The Innocence of Roast Chicken Page 24

  ‘But first … there’s something else I have to do. Before I have to face it, the place where it, where I, happened.’

  Joe remains silent.

  ‘Let’s go make ourselves some coffee. There’s a story I have to tell you. And I’ve a feeling it’s going to take a long time to tell.’

  Joe stands and we move slowly towards the kitchen. We still find it hard to touch but there’s a softness between us now, and … well, perhaps we’ll learn.

  ‘I don’t know how to find the words …’

  ‘Just start slowly, Kati.’

  ‘Well, maybe first I could tell you how it was. How idyllic. What a perfect childhood I had. I think that’s what I’ll do. The rest of the story’ll come in its own time.’

  1966 … Christmas Day

  ‘Namhla sizalelw’ umntwana,

  Indla-lila yamadinga.’

  The harmony of women’s voices shimmered through the early stillness of the wakening day. Gathering my scattered thoughts and limbs to me, I lay a moment wrapped in my sheets, straining to catch and hold this first glowing symbol of Christmas.

  With trilling ardour, the women’s hymn broke through their quiet restraint and rode the wild morning air. Triumphantly it soared through the house and yard, shucking off the chitter of chickens and bucking the three of us from the last of our sweaty sleep.

  We were silent, my brothers and I, for what on earth could be said. I could feel that no everyday words could compete, could even be used, in the presence of such a sign of God’s glory and the magic of Christmas Day.

  Michael sat up in bed and scrubbed his knuckles into his eyes, trying as he did each morning to disperse some of his wounding vulnerability. Neil lay on his back, his arms tucked behind his head. He didn’t want us to look at him. I could feel him resisting our eyes, willing us not to see his screen of strength fall.

  Surreptitiously glancing through my lashes, I could sense the feelings he poured into the room like the soury-sweet pervasiveness of citrus, though I couldn’t name them. But I held it – the look of his face and the odour of his emotions – locked inside me, as I did everything else about that day, that day which started as God’s own.

  It wasn’t sadness, it was poignancy – painful poignancy – which emanated from him as he lay listening with such intensity. And as I squinted at him, I suddenly saw him as a grown-up. On that morning, I think, he passed from boyhood into his adult life and he felt the farm with different senses. He scattered the magic, as a poltergeist chaotically flings vases. He passed beyond the enchanted world of our childhood farm. In those few seconds, he lost the wonderment.

  I couldn’t have articulated that at the time, but I felt it. Those were the days when, though I did not know their names and seldom understood their source, I felt emotions and atmospheres with the shuddering strength of spells.

  Now I can name them. With great skill I have learnt to use words as a talisman. But if naming does give the user some measure of protection against the sorcerous power of passions, it’s too late now. It’s too late for the child that I was. It’s too late for the farm.

  You know, I still feel the guilt of not having seen what was coming – read the signs better. But I don’t think any words could have deflected what happened that day. Acts of love used for hate, godliness and the glory of Christmas turned to evil by the vileness of men and the callousness of God.

  But then, then we were silently illuminated by the sunlight and the chimera of Christmas song. Filled with its joy, I reached to my bedside table for my glittering Advent calendar. Beneath the last unopened shutter I found a tiny baby Jesus, serenely asleep in the arms of a girl who looked not much older than I, with large blue eyes and a blue doek on her head.

  Michael was the first to break from the spell of inactivity. I was behind him, in my shortie-pyjamas, as we broke into a run and raced through the kitchen. Skree-bang, we were in the crowded courtyard. Neil followed more slowly and went to stand, taller than my dad, alongside my bent-shouldered Oupa and smiling Ouma.

  The women of the farm – our people – swayed together in the harmony that seemed to come from their hearts. Their hands, rough working hands, were clasped before them. Each had a doek upon her head. Blankets were tied around waists and babies blanketed to backs. Small children clutched at skirts and blankets, all awed eyes and solemn faces, in amongst their mothers.

  ‘Dankie, mense,’ said Ouma at last. ‘Thank you for that hymn of praise. Just wait a little now, and you will all get your Christmas box. Neil, asseblief, my kind, those parcels in the kitchen.’

