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- Herausgeber: Parthian Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
NOMINATED FOR THE 2023 BULAWAYO ARTS AWARDS FOR OUTSTANDING LITERARY WORK 'In turn these stories are funny, poignant, at times shocking, but always deeply moving.' – Ian Holding, Unfeeling '[a] wonderful collection of short stories' – Siphiwe Ndlovu, The Theory of Flight 'Bryony Rheam's short stories are skilled, perfectly formed, and compelling ... a deeply satisfying collection.' – Karen Jennings, An Island Whatever Happened to Rick Astley?? She imagined that he was happily married with children. A record producer, perhaps? That was the usual way with singers, wasn't it? From Bryony Rheam, the award-winning author of All Come to Dust and This September Sun, comes a collection of sixteen short stories shining a spotlight on life in Zimbabwe over the last twenty years. The daily routines and the greater fate of ordinary Zimbabweans are represented with a deft, compassionate touch and flashes of humour. From the potholed side streets of Bulawayo to lush, blooming gardens, traversing down- at-heel bars and faded drawing rooms, the stories in Whatever Happened to Rick Astley?? ring with hope and poignancy, and pay tribute to the resilience of the human spirit.
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iii
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO RICK ASTLEY?
Bryony Rheam
v
For Sian and Ellie
Contents
Potholes
When the Bulawayo City Council stopped mending the roads, Gibson Sibanda took it upon himself to fill the potholes along Napier Road with sand and small stones. At first, his job was a thankless one: hardly anyone stopped to say thank you or toss him a couple of coins. In fact, not many motorists seemed to notice that the holes had been filled in at all. They still tore down the road at great speed, oblivious to him standing on the side of the road, shovel in one hand and cap in the other. When they did notice his presence, they hooted loudly or leant out of car windows to tell him to get off the road before he got himself knocked over, ‘bloody stupid idiot.’
Unperturbed, Gibson carried on his work, every day shovelling another load of sand into the holes and then beating the pile flat with the back of his shovel. When the rains came, Gibson had his work cut out for him. In the mornings, he would fill in the holes, working hard to make sure that he did not create any unnecessary bumps in the road, flattening the sand with the precision of a baker decorating a cake, trimming the icing here and there, smoothing the top and checking from all angles that no imperfections could be seen. Later, he would watch from the shelter of a tree as the rain washed the sand away, but he felt neither frustration nor anger for there was something he enjoyed about the continuous filling and emptying of holes. He never felt it was a waste of time, but 2rather that it was part of the gentle rhythm of life, a necessity that underpinned its very fabric.
As the other roads deteriorated, a change took place in the behaviour of the motorists. Some stopped to say thank you to him for his work and give him tips and some even asked him to repair other roads. At first, he was quite overwhelmed with the offer of extra work and moved away from Napier to work on its side roads, some of which were barely strips of tar. However, he soon found he disliked the other roads. They were lonely and badly misused: many of them were beyond repair. The edges of the road were rough, dropping away in sudden gullies that made work difficult.
Then he was beset by a much bigger problem. In his absence from Napier, a gang of young boys moved in and took over his spot. The bigger boys crouched in the bushes whilst the two youngest dirtied themselves with dried clay and stood next to Gibson’s neatly filled holes, sticks in hand. As a car approached, they would bend over and pat the holes and then stand back quickly, looking as forlorn as possible, cupped hands outstretched. Initially, Gibson ran up to them, shouting, and they scattered in different directions before regrouping at the top of the road and hurling abuse at him. He picked up a handful of small stones and threw it at them and they ran off laughing. But the next day they were back, and it soon became apparent that he could no longer leave Napier.
One day, early in the morning, Gibson was just walking to his workplace when he noticed a council truck parked up ahead. A gang of workers in blue overalls jumped off and began setting up signs.
‘What is this?’ Gibson asked them. ‘What are you doing?’3
‘We’re fixing the road,’ they said. ‘Haven’t you heard? The vice-president has bought a house round the corner. The road must be fixed so he can travel smoothly to and from his home.’
‘But he is never here,’ lamented Gibson. ‘He lives in Harare.’
One of the men stared at him, long and hard, and then laughed and shook his head.
‘There are other roads he could take,’ began Gibson, pointing weakly down Nairn, ‘in much worse condition.’
