“Crap one,” Arwen muttered while she quickly gathered her cards.
He’d try to create a distraction. Etienne leapt to his feet in time to look up into Odette’s sneering face as well as those belonging to a gaggle of her cronies.
“Oh, look, it’s the Poison Dwarf and the Wicked Witch of the West.” An ugly smile smeared across Odette’s features.
Her companions filled the space in the narrow passage, effectively hemming them in. Etienne considered pushing past them in the vain hope of drawing them off but that ploy had worked once before and he doubted Odette or the others would fall for it again.
“I do believe that the correct terms would be ‘little person’ and ‘goth.’ The words you have chosen betray your sore lack of interpersonal skills, Odette. How terribly non-PC.”
“Oh, what mighty big words for such a little rat.”
“Leave him be!” Arwen rose to her feet, her bundle clutched to her chest.
Odette’s lazy grin spread even further–a face Etienne had always felt was only a handful of genes away from being considered bovine. She shifted her attention to Arwen. “Have you been playing with those devil cards again, little witchy-poos?”
Arwen’s anger was tangible, her breathing ragged.
Please don’t do anything stupid, Arwen.
“Give those here.” Jean-Pierre held out a meaty hand.
“You heard him.” Odette’s laugh was as cold as her steel-gray eyes.
No one moved and Etienne tensed, unsure. If he slapped Jean-Pierre’s hand away, he would most likely receive more than his fair share of swift kicks. If he managed to spit on Odette’s foot the action would elicit the same response and he wasn’t so stupid as to try to kick her knee the wrong way, like the occasion when they’d eventually pushed him down a flight of stairs. Afterward he’d had to make up some pretty wild stories about where he’d gained the livid bruises.
Arwen spoke in a quiet voice. “No.”
Red in the face, Odette barreled past Etienne to snatch the bundle from Arwen.
Etienne leapt and fell hard against the bitch’s thighs, unbalancing the big girl so that she knocked back into her friends. She certainly had not been expecting this.
“Fokken dwerg!” Jean-Pierre grabbed Etienne behind his arms, and threw him against the wall. Bright sparks impacted in his vision, the blow against the side of his head interrupting all rational thought until the pain cleared.
“I thought the headmistress put a ban on dwarf-tossing,” Etienne said as he tried to get to his feet. He swayed, unable to regain his balance, and the world lurched to one side.
Odette and Arwen wrestled for ownership of the bundle of cards.
“Let go, you stupid witch! We should have burned these when we had the chance!”
Arwen’s face had gone very white. Her eyes glistened. “They’re mine! My aunt gave them to me!”
The flat of Odette’s hand cracked against Arwen’s cheek and the smaller girl fell back. The velvet tore, and the cards spiraled to the ground like autumn leaves.
An animal-like whine escaped Etienne’s lips as he sprang forward, trying to save the cards from being damaged. There were too many to catch and someone kicked him hard in the ribs so that he fell, unable to breathe. His palms stung, grazed on the paving.
Through the haze of pain, Arwen’s cries and more cruel laughter reached him. Every time he tried to get up, he received another kick, either to his ribs or belly. These blows were never hard enough to break bone, but they’d certainly bruise, and they were never aimed at his face.
“Oh, look,” someone jeered. “Our mini Prince Charming still wants to come to the rescue.”
Etienne allowed his limbs to slacken. Playing dead was a better option.
The flick of a cigarette lighter was accompanied by Odette’s nasty giggle, which reminded him more of a donkey braying. Arwen wailed.
They were burning her cards–the ones her late aunt had given her. Sick to his stomach, Etienne could do nothing. He was too small, too weak.
“I curse you, Odette! I curse you three times over for what you’ve done!” Arwen yelled.
Odette laughed again but her friends muttered among themselves, disquieted.
Superstitious bunch of fools.
“Leave the witch alone,” someone said. “Jesus will deal with her on her day of reckoning.”
“Oh, please, who’s afraid of Arwen Wareing and her pet dwarf?”
