Well they can’t. We live here. Sam, having been duly hugged and kissed, has retreated to Jem’s side. The unspoken words strain against the inside of her, biting on the bones of her skull to get out.
‘Glad you like the garden, Gerrie, but that’s not going to happen any time soon.’ Jem’s smile is tighter now. He folds his arms across his chest.
‘I know, I know, but, Oom…’ Gerrie grips Jem’s shoulders and grins into his face, ‘Sussie says you’re going to have to move the three of you guys in with her because Aunt Annie is not doing so well, and I say the sooner the better. What you have here, my friend, is a goldmine.’
‘We’re not going anywhere.’ Jem breaks away from his nephew’s fevered clutches and rounds on Sussie. ‘What have you been saying, Sussie? If Anneke so much as heard a whisper of this, she’d clip you around the ear. Arthritis or no arthritis.’
Sam’s whole body throbs. She always liked her uncle Gerrie until now. Her fresh hatred for Aunt Sussie is a raging red fireball lodged in her throat. Sussie’s always pushing and prodding, like a frenzied, voracious bird poking its long sharp beak into the ground to pull defenceless earthworms from their soil world. Snap gulp, and down her merciless gullet they go. How dare she try and make us leave here? Why does she always want to ruin everything? Sam glares at her great-aunt as hard as she can, sending imaginary poisoned darts shooting out of her eyeballs.
‘Perhaps I need to spell this out to you, Sussie, because it seems that you’ve got some kind of busybody mental block when it comes to your sister, but the three of us are not budging, not to your house, or to anyone else’s.’ Jem’s voice is low, almost a growl. ‘This is our home, full-bloody-stop.’
At his words, Sam’s pounding heart lifts and soars above the fruit trees. Sussie huffs out a breath and heads inside to see her sister. Jem looks at Gerrie, who stares at the play of sunlight over the leafy garden with an enchanted expression on his face.
‘I’m just saying, this place would work like a bomb for a guest house, Oom. If you ever want to sell it, which I can see that you don’t,’ Gerrie adds hurriedly. ‘Give me a call.’
*
That night, Sam dreams of the brown horse again. This time, it is standing on top of the hill behind the garden, a sharp cut-out against a green-grey sky. When she looks again, the horse is the hill. The russet boulders and fynbos scrub have become assimilated into the creature’s vast body, somehow. Its eyes are as big and deep as pools fed by a mountain spring, and its nostrils two moss-covered caves.
Sam runs towards the horse-hill, dying to touch it, to climb up on its vast, majestic back so that she can look down from up there and see the other side, see the whole valley and the world beyond. Her dream-feet pound and her muscles strain, but each stream of hot, grassy breath that rushes down from the nostril-caves blows her back to where she started. Again and again.
The horse-hill is always beyond her reach.
CHAPTER NINE
IN EARLY FEBRUARY, on an evening when the blistering afternoon heat shows no sign of relinquishing any of its fury, Anneke refuses to get up from her afternoon nap. The ceiling fan stirs the bright, hurtful light of late summer slanting in through the window into a burning wedge that echoes exactly how Anneke feels beneath her skin. It’s been a bad week in a bad month. Yesterday evening, she’d only heaved herself off the mattress and into her waiting wheelchair when Sam had put the spaghetti in the pot to boil for dinner, but now, as dinner time approaches once more, she’s asked to be served in her bed.
She lies propped up against hot, heaped pillows and bites her lip as Jem hovers at her side, trying to encourage her to rise.
‘You need to keep moving, dear heart, the doctor said, remember? The stiffness can get worse if you don’t.’
Stiffness? What a ludicrous word for what Anneke’s feeling. Stiff is how her legs used to feel the morning after a long outride, stiff is aching shoulders after an hour hunched over a weed-ridden vegetable patch. This is the slow turn of spiked steel screws in each joint. This is her hips, her ankles, her elbows, all screaming. This is hell.
‘I’m sorry, my love,’ Anneke turns her head so as not to see the tears in her husband’s eyes, ‘I can’t tonight. I just need a little more rest.’
‘It’s OK, Ouma.’ Sam, who’s been watching the exchange from the doorway, jumps into action. ‘We can all eat in here.’ She goes over to the dressing table and starts to clear away the little bottles of lotion, pills, tissues and random assortment of life-junk that has collected on the surface. ‘I’ll bring in two kitchen chairs. Grandpa and I will sit here so we can all eat together. It will be fun. Like a picnic.’
