By aligning herself with Michael and using “we” instead of “I,” Rita was lending her actions some legitimacy. I knew her too well.
“I see what you mean,” I said, tripping over a box angled across the doorway.
“Well, you couldn’t expect us to keep it vacant on the off chance you’d be back.”
Dust particles rose and hung there, momentarily suspended in a matrix of light. My old room—now cluttered with cardboard boxes, trunks, and a broken record player—had been robbed of its former identity.
I’d always kept it immaculate—the only space in my life over which I’d had any measure of control, especially during the early years. I’d been determined to keep my room as neat and tidy as my mother would have and had often lain awake worrying about what she would have said were she to arrive in England unannounced and discover the chaos we lived in. At least if my room looked respectable and the bath rim had been cleaned, she wouldn’t be too disappointed in me.
I looked about. A corner of my bed—a lone fixture of former days—was just visible under the boxes, but my photographs, certificates, and school memorabilia were all gone.
While I didn’t really have any right to be angry—after all, I’d been the one to leave—I was. How quickly and easily Rita and Michael had erased all reminders of me.
Rita hovered. “So what exactly are you after?”
“I’m moving into an apartment and could use some of the things that didn’t fit into the studio. You know—my books, my guitar . . . things like that. You haven’t thrown them out, have you?”
“New place, huh? Pay can’t be too bad for cashiers these days.” Her tone was biting. I knew where this would lead. I didn’t feel like another altercation. I just wanted to be left alone to sift through the wreckage.
“Actually, I’m moving in with someone,” I said. Talking about it made it real—but as soon as the words escaped my lips, I regretted them. It was never wise to let Rita in on a confidence. My relationship with her had been dysfunctional at best, and the year since I’d moved out had seen a succession of infrequent and mostly dissatisfying meetings. I’d grown resigned to this, even though a small part of me had never stopped hoping that somehow it could be different. This aspiration sometimes tricked me into an intimacy, which I later always regretted.
For Rita, my adoption had been a failure, a blot on her copybook. I understood that now. I was a constant and harsh reminder of her inadequacies as a woman, a wife, a mother. Out of this festering disappointment in herself had grown a strong dislike of me, my existence only serving to highlight her failures. That I had uncovered her extramarital affair hadn’t helped.
“Aha! So that’s what this little spring clean is all about,” she said. “Finally you’re doing what the rest of us have been doing for ages. What’s his name?”
I was trapped. “Uh . . .”
“Oh, God, Miriam, tell me it’s a man and not a woman!”
“His name is David Bloomfield. He’s a sociology student at Cambridge.”
There, it was out, and already spoiled by her knowledge of it. I began to shift the furniture and boxes with greater urgency, anxious to get away.
Rita loitered.
I hauled my old guitar case out from under the bed. As I did so, a shoe box with a moth-eaten lid fell off and toppled over, spilling its contents onto the floor—a small wooden figure, a photo frame, and a wad of pale blue air letters. The glass in the photo frame tinkled as it broke.
“Sorr—” I stopped in midapology. The uppermost letter was addressed in large childlike handwriting to a Miriam Mphephu.
I picked up the whole blue bundle and sank back on my haunches.
The noise of Rita moving closer startled me. For an instant I’d forgotten about her.
I put out a hand to steady myself, but as I pressed down on my palm, a sharp pain sliced through my hand. Blood dripped onto my jeans, the rug, the floor . . . I’d cut myself on the broken glass of the photo frame.
Undeterred, I reached for the now naked photograph, but as I did so a fine mist of my blood sprayed across it, obscuring the details of a black woman. I tried to wipe the photo clean, but only smudged it further.
“You’ve cut yourself!” Rita said, snatching the photo off me and lifting my arm sharply. “Let’s have a look.”
“It’s nothing. I’m fine,” I said, trying to wrestle free my wrist.
Without letting go, she hauled me up and led me to the bathroom. Strangely, despite all that had transpired, her touch felt good. It was the first physical contact we’d had in such a long time.
She sat me down on the closed toilet seat lid and examined my hand. “Luckily you’ve missed the tendon,” she said, retracting the flap of skin with a tissue.
I looked away and found myself staring at our reflection in the mirror. Rita bent over me in a pose of concern. My mind started to wander, pretending this woman whom I was supposed to call mother loved me.
She straightened. “Looks like you’re going to need a couple of stitches,” she said, her voice softening. “I’ll get you a bandage, then take you down to the emergency department.”
“Just tape it,” I urged her. “I’ll pop down later. I’d like to finish collecting my things.”
“No.” Rita’s voice reverberated around the hollow room. “You can come back another day for your stuff. You’ve waited this long, a few more days won’t make a difference.” Her tone was unrelenting. Then she disappeared down the corridor, to reappear with a roll of bandage.
She was finishing binding my hand when the telephone rang.
“Hold that a second,” she said, passing me the free end of strapping. “Back in a tick.”
So I sat there on the toilet seat holding up my half-strapped hand and waiting for Rita to return.
Five minutes passed. Then ten. I could still hear Rita’s voice down the hall.
