‘Sis, Daddy.’ Delia frowns at her father across the table. ‘Say pardon me.’ Sitting in her highchair, his daughter has the air of a diminutive princess issuing commands.
‘Haven’t you had enough, Charlie?’ Liezette is sitting up very straight, just like Delia. A pair of princesses. Any moment they’re going to order my head to be cut off. Something about the grandeur of the dining room with its heavy furniture and properly set table makes Charlie restless, not to mention the fact that their dinner is brought to them by a servant, for Christ’s sake. Who does that any more? Charlie tries to give the guy a sympathetic ‘you-and-me-are-on-the-same-side’ look, but the man refuses to catch his eye. Charlie moves his gaze up to the wooden ceiling beams that have been treated to look like aged oak from the 1800s. The whole place is doing its best to pose as an old Cape Dutch manor. What a pile of crap.
‘Wasn’t this house built in the eighties or something?’ Charlie spears a sweet potato with his fork. Too sweet, he thinks. What is it with these people? Why must every damn vegetable be coated in sugar?
‘What are you on about now, Charlie?’ Liezette’s expression is willing him to shut up.
‘Nineteen seventy-three,’ Old le Roux answers. With his neatly trimmed moustache, Liezette’s father looks like he’s just stepped out of 1973 himself. I bet he misses the old days, Charlie thinks, glancing at the coloured chap who stands by the door and waits to clear their plates for them. If the old fool has even realised that the apartheid era is over.
‘A good vintage, was it?’ Charlie struggles a little with the word ‘vintage’. How many beers is this now? It was only when they moved here a month ago that he learned that the old man doesn’t even make any wine, he just sends off his grapes to the cooperatives to be crushed and added to their communal fermenting vats.
‘Delia, why don’t you tell Daddy what you found today?’ Liezette steers the conversation into the three-year-old zone. Smart move. Delia, once prompted, can talk about herself for minutes on end without taking a breath. Something about the atmosphere at tonight’s dinner table has rendered his daughter silent, however. She looks at her mother with wide, worried eyes.
‘We found an old photo album, didn’t we?’ Liezette’s mother prompts. Her voice is so soft, and her comments so rare, that everyone leans forward in their seats a little. Delia looks from her mother to her grandmother, her fingers gripping the plastic handles of her child-size cutlery. Her small face begins to pink, starting with the rims of her ears.
‘Looks like your plan to change the subject has backfired, Liez,’ Charlie mutters to Liezette. He can feel the sneer curling his mouth, but is unable, somehow, to stop it. Delia’s own lip begins to tremble in response. ‘Look what you’ve done to the poor kid.’
‘It’s OK, my baby.’ Liezette rises from her chair and goes around the table to pick up their daughter. She holds the little girl against her chest and Charlie feels a cold spot opening inside his. He stares at the tender hollows in the back of his daughter’s knees and fights down the sudden urge to weep.
‘It’s all right, Delia,’ he says, pushing his own chair back and standing up too quickly. His head spins. ‘Naughty Daddy is going to go to his bed without any supper.’
‘Good.’ Liezette’s eyes glitter at him over her daughter’s dark pigtails. Charlie swipes at the table to grab his beer and clips the edge of le Roux’s wine glass as he does so. It wobbles, but the old man manages to steady it in time. He doesn’t look at Charlie.
‘Perhaps you should get a move on before you cause any more damage,’ Liezette hisses, and Charlie stumbles from the dining room with her voice fizzing in his ears.
*
Charlie sleeps on his back with his arms flung above his head and his knuckles grazing the walnut headboard. His snores fill the bedroom with the yeasty stench of breathed-out beer. Liezette would normally wake him and make him turn over, but she’s sleeping in Delia’s room tonight, so there’s nothing to shake Charlie from the clutches of his dreams.
