Bone Meal For Roses

by Miranda Sherry

  *

  Without Zama and Thuli, the schoolroom feels huge and quiet. After break, Mrs McGovern sometimes reads out emails that she’s received from Zama in Botswana. Very hot, seems to be the prevailing theme. Zama appears to be studying for next year’s upcoming final exams from inside a spit-warm swimming pool, with her notes and books spread out on the baking ground beside it. Sam’s imaginings of middle-of-nowhere Botswana did not include such things as swimming pools, and she has to reconfigure her mental image to fit one in.

  The new boy, Dale, has finally stopped crying every morning when his mother drops him off, and has taken to following Keegan around like a small, russet-headed duckling. Keegan doesn’t mind. Sam is no longer particularly keen on playing superhero games at lunchtime, and Dale makes a willing sidekick, and is much easier to boss around.

  Sam usually spends her lunchtime reading out on the lawn by the agapanthus plants, shifting into the patch of shade and out again to warm up in the October sun. Like a cat, thinks Nathan, who has been watching her through the window of the classroom instead of looking at the computer screen. Only cats don’t have such strange pale eyes.

  He leaves the computer and wanders outside. There’s a robin on the grass, right by Sam’s foot. Her stillness has made the little creature brave. Either that, or stupid, Nathan thinks, imagining her as a cat again.

  ‘What’s that you’re always reading?’ Nathan’s voice startles both the girl and the bird, and one of them takes flight with a shudder of wing-flaps. Sam looks up at Nathan, but with the sun at his back, she can’t make out his expression. She can smell him, though. It seems that along with the sudden height and the hardening of Nathan’s limbs, turning fourteen has switched on something inside him that leaks out in the heat of the sun. An oniony, mannish smell, reminiscent of the farm labourers that Sam greets whenever she passes them in Main Street. Reminiscent, too, of the shadowy man-shapes from her Poppy-days. It makes her think of the frizz of Karel’s leg hair and the lump of Jason’s Adam’s apple beneath his scrubby stubble.

  ‘It’s an old book of my grandpa’s,’ Sam answers at last, when it becomes clear that Nathan won’t leave until she does.

  ‘It must be riveting.’

  Sam shrugs. As if protecting a secret, she covers the book with both hands.

  ‘Clearly more interesting than my little brother, hey?’ Nathan’s grin goes unseen as Sam turns then to watch Keegan and Dale on the jungle gym. ‘But it’s a normal thing that you guys are no longer so close, you know. Girls develop faster than boys.’

  Something about the way he says ‘develop’ makes Sam’s stomach lurch. She stands and moves past him towards the classroom.

  ‘Time to go in now,’ she says.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AS THE HEAT of summer continues to build, Jem and Sam carry Anneke out into the garden every evening and place her, as gently as they can, onto an old garden lounger puffed with pillows that has now found a permanent place in the centre of the clover between the roses. Each time they make the journey out into the fragrant air, and then back into the house again later, Jem can tell that his wife is just that little bit lighter in his arms than she was the last time. It is only Anneke’s silver hair, which Sam combs and braids into a long rope just like she does with her own, that seems to be unaffected by the illness that is eating at her. Whenever he can, Jem holds this braid in his garden-rough hand, clutching it as if it is a lifeline that can tow him back in time to when his wife was solid and worried about her weight, and laughed loudly, and banged about in the kitchen when baking rusks.

  One warm evening in late November, Anneke sits up from her garden pillows with a startled grunt.

  ‘Sam?’ she says, staring beyond the yellow rose bush.

  ‘I’m right here, Ouma.’

  ‘No, my sweetheart,’ Anneke turns to smile at her granddaughter, ‘not you.’ A soft breeze lifts the hair at Sam’s temples. She feels a sudden chill rising up through the earth and the clover and into her bare feet, into her bones.

  ‘What is it, love?’ Jem’s fingers tighten around his wife’s springy braid as if letting it go would send her drifting off and up, like a fairground balloon from a sleepy child’s fingers.

  ‘Nothing really. I just… I thought…’ Anneke gives a little laugh and places her misshapen hand onto her husband’s knee.

  Sam looks up at the sky. It’s still too early for stars. The sky is still pale blue with a pinking edge to the west. A wisp of unseasonal cloud hangs high and quiet above their heads.

