Читать книгу Love Tastes Like Strawberries - Rosamund Haden - Страница 7

Françoise wraps the obituary page of the newspaper around the white oily paper that holds her chicken and chips. She does this so that her sister Dudu won’t read it. To show anything of importance to Dudu is dangerous. Dudu is a user; Françoise is a keeper: of secrets, of sadness. She learned how important this was in the playground of The Sacred Heart in Gisenyi when she whispered into Dudu’s ear that she had found a coin in the dirt under the palm trees and opened her clenched hand to show her. That night before dinner their stepmother demanded she relinquish her treasure. Françoise looked at Dudu; Dudu held her gaze and smiled. Dudu watched as Françoise opened her hand once more to reveal the bronze coin – ten Rwandan Francs. She watched as their stepmother, Immaculée, took the coin with a look on her face that was a mixture of smugness and scorn.

That evening when the rain stopped and the grey-purple clouds hung low over the hills, Dudu found Françoise on the edge of their banana plantation, where she had gone to escape. It was getting dark.

“I’m sorry. The words just wouldn’t stay inside.” Dudu smiled her most winning smile. “Look, I brought you a bonbon. I stole it.”

Where Françoise is tall and thin, Dudu is bursting out. Françoise prefers shadows. Dudu craves the spotlight: Can you all see me? Lower the lights. That’s better. Now let me tell you all about myself . . .

But no one knows Françoise like her sister. Dudu can read between the lines, in the spaces between Françoise’s words, on the thin-leafed paper of her life, some smudged, some burned, some torn out with a cruel carelessness.

Françoise and Dudu are inseparable.

It is dark when Françoise steps out of the BP garage shop in Beaufort West. She bought the newspaper as a step back towards their life in Cape Town and Timothy, but what she found in it was shocking. She had taken the pages out and got rid of the rest of the paper while Dudu was in the restroom. Then she had wrapped the pages around the chicken and chips so that Dudu would not demand to see them.

She pulls the sleeves of her thin top down over her hands and then blows her warm breath on them. The smell of diesel and petrol is strong near the pumps. It makes her dizzy.

Dudu has loved strong smells since she can remember: the smell of bananas fermenting in pits to make banana beer, the smell of eucalyptus burning in the plantations around Kibuye, the smell of petrol. She would stand by the petrol tanks when her father stopped to fill up the old Peugeot on the road to Kigali.

“I am going to make perfume from the lilies,” Dudu had told her once, in the tropical garden in their other life. “It is going to be famous and worn by Cécile Kayirebwa, when she sings on stage. I have seen pictures of her, Papa showed me.” That sweet, sweet smile had spread across Dudu’s round face.

Passengers are being called back on to the bus by the driver. They must head on through the night to Cape Town. Everyone has taken their seats except Françoise and Dudu, who is still in the garage toilets. Françoise cannot run to find her in case the bus leaves without them. She pleads with the bus driver to wait. She curses Dudu for being so reckless and always taking chances. Françoise feels an exhaustion so deep it has seeped into the marrow of her bones.

The driver starts the bus and Françoise is engulfed with diesel smoke from the exhaust. He tells her they can’t wait any longer. The doors hiss closed. The gears grind. The bus starts to move slowly as Dudu appears.

“What’s the rush?” she asks. Françoise cannot speak. Dudu bangs on the bus door and the driver opens. The bus is moving when they jump on and sway down the aisle as the bus accelerates on to the N1 freeway.

“We could have been left there.” Françoise takes the seat by the window.

“Two black girls in the middle of nowhere.” Dudu rolls her eyes in mock horror as she plonks herself down next to her sister. She is wearing stretch denim jeans and a sparkly top. “I would have hitched us a lift. Look at all the cars; much more comfortable than this shit on wheels,” she adds. “Why we had to travel by bus, I do not know.”

Dudu plugs her earphones into her cellphone. Françoise can hear the tinny sound of the pop music that is flooding Dudu’s brain as she closes her eyes. Her head slides down on to Françoise’s shoulder. Françoise waits until Dudu is snoring gently. Carefully, she unwraps the newspaper and puts the chicken and chips into a plastic bag for when Dudu wakes up. Her sister is always hungry, for everything, and there is never enough. She unfolds the page with the obituary. My connection to Timothy is dead people, she thinks.

Françoise has thought about Timothy every night before she goes to sleep, wherever she found herself on the trail to find her sister. But still his face has faded. She is not sure of the exact shape of his nose, the exact colour of his eyes. The tone of his voice is indistinct.

In her mind’s eye she sees him standing in his flat in Long Street wearing an apron and holding a frying pan in one hand – king of his small kitchen. His dark hair curls at the nape of his neck. His face is flushed from cooking. He grins at her. Jazz is playing. Cook and love with abandon is written in chalk on the wall.

The bus speeds through the dark, lighting up a road sign – Cape Town – 400 kilometres. She thinks of waking Dudu and asking her if she has airtime on her phone so that she can try to call Timothy. But she knows that her sister will only have one answer for her: “Give it up. The white boy’s not worth it. If you are going to get a white boy, make sure he’s wealthy, has a nice car and lets you spend his money. Then you can marry him and get us out of the hellhole. Not some freak who writes about dead people!”

“You don’t know this kind of love then,” Françoise whispered under her breath the first time Dudu said these words.

Françoise has been away from Cape Town for three months. Anything can happen in three months: people can die, move countries, change jobs, change their minds. She had gone to find Dudu in Lubumbashi.

