Bone Meal For Roses

by Miranda Sherry

  ‘A message?’

  ‘From someone through someone who called someone else. Reg passed it on. Think it’s from your Pretoria days. Some money-lender guys, maybe.’

  ‘What the hell are you rambling on about?’ A hot scratch of worry rises up the back of Yolande’s neck. Who’s she pissed off now? Which someone from what past wants to tell her something? For the first time today, Yolande can smell salty ocean, and the sweet-sour of dropped ice cream cones on hot tar. She waits, but Sabelo just raises the joint to his lips again, moving in slow motion, his lids lowered against the smoke. ‘Ag, you’re just baked, Belo.’ Yolande starts walking away. ‘I’m not hanging around for this shit.’

  ‘Nuhuh. You’re going to want to hear this one, Ratty. It’s about family.’

  ‘Ha, well that’s where you’re wrong.’ Yolande barks out a laugh. ‘I haven’t got any.’

  Sabelo leans back against his tree trunk and raises one of his patchy eyebrows. Yolande’s forced cackle splutters and dies. She shifts from foot to foot. She can feel the sand now, grinding between her sweating toes.

  ‘OK then, tell me, if you’ve got something to tell me,’ she relents. Sabelo smiles.

  ‘According to my sources, you’ve got an aunty trying to get hold of you.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An aunty, man. You know, some nice old tannie from back at the farm or whatever. Determined old gogo. She’s been trying to get a message to her lost little niece out there in the big bad world.’

  Yolande’s head spins. The skin suddenly feels too tightly stretched across her jaw.

  ‘What, Sabelo?’ All pretence of cool has gone from Yolande’s voice. She steps closer. ‘What’s the message?’

  Sabelo pinches out the last, gritty end of his joint and looks at Yolande with his pink, down-turned eyes. He shakes his head, then scratches a scab on his arm.

  ‘It’s your mama,’ he says at last, and Yolande’s mind scrambles for purchase on the word. She sees a flash of silver hair, a pair of muddy gardening gloves lying on a wooden table. An alien ache begins to claw at the space behind her eyes. ‘They say she’s dead. There’s going to be a funeral.’

  For a moment, the ache becomes blindness, and Yolande has to reach out and grip the front of Sabelo’s stained T-shirt to steady herself.

  ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Sorry, man.’

  Yolande is very still, and then suddenly she steps back and straightens her spine.

  ‘Well don’t be.’ Yolande wipes her hands on the seat of her jeans. ‘She was a bitch.’

  ‘Right.’ Sabelo resumes his lean against the tree and crosses his arms over his sunken chest. ‘So. Would the bitch have left you anything, then? Money? Inheritance?’

  Yolande looks out over the parking lot towards the beach and the blue stripe of sea beyond. She’s remembering the rings on her mother’s fingers: a wedding band and a pretty diamond on a strand of white-gold. They never suited the woman’s too-rough, garden-mud fingers.

  ‘Dunno,’ she says. Something about Yolande’s too-wide, brown-toothed grin slices through Sabelo’s weed-induced fog and turns his belly to ice. ‘Maybe I’ll have to just go and see.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THERE ARE TWO, ragged-barked gum trees standing in the graveyard, but their dappled shade is no match for the blazing heat. Dry grass crunches beneath the new shoes that Sussie bought for Sam to wear to the funeral service. They’re hard and shiny black, and look to Sam like two lost beetles poking out from beneath her new dress. The beetles seem to have no idea which way to go to escape either the boiling glare, or the suffocating blanket of sadness that cloaks the valley.

  Sam holds Jem’s hand very tight. In contrast to her trembling, he is motionless and solid, a rooted tree. The black beetles shift closer to his shade. Sam finally lifts her gaze from her shoes and squints at the gathered crowd. A big turnout, Gerrie had said before the service, and Sam thinks that everyone who lives in town, and on all the outlying farms, must be here. She spots Mrs McGovern with Keegan and Nathan accompanied by the seldom-seen Mr McGovern in a dark suit. Keegan sees her looking, lifts a hand to wave, and then thinks better of it, blushing an awkward pink.

  Sam looks back down at the beetles, and then up again.

