Sugar Town Queens

by Malla Nunn

  “With Sam.” Mayme is skeptical. “And no Mummy?”

  “She had work today. She’ll come next time.” Now that we know that the plan works, we can use it again, till we’re caught. “Should we sit down?”

  Sam says, “I’ll show your friends around the house while you two talk.”

  “Wait.” It is suddenly important for Lil Bit and Goodness to meet Mayme face-to-face and to know that she is real and not a fantasy cooked up by a lonely teenager. In the years to come, the three of us will have a shared memory to talk about. “Let me introduce them first.”

  Sam opens the door. Lil Bit and Goodness step into the room side by side: tall and small, shy and bold. Township girls with wide eyes.

  “Mayme, meet my friends Lil Bit and Goodness. We go to school together,” I say. “You can guess which is which.”

  “I certainly can. Nice to meet you,” she says.

  “You too, Mrs. Bollard,” Lil Bit says.

  “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Bollard,” says Goodness.

  She smiles. “You can call me Mayme. Sam, show the girls the games room or take them onto the porch where it’s sunny and warm. You choose.”

  “How about a game of Ping-Pong?” Sam asks on the way out. “Or a game of pool?”

  “Pool.” Goodness likes the sound of that. “Show me how to play and we’ll have a match. If that’s what it’s called.”

  There’s a grubby pool hall in Sugar Town where trashy girls in tight clothes go to mix with bold boys in loose T-shirts and baggy jeans. Lil Bit and I are not allowed inside. Not because we are too young; there is no such thing as “too young” in the township, but because Lil Bit’s mother and Annalisa have said that the pool hall is where girls get into trouble. Whether they want to or not.

  Lil Bit waves goodbye, and Sam closes the door. I am alone with Mayme in a bedroom with a long linen couch for sitting and a tall window that lets in the sunlight.

  “I’m glad you came alone this time,” she says. “It gives us time for something important.” She goes to a writing desk and pulls a yellow envelope from a stack of papers. “When Annalisa disappeared, I hired a private investigator to find out what happened to her. The answers are inside this envelope.”

  I see that the envelope is sealed and brown at the edges.

  “How old is that?” I ask.

  “I’m ashamed to say it’s almost as old as you,” she says. “I didn’t open it because I was afraid to face the truth.” Mayme is painfully honest. “The damage to Annalisa is my fault. Whatever she went through in the months that she was missing was my doing.”

  “That’s not right.” Neville is the one behind Annalisa’s disappearance. I am sure the contents of the envelope will prove it. “Let’s read the report together, and that way you’ll know exactly what happened.”

  “No.” She paces back and forth with the report held tight in her hands, agitated. “I was a coward sixteen years ago, and I’m a coward now. Promise me that you’ll read the report after I’m dead. Not before.”

  “But why?” The request stuns me. “Everything you need to know is right there in your hands. Open the envelope and find out who’s really to blame for whatever happened to Annalisa.”

  “I already know the truth.” She turns to face me. “When your mother fell in love with your father, Neville threw her out of the house. I didn’t stop him. I sent money to pay for her apartment, but that was the easy way out, helping her from the shadows, too afraid of what other people would say to stand up for my own daughter. Now I realize how many years I wasted, how much damage I’ve done. All that time I could have spent with you and Annalisa. I failed you both. I failed myself. That’s the truth.”

  “You pay for our rent and other stuff . . . don’t you?”

  “Small amounts scraped together behind your grandfather’s back.” Her words cut across mine, sharp and bristling with self-loathing. “I could have done more . . . should have done more. When you didn’t turn up yesterday, I thought that something bad had happened. To imagine that I might never see you or Annalisa again put everything in perspective.” She stops to catch her breath, and it hurts to see her hurting. “I have a weak heart because I am weak.”

  “Mayme, we should read it now. Together. And then get over it,” I say.

  “Please, Amandla . . .”

  I want to tear the envelope open. Instead, I reach out and let her put it into my hand. “All right. I promise to only read this after you’re gone and not one minute earlier.”

