and kept trying to make her eat peas and carrots and meat. My mom cried a lot, and then one day she took Beth to the Juicy Lucy in town while I was at school. Mom could only take one of us, because we don’t have money, and the one person had to be Beth because she was sick. So they went to the Juicy Lucy, and in the end Beth couldn’t say no to a waffle with ice cream, bananas and syrup. That’s how she became normal again.

It’s not just the tea. I’m in charge of the sandwiches too. It’s a good thing we have them, because we’re all hungry by the time we pass Somerset West. Especially me, because the sandwich tub sits under my feet. The sarmies are always the first thing we check for when we’re ready to leave. We can’t go off without our padkos.

Mom is always quite nervous when we’re on our way to Gran. She combs her hair too much, paints her nails a pale colour and wears pink lipstick that she never wears at home. She tries on lots of different clothes while she’s packing, so that in the end her room’s a big mess. She struggles with zips and buttons popping off. With the first zip trouble she’ll say, “Oh bugger,” but then later on she screams, “Fuck!” and thumps the floorboards, thinking we can’t hear her. If you peep into the room, you’ll see her sitting on the floor with a red face. And then she packs lots of loose jerseys and things like ponchos. I think it’s because my gran doesn’t like fat people.

But you mustn’t be too thin either.

“Look at this little stick insect!” she always says when she sees Beth, and, staring at me, “Hmm. It’s easy to see that she leaves you to eat every single thing you can find.” Then she gives my mom a dirty look.

“Come with Gran, angel,” she says to Beth, and leads her by the hand to the kitchen where she gets fed leftover roly-poly pudding and farm milk.

Gran doesn’t give me this stuff, because I’m normal, and Gracie’s just a baby. Me and Mom, we need to wait for a meal time to have pudding.

When Gran takes Beth off like this, I go to look at the treasure. It’s not really a treasure, that’s just my name for Gran’s special display cabinet. She’s got lots of beautiful things in there. Things that make my eyes burn from not blinking, things so lovely they make my mouth water. Gran’s favourite is a little statue of a girl with a swan and some flowers. She tells us her mother, our great-grandmother, brought it all the way from England on a ship. We stay away from the cabinet, and never touch, because we’ll get a big, big smack if anything happens. It will be Trouble. But I like to just look.

I think Mom is scared of going to the farm because of Gran, but for me and Beth there’s only really one scary thing about the place, and that’s Uncle André.

* * *

The Consol bottle goes plink-plink-plink as the butterfly tries to escape. Beth has put the bottle up on the dressing table. Because of the mirror, you can see the butterfly from two sides. It’s a black-and-yellow one. After a while she just sits in one spot, opening and closing her wings. Gran wants Beth to let it go, but she won’t listen.

“You’re making the Butterfly Queen very angry,” Gran says in the dark that night. The door is open a crack, and there’s a wedge of yellow light behind her, but Gran is just a voice coming out of a big, black statue. We say nothing.

“Beth, listen, you need to let this creature go.”

Beth sighs. “But why, Gran?”

“I told you. The Butterfly Queen. She’s seen that you’ve hurt one of her little ones. Did you see that she’s lost one of her legs?”

We are both dead quiet.

“Beth, I’m warning you, if you don’t let that butterfly go, the Queen will come in the night, and pull off one of your legs, like you did to this innocent butterfly. It’s your decision, so live with the consequences.”

The door creaks shut.

Beth whispers to me, “Lily, do you think it will really happen?”

“I don’t know. But what are we going to do if you only have one leg?”

We lie and think about it. After a while, Beth throws off her covers, grabs the bottle, and tiptoes past Uncle André’s room. I don’t hear her coming back, but the next morning she wakes up in a wet bed, for the first time we can remember. We know Gran will be cross, so we take the sheets to Gesiena and beg her not to say anything.