  There’s the Vosloos and dour Betty from the Super Saver. There are a large group of farm workers, neat in their Sunday best, with gleaming combed hair and sweating faces. Sam even spots the boarder girl she shouted at that one time, with her brown fringe and her shoulders too wide for her navy blue dress, standing with her family. Everyone is blinking their eyes against the burning light.

  ‘Le Roux.’ Sam’s not sure if Jem has spoken the word, or merely exhaled, but the syllables somehow coalesce in the still air, making Sam turn her head to follow his gaze. There, at the back of the gathering, stands a large, bearded man beside a soft-faced wife. Beside them, it must be, it has to be, is the laroo-girl. The laroo-girl is a woman now, tall and elegant in black strappy sandals and knee-length skirt, but Sam recognises the dark silk swish of her ponytail, remembering the way it had blown out in the wind on that day in the orchard, just like the horse’s tail. Two whipping, brown flags in a rain of white petals. The memory brings with it a rush of Anneke’s flowers-and-lanolin scent. Sam can almost feel the pressure of her grandmother’s arm against hers, just as it was on that day long ago in the front seat of the bakkie.

  To avoid the ache that builds behind Sam’s eyes each time she thinks of her ouma, she concentrates hard on staring at the all-grown-up laroo-girl. Instead of the reins of a horse, the laroo-girl is now holding the hand of a young man with tousled hair who looks like he doesn’t quite fit into his suit.

  ‘Ah, the much talked-about fiancé,’ Sam hears someone whisper in Afrikaans. ‘I hear he’s an Englishman, from Cape Town.’

  ‘Old le Roux can’t like that much. How’s some city-boy going to look after his precious grapes?’

  ‘That’s what everyone said when Jeremy Harding married Anneke, and look how that turned out. He grew the best nectarines in the whole Western Cape.’

  ‘Ja, but Jem is different. His love for Annie was… something else.’

  ‘I know, and now… so sad, hey?’

  ‘Ja.’

  So sad.

  The syllables shuffle and rustle like dry leaves, and Sam closes her eyes, leaning against her grandfather to keep herself upright. So sad so sad. The words are too small to describe the horror of the quiet bedroom back home, with the quilt that Anneke once stitched now so flat on the bed without her beneath it.

  On long-ago early mornings, Sam used to crawl in beneath that quilt beside her ouma. To the background soundtrack of the running-tap-and-clanking noises of Jem making coffee in the kitchen, Anneke would take Sam on imaginary journeys through the landscape created by the different fabric squares. Walking their fingers across the quilt, they would explore perfect planted rows of grapevines in a striped patch, and then the complex grid of a city played out in plaid. They would take their finger-people (Sam’s small and grubby, and Anneke’s sun-spotted and swollen-knuckled) wandering across lawns and seas and through sandy deserts. Sam’s favourite squares were the rare ‘forest ones’, which Anneke had snipped from a treasured piece of Liberty print that she’d once gotten as a gift. The fabric was deep green with repeating, complex swirls, and Sam had imagined tiny forest creatures watching them from between the stylised fronds.

  So sad.

  Sam clutches Jem’s hand and feels a tiny part of herself, deep inside, curl up and crawl away to where she knows she will never be able to find it again.

  *

  After the earth has been replaced over the coffin that Sussie insisted on, despite Jem’s suggestions of a cremation, after the ham sandwiches and milk tartlets that Sussie served for the funeral tea have all been eaten, and after Sam and Jem have climbed into the bakkie to head back to their too-silent house, a figure emerges from behind a clump of bushes on the rise leading up to the family graveyard.


  It’s a woman, but barely. Living has worn her thin. Even her hair is emaciated, its colour leached out to a dusty, hessian grey. The woman is dried out and ashen like the shed skin of a snake, but one that walks about wearing men’s dark glasses, skinny faded jeans, and a T-shirt with a stain on the front of it.

  Yolande trudges up to the grave and stops. She touches the freshly turned earth with the toe of one scuffed trainer. Her foot sinks a little into the soft soil. She pushes harder, grinding her sole over the place where she imagines that her mother lies. With her father, evidently, still alive, there will be nothing for her here. Not yet. She’s going to have to wait some more. Yolande flicks the butt of her cigarette into the divot her foot has made, turns and walks away, back down the hill to wherever it is that she came from.

