The Shouting in the Dark (4 page)

He chucks her chin away from him, then bends over. A sound like a sob drops from his mouth. Ella takes a few steps back. She feels the hawthorn twigs again pressing into her skin. She wishes she could run away but can't trust the numbness in her arms, the strange softness in her legs. Before today, she thinks, she couldn't have imagined her father crying but here is a picture of a man bowed over, crying without words, only strange ragged breathings coming out of his mouth. Getting shot of shit, he tells his drinking friends. Sorry, Ko, here's another story for you, you know, the usual, just getting shot of shit.

This crying, Ella wonders, leaning hard into the hawthorn twigs, is it getting shot of shit? The sharp pricking of the twigs, she notices as if from a distance, dulls the tingling in her hands and arms.

‘Elly Belly, Jelly Belly!' the children in Braemar call in the street. Ella turns her face to the side. She hasn't yet met these children but somehow they've heard her name and what they're saying is no surprise. Up here on the African shield she has grown soft in front. Some days she's so puffy she can't see her feet over her belly. A little bit plump, the grown-ups say, but she knows better. Her belly has grown like a monster vegetable exhibit at the Midlands Royal Show.

Back when they lived in Durban, she had elbows and knees. She knows she did because she scraped them then. On kindergarten sports day she took off her built-up shoe and did the hurdles, outrunning some of the boys. But here, further up the African shield, closer to the sun, it's different. Things grow faster. They jut, thrust, push out strange shapes.

‘Just puppy fat,' says Dr Fry, Braemar's favourite family doctor, ‘Just a little bit squishy.' He sits beside her on the velvet upholstered couch, a chunk of her waist clamped in his hand, the mother opposite in the armchair, ‘A good word for it, isn't it, Ella,
puppy
fat?'

He uses her name but Ella can tell the words are meant for her mother. She's the one who calls him Braemar's favourite family doctor. Together they look at the hank of flesh held between his finger and thumb. Ella shifts away from him. The movement is small but his fingers lose their grip. She goes over in her mind the fat dogs she has seen in the neighbourhood, as there are no fat
puppies
to speak of, just glossy, buttery-looking young dogs moving too fast to gather flesh – except maybe for Mrs Brickhill's ancient dog next door, a sedentary spaniel about as wobbly as his owner.

Over the fence Ella sometimes catches Mrs Brickhill at her habit, while gardening, of lifting her shirt as if without thinking about it and mopping herself with a tissue in the gulf between her belly and her breasts. When she's as old as Mrs Brickhill, she wonders, will she have to soak up the sweat caught between her fat rolls and pretend no one has seen?

The doctor looks the other way when he says she has puppy fat. The mother bends down to her dahlias when Mrs Brickhill uses her tissues. Mrs Brickhill is such a friendly lady, she murmurs in Dutch, as if to remind herself why she has to be civil to this red-faced South African woman whose uncultured breath even at nine in the morning – she says when they are behind doors – smells of whisky and bitters.

‘Mrs Brickhill's a pillar of the community,' the father says warmly, ‘She's a salt-of-the-earth English lady, and no mistake.'

Dr Fry's fingers give Ella's cushiony waist a final pinch. ‘One day all this flesh'll disappear like magic,' he says. ‘Believe me, she's retaining it only a little longer than most.'

The mother's gaze is fixed on the ceiling. Ella looks at her uplifted face, the high ridges of her cheekbones. She follows the line of her twig-thin legs in their pale-green crimplene slacks down to her toes, thin and bony in strappy leather sandals, daisy cut-outs stuck on the central strap. Till now she'd thought she was just like her mother, the same size, the same shape, an extension of her body, but now suddenly she sees it isn't so, not in the least. What's more, her mother doesn't think so either. In fact, she can't bear to look at her sitting here on the couch, her big white knickers spanned over her fat round belly.

Mam has chosen broad-shouldered Dr Fry as their doctor, Ella decides, because he's as thin and tall as she is, but made up of pure cheerfulness, the opposite to Mam's own heavy sadness. From the day of his very first home visit her mother and the doctor have settled into a talking game in which her role is to come up with new ailments for him to sort out.

Melancholic by nature, the mother tells him, stretching out her long legs, that's me. Droopy in stature, droopy in spirit. Expect the worst, hope for anything-but-the-worst, lie awake all night worrying about what might be around the corner.