  ‘Who were you talking to, Ouma?’

  Anneke lifts her hand as if to touch something in the air before her.

  ‘Glowing white, like the arum lilies,’ she says, still smiling.

  ‘Oh God.’ Jem drops the hair rope and rubs his hands over her face. ‘I gave you more this morning, because the pain was so bad in the night. The doctor said I could increase the dose. But this…’

  Sam’s feet feel numb on the cooling clover. Her mouth is dry, and she can’t seem to swallow. She knows her grandfather is talking about the brown glass bottle with the black lid and the pharmacy prescription label that reads ‘morphine’ that sits on Anneke’s bedside table.

  ‘Oh God,’ he says again. There are puddles of shimmering wetness in the lower rims of his eyes.

  ‘Grandpa.’ Sam reaches across Anneke to touch his hand. In her survival book, there’s a section all about soldiers and survival in the fields of war. She knows that they carry little vials of morphine to administer to the injured, the dying.

  Sam’s whole body gives a shudder and her throat aches, but then, quite suddenly, the urge to weep is transformed into something else. Something new. Sam feels totally clear and empty inside, as if a flash storm has rushed through her and washed everything out. She blinks at the yellow rosebush. She’s sure, for a fleeting moment, that she can detect the edge of something moving in the deepening dark beyond it. She hears the faint, raspberry blowing noise of a horse huffing out a breath. She leans her head against her grandmother’s side and closes her eyes.

  *

  In the hushed charcoal-coloured hours of early morning, Jem starts awake. There’s the shrill peep of a cricket coming from the space beneath the chest of drawers, and he can hear the whump-whump whirr of the fan. He pushes himself up onto his elbows and blinks into the gloom. What woke him?

  ‘Je…’ It’s a croak, inhuman-sounding.

  Anneke.

  He fumbles for the switch on his bedside lamp, and with the sudden yellow burning his sleep-sore eyes, turns to where his wife lies beside him in the bed. Anneke’s eyes are wide, and she moves her mouth as if trying to talk, but all that comes out is a slurred rasp of breath.

  ‘Love? What is it?’ Jem takes her hand, and her thundering pulse beats beneath his fingertips. Her gaze swivel towards his for a moment, and then away.

  ‘No.’ He stumbles from the bed. ‘Wait. Not now. Not yet.’ Jem knows, as he races out of the room, slipping on the rug and just catching himself on his way to the telephone in the kitchen, that he’s breaking their agreement. He knows that he is doing exactly what he promised he wouldn’t. But now, in the middle of the night, with the shadows pressing in against the windows and the floorboards hard beneath his bare feet, he also knows just what a fool he was to think he could do otherwise. To think he could let her go without a fight.

  The receiver is slick and solid in his trembling hand. He promised no hospitals, no ambulances. He dials, shuts his eyes, leans against the wall, and sucks a frantic breath through the tight band that has pulled in around his throat. As the phone rings on the other end, he indulges in a brief fantasy of his wife, alive, furious, sitting up in a hospital bed and admonishing him for not being strong enough, for breaking their agreement. Every particle of his being urges the universe forward to that longed-for moment.

  It must happen.

  Anneke.

  *

  Sam stands on the cracked, baking tar of the hospital
parking lot. The blue has bled from the sky, leaving a bleached, agonising whiteness that burns. When she closes her eyes, dizziness engulfs her and she has to sit down heavily to stop from falling.

  ‘Sam!’

  Her nostrils fill with alien parking lot smells: hot rubber, grease and petrol. Someone close by starts a car with a roar, and she breathes in the stench of its exhaust fumes. Her stomach twists and lurches. If she’d had a chance to eat anything today, it would be pouring out of her in a hot snake of sick and splashing down her T-shirt.

  ‘Sam!’ The clomp of feet running towards her is followed by hands in her armpits, pulling her upright. It’s her uncle Gerrie. She can tell without opening her eyes. He always wears so much deodorant, it smells like he baths in it.

  ‘You could get run over out here. What are you doing?’ Gerrie lifts her up in his arms as if she is seven rather than eleven, and carries her back to the safety of the hospital lobby. The sure movements of his muscular frame are comforting. She rests her head on his shoulder, eyes still closed.

