by Rosie Rowell
‘I have to go and pack,’ he said.
I looked down to hide the glowing red that spread up my neck. The imprint of his lips fizzed. The current throbbed around my body, stuck inside. A gecko’s severed tail writhing about uselessly.
He held out a yellow piece of paper folded into a square. ‘This is my address.’
‘OK,’ I said, avoiding his eye.
‘Bye,’ he said.
I looked up. ‘Karraboosh.’
He laughed, raised a hand in a single wave, and walked away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Early on Monday morning Dad made his daily walk around the house, closing all the shutters. It was not something you could sleep through, but this morning I was awake long before his face peered in through my window.
‘It’s going to be hot as hell today,’ he said with a glint in his eye, a deranged sailor forecasting stormy seas. ‘The barometer’s doing the Loop De Loop!’ He bolted the shutters and my room plunged into slatted green darkness.
I reached for the yellow piece of paper next to my bed. Ernest Oppenheimer Halls of Residence, 8 Trematon Place, Parktown. In two years I would be giving my address to Beth. If only it were today!
What would I say to Xanthe? I couldn’t ignore her. I didn’t want to. ‘Hi Xanthe, I’d like to be your friend, but from now on it will be different.’ I could imagine the look on her face. It sounded worse than something out of Beverly Hills 90210. ‘And by the way, I don’t mind about the beach thing anymore.’ I shuddered as the throbbing sensation I’d felt under the pecanut tree returned. As I was about to leave me room I hesitated, then grabbed the folded paper and stowed it in my pocket. A talisman.
At breakfast the Raisin Bran scraped down my throat. In the end I gave up and stared at my mug of tea.
‘A new year!’ said Dad, appearing in his rugby shorts and “I’m too sexy for this shirt!” T-shirt. Both he and Mum were unnecessarily cheerful. They didn’t even try and hide their relief at the start of another term.
‘The year of the “A”,’ said Mum.
‘The year of leaving Meg alone,’ I said.
‘How would I fill my time?’ said Dad, reaching across the table to pick up newspaper.
‘Get a job?’
Dad laughed. He yawned and stretched his arms over his head, revealing under his sexy T-shirt a hairy belly.
He tapped the folded newspaper on my head in farewell and disappeared in the direction of his study with a mug of coffee and the newspaper under his arm.
‘Come on!’ Beth hopped about in the doorway of the kitchen, her satchel already on her back.
‘Don’t wait for me,’ I muttered.
She disappeared, back up the hill to school, to the newly white-washed building, to the mass of girls, the shiny-floored corridors, and the notice boards that would be cleared of last year’s artwork and lab reports and sports fixtures. Ready to start again.
Eventually Marta shooed me out of the door. ‘Get!’ She flicked her dust cloth. ‘Leave me in peace.’
The break-of-day freshness was already burnt off. As I reached the Main Street I caught tannie Ester’s eye, clutching her basket like Mrs Tiddlywinks, on her way to open the library.
‘Lekker dag![*]’ she called before disappearing into her air-conditioned sanctuary. Across the road hotel staff hurried through their outdoor jobs. Two of them beat a pair of runner rugs that hung looped over the outside beams of the front verandah. They pounded away with long-handled brooms, causing dust clouds to rise up above them and hover for a moment before settling back into the rugs.
A little way along Witbooi and Mr Pretorius from the bank leaned over the churchyard wall, peering into the graveyard. I crossed the road to have a look.
‘That bladdy dog,’ Witbooi rasped. ‘Give me a gun and I’ll shoot him fokken dead.’
‘Come now,’ chided Mr Pretorius. Kaptein, the police dog, had found a nest of starlings in the night. I turned away.
Marta, with her instinct for trouble, had caught up with me. ‘Go to school before I smack your bottom!’
I laughed and turned up the path next to the graves. As I left them behind I heard Witbooi say: ‘Mr Pretorius, you must write a letter of complaint. That dog is a menace. Mauling a nest of birds to death is against the new constitution.’
