Bone Meal For Roses

by Miranda Sherry

  *

  The air is so still that the late afternoon heat seems to suck the breath from the barn. With Sam following a little way behind, Charlie moves outside to work in the yard which, at this time of the day, lies in the shadow of the building. Out here, at least, there’s hope of a breeze. Charlie settles on the ground with his work between his splayed legs. He’s doing the final rounds of fine sanding on the pieces which will make up the legs of a slim coffee table. Each leg is pale African pear wood and just different enough in shape to give the finished piece an alive look, as if it might just stroll off the living room rug. He wants to make the one-day buyers of the table feel honoured that the piece is choosing to stay with them rather than leave, much like the owners of a sleek and independent cat.

  Even out here, the air is motionless and heavy. Sweat slides down his nose and runs over his ribs.

  ‘Some water,’ he says to the watching girl, indicating the half-full plastic bottle at his side. ‘Please have. It’s a furnace out here.’

  She moves closer at a crouch, as if the heat is forcing her to stay low to the ground. When she takes the bottle, the backs of her knuckles brush the fabric of his jeans and Charlie can feel their faint trace like a line of tingling cold on his thigh. He turns to watch her drink, eyes riveted on the movement of her throat beneath her creamy skin.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says without meaning to, and her eyes lock on his. ‘Don’t finish all of it, hey.’

  She holds out the bottle, but instead of taking it from her, he wraps his fingers around hers so that they’re both holding on to it. Keeping her gaze steady on his, the girl moves the bottle to his lips, into his mouth, tips it. Some of the lukewarm water spills down his chin. In a sudden dart of movement, the girl leans forward to suck it off. He jerks backwards, shocked at the jab of teeth against his skin, and she goes bright pink, appalled. She tries to get her hand out from under his, ready to run.

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ Charlie whispers. He pulls the bottle in towards his chest so that she has to follow, and once she is right up close, once he can smell the lemon in her hair, it’s easy for him to forget the table legs in his lap, and the farm and the vineyards and the horses and his daughter and his wife. He leans a little closer, she doesn’t pull away. He gives her the lightest kiss. Her eyes are wide, unblinking. He gives her another. She makes a little involuntary sound deep in her throat, and he moves in for more.

  ‘What… who are you?’ he asks into her trembling mouth.

  ‘Yours,’ she breathes into his.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  AS THE HEAT of the day softens into evening, the sprawling vineyards with their parallel ribs of plantings look as if they’ve been soaked in golden syrup. Liezette can almost taste its sweetness on the still air. Everything looks better from up here on Rolo’s back. She sways in time with the animal’s familiar gait, and leans forward to pat his warm, solid neck.

  ‘You know you got me the best horse in the whole damn world?’ she asks her father.

  ‘Don’t say that too loud. Mostert will hear.’ Le Roux ruffles the coarse hair at the base of Mostert’s mane, and the giant yellow bay twitches his ears. ‘See, he’s listening.’

  ‘Oh, Dad.’ Riding out with her father has become the best part of Liezette’s day. Rolo just follows Mostert, so she barely needs to guide him. After a day of trying to get her mother not to spoil Delia, and trying to get Delia not to behave like a little madam, relinquishing the reins is a relief. Liezette grins as her father points out the small shape of a bird of prey against the pinking western sky.

  ‘Buzzard?’ she asks.

  ‘Bateleaur eagle. See how it twists and turns in the air like that? That’s how you know.’

  ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘You’re looking very pleased with yourself,’ le Roux says. There’s something held back about his expression, a look that Liezette knows well. He’s going to bitch about Charlie, she thinks. It’s been a long time coming. Her father may not have said anything yet, but she knows that he’s been stewing.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to mention…’ le Roux says as he steers Mostert around the end of the row of vines. Here it comes. ‘That man of yours. What’s he up to, hey? He’s in that barn every moment that God sent.’

  ‘Of course he is. That’s why we moved out here, Daddy, so he could concentrate on his work.’

  ‘Well if you ask me, he seems to have forgotten that he’s got a family.’