Chapter 4
A Land of Desolation
The big truck had already left with the bulk of their things when Uncle Reinhardt–Aunt Tanja’s husband–arrived to collect them. The man pulled up outside the house in his big gunmetal gray BMW and did not come inside to help them bring their suitcases and the last few boxes to the trailer. Uncle Reinhardt sat with his window rolled down, a pink elbow poking out while he puffed on a cigarette. Apart from a slight nod and a half-mumbled greeting, their uncle had very little to say to them.
Helen and Damon handled most of the packing. Their mother would first pick up a box before putting it down then scratch through her suitcase to check if she’d packed something else.
Damon said, “It’s the medication, isn’t it, sis? It’s making her all scatty.”
Helen nodded but held back the bitter words that danced on the tip of her tongue. “Just help her get to the car. I’ll do one last circuit of the house. If we leave it up to her, we’ll never get going.”
The house, where she had lived her entire life, was echoingly empty, so alien. After Dad had left, and had sent for his share of the furniture, the rooms had grown steadily bare. Mom’s one night in hospital had ended up being a fortnight and their maternal grandmother, whom they had never met, and aunts, had decided the house should be packed up and placed on the market. Mom hadn’t argued, and her passiveness only served to fuel Helen’s anger.
Funny how she’d always taken it for granted parents and home would be constants in her life. Now everything had changed in less than a month. Helen could not cry but a weight lodged within her chest and her eyes ached as though she had dust in them. What they had not sold of their possessions had been packed into boxes and placed in storage, including most of her books, a few of her old toys–a favorite bear, a stuffed lion–things she did not want to let go of yet.
For the rest, she and Damon had fetched boxes from the Spar down the road, filling these with things for the children’s home in Imizamo Yethu township. Some other child would play with her old things, dressing and undressing the Barbie doll she’d been given for her sixth birthday.
This entire situation was far more difficult for her brother. He’d had to find homes for all his reptiles and most of the bugs he’d collected over the years.
Like a ghost, Helen wandered through the rooms, allowing the memories to wash over her. This crack in the bathroom tiles was from the day she and Damon had been playing cricket indoors. That round burn mark on Damon’s carpet had happened when he’d made popcorn for the first time. He’d been so excited by the results, he’d put the hot pot down on his carpet.
They were leaving this house behind, with its old fig tree in the garden, where they’d tried to build a tree house or the boggy spot down at the bottom of the garden where Damon had first found the spawning leopard toads.
Sadness pressed down on her but also the sense that she would be having an adventure. She wasn’t in the paddle pool anymore. There were no inflatable armbands to keep her afloat.
The rooms echoed with her footsteps but it was in her bedroom that she found one thing she had forgotten–a small beaded Christmas decoration, cleverly wrought to represent a sun or star in miniscule golden beads.
The object had been attached to one of her father’s end-of-year gifts–a bottle of whiskey–and he’d discarded the beaded sun with the wrapping paper. Purely by chance, the sun had caught her eye and she’d hung it from her curtain railing. That must have been more than five years ago.
So much had changed. Th
e wooden rings hung naked where her curtains used to be.
“I can’t leave you here,” she said to the little sun. What sort of person would next sleep in this room? Maybe not the kind of person who’d appreciate this little work of art.
Helen snapped the ancient cotton thread from which the sun dangled and tucked the object in her jeans pocket. With a sigh and a last look around, she trudged downstairs to the car.
Uncle Reinhardt did not speak unless spoken to and listened to some awful faux-operatic compilation of four tenors warbling their way through “greatest hits” a decade out of date. Added to their woes, he chain-smoked, grunting noncommittally when she and Damon complained.
Mom said nothing and slumped in the passenger seat, staring at her hands folded in her lap.
They drove along the N2 National Road, first speeding through the Cape Flats with its conglomeration of rusted shacks and government-sponsored housing pushing up out of expanses of soft white sand–so bleak. Then they reached the Hottentots Holland mountains, and ascended Sir Lowry’s Pass.
