The Shouting in the Dark (20 page)

 

For whole weekend afternoons, spring, summer, autumn, after Phineas has gone home, Ella lies on her towel, wherever the verandah's sight lines don't reach her. Her mission to merge her freckles by tanning the spaces in between is proceeding steadily if slowly. She is still pale under her swimsuit. In the early evening, before the municipal baths close, she goes swimming, traces fifty, sixty lengths. Till her tan's complete she won't go swimming with Linda. If Linda sees these freckles she'll tell her to stop damaging her skin.

Across the suburban hedges of Braemar, as she lies sunbathing, the sounds of nearby family lives come drifting. In neighbouring gardens there are games of hide-and-go-seek and rounders, high-pitched calls and a rushing of feet, obscure scufflings in the hedges. Brothers and sisters all over, she can hear from her towel, hit balls to one another, talk and whisper, enjoy a playful butting creatureliness that lies beyond her understanding.

She decides to quit reading Mills and Boon. The stories are all the same; the heroines all look alike; even their declarations of love echo one another. The peak of excitement when the girl finally gets the hero takes too long to arrive and anyway is over after just a few pages.

That final Saturday she borrows five Mills and Boon in one go from the town library, stacks them on her sunbathing towel, looks at each one just for the climax. The fourth offers a good twist in the tale where the hero has sound reason to believe that the girl's dead. The reader is with him in his funk. There's been a terrible accident in the mountains. But then, five pages from the end, sure as eggs is eggs, he has the girl. Through a combination of good luck and ingenuity, she has slithered her way to a safe rocky ledge. Ella hardly looks at the fifth book's ending. That's it for Mills and Boon, as far as she's concerned. That's it for Barbara Cartland also.

In a half-used jotter salvaged from the waste-paper bin in her English classroom Ella begins to write her own story, lying on her belly in the grass. She imagines the story will take up about a hundred pages, this at least is her aim: to write one hundred pages to fill the time that Mills and Boon till now took up. The story will be an adventure, not a romance, she decides. She's had it with romances. The story won't be a novel.
Novel
is a grand word she's only ever seen on a label in the library, marking the shelves of the dusty Everyman books.

In her story a girl named Mali, aged fifteen with melty brown eyes, sets out to swim from Dakar, Senegal to the easternmost point of Brazil, the narrowest part of the Atlantic. The story begins with Mali on a flotsam-strewn beach, surrounded by well-wishers. Through a megaphone she announces she wants to achieve something no one else ever has achieved. Though the sea is choppy she strikes out boldly, her face to the horizon. Ella imagines the waves beyond Gorée Island off Dakar lapping Mali's copper shoulders, her hair floating like a cape. She writes the episode twice through, squeezing adjectives into every sentence.

Ella has an idea Mali might be washed off course to Cuba or else die in her attempt on the Atlantic, weighed down by the long plaits that in her vanity she's refused to cut off. However, she – Ella – will leave that decision till she gets to page 100.

Mali's adventure story comes at the expense of her notebook. The notebook, Ella finds, has become as repetitive as Mills and Boon. Every day it is the same old moan, the same old scene: the father sitting on his verandah, sometimes talking out loud, sometimes not, these days more and more not. Different from the dawn-to-dusk grind of the notebook, the made-up story gives her liberty. With each paragraph, the scene changes, Ella's mood shifts, Mali pushes further and further into the open green sea.

In Ella's matriculation year the season of tropical storms begins early, in October. There are nightly blackouts. When the thunder storms pass directly overhead, the light fittings in the house spout blue flames. Even in this area accustomed to the cyclones that churn up from the Mozambique Channel, the storms this year feel needling and harsh. By early December the tin roof over the tool-shed, that Phineas recently mended, is pocked with hailstones. The father's new rose bushes, planted by Phineas, have been flattened to the ground.

During the storms, Ella and her father watch the great antlers of lightning cross and clash in the river valley. One stands to the left of the verandah windows, the other to the right. The mother and Bogey are crouched together under the dining table, keening.