Jem doesn’t move from his position at Anneke’s side, but his gaze follows his little granddaughter as she trots back and forth between the dressing table and the already heaped top of the chest of drawers where she’s relocating the clutter. Sam’s quick movements feel alien in the stillness of the room. Such comfort to be taken in the busyness of someone else getting on with things. He’d never realised it until now.
*
‘How long has it been, Annie? Tell me, how long since you got out of bed?’ Sussie’s eyes shoot green fury across the padded quilt that covers Anneke’s legs. At any moment, the down stuffing could smoulder and catch fire.
‘Just this morning, when Jem helped me up to go to the loo.’
‘Don’t be clever, Anneke, you know what I mean.’
‘Well don’t speak to me like I’m an imbecile.’
‘So then you don’t act like one!’ It could be an argument right out of their childhood, whipped through the intervening decades and transplanted here in this small bedroom where the winter sun leaks through the window and fades the patchwork squares that Anneke once stitched together in the days before her fingers ached.
‘What do you want from me, Sus? To leap up and start waltzing around the room?’
‘Of course not.’ Sussie’s hands clench into fists. ‘It’s just – you never told me you weren’t getting up any more—’
‘Because I knew you’d act like this—’
‘And they say that once you’re bedridden, you never… I want you to let me look after you until you’re better.’
‘No.’ It’s a small word, spoken softly. ‘There won’t be any better, Sus.’ Sussie’s face crumples and her legs sag. She sits on the edge of the bed beside the slender mound that her sister’s legs make beneath the bedding. ‘Jem and I have known this was coming from the moment I got my first diagnosis. You already know that it’s not just my joints that are affected, it’s my heart, my arteries, my kidneys. My body is eating itself.’
‘Ag, don’t say that, Annie.’
‘It’s true. Even if there was something they could really do for me at this point, or better drugs to dull it all, I’ve no wish to claw myself along through the days like some half chewed up thing.’
Sussie shakes her head, unable to speak. She leaves the room with its sad little bottles of pills and flowery smell laced with something bitter, like the rind of a grapefruit, and follows Jem as he walks her back out to the barn where her car is parked. Through stinging eyes, she sees that the garden has been pruned and cut back, brown stalks waiting for new life. Sussie stops. The heels of her shoes sink into the wet earth.
‘I don’t know what your problem is, Jem, why the two of you have given up, but I’m not going to.’ Her voice is fierce. Sam can hear it from all the way over by the pond where she’s carving the letters ‘SAM’ into a new chunk of wood that will soon serve as a replacement grave marker for the horse’s burial mound. The old one has rotted and splintered, and the carved-out letters are almost invisible. Jem will dig it out and replace it with this new one as soon as she is finished. This is the first time since her horse died when she was fifteen that Anneke is unable to do the carving on the replacement ‘Sam’ marker herself. She’d cried about it earlier, when she’d thought Sam wasn’t looking.
Sam pauses at the sound of Sussie’s v
oice, her chisel placed inside the etched outline of the ‘A’ that Jem made earlier using a bench knife, listening.
‘I pray for Anneke every day, and I’ll continue to do so,’ Sussie says, and Sam seethes at the implied reproach in her voice. As if she’s better than us because she prays. As if we don’t deserve Ouma. The wind sweeps a chunk of hair into Sam’s mouth. It tastes sour from the lemon juice that Anneke makes her squeeze into the last rinse water every time she washes it to keep the blonde from going yellow.
‘That’s good, Sussie,’ Jem says. ‘Prayers certainly won’t hurt.’ Jem’s tone reminds Sam of the many times he’s soothed her own terrors. This casts Sussie in an unexpected role. Sam frowns. For a moment, a small gap appears in the rigid hatred she nurtures for her interfering great-aunt.
‘But you need to know that we’re not giving up,’ Jem continues in the same, calm voice. ‘We’re letting her life play out as she’s lived, with grace. With quietness.’
‘But this is ridiculous. She needs proper care.’
‘She’s got it.’
‘She needs her family.’
‘What do you think Sam and I are, then?’
‘She needs—’
‘She wants peace.’
