The Innocence of Roast Chicken Read online

  I couldn’t understand how everything could seem so normal. Or normal on the surface, I should say. I wouldn’t have known the word surreal then, but I remember thinking of that lunchtime as quite ordinary in every way, except for one outrageously inappropriate thing which I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Rather like a room full of people sitting down to dinner, all with no pants on.

  ‘My magtig, Kati. Why on earth did you make such a fuss about the gravy when you weren’t going to eat anyway?’ Ouma was scraping food scraps and stacking plates. ‘Do-ora,’ she called.

  ‘Ag, Elaine.’ She turned and paused, a knife poised against a plate. My mother had been heading for the door to the lounge, Neil and my dad following behind her. As she stopped and waited they passed around her, arms flailing in bowling demonstration.

  My throat caught and imprisoned my breath. From the corner of my eye I could see Michael, impervious to the crashing end of the world, picking scraps of chicken from the plates and shoving them into his mouth.

  ‘I thought we’d send across a plate of mince pies to the next-door farm … and maybe some soetkoekies. Will you help me bake some more this afternoon? Please?’

  There was a moment’s silence, which ticked through the still room like a metronome.

  ‘Ja, Ma,’ my mom said and smiled slightly, her delicate English smile. Ouma reached out to her then with her smile, her robust farm smile, which lifted and rounded her reddened cheekbones above her face.

  ‘Ja, well, that’s settled then. And you two,’ Ouma nodded towards Michael and me, ‘you’ll take the plate over. And you’ll apologise to Meneer Van Rensburg. Properly, hoor julle?’

  Michael and I were slow to cross the fence. I dragged along the dusty tracks, trailing long lines in the soil with my big toe. Michael was carrying the plate of mince pies, protected by Ouma’s bead-edged doily. He swaggered ahead of me but I saw his feet slow, as we neared the fence.

  The front door was a wooden slab with a square of distorting glass at grown-up-head level. By the time we reached it, the doily was dusted by brown fingermarks where it had been caught from slipping and repositioned.

  The man opened the door himself, his vast bulk blocking almost all view of the inside. For once Michael had nothing to say and the two of us stood side by side, gaping large-eyed. Past his trunk-like neck, I could just see a row of hooks against the wall, studded with hats and caps. In the centre flopped a large khaki sunhat, lined with green. From beneath it trailed the plaited snake of a leather sjambok.

  ‘Ja kinders, kom binne,’ he said, suddenly bending his pillowed waist slightly and flourishing his arm in an ironic bow. My heart hollowed as I trailed my feet after Michael’s into the lounge. The boy was there, sitting on the floor with his back against his mother’s plump, pantyhosed knees. Looking up from her magazine, she smiled as we entered. The boy’s Ouma changed not at all as we dragged across the speckled carpet. Sternly upright, her hands clasped firmly in her lap, she held her thin mouth clenched.

  ‘Ja jong,’ the man said, his meaty arm thumping down across my bony shoulders. ‘It’s not so bad. Don’t look like that – like a frightened rabbit. Haven’t you ever been sent to apologise to anyone before? Goeie magtig, but I was always being sent off to say sorry to someone. And I usually got a good beating for my trouble too.’

  He brayed laughter as my eyes burst anxiously from their downward cast and warily searched his face.

  ‘Ag, I don’t think we’ll be beating anyone today. What d’you think, Magda?’

  She clicked her tongue against her front teeth. ‘Ag, Jannie, moenie die kinders so bang maak nie. Thank you, my lamme. Are those for us? Very kind of you.’

  ‘So are you a boy or a girl?’ the man asked, shaking me with the arm which still lay across my shoulders.

  ‘She’s a gi-irl,’ said Michael, yelling through his and the boy’s laughter.

  ‘But I can do anything the same as a boy,’ I said, my fear forgotten in my indignation. ‘I can cartwheel as well as Michael any day. And I’m never scared of any tree. I can even climb better than him.’

  He propelled me forward with his forearm against my neck. ‘Tell my boy your names. Kobus, stand up and shake hands like a man. And practise your English now, boy. Say hello nicely in English to our small English guests.’