‘Come away from the window, I beg you two,' the mother moans.

Ella doesn't bother to reply. She cannot bear to look at the mother there on the floor, on her knees, as she used to be on their air trips, the skin on her face pulled tight by fear.

‘Shut up, Irene,' the father occasionally bellows over the noise of the thunder.

On the mother's birthday, not long before Christmas, lightning strikes the deodar in the corner of the garden. The tree is the last and the tallest in the line of six deodars that runs down the length of the garden fence. Though wetted through by the driving rain, it burns up in moments, throwing a long plume of orange flame into the sky. As the fire surges to its full height, its pinnacle feathering, the mother begins screaming so loudly the father turns on her, his hand raised. His hand is raised for several moments but he doesn't touch her. Instead he lands Bogey a kick in the ribs that sends the dog sprawling against the skirting board.

On Christmas Eve the mother, the father and Ella are out at the supermarket when another storm strikes. There's less lightning this time, more wind and hail. In the windowless supermarket they barely notice the storm. It just grows very cold. But back home, wherever they look, damage faces them. The deodar closest to the house has had its top snapped off like a matchstick. The falling debris has brought down a corner of the roof. Hailstones have smashed the verandah windows – the broken shards clasp the air like ruined hands. A white drift of hailstones is piled against the mother's beloved piano, laced with glass.

Even the mother is silent when first they survey the scene. Then she makes a dash to the bathroom for her pills. Only later, when she sees the state of the piano, the stained varnish, the mottled keys, a dreadful raw cry escapes her lips.

‘Is there a curse on this house, Har?' She grinds her hands together. ‘On this family? How many other homes in our area do you see struck as we are, two strikes in one month?'

The father mumbles something about this particular rim of the African shield, their exposed location. Lightning seeks out seams of iron in the high ground, he's read this somewhere. A man's obliged to pay somehow for the privilege of his view.

‘Good that we've decided not to have a proper Christmas this year,' he adds. ‘What we save not buying presents we can use to mend the roof.'

You
decided not to have Christmas this year, Ella says out of earshot but out loud.

Though it's a gift-free Christmas, the mother goes ahead and prepares her traditional festive meal of cold garlic chicken, dill-and-potato salad, chilled pears in red wine. Braemar may not be Durban, but here too it can be sultry on Christmas Day. Unluckily, however, the Christmas weekend is extraordinarily grey and chilly. An icy wind blows off the hills still capped in hail. The cold, moist food laid out in the cut-glass Dutch dishes glints nakedly. The pink pears look flayed.

Without a word the father takes his piled plate to the kitchen. Through the mother's remonstrations he shunts the food into a pan and fries it up with curry spices. She drags on his arm, pleads with him to stop. Can't he see he's insulting her? But he is adamant, unflinching. He will and he shall warm up his food. He will and he shall add a dollop of flavour to that dental paste she is trying to pass off as chicken. Cold putrid muck on Christmas Day isn't his idea of festive cheer. He eats his improvised kedgeree straight out of the pan.

‘If only we could've predicted,' the mother says sorrowfully. ‘Even without presents, without window glass, we could've had cheerful candles, hot gravy with the chicken. We should've bought candles at the shop.'

After dinner they sit in the living room wrapped in blankets watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies on television, their skin as blue-veined as the
décolletage
of Aunt Ella in the portrait. The mother has taped bedsheets over the broken windows. The father pours Old Brown Sherry into Ella's water glass, up to the rim.

‘That'll chase down your mother's muck and warm you up inside,' he says.

The mother shakes her head but keeps her mouth closed. She covers her own water glass with her hand.

‘A young person should learn how to hold her drink early, Irene,' the father turns to her, his back to Ella. ‘Nothing so embarrassing as a woman drunk, a female who cannot hold her drink. Nothing so boring, so dull, as a female who won't have a drink.'

