Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms

by Katherine Rundell

  “Oh, Charlie!” Cynthia bared her teeth in a smile. She had to fight to hide her triumph. “Oh, don’t look so glum, my darling man! It needn’t be forever. A year or two in civilized company, and she’ll be a whole new little girl. The little Will you used to know. I’ve received the prospectus from the school. It’s actually rather famous, amongst the right sort of person—very safe, very pretty. They had an opening for just one more pupil; little Will’s an extremely lucky girl. I’ve already replied.” The soft silkiness of female threat came into her voice. “I knew you would approve in the end, Charles. You do approve, don’t you?”

  Captain Browne set his mouth in a line.

  “Oh, Charlie. You do still love me, don’t you?”

  Captain Browne nodded. He tried to smile. His breathing was very slow. His Will! His promise! But. His wife. His Will had attacked his wife. Life was too difficult. He stared out the window, but his beloved trees were just a smear of green. He was getting old, and his eyes were blurred with the first tears since boyhood.

  THE NEXT DAY THE RAINS began. At breakfast the air was a solid sheet of water; by the afternoon the fields were calf-deep in mud. Cynthia would not risk her shoes in the downpour, and instead sent out Lazarus to summon Will. She was to go, he reported, at once, to the withdrawing room.

  “The what?” Will dropped down from her tree, shaking the water out of her eyes. “We don’t have a withdrawing room.”

  “She means your rumpus room, Wheel.” And Lazarus flicked his fingers by his head to indicate madness. “That woman’s bad all through. You be careful, hey?”

  But Will wasn’t any good at being careful, they both knew that. She was good at other things—running, and singing—and she had a sick, aching feeling that those things would not help her now.

  • • •

  “At last, Wilhelmina!” Mrs. Browne was waiting in the doorway, and she handed an envelope to Will, averting her eyes as though, Will thought, Will were something particularly nasty she would rather not look at.

  “This came last week. You might as well see it now. It’s from Leewood School.” Will’s stare widened until her face seemed all eyes. “It’s a school. In England. The captain has decided to send you there as soon as possible.”

  Will took it. She didn’t want to speak to Mrs. Browne, couldn’t bear to show how much she cared, and she could feel that the hot storm of resentment in her chest was dangerously close to flashing out through her mouth, but she had to ask—

  “Why wasn’t I given it before?”

  “What?”

  “You said it came last week. You— Shouldn’t I have had it then?”

  Mrs. Browne sighed as if Will were being deliberately stupid.

  “No, you shouldn’t, Will.”

  “Why not?” Will’s stomach felt somewhere near her ankles. She would not cry.

  “You forfeited the right to be treated as an adult, my dear, when you started throwing plates across the room. We knew you’d only stamp and scream when we told you. So we waited until it was all arranged.”

  We? Will’s head rang with the word. It meant that Captain Browne had joined in the plan to snatch Will’s heart out of her chest and hurl it halfway across the world. And Cynthia Browne was not capable of understanding a creature like Will. Will had never, and would never, “stamp and scream.” In anger she became rigid, and hushed, and lethal.

  Through her daze of misery, Will got the envelope open. The letter was short and formal. It stated that Wilhelmina Elizabeth Silver, ward of Charles Browne, of Two Tree Hill Farm, had been granted a place at Leewood School, a select independent boarding school for girls. As the term had already commenced, she would be expected at the nearest possible date. Enclosed with the letter was a prospectus. It was signed Angela Blake, Headmistress.

  Will looked at Mrs. Browne, at the letter, at Mrs. Browne. It was a long look: in it was everything that Will’s life had been, and everything that it might have been, and everything that it would now have to be. It was a full, swollen look, a look that comprised barefoot races through torrential rain, and lemon curd eaten straight from the jar, and now airplanes and the coldness of English air. Cynthia Browne was unable, for some days, to sponge that look from her memory. It stuck to the walls of her head.

  • • •

  Will would not take the stiff, shiny prospectus into her tree house. She and Simon sat a few feet away from it, sheltered a little from the rain by a msasa tree, and pored over the paper together.

  They stared at it for a long time. It was Simon who broke the silence. He swore, softly, and when Will did not reply, he said, “Sha, Will.”