  ‘It’s not like that. He’s just busy. He comes in to read Delia her bedtime story every night, you know. He hasn’t missed a single one.’

  ‘A bedtime story doesn’t make you into a father’ – he glances at his daughter, so high and proud on her brown horse – ‘or a husband.’

  ‘Oh, Daddy—’

  ‘Don’t “oh daddy” me. Charlie has been completely absent. He hasn’t joined us at the dinner table in who knows how long. Works all through Sunday, even. I can barely remember what the man looks like, Liezette.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘My girl, I’m serious. I’m an old man and I know a thing or two. I bet you a million bucks that husband of yours is sitting around dreaming in that workshop, just counting off another nice hour in which he doesn’t need to take any responsibility for his family or his future.’

  ‘You’re wrong.’ At the memory of those pieces that she saw when she snuck into Charlie’s studio, a bright plume of bubbles fizzes up Liezette’s spine. ‘He’s an artist.’

  ‘Pfft.’

  ‘What do you know about artists, Dad?’

  ‘I know about men, my girl. I know when someone thinks they’re having a nice free ride at everyone else’s expense.’

  ‘He’s working, Daddy, believe me, I’ve seen it.’

  ‘So what’s he so busy with in there all bloody day and night?’

  ‘Magic.’

  ‘Magic?’ Le Roux jerks the reins to stop Mostert from sampling an unripe bunch of Sancerre grapes. ‘He does woodwork, my girl. Now I ask you, who wants bits of mismatched home-made furniture in this day and age? Who’s going to pay good money for that?’

  ‘People do. You should see how nuts they go for his stuff in Cape Town.’

  ‘So where’s all this money, then? Why’s he sponging off everyone else?’

  ‘These things take time, and anyway, that’s not fair. I made us move here.’ Again, Liezette gets a shiver of satisfaction at the thought. ‘I had to force him, Daddy. The last thing he wanted was to live off you.’

  ‘Well, perhaps if he took half an interest in the farm, or in anyone else’s life around here, it wouldn’t be so bad, but…’ Le Roux trails off. Something about the lazy way the low sun glows through the vine leaves sucks the vigour from his argument. ‘I’m just saying… he’s in that barn a hell of a lot.’

  ‘He’s passionate about what he does, Daddy. He’s working the whole time.’

  ‘Alone in that old barn all day, he could be up to anything.’

  ‘Yes, well he isn’t. I’ve seen.’ Le Roux lets out a bark of laughter when he sees his daughter’s self-satisfied smile. Both horses swivel their ears in alarm at the sound.

  ‘You control what he does, do you?’

  Liezette thinks about the way she got Charlie to fall for her, how she teased him into marrying her, encouraged amazing work out of him, made him into a father, and then she engineered this move which has resulted in this… magic. He’s the one carving the wood, but she’s the one shaping the man who holds the tools.

  ‘I know what’s best for Charlie,’ she says. ‘Trust me.’

  ‘If you say so, my girl.’

  ‘You probably don’t even realise it, Daddy, but I control you too.’

  ‘Oh do you now?’ Another loud burst of laughter.

  ‘Of course I do.’ Liezette gives Rolo’s neck a brisk pat. ‘Why else would you have bought me this horse? Right, now are we going to plod along like a pair of old ladies,’ Liezette tightens her grip on the reins and jabs h
er heels into Rolo’s ribs, ‘or are we going to ride!’

  *

  Each day brings a new corner of Charlie to discover. Yesterday, it was the fragrant dent at the place where his neck meets his shoulder, the day before that, the velvet lobe of his ear. Today, Sam found the slight ridge of muscle that runs across from each hip bone and dips down beneath the front waistband of his jeans. Now, as she climbs back over the hill in the low light of evening, her fingertips ache with the memory of the hard-soft feel of muscle beneath skin. What will I discover tomorrow? The thought runs a shiver through her, and Sam stops in her tracks and squeezes her eyes shut. She runs her tongue over the tender places inside her mouth that have been made raw by his kisses.

