Writ in Water

by Natasha Mostert

  Isabelle, this is me talking. Not some crazy woman. You’re my cousin. Blood of my blood. I love you like a sister. If I’ve hurt you with my attitude towards Eric, I’m sorry. I still think he used you, but you loved him and I accept that. Please, please do this for me. I have suffered.

  I’ve always watched out for you, ever since you came to the farm—so quiet and angry. I’ve looked after you, watched over you. In return I’ve always been able to count on you. I know I can count on you now. You’ll do this for me, won’t you.

  Won’t you?

  Come on, Isabelle. I dare you.

  FIVE

  But Death will lead her to a shade

  Where Love is cold, and Beauty blinde.

  The Philosopher and the Lover: to a Mistress dying

  Sir William Davenant (1606–1668)

  ‘I DARE YOU.’

  The girl who spoke had braces on her teeth and a malevolent gleam in her eye. Her school uniform showed a stain just below the collar. She looked at Isa for a moment and then turned to the girl at her side. ‘I knew it, Alette. Your cousin’s chicken.’

  ‘No, she’s not.’ Alette spoke calmly. ‘Come on, Isabelle, it’s not so bad. I’ll show you.’

  Alette dipped her hand inside the shoe box and removed a fat caterpillar from among the velvety mulberry leaves. Without any change of expression she stuck out her tongue and placed the silkworm on top of it.

  Isa felt sick. She looked at the glistening pink tongue, the silkworm’s soft, crumpled skin. The greyish-white worm was moving sluggishly but deliberately towards the back of Alette’s tongue.

  Alette closed her mouth. For a few seconds she stood without moving. Then she opened her mouth and took out the worm again, balancing it on her finger.

  ‘Here.’ She held out her hand to Isa. ‘Take it.’

  Isa held out her hand. The dazed worm plopped onto her palm.

  She looked into Alette’s eyes. Her cousin had a quizzical expression on her face, a kind of could-I-have-been-mistaken-about-you look. It chilled Isa’s heart. If she failed this test, it would be over. It would forever jeopardize her chances of becoming friends. And she did so want to be friends with this stunning girl.

  The worm was moving from her palm towards her wrist. Isa placed the forefinger of her other hand directly in its path. For a moment the caterpillar hesitated. Then it gripped her finger with its tiny, hairy legs.

  Isa deposited the worm on her tongue. She closed her mouth and blanked out her mind. After a few seconds she took out the worm and dropped it among the other silkworms in the box.

  Alette smiled. ‘Well done.’

  • • •

  UNTIL A MONTH BEFORE, Isa had never really given much thought to the fact that she had a cousin. On top of the piano in the drawing room was an out-of-focus photograph of two bald-headed babies in elaborate christening dresses. Isa knew that the baby on the right—the one who was crying—was herself. The other baby, she had been told, was Alette, the daughter of her mother’s brother who lived in KwaZulu-Natal. But Isa’s mother died when she was two and her father had not bothered keeping in touch with her mother’s side of the family.

  Then, a day before her thirteenth birthday, Isa’s father crashed his car, killing himself and a young couple and their little boy.

  On the day of the crash, he was quite drunk. This was not unusual. He was intoxicated almost every single day of his life, although Isa never heard her father slur his speech or saw him stumble when he walked. It was a matter of pride to him that he carried his alcohol well. After an especially fierce drinking bout, his smile might become a little wider and occasionally, but not often, he became violent. Isa learned to recognize the signs. When his smile faded and he became quiet, she made herself scarce.

  On the day of his death, as he got behind the wheel, he was—by his standards—fairly sober. Isa was aware of the alcohol on his breath, but that morning he had been especially affectionate towards her and she was grateful. He gave her a kiss, waved goodbye and then went out and killed an entire family and left her with the guilt of not having tried to stop him.