‘Write to Mr Mandela,’ said Marta, ‘Tell him we’ve got Dr Basson’s dog here in Leopold.’
At the top of the churchyard I paused for a moment in front of the four little graves in the corner. I hadn’t visited them in a long time. If I too forgot about them, their faint imprints on the world would be scuffed out forever, as if they had never lived.
The first day of school traffic rumbled by – cars and dust-sprayed bakkies, even one or two lorries. As I reached the bottom field one of the groundsmen was busy on a tractor, painting white lines back onto the field. I stopped. What a satisfying job, to create a perfectly straight white line against a green field, to look back at the other end and see such unbroken precision.
The school bell rang. Latecomers swelled around me before being sucked into the buildings ahead.
Juffrou’s classroom was a clamour of laughing and hugging and six weeks of gossip. Elmarie sat on one of the front desks, whispering something to Isabel. As I squeezed past her, she stopped and glanced at me.
‘What?’ I said.
Instead of replying, she turned over her shoulder and looked towards my and Xanthe’s desks. They were both empty. Xanthe had not yet arrived.
‘So?’ I said, looking at Elmarie. Her skin was better this term. From far away you wouldn’t see the spots.
But she hadn’t been looking at my desk – her gaze was on the next row along, on the back two desks, which up until now had been empty.
There was a new girl sitting there, a city girl you could see by the smirk on her face. On the far side of her sat Xanthe.
I looked back at Elmarie. She was waiting for an explanation. Of all the scenarios I’d rehearsed while waiting for morning, this was not one of them. I pushed past her to my desk. The wooden seat shrieked as I sat down sat down in a rush. I blinked. This is fine – this-is-fine-this-is-fine-this-is-fine-this-is-fine-this-is-fine.
Girls wandered back to their desks, happy to be with their friends, oblivious to my private misery. What a big-fat-bloody-fucking fool you are, Margaret Bergman! And yet at the same time I was expecting Xanthe to slip in to the desk beside me, muttering: ‘Madgie, where the fuck have you been?’ The din of voices died down. I could make out the sound of the new girl’s voice.
‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Look at them all!’
There was a pause, and a short laugh from Xanthe.
‘Did you go away for New Year?’ said the new girl.
‘No,’ replied Xanthe, in Alan’s ‘Enough now, Shirl!’ voice. ‘I was at home.’
‘Cool,’ said the girl. ‘What did you get up to?’
I held my breath. This was the moment when Xanthe would laugh, call my name and everything would return to normal.
‘Not much,’ said Xanthe.
With that Madge slipped away silently, without so much as a backwards glance.
All of it came to nothing. In the end I was still only Meg, the English girl, with the empty seat beside her. I clamped my hand around the folded paper in my pocket.
I felt Xanthe looking across at me. I didn’t need to see her face to know it would be scornful, as if to say, ‘I did warn you, you knew I wasn’t good at this.’ It was true. Maybe she had been like this all along. Maybe I’d constructed the Xanthe I’d wanted out of somebody quite different.
Juffrou du Plessis huffed into the classroom, carrying a pile of textbooks. She let the books drop to the floor next to her desk with an almighty thud that brought the class to silence.
She caught her breath, then turned to Isabel. ‘What’s keeping you, child?’ she said with exaggerated patience.
‘Juffrou?’ asked Isabel.
‘Hand out the books!’
said Juffrou and left the room.
Dad believed in stories. He said each one of us was born with a story, that it was ours to live. Simon’s story was a hero’s one, but it demanded a great deal of him in return. I thought of Mum, a British–South African Joan of Arc. My story wasn’t going that well. Sitting alone, the desk beside me once again empty, I realised that the difference between Simon and I was that he was trying to be the best at what he was, not somebody else. It seemed laughably simple.
