The Innocence of Roast Chicken Page 9

  ‘I told you I didn’t care how you mocked me!’ He pauses and sits, his eyes warily seeking mine. And are they pleading? I can’t be sure.

  ‘That’s also why I want us, you and me, to go to the rally tomorrow. We have to take sides – you too. And this isn’t a request,’ he bursts in quickly as he sees my head’s slow side-to-side movement. ‘It’s an ultimatum. I know that you need me in a perverse kind of way. I know you can’t just throw our marriage away with alacrity. You’re used to me gentling you, and never forcing you, because I always thought you needed time.’

  I cannot reply. He grabs my shoulder and adds, very quietly: ‘Well, that’s all over now! And that’s why I’m telling you: if you don’t come with me tomorrow, our marriage is over.’

  1966 … Fifteen days to Christmas

  The glittering mystery of the miniature cardboard window lay at the tip of my unmoving finger. My perfect stillness held the anticipation within me – the thought, feathering my stomach, of what might lie behind the gold-speckled shutters.

  Tension edged my fingers towards movement. To avoid the opening just that little bit longer, to prolong my delicate balance of expectation, I jerked my finger into a light stroking of the pastelled forest scene. Slowly, ever so slowly, I fingered the oak, ash and elm trees, though I wouldn’t then have known their names. Snow-dusted, their homely trunks enfolded tiny glittered doors and windows while, from their roots, squirrels, badgers and hedgehogs stirred and peeped.

  This gentle wooded scene was so familiar, so right. It was part of it, my Christmas, as much a part as the dusty heat, peeled prickly pears and watermelon under the enveloping wild fig tree.

  A sudden flick and the window opened to my longing eyes. There, suddenly revealed, was the angelic child who had sung in privacy all through the year. She was a well-remembered harbinger, a soothsayer leading us, in joyous expectation, to Christmas.

  Leg-tangled, I looked up from the end of Oupa’s bed and smiled. Oupa, his tranquillity intact, had waited in silence through my ritual anticipation and elated discovery, as he did every morning, as he did every year, when the Advent calendar was unpacked with the Christmas decorations.

  ‘Ag, don’t tell me you two are still sitting there with that calendar. Magtig, how long does it take to open one little window?’ Ouma’s tone was exasperated as she entered from the bathroom, but when I turned, I found she was smiling. In her plain blue cotton, her face shining and, as always, free of make-up, she looked fresh, smooth-faced and very clean.

  ‘Well,’ said Oupa solemnly. ‘It takes a long time to do it properly. You can’t rush these things, you know.’

  And then the Christmas gladness washed warmth through my chilly limbs and we laughed, Oupa and I, with a solidarity of purpose and perfect understanding. Throwing my head back and flinging my body across the bed, I boiled with raucous laughter. Everything was going to be wonderful, all the Christmas things were still to come: the tree, the baking, the wrapping, the decorating. How could anything possibly spoil that?

  I was scurried through breakfast. ‘Come on, child. It’s time for Dora to clear the table so she can prepare for the baking,’ Ouma told me.

  Dressed quickly in my shorts and shirt, I left the house with a skree-bang and ran barefooted across the chilled dust in search of my brothers. The two dogs trailed behind me in their loping tongue-lolling companionship. The earth felt still. The unwoken insects had not yet begun their buzzing, chirruping accompaniment to the building heat.

  Coming to a sliding halt before a still-silent clump of bush, I felt the dogs colliding, their ears and legs flopping. Firmly, I pressed a hand to each one’s hindquarters, urging the two to sit. Scrabbling in a greasy shorts pocket, I found scraps of egg white and toast which I had discovered on the stacked breakfast plates on my way through the kitchen.

  Nestling the offering between dusty leaves on the very edge of the bush, I settled silently between the dogs, my feet crossed at the ankles and my knobbled, scratched knees poking skyward on either side of my face. We waited, as the dogs and I had often done, our ears aching for a quick scurrying patter. We heard the waking insects begin their buzz in the heat which dampened my neck and the hair on my forehead. Somewhere overhead, the zee-ee of the Christmas beetles grew deafening.

