Bone Meal For Roses

by Miranda Sherry

  ‘You want to come?’

  ‘Yeah right. You know me, I’ve got to look after my grandpa and… stuff.’

  ‘Of course.’ Keegan tosses a palmful of torn-up grass bits into the air, and watches them fall. ‘Stuff.’

  *

  Sam steers the Yamaha into its usual spot in the barn and pulls off the motorcycle helmet. A light breeze ruffles the damp hot hair that’s become glued to her forehead. She climbs off the bike in the dusty silence and readjusts the heavy pack on her back. As soon as she’d finished her algebra paper, she’d headed off to the Super Saver, and the whole ride home she’s been aware of the small tub of strawberry yoghurt that’s been waiting between the sensible oats and rice and cheap packets of powdered soya mince. She’s more aware of rationing than ever, especially with all the petrol she’s using to get to town and back for her exams. Withdrawing money using Jem’s bank card at the service station always makes her edgy. There are cameras at the ATM, and she worries that someone will watch the footage and wonder why it’s always the granddaughter who draws the cash these days. What has happened to Jeremy Harding?

  Despite the fact that Sam has no idea how long this money is going to last, or whether something baffling and administrative will suddenly prevent her from being able to access it, she couldn’t resist the yoghurt. She can almost taste the creamy sweetness on her tongue and feel the soft slip of it down her throat. Sam is so busy thinking about eating that little pot of goodness that she only sees the envelope when she clicks open the padlock.

  The paper corner of it sticks out from between two of the wooden slats of the gate where someone has shoved it, white and clean and out of place in the dusty, petrol-scented barn. Sam pulls the envelope free with shaking fingers. Someone was here. She looks behind her, scans the road and the scrub for signs that they might still be somewhere close. Could Yolande be hiding behind one of those bushes, watching her? Sam is sure she can smell something familiar on the air, a sick, chemical stench. Her stomach swoops.

  Clutching the envelope, she darts in through the gate and slams it behind her, sliding the bolt home and snapping on the padlock before she allows herself another breath.

  The garden is a wall of growth pressing in. The flagstones of the path have shrunk in the onslaught of the tangled weeds which are overpowering the clover. Sam takes a breath. The chemical smell is gone, or maybe it’s just lost beneath the rich scent of roses, lavender, herbs and star jasmine which are now tinged with the smell of rot from the fallen fruit and the dying plants that she’s abandoned to the snails, slugs and caterpillars. Sam makes a run for it, crashing through the greenery towards the house.

  In the untidy kitchen, with the garden at her back, surrounded by the reassuring hum of the fridge that means she wasn’t too late with the electricity payment, Sam lets the pack slide from her shoulders to the floor as she inspects the envelope. Now that she’s looking closer, there’s no way it could be from Yolande: it’s too clean, white and perfect. She turns it over. The rounded cursive on the front is unmistakably Sussie’s, and seeing the words Jem and Sam written there together as if nothing has changed, weakens her legs so suddenly that she has to reach for a chair and sink into it.

  Jem and Sam. Jem and Sam.

  Jem.

  Her eyelids prickle and sting and the white oblong blurs in her hands. She makes the first, cautious tear in the envelope. It’s a greetings card. Sam pulls it out and lays it on the table. It’s thick and glossy with a solemn painting of the three wise men on it, following their star. Before Anneke died, Sussie sent a Christmas card each year, but since the desecration, nothing. Why now? What’s changed?

  Inside it is a short message written in Afrikaans: Dear Jem and Sam, may you both be blessed this Christmas. Sussie.

  Sam remembers the way her great-aunt’s eyes had filled with tears when they encountered each other at Anneke’s grave months ago. Her shocked whisper: My God. You look just like her. Is Sussie hoping for some kind of reconciliation?

  ‘Jesus,’ Sam says out loud, shoving the card away from herself as if it’s contaminated. She imagines Sussie, in full family mode, descending on her in a fever of well-intentioned Christmas spirit. ‘That’s all I need.’

