Off the Voortrekker Road

by Barbara Bleiman

  ‘Time for your bed,’ Ma said.

  ‘But…’

  ‘No buts. It’s late.’

  I felt the tears coming.

  ‘Off to bed,’ she said. She seemed angry with me now, distant all of a sudden and shaking with a quiet fury.

  ‘I’m sorry Ma,’ I sobbed. ‘I didn’t mean to say anything bad.’

  ‘You’ve said nothing wrong, Jackie,’ she said. ‘But now it’s time to go to bed.’ With a firm hand she guided me up the stairs, undressed me at speed, kissed me on the face before turning out the light. I felt wetness on my cheek and wondered whether it was her tears or mine. Both maybe. It was hard to be sure.

  Chapter 12

  We were all crowded into Oupa’s workshop, Oupa at his wheel, Ouma on the big wooden chair in the corner, Ma on a stool next to her, with Sauly sitting at her feet playing. I sat on the floor next to him, making patchwork shapes out of little pieces of leather, leftovers and shavings from the making of shoes. Ma and Ouma were talking quietly. I caught fragments of the conversation, which I tried to piece together, but while some made sense, others didn’t and however hard I tried to put them together it was a struggle.

  Ma was complaining about Pa. She said that Pa’s holiday in Somerset Strand had been a trick, a ruse to get us out the way, not a real holiday at all. And now she was thinking of a holiday herself, a long one, on her own, just with the children. Maybe never coming back this time.

  I was thrilled. I thought of days and weeks and months at Somerset Strand, playing with shells, walking on the windy beach and coming back at dusk to Mrs Maree’s Boarding House for tomato bredie or babotie in the cool, dark dining room.

  ‘I’d go like a shot, if only I could,’ Ma said. ‘I told Sam that and he shouted, “Go gezunterheit!”’ Ma said she would definitely go if things didn’t get any better; there was only so much a woman could take. But Ouma told her to try to be sensible. She reminded her of what Oupa would say. Oupa had always had a soft spot for Sam. And what’s more he took a tough line on wives and marriage: wives obeyed their husbands; marriage was for ever; and above all, a married woman was her husband’s responsibility, not her father’s.

  Ma looked at me sitting playing on the floor and shook her head. There were tears in her eyes. ‘The matchboxes,’ she said, ‘Poor Little Jackie’s matchboxes.’

  When we got home, she took the suitcase down from above the wardrobe, but she didn’t fill it with clothes, nor did she search for her cameo brooch or her lacy underwear from her trousseau. She left the suitcase empty but instead of putting it back above the wardrobe she slid it under the bed. I was puzzled. Were we going on holiday again or weren’t we?

  It was just one week into the new school term, and a few weeks later, that I came home from school to find Sauly sitting on a suitcase, raw-faced and snotty with crying, and the usual motley collection of bags and cases packed and ready to go by the front door. Only this time there were more than usual.

  ‘What’s wrong, Sauly?’

  He started to speak but then burst into a fresh squall of sobs that muffled his words.

  I ran into the back room where Ma was putting on her coat, hat and gloves.

  ‘Are we going to stay at Ouma and Oupa’s again?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ Ma replied curtly. ‘We’re going away. Go and fetch Jarpe. You might want to have him with you, rather than leaving him to stay here on his own.’

  When I went up to the bedroom to find my toy monkey, I was surprised to see that the room was almost bare. I was excited but also afraid. This holiday felt different. I had looked forward to the thought of the seaside, sand between the toes, poking at crabs in rock pools and tomato bredie forever at Mrs Maree’s. But now there was also an icy little splinter of doubt about leaving Parow and the Handyhouse and what would happen to Pa when we were gone.

  *****

  Sitting in the train, surrounded by luggage and sharing a seat with Sauly, I asked Ma, ‘Is Mrs Maree expecting us?’

  Ma hooted with dry laughter. ‘You don’t think we’re on our way to Mrs Maree,’s do you? We’re going to Bloubergstrand, the cheapest place I could think of. I’ve sold off my wedding jewellery to pay for it and it’s all I can afford.’

