Every day he brought her their son’s latest suggestion, like a cat bringing a dead bird into the house.
‘Are you going to be okay?’ he asked, pulling on his jacket. It was his first day back at work.
She let out a sound and he stopped getting ready and came to sit on the bed. ‘I don’t know why we don’t ask your parents,’ he said.
She let her head drop forward over the baby at her breast. She couldn’t speak.
‘If we tell them we need help, Karen…’ He parted the curtain of her hair and took their daughter’s hand in his, studying her delicate fingers.
‘Where’s Robin?’ she managed to ask eventually.
‘I put the TV on.’
They both listened to the sounds coming from downstairs.
‘Let’s ask them at least,’ Ian said. ‘Give your mum a ring. If you don’t, I will.’
He made her promise she would call her mother and he stood up from the bed, ready to leave. ‘I love you,’ he said.
‘How’s little Grace?’ asked her mother when she telephoned later that afternoon.
‘It’s not Gracie yet, Mum, not for sure,’ Karen said, looking down at the baby at her breast.
‘Well, what’s she called, then? Poor little thing needs a name! And nothing too wacky, Karen. She’ll have to live with it for the rest of her life. I liked Grace – Grace is nice. Is she a good little girl, do you think?’
‘Of course she’s good, Mum.’
‘And is she feeding alright?’
‘Yes, fine.’
‘My milk wasn’t enough for you,’ her mother said. ‘You wanted the good stuff.’
‘I’m sure your milk was fine, Mum.’
‘I used to put an extra spoonful in – of the powder, you know, that you use to make up the bottles. You were such a skinny little thing, always crying.’
It felt like an accusation.
‘Of course, it meant your dad could feed you, so it was good in one way. Probably why you were always Daddy’s girl.’
‘Was I then?’
‘Daddy’s girl? I think so, don’t you? I never got a look-in.’
There was another silence.
‘Do you think it was because of… you know, was I closer to Dad after… that time?’
‘Possibly.’
‘We’ve never talked about it.’
‘Yes, well, your generation are all for talking, that’s your way of doing things.’
‘I can’t stop crying,’ she said.
‘You’ll feel better in a few days. It’s just a touch of the post-natals.’
‘It’s not that, Mum.’
‘Baby blues, we used to call it – it’s normal, what with all the hormones whizzing around. You’ll feel better in a few days.’
‘You’re not listening,’ Karen said, panic rising. ‘I’m not normal.’
‘What are you talking about?’ her mother said, and Karen could picture her sitting at the tiny table in the hallway of her home, the outside world blurred through the distorting glass of the front porch. ‘Of course you’re normal! We’re the most normal people I know.’
‘I’m not coping,’ she said. Her voice cracked and she felt her mother shift away from her at the other end of the telephone line, as if in that instant extra miles of cable were placed between them, looped and coiled and knotted in places, stretched to breaking point at others. Not for the first time, she became aware of how her parents struggled with the way she experienced the world. It pained her to know that her mother found it as hard as she did.
‘You’ve got to admit…’ her mother said, her voice confident, strident even, as if she was compensating for the extra distance that was suddenly between them. ‘You have to admit there’s a dissatisfaction in your generation, isn’t there?’
Karen didn’t answer. She wished her mother would speak truthfully instead of cloaking the conversation in speculation about generational difference.
‘All the travelling you and Ian did,’ she continued. ‘I’m not sure it helps.’
Karen closed her eyes and, at the other end of the phone line, Valerie caught a whiff of her daughter’s resistance.
‘Does he know?’ she asked.
Even though she couldn’t see her, Karen shook her head. Her mother thought she endlessly wanted to talk about everything, but there were some things that couldn’t be said.
‘It might be as well to tell him. He has a right to know.’
Both women listened to the sounds of other things around them. Valerie could hear voices from next door’s radio coming through the wall, while Karen listened to her baby’s barely audible breathing and the sound of the television downstairs.
‘Not that this is the same thing,’ Valerie added.
‘How do you know?’ Karen asked.