  Her uncle Leon drove up all the way from Natal to attend the funeral in Johannesburg. He was a mild-mannered man with vague eyes. After the funeral he took Isa to one side and told her that from now on she would be living with him and his family on their sugar farm near the Tugela River. ‘You’ll like it there,’ he told her. ‘The farm is called Kleingeluk, that means “a small dose of good fortune.”’ He looked into her mistrustful eyes and touched her shoulder briefly, awkwardly. ‘You’ll like it,’ he repeated.

  KwaZulu-Natal was a shock to someone used to cool, crisp Highveld air, arid colours and the purity of dust. Natal presented itself to Isa as an onslaught on the senses: steaming heat, flowers in outrageous colours, the air vibrating with screaming cicadas. The sweet stickiness of sugar cane permeating everything, giving life here its texture. The homestead surrounded by sugar cane and the fields stretching as far as the eye could see. To Isa it felt as though she might be swallowed, devoured by all that poisonous green. A mere thirty kilometres to the south was the ocean. But there was not a hint of brine in the air: not the suggestion of a cooling breeze.

  The heat seldom eased. Isa had to become used to waking up in the mornings with sweat on her forehead. It seemed to her as though people here breathed more slowly, as though the humidity in the air made even breathing an effort; a conscious act. Women talked softly, without energy, and there were moist patches on their dresses under their arms. In Natal everything was bigger. The insects were large and fearless. The farmhands who cut the cane wore boots up to their knees to guard against the teeth of enormous cane rats. It was a powerfully feminine landscape, with its rolling hills and in the air the sweet stench of decaying flowers. The cycle of birth and rebirth was as tangible as a slow, sensuous heartbeat. It was Alette’s milieu. It was her setting. It was perfect for her.

  Alette. Alette with her small limbs and fragile bones and heavy woman’s breasts. Alette, at age thirteen, already utterly and uncompromisingly promiscuous. ‘Why?’ Isa once asked her after Alette had sneaked back into the room after yet another amorous tryst—this time with a smitten boy who lived on a neighbouring farm. ‘You don’t even like him.’

  Alette arched her back tiredly. ‘I like being held.’

  At first, the two girls hadn’t bonded. The atmosphere between them just after Isa’s arrival on the farm had been tense. Isa felt clumsy and raw boned in the presence of her cousin. Alette seemed intent on baiting Isa; subtly needling her and then sitting back to enjoy the spectacle of Isa blinking away angry tears and responding in a voice that trembled horribly.

  Alette would challenge Isa not to be timid. ‘I dare you’ were words that Isa came to know well; words she came to dread.

  There was the time Isa watched disbelievingly as Alette lay flat on her back beneath power lines that were strung dangerously close to the roof of the house. Alette slid slowly back and forth underneath the lethal lines, the cords only inches away from her body.

  ‘I dare you.’

  The blood rushed in Isa’s ears. In her mouth was the prickly taste of fear. As she slid her body underneath the lines, she was shivering, even though the corrugated iron of the roof was hot enough to scald the skin on her back.

  There was the time they swam the river. The honey-coloured water was blood warm on the skin. The weeping willows on the other side of the riverbank seemed very far away. Something cold brushed against her leg and Isa was afraid. The cane cutters swore there was an immensely old ingwenya, ‘crocodile’, haunting this part of the river. In front of her Alette seemed to be floating, her hair dark and stringy, her limbs pale shapes in the muddy water. Isa’s arms were getting tired. For one dreadful moment her head dipped beneath the water and it became dark around her. By the time they reached the bank, she was swimming without thinking, her mind numb; her body aching and exhausted, her lungs burning up.

  Isa did not share A
lette’s liking for the thrill of risk. But she had no defence against Alette’s raised eyebrows and half smile. And even though she tried to fight it, she realized that the more she got to know Alette, the more she craved her approval. Alette was testing her and Isa was determined that her cousin would not find her wanting.

  Things were starting to change between them.