  The train pulled in to the bare little station that stood close to the promenade. The straight track followed a line of ramshackle sheds and railway buildings that looked more like a small shantytown than official station buildings. We stepped down from the train. Cheap food joints jostled with narrow hotels, their paint peeling, their signs faded. A coloured boy, alone and customerless, wheeled a dirty yellow trolley along the front offering lemon ices and cream sodas. The beach was windswept and deserted and the wood of the beach huts was rotting, stripped bare by salt and neglect. It was out of season and stalls and shops were shuttered and padlocked. A man accosted Ma almost straightaway, offering to carry her bags. His hair was greasy and his face unwashed. His trousers were held up with a piece of string and his shirt cuffs were frayed. Ma looked anxious but agreed; we were not going to get very far with all that luggage without his help.

  The man hurried ahead, despite being weighed down by all of our bags, and when he reached the nearest hotel, Potgieter’s, he dumped them in a big pile on the pavement. He disappeared for a while, before bringing the owner of the hotel out to greet us.

  Mrs Potgieter was a large woman, whose clothes seemed to only just cover her ample body. Her face was red and veiny, and her eyes seemed surprisingly small, like small black buttons lost in the fleshiness of her broad face. She placed her hands on her hips and peered at us suspiciously, then asked Ma a few questions about who we were and where we’d come from, how long we’d be staying and whether we would have the means to pay the cost of the room up front, which was a rule she always applied. Finally, with a long sigh, she said, ‘I suppose you’d better come in then,’ took us into the hallway way of the hotel. The hall was painted dark red, though flakes of paint had peeled away, revealing a bilious green beneath. The desk was of sombre, dark stained wood and the carpet a threadbare mat that had seen better days. In the ceiling a dusty chandelier barely lit up the gloom, several of its bulbs having blown and not been replaced.

  Mrs Potgieter asked Ma to sign a register, then handed her a key, attached to a flapping white label.

  Ma paid the greasy man a few coins from her purse for his trouble, followed by several more when he kept his arm stretched out boldly in front of her face. Than she picked Sauly up and ushered me ahead of her, up the five flights of stairs to the small attic room at the top of the hotel that had been allocated to us. Leaving us sitting on the bed, she went down to drag each item of baggage, up the flights of stairs, one by one.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Sauly whined.

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  ‘It’s bedtime. You’ll have breakfast in the morning.‘

  I lay in bed looking at the stained pink stripes on the wallpaper and wondering whether Ada had closed the shop door yet and what Pa would be eating for his supper without Ma to cook it for him. Would Terence be coming into the store with his mother and what would he think when he found out that I had gone away? I wondered what Miss Williams would be teaching my class, the story of the Boer Wars or the arrival of Jan Smuts, or maybe tales of the savage Zulu tribes. Would the children still be playing jacks and hopscotch, or perhaps they had already moved on to clapping games or skipping or marbles in the short period that I had been gone? And would I still have any friends on my return from my holiday, or would they have forgotten all about me and changed their allegiances, finding new friends to supplant me? I was missing it all already, home, school, the Handyhouse, and would need to be back soon, to take up my proper place in my world again.

  *****

  A few days later, Ma sat me down on the bed and told me that we were not going home. We would be staying a
way for good. She would look for a job in a school, or she would teach the children of rich people, acting as a tutor or governess. Sauly smiled happily but I burst into tears. Already I missed my school and Mrs Coetzee and Miss Williams, my visits to Terence and Mrs Mostert and my talks with Walter at Mrs Mostert’s kitchen table. I missed Pa, though not the shouting or the arguments about money. And Bloubergstrand wasn’t like Somerset Strand, not at all. I hated this little room at the top of the hotel that smelled of stale cooked cabbage and mothballs, with its narrow beds and bare furniture. I didn’t like Mrs Potgieter’s meals of cold porridge and white bread with a scrape of margarine, or watery vegetable soup, her sago pudding and jam that Ma forced me to eat because it was rude to refuse.

  Ma left me and Sauly on our own while she went to look for work, locking us into the room so that we couldn’t wander off and so that no bad men could come and snatch us away. There was nothing for us to do, except play with Jarpe, or with the snakes‘n’ladders board that Ma had packed to take with us or the little bag of marbles I had, at the last minute, snatched up and put in my pocket.

