The Innocence of Roast Chicken Read online

  Ouma was laughing too now, her lines of brisk disgruntlement softened. She was moving around the table, placing portions of chicken on plates without asking our preferences. I was hoping against hope, willing her to assign a wing to me, and she did, without looking at me. And the gravy-coated egg, so delicious and redolent of the chicken – which we traditionally fought over and whose progress we children were following around the table – was delved from the flesh and reverently placed on my plate. Michael’s quick look of indignation and protest was dealt with swiftly by Ouma, who said: ‘Kati said the grace, Kati gets the egg.’

  ‘Do you really remember that old farm in Swellendam, Marie?’ asked Ouma, forking delicate slices of white meat on to her plate. ‘You were very young when we left there.’

  ‘Of course I do.’ She was indignant suddenly, her veracity questioned, her story brought under scrutiny. ‘I remember that old wooden gate which squeaked, next to the great old oak tree, and I remember the stoep where Pappie sat and smoked his pipe.’

  ‘How did you lose the farm again, Ouma?’ I asked. As the youngest, I was the expected Greek chorus in the ceremonial family play – the questioner, the prompter of plot.

  ‘Pappie was a kindly man,’ she said, ‘maybe too kind for his own good. Do you remember how I told you that he worked as farm manager on La Rochelle? That was before he married the farmer’s only child. She was a beautiful girl, our Mams, much younger than him. Nou ja, who could have resisted her?

  ‘The farm was ours then, of course, when Oupa died, and Pappie was very proud of that land. But he was too kindly to neighbours and often – as a man of substance – he was asked to stand surety for people. Anyway, one day he stood surety for his neighbour, Van Zyl, who wanted to buy more land …’

  ‘Ag, come on, Grieta!’ Oom Frans’s exclamation burst from him, with a laugh which erupted from deep within his shaking chest. ‘That was Pappie’s story … he lost it through a bet, gambling – though of course his precious daughters will never admit to that.’

  ‘Ag, nonsens, Frans,’ Ouma barked. ‘Pappie didn’t gamble.’ Bending her head slightly to one side, she gazed at him speculatively for a moment. Her face broke suddenly into a half-smile, almost sardonic: ‘But of course, you like to think so. It makes you feel so good and righteous, just because you’ve never touched a card since you married Anna.’

  ‘Hha,’ gasped Tant Anna, ‘Griet, I should think he wouldn’t! Onse Here is not forgiving about gambling. And Frans, don’t talk nonsense, I’m sure your father would never have gambled. You just like to annoy the girls.’

  Oom Frans looked slightly chastened by the unadorned Calvinism of his wife. Smiling wryly at Ouma, he allowed her to continue.

  ‘Anyway, as I was saying, when we lost the farm, Pappie loaded us all into the wagon and we trekked very slowly down the Langkloof to the Eastern Cape. It took us years. Magtig, those years were hard!’

  She stared into space for a second, then shook her head. Briefly she gripped Oupa’s hand – the gesture of love not quite reaching her stern features – before lifting her knife and fork.

  It was clear to me that she, as undisputed head of the family, should be placed at the table’s starched white end, but she awarded this distinction to Oupa, who sat now with an expression of infinite sweetness for Ouma. On his side plate was a leather-covered book, which he riffled through and peeped into throughout the lunch that he hardly touched.

  The silence was broken again by Tant Marie. Her giggle trilled as she curled her plump hand over her mouth. ‘Oh, Grieta, it wasn’t hard at all. It was the best fun.’

  Turning to me: ‘You would have loved that wagon trip, Kati. The oxen would stomp in that slow way of theirs, and we – that was Frans and me – we would jump off and run ahead through the veld. When we tired we could sit on the wagon again. I remember being so free … I’d never felt so free before – before that trip I’d always had to act like a lady. No one can really be so strict about that when you’re travelling by wagon.’

  ‘Ja, of course,’ said Ouma, impaling Tant Marie with her look of withering scorn, ‘it was lovely for you. You were the youngest. Didn’t you realise what we were doing while you and Frans were racing around being children? Every morning we had to load up the wagon for travelling, and every afternoon we unloaded for outspan. And every day Mams insisted that I wash one set of clothing for all of you because she said we had to show people what we were. She wouldn’t have us in dirty clothes, ever. You remember, we only had two outfits each. But she said we weren’t bywoners and we wouldn’t look like them.

