‘We’re all coming back here, I promise,’ he whispers as he starts the engine. ‘The three of us, together. You’ll see.’
Jem and Anneke weren’t exaggerating the magnificence of the flowering fynbos, or fruit trees in blossom, but it’s only when Sam spots a horse and a rider moving between the white-petalled limbs of an orchard that she comes to life. She sits up and cranes to see better, unbuckling her seatbelt to clamber over Jem’s lap and poke her head out of the driver’s window.
‘There!’ She points at the chestnut horse, tears drying on her cheeks. ‘Sam.’
‘Not Sam,’ whispers Anneke, ‘he was more chocolate-coloured than that.’ Sam gazes at the rider, a teenage girl with a long, dark ponytail, guiding her horse between the rows.
‘That’s the le Roux girl, isn’t it?’ Anneke asks Jem. ‘She’s all grown up. Must be about sixteen or so by now.’
‘A laroo-girl?’ Sam breathes, enchanted, eyes glued to the horse and human who move, as one, amongst whirling confetti-white petals. ‘Can I be a laroo-girl?’
‘No, le Roux’s her surname, dear heart, that’s our neighbour’s daughter, Liezette.’
‘Oh. The bad people,’ Sam scowls, ‘on the other side of the hill?’
‘What have you been telling her, Jem?’
‘I once mentioned that le Roux didn’t want us to make our garden home where we did, that he wanted our water for his big fancy farm.’ Jem glances at his wife. ‘What? It’s the truth. I didn’t realise that it would make such an impression.’
‘She can’t be bad, though,’ Sam points at the dark-haired girl, now moving out of view, ‘or the horse wouldn’t let her ride him.’ She wiggles backwards off Jem’s lap and tucks herself in close to Anneke. ‘Tell me the story again, Ouma, the one about how you first got Sam?’
‘You sure you want to hear that old thing again?’ Anneke smiles, delighted that Sam’s terror of the outside world seems to have abated a little. ‘All right, I’ll tell it while Grandpa drives us home.’
CHAPTER FIVE
SAM’S SECOND EVER Christmas goose has been reduced to a container of congealing scraps in the fridge, and the last days of the old year hang motionless over the valley, pressing down on the baking soil with heavy fists. When Sussie’s ‘koewee!’ sound comes, Sam is sitting on a rock at the cool edge of the pond with her feet in the water. She glances across to Jem, who is turning the compost heap in the shade beside the shed. He gives her a reassuring smile, and she knows he’s reminding her not to run off and hide like she usually does when Sussie comes round. Sam has been assured over and over that Sussie, who is her grandmother’s younger sister, is a good person, just a bit bossy. Nothing to be afraid of. Sam needs to be brave, just like she was the first few times when going for a drive in the bakkie. Sam has made a promise not to hide, but her resolve is faltering as the ‘koewee!’ rings through the garden. She can feel Jem watching her, and can hear Anneke, in a wheelchair today, as she rumbles over the flagstones to open the gate. The drawing of the latch. The smell of store-bought perfume. Sam doesn’t move.
‘There now, Sussie. I got here eventually.’
‘Good grief, Annie, why you insist on trekking out to let me in each time, I just don’t know. Would it kill you to leave this gate unbolted? What on earth do you have to lock yourselves up for?’
‘To stop busybodies like you barging in whenever they want.’ Anneke kisses her sister hello, and then both women turn towards the pond. Sussie takes in the child with her thin limbs and pale blonde hair, tousled where bits of it have escaped their plaits. She opens her arms as if expecting the girl to run into them. Sam, who can see this out of the corner of her eye, digs her fingers into the squelchy mud at the edge of the pond.
‘She won’t. Not yet.’ Anneke reaches for her sister’s hand. ‘Come inside and have some coffee.’
‘In this heat?’ Sussie tries not to look put out. She’s used to being greeted by children, especially related ones.
‘Iced, of course.’
‘Ah, Anneke’s famous ice-coffee.’ Sussie turns back for one more glance at Sam, and then pushes Anneke’s wheelchair towards the house.