‘And why would we fix those?’ laughed the man. ‘This one is not too bad. It shouldn’t take us long to finish.’
Gibson watched in horror as the council workers cut a big square around each of his holes and then filled them in with carbon waste from the power station. The man was right; by mid-afternoon they were finished and then they jumped back onto the truck and it clattered away down the road leaving Gibson to survey the damage left behind. The men had made a fire on which to cook isitshwala and boil water for their tea. A hasty clearing that had been made in the grass side of the road was now burnt black. Lumps of cold, hard porridge had been thrown into the bush along with a tin, a couple of torn plastic bags and a scrunched-up piece of newspaper used as a makeshift cloth. Gibson picked up the rubbish and took it to the bin at the end of the road. The bin itself was overflowing with uncollected refuse and Gibson knew that any food would be searched out later that night by the stray dogs of the neighbourhood. Still, he felt the rubbish was in its rightful place and returned to view the rest of the carnage.
He forced himself to look long and hard at the large wounds that had been carved into the soft blue tar. He 4thought of the gentle circles, how they would no more empty or fill; he thought of the tiny grains of sand and soft small stones, no longer allowed to move and spill, now captured forever, drowning somewhere in the darkness that subsumed them. Bending down, he reached out his hand and gently touched the surface. Perhaps he could remove the black filler; it wasn’t tar after all. But the squares would remain, those squares with their hard, straight sides that looked as though they had been cut with the brutality of a backstreet butcher hacking at a carcass.
Anyone walking or driving along Napier Road at that point might be surprised to see a man crouched by the side of the road, smoothing his hand over the newly mended potholes. They might be even more surprised to see him fall forward suddenly and appear to hug the road as his body racked with sobs. But there was no one around for it was the wrong time of day; when the afternoon, tinged with orange heat, is suspended in time, when every attempt at movement seems countered by the force of eternity that reminds us that our lives are only the tiniest and most insignificant of moments.
Suddenly a car shot down the road, a large black car with shaded windows and no number plate. Gibson rolled to the side. His mouth thrust into the sooty black stones; they pressed painfully into his cheeks and the palm of his hands and his kneecaps. He could taste the smell of sun on the road and the thick, oily effluvium of petrol. Dried grass stuck to his hair. The car belonged to the office of the vice-president; they were checking the road for him as a visit was planned for the following year. Gibson watched as it turned off down the Hillside Road.5
The visit never happened. Before the end of the year, the old president and his cronies were deposed. The vice-president went on the run and the house remained closed. The road did not last one rainy season and it was not long before the residents of Hillside were once more complaining. By this time, Gibson Sibanda had moved to a different part of town. He went first to Ilanda and then to Famona and finally settled on Pauling Road in Suburbs. There are many potholes to fill in Bulawayo.
The Colonel Comes By
I first saw the colonel as he stood by the pot plants that edged the verandah, looking relaxed in a pair of cream trousers and a white shirt with the top button undone. He was leaning over a large red geranium, a pair of secateurs in hand, snipping off the dead heads with a professional’s precision, pushing his hand up through the leaves and searching for any errant heads.
At first, of course, no one believed me. Trish dug her elbow into my ribs and gave me a long meaningful stare with her mouth as flat as a line drawn with a ruler.
‘That’s not funny,’ she said. ‘Not funny at all.’
Mom said absently, ‘That’s nice, my girl. What’s he doing? Watering the plants?’
‘Deadheading the geraniums,’ I said. ‘Can’t you see?’
No one could, which didn’t help.
The next day, he was back for the petunias. He hated it when they got too long and straggly and the stems went brown. He took the seeds off and put them in a small envelope he kept in the top pocket of his shirt.
‘You know,’ I said to him at last, ‘you are going to have to stop this.’
He carried on as though I weren’t there.
‘This gardening,’ I continued, unperturbed. His silences were the worst: you carried on talking and talking and then suddenly he would turn on you and snap. And it was usually 7quite a bite. ‘This gardening has to stop. You need to do something. Say something. If you want to speak to her, say it. I’ll tell her.’
‘Rubbish,’ he muttered and snipped off the head of a perfectly good purple petunia.
He didn’t appear for quite some days after that, and I thought I had scared him away. He never liked talking or discussion. He just gave orders and everyone followed.