  Nobody sees her but the waving blue gums and the sky.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AFTER THE SOLITARY, silent weeks that followed the funeral, the first days back at school are dreamlike and strange for Sam. For a while, everyone treats her as if she’s made of fragile blown glass, liable to shatter at any moment, but by the end of February, the classroom regains its rhythm and there are moments when Sam almost forgets that her life is no longer what it used to be.

  Today, the wind is on edge, buffeting the eaves, shaking the plants and scouring sand across the classroom window panes. By the time classes are over, it has died down, but the fine Karoo silt that’s been blowing in all morning, travelling up the mountains and over the vineyards and fruit trees, seems to have coated everything in a peach-coloured powder. Sam can feel it clinging to her sweat-sticky limbs as she climbs on to Keegan’s bicycle for her turn to freewheel down the hill, and when she pushes off, she can taste its bitter grittiness in her mouth. The rushing air whips Sam’s hair back from her boiling neck, and she gives a high laugh as the bicycle swoops down the wide, empty street.

  ‘Nice one,’ Keegan calls out after she brakes and swerves at the bottom of the hill and starts pedalling back towards where he waits for his turn at the top. ‘Told you you’d like it.’

  ‘I never said I wouldn’t.’ She’s out of breath when she brings the bicycle to a stop beside him. ‘I just wasn’t sure I felt like it in this heat.’ Keegan’s hand is clammy with sweat as he takes the handlebars from her. ‘I’m surprised that you do, to be honest, Keegan. I thought you stayed inside playing computer games in the afternoons these days.’

  ‘No need. With the boarders back in their barracks,’ he grins, ‘the town is ours again.’

  He gives a whoop as he barrels down the hill, and his slender shape seems to dissolve into the heat haze that hangs over the road. Now that she’s no longer moving, Sam can feel the hot thick blanket of summer pushing down on her once more. She wipes the sweat on her forehead with the back of her wrist, but then has to lift the corner of her T-shirt to wipe away the resulting smear of pale orange mud.

  ‘If you’re planning on stripping down…’ Sam turns to see Nathan sauntering up to her with his hands in the pockets of his shorts. A sheen of moisture glistens over the faint new fuzz on his top lip. ‘Don’t let me stop you.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘Lifting your top up like that. Could be taken the wrong way, you know.’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  Nathan’s cheeks redden, and Sam turns away before he can say anything else. She watches Keegan cycle up the hill, elbows out and knees pumping. There’s an urgency to his movements that wasn’t there earlier when it was just the two of them. He skids to a stop and scowls at his elder brother.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Just chatting.’

  ‘Here, Sam, it’s your go.’ Keegan thrusts the bike at her.

  ‘Maybe she’s had enough of playing around with your baby toys, Keegan.’

  ‘What do you know?’ Keegan hurls back. Sam stares at them both for a moment, and then launches off back down the hill on the bike, biting the wind and relishing the stomach-swoop as her speed builds towards the bottom of the dip.

  When she turns the bike around, she sees that Keegan and Nathan are still arguing. She can’t hear what they are saying from here, but the two little figures at the top of the rise are gesticulating furiously. She wheels the bicycle into the grass beside the road and sits down in the shade of the old karee tree. She leans her back against its rough bark and closes her eyes, but the heat still pricks and pulls at her, itching her skin.

  Eventually, Keegan wanders down the slope, kicking up dust with his trainers and muttering curses. Every so often, he turns back to make sure that Nathan is no longer watching him. The road is empty, except for a small, dome-shelled tortoise that is making its way across the orange sand.

  ‘Hey,’ he says when he gets close enough to Sam, who is still sitting, eyes closed, against the tree. Her eyes fly open. As always, Keegan is taken aback by their impossible pale watery blue. He jams his hands into his pockets. He pokes at a tuft of dry grass with his toe. ‘Too tired to cycle up the hill again?’

  Sam shakes her head and closes her eyes again. ‘Too tired to get in the middle of your and Nathan’s sibling stuff.’

  ‘Right.’ Keegan sits down beside her with a huff of breath. ‘My brother’s being a dork.’

  Sam says nothing. A breeze moves the long tapered leaves on the branches overhead, and the dappled spots of shade dance across Sam’s cheeks and closed eyelids.

