The Innocence of Roast Chicken Page 19

  When I could no longer see them, I looked back at Neil and considered.

  ‘Neil.’ I called him softly, hoping that if he were awake he would respond in some way and that, if he weren’t, I had called too quietly to disturb him.

  ‘Buzz off, brat.’ He hadn’t moved and his voice muffled through the restraining hold of his arms.

  ‘Neil, d’you want samp ’n beans?’

  ‘No, of course I bloody don’t want samp and beans. I’m not a baby any more to sit in the kitchen scoffing that stodgy stuff. I’ll wait for my proper lunch, thank you very much.’

  The kitchen was silent with chewing. Dora usually contorted her face while eating, moving her food around her mouth to catch her few teeth. But samp and beans she mushed with her gums, her lips and cheeks collapsing as she squelched them together. The dogs lay unmoving, side by side, just their ears flicking at the flies which hovered and landed.

  I slid into my chair without speaking and began spooning my food fast into my mouth. My other elbow rested on the table, my left hand cushioning my head to read the folded-over comic. Engrossed, I hadn’t realised anyone had moved until Dora called me. Both she and her friend were standing, their dishes scraped clean. Hearing the scraping of chairs and unaccustomed movement, the dogs had also lumbered to their feet.

  ‘Missie, you can hold Kati for her to go. I hold Mikey. She scared to go with the dogs there. Come, we see her go and wave goodbye.’

  I stretched my arm out sideways to clutch at the lolling dog’s enormous collar. Docilely, she walked alongside me to the open screen door. The maid who was plucking the chicken in the scullery area looked at me in amusement as I passed her.

  ‘I don’t really have to hold Kati,’ I told her earnestly, while Dora and her friend wandered slowly into the courtyard. I didn’t want my panting, wrunkly dog, my namesake, to be misunderstood. ‘It’s just Dora’s friend’s scared. Mikey’s sometimes a bit naughty. He once chased a horse and the horse bucked the rider right off its back. William had to race over and hold him tight with both arms while the horse galloped off again.’

  As I chattered on, the maid plucked the chicken with small, deft movements. She was smiling. Dora was standing in the glaring courtyard, holding Mikey with one hand while she gesticulated with the other in final chatter and long farewell.

  ‘Bye,’ I called as I saw Dora’s hand raised in a wave and her friend begin to walk through the courtyard to the yard on the other side.

  ‘But Kati, Kati’s never been naughty like that, you know. She’d never harm a fly. Look, you see, you don’t have to really hold her tight. I can just keep my hand loosely on her collar. She’ll sit here without moving. I c’n even tell her to sit while I feed meerkats.’

  My resting hand felt the shiver of tension run through the dog and I laughed, thinking it was the mention of meerkats that caused it. Looking up, I saw that Dora’s friend had started to run as she passed through the far door of the courtyard, in a straight line with the kitchen where I stood.

  As I watched her, I felt Kati stretch from her tensed sitting position in a single leaping burst of energy. My hand clutched convulsively at her collar as she bounded, dragging me hard on to my knees, before ripping herself clear of me.

  The world was suddenly filled with screams. I heard the maid scream in piercing bursts behind me, Dora’s long wail, my own cracked whimper. And I heard the woman, Dora’s friend, scream high and clear as she fell to her knees and clutched her elbows and hands protectively around her head and face.

  I watched in slow, burning horror as Kati, beloved Kati, burst at her, again and again. And then suddenly the courtyard was filled with people. William was there, twisting the collar and dragging the dog away. The woman was crouched on the ground, her back to me in a keening backward and forward rocking motion. Her arms were still around her head. As William dragged the growling dog past me, I could see its pink, foaming saliva flecked on bared teeth and brown muzzle.

  Oupa was at the woman’s side, lifting her up by the arm. She was keening still, a high, horrifying sound in the sudden still.

  ‘Don’t look, little one. Don’t look at her.’ I could hear Neil’s voice as he gathered me into his arms and began to carry me into the house. But my head turned to fix groping eyes on the woman.

