Bone Meal For Roses

by Miranda Sherry

  ‘What—’

  ‘Tuck the bottom of your jeans into your socks in case of snakes,’ Jem instructs, and then: ‘Come.’ He puts the sun block back into the backpack and starts heading for the hill that rises up behind them.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Sam scampers behind him.

  ‘Up there.’ They’ve never gone up the hill before. Too many snakes, Jem’s always said, but Sam knows that it’s really because of the le Rouxs on the other side. What would happen if they encountered Jem’s old enemy? Would there be a fight? She can’t picture her grandfather’s large, strong hands being used for anything but gentleness.

  ‘But Ouma?’ Sam says. They never go anywhere if they can help it these days. What if Ouma needs them for something? What if something happens while they’re gone?

  ‘Remember to make a noise with your feet.’ Jem keeps moving. ‘We want the snakes to hear us coming and get out of the way. Nothing more dangerous than a surprised snake.’

  Sam swallows her questions and follows Jem as he steadily climbs, stepping between the tufts of fynbos that cover the hill. No snakes so far, just khaki-coloured crickets, black-bottomed beetles and dusty lizards.

  The climb gets steeper. After a while, all Sam can focus on are the soles of Jem’s boots pushing ahead, balancing over stones and kicking up sand. She’s exhausted now, and starving. It’s lunchtime, isn’t it?

  Finally, they reach the top. Jem sinks down and rests his back against the cool slant of a red rock and pats the stone beside him. When Sam sits, he pulls a bottle of water and a sandwich out of the backpack and hands them across. She tucks into both. The cheese and tomato sandwich tastes like heaven. She can smell the fishy tomato-tinned-pilchard goo oozing out of Jem’s.

  The sky is enormous from up here, with a depth of blue that seems to tug her breath right out of her, leaving her giddy.

  ‘I used to come up here all the time, once.’ Jem breaks the companionable silence once his pilchard sandwich is finished. ‘I’d forgotten what it’s like. So wide open.’

  ‘It’s great,’ Sam says, but now she’s dying to scamper beyond the rock and look down the hill on the other side. What’s it like? she wants to know. She’s never seen the le Roux farm. Can you tell that the people who live there are nasty? Jem told her that they’re not allowed on the property since the dispute over the spring, when Anneke and he moved to the stables. No le Rouxs on this side, and no Hardings on that side, those are the rules.

  ‘Go on,’ Jem says, responding to Sam’s unasked question. He jerks his thumb behind him, towards the le Roux side of the hill. ‘Take a look if you want.’

  ‘But won’t they see me?’

  ‘Not from down there. But keep low. Who knows what that old lunatic would do if he thought we were trespassing.’

  Sam tries not to look too eager as she gets to her feet and walks towards the other side. When the land starts to slope, she drops to her haunches and stares down at another whole world. There are tractors and machinery, a stable, a large barn with a corrugated iron roof, and a sprawling white, gabled house in the distance that looks like all sorts of new bits have been added onto it over the years. There’s a paddock with horses in it (laroo-girl laroo-girl!) and beyond the house, stretching into the distance, rows and rows of pale green grapevines.

  ‘Which cultivars?’ she asks, sounding so much like a local now that Jem grins.

  ‘Cinsaut, I think. And palomino.’

  ‘They live so close to us.’

  ‘I know. Down in our little spot, you’d never think we had neighbours, hey?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re never to go over there, Sam, do you hear me?’ Sam turns back to see that Jem is watching her, squinting against the sunlight. Her grandfather’s mouth is a small, hard line. ‘That le Roux is an angry, vindictive old bugger. It wouldn’t be safe.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Promise me.’

  ‘I promise, Grandpa.’

  As Sam stands and walks back, wiping her buttery hands on the pockets of her jeans, she feels the intensity of Jem’s look soften. Together, they gaze down at their own side. Home. The garden is a dense patch of green nestling at the bottom of the brown, bristly slope, embraced within the ragged-roofed arms of the U-shaped buildings. Sam watches, mesmerised, as the wind shifts the leaves on the top of her familiar old oak tree. It’s another creature entirely when seen from up here.