‘You and Annie… you’re both fools, Jeremy Harding,’ Sussie declares. Sam’s hatred gap closes up again and stitches tight.
‘That’s what you’ve always said.’ Jem sounds weary, now. Sam can hear the squeak of metal on metal as he works the gate bolt open. ‘Nothing new there.’
‘Shall I come round tomorrow?’ Sussie’s voice has changed again. The frightened child is back.
‘Give it a week, Sus,’ Jem replies, and the rest of his sentence is swallowed up by the barn as the gate closes behind them. Sam lets the tools drop to the ground at her feet, and tucks her chilled hands into the warmth of her armpits. The wind gusts again, and Sam’s sure that she can make out the faint whinny of a horse on the air. She stands dead still and stares hard at the periwinkle-blanket over the burial mound, straining her ears for more, but there’s nothing but rustling leaves and the high, raspy peep of a Cape sugarbird.
Sam-the-horse, it’s clear, only rises up in her dreams.
CHAPTER TEN
WINTER RAIN DRIPS from the eaves outside the Super Saver, and Sam and Keegan, although already wet from their walk to Main Street, dart between the drops and under the awning.
‘Hello, Mr Vosloo,’ Sam says to the spherical figure of the shop owner, who is leaning up against the outside wall, staring at the wet.
‘Hello, my girly. How’s your ouma doing, then?’ Sam shrugs her answer, and Mr Vosloo nods, then looks back out at the rain. ‘I’m having my break now, so Betty will help you guys. Don’t think that because she doesn’t talk she doesn’t have eyes like a hawk, hey? No snitching.’
‘We would never, Mr Vosloo,’ Sam says as she pulls Keegan inside. The Super Saver is gloomy compared to the brightness outside, and they stand in the doorway, rainwater squelching from their shoes, as their eyes adjust.
‘Let’s not,’ Keegan says for at least the tenth time since Sam pulled him by the hand and dragged him from the McGoverns’ to Main Street. ‘They could be anywhere.’ It’s true. Mid-year break is even more perilous than December because there are no festive celebrations and beach holidays to thin out the herd of boarders that have migrated back to town.
Sam squares her shoulders and marches deeper into the store.
‘Come on.’
‘They could come in any minute.’ Keegan is pale. Why has his friend suddenly gotten it into her head to go to Main Street on a day when she knows the boarders are lurking?
Sam has been strange all day. If Keegan is honest with himself, she’s always strange, but today it seems to burn right through her skin, like a fever. Her cheeks are pink, and her hair, ever unruly, has worked even more of itself out of her braids than usual. The stray wisps stand up around her head like antennae.
‘I’m getting a Bar One.’ Sam knows this is Keegan’s favourite. She holds up the black and red wrapped chocolate like a trophy and waves it in his direction. ‘Want one too?’
‘I guess.’ Keegan takes a step further into the store. He nods to silent Betty, waiting behind the till, and scurries to Sam’s side in the sweetie aisle. ‘Just hurry up.’ He selects a chocolate bar, and then shoots a glance over his shoulder towards the door. He freezes. His stomach drops. There, silhouetted in the Super Saver doorway against the grey-blue daylight, are three shapes. Big ones, but not big enough to be adults. Boarders.
There are two boys and a girl, all older. He recognises them straight away. They are wearing big farm boots and jeans and their faces are clouded in shadow despite the buzzing neon overhead. Keegan makes a little mew of despair deep in his throat, and Sam spins round to see the three approach. They are wet from the rain, and the girl, who is wide-shouldered and athletic-looking, has a slick of brown fringe glued to her forehead.
‘Look who it is!’ the girl says in English.
‘It’s the little soutpiel who’s always hiding from us.’
‘Haven’t seen you in ages, soutpiel.’
‘Ja, we thought you’d died or something.’
‘Of fright!’
‘Hey, where’s your big, brave brother, soutpiel?’
‘Why do you ask, Chantal?’ The smaller boy gives the brown-fringe girl a shove. ‘I didn’t know you had a crush on Nathan.’
‘Shut up, Dewalt.’ She shoves back. ‘Don’t be a dick.’