  I knew I was supposed to look after Sauly and give him a Marie biscuit from a packet in the drawer, if he got cross or cried. I wasn’t to let Sauly cry too much, Ma had said, or Mrs Potgieter would get angry and throw us out. But Sauly wanted Ma, and he wanted his lunch and he cried and cried, and I didn’t know what to do to stop him. I didn’t want to be thrown out to wander the streets of Bloubergstrand with all our cases and bags, so I started to sob too.

  There were heavy footsteps coming up the stairs, that stopped as they reached the hall outside our room. I held back my tears and drew in my breath.

  ‘Shh,’ I whispered to Sauly but he continued his bawling.

  From outside the door, there was a woman’s voice, Mrs Potgieter’s.

  ‘Stop making such a damn blerry noise, you young scallywags. My husband’s having a bit of shut-eye and you’re disturbing him. He’s getting angry, he is. If you’re not quiet, he’ll come up here quick as a flash, unlock that door and donner the pair of you with a slipper and then you’ll be quiet, that’s for certain.’

  Now Sauly stopped his crying and looked at me with big frightened eyes. We waited till the footsteps retreated and then huddled together on the bed, too afraid to do anything, too shocked to cry. For once, I was grateful to have my little brother next to me, to sit up close to him and pretend that I was comforting and protecting him. I had a duty to him, and I tried my hardest to fulfil it.

  ‘Don’t worry, Sauly. Ma will be back soon. And Mrs Potgieter’s gone downstairs now. She won’t come back if we’re quiet.’

  When Ma came back a while later, she found us sitting there on the bed waiting for her in silence, huddled together.

  ‘Mrs Potgieter says you were making a racket, you naughty boys,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow you must be quieter.’

  ‘Y-y-yes Ma.’

  ‘Why are you stuttering like that again?’ Ma asked.

  I didn’t know.

  Ma came home at lunchtime each day, in time for our lunch. And then she took us down to the beach to play on the sand and paddle our feet in the salty foam. Each morning she would go off early again looking for work, leaving us locked in the hotel bedroom.

  But one morning, she stayed in bed, rather than getting ready to go out.

  ‘I’m not well, Jackie,’ she said.

  I was terrified. What would happen if Ma got really ill, or worse still if Ma died? What would become of Sauly and me? I wondered if Pa knew where we were and whether he would come and find us and bring us home or whether we would have to live alone in Mrs Potgieter’s attic forever.

  Ma hurried into the bathroom. But soon she said she was feeling better.

  ‘I’m not looking for work today,’ she said. ‘I’ll start again tomorrow.’

  She took us out onto the beach to play. Then things didn’t seem so bad after all. The sun came up and the wind died down, we dug holes in the sand with a small spade and Ma and I built big mounds for Sauly to run at, and knock down. We buried our toes in the sand and wrote our names with sticks and shells. Away from the store, and Pa, my little brother and I were suddenly becoming friends. When the ice cream trolley came round, and Sauly and I begged and begged for a cone, Ma reached into her purse for a few coins and let us run after him to ask for one scoop each of lemon ice, chocolate or vanilla. We sat on the beach licking our ice creams. Everything else was forgotten.

  And the next day, when Ma came back before lunch, she told us that, miracle of miracles, she had found herself a job as a part-time teacher at a nursery school, starting in a week’s time.

  ‘I always wanted to teach,’ she said. ‘I did all that training before your pa and I got married and it seemed like it had all gone to waste. But now I can do it after all.’ Her eyes were bright and her face glowed. That evening she took us out to the fish restaurant on the pier to celebrate and we ate big chunks of flaky white fish in oily batter and watched the steamboats chugging past on the horizon.

  ‘We’ll stay here for a few more weeks,’ she said, ‘And then I’ll look for a little house for us, down one of the roads close to the front, a nice clapboard house, with painted shutters and a small flower garden. We’ll grow proteas and geraniums and plant a loquat tree. We’ll find a school for you Jackie and I’ll take Sauly with me – they say he can join the other children at the nursery. We’ll build something up for ourselves, a nice little life. It will be lovely, I promise you.’