  ‘Every night, us four girls crushed up to Mams to sleep in the wagon. The boys slept under it with Pappie. And we were so poor we were happy to get one piece of fruit between us. We didn’t go peeling it, like you spoilt children do.’ This with a frown aimed at Michael and me.

  ‘What? You ate banana skins?’ asked Michael, collapsing into wild laughter and slipping from his chair with the glory of his own wit and hilarity.

  My mother reached across and slapped him so that he slid upward again, just a small giggle still escaping.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Ouma snapped, but a small chuckle rumbled from her throat. ‘I meant apples, of course, and pears and peaches. You knew perfectly well what I meant.’

  ‘So how did you finally get this farm in the Eastern Cape?’ I asked, anxious to keep the ritual on track.

  ‘Ja, well, my kind,’ said Ouma, brushing a damp curl from her forehead and reaching for empty plates, ‘Pappie worked for farmers along the way. We’d stop for long periods while he worked on farms or even sometimes loaded and carried. Menial work, which he wasn’t built for. But he did it, and he made money along the journey.’

  Oom Frans was smiling mischievously: ‘Ja, Griet? Is that really what happened?’

  She stared at him a moment. Her voice quavered with the slightest hint of amusement as she glanced at Tant Anna’s unsmiling piety. ‘What is it, Frans? What did you want to say? Speak up and tell us what you think.’

  ‘Ag, nee, nothing really, Grieta. Just that us boys sleeping under the wagon didn’t always stay there all night. Pappie had other ways of making money besides labouring on farms. He was lucky on that trip. Magtig, but I remember how lucky he was.’

  ‘Frans, watter nonsens praat jy nou?’ snapped Tant Anna, her agitation ousting her English. ‘Moenie dit sê nie. Ek wil dit nie hoor nie.’ She had placed her long, unpretentious hands over her ears. With her unaffectedly cut fingernails, she showed her single adornment – her plain gold wedding band.

  I could see slight smiles all around the table. Even my mother’s unexplained tension seemed to have evaporated during lunch. Ouma and Oupa looked down to hide their amusement, while Tant Marie shook and quivered behind her small white hands. Michael and Neil grinned unrepentantly.

  And that is really all I remember from that lunch, that wonderful communion of roast chicken and love. I think we had a hot pudding, which my father refused. ‘Hot pudding reminds me of boarding school,’ he often told us. Michael and I lapped up the home-made custard. I’m sure we must have. We always did.

  ‘I just love custard,’ I told Ouma – well, I think I did. I usually said so on the farm as I poured great globs and dollops from the jug. ‘We never have custard at home – only cream.’

  And Ouma always turned to an invisible audience to comment: ‘Magtig, the child complains about being fed cream.’

  I do remember the full, lazy move outside, Oupa slapping his pockets to find his pipe and opening his book again. Scrabbling for his glasses which had fallen down the side of the lumpy couch on the stoep, he settled there. The rest of us wandered in the slow, buzzing heat towards the fig tree, stopping to admire and to comment on Ouma’s flowers. Laughing, my brother Neil had to rescue a shrieking Tant Marie with flapping arms, from an enveloping cloud of miggies which settled on her hair and her face.

/>   A scattering of upright chairs and a blanket had been spirited beneath the tree during lunch and we collapsed there now, Michael and I lying full length, lazily picking at the grass and sucking stalks. In an unusual show of solidarity he rolled over and opened his grubby, damp hand. Gesturing with it, he allowed me to choose a wilting clover from the clump he had unearthed in Ouma’s flower beds. I smiled at him and we munched our clover leaves, chewing the stalks with quick little bites.

  My father came then, running around the side of the house with a watermelon tucked under his arm like a rugby ball. Shifting it into both hands for a pass, he ran past Neil who was dawdling on the lawn. He gestured the melon towards him and the two began running side by side down the lawn in our direction. Daddy passed and Neil, laughing, had to leap sideways to catch it, falling on his elbows and rolling over to protect the melon. My father slapped him between the shoulder blades when he rose – the only form of touch he allowed himself with his boys – and left his hand there while they sauntered, laughing, towards us in a togetherness of men.

  In the deep, cool shade of the tree, Daddy knocked on the watermelon and listened for its hollow signal. ‘Sounds like a good one, Jim,’ said Ouma, while Mom, her long legs curled under her, tugged at her mini and nodded, smiling at him.