‘You’re going to have to meet your great-aunty properly sometime.’ Jem grins at his scowling granddaughter. Sam picks up a clod of mud and lobs it in his direction. It splats into the still green water of the pond and Jeremy laughs.
After a bit, Sam laughs too.
SUSSIE WEARS HER hair short and immaculately styled in an upswept halo, but in the time between exiting her air-conditioned car and entering the blessed cool of Anneke’s kitchen, the carefully arranged wisps at the back of her neck are already sweat-glued to her skin.
‘Sit down, Sussie,’ Anneke orders, and rolls her wheelchair over to the freezer.
‘Let me help—’
‘Stop fussing. I do this a hundred times a day, you know.’ Anneke waves an ice tray at her sister in a menacing fashion until she sinks down into a chair. Anneke gets out two tall glasses and pours cooling coffee over the ice cubes that she made earlier using condensed milk.
Sussie stares out at the garden. The heat has leeched the greenery of its colour, and the borders blur between the plants, the pond water, and the white-haired, skinny-limbed child.
‘Sam’s grown a lot, hasn’t she?’ Sussie takes the proffered glass. The iced milk cubes are already sending creamy tendrils snaking through the dark coffee. ‘She has hair just like you did when we were girls.’
‘I know.’
‘She must be six now, hey? Or seven?’ She sips the bitter warmth. As the ice melts, each progressive sip will be colder, creamier and sweeter.
‘We think so.’
‘She’ll be needing to go to school then, won’t she?’ The town is too tiny to warrant having a school of its own. All the local kids are bussed to and from a bigger town in the area each day.
‘I don’t want to send her to the primary in Robertson. She refuses to speak Afrikaans.’ Sussie raises an eyebrow. Anneke plunges on: ‘I think it reminds her of her old life or something. Understandably, she wants to forget the whole thing, poor child.’
‘Well there’s always boarding school, if it needs to be English.’
‘Nope.’
‘Come on, Annie, it’s been almost a year and a half and you haven’t heard a peep from Yolande. Don’t you think it’s time you and Jem relax the guard a bit?’
‘It’s not that. Or not just that. I can’t possibly send the little thing off to board. After what she’s been through, not a chance.’
‘So take her to mad Mrs McGovern in town. She teaches the English curriculum from her house to her own sons and those fancy-schmancy Ndlovu kids whose folks don’t want their precious brown babies shipped off to a big bad boarding school either.’
Anneke remembers her own petrifying first day of grade one. There were vast cold rooms with windows too high to see out of, bristling with screeching, elbowing girls. Compared to her parents’ warm, ramshackle farmhouse, it had felt like she’d arrived at the other end of the earth. Three decades later, she’d deposited a singularly unterrified Yolande into those same dark, socks-and-floor-polish-smelling corridors.
‘You’ve heard of Mrs McGovern?’ Sussie continues. ‘She’s the wife of that big-shot engineer whose working on the dam project in—’
‘I know who she is, Suss, I’m in a wheelchair, not an isolation tank.’
‘Could’ve fooled me, the way you and Jem carry on.’ Sussie spears a spoon into her glass and the melting cubes skitter. ‘She’s a bit of an odd bird, but then again, she’s English.’ Sussie’s shrug manages to convey the ludicrousness of all English speakers, Jem (and now Sam) included. ‘Look, Sam’s around the same age as the youngest McGovern kid, so I’m sure she’d be accommodated. I could make a call.’
‘You’d love that, wouldn’t you, Sus? Taking charge.’
‘I’m just saying, she needs to become socialised, integrated into the community. She can’t just bugger ab
out in the garden all day like you and Jem do, never going out, never seeing family.’
‘And here comes the obligatory lecture.’
‘Look, Annie, having your own kooky ideas about things is fine when you’re a little girl who wants to talk to invisible creatures in the fruit orchard rather than play with real humans… But it makes no sense now. Not in your condition, with Jem not getting any younger. The two of you all alone out here without any help, and now with a child to look after—’
‘Good grief, you make us sound like a pair of decrepit old fools.’
‘Someone has to be practical, is all I’m saying.’ Beyond the window, in the green garden, Jem is crouched on the grass beside Sam, their heads bent over something small and wriggly in his soil-covered hand. ‘Learning how to faff around with worms is one thing. But that girl is going to have to go to school.’
