She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (15 page)

“Go on.”

“And said, ‘We may be poor but we sure see life.'”

My mother grinned rather fixedly.

I continued: “Though life dealt you many challenges and injustices not once did I detect any malice or selfishness. You remind me of the Bible's Ruth.”

Now she snorted, softly.

“My dearest sister,” I read. “Thank you for not deserting us all when we were little. You are—”

In alarm I scanned quickly down the letter.

“Go on.”

“You are an old iron horse, a strong tower to which we could run and hide. Be not afraid, my sister. We shall not die but at the sound of the last trumpet soon the dead in Christ will rise. Be vigorous and be courageous. ‘You are precious to me says the Lord, I have called you by name and you are mine.' Do not underestimate the power of God or for a single moment think that he does not know or care. ‘I know,' says the Lord, ‘I know.' And we love you too. Tony.”

Standing in our atheists' kitchen, I started to cry. My mother looked off into space. “Shame, Tony,” she said. “He always was full of nonsense.”

“I'm divorced from Liz, you know that?” says my uncle down the phone.

“I know.”

“She left me for a better man.”

Tony is now the oldest. I wonder if it is strange for him, but before we can talk any more, we are cut off as his phone credit expires.

“He's so sweet,” I say to his sister.

“Sweet? He's a devil. He put Liz through hell.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Oh, nineteen years ago.” I must look stunned, because she bursts out laughing. The house where I dropped off the note was four miles away.

Hearsay

IT IS A KIND OF JOKE
within the family that Doreen, the Last White Woman of Hillbrow and second racketiest of the siblings after Tony, should be living in the genteelest part of the country, a resort on the Garden Route, that great magnet for the English and their impersonators. Doreen certainly found it funny. Not long after moving, she sent my mother a postcard of a fancy hotel on a cliff overlooking a magnificent stretch of coastline, where tea and a sandwich cost a day's wages.

“It's ever so posh,” she wrote. “Everyone so proper and civilised. On entering I thought of you immediately, Paula, and how you would fit in so well there. I ordered a single G+T (the Queen Mum and her daughter Lizzie consume copious amounts of G+T, do they not?). All the staff are British.”

My mother rolled her eyes but she enjoyed these communications from Doreen, filled as they were with a sense of their own consequence, going against the English style of concealing one's efforts. Doreen's letters came in, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen pages long, written entirely in capitals. “Read it to me,” said my mother, and I would.

“HE LOVES ME HE SAYS, HE WILL POST MY RING TO ME HE SAYS, THERE IS NO OTHER HE SAYS. PAULA, AM I A BLOODY OLD FOOL?”

“AFTER MUCH DELIBERATION, I TOLD FAY WHAT I AM GOING TO TELL YOU, SOMETHING BARBARA TOLD ME . . .”

“I'M SORRY TO HAVE TO TELL YOU ALL THIS PAULA, BUT I FEEL YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW . . .”

“SHE DOES TELL GREAT AND DESTRUCTIVE LIES, IT'S A SICKNESS . . .”

“I DID TELL YOU WE WERE DIVORCED DIDN'T I?”

“I'VE GONE BLONDE PAULA. LIKE DOLLY PARTON SAYS IT TAKES A LOT OF MONEY TO LOOK THIS CHEAP.”

In the 1980s, Doreen went on a diet that involved eating only red foods, and wrote to my mother to ask if she could source some red lightbulbs for her in London; she thought the ambience might help and she couldn't find them in Johannesburg. In the mid-1990s, she joined a charismatic church. “She probably fancies the pastor,” said my mother. Doreen even went through a phase of writing to me. I think she was Beatrice then. (One day out of the blue she changed her name to Beatrice, which she told everyone was to be pronounced the Italian way. For the benefit of her correspondents, she spelled it out phonetically: BE-A-TREECH-AY. Then one day, without comment, she reverted to Doreen.) For a while her letters had JESUS IS LORD scrawled all over the envelope.

To my mother she wrote: “HOW I WOULD LOVE TO SEE YOU AGAIN. SO PAULA THINK ABOUT IT PLEASE.” My mother gave the appearance of thinking about it.

Before leaving Johannesburg for the coast, Doreen had fallen in love with the vet who had euthanized her cat. On an impulse one evening, she scraped together the airfare and flew from George to Jo'burg to have dinner with him. He was rather surprised, wrote my aunt to my mother, when she turned up unannounced at the clinic.

•   •   •

THE TOWN OF GEORGE
is in the Western Cape, seven hundred miles southwest of Johannesburg and a two-hour flight over the heart of the country. After landing, I spend a pleasant hour on a bench in the sun before a blue van pulls up and a man with long, wavy hair and startling blue eyes gets out; then a woman with bleached-blond hair, dark roots, and incongruously black eyebrows.