  He gave another bellow of laughter and cuffed his huge banana fingers against my ear and cheek. The boy smiled shyly and shook hands with Michael. His mother came through with glasses of Coke, which we drank in Kobus’s room.

  ‘D’you want to see my silkworms?’ he asked. He wasn’t so bad when he smiled. He had large new teeth like Michael and he spoke English fine. He didn’t stutter or stumble over the words. ‘I really like the bioscope,’ he told us. ‘So my English got good.’ After a while I hardly noticed his hair, bristling across his pink scalp.

  He gave us each some worms in shoeboxes we rooted out from his mother’s powder-scented cupboard. After that, we walked to a part of the farm which looked familiar to me again. There we picked leaves and ripe mulberries to squelch into our mouths.

  When we returned to his farmhouse, the sun was splaying gold directly along the surface of the Zuurveld. Deep shadow crept into the hollows and held the easterly sides of trees and small rises. Kobus’s mother said she thought we’d better be going. The man saw us off at the door, which looked naked without a proper stoep.

  ‘Ja, well, we’re going to the coast on Monday, for the day.’ The man’s eye wrinkles were white lines in his reddish-brown face. His eyes sparkled and his tobacco-coloured teeth were like a row of dried mealies. ‘Would you like to come with us? We’re going in the bakkie.’

  1989 … 17th November

  They don’t read, those wispy ponytailed ones with their books clutched close to their faces, their heads drawn close in the togetherness of titters.

  I don’t care any more. All I care about is that this is the final period, and this my last library class of the day. Not that they ever really touched me, those shallow-faced girls who bob from their chairs in blonde bounces, chattering outside the door with squeals of exaggerated vivacity.

  But I used to care a little, enough to try tempting them into reading anyway. I suppose I can’t really say it was for them. That was the time I still thought I could make my job as school librarian more interesting than the book-stacking drudgery that it is. It was the time I thought perhaps one could find some small satisfaction in this place of literature and young minds.

  I thought that if I just got them interested in a book or two, I would give them some spark that could warm their ever-intensifying search for husbands, homes and dirty nappies. That was when I tentatively offered them slim Barbara Cartlands and those untaxing teenage love stories, which I ordered by the prolific crateful for the school. I thought the anguished stories of love lost and ecstatically found on the final page might just reach the romance that those girls giggled and yearned for.

  But it seems the stories are tame compared with their own real-life forays into the world of romance. And it seems the headmistress is now ashamed to show the library to her VIP visitors – her term for all those balding, small-eyed men, puffed by their paunchy lifestyles and self-satisfied patronage. She says the ‘shelves and shelves of your cheap romances’ now desecrate this sanctified place of musty-paged learning.

  At least it gives me some job satisfaction, seeing that tight-faced, tight-arsed woman backing desperately against my romance shelf, eyes darting wildly while she tries to spread her body all over the titles and distract her visitors’ fascinated gaze.

  Oh, thanks for small mercies. There’s the final bell. Before it finishes its ring the girls are lurching and slouching from the library, clattering books over the reading tables with eye-rolling smirks. Sullenly dropping their eyes to avoid mine, they leave without a ‘Good afternoon, Miss’ or a ‘Thank you’ between them. Saving thems
elves for gum-chewing and skinder in the toilet. I suppose I could insist. I know I have the threat of detention after school, a great and awesome power, which carries the greater threat of missing the boys’ school at the bus stop. But I don’t care enough about them or their smutty little lives to bother.

  I push through the perfume-sharing clumps of girls outside the cloakroom to reach the teachers’ toilet booth. Bending forward to fluff out wafts of waved hair – intimidated into bobbles all morning – a group of ultra-cool girls smooth each others’ overly short gym slips and examine their mascara. These ones I dislike the most. They barely shift their feet to allow me to pass, these narrow-eyed girls, who whisper in their smug containment in the ‘in-group’. Two of them, thinking my eyes are elsewhere, make smoking gestures with their hands, jerking their chins towards the door.

