She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (16 page)

I retreat down the corridor. In the lounge, I check the trap I set, an arrangement of the phone cord over my suitcase. Fay had warned me it wouldn't strike her sister as outrageous to go through my luggage. The trap is unsprung.

“Night!” I call guiltily. My aunt's bedroom door shuts.

But the next morning she is cheerful. After lunch with Jason, my aunt and I lie out in the garden on a blanket in the sun. It is the most relaxed we've been together since my arrival.

“Isn't this cozy?” taunts Jason, when he walks past.

That evening, we get in the van and drive down the hill to see my mother and Doreen's brother Steven, who lives and works in a craft center on the outskirts of town. By a quirk of geography he and Doreen are the only two siblings now in regular contact. He is an artist, too, the second youngest of the siblings and the only one to have been to university. He has a degree in psychology, or, as Doreen puts it, “is full of bullshit.” Before leaving the house, she said to me, “I feel I must warn you about my brother's bullshit”—just as Fay had warned me about Doreen in advance.

In the van, my aunt suggests we stop in town to buy wine for the visit, and Jason yells at her. “Mom, what's wrong with you? You know he struggles with that.”

I have brought a couple of Steven artefacts along with me in my bag: a photo of him aged twelve looking doubtfully into the camera in his Scout uniform; and a letter he wrote to my mother in England, five or so years later, when he was doing his national service. The return address was a town called Wonderboom. It's such a singular name, like a word invented to capture a contradictory state; horrifically beautiful, savagely great.

The angelic twelve-year-old is now a man in his mid-fifties, lean and rangy with a scraggly beard, smoke from his roll-up curling into the air as he sits in the craft center's garden. At his feet are two enormous dogs, a German shepherd and a rottweiler, whom he introduces as Jesse and Jezebel. Doreen greets him sardonically; Jason gives him a bear hug. My uncle looks at me intently for a long time. I look back at him. My mother would be amazed at her baby, I think.

In that boyhood letter, Steven told his sister he was enjoying reading a short story by Somerset Maugham, “although it was somewhat difficult in places,” and thanked her for sending the book to him. He wrote of how disappointed his mother was in the failure of Doreen's and Fay's marriages—both of them under twenty-five at that stage.

“Every night,” he wrote, “I watch the sun setting behind the hills which are part of the Magaliesberg mountain range. The crimson sunset makes the black silhouetted hills seem like erupting and somehow this indescribable beauty always makes me think of you.”

He wrote of how he wished his mother would come to life; it was painful to see her going on like this, “day after day.” He said how nice it had been to see my mother on her recent trip back, but that he got the sense she had been disappointed in them all. He hoped this wasn't the case. It was signed, in boyish script, “STEVE XXX.” Of all my mother's letters from that era, this was the most worn.

Doreen and Jason don't stay long. “Look after her,” says my aunt, as she bids her brother good-bye and gives him another of her indecipherable looks. I watch them leave with a pang, and my uncle and I adjourn to his hut by the water.

To people who have lived in genuinely wild places, this place, I'm sure, would be laughably tame. My mother told me that her brother had spent time, drifterlike, on a beach in Mozambique; that he had lived in thatched-roof houses where he leaned from the window and picked overripe fruit from the trees outside. She admired this wildness in him; it appealed to romantic ideas she had about free spirits, which is a bit unfair on Doreen, I think, because when she did the free-spirit thing everyone accused her of being a sponge and a layabout.

To Steven, this is practically an urban environment. To me, it's the incarnation of my mother's Deadly Wildlife of My Youth, a nightmare come to life. The toilet is down an overgrown path where snails crunch underfoot. The stoop of my uncle's hut opens onto a body of stagnant water, thick with plant life, where things click and slither in the gathering gloom. The mattress where I'll sleep is on the floor of a half-enclosed porch. My uncle says he will leave one of the dogs out with me overnight. He smiles. “Jezebel has never let a snake get past her yet.”