In his dreaming, Charlie finds himself sitting beside his mother at the little craft table that she’d set up for him when he was six. The craft table had been painted yellow, and on it, Charlie’s mom used to arrange little tubs of things for him to create with. There was a tub of old buttons, one of pebbles, and numerous others filled with bits of things that they’d collected together. There were delicious-looking packages of Fimo clay for sculpting, a tin can full of coloured pencils, and heaps of paper, cardboard and glue. Every afternoon when he’d come home from school, his mother would sit with him at his craft table, helping him build castles and superhero badges, pencil holders, bows and arrows, and dinosaurs. She taught him simple origami, and sometimes let him use a sharp awl to punch patterns into her leather belts. She always wore them, even after he’d messed up.
After his mother died from leukaemia when Charlie was twelve, he’d abandoned his craft table, unable even to look at it without feeling as if he was drowning. It was only when he started high school a year later and was introduced to compulsory woodwork as a subject that he felt he might be able to breathe again.
Now, in the dreamtime, his mom looks just as she did in the years before she was diagnosed. Her face is tanned and her hair is brown and the harmonic of her shampoo makes it smell sweet and slightly fruity, like jelly babies. She’s wearing it plaited up into a single, long braid that pours down over her shoulder.
Wait.
His mother never wore a braid.
The braid is from somewhere else. For a moment, his dream scene slips from the room and skids out onto the dusty road he drove earlier today, where a girl rides a motorbike with silvery hair streaming out behind her.
‘Charlie?’ his mother says, and he’s back at the yellow craft table. Dream-Charlie is too big for the thing, and his adult legs cramp as he tries to squeeze them under.
‘What are we making today, Charlie-chops?’ his mom says, picking up a chunk of green Fimo. ‘Dinosaurs? Dragons? Daisies?’ She grins and nudges him with her elbow. Real. Alive.
‘Mom, I can’t make anything any more.’
‘What are you talking about, darling? Look at all this stuff. We’ve got the whole afternoon.’
‘No, I… you don’t understand. I can’t.’
Charlie’s dream-mom turns to him, her face full of encouragement. He notices that the lump of lime-coloured clay she’s holding has become patchy with dark mould. Something like watery tar drips out of it and through her fingers and splats down onto the yellow tabletop. ‘Why not, Charlie-chops?’ The dripping from the clay is getting worse, with more and more thin fluid sloshing out of it. Charlie suddenly realises that the more it drips, the less of his mother is left. She’s dissolving into the lump, all of her self being swallowed up and dripping down until there’s nothing but a slick puddle of dark slime.
Charlie jerks awakes when his fists slam into the headboard above his head. He is drenched in sweat and panting for breath. He stares into the pitch-dark bedroom, waiting for his heartbeat to slow. When, at last, it does, he gets up and puts on the clothes that he left lying on the floor before he collapsed into bed earlier. He follows the trail of discarded items and puts each one on as if trying to rewind back to a time when he hadn’t had that dream. No, before that, before dinner. He winces at the memory of it. He is fully dressed when he reaches the bedroom door. He opens it slowly, then creeps through the silent house and out into the night.
It’s drizzling outside. The cold spray on his face clears his head a little. He tiptoes over the gravel drive towards his van, gets in, turns on the headlights and lets down the handbrake, rolling the vehicle down the hill and away from the house so that he won’t wake anyone when he starts up the engine.
He sits in the cabin staring at the track that diverges up ahead. One path points towards the gate and the road beyond, and the other winds deeper into the farm, leading to the workshop. After five long, humming minutes, that’s the route he takes, navigating through
the mud towards the looming shape of the black hill against the dark purple sky, and the barn with its double doors and corrugated iron roof.
The lights flicker and then blaze on when he presses the switch, and everything is just as he left it: the chunk of tambotie on the floor, the rows of tools that have been extensions of his hands for so long, and the workbench with its waiting holes and little wooden dogs poking up into the stillness. Perhaps dense, dark tambotie was the wrong choice. He needs to work in something pale and silvery. Curly maple? He blinks away the image of a streaming blonde braid and takes a breath. Ash. Carefully, as if approaching a half-tame animal that might turn and snap at him at any moment, Charlie Rowan walks towards the wood.