Françoise couldn’t explain to Timothy why she can never leave Dudu. She cannot tell him, not yet. He would try to fix it, and this was something nobody could fix except herself, Françoise, born in an avocado tree. That’s what Dudu, aged eight, told her friends in the yard of The Sacred Heart under the tall trees heavy with fruit.

She told them, “My sister was born up that tree, that’s why she loves avocados – it was the first thing she ate. Watch out for my sister, she is very clever,” she would say, tapping her skull, with a menacing look on her small chubby face as the children gathered around her in a huddle, “so leave her alone.”

Dudu still tells people to watch out for her sister, only now Dudu is seventeen – too young to drive legally, but too old to let it stop her. And Françoise is twenty-one.

Against all odds Françoise found Dudu in Lubumbashi. She had taken one broken-down car, taxi and bus at a time. After the car was sold and the bribes were paid, they had taken the money that was left and crossed the border. Dudu was lucky; she had found herself a protector in Lubumbashi when Jean-Paul left her. She promised Dieu Donne that if he came south to Cape Town they would hook up again. Pas de problème! No problem! She made lots of promises with the best intentions.

Every day, at least once, Françoise feels the constriction that Dudu places on her life. But every day she also wonders what she would do without Dudu. She is the purpose around which she has built her life since she was fourteen and they crossed that first border into a foreign country. Without Dudu everything would fall apart.

The bus speeds along the dead straight road through the flat semi-desert scrubland of the Karoo.

“In my country there are a thousand hills, green and sparkling after the rain,” she had told Timothy. “If you iron out the country it would be four times the size. It’s an old Rwandan joke.”

Here in the Karoo the flat, scrubby plains are broken only by strange conical hills lit by the pale light of the moon. Across these wide open stretches the dinosaurs roamed in prehistory. Françoise had read it in a National Geographic magazine. She had found a small pile of these magazines in their room above the Chinese shop on the Main Road in Woodstock. The room Dudu calls the hellhole. When she asked the woman living next door who the magazines belonged to, she just shrugged.

“There was another lady living there before you. Maybe they belonged to her. Maybe someone at the church gave them to her. Que sait? Who knows?”

Françoise read all the Geographics after work, cover to cover. When she came to the edition on Africa’s Great Lakes in the Rift Valley, the gorillas in the Ruwenzori mountains and Mount Karisimbi, the volcano of her grandmother’s stories, she saw the pictures had been cut out and just the captions left. She closed the magazine quickly, put it to one side and moved on to the next edition.

She paged through and got lost in the pictures and words. In their humid, stuffy, dark room above the Chinese shop she let the sand in from the Sahara. She stepped into a palace in the desert in India with a still pool at its centre, gliding birds and water lilies. She braced herself as she crossed the ice of the Antarctic. And underwater she ran her fingertips along the rough scales of strange fish.

Geographical and biological facts – the world of nature, of plants and animals – were safe. But people – only they knew the truth of what lay in their hearts. This was survival, and it was one of the first things she learned.

Dudu preferred tabloid magazines. She slid them into her bag in the waiting rooms she visited to do just that. “You’re weird, Françoise, reading that stuff. No wonder you don’t have a boyfriend,” she would say as Françoise lost herself in other territories and Dudu admired the before and after shots of a model who had gone under the knife.

Ivor Woodall died at his home in Observatory, Cape Town, on Wednesday, 25 September, aged 42.

Françoise stops and stares at the invitation to his exhibition that is placed alongside the obituary. There is a portrait of herself staring into space, and underneath in the sloping ornate writing of a wedding or funeral card – Exhibition, 9 October, Oval Gallery.

Her heart pounds as she stares at her face, at her naked shoulders, her hair smoothed back from her high forehead, her eyes as she stared at the wall in front of her. She reads the words again in case she has mistaken something, but the words remain the same. Then she hears Dudu’s voice and feels her breath warm on her shoulder. Dudu never misses a trick.

“What’s that?” she asks, leaning over.

“Nothing,” Françoise says and tries to cover the page with her hand before she turns to face her sister.

“Nothing?” Dudu leans closer, scrutinising the oily newsprint. Françoise’s arms feel like iced water. “What is it?” asks Dudu, like one of those children in Mao’s red army who burn books and have no qualms about setting fire to people too. Dudu snatches the paper and is reading through the oil and grease. “Mr Ivor Woodall is dead,” she says and then her face lights up with realisation.

Françoise turns her head away from her sister and stares out of the bus window at the land whizzing by and up at the moon hanging, a giant pale ball, in a canopy of stars. It’s beautiful out there, and solitary. If the bus stopped now she could just walk out into the darkness and keep walking. She had done that before. She wonders how long she would last, with no food, water or money.

“I didn’t do it,” whispers Dudu. “How could I? I was in Lubumbashi.”

“With Mr Woodall’s car.”

“It doesn’t even say how he died. Why would I want him dead?”

“An exhibition of Ivor’s work will be held at . . .” Dudu reads over Françoise’s shoulder. “It is you.” She taps a glittery pink nail on the portrait of Françoise. “You were the model,” says Dudu accusingly.

“Mr Woodall is dead, yapfuye!” repeats Françoise.

“Who wrote this – the freak?”

Françoise takes Dudu’s cellphone and dials Timothy’s number.

The person you are calling is unavailable. Please try again later.

She looks back at Dudu. Her sister holds her gaze – unblinking.