I knew something that the girl who’d sat here, alone, six months ago didn’t. I’d rather be alone than uncomfortable trying to be somebody else. ‘Xanthe is cool,’ I told that girl, ‘but she isn’t that brave.’ And her parents, and Stuart and Judy, for all their beautiful homes and lifelong friendships, weren’t brave either.
‘Meg!’ Elmarie rattled my pencil case.
‘What?’
‘My dad says he’s going to phone your mum.’
Not today, please God. ‘Why?’ I asked.
Esna swung around. Isabel stopped to listen, balancing the pile of books on the edge of my desk.
‘He’s going to ask your mum to come do a clinic on the farm, to teach the volk about her disease,’ said Elmarie.
‘Why?’ asked Isabel.
‘He says the last thing he needs in this life is for them to start dropping like goddam flies,’ said Elmarie.
Esna gripped Elmarie’s arm, her eyes wide at the impending apocalypse. Isabel started to say something, but Juffrou walked back in and she hurried away.
‘So,’ continued Elmarie, shaking off Esna’s hand, ‘Maybe when your mum comes to our farm, you can come too. To visit.’
I looked at her, registering slowly. ‘Maybe.’
Juffrou stood at the front of the class. She mopped her forehead with a hankie and tucked it back into her dress. She looked about the room, examining each of us in turn. Her eyes rested on the empty desk next to me, then shifted across to the new girl and Xanthe beside her. Juffrou’s eyes narrowed. I knew that her glare was a protective one, but I still felt shame prickle my skin.
When the bell rang, I was the first one out of the classroom. Instead of turning left for science, I kept walking, out of the building, down the hill. I caught my breath on the Main Street, my tears smeared hot and sticky on my face.
Mum stepped out of the old coloured entrance to the post office. She turned towards me carrying a large box. It would be from overseas, from Bibi. I waited for the anger, but found nothing. Instead I heard Simon’s voice, ‘She’s helping people whom no one else sees as important enough to bother with.’
I smiled.
She stood in front of me, her eyes taking me in. ‘When I was fifteen Bibi and I went to Paris for the weekend without telling our parents.’
‘What?’
‘I was in so much trouble,’ said Mum, laughing, ‘worlds of trouble when I returned.’
‘Paris! Was it worth it?’
Mum’s lips twitched, but she didn’t say anymore.
I looked up at Bosmansberg, so close that it could be leaning in to hear the story too. Mum followed my gaze. The prospect of going anywhere, let alone Paris, seemed so ridiculous that we started laughing.
‘Walk with me,’ said Mum, shifting her box onto her far hip and threading her arm through mine.
We started up the Main Street – past the library and the off-licence and the Volkskas bank. Soon we would be at the top of the road. There we would turn right and make for home.
*. Have a nice day
Acknowledgements
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude for unwavering support and inspiration from Aty Georgopoulos, Alison Nagle, Gerda Pearce, Rochelle Gosling, Sarah Morris Keating, Elspeth Morrison, and Charlotte Edwardes. Thanks also to Maggie Hamand of the Complete Creative Writing Course, and Shaun Levin for many years of creative nurturing; and to Dr Sally Cline, who taught me, among many other things, the correct use of the word ‘so’.
Huge thanks to Claire Wilson, for seeing the potential of an imperfect draft, and to Emily Thomas, Georgia Murray and the Hot Key team.
To my wonderful family and friends – each of you are a thread in a tapestry I treasure very deeply.
And of course, Johnny, who dared me to dream.
Rosie Rowell
Rosie Rowell was born and grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. These days she lives in West Sussex with her husband and three children. LEOPOLD BLUE is her first novel.
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hot Key Books
Northburgh House, 10 Northburgh Street, London EC1V 0AT
Copyright © Rosie Rowell 2014
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4714-0126-8
This eBook was produced using Atomik ePublisher
www.hotkeybooks.com
Hot Key Books is part of the Bonnier Publishing Group
www.bonnierpublishing.com