One day in late afternoon as Mom and I took our usual walk around the garden, Mom with her teacup and saucer and I with my mug, I saw him just above the lavender. This time, he was looking directly at Mom, and deliberately avoided my gaze.
‘He’s here again,’ I said, glad that Trish was inside doing her homework. ‘The colonel. You do believe me, Mom?’
‘You miss him, don’t you?’ she said, softly, her eyes flickering over the large shrubs that grew next to the wall.
‘Not that way,’ I directed her with a nod of my head. ‘He’s by the lavender. Just there. See?’
She looked and stared for a full minute before shaking her head. Her teacup shook a little in its saucer.
Exasperated, I turned to him and shrugged my shoulders in dismay. Couldn’t he say or do anything, instead of standing there, half-hidden by a great clump of grey lavender?
Mom put a hand on my head and smoothed my hair down.
‘Come, let’s go inside,’ she said.
When I looked back at the colonel, he had gone.
‘He wants to tell you something,’ I said, suddenly, for although he had gone, I felt it was his wish.
She stopped and waited, as though humouring me.8
‘He says he’s sorry.’ That wasn’t exactly right, for he hadn’t said it, but it was something I felt very strongly as he had crouched by the lavender, the top of his head barely visible.
The cup shivered again in its saucer.
‘Whatever for?’ asked Mom in a voice like the one she used when we were very young and we showed her the fairy houses we had built.
‘I think you know,’ I replied, but I was guessing now. I looked round for the colonel to help me, but he wasn’t there.
‘Bath time,’ said Mom.
I stuck a finger in my mug and scooped up the lovely warm sugar at the bottom.
The next day, when we came home from school, there was a man sitting on the verandah with Mom. He had long, floppy brown hair and an unevenly kept beard that looked as though he had attacked it with a pair of nail scissors. He wore blue and purple tie-dye trousers with bottoms that were frayed and dusty from being trodden underfoot and a pair of open brown sandals from which protruded two long, thin big toes, like talons. An unfortunate mark on his trousers in the groin area suggested that he had wet himself, but Mom assured me later that he had not done so. He wore a black T-shirt and two necklaces: one was of small wooden beads and the other was a little longer and a white feather dangled from it. There were beads on a strand of leather wrapped round his wrist, too, and he even had an earring in his left ear.
Trish and I stared at him in horrified fascination.
‘This is Mr Patchouli, girls.’
‘Ramon, please,’ interrupted Mr Patchouli, drawing back 9his lips in a hideous attempt at a smile. I agreed. He wasn’t someone who suited having a surname.
‘Mr Patchouli is here to help me with something very important.’
My mother was never one who settled into nonconformity easily.
She took a sip of tea from her teacup and looked nervously at us over the rim.
Ramon settled back in his chair with the ease of a conqueror. Got her, his stance seemed to say, and there’s nothing you can do about it. For indeed it did seem as though Mom had been taken hostage whilst we were at school.
Mom did that thing with her head. Looking straight at us and smiling, she gave a little nod to the left. We could take a hint. We leaned our bikes up against the verandah and went inside.
‘There’s cheese in the fridge,’ Mom called, ‘and have as much lettuce as you want.’
When Dad left us, about a year ago now, Mom found it very hard to cope. Although she had trained as a secretary, she had got married before she had completed her qualifications at Miss Tapson’s Secretarial and Commercial College and had always been a housewife. Now, she lacked the confidence to go back and finish the course, even though Miss Tapson said she was welcome to. Mom had the fingers of a typist; they were long and thin and elegant. They were also the fingers of a pianist, and she would spend many an hour playing sad, slow symphonies on our old piano. They weren’t gardener’s hands at all, and it seemed a travesty to see her working outside in 10the vegetable garden, digging and scooping and ploughing and planting – even though she wore gloves.
My first impression was that Ramon Patchouli was something to do with vegetables or flowers, although he didn’t really have the right look about him. He lacked the knowledgeable air and the brisk no-nonsense demeanour of one used to lopping the most beautiful roses off a bush because they needed to be brought to order. Instead, he left Mom with two small stones and a packet of dried herbs.
‘What are these?’ I asked rolling the stones together in the palm of my hand.
‘Now do be careful, Izzie. Don’t lose those, will you? They’re quite precious.’
‘But what are they?’ I persisted, holding their soft contours up to the light for inspection.