  Oupa was leading her step by step towards an upturned box against the kitchen wall. She held her doek up on one side of her head with both hands. Blood smeared her hands and cheeks and dripped from her chin above the blackened hole where her ear should have been. Dark fleshy chunks clung to the side of her head.

  I began to pant in hot heaves that tasted of vomit. My body shook in rigid tremors as Neil held me firmly on one hip while he reached for the pot of rooibos which boiled perennially on the stove.

  ‘O my magtig!’ I could hear Ouma’s voice from the courtyard. ‘Het jy gehardloop? Hoekom het jy gehardloop? Why did you run, stupid girl? O magtig, now what shall we do? Dora, gaan nou dadelik vir die jong Miesies en Master roep.’

  I heard my parents running around the side of the house to the courtyard as Neil lowered himself on to the kitchen table, holding me on his lap so that he could feed me sugared tea. Through the screen door I heard my mother’s horrified ‘Oh my God, what happened?’

  ‘Keep quiet, Elaine,’ Ouma’s voice cut in. ‘Jim, you’ll have to drive her. Try old Doc Williams first. He’s retired but he’s not far. You know the farm. See if he can’t mos sew her up. Otherwise you’ll have to take her to Casualty in Grahamstown.’

  I was unable to swallow the tea as the sounds from the courtyard trailed away to the yard where the cars were kept. I couldn’t swallow at all, couldn’t make those burning threads of shock go down my throat. Lifting me again, Neil carried me through to Oupa’s bed, where he stroked my stinging scalp. I closed my eyes for a while.

  ‘Shame, my darling. That was an awful thing for you to see.’ I opened my eyes to see Oupa reaching lovingly for my icy hand. Behind him, Ouma’s face was a mix of shock, distress and bursting irritation.

  ‘Ag, man, how many times must I tell these people not to run?’ she said as she walked to the window, staring out at the lawn. Oupa slipped a series of white sugar pills into my mouth, where they lay dissolving on my tongue. He always kept these tiny pills about him, sweet and comforting, to feed to himself and his loved ones in moments of upset and stress.

  ‘But why, Ouma?’ my voice scratched out. ‘Why did the dog do that?’

  ‘Ag, my kind, she wasn’t one of our girls. The dog knew that. The dog knows the smell of all our people.’

  ‘But it’s never bitten anyone, never, even when Mr Van Rensburg was here. He’s not from here and the dog didn’t bite him.’

  ‘Natives have a different smell about them. Dogs pick that up. It makes them wary and the silly girl ran. That’s the worst thing she could’ve done.’

  ‘It’s OK now, old thing,’ said Neil, coming in with more tea. ‘You’re looking a bit better. Not so green about the gills.’

  ‘I’d better go and see about Dora. She must settle down now. Nothing else can be done here,’ said Ouma, turning from the window.

  ‘She’ll be all right, you know,’ said Oupa softly. ‘It looked very ugly but it wasn’t really a serious injury. She’ll be right as rain by tomorrow. She just needs to be fixed up a bit by the doctors.’

  ‘But her ear …’ I started to weep, in great shaking sobs.

  ‘Poor child, it’s an awful thing for you to have seen. But …’ Oupa gave a deep sigh, ‘… these things happen, you know. I’m just sorry you had to see it.’

  ‘But you don’t understand, Oupa. It was because of me.’

  ‘Oh now, what nonsense is this?’

  ‘It happened because of me. I wasn’t holding Kati properly. I thought she’d sit, like with the meerkats.’

  ‘You’re just a little girl. You couldn’t h
ave held that great beast by yourself. Dora was stupid to have expected you to.’

  ‘But it’s because I loosened my hand. If I’d held tightly the dog mightn’t have gone.’

  ‘You don’t know that. You can’t possibly say that dog wouldn’t have gone for the girl, even if you’d been holding tightly. And quite frankly it’s probably a good thing you weren’t. The dog might have dragged you with it, right into that mêlée.’

  ‘No, no, the dog thought I was telling it to go. It’s my fault.’