IN THE CODE I MADE with Zami, shining for a long time then off then on again means you’re happy. Shining for only two counts then off and on again means sad. It was dark and I was doing our code out of my window but Zami didn’t do it back so I went to his shed to say why didn’t you shine back. I had to creep quietly in case Dad heard me.
He was copying the words in Robin’s guidebook as per usual and his writing made me want to scribble all over the page. I wanted to tear it out and screw it up, stuff it in my mouth, chew it then spit it out. If I did, he would just look at me in his usual way. When he stares at me I never know what he’s thinking.
For an experiment, I picked up his exercise book and threw it on the floor. What’s the point of all this, I said. He picked it up. I said Who is that skinny guy you talk to outside the gate, the one in the woolly hat – is he a friend of yours? It is no one, he said. A mosquito was humming next to my ear. Come on then, I said, and Zami said Where to? To see Young Lady, I said. It’s good practice if you want to get a job with tourists.
He looked out of the window of his shed at the house where all the lights were on, then he looked at me. Without saying anything he stood up and took a shirt off a nail in the wall. He put the shirt on over his T-shirt. He put on some old trainers that went on his feet without undoing the laces, like a pair of slippers. We went outside and he shut the door of his shed. Jack started barking but Zami spoke in his calm voice and he stopped. Another dog started barking somewhere else far away. Zami said Wait here while I open the gate. I felt a bit sick. Are we going then, I asked, and he looked at me without smiling and said If you want to. I said Of course I want to.
The lights all around the house made big shadows. It was so cold my teeth were chattering. Zami was talking to Lindisizwe while I got in the Jeep. I was shivering but not just from the cold. It was really noisy when Zami started the engine but we drove fast. We drove so fast out of the gate I had to hold on tight to the sides. I looked behind to see if Dad was following us but my hair was in my face and eyes and all I could see was Lindisizwe dragging the gate shut.
DOUG AND VALERIE sat next to their daughter’s bed, waiting for her to wake up. She was out of danger. They would be allowed to take her home later that day.
‘Is she really asleep, do you think?’ Valerie asked.
Doug didn’t answer.
‘She woke up alright when the doctor came round,’ she said.
It was clear Karen didn’t want to talk to them. She was prepared to speak to complete strangers – doctors and nurses she had never met before – but not to her own flesh and blood.
‘You heard what the nurse said,’ Doug whispered. ‘After what her body’s been through, sleep is the best thing for her.’
‘Ironic, when you think about it,’ Valerie said. She pressed her lips together, not wanting to say something she would regret.
The last time all three of them waited to be discharged from this same hospital had been when Karen was born, seventeen years ago. Then, as now, they had seen the sun rise. Today it was swollen and red, and so large that it filled the window of the hospital ward, lighting the room a rosy pink. Shepherd’s warning, Valerie thought, but again, she stopped herself before op
ening her mouth to speak. ‘She’ll need clothes to travel home in, won’t she?’ she said instead.
‘I’ll go,’ Doug said.
‘No, you stay. I know what to bring. I know where everything is.’
‘Will you be alright driving?’
‘I’ll be alright.’
She didn’t like driving, but she didn’t want to be the one sitting by the bed when Karen woke up. The nurses would be there, of course, and they were very nice, she couldn’t fault them, but it was better if Doug stayed.
She followed his instructions and found their car where he had parked it the night before but she couldn’t get the door open, the key wouldn’t fit. She turned it this way and that, tried it upside down, even checked the numberplate, thinking she had the wrong car, although she was certain it was theirs because there was Doug’s wooden-bead cover on the driver’s seat. Her hands were shaking. This wasn’t her; none of this was her. It wasn’t how she pictured herself and her family. Finally she fumbled the key in the lock and got the door open. Once inside the car, she rested her forehead on the steering wheel and wept.
The traffic wasn’t too heavy and she drove carefully around the roundabout that always gave Doug trouble, allowing herself two complete circuits to make sure she got the right exit and didn’t land up on the dual carriageway. The house seemed different on her return – transformed, somehow, by the events of the night before. She let herself in quickly, knowing that Shirley opposite would be watching.