Steven was the only sibling my mother said she thought would visit. “I really thought he would,” she said. “He had no ties.” She was very proud of him. While still practicing as a psychologist, he had pioneered something called Wilderness Therapy, which involved taking teens who'd been traumatized by violence in the townships out into the bush. It was the subject of a TV documentary part-funded by Irish television. He sent my mother the newspaper clippings. She made me sit and read them. But it was as a baby she liked to remember him, with the “soft little head that moved in and out when he breathed.”

We sit on the stoop, our backs against the wooden frame of the hut. My uncle smokes in the darkness.

“How are you bearing up?” he says.

“Fine!” I say.

I take out the letter he wrote to my mother from Wonderboom and hold it out, thinking he will be charmed and delighted, but my uncle waves it away. “Ach,” he says. I stuff it back in my bag. I suppose even in the best of circumstances, no one wants to be greeted by the ghost of their own past.

“How much did your mom tell you?” he says.

“Some.”

“Did you talk to Fay and Doreen?”

“Fay yes, Doreen no. There wasn't time.”

Doreen is flippant, he says, Fay is in denial. Steven talks with a low, quiet intensity, which I imagine his sisters, when they're minded to, regard as self-importance. He never married, he says, because after seeing the way his elder brothers treated their families, he couldn't be sure he wouldn't go down the same road.

Sitting here in the muggy darkness, looking out at the water, it is easy to talk about difficult things—at least easier than it was in Fay's brightly lit lounge. There was something he used to dream about, says Steven. He supposes it is his worst memory. He was four years old and standing in a doorway, seeing his mother on the floor and his father kicking her. He dreamed about this scene over and over until, one night, he entered the scene as an adult, intervened, and put a halt to the violence. The next day, says my uncle, “I felt the most amazing sense of grace.”

He remembers a copper jug. It was hurled across the room by his mother and met its target, his father, with a satisfying crack, whereupon all hell broke loose, and when the law turned up, it was to a scene of such mystifying chaos that, forty years on, it is still the young policeman my uncle feels sorry for: his mother screaming, “Arrest him!”; his father with blood pouring down his face; the children going berserk.

He lets out a sarcastic chuckle.

When his father couldn't get regular alcohol, he says, he drank methylated spirits strained through bread; when he was really desperate, he drank Old Spice. He injected morphine into his legs and between his toes. Sometimes, he sent one of the children out to the chemist's to buy “carbon tetrachloride.” If the chemist asked why they needed it, he told them to say it was for polishing their shoes.

“You'd come home from school,” he says, “never knowing who'd be alive or dead.”

In the midst of all this was family life. There was kindness there, too. He remembers his brother Mike, eleven years his senior, telling him if he planted a feather in the ground, an egg would grow out of it. Every day for a week, Steven planted feathers in the ground and, after he'd gone to bed, Mike crept out into the yard and buried an egg for his little brother to find the next day.

When Jimmy wasn't drunk, he says, he could be quite creative. He made a Christmas light show for them once, with colored polythene. He wrote thousands of poems and did line drawings, which he kept in a map drawer. He lectured Steven once for saying something racist, and told him the system was evil. But, as in all things, his position was unstable. My mother had told me once that when she was a teenager a black man had asked her out, and when her father got wind of it, he had gone out, found the man, and beaten him half to death.

Steven remembers an ice-cream cake. It was one of his sisters' birthdays, and they were opening their presents—all the kids used to get presents if one of them had a birthday, he says. There was the cake, there were the children, and there was his father bursting in. This is how he remembers it. His father charged across the room, grabbed Fay by the hair, pinned her to the wall, and put a knife to her throat. Then he left.

I am sitting very still. “Can you hear more?” says my uncle.

“Yes.” I am grateful he has even asked this question; that someone, somewhere in all of this, has broken with my mother's hard line to allow for the possibility that these things are difficult to hear. That one is allowed to be hurt without betraying their strength.

My uncle remembers a trip to an air show. It was a family day out, with his father and two of his sisters. Halfway through the afternoon, his father disappeared with Fay, leaving Steven and his younger sister alone, shivering in their swimming costumes. They thought he had left them there for good and started panicking. Fay had been in her bathing suit, too; her clothes were in a heap on the ground. I had read about this in the trial papers. Of all the incidents in Fay's testimony, this one was the most shocking, taking place as it had on a family day out and in the midst of so many other families. Eventually, he and Fay reappeared, and when they got home, Fay went and told her mother, as she had on many previous occasions, but this time Marjorie fetched her children and ran from the house.