  Neil carried the brown-wrapped food parcels – fat with mealie-meal, tins of baked beans and meat – past the skree-bang of the door and handed them, one by one, to Ouma as she moved among the women.

  ‘Ethel, how is your mother? I see she is not with us this morning. Tell her I shall pray for her health.

  ‘Maggie, thank you for the help this year. You’ve been a good girl.

  ‘Lizzie, that baby’s looking lekker vet now. Better make sure you don’t have any more, hoor jy?’

  The women, shy-faced with their downcast smiles, bobbed to Ouma and clapped courteous hands together before taking the parcels with both hands.

  ‘Dankie, Miesies.’

  ‘Dankie, Miesies.’

  The women waited for Ouma to speak to each one of them before pressing the children forward with small, rough shoves. Squirming and giggly, they sniffed and wriggled skinny legs as they accepted their Christmas clothing – khaki shorts and shirts for the boys, shift dresses for the girls. I felt warm with their gratitude, benevolent beneath their smiles.

  ‘Happy happy! Happy happy!’ called the women, high and clear.

  ‘Happy Christmas, happy Christmas,’ we shouted, smiling and waving as they turned and rhythmically swayed from the courtyard with shuffled dance steps and swinging arms.

  ‘Kulowo mzi kaDavide,

  Kwisitali seenkomo …’

  ‘Happy Christmas, my darlings,’ said my mother, encompassing both Michael and me in the perfume of her bosom as she swooped to embrace us. The swinging orange flower clipped to her ear tapped against my temple as I hugged her. And then we were all hugging. Ouma and Mom clutched each other fiercely, their eyes so similar in their damp darkness.

  ‘Ag, my kind, I think we must mos try harder to understand each other. We are flesh and blood.’

  ‘Oh Ma, I really do love you …’

  All that anger, all that hate-filled energy, with such power to destroy. And they could sweep it away, just like that. They could just say sorry, as if they’d torn a dress or something. Grown-ups were like that. They allowed all the dark creatures out of their lairs, fluttering dank wings, because grown-ups didn’t seem to understand their destructiveness. They thought they could call them back afterwards, send them home to their caves, not realising how they multiplied on the outside. They had lost what I still had, a realisation that bad feelings clustered around a house and a family, sharpening their gnashing, monstrous teeth. Left there too long, they could make bad things happen.

  ‘C’mon, Katie, c’mon.’ Michael was dragging at my arm, pulling me through the kitchen which was sizzling with the smell of bacon.

  ‘Happy Christmas, Dora,’ we called, stretching our arms around her as she stood sweating in the glow of the coal stove. My face pressed into the soft jiggle of her flesh as her large chuckle shook through her body.

  ‘Happy happy!’ she called, in high-pitched counterpoint to her laugh. And then we pulled away and slipped past her bulky hips which nearly blocked the kitchen door. In the lounge, at the foot of the towering Christmas tree, were the most important things about today. There stood two … Only two? Why only two? … crisp white pillowcases, outlining bulges of throat-hollowed anticipation.

  And there we all were, clustered, with the enveloping warmth of Christmas, at t
he foot of the tree. The grown-ups were already dressed and, after a couple of minutes, so was Neil, appearing in the doorway with newly-combed hair. In my strawberry-patterned shortie-pyjamas I crouched beside my mother, clutching at the excitement in my belly with both arms. Mom, sitting on her legs on the carpet, reached for the pillowslips and placed one in front of me and the other on Michael’s lap.

  Looking down into my face, she placed a finger under my anxious chin.

  ‘Neil told us he was too old for a pillowslip this year. He’s going to get presents from under the Christmas tree like the rest of us. But you two still believe in Father Christmas, don’t you? Enough to get presents from him anyway – isn’t that so?’

  I smiled and ducked as she ruffled my short hair away from my forehead. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to tell her I’d seen these ‘humphs’ in the cupboard and that I didn’t believe in Father Christmas. She might change her mind, as grown-ups sometimes did when children weren’t exactly as they would like them to be. You never quite knew with grown-ups.