Ella quietly pours the sherry into the mother's potted ferns.

 

In the New Year, the year Ella will turn sixteen, her English teacher enters her as a school representative in the annual provincial debating competition. She begs to be withdrawn. Try being an understudy, Ella, you may not be called upon. No, please no, I can't. But you're so good at public speaking. Think of your poetry recitations, the prizes you've won. Maybe, but I'm no good at argument, even pretending to argue. She can't meet the teacher's eyes to say this.

Only when faced with her father, she knows, is she the master of argument. Only opposite him does she rise to the occasion, does her voice grow articulate and purposeful, her logic impeccable, her spirit blazing. On what grounds do you say that? she asks him in cold fury, at first mostly in her thoughts, now more and more to his face. His eyes blaze back, his mouth works. She makes her eyes lock with his, she stares him down. On what grounds do you say I'm a succubus, a
nietsnut
? she yells. How do I drain the lifeblood from your veins? No one should be spoken of as you speak of me, without reason. Till the day I'm old enough to leave you I'll shout you down when you say these things.

A veil of quiet has fallen over the country now that the township children have gone back to school. Out on the verandah Ella experimentally sniffs the air but the nose-burning smell that drifted on the winter wind has blown away. Things are, if anything, more peaceful than before. At the time when subversives from outside were daily expected in their midst, people were jumpy, alert to hidden threats. Now they know the hidden threats arrived as predicted but were dealt with. Before communist influences could become entrenched the agitators moving amongst the children were targeted and stamped upon. The Prime Minister's ace Terrorism Act sorted them out.

There still are occasional disturbances but they are of a different nature than before, piecemeal and sporadic. There's sabotage to a railway line, a bomb in an empty restaurant. Now and again terrorists are picked up, the announcements are made on the television news, but that's as it should be, the police are doing their job, Minister of Justice Kruger has smashed down his gauntlet of steel. ‘They got that arch rabble-rouser the other day,' the father reports one dinner, ‘That clever but dangerous doctor from Durban, what's-his-name, Biko. The shock of the arrest thankfully killed the wimp.'

Ella swallows her grimace when he says the word
wimp
.

Lately the cramps in the father's legs and groin make it difficult for him to sit down for more than short stretches so he no longer spends the hours on the verandah that he used to. The night air, he says, doesn't agree with the gripe in his gut, the small of his back. After dinner he stays indoors, watches television. He brings home a brand-new TV set, a colour one this time. Money saved from the non-Christmas, Ella thinks to herself. He watches his new television by pacing in front of it, looking sideways at the screen.

By now he has read the many volumes of Churchill's
History of the Second World War
twice over as well as all the biographies of the war-leader available in the town library. There are no other books to interest him, he says, not in this library, not in any other library anywhere. He intends to quit reading. Frith Fouché's librarian mother recommends a thin book by a man called Conrad, something about a shipping company line operating in the Far East. But the book looks too cloudy and obscure for his taste, he says, short as it is. Maybe it's the murky dust jacket, the wishy-washy watercolour of a steamship. He borrows the book but doesn't open it.

For his birthday Ko sends him the
Collected Short Stories
of W.S. Maugham in a fat, cheap Heinemann Octopus edition with a note scrawled on the title page:
He got it. Ko

For a few days the father keeps the book open on the coffee table beside his desk and, with his elbows propped on his knees, reads. Then he closes the book and puts it away. Maugham got it, he says, but the world he talks about is past. Conrad's world is past. The men he knew in the East were not all of them as weak-chinned and soft as these fellows make them out to be. Now can he please spend his time watching television, this is his preference, as much television as he likes, the news especially of course, but pretty much everything besides, at all times of day, and after his own fashion, which is to say, pacing, smoking and commenting as he goes?