I have read about this in detail, and yet I realize I am desperate to hear someone say it out loud. No one ever says it out loud. Fay and I managed to spend seven hours talking without saying a single word to describe what was actually going on.

“What was happening?” I ask in a small voice.

My uncle looks at me incredulously. “He was off assaulting her somewhere, in the bushes.”

This isn't good enough, this language. Steven seems to read my thoughts. He tells me a story about being in a library when he was young and seeing a book on the shelf with the word “incest” in the title. A jolt went right through him. He wanted to take it out but was too embarrassed. It took him a very long time to be able to say it, he says.

Later, when he went to university and studied psychology, he read textbooks in which they called it seduction, not rape, because of the way in which the abuser managed to con the abused into feeling complicit; that they had “allowed” it to happen.

He says, “I would walk around the township and I could point them out, which girls had been abused. You could see it in them. There's a luminosity to incest. The taboo is so strong and the damage so great. Luminosity—do you understand? It travels across oceans and down generations. They shine with it.”

•   •   •

IT IS LATE NOW.
My uncle lights the bug lamps. The dogs twitch and slumber. Beyond the edge of the stoop the world is in darkness.

My uncle asks if I know about the shooting.

“Not really,” I hedge. “Jason mentioned something.”

My uncle rolls another cigarette. It happened in a mining community out west of Johannesburg, where they lived when Steven was very young. He thinks my mother and Marjorie planned it together—“probably over a few drinks,” he chuckles—to shoot Jimmy when he came in from work. My mother shut the children in one of the bedrooms and told them to stay put. When their father came home, Steven heard the gun fire six times. She was a terrible shot. One of the bullets penetrated the bedroom wall. Wherever the other five went, it wasn't where she intended. Their father was there the next day, and the day after that. He didn't go to the police.

I struggle to imagine this scene as anything but comic. We both laugh.

I ask if he knows anything about his father's conviction for murder. He turns to look at me in amazement.

“No?”

I tell him what I found in the archive; that he served part of a life sentence for killing an old man in the course of a robbery, a few years before my mother was born. He shakes his head. “Shabby. If he'd robbed a bank, fair enough. Something ambitious. But this? An old man? It makes me sad.”

He remembers nothing very much of his father's later trials. Steven was too young to testify. I experience a strange shift in perspective: a realization that the court case was not even remarkable, just another in the litany of failed attempts to get help.

Steven asks again if I'm OK, and after I reassure him that I am, we say good night and he retreats to his room at the back of the hut. I lie on my mattress at the front. For a good hour, the bug-killing candle crackles with dying insects. Jezebel sleeps on the floor by my side, and eventually I fall asleep too, tense and exhausted.

I'm not sure what wakes me—the sound of her snarling or the sensation of something falling through the open window onto my feet. Instantly, the dog is up on her front legs, tail in the air, snarling in the direction of my lower legs in the sleeping bag.

It is too dark to see, but whatever it is, it is soft and pulpy and is making slow progress up my legs. I'm too scared to look. It stops at my knees. What's it doing? Checking its watch? When I am seconds away from having a heart attack, the weight suddenly shifts. Something plops onto the floor and I see a dark, hunchbacked shape which the dog nudges expertly, tenderly toward the door. It is a frog, that's all, friendly in its curvature, flopping out onto the stoop and away into the night. I go back to sleep.

•   •   •

THE NEXT MORNING,
my uncle drives me to the bus station. On the way, he tells me about something that happened in the street recently that struck him with the force of an exorcism. A “demonic drunk guy” was staggering around, waving a knife and scaring the pedestrians. Steven, passing by, told him to stop it. The man lunged at Jezebel, and without hesitating, Steven knocked him out cold with the homemade Zulu fighting stick he happened to be carrying. It had the same effect as his action in the dream, when he stood between his mother and father.