*
Mrs McGovern’s home school is to regular school as a cupcake with icing primroses covered in sprinkles is to a stale bran muffin. Despite this, and regardless of the fact that each flagstone leading up to the front door of her house has been painted a different cheery colour by each of the four pupils in Mrs McGovern’s care, Sam can hardly breathe as Jem lifts her down from the bakkie.
‘See, what’s this planted here?’ Jem tries to distract her. Sam bends down briefly to finger the tiny leaves and woody stalks of the plants growing between the coloured flagstones, but doesn’t loosen her clutch on Jem’s hand.
‘Don’t know.’
‘Course you do. Give it a whiff.’
‘Lemon thyme.’ She curls her scented fingertips into a fist.
‘Good girl. See, it can’t be so scary here if there’s lemon thyme, now can it? Mrs McGovern probably planted it on the path so that each morning you’ll be enveloped in a cloud of refreshing scent on the way to school.’ Sam’s scowl deepens.
‘Why can’t I just stay home with you and Ouma?’
‘We’ve talked about this, darling, and I hate to admit it, but your ouma’s busybody sister is right for a change. You don’t want to just sit and deadhead daisies with old folks all day for the rest of your life.’
‘Yes I do,’ she sniffs. ‘I really do. Sussie doesn’t even know anything.’
‘I’ll be right here waiting when it’s time to come home, and then you can help in the garden for the rest of the afternoon.’
‘But what if she… somehow finds…’
‘Yolande’s a hundred miles away. Remember that long drive we took to get here from Pretoria?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well she’s all the way on the other side of that. And she hasn’t got a bakkie like mine to drive here, now does she?’
‘She doesn’t have a car at all.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Or a motorbike,’ adds Sam, thinking of the two old machines parked in the shed back home. She feels a little better.
Jem pulls her gently up the steps to the stoop. As they approach the open front door, a small boy darts out of it. He’s clutching a painted paper plate with two cut-out eye holes over his face. The ragged fringe of orange wool around the plate hints that it’s supposed to be a lion. The boy roars with gusto and Sam just about levitates into Jem’s arms.
‘Gosh, Keegan, that’s quite a welcome for our new friend. Perhaps it’s time to put the lion mask away and let Sam see how friendly you really are, hey?’
Mrs McGovern looks exactly like the sort of person who would encourage children to paint flagstones with their fingers, and then give them herbal tea with honey and oatmeal cookies afterwards. Unlike the other women in the area who favour practical jeans and men’s shirts, saving their coloured slacks and chiffon blouses for Sunday church services, Mrs McGovern is wearing a long flowing outfit that seems to be sewn together out of different bits of old saris and cushion covers. Her feet are bare. There’s a silver ring on one of her toes. She smiles at Sam, and despite herself, the girl doesn’t scowl back.
‘She’ll be very well looked after here, Jem. You don’t have to worry about a thing,’ Mrs McGovern says as Jeremy hugs Sam close to his soil-smelling shirtfront.
‘Remember,’ Jem says, working to keep his voice steady, ‘she goes home with nobody but me.’
‘You have my word. Come on, Sam, say goodbye to your grandpa and let’s go in and show you around.’ Mrs McGovern takes her by the hand, and Keegan rushes up, lion mask abandoned in the flower bed, to grab the other. Between them both, Sam is almost carried into the house.
CHAPTER SIX
BY THE TIME December returns, bringing hot winds and flying beetles with domed coppery shells that munch on the rose leaves at dusk, the terror of Sam’s first day at school has been reduced to a shifting, shadowed memory. Over the eleven months that have passed, she’s relaxed into the company of her classmates, Zama and Thuli, can tolerate ten-year-old Nathan’s teasing, and is devoted to earning Mrs McGovern’s smiles of approval. Early on, Keegan’s chatter wore away Sam’s brittle shyness, and now the two of them, laughing, race down the main street.
‘Last day, last day!’ Keegan shouts into the midday heat. ‘No more school for a whole month.’ And then, when the Super Saver comes into view: ‘I’m going to buy… like ten Fizzers!’