Upstairs, she stood in the doorway of the bathroom. There had been no time to clean up the mess. She tried to conjure Karen on the floor again, lifeless and heavy as an oversized doll. The shrillness in Doug’s voice as he’d shouted for her to call an ambulance had been more like a woman’s scream than her husband’s voice. She half wanted to see them again like that, the two of them – Karen gathered in her father’s arms with the whites of her eyes showing and sick all down her front – and half wanted to scorch the image from her mind so she would never remember it. There was something extreme about what had happened, and they weren’t extreme people. At least, she and Doug weren’t. They kept themselves to themselves. They were polite, of course they were, but they liked things private, not like some.
She filled a bucket and fetched a scrubbing brush. Bleach fumes made her light-headed as she worked away at the bathroom carpet. She tried to summon details of their normal life: the setting of the morning alarm and the making of Doug’s cup of tea while Karen got ready. They would have to let the school know. The hospital would make a follow-up appointment with their GP. She felt exposed, and it was hard not to blame Karen for exposing them. Other people might think of her as stuck-up but she wasn’t. She was more private, perhaps, than some, and not one to wear her feelings on her sleeve. Of course she liked things to be a certain way – who didn’t? – but she wasn’t a snob. She emptied the bucket down the toilet. It was the way of the world, she thought: we get the children we deserve. The ones who will teach us how to be. Perhaps it was part of God’s plan. She refilled her bucket with hot water. Margie and Dave Lawrence were what she would call extrovert, not to say highly strung (her, certainly) and yet their children, a girl and a boy, both appeared very sensible.
She emptied her bucket again and placed a towel over the stain, marching up and down on it to dry the offending patch. What to tell Shirley, who had watched out of her window as the ambulance crew lifted Karen into their vehicle? Best not to say anything at all.
She threw the towel away in the outside dustbin and went back upstairs. In Karen’s room, the disinfectant smells wafting along the corridor from the bathroom couldn’t overpower the scent of her daughter. She sat on the bed and looked out of the window. Next door’s cat pawed the soil in Doug’s flowerbed. The thought of rushing downstairs and out of the back door to clatter the saucepan she kept on the worktop for the purpose made her feel tired. She thought about laying her head on the pillow but her daughter’s smell was overwhelming. On the one hand she was repelled by it and on the other she feared that, if she surrendered to it, she could drift into a deep sleep from which she might never awake.
‘Come on, Val,’ she said out loud.
She parcelled up the navy padded jacket Karen wore every day and selected a jumper and skirt and fresh underwear from the drawers. She packed the garments in the Weekender bag that Doug used for business trips and placed Karen’s Chinese slippers on the top. The cloth they were made from was so thin they were hardly shoes at all, yet she wore them in all weathers. They held the shape of her feet, bearing imprints of her toes where they pressed.
She drove back to the hospital, where Karen was still sleeping, supposedly.
‘She woke up and said hello,’ Doug said, ‘and then she went back to sleep again.’
Valerie folded the clothes over the end of the bed and placed the Chinese slippers neatly side by side on the floor underneath. She got Doug to write in a card addressed to A Dear Daughter and stood it on the bedside cabinet so Karen would see it when she woke up.
They would be glad to be home again, after such a long night and after all this hanging around, but she couldn’t imagine how they would be with each other away from the careful, serious doctors and away from the nurses with their bright faces. She felt almost embarrassed to think about it. Maybe there would be a wildlife programme or a comedy on television that they could watch together. They would have an early night. Valerie wouldn’t sleep, however. She would be awake forever, now. She was exhausted, but it wasn’t the kind of tiredness she could sleep off. It was a different kind of tired. One thing was certain: she wouldn’t be taking any sleeping tablets. She blamed Doug for even having them in the house. Look what happened.
WHEN WE HAD BEEN driving for a while Zami stopped. It was so cold we had to put on some of the old clothes and blankets from under the back seat of the Jeep. They smelled like Nan’s winter coat. Zami showed his ID to the man in the shed but the man kept saying It’s not allowed. He walked around to my side of the Jeep and I was glad I had my alarm under the blanket. Zami said we had to go back but then I had the idea of showing the money I got from Dad’s room. The man shone his torch at it. He took it out of my hand and counted it and then he waved his hand and we were allowed to drive into the park. He didn’t give me any change.