  “Good. You can hate me when I’m dead, but not before.”

  I put the envelope into my backpack. Mayme didn’t challenge Neville, and she has to live with that shame. Oh, I know what it’s like to live with the shame of being poor and stranded between black and white, but I don’t know what it’s like to abandon your own daughter. Annalisa will never experience that feeling, either. She’d die for me. If she lets it, shame could pull Mayme down into the same black hole that swallows Annalisa.

  “We can’t change the past, but we have now. I’m here with you, Mayme. Right now. Let’s not waste the time we have left.”

  She looks at me in a way I’ve always wanted to be looked at, with loving kindness and warmth.

  “Clever girl,” she says, and touches my face. She leans down and kisses my forehead. “Let’s you and me make the most of now.”

  “Oh . . . I wanted to tell you that Mrs. M loved the fairy lights chili and the yellow pepper from the hospital garden. She’s saved some seeds to plant in the spring, too. With a few more plants she’ll have an excellent chance of winning the Best Garden in Sugar Town Award.”

  Mayme smiles. “I have some speckled tree orchids that your Mrs. M might be interested in.”

  There is no Best Garden in Sugar Town Award, but the thought of it has perked Mayme up and taken away the regrets that weighed on her.

  “Let’s go look.” I stand and move to the door, suddenly glad to get out of the room that holds the same volume of sadness and regret as any shack in Sugar Town. Wherever you live, it seems that life finds you.

  The door opens before I get there and Father Gibson sticks his head into the room with his flyaway hair and wide grin. I step to the side, surprised, and he doesn’t see me pressed to the wall.

  “Look who’s come to visit,” he says, and my mother walks into the guest bedroom, wearing her second-best outfit: a tailored blue dress with a white hem. She is simple and elegant, a style she inherited from her mother but, unfortunately, did not pass down to me.

  “Annalisa. You got time off work.” Mayme is delighted. “How lovely to have the two of you here at home. At last.”

  Mother glances at the family priest, confused, and then, as if by magic radar, sees me stuck to the wall. I step forward, caught in a lie for the second time in days.

  “Oh . . .” Annalisa blinks and says, “I, uh . . . I forgot to tell you that Mr. Gupta gave me a half day off. Father Gibson picked me up from the station so the three of us could spend a few hours together. To make up for yesterday.”

  That is a big fat lie. She found a way into the house and didn’t think to bring me along. I’m offended, hurt even, but now is not the time to call each other out. Both of us want to spare Mayme the truth of what happened yesterday.

  “Because of the broken security panel and the locked gates.” I jump in with the fake reasons I gave Mayme for our missed visit. Mother raises an eyebrow. Really? That’s what you came up with? I shrug off the sharp look. If telling lies is a family talent, then I have missed out.

  “You’ve come just in time,” Mayme says. “Amandla and I are going to the garden room to pick out cuttings for Mrs. M. With a few more exotics, Amandla says that she might win the Best Garden in Sugar Town Award.”

  Mother nods and smiles in my direction, impressed. Excellent lie, the smile says. Keep up the good work.

&
nbsp; It’s the first time I can remember being congratulated for lying, but we are far from home. Things are different in the big white house, I guess.

  “I’ll leave you three to it,” Father Gibson says. “If you need me, I’ll be on the back porch, smoking a cigarette. With your permission, Amanda?”

  “Smoke all you want, Tony. My lungs are fine. It’s my heart that’s the problem.” She squeezes his shoulder on the way out, affectionate. “And thank you for bringing my girl home.”

  The two are good friends. I wonder if Mayme ever imagines how her life might have been if she’d married a poor Anglican priest instead of a wealthy businessman? When it came time to choose between loving her daughter and granddaughter or keeping her social position, she chose the latter. The township bitch that lives inside me thinks that she deserves an empty room and regrets. If I hadn’t followed Annalisa to the institute that morning, would she have lifted a finger to find me? No. She has, in fact, done nothing to build a bridge between us. Nothing!