  When she opens her eyes again, the garden at the bottom of the hill seems to be staring back up at her. From here, it looks like a dark green pool with a limpid surface, but Sam knows that swirling, sucking depths hide beneath. She watches the leaves on the olive tree turn in the breeze from green to silver to green again. A moment later, the same wind makes the wild grasses whisper at her back. You can’t stay here all night, dear heart. Jem’s voice in her head is gentle, but insistent. Sam thinks of the studying she needs to do for the impending end-of-year exams, takes a deep breath and plunges down the hill towards home.

  *

  For most of the time when the girl is at the workshop, Charlie works and she watches, lingering at the edges of the barn, silent and unobtrusive. It is only towards late afternoon that something shifts, and Charlie will suddenly turn to find that she is right up close beside him. Moments after that, her mouth is on his and his hands are on her skin, and the mortise and tenon and hand plane and bow saw no longer matter. The wood is nothing and she is everything, and then his phone pings its bedtime story reminder, and she is gone.

  Yours.

  Beyond telling him this, she’s said nothing else, and Charlie hasn’t asked where on earth she comes from, how she came to be here with him in this barn in the middle of nowhere, or where she goes every evening when she walks up the hill. He could ask, of course, and maybe she’d even tell him, but he likes it like this. This way, she’s not quite real, and if she’s not quite real, then there’s no real betrayal.

  So while she certainly feels very human as she writhes and gasps beneath his fingertips, Charlie thinks of the not-quite-real girl as a creature conjured up from the valley itself. She is made of Karoo dust and mountain grass and sunlight on river water. Just for him. There’s plenty to delight in, from her exploring fingers to her needy tongue to her lithe, smooth curves, but it is her eyes that he craves the most. Charlie is convinced it is the watery pale coolness of Sam’s gaze on him as he works that has brought his recent pieces into being.

  Charlie stands back from his latest item, a writing desk on elegant, curved legs. He can barely remember making it. The desk has three slim pull-out drawers in the front, each one sitting snug and perfect inside its cavity. The lines of the dovetail joints themselves are all curved, rather than straight, and seem to have flowed into each other and melded themselves together as if he had no hand in their construction at all.

  Water-wood. The words seem to swim up in his mind and bob there, ripe with promise. Like this writing desk, each of his latest pieces look as if they’ve been worn into shape by waves and rubbed smooth by ripples rather than painstakingly worked by hand.

  As Charlie drives back up to the main house, hugs his daughter and smiles at his wife, the new pieces that he’s already calling ‘The Water-Wood Collection’ never leave his thoughts. The whorl of a chair arm, the sweep of a tabletop and the silk-smooth grain of the sides of a shelf, these are the things that pulse through him and set him alight. As for the girl? Well, while she isn’t watching him, she doesn’t need to exist.

  *

  Are you going over the hill, Sam?

  No, Grandpa. I’m studying in the lookout. Remember, I told you?

  Well something’s up. Why do you look so guilty, then?

  Maybe that’s just my face.

  I know your face, Sam. Silence, the dark house pressing in on all sides. So then why are you never here any more?

  You know why.

  This is your home, dear heart.

  Sam looks out of the window at the black neglected garden which is growing too dense. Out there in the shadows, she knows that the roses are blooming. Opening up their fleshy, fragrant faces, always looking at her.

  Is it?

  *

  One boiling hot, white-sunned day, Sam realises that Charlie has been all explored. She has touched and tasted every plane of him, and his reciprocation has left her tingle-skinned and humming all through. Her body feels like a china bowl that wants to sing a high clear note and then shatter, exploding in a shower of fine shards. Could that one, mysterious act that she’s read about and wondered over and ached for, set her free? Take her away from the too-silent house, her nagging guilt and the whispers in the garden? She wants to do the thing that will grow her up while it makes Charlie hers. He won’t without her asking for it, that much he’s made clear, so Sam raises the topic with her fingers and her eyes, and he asks if she really means it and she says the second word she’s ever spoken out loud in his presence: ‘Yes’.