  Is one padlock enough?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  WHEN SAM MAKES the hot journey up and over the hill after her final exam, she’s stunned to find that the barn is closed up, and there’s no sign of Charlie. A high whine of panic builds in her ears as she creeps around the far side of the building and looks through the windows to see that the workshop is dark and silent. In the yard at the far side, where she knows Charlie parks his van, she finds nothing but tyre ruts and a small shred of bubble wrap caught on the branch of a tree.

  Sam clutches the plastic in sweating fingers and stares up the track that he must take every day when he goes home to whatever he goes home to. The dirt road curves away into an orchard of pruned plum trees planted in even rows. Sam tucks the bubble wrap into the pocket of her shorts and moves towards the trees. They smell of sun on sugar, and unlike the ones in the garden back home, these have been tended and sprayed, and the fruit she finds is firm and perfect. She recognises Santa Rosas. They’ll be harvested soon then, next week, most likely.

  She eats a red-skinned plum. It’s not ripe, but warm and sweet just beneath the skin. No worms. She picks another and bites into it as she makes her way deeper into the orchard, following the track. Where’s Charlie? She licks the tart juice from her fingers. Her heart is going at a gallop, and her legs feel wobbly. Is he coming back?

  When the trees end and the farm opens up before her with its blocks of green lucerne, rows and rows of vineyards and its buildings in the distance, very white in the late sun, Sam stops. She’s breathing hard. The fragrant sweetness from the plums has gone from her tongue, leaving only the sourness behind.

  Keeping in the shadows of the trees, Sam scans the farm for any sign of Charlie. She spots two horses and riders heading out of the far paddock, and remembers, with a rush of guilt, how decrepit Sam-the-horse’s grave marker is looking back at the garden. She doesn’t want to think about that place. She doesn’t want to go back. Perhaps I can stay here? The thought sidles into her head and lingers, even though she knows it’s ridiculous. What would she do for food? Swan up to the distant white house with its pristine gable and raid the kitchen? Eat unripe plums until she’s sick? Her uneasy guts give a little growl in protest at the idea.

  But Sam feels unravelled and lost without her fix of Charlie, and the longer she waits beneath the trees, the less possible leaving becomes. She stands, motionless. A bee buzzes past her ear, lands with a tickle, and then takes off again.

  Eventually she forces herself to move. Her legs feel strange and stiff as she makes her way back through the orchard, as if they’ve got hinges that need oiling. When she arrives back at the barn and tests the handle on its small back door, it opens easily beneath her hand, and she almost falls into the dark, woody silence. She blinks as her eyes adjust, and then closes the door behind her. Without Charlie in here, the mood of the place is different, solemn, as if, like her, the wood is biding its time until he returns. She notices that there are more bits of bubble wrap lying around, and it soon becomes clear that almost half of his finished items are gone.

  Sam has never thought of Charlie’s pieces being wanted somewhere else, but of course they must be. Why else would he be working so hard to make them in the first place? He must’ve taken some to be sold. That means he’s coming back. He’s not gone for good. She walks between the items that remain. They’re familiar, like old friends. She’s watched most of them come into being from chunks of raw tree. She touches each one as she moves through the barn, then walks back and counts them again, searching. It’s gone. The little dimpled stool with the curving legs has been wrapped up and taken off and sold to someone else.

  I thought he made it just for me.

  Sam’s first sob is a brutal hammer smack on the inside
of her chest bone. The force of it pushes her to the sawdust-coated floor. She drops her head into her hands, still sticky from sour plums, and weeps.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHARLIE CALLS SOON after Delia’s bedtime story.

  ‘Hang on,’ Liezette whispers into her phone, and leaves the darkened bedroom as quietly as she can. ‘Charlie?’

  ‘Babe!’ Charlie’s voice is overly loud, punching into her eardrum. She winces, although she knows it’s impossible for Delia to hear it, and moves further away from her daughter’s bedroom.

  ‘How are you? How did it go?’ she asks. The line gives a hiss and a crackle and when the reception clears, she hears that Charlie is laughing. He sounds a little drunk.

  ‘It went like a bomb, Liez.’

  Liezette adjusts her grip on the phone. Her fingers are sweating. ‘So? Did they love the stuff, Charlie?’