  Rational me pushes township-bitch me aside. Mayme has her faults, same as anyone else. I’m not ready to walk away from the only connection I have to Annalisa’s past and my own. And maybe, just maybe, to Father as well.

  16

  At the potting table, I learn that Annalisa cut her leg open while surfing when she was fourteen and hiked the Annapurna track in Nepal with a friend at nineteen. Uncle Julien, on the other hand, was cautious and sensible. Mayme uses the words sensitive soul to describe him three different times, and decoding what she really means is easy. Mother was strong-willed and Julien wasn’t.

  “Neville had big plans for Annalisa.” She pushes a vivid pink geranium with a white center across the wooden table to me. “He was certain that she’d take over the company one day. He liked that she had her own mind . . .”

  “Until he didn’t,” Annalisa says. “We had a fight. After that, I can’t remember what happened. There was a dirt road with mountains . . . but I don’t know how I got there. Or how I got those blisters on my feet.”

  I shoot Mayme a sideways glance, waiting for her to fill in the blanks. Surely she has something to add? The time, the date, the reason for the fight? Anything at all. She stays quiet and keeps her hands busy shoveling soil into a row of seedling pots. The only sound is her hands working and the shuffle of the clay pot on the table.

  “The fight started at dinner,” she says at last. “You wanted to invite your boyfriend to a charity event at the Botanic Gardens. Neville said, ‘If you mean that Zulu bartender that you’re running around with, the answer is no.’ ”

  My father was Zulu. He worked in a bar. Small pieces of information that I’ve never heard before. I grab the new facts, greedy for more.

  “He told Julien and me to stay in the dining room while he talked to you in his office. In private. I should have gone with you. I should have stuck by your side, but I didn’t. I left you to deal with your father alone.”

  Three sharp taps rattle the planting-room window. Father Gibson waves me into the garden where he stands with a flushed face.

  “We have to leave,” he says. “Say goodbye to your grandmother and meet me at the side gate right away. Bring Annalisa with you.”

  “But my friends—”

  “I’ve got them. They’re already at the gate. Hurry.”

  “Okay. Out in a minute.” I slip back into the planting room. I don’t know what excuse to give for leaving so soon. Annalisa reads my strained expression and begins packing the potted seedlings into a small wooden tray.

  “We have to go, Mama,” Annalisa says to Mayme. She forces a smile. “Mr. Gupta gave me the morning off and it will take an hour to get back to Sugar Town.”

  Mayme sighs. “You’re angry at me for leaving you to fight with Neville instead of standing up to him. Rightfully so.”

  Annalisa says, “I’m not happy about it, but I’m not angry, either. Father always gets his way. We know that.” She hands me Mrs. M’s box of seedlings. “I want to know about the place in the mountains and what I was doing there. We’ll talk about that next time?”

  “I don’t have answers to all of your questions,” Mayme says. “The seven months between when you disappeared and when you turned up in the countryside with Amandla in your arms are a mystery. I promise to tell you everything that I know about your life before the day that you went missing.”

  All the answers to Annalisa’s questions are inside the report that Mayme refuses to read. A report that will be opened only after she is safely in the grave and free of the shame that weighs on her. Annalisa will be disappointed, but right now we have to leave.

  “Till next time.” I kiss Mayme on the cheek and hurry through the garden with the seedling box bumping against my hip. I leave Annalisa to say her goodbyes in private. If there’s trouble waiting for us in the garden, I will hopefully have time to defuse it before Annalisa comes out.

  Ahead of me, the side gate is open. Lil Bit, Sam, and Goodness stand to the side while Father Gibson talks to Gerald, the green-eyed guard with the pockmarked skin. Shit! We’re sprung.

  “This is a private matter,” the priest says. “There’s no reason to involve the authorities.”

  Authorities?

  Lil Bit meets me halfway to the gate.

  “The police,” she whispers.

  “What?”

  “In the side lane.”

  “But . . .” I glimpse a patch of blue behind Gerald’s shoulder. “Why?”

  “Don’t know. The priest came to the games room and told us to come out. Now he’s trying to get the guard to send the police away.”