  ‘Now, don’t be silly. Take this pill. It’ll make you sleepy. Neil, please fetch my copy of Bosman from the library. I’ll read to you for a while, till you drop off, take your mind off it. Nothing like this can be your fault at your age, don’t you realise that?’

  I closed my eyes again, tasting the bitter gall of guilt in the back of my throat. I swallowed again and again, but it wouldn’t go away.

  ‘“Rooineks,” said Oom Schalk Lourens, “are queer. For instance, there was that day when my nephew Hannes and I had dealings with a couple of Englishmen near Dewetsdorp. It was shortly after Sanna’s Post, and Hannes and I were lying behind a rock watching the road …”’

  1989 … 3rd December

  ‘Well, let’s hope the aborigines don’t get too uppity down under, or you’ll be forced to move to Canada.’

  I couldn’t help that remark. I’ve just had enough. After this entire afternoon of warm wine and singed meat under the aching heat of their patio awning, I’ve had absolutely enough of Louise’s smug sense that she’s right about everything, that she can sashay off to live in Australia without a hint of moral condemnation around her.

  ‘That’s a remarkably snotty remark, Kate, even for you,’ says Louise, placing her wineglass deliberately on the patio table and fixing me with her earnest gaze. ‘You’ve known me for a long time – since varsity in fact. You’ve always known my views. I think it’s particularly offensive of you to imply that I’m a racist.’

  Oh, that’s just too much. She thinks that her way-back-in-the-dim-distant-past lefty image gives her some kind of immune status, a passport to do as she pleases because she’s proved her bona fides. My God, she’s all outraged virtue, look at her. It doesn’t even occur to her that, in the light of the fact that she’s about to bolt, she marks herself very clearly as a hypocrite.

  ‘Well, Louise dear, it seems to me that must be the reason you’re suddenly emigrating, right on the threshold of change. After all, you stayed firmly put through all the oppressive times, shouting your mouth off.’

  Louise opens her mouth to speak, but doesn’t know what to say. She glances sideways at her friend, who is, besides us, the only guest at this Sunday afternoon braai. It was arranged, clearly to break the news to Joe and me that they’ve sold the house, resigned their jobs, packed their bags; everything, in fact, except waved to us from the airport.

  Obviously Louise invited this other woman as moral support. Both she and Louise work for one of the abounding acronymic non-governmental organisations. She’s made it perfectly plain to me already today that, as part of Louise’s in-group, she’s known about their plans for some time.

  Christine, I think she said her name was. I didn’t quite catch it. I was too busy being irritated by her hiking boots and black jeans – Jesus, it must be thirty-five degrees out here – and the way she swings her chair around to face me so that she can deliberately fold her arms above her head. Misreading me entirely, she clearly thinks she can shock this prissy school-marm by making a big show of the black bushes of hair protruding from the cut-off sleeves of her black T-shirt.

  Exchanging pitying glances with Louise, she says to me now: ‘Oh, that’s fucking ridiculous. No one who really knows Louise would ever call her a racist. I can’t believe you said that to her. I don’t have kids, so I don’t have Louise’s pressures, but I know her reasons for going would always be moral.’

  Oh well, of course. That’s what this one’s role is. Louise has always managed to surround herself with a coterie of ideologically sycophantic little arse-creepers. Well, I’ll say this for her. She’s succeeded in keeping it up, even through her great moral turnaround.

  ‘Funnily enough, I’ve known Louise a lot longer than you have. But I do find it faintly amusing that you bunch – which NGO are you again: TRIC, FINC or PRIC? – that you bunch turn around so neatly on all your previous beliefs and still make it sound like you’re treading the moral higher ground.’

  ‘Actually, the reason we’ve decided to leave …’ says Louise, tilting her uncompromisingly make-up-free face, the better to justify her greatest compromise, ‘… is the kids. The level of violence is such that I just can’t justify our staying merely on some spurious ideological ground. And I can’t actually see it improving through change. By all accounts, it’s going to get worse.’