  The lounge filled with discarded Christmas paper and rustling cries – squeals of joy from me and my mom, the boys’ deeper ‘Oh wow!’ and my dad’s quiet: ‘Oh lovey. Just what I wanted.’ Ouma and Oupa watched us all in silent happiness before exchanging small gifts – a new, leather-bound prayer book for her and, for him, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.

  Michael received the Size Twenty-six bicycle, with three speeds, that he’d been dying for. My dad had taken a picture of it and they’d wrapped up the photographs in his pillowslip with a bicycle bell, so he’d thought he wasn’t getting it. It was waiting in his room back home in Port Elizabeth. Neil got a backpack for taking overseas with him when he went. Mom swung round and flung her arms around my dad when she unwrapped the delicate diamond drop earrings he had chosen for her. And I, I got the floppy doll that I’d wanted so badly all year. And it was the big kind, not the small monkey-faced type that my friend Penny got for her birthday. I’d been envious of hers, but that was only because I hadn’t had a floppy doll at all.

  Michael and I had to gather up the paper before we were sent off to wash and dress, starving by now because of the trailing waft of bacon which had tantalised us through the present-opening ceremony. We joined them on the stoep – Christmas breakfast was always eaten on the stoep – where the faintest breeze kept the heat moving across our faces. We sucked the cold from chilled prickly pears and nibbled at the crisped fat of farm-cured bacon before the grown-ups settled into their chairs and slurped at coffee. Ouma and Oupa dunked Dora’s buttermilk rusks into their cups, but Mom refused to dunk, a quirk of the faintest distaste just there at the corners of her mouth.

  After breakfast we moved back into the buzzing heat of the dark lounge. Michael and I suffered Ouma’s Bible reading and prayers, wriggling our feet and stretching our eyes behind our hands. I gazed longingly at my confiscated floppy doll, lying on a chair across the room with her vacant, beautifully blue eyes closed. Michael poked at me a few times with a straightened finger, but soon lost interest when my mother’s scowl reached him. Finally we stood to sing ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, which we all knew off by heart. And then we were free.

  I squeezed off a quick, silent prayer as Michael and I were heading for the door. ‘Please, gentle Jesus, please say thank you to God for today. Please just let it stay like this, please, God.’

  ‘What are you doing? Praying or something?’ Michael had caught me.

  ‘No, of course not. What makes you think I was praying?’

  ‘You’ve got your eyes closed and your hands clutched up at your face. You tripped over the chair in the library. Of course you were praying.’

  ‘I was not! I thought I was going to sneeze, that’s all.’

  ‘Ka-t-i was pray-i-i-ng, Ka-t-i was pray-i-i-ng,’ chanted Michael as he darted around me, giving me little taps on the face and head at the longest reach of his arm, so that my hands ineffectually flapped at him, unable to slap him back.

  Later I wondered if it could’ve been that which started what happened that day. If I, like Judas, hadn’t set off some inexorable process towards violence and mangled horror. And, if I had, could I have stopped what happened if I’d acted differently? If I hadn’t presumed, and begun to take His favour for granted again. Could I, could Judas, have done any different? But surely God, if there was one there that day, couldn’t have been so angered by one small child’s denial. Surely He was more of a grown-up, or, as I hoped, more than a grown-up.

  Michael joined me under the wild fig for a while, being the daddy who went to work. Work was up the tree. I sat at home on the grass, feeding my baby from a magic milk bottle which appeared to empty but never did. He soon got bored – pelting me with twigs and practising his dove-call whistle – since he couldn’t come home while I declared it to be daytime, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do at the office once he’d gone there. Coming down from the tree, he tried to make the game more interesting – ‘I’m a boogieman now, OK? Pretend I’m not the dad’ – and kidnapped my floppy doll. At first I chased him up the tree, calling for the police. But then he went too high for me to follow and I tired of the game too.

  ‘Ah, Michael man, give her back. Ah please, Michael, ple-e-ase give her back, Michael. It’s not fair …’

  ‘Chi-ildren!’ My mother’s voice floated up to us in the cool branches. ‘It’s time for the pictures. Come down now.’

