Driving into the estate (strictly adhering to the 40 kph rule), we pass homes where little children forget to close their front doors when they run in, where teenage girls smoke cigarettes out of their bedroom windows so their parents may not know and leave them wide enough open for eyes taking walks in the streets to stroll in. I look into these Seventh Heaven-like homes, I smell their food and catch a glimpse of the portraits on their walls as we drive by. Now back home, outside our orange brick villa, I peer into our own windows and wonder what others see.
“Tuscan is the architectural style,” the sales agent had said to Daddy. “A gem!” she had shrieked, “a house incomparable to any other.” However, inside my home it is not the smell of sautéed prawns and ricotta stuffed pasta with mushroom sauce that wafts into the garden, but rather the sharp smell of mala le mogodu.
I do not know where I may have lived before, or who I may have been. I do know that this world is strange, though, and I somewhat of an anachronism. Locked in. Uncertain whether I have come to love this cage too. Afraid of the freedom that those before the time before-before knew. There is jeopardy in the sky.
Mama shouts Tshepo’s name as she enters the house and heads up the salmon-coloured hefty stone spiral staircase to the bedrooms on the third floor. “Tshepo, come down and help your sister carry in groceries.” The midday sunlight beaming through the punch skylights high above the staircase and the shy wisp of Mama’s white dress as she hurries up the stairs remind me of a make-believe fairytale. In the tale a beautiful but damned princess runs up a twisted tower in a forgotten castle escaping the crafty dragon that has kept her hostage in a moonless dungeon below. She runs up to a radiant prince above who will slay the dragon and free her from a life of darkness.
I am already holding three large packets in each hand, but grasp onto the seventh with my left ring finger and pinkie. They are heavy, but the garage opens into the kids’ pantry, which leads to the kitchen. I do not have far to go. If I speed-walk I should be able to get them all there without dropping and breaking anything.
“It’s fine, Mama, I can manage on my own,” I say more to myself than to anyone else whilst dropping the packets onto the oyster-and-pearl marble kitchen surface. I flinch at the force with which the two meet, realising too late that there are glass containers in some of the packets.
“Tshepo! Tshepo wee!” Of course Tshepo can hear Mama. Although the walls of our house are thickly plastered to give it a colossal appearance, and the ceilings beamed and soaring to make it look grand, the living space is intimate and the family bedrooms all open up onto the circular stone staircase, so that every sound formed on the third floor is equally shared in 360° before dissolving into the nothingness and fleeing through the skylights. “Tshepo! Tshepo sweetie, we is home.” Tshepo is choosing not to hear her. Mama is choosing not to know.
In this house it is the parents who slam doors. It is the cherry-wood cupboard doors in Mama’s all-mirrors dressing room that now swing open and slam shut. Mama is in a rush, she will rapidly remove her dress and cream pumps and change into the skirt and wrap top that will match the cork heels she has been searching for a reason to wear. “Tshepo! Tshepo my darly. Tshepo!” I can still hear Mama from two floors down. She seems to delight in calling his name, despite the fact that she knows he will not answer. Persisting consoles her. “I never did stop trying,” she will say to her friends when he is gone for good. “Never did I ever give up on him,” she will continue, between sobs, as they rub her back in manicured sympathy.
I consider packing away the groceries but decide against it. What will I do with the mango atchar that steadily seeps through its cracks and collects at the bottom of the packet, turning the white plastic and the already soggy egg carton a grimy orange? Should I throw the whole plastic packet away? Is that not a waste of food? I do not even know where they keep the kitchen dustbin. Mama is always rearranging her kitchen. And where would I pack away the rest of the food? I am not sure what goes into the Kids’ Pantry, Entertainment Pantry and Foods Pantry because it is all food to me. I will wait for Old Virginia to do it. Old Virginia should be around here somewhere.
“Tshepo, honey! Tshepo!”
I follow the mosaic of bundles of wheat on the soft-caramel tiled floor to my favourite room in the house. From here, right in the centre of the house you have a view of every nook that matters: the billiard room and its bar, the fishpond built deep into the floor of the sitting room, the lone fish that swims in its inky water, Daddy’s newspaper room, the flat screen, the glass bricks that open out onto the outdoors and the breakfast table. From this room I can see it all. Other than when Mama is in here with her guests, this room is seldom used.
“Tshepo! Tshepo wee? Tshepo where are you?”
Through the window I see Daddy in the garden. It is a deliberate garden, meticulously arranged into several mazes of cleanly trimmed hedges bordering rugs of intense red and pink flowers which flatter the terracotta-tiled roof when they are in bloom. Standing in the heart of it in his Sunday suit, where all the mazes lead and where a clay boy wees into a stream of stones and pebbles below, Daddy resembles a character in a world of pretend. Although I cannot see from where I am sitting, I know my father is on his cellular telephone. I have known him for too long to kid myself into believing he is enjoying a moment of respite amongst the birds and shrubbery. Oh, but how picturesque it looks, Daddy, at home in the garden, framed by the window’s silk curtains that are draped like ball gowns over the wrought-iron rods.