I stood up, steadying myself against the basin as a wave of dizziness washed over me, then lurched woozily into the corridor.
Back at my bedroom door I stopped. It was shut. I placed my swaddled hand on the knob and turned. My palm slid against resistance. I tried to get a better grip, wincing under the pressure, but still the knob would not budge. The door had been locked.
“Just can’t keep away, hey?”
I swung around to find myself dwarfed by Rita’s solid frame.
“Why . . . why have you locked it, Reet?”
She looked away. “Safer. Work things, you know. Confidential patient reports—that sort of thing.”
Minutes later we were driving to the hospital.
“Rita, who is Miriam Mphephu?”
She screeched to a halt, seeing the red traffic light only at the last moment. Staring straight ahead, she gripped the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles blanched.
“What?”
“The name on those air letters. They were addressed to Miriam Mphephu. Is that . . . Were they for me?”
“Miriam, I really don’t know what you’re on about.” Rita’s voice was strained and her tone final. She was warning me off. “I’ll drop you outside the entrance and then find parking, okay?”
The light changed to green and once again the sound of the engine filled the car.
—
I returned to the house a week later, timing my visit carefully to ensure Rita was at her weekly morbidity and mortality meeting. I had to get those letters; I’d been unable to think of anything else.
Michael opened the front door.
“Miriam, what a lovely surprise!” he cried, his drawn face plumping into a smile. He pulled me into an eager hug. “And to what do I owe this pleasure?”
“I’m sorry, Michael,” I said, gently extricating myself, “but I can’t stay for long. I’m in a bit of a hurry. I just popped by to collect some of my things.”
“R
ight, of course. You youngsters lead such busy lives.”
I could feel his disappointment.
“We miss you, Miriam,” he blurted out suddenly. “The house is positively empty without you.”
I shrugged awkwardly.
“What have you done to yourself?” he said, suddenly noticing my bandaged hand. So Rita hadn’t told him of my visit.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I managed to cut myself on a piece of broken glass. Just a few stitches, but they come out tomorrow.”
He reached for my hand, but I eased past him. “I’ll just shoot upstairs.”
“Of course.”
At the foot of the stairs I stopped. “Michael, what was my name before I became a Steiner?”
His eyes widened. “Your name?”
“You know, before I got your surname.”
“Oh. Right. Uh. It was— Gosh now, my memory,” he said, flicking his thumbnail against his forefinger.
“Was it something like Mpepu?”
Color rushed into his face and he gripped the handrail. “Mphephu. Yes, Miriam Mphephu.”
M-phe-phu. M-phe-phu. I smiled. It sounded so appealing the way he pronounced it.
“P-h is pronounced f in Africa,” he said, putting his free hand, which was trembling, behind his back.
“What’s Africa like?”
“Africa?” he said too loudly. “So many questions, young lady. I thought you were in a hurry.”
I glanced over my shoulder. Rita would be returning soon. “Yup. Better grab my stuff.” I scaled the stairs two at a time.
I heard Michael say something.
“What?” I said, looking down from the landing.
“I just said that Africa is beautiful and that one day you should go back and visit.”
My heart whooped in my chest. “Yes. Yes, I’d like that very much.”
He started to walk toward his office, then stopped. “What are you after, anyway?” he said. “Only last weekend Rita gave your room a thorough clean-out. She took loads of stuff down to the Salvation Army.”
My gums prickled.
I ran down the corridor. The door to my room was open.
I burst in . . . into a perfectly ordered, foreign space—bed, lamp, desk, curtains. Nothing else. Nothing. She’d removed it all.
CHAPTER TWENTY
December 1978
Celia
I was ironing in Missus Sylvia’s kitchen when I heard the crash. The house shuddered, birds took flight, and Fleabag shot under the table, his tail tucked between his legs.
I rushed into the living room. The soft salmon drapes were billowing around a ragged hole in the window. Loose shards of glass swinging from invisible threads clinked and chimed in the breeze. Missus Sylvia was sitting at her desk in the corner, as pale and still as a dead person.
I ran over to her, tripping on a rock the size of my fist lying in the middle of the lounge floor. “Missus S?”
As if she’d been suddenly brought back to life, she jumped up and ran toward the door. “Quick, Celia. Hurry!”
“No, Missus,” I called after her, “they are skelms, tsotsis!”
But she was faster than me, and I only caught up with her at the top of the drive, my chest hungry for breath and my calves burning. A battered brown Toyota was careening off down the road.
“TJ64 . . . Darn! I didn’t get it all!” Missus Sylvia cursed as the car and its number plate disappeared out of sight. “Not that it would have been much use.”
I stared down the tree-lined avenue. All of a sudden the shade felt menacing.
“Come on,” Missus Sylvia said to me, patting me on the back.
We turned together, and that was when we saw it—red paint dripping down the plastered white wall like fingers of fresh blood.
“Hau, Missus S! What does it say?” I asked, frightened to hear the answer.
“Kaffirboetie. You know—a Kaffir’s friend.”
“This is terrible!”