Some things she tells only the father and the daughter, not Dr Fry, holding her forehead in interlaced hands. Every day she wakes feeling no higher than a worm, she tells them. By nightfall she is a mote of dust.

‘Am I as useless to you as I feel?' she asks, moving her duster slowly over the furniture, ‘Superfluous, in the way? I can't cook, my head's broken, my hair's falling out, I don't belong here. I live for the trips back home. My teeth are going black, aren't they? They wobble in my jaw. There's a bald patch on my crown,
kijk hier
, if you closely look. Yesterday the cashier in the supermarket was studying it. If all my hair falls out, if my teeth fall out, I can't go on living, I'd rather die.'

If ever the mother's body is briefly free of trouble then Ella's body is pressed into service. The defects that the mother likes to have inspected in herself crop up in her daughter also, mixed in of course with the father's defects. The ills of Dutch fathers and mothers are visited upon the children.

‘These things lie in wait like fate,' Aunt Suus tells Ella on a Christmas visit home, chopping vegetables for winter soup in her Zuid-Holland kitchen. Not only our odd pigeon
voet
and towering height, she adds, but also the more hidden ailments – like the insomnia we all get, the migraines . . . Even for an immigrant family like theirs, removed from their Dutch roots, seesawing between Europe and Africa, push-pulled by the mother's homesickness, the swelling or shrinking of Oma's trust fund, there's no difference. No matter how far from their Low Countries homeland they may wander, no matter how they seesaw, ills are carried deep in every family line. ‘The kinks in our bloodlines are knotted inside us,' Tante Suus vigorously stirs smoked sausage in with her chopped greens.

It's true that Ella's left foot swings inwards when she walks and trips her up, a kink that has been passed down the mother's father's bloodline. ‘In each generation there is at least one such wandering
voet
,' remarks Tante Suus conspiratorially. ‘I myself have one, the sign of an adventuresome spirit, whereas your late Opa, my poor bronchial brother, he was spared.'

On the yellow velvet couch Ella shuffles another inch or so away from Dr Fry. ‘Can I go now?' But the mother, reaching into her handbag, is not quite finished. ‘There's one more thing, doctor,' her voice drops. ‘Ella as you know is not quite ten but, well, between her legs there's often a sliminess, a whiteness that sticks to the inside of her knickers – ' She produces a used envelope resealed with Sellotape, something folded inside. ‘Have a look when you have a minute,' she says, ‘Let me know what you think. Is it that premature ripening you read about, you know, that happens to girls born in the tropics?'

Ella sits on her hands, stares at the opposite wall, tries to imagine she's invisible. Looking at how quickly Dr Fry slips the envelope into his bag, she thinks he probably wants to be invisible, too. He's in any case blushing as red as she is. Her father is nowhere to be seen. Hours ago, long before Dr Fry's arrival, he took himself off into the garden. ‘Rake through the compost,' he muttered, ‘long overdue.'

The father mostly keeps quiet on the subject of Ella's physical defects. Instead it's her character that concerns him. Is she strong enough to rise up and be counted, he wants to know, come forward as a citizen of the world's most disciplined republic? In the matter of her feet however he makes an exception, even considering the expense. ‘Feet are about standing tall and getting a move on in the world,' he says, ‘Pardon the pun. No child of mine should be shambling about like a loafer – and that's even when they're fat as a pancake and won't look their elders in the eye.'

On their visit to the podiatrist in a tall building in downtown Durban, the father stays in the waiting room holding his wallet on his knee. The mother watches as the podiatrist squeezes Ella's feet, then sets an infra-red lamp
to draw strength to the soles
. Ella looks through the non-opening window at the toy-sized cars in the street way down below.

The podiatrist prescribes special brown leather shoes, tells her to wear them for two, maybe three, years. The lace-up left shoe with the anklet and heavy sole will raise her instep, force the foot to point forwards. The right shoe has a matching anklet. An Indian cobbler in Victoria Market makes the shoes for a princely sum, so they have to be kept polished and nice-looking, yet every day thicker tidemarks of dried white sweat spread up the inner anklets, from the heel to the calf.

Ella plots cutting up the shoes with scissors, then burying them in the garden. With the built-up shoe on, she can't easily run and skip. Her belly puffs out bigger. If ever she does try to run, her left foot goes on hitting her right ankle just the same as before.