“Tshepo! Old Virginia, have you seen Tshepo? Tshepo! Where is my boy?”
It was something that was understood. Like the fact that Mama wakes up at 4.30am every morning. She wakes to intermittently stir the samp and beans which she had left in a pot to soak overnight so that they are soft and pulpy, ready for Daddy’s breakfast at 7am (nothing else fills his stomach quite the same). It was something that was undisputed. Like the fact that Mama’s money is her own to be used on herself and nothing else because she is beautiful and it costs money to remain so. It was something that was never questioned. Like the fact that Daddy has his lady friends, like Mama has hers too. And that Daddy sees his lady friends, like Mama sees hers too. So when Daddy scrambled down the stairs to the family room where Mama, Tshepo and I were watching the evening news, to point out that Tshepo had made an error in his university application forms (which Tshepo left on Daddy’s study desk for him to sign), we all agreed that Tshepo had made an error indeed. In the space provided for ‘Choice of degree or diploma’ Tshepo had written ‘Bachelor of Arts Majoring in African Literature and Languages’ and not Actuarial Science, which Daddy and he had agreed upon.
Tshepo, contrary to his character, had begun the stampede of words. “I want to write,” he stood up and declared, demolishing the shared notion that he had made a mistake, “I want to speak. I want to say those things that people are afraid to hear. Those things that they do not want to face. In the pages of a book, in the privacy of their minds, where they feel a little less vulnerable, I will talk to them, long after the book is down, we will converse, my readers and I, and they will know.”
“Nonsense!” Daddy bellowed. “Absolute nonsense.”
“Stop it, John! Stop it.” Mama’s eyes were glistening. Clearly she had been moved by Tshepo’s display.
“You are a lazy little bugger, Tshepo. That is what you are, bloody lazy.”
“Leave the boy, John.”
“You ran when you saw a challenge ahead. You didn’t even have the guts to say it to my face. You disgrace me, Tshepo. You are a disgrace to our name.”
“They is young, John. Let them dream.”
“Dream, Gemina? Dream? Dream at whose expense? And then when he’s finished dreaming, who supports the dreamer? You?”
“John, please. Stop all this. Tshepo, she is gifted. You know that. He is got talent and he is success in anything he is doing.”
“Do not give me that rubbish, Gemina. You understand nothing of the real wor
ld. You could not even finish high school.”
And that is how it begun. After that comment, Mama shrieked and screamed so many sentences. Daddy roared a thousand others. Tshepo slipped between the panels of wood on the floor and disappeared. I sat there mesmerised. It was the longest conversation Mama and Daddy had ever had and it went on for days. When you thought it was sadly drawing to an end, it would abruptly begin again. At night the words they threw at each other would spin hysterically around, then fly through the innocent and exposed walls and into my room making me wake with delight. The words would swish up and come crashing down. They would zoom out of the door and back in again. They would dance on the balcony, and race down the stairs and spin in each other’s arms.
I though it was fantastic. I had not seen Mama and Daddy so verbal with each other since before I can remember. “They’re not talking, Ofilwe, they are fighting,” Tshepo snapped at me after I had thanked him. What did it matter, didn’t he see? Hadn’t he heard? Mama and Daddy had been up the whole night, talking and talking and talking. “I couldn’t even sleep, Tshepo! I tried, but I could not sleep,” I laughed. Walking around the house in a warm and pleasurable drowsiness, hoping that it would never fade away, I quietly thanked my brother again for being so selfless.
“Where were you, Tshepo?” I ask. Tshepo turns around startled. He must have assumed I had left with Mama or Daddy. Tshepo holds a drum in his hands and is wearing a brightly coloured loose-fitting tunic, with wide elbow-length sleeves and a square neck. It resembles the West African shirts they sell at the flea markets.
“Where were you, Tshepo, did you not hear Mama calling you?” At first Tshepo looks a little embarrassed, but I think he decides against it, because he pulls the drum closer to his body, pushes his chest out and walks towards where he thinks I am sitting. He cannot see me.
“Where were you, Tshepo?” I ask again.
“In the middle.” Ever since Tshepo started hiding out on the second floor, he decided that referring to the levels of our house as floors sounded pompous and that he would call the second floor the middle, the first ground, and the third the top.
“Did you hear Mama calling you?” I know he did and dared him to lie.
“No.”
“You didn’t hear her? She must have called you a gazillion times. You didn’t hear that? She called your name from the moment she walked into the house, all the way up the stairs, while she was changing, all the way down again and on her way out. You never heard that, Tshepo?”
“No.”
It is not the first time Tshepo has feigned absenteeism. In fact he does it all the time. It is something that developed discreetly. First he lacked an opinion about anything and then months later he ceased speaking altogether. Tshepo then became extremely busy with all sorts of projects and assignments. This was followed by a note, slipped under my bedroom door, that said he needed space to think and could no longer write in the newspaper room where the two of us had done our schoolwork from ever since we had work to do. Why, Tshepo was so very busy, he stopped having to come downstairs, then stopped having to go out, and then stopped having to be around until it was OK that Tshepo had stopped being. I taunt him not because I am sad for Daddy or sorry for Mama, but because sometimes I feel like Tshepo got the easy way out.