‘Well, one’s citrine and the other is smoky quartz.’
I waited, expecting further explanation.
‘They… they are for something I need.’
‘And the herbs? Are you going to plant them?’
‘These are dried herbs. No, no I am not going to plant them.’
Any further explanation was impossible to extricate from Mom. Ramon Patchouli’s visit seemed to have given her a little boost of life, but at the same time unnerved her. I could tell by the way she played with her crucifix that hung on a chain round her neck. She made herself tea and took it to the far end of the garden where the lavender grew. I thought for a moment she was looking for the colonel and was going to tell her that the last time I had seen him he was in the vegetable patch at the back, tying the plum tomatoes more securely to the stakes.11
When she came back, she seemed to have made up her mind about something. It was as though the last hour or so had not happened and we had just got home from school and she was there to greet us.
‘Hello, girls!’ She placed a hand on each of our heads. ‘How are you? How was school?’
She seemed to be her normal self again. Helping with homework, putting the vegetable peelings on to boil for stock and even making a small caraway seed cake. It was only later when she excused herself to do some watering of the vegetables that I saw that cloud descend again. I looked for the colonel, but he wasn’t there. It was just like him to run from trouble, emotional trouble that is.
I don’t know what made me wake up that night. Perhaps it was just the feeling of someone being outside. I looked out of my bedroom window but couldn’t see anything so I put my dressing gown on and moved slowly down the passageway. All the lights were off, but outside there was a full moon and a bright, strong white light flowed in. Mom had moved the small verandah table so it was out in the moonlight and seemed to be arranging something on it. Then she stood back and looked around as though there might be someone watching her – and indeed there was, for the colonel was back to the geraniums and I was behind the curtains in the lounge.
She picked up something from the table and cupped it in her hands, which she then raised up into the air. She seemed to mutter something too whilst looking back over her shoulder down onto the table. It was then I realised she was reading something from a small scrap of paper. She put whatever it was in her hands back on the table and looked round again, 12like a large cat with its ear twitching. Then she held her hands together as though in prayer, took a reverent step backwards and made to come back inside the house. I darted down the corridor and jumped into bed, pulling the blanket completely over my head. I lay waiting for what seemed an age, before I imagined I had heard her bedroom door close, and I stuck my head out and breathed normally again.
The next day when we came home from school, the house smelt of smoke. We were used to the smell for the colonel had smoked since he was fifteen, although in his later years he had preferred cigars, which had a sweet, dense, masculine aroma. This was different, but I couldn’t quite place how. It was a bit like the smell of the grate in the lounge and a little bit like the smell of a bush fire. The colonel used to burn piles of garden waste in the winter, pushing any errant leaves onto the pyre while we would run around adding anything we could find. Afterwards our clothes smelt of smoke and our eyes burnt. But it wasn’t quite that smell either.
‘What’s that smell?’ asked Trish, wrinkling up her nose.
‘What smell?’ asked Mom in a voice a little too wide-eyed innocent.
‘Like… like… something’s burnt.’
‘Like grass,’ I suggested.
‘Oh, it’s just something I was doing earlier.’
‘What?’ Trish looked up at her suspiciously. ‘You weren’t burning our things, were you?’
‘No, no.’ Mom pulled in her lips and shook her head. She took a deep breath. ‘This might sound a little strange, but I was burning some herbs.’
‘Herbs?’ we asked in unison.13
‘Yes, just some lavender and some sage. A little rosemary.’ She twisted her hands and smiled an unsure lop-sided smile. ‘I’m… well… I’ve been clearing some negative energy.’ Those last words seemed to roll out of her mouth like heavy stone marbles that fell on the floor between us, scooting off in all directions.
‘You see, when you’ve had a run of bad luck, it… well, it accumulates. It stays with you. And all that happens is that more and more of it comes your way and suddenly you are drowning in it.’ She gulped suddenly as though holding back tears.
‘What about Jesus?’ I asked. Everything about my education had taught me he was the first port of call. ‘Can’t he help?’
‘Ramon says—’
‘Oh, Ramon,’ Trish and I breathed, heavy with cynical apprehension. His significance in our lives was becoming clearer.
‘It’s not that Jesus doesn’t matter,’ she began and then, changing tack said, ‘Well, Ramon says they’re the same thing. Positive energy.’