 

Everywhere in Braemar, in the shadows, around corners, behind the furniture, Ella finds ugly hunchbacked shapes skulking. She stares into the rectangular mirror the mother has hung in the hallway opposite the front door the same as in the old Durban house, so you cannot miss it as you come in. A larva thing, white and puffy, with a fat misshapen face, looks back at her. In the arum lily patch at the bottom of the garden, after rain, giant livid locusts cluster oddly together, noiselessly trembling. Almost she can't bear to look at them, yet can't tear her eyes away. But even they aren't as awful as the carbuncled toads that live down in the river valley below the house. Without warning, the toads blow out their throats, make brown balloons bigger than themselves that protrude slimily through the ferns. The Zulus who ruled over these hills and valleys long ago, the father says, used to curse the toads, but the toads cursed them back. The curse must be powerful, Ella thinks. Everywhere the land is scarred with the Zulus' losses, abandoned huts and hearth stones, red fissures that run through the earth like open sores.

In the native location on the perimeter of Braemar, between the poor white housing and the river, live survivors of the 1950s polio epidemic, withered Zulu children who come to the front door to beg. They stand on the step whining, hold up their small dangling arms for examination as if they were false appendages, hobble on withered legs that are asymmetrical like Ella's own, only more so.

‘Tell the children to go away,' she asks her father, hating herself.

But before he can speak, they have slunk off through the garden gate like whipped dogs. Watching them go Ella is gripped by a sense of triumph. At least her limbs work, more or less. At least she is not as deformed as they.

Then she turns from the front door, catches sight of herself in the rectangular mirror, and the monster grub inside her opens its big scornful mouth and snickers.

She turns her back on the mirror, but out of the corner of her eye catches sight of herself anyway. Slabs of her puffy belly are reflected in shop windows, the sides of passing cars, even in the father's suppressed harrumph when by chance he catches sight of her, quickly looks away.

‘That's our
meid
,' he says glancing towards her, glancing away, his cheeks flushed, ‘Squeezed in the womb. A too-hugging mother. From the time I married her, the hugs in his family have never come to me.'

When they stood side by side at the Durban docks, he never made remarks like that.

In Braemar, cut off from the Dutch immigrant community in Durban, the mother's sighing grows more echoey. The days she spends sighing, the father's fits of fury come before the sun has set. To the clinking sounds of the Old Brown Sherry bottle, first in the garage beside his workbench, then on the verandah, he spits at degenerate Nazis, lily-livered Dutch, weasly Allies, everyone but the crew of his own trusty warship the
Tjerk Hiddes
. Ella alone seems to hear the clinking; no one remarks on it. The binoculars he used to watch the ships outside Durban harbour gather dust in a drawer.

Ella knows of only one truly lovely thing in Braemar, though it comes from Durban or in fact Holland: the oil painting of a lady in a midnight-blue evening gown, low-cut, that hangs on a wall by itself in the living room. It hung in the same place in their Durban living room, above the yellow velvet couch and to the left of the father's desk, except that down there Ella didn't notice it as much. In Durban, there were other interesting things to look at; there was the hydrangea labyrinth to explore. But on early evenings in Braemar, the father already out on the verandah talking to himself, she comes to stand by his desk to gaze at the portrait and take in the pretty details, the pearly look of the lady's pale shoulders, her folded hands nestled in the soft folds of the blue gown. For a while, standing there gazing, Ella forgets the miserable things in Braemar, the toads, the polio children, the locusts, the squashed larva shape in the hallway mirror.

Ella doesn't think the woman in the picture is beautiful – she looks far too much like she does to be beautiful – but her eyes are amazing, shiny and big like planets. Though at night they look black, actually they match the blue gown. And they follow her around the room. Wherever she goes in the room, the eyes are on her. Wherever she moves the face calls for her attention – as if it were someone staring, making her look their way. Some days Ella avoids standing near the desk so that the eyes can't find her. Their gaze is too near, too close. What must it be like for her father, she wonders, when he sits here at his desk doing his freelance bookkeeping for the Memorial Order of Tin Hats, the Missions to Seamen, to have those eyes always on him?

She knows the picture is of her dead aunt Ella, but why, she'd like to hear, does it have this pride of place? ‘What's it doing there, the picture of the lady?' she asks her mother, points. ‘How's it so special?'

She says
lady
because she doesn't know the woman as
Tante
though the mother calls her sister and Dad says to Mam
your sister
. She died before her namesake, Ella herself, was born.