  The smallest skitter suddenly drew the dogs into alertness and shrank the sound of the insects to its usual background hum. I leant forward, sliding my feet through the silent dust into a crossed position. And there she was, collecting the food – for her nestled babies, I thought. Sleek and shiny in the morning sun, the small grey meerkat delicately clutched at a crust and scurried back to safety. I pressed my hands down hard on the two tan flanks, tense beside me. Their noses sniffed and worked the air and, with their eyes, they followed the small animal’s return. This time she nibbled neatly at the egg white before skittering away with a larger piece.

  Content with the results of my offering, I stood and released the dogs. They dashed side by side into the thick, thorny brush. Futilely swinging their clumsy bulks in circles, they crashed against the impenetrably entwined growth.

  ‘Mikey, Kati,’ I called, and heard their dusty padding behind me as I ran. Then, as my exhilaration could no longer be contained, I sprang into the air and began cartwheeling wildly down the centre of the rutted, water-scored track. Crossing the spiky clumps of grass, I saw the pool ahead and slightly below me.

  ‘Hha, ja jonkie ja-a! Michael’s chant floated up to me. He was dancing exultantly in the dust, flicking his fingers reprovingly at his elder brother. ‘Ja jonkie ja.’

  He was facing a frowning Neil, whose mouth was twisted around an unheard retort. A small wisp of smoke wavered from Neil’s fingers into the unmoving air above his head. As his eye caught my approach, he quickly staunched the source of the dancing wisp. Waving arms above his head dissipated the remaining wandering smoke.

  ‘Can’t I ever be free of you bloody little piks? Why do you always follow me everywhere?’

  I was hurt that he included me in his scowling displeasure, I who had made no comment about his scary defiance of the forbidden. ‘I didn’t say anything …’

  ‘Yes, well, you didn’t see anything, did you now?’ he snarled. ‘Buzz off, both of you. Leave me in peace. And Michael …’ He stood in one agile straightening of his long legs and towered over the willowy boy. His large hand closed in a wincing clasp of his shoulder as he bent towards his ear. In a menacing growl he continued: ‘Tell Mom if you want to, just tell her and see what happens to you.’

  We escaped, Michael and I, from the adolescent disquiet around the swimming place.

  ‘I’ll race you,’ he said, his spirits unlowered, his body doubling and snapping in perfect Arab springs across the brush-like grass.

  He won the race, as he knew he would, with a decisive skree-bang of the screen door. We tumbled, wrestling and laughing, against the dresser, scrabbling in the blue and white jar for soetkoekies. Our thin arms snaked and twined to be first inside the jar’s narrow mouth.

  ‘Chi-i-ne,’ sang Dora, shaking her head. Her quivering bulk was heaving with inevitable laughter as she stood, sweating arms on hips. Bowls and jars of glacé fruit and flour stood on the scrubbed wooden table beside a great lump of marzipan.

  ‘Is that you, kids?’ called my mother from within, as I twisted a pinch of marzipan from the yellow lump.

  ‘Ja-a,’ intoned Michael, his voice an unenthusiastic down-tone. Slowly, we wandered through to the lounge, Michael pulling a face at my lump of marzipan. Before eating, he would always theatrically peel the marzipan free and scrape the cake to remove the last remaining scraps.

  The Christmas tree stood, bare and magnificent, brushing the ceiling. Beside it was piled a mound of boxes – boxes which had always held the Christmas decorations and the Advent calendars for as long as I could remember. Outdated advertisements told of their long-ago contents of shoes
or shirts in curling old-fashioned script.

  ‘Aren’t you going to decorate the tree this year, Kati?’ asked Mom, her legs folded under her as she opened boxes and lifted out tangled tinsel strings.

  ‘I was going to do it, Mom. Can’t I do it just now, though?’

  ‘No, you’ll do it now! Your ouma doesn’t want these boxes here to trip over all day. And I’m going to help you. Just now, I have to help Ouma with the baking.’

  My father, summoned from somewhere outdoors, sat meekly in a chair, a long string of lights across his lap. In his hand he held his ever-present silver penknife. He plugged the string of lights into the wall beside his chair and clicked his tongue when no lights glowed. Unplugging again, he methodically unscrewed and retightened each small light. The bulbs, in delicate olden-days style, formed glowing miniature Christmas trees, Father Christmases and wrapped gifts. At his feet, Michael settled to help him with his plodding detective work by plugging and unplugging, switching on and switching off.