  Oh Jesus Christ, I forgot. I can’t even leave now. I’m on after-school library duty today. I sit for a while in the cool toilet booth, my forehead pressed to the shiny utilitarian green of the wall. I think I’ll wait for the crush to pass before I return to my dreary post. I hear the cool girls’ superior sweep from the room and a group of gigglers replaces them.

  ‘Do you think she actually does it?’

  That’s one of the girls who mouthed and sniggered through my last library class, although I can’t place which one. Hand-smothered giggles mask the next murmured comment. It amuses me that they have such a vast preoccupation with sex, as though they’re the earliest explorers to quest for the orgasmic grail.

  ‘She’s married to some lawyer. She must do it. Men don’t stand for wives who don’t put out.’

  ‘Aha, but she’s got no children. She looks like she’s sewn herself up down there so he can’t get to it. You never know, maybe he gets it somewhere else.’

  ‘D’you think she ever sucks him off?’

  ‘Oh, gross.’

  I wonder if their shrieked horror is due to the act itself, or to the thought of my doing it. Anyway, what do I care? They’ll reach their own disillusionment in the years of fumbled, sweaty embraces to come. And in the welcoming response that’ll be expected of them – as it’s been expected of all those women before them – to that dark fingering of breasts and pressing penis.

  There’s such a sense of déjà vu to this, sitting in the loo to avoid the bitchy girls. This school, at which I punish myself by teaching, reminds me so much of my own. That all-girls’ production line for young ladies of the colonies, where they gnawed at all our wayward little lives and spat out nicely brought up children like these, with no individuality and little creativity of their own. Here is another institution where all unladylike signs of anger are ruthlessly put down. Where all that pent-up adolescent aggression oozes out, in malevolent bitchiness from those narrow blue eyes and tossed blonde hair. And, of course, now we also have those token few dark heads that we never had at a school like this, even five years ago. At first they were so easy to spot, clustered together in their awed sparsity. But lately, I’ve noticed, they’ve learnt to roll bored eyes with the rest of them and desperately chatter their entrée into in-groups, moulding themselves and their views to match the privileged ennui and passionate banality of the others.

  Back in the library, I sit in my silent chair watching the still columns of sunlight grow from the long tables up to the high windows. I am avoiding those spitefully flung books, which still have to be gathered, sorted and put away.

  My solitude is shattered by the scuffing of deliberately casual shoes on the lino’d floor. These ones keep their hair seriously scraped from their foreheads, winsomely allowing just the odd tendril escape. Ignoring me, they lope for the serious shelves, sniffing as they glance disdainfully in passing at my collection of love stories.

  They raid my neat shelves, swapping, discussing and adding to their piles of Shakespeare and Zen Buddhism. I’m used to these ones. They’ll leave again in a minute with artfully tippling piles weighing down their arms, while their nearly empty satchels hold only biology, or possibly geography books. This is adornment by book, the jewellery of the adolescent intellectual. Perhaps they’re off to attract their male counterparts at the bus stop, those careful James Dean copies with their bravely carried cheekbones and the cultivated fire of garrets in their eyes. They were around in my day too – I wonder if they still roll their Texans up in their T-shirt sleeves? But in my day their hair, candle-greased behind the ears for school, was combed out to flop over the forehead for the bus stop. Or perhaps these girls are off to dangle on each others’ beds in wallowed knee-hugging and the enjoyment of their delicately agonised images of themselves.

  I see them approaching me now, clutching handfuls of Sartre and Camus while free hands gesture impatiently or earnestly brush at straying strands of hair.

  ‘Oh, rats,’ I say, feigning terror. ‘It’s a plague of existentialists.’

  They gaze at me wonderingly, my little conceit going right over their heads, even with the heavy emphasis I give it to help them a bit. But I stamp their books with added dash, my small enjoyment imbuing a touch of energy to the rest of my solitary afternoon of classifying and stacking.