  ‘Yissis, I’m so, so sorry about your ouma, kind,’ he croons once they’re inside, swaying with her in his arms. ‘Such a terrible thing. And so sudden, even after her being sick so long, hey?’ Sam breathes in. She can now detect a salty layer of sweat beneath the overpowering deodorant. She’s glad of the onslaught of smells. It’s something to focus on. ‘And I’m sorry about how I made you worried because I wanted your grandpa’s land for a guest house, that one time.’ His voice is thick with tears. ‘I never meant to make you think you’d lose your home. Especially after all the kak you’ve been through, kind.’ It seems the drama of the morning has opened a sluice gate of sorry inside Uncle Gerrie. He keeps on talking, calling her ‘kind’ every so often, but Sam stops listening. It’s too much to manage: both breathing and listening. Not now. Not today.

  *

  ‘Right, then,’ Sussie says as she steps out onto the stoop. She and Gerrie have stripped the bed, bundled the bedding into the wash, and carried the mattress outside to dry in the sun.

  Ouma peed herself, Sam thinks. Dying must be really scary.

  ‘You won’t be able to use the mattress for a day or two, Jem.’ Sussie’s voice is brisk and businesslike, but the rest of her seems to have dissolved. She stumbles a few steps before sinking down into one of the cane chairs. She stares in front of her, hardly blinking.

  It’s taken Sam all day to figure out why her great-aunt looks so strange, but now she gets it: Sussie is not wearing any make-up. Sussie always wears make-up.

  ‘But in any case, I think you two should definitely come back with me tonight,’ Sussie says.

  Sam turns away and glares at the garden. The green swims and shimmers.

  ‘We need to talk about the funeral, Jeremy.’ As soon as she utters the word ‘funeral’, Sussie starts crying again. Sam digs her fingernails into the palms of her hands to stop herself from starting up again too. She glances at her grandfather. He is sitting dead still with his back straight. His brown hands, loose and lost-looking, rest in his lap.

  ‘She wanted to be buried here.’ Jem knows that he’s already broken one promise so easily. He tries to fight away the image of his wife in the ambulance earlier. Again, he sees the tube shoved between her teeth and fed down her delicate white-skinned throat, watches needles puncturing her flesh, medics handling her precious body with cursory professionalism.

  ‘There’s the family graveyard at the farm. Every member of our family has been buried there since my grandfather’s father. You know that’s where she’ll be buried.’ From the way that Sussie’s jaw juts out, Sam can tell she’s clenching her teeth.

  ‘But…’ Jem’s voice comes out soft. Weak. ‘She wanted—’

  ‘You can’t put her in the bloody garden, Jeremy.’ Sussie turns on him, tear-streaked and vicious. ‘This is the real world, man. For one precious moment, will you stop being such a damn dreamer?’

  ‘Anneke—’

  ‘She was my sister. She wasn’t just your wife. She was…’ Sussie gasps for breath between heaving sobs, ‘ours too.’

  ‘Ma?’ Gerrie steps out onto the stoop. ‘Come now. It’s OK.’ He puts a hand on her shuddering shoulder and darts an apologetic look over the top of her head towards Jeremy.

  ‘Before you. She was ours,’ Sussie whispers, hands over her face. Sam digs her nails into her hands even harder. She will not cry. Not now. She bites her bottom lip.

  ‘I think we need to head back to the farm and give these guys some space. Come, Ma.’ Gerrie helps Sussie stand. ‘We will discuss the funeral plans and that tomorrow. I think that’s best.’ He looks at Sam and tries to smile, fighting his mouth which keeps pulling down into a sob, and then turns to Jeremy. ‘I am so sorry for your loss, Oom.’

  When the wooden gate rattles shut behind Sussie and Gerrie, the whole garden seems very still and quiet. Sam holds her breath along with it. Her head thumps with blood in time with her heart. She stares out over the garden to the dark patch in the far corner beneath the oak tree where Sam-the-horse rests.

  ‘She should be buried here, Grandpa.’

  ‘I know.’ If he hadn’t called the ambulance, if he’d behaved like she’d asked him to, she would’ve died here. Her body would still be his to protect.

  ‘But that’s not going to happen.’