  Ouma was busy with some farm business, a pencil and a large hardbacked black notebook on her lap. Oupa, a book pressed close to his spectacled eyes, was reading in his armchair, his stick resting against its arm.

  Gently dusted light flowed through the fly-screened sash window, embracing my smiling mother, who was now softly laying glass tree ornaments on her open palms. Beyond her, the light held Ouma in its golden grasp – the two of them gentled, haloed and, somehow, drawn together.

  No scowls appeared, no lips were tensely drawn between teeth, no eyes narrowed. For a moment I held a superstitious stillness, my indrawn breath a talisman against the reappearance of yesterday’s ugliness. Then with a tentative return to movement, I realised that there were no reminders here of the awfulness, since no thought of it was welcome in the Christmas-scented room. It was gone. How silly to have believed it an omen.

  In my anxiety and hope, Christmas – even the hint of its coming, it seemed to me – had sponged away the dread. The tangled joy of preparation had restored the farm. Smiles, passed from person to person in the tinkering room, seemed to draw each into a charmed forgetfulness.

  Only Neil, in his unacknowledged guilt and adolescent resentment, remained outside the circle of tacit forgiveness. By his absence from the Christmas preparations, he had not sanctioned the unspoken truce tentatively reached within the home.

  ‘What’s the time, Dad? Has the cricket started?’ I remember Michael, his clear face eager. He asked the question which I knew at the time to be his own ceremonial talisman to ward off evil and draw the room’s warmth tighter.

  ‘Quite soon now, son. Go and fetch Ouma’s wireless in the meantime.’

  And I, aware of the magic in the liturgy of cricket commentary, remained silent, leaving my usual ‘ughs’, ‘yechs’ and ‘awfuls’ unspoken. The wireless, fetched by Michael, awaited its part in the ceremony, as I spun webs of gold and silver tinsel and charms of bold-coloured balls. Glittering birds silvered the branches in the hesitant sunlight and my father, his practical feet firmly planted, wove an enchanted scene with his strands of sparkling lights.

  Last to be unwrapped was the fairy, my favourite, my sorceress. Her lumpy forehead curl had lost its gold, her green net skirt clung to her plump plastic stomach with clumps of gluey glitter. Her gauzy wings were bent into the kinks of age and years of being packed away.

  Yet as she – my fairy portent of the joyousness of Christmas – rose to the tip of the tree, my last demon of family disquiet winged with her.

  ‘Shouldn’t we just put a star up there?’

  My mother, balancing on a chair, was wrinkling her face at the fairy as she stretched upward to attach her.

  ‘She’s really seen better days. She’s so ugly now.’

  And down the fairy plunged, her head aiming floor-ward in my mother’s hand.

  ‘No,’ I shrilled, hysteria pitching my voice higher. ‘You can’t do that. She’s important. I love her.’

  And then everyone laughed, a warm drawing-together kind of laugh. It was aimed at me, but for once I didn’t pout in hurt humiliation. I felt only relief, even if it was I who had to be the instrument of God’s purpose in pulling the family together.

  And as my fairy flew again, and was wired to the topmost branch in exalted familiarity, I felt that nothing could be wrong or ugly now that the preordained rites of Christmas had begun. We had moved into that magic, suspended time of preparing a feast for God. For Him to allow awfulness to intrude would be for Him to destroy what was His. It would be like crushing my birthday cake the day before my party.

  But we had to be careful. Everything had to be the same, and I knew it was my responsibility to hold it together, because only I realised how important it was to keep everything as it was before. And to be good. Good enough to avoid His wrath. He’d seen our Christmas before and He’d been pleased because, before, He’d blessed us constantly with unfailing family warmth. And, most important, He’d granted us this perfect place – the farm. The farm was all about Christmas. In some ways I thought it existed for Christmas. The perfect place, God’s place, which He’d created for the celebration of His most important ceremony.

  ‘It’s time, it’s time, isn’t it, Dad?’ Michael was darting and bouncing.

  ‘Ja, turn on the wireless, Michael.’ Daddy’s chesty chuckle created a balm of togetherness with his younger son. Looking up, I saw that my elder brother had joined us, aloof in his armchair. My mother took a breath to speak and lifted her head in her drawn-up disapproving look. But my father, who rarely interfered, frowned. I bet he couldn’t have put it into words, but at the time I instinctively understood what his frown communicated: let the cricket do its ceremonial job of calming and drawing together; let the cricket have its way.