CHAPTER TWENTY
EVER SINCE HE saw the white-braided girl on the motorcycle, and then dreamt about his mother and the yellow craft table, Charlie has barely left the workshop. He is up and dressed and driving to work before the spring sun has had a chance to soften the mountain air. It tastes clean, each breath filling his lungs with a freshness that finds its way into his work. Charlie, it can be said, is on a roll. The finished pieces that now stand at the far end of the barn have a life to them that seems to go beyond the warm tones of the finely sanded, painstakingly polished wood. As the sunlight strengthens into midday, and bands of gold slide through the open double doors and pool around Charlie as he works, the completed pieces in the shadows seem to glow in response, as if they’re still nourishing themselves on his fervent energy.
As he closes up the barn each night, he touches each item as he passes, his brief caress somehow refining the curves even further.
He missed dinner last night, only coming in long after everyone else had finished. Liezette had watched from the kitchen doorway as he’d stood at the counter and shovelled down the plate of dried-out lamb stew and creamed spinach without even noticing she was there.
Liezette wakes early. The curtains on the bedroom window are the same ones she had as a child, and in those first, fuzzy moments between sleeping and waking, the familiar pink glow of the day shining through them whisks her back into the past. It’s only after a minute that she remembers that she’s no longer a girl, and that there’s supposed to be a husband in the bed beside her.
When she sees that Charlie’s already up and gone, a little nagging feeling twists at the bottom of her belly, and despite spending the morning busy answering emails, collating orders and trying to stop Delia from destroying her grandfather’s study, by lunchtime the worry has wrapped itself tight around her insides.
And so, armed with a bag of sandwiches which she asked Angie the maid to make, Liezette drives down to the barn, her now-seldom-used city car bouncing over the rutted dirt road. On either side of her, the grafted vines shake their velvety new white-green leaves at the empty sky.
She cuts the engine and glances in the rear-view mirror to check her make-up. The twist around her guts has transformed itself into a nervous flutter. She pauses for a moment before striding towards the barn.
‘Charlie?’ she calls. ‘I brought you lunch.’ Liezette walks into the resin-scented hush feeling as if she’s entering a church in the middle of a service. The light streams through the open double doors at the far end of the workshop, and she has to blink to see Charlie there in the middle of it, his head and back haloed by a swarm of slowly descending fragments of wood dust.
‘Hey, babe?’ she says, and when he turns, the expression on his face is one of such intensity that Liezette realises what an intrusion her visit must be. She wishes she hadn’t come. ‘Sandwich?’ The wobble in her voice makes the word come out as a threat rather than an offering.
‘Oh yeah, hi.’ He wipes his forearm across his face. ‘Thanks, Liez.’ There are shavings of sawdust stuck all over his sweating skin, making him fuzzy around the edges, as if she’s unable to see him in anything but soft focus. Liezette approaches with the sandwiches held out in front of her: like one of the bloody three wise men in a Nativity play, she thinks, feeling like an idiot.
‘Put them down anywhere. Just in the middle of something.’ Charlie turns back to the workbench. Liezette places the packed lunch down, and watches him in silence for five long minutes before realising that this is it. This is all she’s going to get.
Liezette is very aware that when she exits the barn, Charlie doesn’t even register her leaving.
*
Liezette’s new horse is called Rolo, and while she wasn’t the one who named him, she’s in full agreement with whoever did. He’s exactly the colour of milk chocolate, and his large eyes are warm toffee brown. Rolo’s nature is just as sweet as the treat he’s named for, and when she walks towards the paddock with tears drying on her cheeks, he trots over and whiffles his soft nose all over her face in welcome.
Together, they head towards the stable so that she can put on her boots and saddle him up. She walks with a hand pressed against the warm velvet of his neck, feeling the huge muscles moving beneath his skin, and every now and then he gives her a little nudge with his shoulder, as if they’re both in on a private joke.
When she rides Rolo between the grapevines, with the mountains curving around the bowl of the valley and the sky open above their heads, Liezette doesn’t think of Charlie. She doesn’t think of how both strange and comforting it is to be living with her folks again, she doesn’t even think of Delia, who has occupied her every moment since she emerged, yelling, into the world three years ago. Riding Rolo is all about sensation. The curve of his ribs between her boots, the movement of his shoulder blades beneath her hands, the tickle on her fingers from that humorous little tuft of mane that bounces as he moves, and the sound of his breath and her own. Each hoof fall vibrates through the earth and up through his strong legs and into her spine, melding land, horse and human together into one, joyous, thought-free thing.