  ‘It’s all so small,’ she says at last.

  ‘I know.’ Jem closes his eyes and leans his head back against the rock. ‘It’s good to sometimes remember that, Sam.’

  But as Sam stares down at the curving slate paths twisting between the green, and the bright spots which must be the roses, she knows that it doesn’t matter how big the world that sprawls on either side is, all that matters is this perfect piece. The place where she is safe.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ON NEW YEAR’S Eve, Sam decides to sleep outside in the garden. The midsummer air is no cooler out here, but the movement of the wind creates the illusion of it. Earlier, she laid out her bedding on an old camping mattress in the middle of the clover patch, and now she lies with a ring of rose bushes framing the black sky above.

  Without the barrier of walls and windows, the garden sounds press up close. To one side, there’s the house, with the soft ticking of metal as the roof cools and the electric whirr of the fan in Anneke and Jem’s bedroom, and on the other, the pond with its watery splashing and serenading frogs. The chittering of bats and the zinging of crickets are punctuated by the eerie screech of big-eyed ground birds calling to one another through the darkness.

  Every so often, Sam switches on her torch and shines it onto Anneke’s old watch. The watch was her recent Christmas present. The metal on the back of it is dull from decades on her grandmother’s wrist, and the strap feels warm, as if it carries something of the essence of Anneke’s skin even now, clutched in Sam’s fist, out in the night.

  She is waiting for the moment when the old year will be over and the new will begin. Will she be able to tell? Will the sky change, the winds shift, the sounds alter slightly?

  It’s close now. Her hours of patient wakefulness are almost up. She glances at the watch face, then switches the torch off and counts the last three minutes under her breath.

  There. It’s happened. It’s 2008.

  Nothing is different.

  Sam’s body fills up with something she can’t define: a restlessness and a squeeze of doubt stirred in with a new ache beneath the skin of her chest.

  When she finally falls asleep, the rose beetles zub down and investigate her hair. A moth flutters past her face, its wings vibrating with her breath. A small, brown scorpion marches across the sheet that covers her still limbs and scuttles off into the darkness on the other side.

  As Sam sleeps, she dreams that she wakes. In dream-time, the night wind that brushes her face has become breath. She can smell ground-up grass, and when she looks upwards, it’s into the wide nostrils and the long muzzle of Sam-the-horse. In the dark she can make out little more than the patch of white, and somewhere higher up, the gleam of his huge eyes, but she can feel his vivid, shocking presence all around her. She gets up from beneath her twisted sheets to stand before him, and reaches out a hand to touch the velvet of his nose. When she makes contact, a shock, like electricity, jolts up her arm and through her body and she is flung backwards. She flies through the rosebushes and continues on, falling fast back and down and down through the space where the ground should be but isn’t. Her stomach swoops and clenches until she jerks to real wakefulness with a gasp. With her cheek pressed against the cool, soft clover beside her pillow, Sam waits for her heart to slow back down.

  *

  ‘We’re not sure what we’re going to do without the two of you,’ Mrs McGovern says to Zama and Thuli once they’ve all finished singing the ‘jolly good fellow’ song. The ‘best of luck’ banner that Sam made with coloured felt-tip pen letters on pieces of paper
Sellotaped together and strung up across the blackboard has buckled under its own weight, and now seems to be wishing the sisters ‘best ofuck’. Keegan nudges Sam to point this out with a grin, but she struggles to smile back. Since she heard the news that Zama and Thuli’s father has been relocated to Botswana, and the sisters are leaving the area, she’s had an itchy uncomfortable feeling. She wants things to stop changing. She wants to find her ouma pottering in the garden when she gets home from school like she used to, instead of inside that close little bedroom. She wants Zama and Thuli to be here every day with their wide, perfect smiles and their dark brown eyes. But no matter how itchy she feels, nothing is staying the same.