‘I’m also getting some. Green ones.’ Coins rattle in the pockets of Sam’s shorts, and puffs of silky dust billow up around her bare feet.
Suddenly, Keegan skids to a halt.
‘Hey!’ Sam yelps, just managing to stop from slamming into the back of him. ‘Why are you stopping?’
‘They’re back.’ The dread in Keegan’s voice jellies her muscles and freezes the marrow inside her bones. Her breath is gone. The world tilts to one side. Yolande and Karel are here. Her mother has finally come to take her. Sam feels as if her insides are filled up with ice-cold porridge, sludging in her veins, slowing her heart. She ducks behind Keegan and stares at the Super Saver, now only half a block away. At any moment, Yolande and Karel are going to step through the doors and out into the street.
They will turn their heads and they will see me. Sam remembers the wiry strength in Karel’s skinny arms, and the way Yolande could run when she needed to, chewing up distance in greedy, gulping seconds. Blotches of white-hot panic cloud the edges of her vision.
‘Who’s “they”?’ she whispers through dry lips.
‘Boarders.’ Keegan’s voice is faint with horror. ‘I just saw two of them go into the Super Saver. I thought they’d only come tomorrow.’
Relief nearly drops Sam where she stands. She sways, light-headed, almost laughing. Not Yolande.
‘What are boarders?’
‘Some of the other kids that live on the farms and stuff around here get sent away to boarding school, but now they’re back for the holidays.’
‘Is that bad?’
‘Yes, that’s bad. They’re Afrikaans.’
‘I’m Afrikaans.’
‘Only half. And you’re not… you don’t… They once tried to—’ He breaks off, gulps air, and tries again: ‘They like picking on me and Nate.’ Keegan places the arch of his foot over a small sharp stone and pushes down. Sam can see him wince. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘But the Fizzers—’
‘Come ON!’ Keegan tugs Sam’s T-shirt to spin her round, but in his clumsy desperation, he knocks her over. Gravel stings the palms of her hands.
‘Hey, that’s no way to treat your girlfriend!’ someone shouts in Afrikaans. Sam looks up from her shredded palms, and through hot tears, sees two big boys with khaki shorts and bony hard feet striding towards them. One of the boys has hair on his legs, but it’s not wiry like Karel’s was, it’s mielie-silk yellow against the brown.
‘Is your English willy so small you have to show your little girl who’s boss by hitting her around, hey, salt-dick?’
Sam hasn’t heard anyone swear in Afrikaans since her Poppy days. The harsh cadence of it sends her spinning back into the past. She can feel the pressure of Yolande’s hand
on her shoulder, and her nostrils fill with the vomity cigarette smell of her mother’s claw-fingers.
‘Get up, get up!’ Keegan wrenches Sam upright and the two of them belt back up the road towards the schoolhouse, feet pounding on the dirt.
The boarders must have better things to do on their first day of summer freedom, because a breathless Sam and Keegan make it back to the safety of the lemon-thyme pavers without any further incident.
‘Oh no, you’re bleeding,’ Keegan whispers when he sees the state of her hands. ‘I’m so sorry. Come.’ He drags Sam past the schoolroom and into the never-seen-before depths of the McGoverns’ home, taking her to a bathroom that smells of something lemony with an undertone of peed-on bathmat. Sam notices a small plastic ship on the edge of the bath as Keegan leads her to the basin.
‘Here. You need to rinse.’ He guides her hands under the running tap, and she sucks in her breath. Flaps of translucent skin lift and move in the cold water. There are bits of grit embedded beneath.
‘Ow, it looks really sore, Sam.’
‘It’s not that bad.’ Sam moves her hands to try and wash the grit out. For a moment, the two of them are engrossed in watching the thin trails of blood snake down the plughole.
‘Do the boarders come every year, Keegan?’
‘Ja.’
‘And are they always so…’
‘Ja.’
‘Hey, what’s going on?’ Nathan appears in the doorway, scowling. ‘Why’s she in here. You know my rules about school people on home turf.’
‘It’s holidays, she can come in if she wants,’ Keegan retorts, and then lowers his voice. ‘They’re here already, Nate.’
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