Doreen and I greet each other while Jason, her son, stands, arms folded, regarding the scene with apparent amusement. Doreen had always been advertised as the great beauty of the family, alongside tough competition, and although she is small where my mother was tall, her face is a variation on the same theme: round chin, high cheekbones, dark eyes sizing me up. A woman who dislikes other women, I think, and dismiss the thought instantly. We hug and get in the van for the two-hour drive east.

While we drive, Jason tells me that he lives in a kind of hippy enclave halfway up a mountain, where he works as a freelance designer and artist. Doreen is an artist, too. I have one of her paintings at home. It's good, a portrait in oil of a black woman with a blue headdress, staring with a kind of catlike superiority out of the canvas.

She is living with her son only while she sorts herself out, she says. She was a receptionist for years but is tired of working and, after getting a psychiatrist to sign off on her nervous breakdown, is now living on sickness benefit. Doreen summarizes her life history in cycles of belief and disillusionment. She has been through Scientology, numerology, cosmology. She used to swear by Linda Goodman's
Sun Signs
. “Oh, we had that in the house!” I say. It was a big yellow paperback of my mother's, well-thumbed. But when Linda Goodman fell into a diabetic coma, Doreen lost faith in her. “So in tune with the spirits, but she didn't see it coming. I was disappointed.”

She sighs. She fell out with the charismatic church, too, where Pastor Harold proved a disappointment.

“Everyone does in the end,” says Doreen, and smiles.

An hour into the journey we pull over for my aunt and cousin to smoke. As we walk back to the van, she stops suddenly, letting Jason get ahead of us. My aunt turns to face me and, with proprietorial fierceness, says, “How are you doing?” No one else on the trip has asked me so far, not for want of care, I think, but out of deference to something aloof in my attitude. I will not be consoled. My mother's sister, shorter than me by several inches, eyes straining to the point of bulbousness, throws her cigarette on the ground and continues to look at me.

“OK,” I say. “It's a bit . . .”

She gives me a hug. In spite of all the warnings, I fall for her instantly.

•   •   •

AN HOUR OR SO LATER,
we pull off the road and drive down a track toward the beach. The bar is rustic, with wooden tables and benches, ill-fitting windows flung open to the salty, humid air. Outside, vegetation crawls through the sand in thick, arthritic tendrils.

“It's expensive,” says my aunt, glancing down at the cocktail menu.

“I'll pay,” I say instantly, and feel like an idiot. “Since you're having me to stay.”

“No, you won't,” says my aunt.

“Yes, she will,” says Jason, and grins. “Mom, it's ten rand to the pound.”

“Don't you bully my niece,” says Doreen, and exchanges looks with her son that I can't decipher.

We order blue cocktails with pineapple wedges on the rim and thick, cream-based drinks in tall glasses. We order rum and Cokes and tequila chasers. Abruptly, my aunt gets up and goes to the loo. My cousin leans across the table over the litter of our drinking binge. “Is it true your mom shot him?” he says.

“What?”

“I heard your mom shot him, the old man.”

I am so surprised I smile. “No, I don't think—I haven't heard that.” But my mind flashes back to a memory: my mother standing in the garage, getting something from the freezer, then turning to me and saying, “I thought I might have to shoot my father.” When I didn't say anything, she laughed sheepishly and said, “I shouldn't joke about these things to you. It isn't fair.”

My cousin leans back in his chair and grins lazily. “That's what I heard.”

His mother, weaving slightly, returns from the bathroom and sits down heavily on the bench next to me. She looks from one of us to the other.

“How are you children getting on?” she says.

•   •   •

I HAVE NO IDEA
what time we leave the bar. My cousin gets behind the wheel and we drive along the highway in the dark. My aunt wheedles and cajoles for him to stop at a shebeen to buy more drinks. “No,” he says.

“I should have put you in an orphanage,” she snaps.

“Mom, you're not having any more. You know how hectic you get when you drink.”

Changing tactics, she says, in silky tones, “Jay, my babes, come on, just one.” When he refuses her, she lapses into a sulky silence. After forty minutes, we pull off the road onto a badly surfaced track, climbing up a hill to the village. We seem to be going very fast, or else it's the effect of the darkness and alcohol and the way the van swerves this way and that to avoid potholes.

The house is isolated, a cabin with no immediate neighbors. We walk in, and my cousin introduces me to Snoopy, his dog, and gives me a duvet; I collapse onto the sofa and fall into a deep sleep.

When I wake the next morning, Snoopy is on my legs. I am conscious of my aunt moving around heavily in the kitchen. From the corner of my eye I see her white nightgown and blue leggings. The air is sour. I cough. Nothing. I make some more noise and eventually get up, walk to the kitchen, and stand directly in her path. “Hello.”