  At the beginning of the school year, Sam was startled to discover a new member of the school group in the form of a tiny, six-year-old boy with auburn hair called Dale, the child of an English-speaking family, new to the valley. Even now, months later, his small autumn-toned presence in their midst feels like an intrusion. Dale’s arrival has also nudged Sam and Keegan out from their positions as youngest in the class, and Sam can’t help feeling that Mrs McGovern now expects more of her, somehow. She had to watch from the other side of the room as Mrs McGovern helped Dale to blow up the balloons for today’s party. She’s sure that her balloons were fuller and rounder and less inclined to deflate.

  At the front of the room, Zama and Thuli are now cutting the cake. Zama turned sixteen three weeks ago. She no longer wears floral skirts and coloured T-shirts. Now, she’s in black jeans that are so tight they look like pantyhose, and a white T-shirt with a skull on it. The skull comes dangerously close to the icing as she leans over the farewell cake to cut a slice.

  When her family moves out to the middle-of-nowhere in Botswana, Zama’s going to finish her schooling via correspondence like a grown-up. Mrs McGovern thinks it’s best to continue working with her this way as she’s so close to writing her matric finals, and starting a whole new school in a whole new country would be too much of an upheaval before the exams. Thuli will be enrolled in a boarding school to finish her education, and, after existing on a diet of ‘jolly hockey sticks’ type books over the past few months, has been talking non-stop about all the things she’s going to get up to with her new friends living in a dorm. It sounds awful to Sam. Just imagining being shut up in a place where she can’t leave to go home in the afternoons brings the dirty walls and sallow corridors of her Poppy days sliding in to the edges of her vision.

  ‘Here’s some cake for you.’ Sam is brought back to the sunny schoolroom when Nathan hands her a plate. He’s been different lately too. No more teasing Sam about her technophobia, no more ignoring her as if she’s one of his little brother’s toys that he couldn’t be bothered to play with.

  Sam doesn’t know that Keegan recently told his elder brother about her tirade of Afrikaans at the Super Saver a year ago, the one that sent the boarders scattering like startled pigeons. She’s no idea that the two boys scoured the internet for meanings to some of the words that Keegan could remember from her torrent of curses. It wasn’t easy finding translations for them, but what they did unearth left them wide-eyed and stunned. In their minds, Sam transformed from a familiar girl with a long white braid into a mysterious being with almost supernatural powers and sinister depths.

  *

  This winter, there’s snow on the tops of the highest mountains that ring the valley, and Sam can taste its white-cold breath in each of her own. The garden is a wet, icy quagmire filled with blackened stalks and silence. Sam is forced to remain indoors more than usual, and finds herself exploring deeper into the archives of Jem’s old book collection. One Sunday morning, she finds an aged paperback with a worn beige cover with the picture of a compass on it: Survival. A guide. The spine is soft and creased, and who knows how long it’s been lurking beneath that pile of detective novels with moisture-wrinkled edges.

  Sam turns the yellow, musty-smelling pages with their dense, small type, and starts to read. She rests her spine against the bookshelf and learns about the various ways in which you can collect water from overnight condensation if you’re stuck in the desert. She discovers how the patterning of moss on the trunks of trees can tell you where north is if you’re lost in a forest.

  I could survive on my own, she thinks. If I had to. This new knowledge is intoxicating. If she had to escape from Yolande again, she could run, and survive. If she found herself without Jem or Anneke to come home to, she could live wild on the hills around here, safe on her own, where no one could touch her. Sam draws her knees up beneath her jersey and reads about how best to skin a deer carcass. The mug of tea goes cold on the floor beside her.

  *

  By the time Sam is about to turn eleven that September, she’s read the survival book from cover to cover, and reread parts of it more than twice. As soon as the weather warms, she uses the book’s illustrated diagrams to experiment with building different kinds of campfires, and tries some of the suggested water-collection techniques, checking her buried Tupperware traps in the mornings before school and drinking each small, earth-flavoured yield.