We drove on the rough track for a little way and then Zami stopped to listen. There was a kind of moaning. The headlights shone in a straight line in front of us, lighting up a clump of bushes in the distance and a slope running down from where we were to a plain stretch of land. We were in the middle of nowhere. The moaning stopped and then started again, stopped and then started. Zami said it was a lion but it didn’t sound like one to me. I didn’t know what it was but it didn’t sound like a lion. Zami switched off the engine and let the Jeep roll down a little slope so we wouldn’t make any noise. It was so bumpy I had to hold on to the side to stop myself being thrown out.
At the bottom of the slope the Jeep stopped rolling and we heard more moans. Zami switched off the lights and we were in complete darkness. I held his hand and he didn’t take it away. His fingers felt dry. It was quiet all around, but a full kind of quiet, as if someone was lying in wait, holding their breath. Then whatever it was couldn’t hold on any longer. A horrible cackling like a witch made me jump. Hyenas. They weren’t as loud as the woman screaming on my alarm but their sound was much worse. Zami said it meant there could be a kill nearby – antelope most probably. He was being like a proper safari leader but the thought of a dead antelope with hyenas all over it made me want to be back at Dad’s house. Let’s go, I said. We can come back with Dad and Robin tomorrow and show them. I thought you wanted to see Young Lady, Zami said, but I told him I had changed my mind. But if I get out to start the engine the lions will eat me, he said. Even though it was dark I could hear in his voice that he was smiling when he said it so I said You should have thought of that, shouldn’t you? Joking made me feel less scared and we were still holding hands but t
hen he let go and jumped out. When I called his name his voice came from round the front of the Jeep where he was starting the engine. I didn’t know if a lion or a hyena would be scared of my alarm so I patted all around me like a blind person, trying to find a weapon. If Zami got mauled I could probably drive, from what he showed me and from watching Dad, but only if he got the engine started before he was attacked. He would have to tell me what to do, but he couldn’t do that if he was unconscious or if half his face was eaten off.
The engine kept clicking without turning on and the hyenas were making their horrible noise. It sounded as if there were lots of them all climbing on the dead antelope, tearing its guts out and shrieking. I tried to tell Zami to get back in but the night swallowed up my voice and nothing came out. Then the Jeep gave a bounce as he climbed back in. No petrol, he said, and I started to get scared. Stop mucking about, I said. Put the lights back on. He said we needed to save the battery. Put them on, I said, I mean it. I sounded like Robin.
Zami turned the lights on and we saw pale shapes moving softly and slowly against the dark. Lions. They arrived out of nowhere, like ghosts, a male and four females. This time it was Zami who held my hand, not the other way round.
We were quiet for ages, watching and waiting to see what they would do. I was thinking that our Jeep had no sides or roof or petrol and I didn’t tell Dad or Nan where I was going. My chest grew tight as if the blanket around me was a boa constrictor but I didn’t cry. Then Zami said You want to go now? How can we, I said, and my voice was all croaky. I thought we would be stuck there all night until Dad or the man in the shed came looking for us and found our mangled bodies with lion claw marks in and hyenas scavenging all over.
Zami jumped down from the Jeep and the nearest lion looked at him. He lifted up the bonnet. The headlights lit him up bright and the lions were fainter behind. I remembered what Robin said about how if there was a kill they wouldn’t be hungry but the lion could easily run across and leap on to his back and attack him just for fun. Her heavy paws would pull him to the ground and her claws would shred his shirt and his flesh. Also, it was the hyenas who were eating the kill so maybe the lions weren’t full. Maybe they had room for Zami. His face was even more serious than normal while he was looking at the engine. He told me to turn the key and when I did the engine roared. The big male lion jumped up and the others ran away into the shadows when Zami slammed the bonnet.
Alarm Girl Page 11