The curve of False Bay vanished, Table Mountain sinking in the distance. They roared through the apple orchards of Grabouw, and soon descended into the Overberg proper, with its rolling late-summer wheat fields, shorn of their crop and dusty as hell.
Helen fell asleep then, resting her head against the bedding and boxes forming a barrier on the back seat between her and her brother. She only awoke when they stopped to refuel in Mossel Bay, shortly before noon. Already it was clear how the landscape had changed much from her familiar Cape. Neither she nor her brother had been this far from home before.
Damon was sullen, almost as quiet as their mother, who moved to the rest rooms like a sleepwalker. Their uncle bought them each a pie and a soft drink before he walked a distance from the car to have a conversation on his cell phone.
“I feel like there’s been some sort of a mistake,” Helen said.
Damon shrugged, and stared off into the distance.
“We should be at school. I hope we don’t miss too much or that they’re not at a totally different part of the syllabus when we do start classes again.”
“How much farther?” he asked.
“I don’t even think we’re quite halfway yet.”
“That music...”
“I know. We’ll just have to pray he grows tired of it.”
Once they passed the town of George, the Outeniqua pass was pretty enough, with its deep, folded ravines, their road ribboning the contours. Some of the sharp corners made her clutch at the panic handle when Uncle Reinhardt did not slow down. Helen did not want to entertain thoughts of the Beemer plunging hundreds of meters down.
The landscape grew arid as soon as they left the mountains. The flatter road meant their uncle gave the car more fuel. He did not hesitate to overtake trucks, even on blind corners.
It was as if he couldn’t wait to be rid of them.
They stopped again in Uniondale, to stretch their legs and have a cup of coffee at a quaint flamingo-pink coffee shop with a rusted iron ostrich standing sentinel on the pavement outside.
Late-blooming roses twined through the chain-link fencing and a lazy, one-eyed ginger cat on the veranda gazed at them with its remaining gooseberry-green eye. Helen stood for a moment, just breathing. Doves called in the oak trees at the police station next door. Fat policemen greeted friends walking past who weren’t in a hurry to be anywhere in particular. Men in white pickup trucks cruised along the road, nodding at cars headed in the opposite direction. Sweetness clung to the air, like freshly mown alfalfa.
Time passed differently here, slower.
Uncle Reinhardt struck up a conversation with the proprietor, who let slip he was originally from Joburg, so the two men chatted for half an hour while their mother stared at a near-empty teacup, unseeing.
Helen did not like the stuffed leopard crouching in the hallway, and neither did Damon, once he’d also gone inside to use the bathroom.
“I hope Nieu Bethesda isn’t like this town,” he said.
“It’s worse. I Googled it. It doesn’t even have a thousand inhabitants, and you can bet most of them haven’t ever been to a city. It’s small-town times for us, bro.”
“That’s just great.”
Helen had always heard about the plains of the Camdeboo but had never imagined they really would be so flat. The N9 cut through a landscape almost completely devoid of life, punctuated by lonely wind pumps and the occasional thick stands of prickly pears.
The soil had been baked almost white. Once Damon nudged her to point out a small group of springbok but apart from occasional dead meerkats lying along the road, they saw little else.
She tried to read a book but couldn’t get past a paragraph before losing the thread of the story and having to start again. Her brother immersed himself in a hand-held game. Between Uncle Reinhardt’s warbling tenors and the game’s bleeps and bloops, she could not relax.
The act of counting passing telephone poles amused her for a while until her eyelids grew heavy, her head nodded and she drifted into slumber.
The vehicle swerving onto gravel woke Helen, its wheels churning up small stones that knocked against the car’s body, sounding as if they would puncture the metal.
“Are we–” Helen asked, rubbing her eyes.
The landscape had changed yet again, with the Karoo’s typical flat-topped hills in evidence. The spear-shaped, blue-gray leaves of sisal lined the road but the rest of the terrain was uniformly dull, bleached by the sun.
“You missed Graaff-Reinet. I saw the turn-off for our new school. Mom wanted to go look but we drove right through,” Damon said. She’d showed some interest in something, for a change, was what her brother really tried to say.