  But the following morning Ma was in the bathroom being sick again, and the next morning and the next. When she came out of the bathroom her eyes were red and swollen with crying. She took us out onto the promenade, where there was a public telephone, and rang Ouma’s neighbour, who had a telephone, and asked him to fetch Ouma. She waited a few moments, opening and closing the telephone box anxiously, pacing up and down on the pavement. And then finally she rang again, feeding the meter from a small pile of coins. Sauly and I stood holding onto her dress. I rubbed her stocking softly, feeling the comfort of the smooth warm wool and I listened to her crying down the phone:

  ‘It must have happened when we went to Somerset Strand,’ she said. ‘On our so-called holiday.’

  A pause. The scrambled but faintly recognisable sound of Ouma’s voice, loud but unintelligible overheard through the earpiece of the phone, and Ma’s frightened, ‘ Oh my God Ouma, what am I going to do?’

  And then, ‘Please Ouma, I’m begging of you and Oupa. Just for a few weeks, till I sort something out.’

  And then again, ‘Please Ouma. Ask Oupa for me. Persuade him.’ And then Ouma’s voice, crackly and strange, before the coins ran out and Ma, weeping, putting the telephone down. I wondered what had happened at Somerset Strand that could be so awful. Ma had seemed so happy there, Ma and Pa, both of them, holding hands and smiling and smiling.

  The next morning, after breakfast, Ma talked to Mrs Potgieter and told her that she would have to terminate the arrangement. She would be returning with her children to Cape Town, she said.

  Mrs Potgieter folded her arms and pursed her lips. ‘You’ve paid up front for a month and we agreed the period of your stay,’ she said. ‘So there’s no money back, you know?’

  ‘But we’ve only been here such a short while. Surely there must be some kind of refund?’

  ‘I told you before you took the room, it’s money upfront. That’s how I do things. The rules is the rules. I’ve got a living to make here – I’m not giving out charity.’

  Clearly unable to argue any longer, Ma asked her to order a taxi to take us back later in the day, however much it cost, and then she told me and Sauly that we were going home.

  *****

  We arrived back at the store towards the end of the afternoon, just as the sun was creeping slowly down below the roof of the Handyhouse.
Ada, hearing the sound of a car pulling up in front of the store, came running out to see what was happening. She hurried to open the door of the taxi and let us tumble out into her arms.

  ‘Ag sies tog, Jackie,’ she said, ‘You look half-starved, you’ve gone so thin. Your legs are like a couple of pick-up sticks that could snap off just like that!’ She held me close to her as if she would never let me go, kissing my cheeks with fierce enthusiasm. I held on to her tightly, wrapping my legs around her, smelling her salt-sweet skin, remembering how nice it was to feel her close to me.

  Pa did not appear out on the street but when the store bell rang and the door opened, he looked up briefly from his accounts. He seemed unsurprised, as if his family going away for good happened all the time and he had barely noticed it, let alone allowed it to cause him serious concern. But he came out from behind the counter and helped Ma with the bags, and ruffled Sauly’s hair before sweeping him up towards his face and planting a big kiss on his cheek. I stood and looked at him and waited my turn but for me there was nothing; no arm across the shoulder, no welcoming look, no kisses.

  ‘What brought you back so soon?’ Pa said to Ma, his voice betraying no emotion.

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ she said, taking off her coat and hanging it on the peg behind the counter.

  I lay in bed that night thinking about everything that had happened and wondering about what was coming next. How soon was soon enough? And what would that bring? I wondered too why Pa seemed to be so cross with me. For a while now he’d stopped talking to me about the faraway day when I would be a grown man, standing by his side in the store. He didn’t pick me up any more and kiss me on the head or slip a little toffee into my hand, or let me follow him around watching as he cut wood or filled bags of corn. But on our arrival home, it seemed even worse; he was barely able to look at me.

  Over the next few weeks, I became quiet again. Better not to say anything than to risk saying the wrong thing. Simpler not to draw attention to myself or put myself in the line of fire between Ma and Pa. When Ma’s stomach began to swell again and her legs grew thick and swollen and her dresses tightened and her movements slowed, I made no connection between this gradual change and anything that might have occurred that autumn in Somerset Strand, nor with the burning of the shed nor with what happened next.