  The afternoon lazed into shadows while we lay or sat, waving arms lethargically at flies which buzzed and landed, buzzed and landed. Tant Marie dozed on her straight-backed chair, her plump chin dropping towards her chest. Jerking awake, she looked around and brazened her pretence of not having slept.

  We talked of the bioscope – Neil had seen Khartoum, while Mom and Dad had recently seen Sophia Loren’s latest, I forget now what it was called. Daddy was loud in his disappointment at having read somewhere that she was expecting a baby. ‘Lovely popsy that, just lovely!’ he added admiringly.

  Tant Marie said she hadn’t been to the bioscope for such a long time, but she was very keen to see Doctor Zhivago. ‘But I just wish I could get to Johannesburg somehow,’ she said, sighing. I would do anything to see Maurice Chevalier while he’s here … it’s that accent of his. It just does something …’

  And the cricket. A hotly-disputed discussion about how good the sides were, and who would win the Test between Australia and the Springboks being played in Port Elizabeth.

  Oom Frans smilingly teased my dad about Britain’s treatment of Rhodesia. ‘So which Engelse are you supporting this time? Harold Wilson’s boycott, or Smithy’s boys?’

  Oom Frans knew my parents had voted against a republic in South Africa and still spoke of the ‘union’ – but I think he suspected that they supported Rhodesia’s UDI.

  My father smiled and sliced more of the watermelon. My mother’s eyes began their darting again. Oom Frans held on, reluctant to let a good teasing point drop.

  ‘Sanctions won’t bring Rhodesia down, you know! Those blimming Brits can’t think they can keep telling us what to do in Africa. And now the Americans are getting in on the act.’

  My father wielded the carving knife like a panga to swish down on the blood-red slices, cleaving them in two. He smiled and made as if he hadn’t heard. My mother’s eyes were fixed, anxious and searching, to his face. Seeing his smiling imperturbability, she relaxed slightly and put out her plate for another slice.

  ‘Those Americans,’ Oom Frans said, sighing and shaking his head, letting the subject drift into the indolent heat of the afternoon.

  Tant Anna turned her anxious gaze on Neil. ‘Ag, my boy, your ouma tells me you’re applying to go and live with them for a year. Is this true?’

  He rolled over and sat up, facing the old people.

  ‘Ja, Tant Anna. I’m applying for an exchange scholarship to go to America. I really hope to get it. I’d like to see how their country works and look at their democracy. But really …’ He leapt to his feet and shaking off his earnest demeanour, laughed raucously. Bending forward to twang at an imaginary guitar, he continued: ‘I’d like to go to California to see The Beach Boys. And I hear there’s some real groovy surfing over there.’

  Laughing still, he flung himself back to the blanket.

  ‘But I hope you’re going to be a good ambassador for us,’ continued Tant Anna, looking perplexed, and anxious still.

  ‘Ja, Tant Anna, I’m going to tell them how terrible apartheid is.’

  My father’s panga-knife faltered and his arm dropped quietly. In the sudden silence I saw my mother’s eyes freeze and, beyond her, I caught a sudden flitter of my landing hoopoe. But it was my last glimpse. I don’t remember seeing another hoopoe that holiday.

  Oom Frans’s eyes had hardened. To me they seemed, frighteningly, to have developed the consistency of glass. His lean body had stiffened on his upright chair, his tie still firmly knotted to his collar.

  ‘How the donder can you possibly sit there and tell Tant Anna you’ll be an ambassador for South Africa, when you have views like that?’ His voice was very quiet, with a sibilant quality. But we all heard him, with the clarity of shattering glass.

  ‘Well, obviously, Oom Frans,’ said Neil. He tried to appear unconcerned, but his shoulders had stiffened and hunched. And his fingers fiddled with the blanket, weaving the tassels between them. ‘How could anyone possibly justify apartheid? Ask my dad. It’s like trying to justify the Nazis. The only way I can be an ambassador is to let them know that not everyone thinks like the hairy-backs do.’

  ‘Neil!’

  My mother’s cry held a depth of anguish. Her eyes were squeezed closed and her hands, white-knuckled, clutched at each other in her lap. Her whole body, with her legs tightly tucked beneath her, appeared to bend into itself. My father finally dropped the knife from his loose fingers and shifted across the blanket to place an arm around her.