We stared at her and she looked back at us, pulling the side of her bottom lip in.
‘What about the bank manager?’ asked Trish. ‘Haven’t you been to him before? Couldn’t he help?’
‘He did help, yes. But things haven’t changed. If anything, they’ve got worse.’
‘If he helped once, I’m sure he will help again,’ began Trish with sudden enthusiasm as though she had just hit on an idea no one else had thought of.14
‘It’s just that,’ Mom interrupted in a halting manner, ‘I don’t know what to do any more.’ Her voice had gone up a pitch and her eyes had filled with tears. I took her hand, which was soft and light, devoid of all resistance. ‘There are bills to pay. You two have to go to school and we have to eat. We can’t live on butternut soup for the rest of our lives.’
Trish and I looked at each other, our eyes holding the same solution.
‘We don’t have to go to school,’ we chorused in unison.
Mom smiled, a sad, broken smile.
‘It’s true,’ I insisted. ‘Trish can help me with my maths and you can help us with English. You can give us titles and we’ll write stories for you.’
‘Oh girls!’ Mom cried, looking down into her hands, her thin body wracked with sobs. ‘I wish sometimes the adult world was as easy to navigate as yours. I wish I were a child again.’
‘The colonel,’ I cried, without thinking. ‘The colonel. We have to get the colonel. He’d understand. He always knows what to do.’
‘Sssh!’ Trish dug me in the ribs with her elbow and did that thing with her mouth that said she would have hit me if she could.
I gave her a look back to suggest I didn’t know what all the fuss was about, but I knew I’d overstepped the mark and shrank back, guilty that I had made Mom cry harder.
‘What about the bank manager?’ Trish hesitated again. Mom squeezed her eyes shut for a couple of seconds and then opened them again.
‘I have tried. He said no.’15
I couldn’t help throwing Trish a look of triumph. Mom and I knew what had to be done. We knew it required more than earthbound things to transform our situation. I held back now but I resolved to try again later to tell her about the colonel. Suddenly I felt more positive than ever.
Another person appeared at our house now on a regular basis. She had a long, angular face with a sharp, pointed chin that reminded me of an axe. Her greying hair was scraped back into a punishing bun at the nape of her neck and secured with an army of large hair grips. She wore long sleeved shirts, however hot it was, and pleated tweed skirts with a large safety pin. In fact, she seemed to be all sharp things, for I noticed she kept a long, thin needle on the underside of her skirt hem.
‘Maybe it’s for emergencies,’ Mom said when I told her, but I couldn’t think what emergency might require you to carry that round with you all day. She would also arrive with her darning in a small woven bag. As Mom spoke to her, she’d be looking down at the socks or underwear or whatever it was she was mending, sucking her lips in purposefully, pushing the long, thin needle in and in and out. Sometimes I would get the distinct feeling that she was looking at me. I’d look up and there she would be, staring at me with her grey-blue eyes. Feeling her about to pounce on me, I’d squirm and look away for I was guilty of numerous holes and tears in my clothes. When I looked back, she was still staring, her hands working obediently of their own accord. In, out, in, out.
Mom didn’t like us there when she spoke to Mrs Crossack. We could stay for tea and, as Mom always made a tray of ginger biscuits if someone was coming round, we would wait 16until the plate had been passed round, grab one and then go. But we didn’t like leaving Mom on her own, especially as time went on and we had a clearer idea of who Mrs Crossack was.
We would take our biscuits and make a point of saying we were going inside to do our homework. Then we would creep out of the back door, making sure that the screen door did not bang shut, down the steps, and along the side of the house, back onto the verandah. There we would sit, silently munching our biscuits and trying as hard as we could to listen to the conversation. Mom talked about money and Dad and how we had to let the cook boy go and how we’d have to sell the car if things went on the way they did. Mrs Crossack didn’t say much. It was as though her lips were full of pins and she couldn’t speak in case they all dropped out and fell on the floor.
Once there was nothing, just a silence and Trish and I shared a look and then crept very slowly to the end of the verandah and looked round. My heart was beating fast although I didn’t really know what I expected to see. Mrs Crossack standing over Mom’s body, dagger in hand? Instead, we saw them sitting close together; Mrs Crossack’s hand was over Mom’s and they both had their eyes closed. Suddenly, a long, deep man’s voice came from Mrs Cossack whose eyes shot open and looked directly at me. I shrank back, my heart pounding against my chest and my palms damp with perspiration, but she didn’t appear to have seen me.