  My ears strain to pick up the conversation between Father Gibson and Gerald, who stands with his hands on his hips in what Lil Bit calls the “power pose.” Another gem she picked up from the self-help book that she liberated from the shelves of a hip Glenwood store.

  “Sorry, Father. It’s out of my hands. You, you, you, and you”—Gerald points to Goodness, Lil Bit, me, and then to Annalisa, who has finally made it through the garden to the gate—“are being arrested. The police are here to take you into custody. Go quietly and things will go easier for everyone.”

  “You serious, brah?” My mouth jumps into action. “Things will go easier for all of us if you stand aside and let us pass. After that, you’ll never see us again.”

  A lie, but whatever . . .

  Gerald doesn’t reply. He steps to the right to let two constables into the garden, one black, one white. They are tall, serious, and in body armor. The black officer says, “You are all charged with criminal trespass. Follow me to the van. We’ll need your addresses and then we’re taking you to the Umhlanga Rocks station.”

  “I’m here to visit my grandmother!” I say. “Amanda Bollard is my grandmother. She invited us.”

  The black constable says, “Come quietly. We’re not going to have the conversation here.”

  Annalisa leans close to Father Gibson and whispers words I cannot hear. He nods and walks back toward the house . . . to take care of Mayme, I guess, and to shield her from the shock of seeing the police arresting her family in her garden. Goodness and Lil Bit follow the cops, and then I follow.

  “You’re not under arrest, Mr. Bollard,” Gerald says to someone behind me. “You can stay.”

  “I don’t think so,” Sam says. He moves to my side. He’s coming with us. “I let them in, so technically, I’m the guilty party. We’ll see what the police say.”

  “Your grandfather doesn’t want you in jail.” Gerald is tense. “Just the others.”

  “Let Grandpa know where I am. If he doesn’t want me in jail or with a criminal record, he can send his lawyer to deal with it or he come down to the station himself.”

  Sam, you rock star. Vive la révolution, cuz.

  “Let’s go.” The white constable pushes my shoulder. “Quick and quiet.”
/>   I hold on to Mrs. M’s seedling tray and zip my mouth shut.

  * * *

  * * *

  We squeeze into the paddy wagon, Sam on one side of Annalisa and me on the other. Lil Bit and Goodness sit across from us, quiet and self-contained. A cruise in a cop wagon is nothing compared to the rough treatment that the police dish out in Sugar Town. No one says anything for a moment. The engine starts.

  “Annalisa, meet Goodness Dumisa, my friend from Sugar Town,” I say. “And meet Sam. Your nephew.”

  She nods hello to Goodness and turns to Sam. She studies his face for almost as long as he studied mine on the roof garden. “Well,” she says, “we may be a screwed-up family, but we are a good-looking one.”

  He laughs. “I take after you, Auntie.”

  “Good-looking, like I said.” She smiles and leans back against the caged windows, relaxed. “Okay, listen up, my fellow criminals . . .”

  We lean in.

  “Be polite. Be chilled. Don’t volunteer any information.”

  Nods all around.

  I realize this isn’t Annalisa’s first time in a police vehicle.

  * * *

  * * *

  Inside the police station, we sit in a row of plastic chairs pushed against the wall. The constables who arrested us said to wait here until they are ready to process us. The police station is less scary than I thought it would be, but still, we could be here for a while. And, if the charges stick, Lil Bit and I will end up in a youth center for juvenile offenders. Goodness and Sam have a good chance of walking free. The Dumisa family connections and the Bollard family lawyers will keep the heat off them.

  A dozen police walk by us and stare at the multicolored catch of the day. We are the rainbow nation that Nelson Mandela dreamed of: white, brown, and black together. Only, in jail. Not how he planned it.

  I think about all the people in South Africa who have come to places like this and never come out. Nelson was in jail for twenty-seven years. The number sinks in, and the pain of it hits me in the heart for the first time. He was locked behind bars for almost twice my lifetime, and when he was released, he walked out with nothing but love in his heart. Respect. One week in a prison cell would break me.