  I finish at five, when I lock the library for the night. My footsteps echo through the pillared courtyard as I make for my car, where I sit a minute behind the wheel and begin intently picking and ripping at my nails. Too late. Oh shit, I should have left early and gone home to shower. I’d put it right out of my mind, on purpose I suppose, Joe’s bloody Christmas drinks party at the office. Oh well, fuck it, why should I care? I’m dressed, after all. They must bloody well take me as I am, even if I’m not one of those simpering, moist-lipped attorney’s wives, so thrilled with their marvellous maids and over-therapised children.

  I drive easily into town, where backed-up cars and fleeing pedestrians escape in opposite directions for the townships and suburbs. Town at night has the look of crisis, much as the scene of a threatened nuclear explosion might. First you get the desperate mass of humanity fighting and hooting to break out of the maelstrom. And then, with the falling of night, darkened desolation. Cars appear furtive, and only the odd human figure is still about, scuttling into a deserted alleyway.

  The lift pings me to the plush-carpeted floor of Establishment Law. I can hear the desultory murmur of tasteful conversation from the boardroom, passing the loo as a cluster of secretaries bursts into the corridor, pouring their giggles into the red-nailed receptacles of their hands.

  The senior partner greets me at the door, his head bobbing baldly in time with his courtly handshake.

  ‘Your old man’s really doing great shakes in our Labour department. Really. Very well indeed … Excuse me, won’t you?’ His eyes are already focused somewhere over my left shoulder. He gives me that patronising little pat which I’ve noticed he reserves for the ‘firm’s wives’ and breezes past me. I suppose that’s a great relief to him, to have escaped so easily from conversation with a non-lawyer. Oh my God, we’re scarcely human. And one as dowdy as I among these flitting cocktail sequins and little black minis, or more accurately – Jesus, look at that one – very wide black belts.

  There’s Joe, over at the far side by the windows. He’s cradling his drink in his two large hands, his thumbs caressing the rim and his eyes intently downcast. He’s the guy who’s usually more gregarious than a Dale Carnegie get-together. And there – he hasn’t noticed me yet – he looks kind of scrunched into himself, with his shoulders hunched over to protect his drink.

  ‘Hi,’ he mutters. His voice sounds unused and slightly rough. He clears his throat and turns away to order me a drink from the bar. Avoiding my touch, avoiding my eyes, he places the clinking whisky in my hand.

  ‘Joe, what’s the matter?’

  There’s something odd or incongruous about my question. As I’m asking, it strikes me as out of place in some way. And then I get it. Of course. How many times has Joe used those words over the years, used them
pleadingly, to prise at what he thinks is my hidden pain? And have I ever asked them of him? I can’t actually remember having done so. I’ve always been so closed in on myself.

  But lately, I feel more … what is it? I suppose it’s more needy for his openness, the other side of my coin. I mock him to death, but I’ve grown to depend on his rush of Pollyanna emotions to counter my bile-driven silence. I’ve become used to the bolster of his balancing self. So this silence of his, this new reserve, is uncomfortable for me. And now, now that I’ve finally brought myself to ask him, I wait for the expected arterial gush of feelings.

  ‘Nothing particularly.’ He shrugs and straightens himself, looking around the room. Watching his face, I see his eyes sent out in search of escape. They come to a stop suddenly and he nods. His buddy appears at my side, obviously in response to Joe’s eye-sent invitation.

  ‘Howzit, Kate! Straight from school?’

  ‘Don’t tell me it shows?’ I strike my arm across my forehead and gaze at him with exaggerated horror.

  He has a deep gurgling laughter in his throat. ‘Well, Kati my dear,’ he says leering down at me. ‘You sometimes have that deliciously school-marmish look about you. It’s a definite turn-on, you know. But I’m sure that couldn’t be calculated. No-oo. Wouldn’t that be a mortal sin for a feminist: like dressing up as a nun or a schoolgirl just to drive the men wild?’

  ‘Well I wouldn’t really know, Paul. Why don’t you ask that perky young thing I saw dangling from your arm earlier? Ask her whether dressing up in bright-young-attorney-with-a-social-conscience clothes qualifies. And I know she’ll definitely be an authority. I noticed immediately how proudly she wears her badge of feminist membership on her legs. Or is it perhaps her hairshirt of feminism?’