  ‘Well, to quote you, Louise: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” Isn’t that what you used to say?’

  ‘Oh don’t be such a little bitch. I never expected it to be like this. We expected violence against the state, against the oppressors. We never conceived of the country just plunging into senseless crime and this … this violence against everyone.’

  ‘What, you were working all those years for the glorious revolution, and you didn’t expect it to affect you? Funny, I can see you now, fervent fist in the air, proclaiming: “Come the revolution …” Oh, and weren’t you the person who used to scorn people who used their jobs and their families and security as excuses for not getting involved?’

  ‘Well, your priorities change when you have kids. We’re not leaving for ourselves. We’re leaving for the children.’

  To underline her point, underscore the difference between us, she stands suddenly and yells at the two splashing, screaming brats in the pool. ‘Get out of there now, you two. Go’n change, please, straight into your pyjamas.’

  Whinges and echoing whines of ‘But why, Maw?’ and ‘It’s so e-early, Maw,’ float up from the water. Louise sits down again. She’s done her motherhood thing. The children ignore her and continue their game. They know her well enough, I suppose, to have worked out for themselves that she’s a person of instant responses and enthusiasms. She never follows anything through. Never did. She takes a sip from her wineglass – it’s been sitting there so long, glowing in the lowered sun, it must be lukewarm by now.

  ‘I personally would love to stay,’ she continues, with a quick glance at her husband Peter. He shifts slightly in his chair and gazes absently at the sky. He’s not going to be drawn into this discussion. ‘I think things are going to be very interesting. I envy you, actually. But I’ve had these kids. Now I owe it to them to give them the chance to grow up in … a normalised society …’

  Oh Jesus Christ, a ‘normalised society’. Do people really talk this way, in real life?

  ‘… where they can walk home from school without fear. But I wouldn’t expect you to understand that level of unselfishness. You’ve never stopped staring self-absorbedly at yourself long enough to think about another human being, let alone one who’s totally dependent on you for its security.’

  ‘Ooh, we’re getting heavily personal now, are we?’ I force a laugh and trickle the last of the sun-warmed bottle of wine into my braai-smeared wineglass. Oh shit, not even the smallest block of ice left in the ice bucket. I swallow it back. No use sipping it. No one’s making the slightest move to open another bottle. I suppose that’s a hint. I wonder what the time is. Must be five at least.

  Joe, slouched in his white patio chair with eyes half closed against the sun, rouses himself suddenly.

  ‘Ja well, I think it’s time we were going. If, that is, you women have finished tearing each other to pieces. Kate, it’s nearly five. I’ve still got a lot of things to go through before tomorrow.’

  Louise doesn’t respond. She is breathing heavily, her eyes downcast and blinking fast.


  Her young friend leans over to her, a hand on her arm, playing up the role of confidante for all it’s worth. ‘You must understand, Louise, the dynamics at work here …’

  I can’t believe this. Dynamics? What is this – a first-year sociology tutorial?

  ‘… your old friends feel hurt and bereft at your leaving. So they find it hard to appreciate your personal morality and they’re taking their grief out on you.’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake!’ I’ve had enough. ‘Let’s go, Joe. I’ve had enough justification rhetoric to last me a lifetime. Have a nice life in Australia, Louise. I truly hope you manage to cope with two kids and no household help.’

  ‘I understand your feelings of hurt, Kate, really I do. I’m sorry I never told you before, but we had to sort out everything first and make sure we could get in. I’d like you to know that I’m still your friend. And I won’t take anything to heart that you’ve said today.’

  ‘Oh please, Louise, preserve me from your patronising friendship. Don’t do me any favours. I don’t need them, I promise you. We’ll get along just fine back here without people like you.’

  Louise sighs and shrugs, throwing herself back into her patio chair with folded arms and a mouth struggling between a pout and a caring curve. Peter rises to let us out.

  ‘Thanks for the lunch, Louise,’ I say as we step through the sliding doors into the house. ‘It was certainly … informative. On many levels.’