‘Mama!’ Delia’s sharp yell spears through the still evening air, and Liezette gallops back towards the paddock with her heart in her throat. ‘Hello, Mama.’ Her daughter is grinning. The yell was merely outrage that Liezette’s attention was elsewhere. Delia rides her grandmother’s hip with an air of entitlement. Liezette has the momentary impression that all that’s missing is a bit and a set of reins clutched in her daughter’s pudgy fist.
‘Ma, did you carry her like this all the way from the house?’
‘Ag, it’s no trouble.’ Antoinette le Roux gives Delia a kiss on the cheek and squints up to look at Liezette. ‘She was asking for you.’
‘We were just stretching our legs.’
‘You’ve been riding for ever.’ Delia scowls. ‘Come inside now.’
‘I will. In a minute. I have to brush him down first.’
‘Ooh, can I brush too?’
Rolo gives a snort as if he’s objecting to the idea. Liezette is equally reluctant to relinquish the quiet of the stable for Delia’s high-octane mix of babble and squealing. The realisation brings a stab of guilt.
‘Of course you can, my love. Come. You can help Mama brush Rolo down.’ Liezette dismounts. Her legs feel light and anchorless without the dense, vital body of the horse between them. She lifts her arms over the fence to take her daughter.
‘Thanks, Ma,’ Liezette says to Antoinette. Her mother looks small without her granddaughter on her hip. ‘For everything. You know.’
‘Shush, it’s just lovely to have you all here.’ Liezette knows that Antoinette has been waiting for her to return to the farm from the moment she left to go to university years ago. Liezette always resisted, and now here she is. She’s not sure if it’s a victory or a failure.
‘Where’s Daddy?’ Delia asks her as they walk hand in hand back towards the stables.
‘Daddy’s working.’ Rolo gives another well-timed snort. Liezette can’t help smiling.
‘He’s always working,’ Delia whines.
‘Now that’s not true,’ Liezette says, thinking of the past months of infuriating inactivity. ‘It’s just he’s got a lot of catching up to do.’
‘Soon.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘IT’S SAM’S BIRTHDAY today, you know.’ Keegan interrupts his mother in the middle of her explanation of a geometry theorem. Mrs McGovern smooths her hand over the textbook page with its network of intersecting lines, and glances at her son.
‘I know that, love.’
‘We always used to have cake for her birthday. Vanilla was her favourite.’ From across the classroom, the scratch of Dale’s pencil stops.
‘I can’t stand vanilla,’ Dale says. ‘What a waste of a cake. ALL cakes should be chocolate, don’t you think?’
‘How’s that cross-section diagram coming along, Dale?’ Mrs McGovern says with a pointed nod at his many rubbings out.
‘It’s coming,’ he mutters, and bends his head back over his work. With only two students left, Mrs McGovern’s concern can no longer really be called a school. The classroom has a brittle empty feel about it. She’s thinking of bringing in some couches or something, just to make it feel less cavernous.
‘Remember how last year she only wanted yellow balloons?’ Keegan says. Last year, they’d both turned sixteen. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed, Keegan thinks, and reddens at the memory of his clumsy attempt to kiss Sam years ago at the bottom of the bicycle-riding hill. In the years since then, his courage seems to have shrunk in direct proportion to her growing. He’s never summoned up the nerve to try again. And now she’s gone.
‘I remember.’ Mrs McGovern places a hand on Keegan’s, and then removes it again before he can get all cross and accuse her of embarrassing him.
‘Think she’ll come back, Ma?’ He sounds so young when he says this that Mrs McGovern’s heart clenches inside her chest.
‘I don’t know, Kee.’
‘She should. You should tell her to.’
‘She’s a very independent young lady. You know that.’
Bone Meal For Roses Page 14