  Will rolled onto her stomach and propped herself up on her elbows. The paper looked no better from the new angle. “I know.”

  “It’s . . .” Simon screwed up his face. Will grasped her ankles and pulled the soles of her feet to meet the back of her head. She rocked to and fro, trying to squeeze the nervousness out of her chest.

  The first page showed a dark-haired girl sitting on a sofa holding a book. There was something careful about the girl’s smile. On the second page the same girl and two others were shaking hands with a tall man with gray skin. They all, Will thought, had astonishingly neat hair.

  Under the photograph was a caption, Leewood girls meet the school governors!

  And she saw that the whole thing was like that. Across the paper, exclamation marks abounded, like a rash. The girls tidying their comfortable, cozy rooms! Tidy rooms, tidy minds! And We work hard, and we play hard: Leewood girls busy with a board game!

  Other than that, there was very little writing; the presence of the girls seemed to have crowded all the text into the bottom of the final page. Will read it quickly, scowling in concentration, gulping it in. It left an unpleasant taste in her mouth.

  “Si, listen to this. ‘The small size of Leewood School ensures that the best students are selected and the best care is given. Our girls become accomplished and successful citizens, prepared to reach fulfillment in all areas of later life.’ What does that mean? And here. ‘The school system aims to deal with both inter- and intrapersonal relations. It promotes good manners, academic excellence, and, above all, personal authenticity.’ ”

  Will stared at the paper, her forehead folding in on itself.

  “Is that English? Si, I—I have no idea what they’re talking about. I don’t think . . . It doesn’t sound very . . . happy.”

  Simon put a finger on a picture of a girl with long plaits.

  “Watch out for this one, hey. She turned too quickly, she could have your eye out with those things.”

  In silence, they looked down at Will’s wet hair. It was thick and very tangled, especially at the back, where Cynthia said it was getting really shocking, Wilhelmina. It had never been cut. They looked dubiously at the plaits. There seemed very little to say.

  Simon flicked his forefinger at the photograph, at the dark-haired girl, again, with her hand high in the air. He grinned. “Oh, sha.” “Sha” meant something like, “Oh, dear. Oh, bother,” but larger. It meant, “There aren’t words.”

  “I don’t think there’s words for this one. Ja.” He sucked in his breath. “Words’d be defeated before they began.”

  Will nodded. “Defeated,” that was the word. She brushed the rain from her face. I will not be like that, she thought. Will caught at the thought and gripped it hard, compressed it into three words, and wrote them behind her eyes with an imaginary pencil. I will not.

  She said, “I’ll come back, ja.” And Simon said, “Of course,” but too quickly. She could tell when he was being polite. Neither saw a way.

  “When I know how bad it is—”

  “If, Will. It might be okay, hey. Sha, Will—don’t decide to hate it already.”

  Will shook her head. “When I know how bad it is—because you’re not going to be there, are you?”

  He punched her arm—not softly. “No, hey, it might still be okay. You’re not psychic. You can’t know
till you get there.”

  Will frowned, and then smiled a little, and kicked him. He stepped on her toe. She elbowed his ribs, but gently. He pushed her softly into a puddle. But Will couldn’t find the will to fight properly. They were just going through the motions. She said again, “When I know, I’ll work out a way to get out. I’ll come back. They can’t stop me, ja. They can’t tie me to the bed with horse rope.”

  “You hope.”

  “Ja! And even if they did, I’ll take a knife.”

  That was an extra thing to add to the list of things to do before she left—thin out Shumba’s tail, weed the giant thistles out of the flame lily bed, force the captain to smile, find a knife, make a plan.

  Simon turned the prospectus over. “So, this is what real girls are like?”

  Will tried to smile up at him. “What does that make me, hey? Some kind of root vegetable?”

  “No.” said Simon. “You’re Will.”

  Will flushed. The paper of the prospectus was turning pulpy in the rain; Will tore it in two, spat on it, and hurled it into a bush. “Come on, Si,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  THE NEXT SIX DAYS PASSED in loud, unhappy activity. The farm had no telephone, so frequent trips to borrow the Madisons’ were made. The school had to be contacted, and the farm itself put up for auction. Most urgently, Will had to be equipped with clothes for an English winter. She had never owned a coat and had only one sweater. It was six inches too short in the wrist, and its hood, often used for smuggling fruit, smelled of elderly banana.