  Something shifts inside Sam when Charlie, encased in rubber, is in there too. At first, the smell on his hands, as they twist and clutch through her hair, reminds her of blowing up balloons for a birthday in Mrs McGovern’s classroom. Then there’s the edge of the workbench snagging the skin at the back of her legs. Then it’s a sudden clench of pain that makes her cry out, her shout bouncing up into the high rafters of the barn. But after that, as the pain seeps away and leaves a new feeling that builds and spills down her legs and into her feet, Sam realises that instead of satisfying her hunger for him, this is opening up a bottomless maw of need. She wants to crack wide open and swallow Charlie into her very being, to have him never leave. Things that didn’t matter before, like who he is and what his life is like beyond the barn walls, suddenly become imperative, and she wants to know him.

  Sam both wishes that she’d never started this, and wants to do it again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  SAM WAKES, GROGGY and thick-headed, shaken from sleep by the dull thumping sound that worked its way into her dreams. She grasps Jem’s old alarm clock from her bedside table and stares at it, waiting to make sense of the numbers. Nine thirty. When did she last sleep so late? She falls back against the pillow, trying to figure out where the thumping is coming from. Suddenly, she sits bolt upright.

  It’s the garden gate!

  She can hear it now: the thumps are interspersed with the metallic rattle of padlock against bolt.

  Who is it? No one ever comes here.

  Panic.

  Sussie?

  Sam’s heart bashes against the cage of her ribs like a terrified bird as she runs from the bedroom and out of the house. If she doesn’t answer quickly, Sussie will know something is up. Her feet, still sleep-tender, slap against the sunny flagstones, and surprised bees, shaken from their flowers, whizz up from the plants on either side of the path.

  Sam skids to a halt.

  What if it isn’t Sussie? What if it’s Yolande?

  The wood judders. Thump thump thump. Sam freezes. Her vision blurs. Suddenly, she is back inside Poppy’s small body, listening to her mother beating on the outside of the bathroom door of Karel’s disgusting cottage. This was a time before Karel ‘lost’ the bathroom key. This was before he sold the TV. This was the time that Yolande was sick and screeching and her eyes were mad with storm clouds and, before Poppy had run in here to hide, her saliva had flown out with her shouts, spattering against Poppy’s face. Sam can’t remember what her mother had been so furious about, but she remembers thinking: This is it. This is me, about to get killed.

  How would it happen? With a whack against the side of the head? Maybe with a half-brick, like she’d seen one time on the TV. Karel kept a crumbling, orange one by the fr
ont door to stop it from banging shut when he wanted a breeze. Sam flinched. Or maybe it would just be her mother’s hands around her throat. Wiry, cigarette-smelling hands that squeezed and didn’t stop. Poppy had imagined it would be like one of the Chinese bangles that Yolande liked to give ‘in fun’, but around her neck instead of her wrist. Whatever it was going to be, it would hurt.

  ‘Sam!’ Her eyes snap open. She’s Sam again, back in the garden. The padlock bounces against the gate. That’s not Yolande’s voice. Nor is it Sussie’s.

  ‘Keegan?’ she queries, breathless.

  ‘Sam! Jesus Christ, I was starting to think I’d have to break this thing down.’

  ‘Keegan! Sorry, I was…’ She sways on her feet, rubs her eyes. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Are you going to let me in, or what?’

  ‘Um…’ Sam casts a desperate look around the garden as if the overgrown, buzzing-insect-green will have a solution to offer. ‘I’m kind of in the middle of something, can you… wait for a moment?’

  ‘I’ve been waiting ages already,’ he says. There’s a pause. ‘Sam, are you OK?’

  ‘Of course. I was just… about to have a shower, so I’m not…’ Sam swallows, shuts her eyes. ‘Ready. I was busy doing some stuff for my grandpa. He’s…’ She draws in more breath. ‘Resting.’

  ‘I’ll wait, then,’ Keegan says. Sam can hear the thump as he sits down on the other side of the wooden gate. ‘But I’m not leaving until I see you face to face. My mom will march over here herself if I don’t tell her everything’s OK with you.’