There was another lady, too, by the name of Adeline. We were told to call her just that: there was no miss or mrs and, although it seemed strange at first, calling an adult by their first name, and we had to first look to Mom for approval, we not only got used it, it felt quite natural to call her by her first 17name. She was that sort of person. Not bound by something called conventionality, my mother commented rather wistfully one evening when she had just gone. She wore long skirts in bright colours with tassels and little bells and bits of mirrors embedded in the material. She wore leather sandals that were scuffed on the front and made her toes dusty and a myriad of necklaces in bright pinks and greens and blues.
Sometimes Adeline and Mom would sit cross-legged in the middle of the floor, palms turned upward on each knee, their eyes closed. Whereas Adeline looked as though she had had lots of practice, her smile as sublimely relaxed as a buddha’s, Mom was less so. Her face was set into a grimace of concentration and whenever Adeline said it was now time for them to open their eyes again, she always seemed incredibly relieved.
This was called meditation.
‘Relax, relax,’ Adeline would say, dragging each word out as though it were a hypnosis. ‘Try not to think of anything. Focus on now, on this moment. Relax. Reellaaxx.’
It was obvious that Mom wasn’t relaxing because she’d fiddle with her fingers, rolling them together as though she had glue on them, and sometimes I’d see her open her eyes ever so slightly, steal a quick look at Adeline and then close them together. It reminded me of praying in church when some of the prayers went on and on and I’d peep out from behind my hands to see what everyone else was doing. I’d usually get a sharp dig in my ribs from Trish in pious admonition. I’d then step on her toes and a scuffle would ensue, ending in us both having to experience the wrath of Mom later on.18
‘It’s your base chakra that’s out of alignment,’ Adeline pronounced one day. ‘I can feel it. It’s all about self-worth. If you are out of balance’ – here she sucked in a sharp breath of air ‒ ‘well, you’re on the road to certain destruction. Money problems, business failures, relationship collapses.’ Here she looked knowingly at Mom who stared back, her face a paroxysm of guilt.
‘Is there anything that can be done?’ hesitated Mom in a small voice.
‘Well, that’s the good part,’ smiled Adeline. ‘We can realign the chakras. But it will take time and’ – here she nodded towards Mom again as though she doubted the possibility this could happen – ‘effort. Lots of effort.’
In her stockinged feet, Mom nodded meekly, duly rebuked.
‘We need to look at your wardrobe,’ said Adeline, casting a doubtful eye over Mom’s white blouse and light brown trousers. ‘You need to wear more red, more colour.’
‘I see,’ said Mom looking upwards as though making a mental inventory of her clothes. ‘That may be a problem.’
The next day when we came home from school, a figure in red awaited us on the verandah. We didn’t recognise Mom at all. Not only did the dress billow outwards as she walked, the two short sleeves lay like a soldier’s lapels. It had large red buttons down the front and was made of a fine linen. Mom, who dressed habitually in shades of beige, looked decidedly out of place.
She perched self-consciously on one of the cane verandah chairs while we did our homework, glancing up every once in a while to get a glimpse of our mother so wondrously adorned. After tea, she changed back into beige, tied a large blue apron 19round her waist and set about making the supper. It was as though she had taken off a pair of glamorous but exceedingly uncomfortable shoes. That night, she lay on my bed, ostensibly to read us a story, and fell asleep. I tried to squeeze in next to her and in the process woke her up.
Jolted awake, she sat up rubbing her eyes and swung her feet off the bed.
‘You can stay,’ I said for I hadn’t wished to wake her. ‘I don’t mind. There’s enough room.’
‘No, no, my darling,’ she smiled, trying to stretch her eyes open. ‘You have a good night’s sleep. I have things to do.’
She squeezed my hand and gave me one of those smiles where she compressed her lips and narrowed her eyes as though she had just tasted something very bitter.
‘Are you all right, Mom?’ I ventured. I wondered if there wasn’t something we could do. The washing up, maybe? Or watering the plants. Now the gardener had gone, that was a full-time job on its own. To be honest, the colonel could have been more help, lingering as he did every day by the large geranium pots or out in the flower beds. But pruning was his thing. Watering had never interested him; it was too mundane. Not specific enough and it required very little skill or precision.