  It was Cynthia who took her shopping. Will loathed it even more than she had thought she would. She had not wanted to go, being unwilling to spend a whole day of her last week away from the farm, “Look, Si,” she’d planned, “I promise I’ll get through it quick. I’ll come back before dark, ja, and we can roast the potatoes and we’ll ride with Peter and the boys, okay? Ja?” But she had thought the actual shopping would be new and enticing.

  Instead, it was humiliating. Will stood in her gray underpants in bright lights, shivering in the too-powerful air conditioning, longing to be outside, longing for a drink, too bewildered to ask for one. Mrs. Browne was brisk, efficient, and businesslike. Looking neither at Will nor at the friendly women serving in the shop, she pointed one long French-manicured finger at Will, saying: “Skirts.” Or, “Cardigans. Four. One blue, three yellow.” And always pointing, pointing, as though, Will thought angrily, her mother and father had had a fit of madness and named her “Shoes, Size Six, Extra Narrow Fit” or “White Knickers.”

  Will was thrust into changing rooms and squeezed into blouses and sweaters that cost more than her entire wardrobe, and brand-new blue jeans, and nylon tops that gave her electric shocks. It was not, she told Simon later, that she hated the clothes. They were wonderful, starchy and crisp—although, she would have chosen different colors. She would have liked bright orange T-shirts against light blue denim—“To be like the sunrise, ja. Please?”—and pink trousers with grass-green sweaters, and an all-in-one denim jumpsuit like the tall, muscled mechanics wore at Tatenda Motors. But Cynthia laughed with a curled lip. “Those are for working boys, my dear.” And then, Will had been astonished by the way passing women had walked in on her, had cooed over her, calling her sweet, adorable, a pretty little dear.

  “Pretty little dear! You? Sha, Will. . . . They don’t know you, struze fact.”

  • • •

  The hatred did not come until later. In the dim light of sunrise, Will found her wooden trunk—her trunk, the only thing she really owned, inherited from her mother—standing open outside her door, the padlock forced, and the new clothes replacing the squares of flame lily curtain she’d cut out to take with her, and replacing the plastic bags full of msasa pods and sticks for catapults and her collection of dried mangoes. They lay in a pile on the floor.

  Choking with rage, her brown eyes thin with misery, Will snatched out the now foolish clothes—blaming the clothes themselves, swearing, how dared they wipe their stiff shop-smelling newness against her mother’s love—and threw them into the kitchen fire. She added anything Cynthia Vincy had touched—the old dresses from the captain, her khaki shirt, the underwear that Cynthia had washed for her—until she had only the shorts, T-shirt, and sweater she was wearing. Cynthia would probably beat her. Will lifted her chin defiantly. She did not care.

  • • •

  Will was not beaten. Mrs. Browne was cold and rigid, icy hard.

  “You will have to learn to control yourself, child.”

  “But you broke into it!” cried Will, hugging the padlock to her chest. “You broke my lock!”

  “Because—there—was—no—key.” Mrs. Browne spoke as if Will were deaf, or an unusually stupid toddler.

  And Will, physically shaking, unable to see anything but mist and madness, shouted, high and wild, “I had the key! I had the key! It was mine! From my mother—my mother—oh, my mama, Mum, Dad, Papa—” and Will choked, fell silent, finding that there were no words that matched the feeling of loss, or lost. Loss is a vacuum, in which no living word can exist.

  ON THE DAY OF HER departure, Will’s resolution broke. Having sworn that, for the captain’s sake, she would go quietly, it felt suddenly impossible. She ran into the bush and hid—from the one adult’s silky triumph and the other’s helpless regret.

  Mrs. Browne, stalking down from the house in a trim khaki dress, saw Will’s legs hanging from the baobab tree. She set her jaw. She would be glad to see the back of those legs.

  “Will!”

  Will jumped. “Dammit,” she muttered under her breath. False as “dammit.” But aloud she said, “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Will, we’ve been looking everywhere for you! Come down! It’s nearly time to go.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Browne, ma’am,” said Will. Time-to-go, said the beat of her heart. She dropped to the ground. Time-to-go.