  Mom subsided then, her breath harmlessly expelled.

  ‘Hy kom, en hy kom, en-hy-kom-en-hy-kom en hy BOUL.’

  Ouma’s radio had been tuned to the B programme, the Afrikaans station.

  ‘Change to the A. Let’s hear what Charles has to say,’ said Oupa, smiling, his book laid flat, open to his place, on his chest.

  ‘Sometimes I rather like listening to the commentary in Afrikaans,’ Neil said, his sudden eagerness wrestling with the entrenched ennui on his face. And suddenly, as Ouma looked up from her notebook and smiled at him, I knew the cricket had already woven its spell, drawn him in, and healed the hurts of yesterday.

  ‘I don’t know about you,’ he continued, glancing at Dad and Oupa, ‘but I like the way they make it into quite a different game. It’s not like the cricket we play, but it’s … I s’pose it’s more exciting really … like, gladiators fighting it out.’ He finished this with a little deprecating laugh. But no one laughed at him. They nodded and strained towards the room’s new focal point.

  Heads drew forward towards the centre of the room where the wireless sat on the coffee table. Daddy and Michael, who was frantically tuning the radio now, looked suddenly very similar, their expressions achingly eager and … young. All the faces around the room, except for Ouma’s, were gazing intensely at the set, as if they could see the green of the pitch through the dials.

  And suddenly Charles Fortune’s treacly voice poured into the room.

  ‘Oh what a glorious day this is at St George’s Park, this day! The very heavens are crowding above the green and white arena below me. Thirty thousand people are here this morning to see the majestic Pollock wield the blade on this, the third day of the first Test against the Australians …’

  ‘Oh, get on with it, Chawles,’ my father mocked. ‘Tell us what’s happening.’

  ‘Tell us the score, Chawles,’ said Neil, laughing now with my father. But their exhilaration was unmistakable, impossible to conceal behind the camouflage of their mockery of the commentator’s plum-pudding speech.

  ‘McKenzie is walking slowly back to the Duckpond End. He’s taking his time. This
is going to be a long, hot day. I remember just such an occasion back in fifty-three …’

  It was working, I could see it working. And that’s what mattered. Even my mother was smiling, cross-legged on the floor, gazing at the transistor as Michael leant forward and pounded her leg before grabbing her wrist in a ferocious ‘Chinese bangle’.

  ‘We’re winning, Mom, our side’s winning.’

  ‘Denis Lindsay is settling in nicely with Graeme Pollock now.’ Charles Fortune’s voice wafted endlessly through the hot, airless room. All were motionless except Ouma, who – unaware in her pragmatism of the transfiguration around her – raised her wire-mesh fly swatter and rose to end the lazy buzzing of the lone fly which had found its way past the fly screens.

  ‘You will remember that glaur-rious knock in the first innings …’

  ‘Oh glaur-r-ious, Chawles,’ mimicked Neil. My father threw back his head and bellowed with laughter. But they loved him. He was part of it, I could see that.

  None the less, the bile began to rise in my throat. I couldn’t help it. I understood that it was important, but the very sound of Charles Fortune’s rich, fatty voice caused dry, heaving retches. For too many endless car journeys I’d sat squashed in the back seat, nauseous with a terrible carsickness, while Charles’s voice had commentated on unending cricket matches. After a while, I simply associated the two.

  His voice wafted after me as I slipped from the room. ‘Dare we hope he can repeat it now as the Australians gather all their strengths to smash this partnership? Oh! Good ball that! Was that a chance? I think not. The ball went to ground well before gully. No run. Lindsay stays without a blot on his second innings. And I’ll hazard a guess, he’ll offer few this quite lovely summer’s day …’

  Cool silence. Dropping into the enveloping leather armchair in Oupa’s library I could smell the slight mustiness of old paper and crumbling leather spines. I gulped twice to allow my nausea to subside and felt, as I always did here, the beginnings of a small twining thrill which crawled up my belly as I considered which shelf or cupboard to explore. Last Christmas holiday I had discovered King Solomon’s Mines. It had seemed rather too grown-up a book for my seven-year-old self, but I had thought that next year, next year I would be old enough to read it. And I also knew that in the lowest cupboard, hidden at the back, Oupa kept a pile of Angelique books, ‘quite unsuitable’ for the youngsters.