  ‘No.’

  And then at last, looking out of the garden that they planted together, with the sunlight touching the tops of the bright leaves of the lemon tree, Jem begins to weep.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  YOLANDE LICKS THE scab at the corner of her lip and tastes metal. Some thin type of stuff, without shine. Tin. She tastes like tin. The thought makes her smile, and the crusted blood tugs at her skin when she does so, pulling her out of shape. Yes, tin is malleable and dentable, but endlessly recyclable.

  Yolande is recyclable. She’s eco-friendly. Greener than green. She’s filling no landfill, not yet. She’s gotten herself a whole new life once more. Like a used tin can, she’s melted herself down again and again, forming up into the same shape each time. A vessel to pour chemicals into. A can of worms.

  But there’s a blank space inside it where an aching memory used to sit. Yolande can sometimes feel the jagged edges of the forgotten thing, raw and sharp. Whenever she senses it, her persistent need for oblivion sprouts vicious teeth that rip at her until she smokes something to push them under again.

  Yolande is wearing clothes that have been worn and faded to the colour of leaking rubbish bins and dark corners, perfect for blending in with the city night. Yolande dislikes the term ‘cat burglar’ to describe her craft because cats are sneaky little buggers and too clever by half, always sucking up to people and purring to get what they want. Yolande’s days of sucking up and purring have been used up and wrung out. Only the blind-drunkest of men, or the dead-eyed-empty ones, fall prey to whatever wiles she can thrust at them. She’s got far too few teeth for one thing (although to some, that can be a selling point), and has found that robbery is more lucrative than getting some guy to be interested enough in her scrawny beef to let her freeload off him and his stash like she used to in the old days.

  No. Yolande thinks of herself as a ‘rat burglar’. Twitchy, quick and skinny enough to squeeze through places people never think to lock. She’s been operating her own little thievery concern for over a year now, and she’s thriving. She’s living ‘hand to mouth’, or more accurately ‘needle to vein’, so she doesn’t need much. She scuttles from city to town to another city to another town before she can get too complacent and get nabbed. She’s always one step ahead on her scaly little paws. Ducking out of sight just in front of the sleek clever cats and the big, stinky dogs that like to run in packs, robbing with brute force and working for syndicates. Yolande tried that for a bit, but she’s not a team player. She had to leave Durban in a hurry to prevent things from getting ugly. Uglier.

  For now, she’s the rat-bitch, tin-can queen of Port Elizabeth. Small towns ca
n make things tricky if you’re not careful, but it’s always easier to get to grips with the local scene. It didn’t take Yolande long to sniff out the right types to score from, the right types to sell to, and some nice dark little corners where she can take her medicine in peace.

  Yolande slips around the edge of the beachfront parking lot. Salt-rimed sand crunches beneath her flip-flops and jumps over their rims and in between her toes. She doesn’t notice. Her attention is elsewhere. This is a good place for lucky-dipping and sneaky-snitching. At this time of year, the beach is packed, and holidaymakers often leave their phones and wallets in their cars so they can flop about on the sand and run into the sea unencumbered. Sure, they hide their precious goodies, but Yolande can spot the telltale bulge of something slipped under the floor mat on the passenger side, or a too-carefully placed cardigan hiding a handbag or an iPad. She’s getting better and better at jimmying the locks, and makes her way over to the spot where she hides the wire she keeps handy for the job.

  ‘Hey, skinny.’ Yolande just about jumps out of her skin when Sabelo calls out to her, but she scowls instead, plays it cool. She saunters over to where he stands in the shade of a scrubby tree.

  ‘Fuck do you want?’ she asks when she’s close enough to smell the sick-herb stench of the permanent weed-cloud that surrounds him. Sabelo’s eyes are salmon-pink-stoned in the deep brown of his face. A puff might lessen the mad sun heat, but Yolande needs to be sharp for her lucky dipping. She’s rushing nicely anyway, no need for a downer. She waves the offered joint away and asks again: ‘What makes you think you can order me over like some kind of waitress, hey?’

  ‘You came, didn’t you?’

  ‘Ag, bugger off, Belo, I don’t have time for this now.’

  ‘No wait,’ he drawls as Yolande turns away. ‘I’ve got a message for you.’