  ‘Ag, I’m sorry, Ouma, I don’t mean you. You know I mean the government,’ said Neil, glancing anxiously at my mother’s face before gazing pleadingly at Ouma. My ouma sat, her hands held loosely, palm up, in her lap. She stared bemusedly at them and didn’t look up when Neil spoke. But she sighed a long, shuddering sigh.

  ‘Ja, Neil, I know that’s what you meant.’ Her sadness, like a watercolour wash, stained away all the brisk stern lines from her face and left a soft, slightly sagging whiteness. Tant Marie, her eyes darting between her sister and brother, gave a small giggle which ended in a tiny catch.

  That sound acted as a switch to Oom Frans, whose sprung body flew upright from his hard chair. ‘I can’t sit here and listen to this kind of talk. And in front of my wife too.’ His wife sat transfixed, her mouth slightly open.

  ‘Griet, we’ve always tolerated you and your damned – ag, excuse me, Anna, but I’m angry – SAP views and your Engelse pretensions. Why, for the blessed goodness, did you have to create a little English girl? Now see what you’ve done. You’ve created a monster.’

  Turning on my mother, whose face was turned into my father’s open shirt-front, his hand stroking her hair, he rasped: ‘You’re volksvreemd, my girl, you always were and you always will be. But just look at what you’ve produced – a pack of rooinek savages, who have no more idea of volk, family or nasie than hyena cubs.’

  ‘Kom, Anna, laat ons nou gaan. Ons kan nie hier sit en luister na hierdie soort ding nie. En ons kan nie hier sit saam met hierdie soort mense nie.’

  He stood under that great, achingly joyful, embracing tree, and burnt us with his rage and hurt. His anger and rigid conviction consumed his age as he marched, long-limbed and sure, towards the house.

  1989 … 28th October

  His thick, sinuous sliding makes me flinch in my softest innermost self. Above me his alien features dance in their primitive rhythm. And beyond … beyond I can just glimpse the chirruping morning sunshine. The day breezes in the jasmine to mingle with the hot smell of sweat and last night’s wine.

  Raising his body on freckled, almost hairless arms, he lifts his
head in the exultancy of conquering manhood. Then his eyes drop in admiration, not of me, but of his veined, glistening lunge.

  His insistency rubs unwilling sensation through my belly. But my cringing, secret being feels battered, desecrated by his impervious hip-flexing – his unrelenting plunge and withdraw, plunge and withdraw. Between my two tight-clenched fists I hold, in safety, my soul.

  The dance moves faster and my detached gaze holds and frames, for an instant, his slackened mouth and eyes that are beginning to roll back. My guard, I suppose, loosens as I feel a film of contemptuous revulsion spread over my eyes. Suddenly my wrists are manacled in the imprisoning grasp of his hands. Panic flies, hot and acrid, to my mouth as my hands are roughly pinioned above my head.

  ‘Stop it! Let me go!’ I can hear the high-pitched fright in my voice.

  But the dance is in its frenetic death-throes now. In his grunting, inhuman state I doubt he even hears me. He gives two violent thrusts – thrusts that, had he been wielding a sword, would have been death strokes – and collapses, trapping me beneath his wet weight.

  ‘Fuck you, get off me,’ I gabble, pushing my released hands at his shoulders.

  Slowly he raises himself, perplexed now, the familiar hurt spreading over his open features. Rage smothers me like a hot blanket. How could he never understand? How could it never be brought home to him how close sex brings him, and all men for that matter, to the totally primitive, the bestial? Even gentle new-age men lose their thin veneer in this act of conquering, which so closely resembles a wrestled fight to the death.

  ‘You know I hate that.’ My voice is almost a shriek. ‘You know it. We’ve been through this. How dare you hold my hands like that? You did it on purpose to scare me, you bastard.’

  He rolls off me, his hands and feet entwined in mine, withdrawing as suddenly as if he has found himself embracing a cobra. He rolls to the edge of the bed and sits, his feet on the floor. He makes no effort to cover his damp, withered self. He is always like this – totally comfortable to fight with me in his nakedness. Unselfconsciously he raises his arms to rub at his face and neck. He feels no vulnerability in his unclothed self. I, in contrast, have obsessively mummified my body in the twisted duvet and sit now, gazing at his back.