‘You’re all dicks,’ Sam says. She’s speaking in Afrikaans. They all look at her in astonishment, Keegan included. Sam turns her attention back to the chocolates. Her voice is matter-of-fact, as if she’s talking about the weather: ‘Even you, big girl. Maybe that’s why you’re wearing those boy’s jeans. To hide it so no one will know.’
There’s a long silence while everyone digests this. Sam picks up a chocolate bar. Puts it down. Selects another. Keegan is dry-mouthed and staring. He’s not sure he caught everything that his friend just said in her rapid Afrikaans, but for her to say anything at all to a bunch of strangers is astounding in itself.
‘What? What did you say?’ The brown-fringe-girl’s face has gone violet. Her companions are pinking around the ears, their mouths hanging open.
Sam turns to face the boarders. She seldom speaks Afrikaans because doing so reminds her too much of being Poppy, but the few, short sentences she’s just uttered have opened up a sluice somewhere inside her. Sam’s past hurtles through it in a deluge that seems to fill her whole body with brackish water and when she next opens her mouth, it’s as if she’s channelling Yolande, the scabbed users she hung out with, the bull-necked drug dealers that used to drop by, and all of her loser boyfriends at once.
A volley of filth spews from Sam’s mouth, splashing over the horrified boarders, filling the Super Saver aisles, and trickling out to mingle with the winter mud on Main Street. She’s not even sure what she’s saying any more. The vile words, of which she has no idea of the English equivalents, pour out of her from a hidden vault that taps directly into the years before she came to live with Anneke and Jem. What emerges is stinking and putrid. The boarders turn tail and run as if they’ve had scorching acid flung in their faces.
Sam stops. Now that the words are out of her, she feels emptier. Lighter. She turns to Keegan, who hasn’t blinked since she began her rant, and smiles.
‘Maybe they’ll leave us alone next time,’ she says, speaking English once more. She takes her Bar One to the till, and Keegan grabs a chocolate bar and trots obediently behind. He has no idea what she said to the boarders, but the guttural sounds seem to have left a residue of something behind in his friend. He watches in admiration as she pays Betty for her sweets. Sam is taller. Stronger. He’s sure of it.
*
In her dreaming, Sam looks up into the cooling twilight and sees that Sam-the-horse is on the hill. At first, he’s a cut-out with twitching ears, small and distant against
the indigo sky, and then, quite suddenly, she is the horse. She has high-stepping long limbs and twitching skin where the flies try to land. She is the one watching over the garden below with her large brown eyes, and sniffing the air for danger. Sam stamps a hoof in a frustrated panic, sending up curls of dust. She can sense creeping, stalking figures out beyond the valley, trying to find a way in, but no matter how hard she stares, all she can see is grass.
*
October heat prickles the back of Sam’s neck and sends trickles of sweat sliding down her chest, along her arms, and pooling into the fingertips of her gardening gloves. Her fingers ache from squeezing the cutters. Often, she has to use both hands together to get the blades through the woody stems. She’s working in the patch of garden at the base of the hill which has gotten overgrown, limbs snaking into vines and thickening, locking into place. The quince hedge is taking over a lavender bush, and is casting too much shade on the tomatoes. Sam makes each cut with ferocious determination, bracing her shoulders and clenching her jaw.
Now that she is a big girl (she’s stopped wondering what her real age might be; she feels ten, and that’s enough) and Anneke is no longer able to do any of the tasks she once carried out in the garden, Sam has taken it upon herself to fill her role. There seems to be a never-ending list of things for her to do when not at school: prune this, cut back that, dig in compost here, pull up old plants there, pick these, tie those back. This overgrown bed has been taunting her lack of discipline and effort. She works till her shoulders burn.
‘Come, Sam.’ Jem walks up and gives the pile of ravaged branches at her feet a long look. ‘It’s time to take a break.’
‘I just want to finish this first.’
‘No, my love. Give it a rest.’ Jem’s quiet words send Sam’s frantic energy spinning free and away, and when it does, she finally feels the ache in her hands, and the sting of salt and sun in her eyes. She pulls off her sticky gloves to find raw burnt-looking patches on her fingers where the blisters are starting. Sam goes over to the tap and winces as the cold water sparks the pain to life. When she’s drunk deeply and washed the sweat from her face, Jem is still waiting. He holds out a tube of sun block, and as Sam reapplies it to her arms and face, she notices he’s carrying a small, faded khaki backpack.
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