“Oh, hello,” she says vaguely. I put on my most obsequious face and ask if she slept well.

“Mmm-hmm.” She moves around me to make tea. There is no fridge. The milk and butter are kept on the counter and, thanks to my cousin's artisanal methods, don't spoil. There is a large bunch of bananas on the countertop too, unripe, rock-hard. “You could kill someone with them,” I say without thinking, and my aunt looks at me sharply.

“Yes,” she says. She laughs suddenly. “I thought that, too.”

We take our tea out onto the terrace, where the light is pearly, with magnificent views over the valley. At one end there is a defunct bath filled with plants; next to it, bongo drums. My aunt smokes a roll-up, sticks out her legs, and flexes her feet inside giant woolly socks. It is cool outside at this altitude in the morning.

I sense in my aunt a combination of affection and wariness and something like pride. She is thirteen years my mother's junior, a year younger than Fay. Despite her voraciousness, she has not been terribly lucky in love. My mother always said her sister's first marriage was tempestuous. She married again thirty years later, but it didn't last. Her most recent boyfriend, she tells me, was Czech. She used to steam open his mail to see if he was cheating on her.

Doreen asks about my life. I find myself deliberately editing things to match her bravado, pulling out my worst traits, boasting of my nastiest episodes. We get into a competitive exchange of horrible stories. I tell her how I once kicked a date out of my flat at two a.m. on the coldest night of the year. She tells me how she used to play people off against each other. I tell her how I love my friends but don't ever want someone clogging my life up at home. She says she would never seriously put herself out for the man in her life. We are competing, I understand, for the approval of a dead woman.

She tells me about her second husband, Roger, whom she met in a rough bar in Johannesburg. She sent us photos of him. He looked raddled and insane. My mother said, “She's really done it this time.” The night of the wedding, says Doreen, he hit her so hard her head bounced off the wall.

“That was a mistake,” says my aunt.

We are both silenced for a moment by the unexpected honesty.

“And the vet?”

My aunt laughs. The family rumor is that the vet is gay, but before I can get there she says, “I knew he was gay, of course I did.” She tosses her head. “I was just doing it for the drama.”

She asks after Fay.

“She's good. We got horribly drunk. Or at least I did.”

My aunt says when she first moved to the coast, she and Fay used to have three-, four-, five-hour telephone conversations, intermittently telling each other to hold while they got up to refill their glasses. Eventually, Doreen moved to a place where there was only a pay phone, to stop the “addiction.”

“You know she saved me from drowning once?” she says.

“No?”

“Yes. When we were children. Shame, Fifi. Silly woman.”

My cousin ambles out onto the terrace in baggy pants and a T-shirt, scratching his head and sipping his tea. He looks at us with affable condescension. I feel my aunt's mood sour again.

“It's beautiful here,” I say to my cousin.

“Isn't it?”

“It's too far from town,” says his mother.

“Ma, it's the bush.”

“
Ja
, and you're bush pigs.”

To Doreen's amazement—“He doesn't usually put himself out for people”—my cousin has organized a tourist itinerary for me. I hope she'll come too, but she seems to sink a little lower after lunch and says she is tired and wants to stay at home. We have a nice afternoon. My cousin is charming, good fun. We go dolphin-watching. He takes me hiking, on a trail that opens out with a spectacular view of the ocean. On the path back down, I jump ten feet in the air at a stick jutting out from the undergrowth.

“What did you see, Emma?” he says, grinning.

On the road back, we stop the van for a family of monkeys to cross.

My cousin has seen his share of the world: he's traveled in the United States and Europe, worked in bars, lived abroad. Like his mother, he has the louche frankness of someone confident in his ability to charm. As we near home, he lightly, naturally brings up the family history.

“When did you find out?” I say.

“I don't know,” says my cousin, and he is thoughtful. “My mom must have told me when I was really young.” He shrugs. “I seem always to have known.” For reasons of pride, I can't ask him to elaborate on the shooting. I can't have this kid (he is not a kid; he is thirty-eight, ten years older than me, but like his mother, seems essentially teenaged) tell me something like that about my own mother. I will have to find a grown-up to ask.

“Our grandfather sounded like quite a character,” he says.

“Yes.”

He looks at me slyly. “You know Victoria doesn't know anything?”

Fay said this too, but it strikes me as absurd. There's more than one way of knowing a thing.

“Of course she does,” I say. “Why do you think she doesn't let the family anywhere near her children?”

•   •   •

THE HOUSE IS DARK
when we get in. I call out a tentative hello. My aunt is in her room, sprawled on a coverless mattress, smoking. “Hello!” I say again cheerfully, and she murmurs an acknowledgment.