  “Cynthia, Will. I asked you to call me Cynthia.” Cynthia Browne bared her teeth in a smile. “Not that it matters now.” Then she looked more closely at Will, something she usually tried to avoid. “Are you planning to wear that on the plane?”

  “Ja.”

  “Shorts? You’re going to wear filthy shorts and farm boots on an airplane?”

  “This is what I’ve got.”

  “And whose fault is that?” Mrs. Browne gave up the effort of her patient face. “What was I saying? You’ve made me forget what I was going to say. . . . Oh, yes. The school has arranged for someone nice to pick you up from the airport. I’ve put your passport by your box. And”—Mrs. Browne made gulping noise, as if to swallow disgust—“Lazarus has put a stem of bananas out for you. They won’t let you take them on board, but the man simply won’t believe me that they’ll feed you properly.”

  “Oh,” said Will. And, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “So . . . this is good-bye, then, Will.” Cynthia bent down and tried to embrace her. Will stiffened her shoulders, and she locked her hands behind her back.

  Cynthia let out a little hiss of annoyance, and released her. “I must say I’m disappointed by your attitude, Will. Look, I’m sorry if you’re not happy with the situation. . . .”

  Will didn’t believe it. She stared at her feet.

  “Will, these changes haven’t been easy for anyone. Life”—Cynthia’s voice became shrill—“isn’t easy.”

  • • •

  Captain Browne said the same thing when he called Will to say good-bye.

  “Life isn’t all mangoes and milk tarts, Will.”

  He had aged in the past months; his thin, mobile face had become gaunt. He was dressed in new trousers, new shoes—brown brogues, not his old cowhide—and he crossed and uncrossed his legs, rubbed his thighs, unable to settle.

  “So it’s good-bye, is it, little Cartwheel?” he said.

  Perhaps the captain saw something in the expression on Will’s face at that moment, because he sighed deeply, which would not have been so bad, Will thought, except Captain Browne did not sigh.
He would have said it was “dramatic and indulgent, girl.”

  “Don’t you worry about me, my girl. You look after you, and I’ll look after me, ja?”

  Or perhaps it was the way she leaned toward him, one hand unconsciously held out, aching to touch him, to lay a thumb on his tired eyes and to love him back to his old, wheezing, leather-skinned, indomitable self. Whatever it was, it made him shiver, and sigh again.

  “I’ll write to you, my wildcat. Cynthia thinks I should wait a month or so—give you time to settle in, ja? But after that. And you’ll write to your old captain, won’t you?”

  “Ja.” Will tried to smile.

  “And you look after yourself. England’s a good place. But don’t forget how to be brave out there, Will, ja? Will?”

  “Ja.”

  “Right. Don’t you get out of the habit of bravery. Even if you think nobody’s seeing, hey? It’s still so important, Will, my girl. So important . . .” His voice trailed off. He looked desperately around for something to say.

  There was the sound of a car horn. The captain touched Will lightly on the cheek. “Safe travels, little Wildcat. Brave, remember? No tears, hey?”

  Will swallowed. It was all she seemed to do these days, say good-bye. She’d worked out that silent partings were easier than noisy. There was less to regret later. She nodded. “No tears, Captain Browne.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss the rough-stubbled cheek. Then without another word, without looking up again at the old face, Will walked out to the waiting car.

  There she stumbled, brought up short. There had been two car journeys into town (for the shopping, and for a passport photograph—Will liked the photo; her bird’s nest of hair stood up at the back like a halo, and she was scowling ferociously, because the jolly photographer kept telling her to “Say chongololo”), and for both they had taken the captain’s rusty red Toyota pickup. It had smelled of petrol and sawdust, and Cynthia Browne had sat in the cab with gritted teeth, but for Will it had been the best part of each expedition, a tooth-rattling ride in the open back with a gang of farmhands. Will had looked forward to the drive to the airport. “It’ll be my Last Ride,” she’d said to Simon—they’d spoken about it in capital letters. “Ja—it’s going to be wind-rushing and bumpingly good; it’ll be my Ride Out of Africa.”