Sitting in her chair, the jotter with its story about the swimmer Mali on her knee (written to page 49), Ella watches the father watching television, yelling
klootzak
at public figures near and far – that whining lying Mother Teresa, the retarded Minister of Education who cannot string two articulate English words together, namby-pamby Jimmy Carter, those worthless goons of African politicians. The more she watches, the more she becomes convinced. Her father yells out of pleasure, first and foremost, but also to spread his aggravation around. Each and every evening, she's sure, he has a fixed aim, and that is to test to its limits the tiny dimensions of her hardened heart.

One night there is a news report about a terrorist incident at a power plant. A homemade bomb was found mounted on the plant's perimeter fence.

‘Troublemakers,' the father turns on the would-be saboteur the same attack he once made on the African schoolchildren. ‘Ne'er-do-wells. Biting the hand that feeds them.'

‘What do you mean
troublemakers
?' She won't let him get away with it. ‘That's rubbish. Maybe these amateur bomb-layers think the hand that feeds them is pretty stingy. Africans build this country, after all, they do the real work. What reward do they ever get? Half the time the hand that feeds them turns around and hits them also.'

She's on her way, taking him on, staring him down. ‘This country rests on African labour, huh?' The father balls his fists at his sides. ‘To whom have you been speaking,
meid
? Better consult the people who know a few things.
You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.
Abraham Lincoln. That's another source of wisdom you might be listening to.'

‘But the wage-earner should be recognized too. It's obvious. The pittance-earner. African people have made this country with their own hands but they own almost nothing, next to nothing.'

‘How you drive pins into my eyeballs! That kind of language – where in God's name do you get it from?
It's obvious
.
Pittance-earner
. Who plants it in you? No normal child could come out with the things you do unprovoked. The Africans are right to try to blow up a power station. That's what you're saying. What tosh, what rot!'

The redness of his face scares her, the shininess of his nose, but still she can't help it, a sound escapes her lips, a half-laugh, a laugh masking as a cough. He rears in front of her, filling her field of vision, grabs her shoulders, fingers digging in. There's hurt somewhere, maybe in her shoulder blades. He pulls her upright and her teeth smack together.

‘Enough!' he roars. ‘Another word, another sound, and I'll call your school first thing tomorrow to report this conversation. I should do so anyway. It's my duty. To think that in my old age I'd be fighting the Cold War in my own lounge. You're talking to the wrong people,
schepsel
, you're under bad influence. Someone's feeding you this. Someone's getting seditious material through. It's as if I hear Chairman Mao speaking, listening to your rubbish. I want you to give me the names of who you're talking to.'

You're shouting very loudly, she wants to say. My ears are two inches from your mouth. You're shaking me. Can't you hear my teeth go? But she keeps quiet, her shoulders droop in his hands. She feels all used up, her body trembling. Her heart's the opposite of small. It has grown pulpy and swollen with the rage it has absorbed.

The morning after the quarrel about African troublemakers, Ella snatches a look at the papers lying on her father's desk. He's out of the house, on his weekly visit to the butcher's, followed by a drop-in with Tom and Nobby at the ratepayers' association. She pushes a few loose cuttings about oil sheiks to one side, some foolscap criss-crossed with sums, workings out, not sure what she's looking for. In set-to after set-to he says more or less the same thing:
I should report this
.
Give me names.
What does it mean? What's he trying to tell her?

A cold finger suddenly presses into her nape. What's this here, this word
Magistrate
in his clear flowing hand written on the memo-pad under the cuttings? A word on a notepad could be an ordinary, everyday reminder, couldn't it? Go to the magistrate's to renew Bogey's dog licence. Check about the new water rates. But she can't be sure, can't convince herself. The opposite might equally apply, her name might be dobbed in, her school alerted. From the photo-comics she used to read she knows about spying, surveillance, the sifting of records. Already, even as she stands here, maybe the library books she has read are being listed and checked, the Brontës, the Mills and Boons. Did she ever leave traces, write in the margins? Soon, very soon, even now, someone could be put on her tail, to follow her home from school, see who might make contact.