  ‘They sure bloody did!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You better believe it. I thought that one guy, what’s-his-name… Craig. I thought he was actually going to burst into tears.’

  ‘Oh my God. That’s great, babe.’

  ‘Get this, Liez: they want to do an exhibition, launch the Water-Wood Collection like it’s a goddam work of art.’

  ‘It is, Charlie. It deserves that.’ Liezette is grinning, her head feels light and swimmy. It’s really happening, all the things she’s been dreaming about for them. ‘I’m so proud.’ And then: ‘Are you staying the night?’

  ‘Yeah, sorry. They insisted on taking me out and I’ve had a few beers. And anyway, it’s too late to set off now.’

  ‘No, of course.’

  ‘I’m going to have to make another trip in the next few days to deliver the rest of the stuff that I couldn’t fit in your dad’s van.’

  ‘Oh really?’

  ‘Yeah, they think there’s still time to do this before Christmas. Take advantage of the holiday-shopping madness.’

  ‘Awesome, babe.’

  ‘I know, hey?’ He sounds young, like a schoolboy winning a longed-for prize. She laughs and he joins in, and neither of them seems able to stop for a long time. The cell phone is warm in Liezette’s hand.

  *

  Charlie drives back from Cape Town early the next morning, and by nine o’clock, he’s showered and has spooned cereal into his mouth while Delia read him a story: turning the pages of her mother’s magazine and making up nonsense rhymes to go with the bruised-eyed skeletal fashion models that sulk across the glossy pages. He’s returned the van keys to le Roux and, at last, is in his old van and driving through the orchard towards the barn. He taps his fingers on the steering wheel, impatient to get back to the wood and finish up those final touches. Last night, in his beer-soaked sleep in Craig’s guest bedroom, Charlie had dreamt that the barn was flooded, and that his precious water-wood babies were swelling and warping in a sludge of brackish water. He’d woken at dawn, breathless with longing to get back. Now he sprints from the van to the barn.

  There they are, waiting for him in the shadowy gloom of the closed-up workshop, their curves aching to be stroked. No flood, no fire, all present and correct. Charlie touches each piece before throwing open the wide double doors. When he does so, he stops, and draws in a sharp breath of surprise.

  The water-eyed girl is sitting in her gift-garden, in the midst of her freshly watered plantings. Her hair is so white in the glare of the late morning sun that Charlie has to blink and squint, but when her eyes meet his, they’re cool as shade. Never shifting her gaze, she stands and walks towards him, pulling off her clothes with quick tugs, so that by the time she’s up close, she is utterly bare but for her hair, which is loose and moves across her back and shoulders like a cape woven from living white snakes.

  ‘Woah,’ he whispers as she crashes into his body and pulls him closer. ‘No waiting this time, hey?’ Her fingers fight the fastenings of his belt and jeans. ‘I guess you missed me.’

  In reply, she wrenches his T-shirt up and off, and when he blinks in the wake of the scrape of fabric over his face, her eyes, with their strange unreadable expression, are still staring into his. She hangs onto the back of his neck and uses her weight to draw him to the floor before climbing on top of him. Charlie, on his back on the ground with the girl above him and sawdust sticking to his skin, surprises himself by wishing she would say something. There is too much feeling in her silence, and a word or two would lessen the intensity that radiates off her boiling skin. But there’s no time for words, her mouth is already on his, devouring.

  *

  Later, when Charlie is, at last, back with the timber and the tools in his hands, and she is dressed and sitting in the shadow by the wall, the water-eyed girl finally does speak. The sound of her voice is so strange, so unexpected, that the small handsaw Charlie is using slips from his grip and clatters to the floor.

  ‘I was here, yesterday,’ she says. ‘Without you. I waited.’

  Charlie goes cold and a rash of goosebumps rises up on his skin.

  ‘Oh?’

  Yesterday. He remembers holding his cell phone, about to call Liezette and ask her to drive down to the barn and take some photos of the pieces he’d left behind and email them back to him for the gallery guy to look at. He remembers getting distracted by the conversation, and never making the call. If he had. If she had come here. If this girl had been…

  Fuck.