‘I’m just so tired,’ answered Mom. ‘So incredibly tired.’
‘We can help.’
She smoothed my hair with one hand and smiled again, although this time her lips moved upwards in a curve. Then she leaned forward and a veil of sadness fell across her features once again.
‘It’s another kind of tiredness. I just can’t seem to catch up.’ 20The next day, there were red roses in a vase on the table, even though we did not grow red roses. The colonel came by, glancing disapprovingly at them. He preferred the small, pink climbing roses that grew along the hedge and the large yellow roses in the main flower bed. Anything he hadn’t planted wasn’t worth much.
Then Mom hung a long dangly red and gold thing that she told us was a Chinese good luck charm in the front doorway and spent a frantic afternoon going through the linen cupboard in search of anything red. She gave a loud ‘aha’ when she discovered a red tea cosy and a white tray cloth embroidered with red flowers.
She appeared to be completely in her own world at times, sitting on the verandah with her eyes closed, muttering whatever incantation Ramon had given her for that day or that phase of the moon or to clear this energy or that. Meanwhile, nothing changed. One day, Mom sold her wedding ring. She came home with a purse full of notes that she seemed too reluctant to touch. It sat on the mantelpiece in the lounge for three whole days before Mom eventually put it in her bag.
She was thin; incredibly thin and her cheeks had shrunk inwards like an old lady’s. That night we had casserole. She hovered on her chair and watched us eat our food with an odd, hungry fascination while she pushed her small heap around her plate in ever decreasing circles. It became common to find herbs sprinkled in corners of the house and small mounds of coarse salt that were supposed to absorb negative energy. Incense sticks burnt at the table whilst we did homework, the smoke often wafting in my eyes and making them water.
It felt all the time as though we were waiting for something 21to happen. Every day when we were back from school and threw our bikes down on the ground, we looked expectantly up at the verandah in search of some sort of sign. A sack of gold or a beautifully wrapped present. We wanted someone to appear, their arms around a smiling Mom, and say everything was all right. It was all over, this searching. We could go back to our bikes and our games and our petty arguments and be ourselves; be children once again.
But this was not to be. One day, Mom failed to get out of bed at all. She lay like a small piece of broken porcelain on her pillow and stared blankly at the wall. She tried to smile when she saw us and raised her arm in a weak attempt at a hug, but then closed her eyes and breathed in deeply for the effort was too much.
While the doctor attended her behind closed doors, we sat in the shadows of the verandah step, not saying a word. Pressing my cheek against my kneecap, I drew pictures in the sand with a short stick. I drew a house with a triangular roof and a tree and a flower with large round petals. As time wore on, I resorted to shapes: long, chongololo-like concentric circles that threatened to go on and on, ever widening and expanding.
I looked up at one point to find the colonel next to the geraniums. His face held a look of perturbation as he stared rather dismally at the browning leaves. Of course, watering had gone right out of our minds lately. I expected the vegetable patch looked rather sad as well and resolved to water it later on. He didn’t attack them with his usual fastidiousness. Instead, he too appeared to hang back in the shadows as though awaiting some instruction. He did that thing he always 22did when worried, which was to roll his lips together and then smooth his hand over his mouth, bringing his fingers to a point at his chin.
The next day, a very solemn looking delegation arrived at the house. Mom was propped up in a chair on the verandah, her knees covered in a thick blanket and a shawl around her shoulders. A cup of cold tea sat on the table and Trish was attempting to read to her from a book of inspirational verse we had found on her bedside table. She read in a slow, halting fashion that required her to start the sentence again many times. Listening was a laborious job, like trying to chew through a large, hard toffee. By the time the last stanza was finally ground up and spat out, we had forgotten what the beginning had been.
Trish ended each attempt with a triumphant nod of her head and a knowing smile as though the wisdom of the words was nothing short of life changing. I watched Mom’s face closely for any sign of improvement, but her eyes remained closed and her cheeks drawn in, highlighting her beautiful high cheekbones that seemed only lightly covered with a veil of soft white skin.
‘You’ll like this one,’ began Trish after she had studied the next verse with a fierce intent.
Mom raised her hand ever so slightly and coughed.