But my boss was already headed inside to call a man to repair the glass, and after that to retrieve the tin of white paint that lived in the shed. I was not yet used to these sorts of attacks, despite their increasing frequency. Every unexpected noise, phone call, or ring of the doorbell made my heart jump and my breath run. Missus Sylvia and Mister Jo seemed more accepting, as if they were just an unavoidable part of the life they lived.
Master Jo Eloff was a man of the law, and much of his day was spent helping those who had been held in detention without trial and tortured by the security police. Missus Sylvia was a teacher. She’d set up a school for children in Soweto where the pupils could take lessons in their own language and not the prescribed Afrikaans. However, when the Department of Bantu Education found out, the school was closed down for “inciting revolt.” Undeterred, she simply moved the small school to a secret location.
I had never met white people like them before. They were risking their lives for us—black people. I did not properly understand why. Living under their roof brought both good and bad things to me. I was paid a very good wage, ate good food, and could again sleep in the suburbs. There was laughter in this house, and kindness too, and I was sheltered from many of the hardships my friends endured.
But being a part of the Eloffs’ household also meant I was shot to the front of the struggle and knitted, like an extra stitch, into “the resistance.”
Tension stretched across our days like a taut elastic band. I had to be constantly on the lookout for danger, and the threat of arrest circled like a pack of hungry hyenas. Master Jo told me a tiny policeman’s ear lived inside our telephone, so I had to always say the opposite of what I really meant, when I used it.
Letters and parcels coming to the house also had to be checked before being opened. One time the master opened a small parcel bomb, which luckily had lost its boom.
But there was much to be content with. Missus Sylvia taught me to read and write. And with her encouragement, I discovered things about myself that had been hidden for all my lifetime. I came to believe I was a good person. I could be trusted. I had a talent for drawing and a head for numbers. I had the right to get angry and the right to be heard. At fifty-three years of age I was discovering a different Celia Mphephu, and I liked her.
—
One hot December morning I was hanging up the washing outside when Piglet started to growl.
“What is it, Piglet?” I asked, as I pegged my colossal bra beside Missus Sylvia’s very small one. Hers could barely hold two plums, while mine had space for two fat pawpaws. The sun was not long out of bed and its gentle warmth had doused me in lazy contentment.
Piglet growled again. The little brown terrier often argued with the billowing sheets, but this day they hung without life. There was not even the murmur of a breeze. Then his growl turned into a bark, and he shot up the driveway. I looked around the wall of white linen. A black boy was peering through the bars of the gate.
My heart jumped in my chest.
Dropping my pegs on the ground, I moved cautiously toward him. As I got closer I saw he had a blotchy face with patches of pale skin where skin-lightening cream had left its cruel mark. His eyes were hard, and he looked as if he had seen more than his youth would suggest. I stopped well back from the gate.
“Celia?” He spoke with a rough, urgent tone.
I was surprised; he knew my name. I did not know his. I nodded. By now both Piglet and Fleabag were barking furiously.
The boy flung something over the gate, then turned and was gone.
I jumped back, away from the letter.
It did not explode.
After a few seconds, I stepped cautiously forward. The crumpled envelope was too thin to hold anything more than a single sheet of paper, so I bent down to pick it up. My name and the Eloffs’ address were written on the envelope. I tore it open. Insi
de was a piece of toilet paper with one line scrawled across it in biro. Immediately I recognized the rise and fall of the script. It was from Christian.
It had been over fourteen months since I’d been woken in the middle of the night by his agitated knocking. I had heard nothing from him since, except for when the security police arrested me, and they seemed to know as little as I of his whereabouts.
After many sleepless nights I had finally managed to convince myself that no news from my boy was in fact a good thing, especially when Missus Sylvia suggested Christian could possibly be living over the border in Angola.
I’d held on to this one thought and never allowed myself to think beyond it. It offered me a calm place in my mind where I could see my eldest son safe and out of harm’s way.
Now I was swiftly robbed of that peace.
28 October
Ma, I have been arrested. Please try to get help.
C
I struggled to understand the note—my hands were trembling and my reading was still slow and clumsy. I checked the date. The letter was already five weeks old. I’d been lent an empty peace for five whole weeks—a peace that, all this time, had been a foolish lie.
Fumbling with the gate, I opened it and raced onto the avenue after the mysterious messenger, but the street was empty. I scoured gardens and driveways, parked cars and bus shelters, but with no success. The blotchy brown face had vanished.
—
It took many weeks before Master Jo managed to find where Christian was being held; however, his discovery did little to lessen my pain.
“Celia, I’m afraid Christian is being held incommunicado, which means he is not allowed to talk with us. He will be in solitary confinement and have no access to a lawyer. His detention is even beyond the jurisdiction of the courts.”
Master Jo’s lawyer words were difficult to understand. They only confused and frightened me. But when Missus Sylvia explained them, I realized they carried bad news.
“There is not much we can do from this end,” he went on. “I will try to reach him, but I don’t want to get your hopes up. I can’t promise anything.”
Master Jo was a kind man, but this time his kindness would not be enough. And on 17 January 1979, on a clear and cloudless morning, he was notified by the security police that my eldest child, Christian Mulalo Mphephu, had slipped on a bar of soap in the shower, hit his head, and died.
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