  He picks up the saw and tries to focus on the join he’s working on, but his head is whirling and the sudden tightness in his chest is making it impossible to breathe.

  ‘I figured you were making a delivery.’ That voice again. It makes her sound so young. Jesus, how young is she?

  ‘You were right. I was in Cape Town. Didn’t I mention I was going to go?’

  ‘No.’

  He readjusts his grip on the worn handle of the saw. His fingers are sweating. He doesn’t have a clue how to navigate this new, strange space with the water-eyed girl: she is talking to him. Like a girlfriend, or something. A wife. He swallows.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. That’s usually a good start.

  Silence. From outside somewhere, softened by distance, comes the high wild sound of a horse’s whinny.

  ‘Well, I’d better let you know that I have to go again in a few days. They want the rest of this stuff.’ Charlie gives a nervous laugh. ‘They want to have an exhibition.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon, before Christmas. To capitalise on the holiday shoppers, you know?’ Does she? Charlie has no idea what she knows. He imagines her being born, new, each morning as the sun touches the tops of the hills, rising out of a stream like a nymph. But there’s nothing nymph-like about her questions:

  ‘When are you going again?’

  ‘Hey?’

  ‘To Cape Town. When?’

  ‘Oh, right. In two days’ time.’ Charlie places the saw to the wood and then pauses, alert to the weight of the silence. ‘I’ll be packing up this lot on Friday morning and then heading off.’

  Sam tightens her arms around her knees, holding herself in place. He’s leaving again. And she’ll be stuck here. Alone in the garden with the roses and the silence. The idea is sickening. Unbearable.

  *

  It is still early when Sam gets back to her side of the hill. As she walks past the sun-drenched rose bed, she notices that the blooms are vast and fleshy and vibrant with colour. She imagines the roots of the plants twisting down and nuzzling in between the cells of her grandfather’s flesh to feed on his corpse.

  Fuck you, she wants to scream. How dare you devour him and flaunt yourselves at me? Damn you with your flouncy petals and your fat, greedy buds. She stands at the edge of the flower bed, shaking, and then marches with determination to the tool shed where she keeps the secateurs. With vicious, ragged snips, she decapitates each lovely, fragrant rose. She stamps through the clover and scratches herself on thorns to get to the hard-to-reach blooms. When the flowers are all gone, it’s still not enough. She s
lices off the buds too, even the tiny, whiskery green ones.

  Sam steps back, sweaty and tear-streaked, suddenly appalled at what she’s done. The fallen flowers blink their brilliance at her from their spots on the ground. Still beautiful. Still scented. Sam drops to her knees and starts to gather each one, crawling through the dirt to get to them, running inside to fetch a bag to put them in when they start to spill from her arms.

  When they are all collected, she opens the bag and peers in. The petals quiver up at her, blood and peach and sun and snow and blushing pink. Each perfect, frilled oval carries something of her grandfather’s life inside its sap. She thinks of his strong, wide hands and his blue eyes filled with kindness and his metal-coloured hair. How could she have done this?

  I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. But the roses cannot be glued back.

  There is only one thing that Sam can think of to do with them.

  *

  Before she gets to the graveyard, Sam stops at the top of the rise and scans the road for a puff of dust that could mean Sussie’s SUV is on its way. The lucerne fields look like blocks of emerald, and the grapevine rows flaunt their exuberant leaves, but the only companions in sight are a pair of small brown birds that flutter up and then wait in the long grass for her to move on so that they can resume their pecking on the road.

  She rides the motorbike down to the graveyard and parks it by the fence. The roses here are blooming too, an echo of their parent plants across the valley. She takes a trowel and the bag of flower heads from her knapsack, and walks to Anneke’s graveside. Sam drops to a crouch, and proceeds to bury each and every cut flower into the soil amongst the plants around her grandmother’s grave.

  Her grandpa and her ouma together. Sam thinks of all those love letters in their tin at home. She clenches her fists into the mud. Charlie is leaving her again. Why can’t she have the kind of love that Jem and Anneke had?

  Why is he going without me?

  She brushes the soil from her fingers, collects the empty packet, and scrunches it into a ball.