  We scrambled and scraped down the tree to join the family on the lawn. As they did every year, William and Petrus had brought their younger children round to the front lawn before lunch. Looking clean and uncomfortably proud in their starched new outfits, they posed with us for Christmas photographs. I have such a clear picture of us, as we must have looked. Six young children from the Eastern Cape – from the same farm, who hardly knew each other – two of us white, four black. All of us barefoot. Against the swaying splash of Ouma’s bright flowers we stood smiling together, the black children stiff in their Christmas clothes. One small black girl clutched a Christmas toy, an unbending trading-store doll, its hair and clothing painted, its skin white. We, Michael and I, held a shiny silver bicycle bell and a huge, beautiful doll with ‘real’ hair and closing eyes and baby clothes.

  We were happy then, when the photographs were taken and the children trailed after their fathers back to the huts. How could we have been so happy? How could I not have seen how God had used me? How He’d tantalised and taunted me with Christmas as it should be, as it had always been?

  It was time for lunch. Time for pulling crackers and wearing silly hats, which Michael and I wore around our skinny necks and my dad had to tear slightly to fit over his wide forehead. Time to swap cracker rings for small clown games, and for me to beg for dolls’ rattles. For Michael to argue over who would pull the wishbone.

  ‘Ta-ra,’ called my dad, making a big thing of Dora’s giggling entrance with the two enormous chickens. And then Ouma appeared, smiling from the kitchen, with a plate.

  ‘This is specially for you, Kati,’ she said, pride in her surprise leaking from her every gesture.

  ‘What, Ouma?’

  I could see though. My mouth had turned bitter. But it couldn’t be! Surely she couldn’t have done that. I think that’s when I realised that the day was going to go wrong. From here, from this moment, when things weren’t as they should be, till … till the things that happened later.

  ‘It’s your little chicken, your very own Christmas chicken.’ She placed the small-boned meat in front of me, hunched and brown now with cooking. There was no sign of the lively feathered creature who’d strutted its white body through the hok the day before.

  ‘It’s the chicken, my lief. The one you chose, remember?’

  ‘I can’t … I can’t eat it.’

  I choked on the saliva which was filling my mouth, and the table blurred.

&nb
sp; ‘My magtig, now what’s wrong? It’s just a chicken.’

  ‘Her name is Sheba. She’s not just a chicken. Stop calling her a chicken.’

  Darkness took me from behind then, sliding in on both sides of my head. I could hear Ouma’s voice somewhere far away.

  ‘O my magtig. But this is a pieperige child. She gave the chicken a name. On a chicken farm, where we eat chickens every day. All right, take it away, Michael …’

  ‘I’ll eat it, Ouma …’

  ‘No you will not, Michael. Don’t cause more trouble than you can help. Give it to Dora. Tell her she can eat it.’

  The helpless darkness receded as I stared at my empty Christmas place, littered with cracker debris. All that was left was that burning – the burning which couldn’t be blinked or swallowed away.

  ‘Settle down now, child. Don’t take it so hard.’

  *

  Tick Tick Tick

  In the dead of the silent afternoon, I curled myself into the cool castle under Oupa’s desk in the library. The desk clock above my head moved the day onward with clumsy, clattering slowness.

  This was always the worst part of Christmas Day, when the presents were played with, the food eaten, the crackers pulled and the paralysing heat lay upon stomachs laden with midday feasting.

  But that afternoon, it wasn’t like that. I had none of the usual drowse of anticlimactic satiation. That day my body felt at war with itself. My belly hollowed and hankered for my uneaten ritual dinner, while my gut galled in rebellion at the thought of my Christmas pet, reduced now to sucked bones. And I was alert, aware even of the small sugar-ants pattering out from the skirting board to a sticky patch on the wooden floor.

  Tick Tick Tick

  On my knee I held King Solomon’s Mines, a refuge from this place and this Christmas time. This Christmas which had seemed the same, but was now slightly askew. Just a little out of kilter, stirring the unease in my throat, the anxiety in the prickles around my hairline.