  ‘He thinks you’re too grown up to be playing with me but that’s not true because we’re the same age.’ Keegan steals a look at the long white braid draped over Sam’s shoulder. It reminds him of the twisted-looking horn of a unicorn in one of the picture books he used to love when he was little. Would the braid be warm to the touch? Springy or soft? His heart is hammering beneath his sweaty T-shirt. ‘Don’t you think, Sam?’

  ‘Of course. Nathan doesn’t know what he’s talking about half the time.’ She blinks her eyes open again, but doesn’t look at him. She is gazing up the road. ‘Is that a tortoise?’

  Keegan doesn’t hear the question over the sudden swish and thump of the blood rushing through his ears. He’s going to do it. He has to. He knows that it’s too soon, far too soon, but if he doesn’t, he gets the feeling that Nathan just might, and that cannot happen. It just cannot.

  ‘Sam.’ His voice comes out in a strange croak, and she turns to him then, her pale eyes on his, unreadable. With a funny little gasp and a jerk, he moves forward and kisses her, quickly, on her slightly open mouth.

  Sam pulls back. ‘What are you…’

  Keegan holds his breath. Everything is very still, even the breeze has stopped. Sam frowns.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  Keegan blinks at her. Surely it’s obvious? But Sam’s frown deepens. She seems genuinely baffled.

  ‘I don’t… know,’ he lies. He tries to smile. Sam turns to look up the road again, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Wiping away his kiss. Keegan’s chest crunches in.

  ‘Look, it is a tortoise!’ She jumps up and trots towards the dark little creature that’s trundling through the dust. ‘Let’s help him off the road in case a car comes.’

  Keegan’s eyes fill with sudden tears and the red road and the girl and the tortoise all blur into a shimmering hot mess. He touches his mouth with the back of his hand as if to hold the taste of her on his lips: fresh and strange and almost sweet, like water.

  *

  The bakkie’s headlights snake along the bottom of the dark bowl of the pre-dawn valley. It overpowers the moonlight that Sam knows is bright tonight. She knows it is because they’ve timed this carefully. They’ll need a full moon.

  She forces her sleep-gritty eyes to stay open by staring at the stripes of light from the headlights illuminating the road ahead. Jem is silent in the driver’s seat beside her, and in the back of the bakkie, tucked up against each other and rattling around under the stars, are the plants.

  Months ago, Jem showed Sam how to take cuttings fr
om each of Anneke’s rose bushes. He showed her where to snip with sterilised secateurs, how to remove the buds and leaves and moisten the end of each cutting in her mouth before inserting it into a raw potato. It’s important to make the hole in the potato first so that you don’t damage the end of the cutting, he’d said, handing her a screwdriver whose shaft was about the same diameter as the rose stems. She’d slotted a licked stalk snugly into each potato before Jem showed her how to bury them in good loose soil, tamp them down hard, and make a little greenhouse with a plastic bottle over the top for each of them. Now, three months later, they have a new little rose plant for each of the bushes that Anneke nurtured and watered and whispered to for so many years. The stalks have hardened off well and the roots have grown, feeding first on the starchy tuber and gaining strength before venturing out into the soil. All through late summer, autumn and early winter, the new bushes grew, sending out small leaves and a few cautious buds, until last week, when they were pruned back along with their parents in preparation for spring.

  Yesterday evening, Jem and Sam dug up the baby rose stalks and wrapped each little clod of dirt and roots into careful bundles of sacking before tying them with string. Now the new plants, little more than thorn-covered twigs, bounce against each other in the bakkie basin along with piles of compost and a tub of bone meal, two spades, a trowel, and a sack of brown bulbs, collected from the garden and rustling their oniony skins against each other in the darkness.

  Jem parks the bakkie as close as he can to the little family graveyard beneath the blue gum trees in the dip behind a low hill. Without saying a word, Sam climbs out of the cabin and goes to the back to help him unload. With the headlights switched off, their eyes begin to adjust to the blue moonlight, and Sam is astonished at how much she can see: the snail-trail-silver road winding down the hill behind them, the dark trees against the darker sky with the mountains rearing up in the distance. She can easily make out the little granite headstone that marks her grandmother’s grave.