  She is keen to try her hand at shelter-building, and starts planning how she’ll make one on one of the flatter spots on the lower hem of the hill. She chooses a location that’s just high up enough to allow her to see out beyond the U-shaped buildings and towards the road. From up there, hidden behind its camouflaged walls, she’ll be able to see if anyone suspicious approaches their home. Anyone too-thin with ratty brown hair and wrecked teeth and stone-filled eyes. As Anneke grows weaker and quieter, Sam starts to think of her planned shelter as ‘the lookout’. No longer an experiment, but a necessity.

  ‘You need a proper knife for that,’ Jem says when he finds her trying to strip the green bark from a selection of fruit tree canes that were recently pruned from the plum tree. Jem is startled to realise how much Sam has grown over the long, cold winter without him having noticed. It is as if the ice in the air has simultaneously shrunk his wife, now such a deflated little shape beneath her bedcovers, and nourished the girl into the beginnings of growing up. Sam’s white-blonde hair is so long now that she has to wind her braid back on itself in a loop to stop it from getting in her way when she works in the garden. As she battles with the bark on the fruit tree canes, Jem watches the rope-like bundle at the back of her head let loose new escapee wisps each time it swings.

  Sam’s eleventh birthday is dwarfed by Anneke’s worst flare-up episode of rheumatoid arthritis yet, and the day is a blur of pain management and fright. Late that night, while Anneke finally sleeps a doped-up sleep, Sam and Jem eat an improvised dinner at her bedside. Crackers spread with peanut butter and home-made plum jam for Sam, and the obligatory pilchards for Jem. There, at Anneke’s bedside, a pale-faced Jem finally hands his granddaughter her birthday gift. It’s Anneke’s father’s old hunting knife. It has a bone handle and a time-hardened leather sheath that fastens closed to ensure that you can wear it in a belt without any accidental stabbings. It even comes with a hard grey oblong of well-used whetstone. Sam gazes at the knife for long moments, and when she looks up to thank her grandfather, her eyes are full of wonder.

  As September ripens into October and the garden breathes again, Sam starts work proper on her lookout shelter. The knife is strange in her hands at first, big and quick and dangerous, but she soon masters the slice and the sweep of it. Her wooden building material is finally twig-free and smooth, and a pile of green bark strips lie softening in water, ready to be used to tie the construction together.

  Every evening, Sam sits at Anneke’s bedside and tells her how progress is going on the shelter. Neither one of them pretends that Anneke will ever see it, but Anneke is as invested in its construction as Sam is, keen to discuss the details and make suggestions. Does Ouma also think that I need to watch out for Yolande? Does she also think we’ll need a place to hide?

  ‘And for the roof?’ Anneke asks. Her face seems pale, tiny and childlike within its cloud of white pillows and even whiter
hair.

  ‘Well, I don’t want it to be too hot in there, so I’m going to grow one, Ouma, for insulation.’

  ‘Grow one?’

  ‘Using the grasses and some smaller fynbossies from the hill.’ Sam moves closer to Anneke to show her the picture in the survival book about creating a living roof using a waterproof barrier and a grid of wooden battens to hold the soil from slipping.

  ‘It looks heavy.’

  ‘Ja, I’m going to have to do a lot of reinforcing.’

  ‘You’ll have to water it.’ Anneke smiles at the image of her granddaughter teetering on a ladder with a watering can.

  ‘Especially at first, to get it established, but then because it’s indigenous, it should be OK. I’m worried that one big storm will wash it all away, though.’ Sam closes the book and rubs her hands. They ache from lashing poles together. Her fingernails are rimmed with a faint green colour from the strips of bark she’s been using. ‘Or the wind could just blow it all off. It’s probably not going to work.’

  ‘Then you can try again.’ Anneke shuts her eyes. The lids look as if they’ve been replaced with crumpled lilac silk. ‘A living roof. How magical. It would be like sitting inside the earth. If I had known it was even possible I would’ve done it to this place.’

  The scent of lemon blossom enters through the open window and washes over them both. There are fewer flowers on the tree this year, and the garden is slow to come to life. While the winter was particularly harsh, Sam knows the real reason: it’s because her ouma is no longer able to walk through it. The plants feel her absence like a vital nutrient is missing from the soil around their roots.