Uncle Reinhardt gave no sign he’d heard the comment, which Damon had clearly intended as a barb. The man continued to wrestle with the car, driving too fast.
Mother’s head bobbed and she didn’t seem to be aware of their surroundings. Helen’s butt burned and her legs cramped something awful from having sat still for so long. Every so often, the car juddered over a stretch of rippled road. The sound drowned out even the tenors, making speaking impossible.
This was a dismal land.
They’d crested a curvy mountain pass to reach a plateau covered in rocks, scrub and not much else. Ahead, a tall mountain peak rose to a sharp blue point without a stitch of civilization to be seen.
Where was Nieu Bethesda? Could an entire village exist in the middle of nowhere?
Helen slumped. The shadows were long and blue, and stretched over the narrow track. The CD skipped whenever the surface grew too furrowed and Helen grabbed for the panic handle time and again, while entertaining visions of the car overturning on a corner.
Then the car pointed down and they plunged into a river valley. Helen would not have believed in its existence out in this bone-dry world.
Green, and so many trees lining the river’s course, with a crust of folded sandstone cliffs cupping the verdant strip.
Damon turned toward her and smiled. No doubt he’d expected worse, himself.
A large monitor lizard, more than a meter long, dashed across their path when the road leveled out at the bottom. Uncle Reinhardt cursed, overcompensated and almost succeeded in running them off the road. Damon’s face, however, lit up. No doubt he’d be out hunting for new pets quite soon.
Mother raised her head to look around. “Aah...we’re almost–” Then she lapsed into silence.
The hamlet’s church steeple was the first they saw of Nieu Bethesda. Ancient pear trees lined the road, welcoming them–their shimmering leaves a deep green contrasting with the brown ridges.
“When last were you here, Mom?” Damon asked.
“I, uh... When I met...”
Helen glared at her brother. “Don’t mention him, idiot!”
Damon made some show of looking contrite. No one said anything.
That meant she hadn’t been here for sixteen yea
rs. Mom’d been sixteen when she’d had Helen. For some reason this thought chilled her.
Trees shaded the furrow-lined streets and most houses were modest, one-story structures with peaked tin roofs, covered verandas and a distinct farm-housey air. Many were in a state of disrepair and a number were clearly closed up. Holiday homes.
The place seemed pretty enough, almost charming. People looked up when Uncle Reinhardt gunned the car down the main drag, still too fast and raising a great plume of pale dust behind the vehicle.
When it seemed as if he was about to drive clean through, he took a sudden right, and pulled up in front of a double-story house, a structure that appeared almost too grand for the setting. Although it may once have been fancy, the home offered an air of neglect, its shuttered bay windows badly in need of paint. A huge, overgrown hedge and a veritable forest of weeping willows, whose branches reached the ground in places, obscured almost the entire building.
Salix babylonica, Helen thought, remembering what she’d heard a teacher calling them in class. Somehow the Latin made her think of the Middle East and hanging gardens next to a swirling, inexorable river Tigris. According to her teacher, these trees were invasive aliens that should be chopped down.
A cloud of bugs already circled a naked light bulb that had either been left on all day or switched on early.
Damon spoke. “It doesn’t look as if anyone is home.”
Uncle Reinhardt snorted but did not reply, and climbed out of the car with a groan.
“Mother?” Helen asked. “You never told us what Granny’s name is.” It had never occurred to her to ask much about a grandmother they’d never met.
Chapter 5
Oh, to be Young Again
Trystan had new neighbors. Or, rather, new people had moved into the old Schroeder house across the road. Unfamiliar voices rang out.
Pressed against his lounge window, he wished he’d bothered with cleaning the glass that had, by his estimation, not been washed for almost a century.
Had he really been here so long?
When he wiped at the window, the dust coated his almost translucent skin with a fine, chalk-like layer that persisted, no matter how much he wiped his hand against his jeans.
Camdeboo Nights Page 2