“What were you doing in the middle, Tshepo?”
“I was writing.”
Tshepo, tracing my voice to the rocking chair, walks around the decorative coffee table, thoughtfully places the drum on the floor and sits down, cross-legged, on the sofa across from me. It is only now that I recognise his shirt as one of Mama’s kaftans, presumably the white one that she once mentioned was too large. He must have dyed it.
“What are you writing?” Now that I have his attention, I resolve to say nothing about the kaftan which looks increasingly feminine and odd in the clashing blue, yellow and orange fabric paints he must have used. I wonder if they will wash out.
“A poem.” And he begins to read.
We were the Sun’s last hope: We whose skin had been marked by her fiery kiss.
We were all she had left to love and she promised to love us always.
Her rays turned pale skin a painful red. Her scorch crisped freckled noses and beat down on bleached heads.
Not out of vengeance. No, nothing they could ever do would bring her that low. Nor out of malice. Such hatred she had never known.
It was fear. Not fear of what she’d seen them do or what she’d heard them say. It was not fear of their extravagant rifles and armies of rigid men.
No, it was the hollow in their eyes and the cracks in their ice-cube hearts that scared her. She was afraid of the cold that threatened to seep out of their nothingness and smother her flame.
It was out of self-defence, Your Honour, that is why she burnt them. She had only seeked to protect herself and her own.
We were the Sun’s last hope: We whose skin had been marked by her fiery kiss.
We were all she had left to love and she promised to protect us always.
But when it seems that all skin is pale, all noses freckled and all heads bleached?
It is not out of vengeance. No, nothing we could do would ever bring her that low. Nor out of malice. Such hatred she has never known.
No, it is the hollowing out of my eyes and the freezing over of your bubbling heart that scares her. She is afraid of the cold that threatens to seep out of our nothingness and smother her flame.
It is out of confusion, Your Honour, that is why she burns us. She only seeks to protect herself and find her own.
“Today I got new school shoes. Every year I scratch my new school shoes because I am clumsy and I trip and fall. But this year I am going to try my very best not to scratch my new school shoes. I am going to walk real careful and lift my new school shoes up high in the sky. This year I do not think I will scratch my new school shoes because I am now steady.
Mr Homes is my new teacher. He is a grade four teacher and I am a grade four boy. It is funny, hey; all the teachers in my school wear the same clothes, every day. And I don’t even know why, they just wear them. They never even change. Maybe it is because they are trying to make us feel better about having to wear school uniform and stuff or maybe they just like their clothes very much.
Mrs Leeroy’s husband is a policeman. He has a funny uniform. Sometimes he even comes to our school with a gun. A real gun! He keeps it in his pocket, and Rick says he heard Mrs Leeroy tell one of the grade four teachers that he even sleeps with it at night! No way! Rick is a liar! What if it goes off and shoots the roof? Mr Leeroy would never do that.
Rick is so naughty, hey; just because his mom is a grade seven teacher he thinks he can do anything he likes. And he’s a liar. One time I was cutting up my eraser to give it to my friend who forgot his at home and then I was going to give it to him, but I sort of forgot and left it on Rick’s desk and then Rick goes and tells Mr Homes that I cut his eraser in half. And then Mr Homes believes him and says, ‘Tshepo I am giving you a demerit for taking other children’s property!’ But I knew I didn’t take other children’s property so I didn’t care. That’s why nobody invites Rick to their parties because he is a Meany.
I have a party to go to on the third. It is my second indoor soccer party. Chad had one in grade three at the clubhouse and now it is Tony’s. If I feel like it I’m going to be a professional soccer player one day, because I am pretty good, but only if I change my mind about being a lawyer. Or maybe I’ll be a computer man like Daddy, but I’ll see. Mama says I can be anything I like in the whole world, even everything. But I don’t think I want to be everything because then other people won’t have jobs and stuff and then I’ll feel real bad for them and then I’ll have to give them all my money so that they can buy some bread and apples and juice and stuff and then I’ll have no money and then I’ll be poor.
At lunch break the other day we were playing horses and we were show-jumping over this one pole that used to belong to the jungle
gym and then Craig was galloping backwards and then he tripped on Jason Shirley’s juice bottle and then he fell and broke his whole wrist. But then he never even knew until he got home and his mom told him. They took him to an ambulance and then they put his wrist back together and then covered it with this real hard white stuff and when he came to school the next day he had to wear a different shirt because his big wrist wouldn’t fit through his normal shirt. And then Jason Davey asked him if he could draw a picture on his wrist and then we just all ended up drawing, and Ben drew this funny picture of a girl that didn’t even look like a girl, but looked like a house, and everybody laughed at Ben because Ben is so doff!
Coconut Page 7