  • • •

  THE RELATIONSHIP CHANGED from the adversarial to the symbiotic. Alette became Isa’s protector. At the school where Isa and Alette were students, their classmates were mostly children from a small cluster of villages and from surrounding farms, and they had all known one another since infancy. The children formed a tight clique and without Alette, Isa would have been lost. But Alette assured Isa’s popularity. She exaggerated Isa’s academic achievements at her old school. She admired Isa’s drawings and sketches and expected her circle of friends to show admiration also. And in return Isa gave her loyalty to Alette utterly and without reservation.

  At the farm, the two girls were pretty much left to their own devices. Her uncle Leon and her aunt Lettie were kind to Isa but not especially interested in her. Her uncle doted on Alette, but Isa had the feeling that Aunt Lettie was slightly jealous of her daughter.

  She and Alette became as close as sisters; closer. And yet they were so different from each other: different in temperament, different in what they wanted out of life.

  Alette stated often and with conviction that she would never marry. ‘Marriage turns women into drudges,’ Alette said in that calm way of hers. She didn’t speak aggressively, just with total certainty. ‘I don’t see myself in that role. What about you, Isabelle? Would you want to marry?’

  And ‘Yes,’ said Isa meekly, ‘I would.’ And yes as well to children, a house in the suburbs and a husband who came back from the office at six, loosening his tie and asking what’s for dinner. She looked into Alette’s incredulous eyes and said defensively, ‘I’m not a romantic.’

  ‘Then why are you reading this?’ Alette picked up the paperback romance, which Isa had borrowed from her friend Barbara, who, in turn, had stolen it from her mother’s stash.

  Alette looked contemptuously at the cover, which depicted a swarthy man and a swooning female striking an unlikely pose against his shoulder. Alette flicked open a page and started reading a passage out loud. Before she had finished, Isa was convulsed with laughter. Alette was substituting all the male pronouns with female pronouns and vice versa.

  ‘Her muscled arms were like steel bands around his fragile shoulders,’ Alette read in a high, affected voice. ‘She placed a finger under his rounded chin and tilted his small, expectant face up to hers. ‘You light my fire,’ she growled huskily, and pressed her lips against his moist, half-open mouth. He smiled tremulously and bravely offered himself to her rough passion.’

  Alette threw the book away from her and it skidded across the table. ‘Of course, you’re a romantic. But your need for security and stability is stronger. And so you’ll willingly settle for a life of comfortable boredom. Whereas I want delirium and protracted desire. A man who’ll eat oysters off my breasts—like Casanova,’ she said, laughing at Isa’s repulsed expression.

  ‘And what about the heartbreak?’ Isa asked, a little stung by the contempt in Alette’s voice. ‘Feelings that strong usually end in tears.’

  Alette looked at her with amusement. ‘There’s always the one who kisses and the one who is being kissed. I’ll be the one who turns the cheek. But I need the man I’m with to ache and burn. He should want me more than anything. That kind of infatuation is not possible in marriage. And anyway,’—she made a dismissive gesture with her hand—‘playing house is not in my nature and character is destiny.’

  Many years afterwards, Isa would think back on these words and wonder at the strangeness of life. Because Alette did get married, while she, Isa, did not, but went on to occupy for years that much more tenuous and shadowy position of the other woman.

  • • •

  ISA WOKE UP sweating and nauseous. The farm was dead quiet. It was late and her room was dark and it took her a brief, terror-filled moment to realize that the person standing next to the bed was Alette. Dressed in a white cotton nightgown, Alette seemed as ephemeral as a ghost.

  ‘What …?’

  ‘Bad dream,’ Alette said matter-of-factly. ‘Wait, I’ll be right back.’ She turned around and padded almost noiselessly out of the room on her bare feet. Isa heard a stair creak as Alette carefully negotiated her way downstairs in darkness.

  Isa rubbed her eyes tiredly. This was the fourth time in a week that she had had the same nightmare. And every time Alette was there to wake her up, to rescue her from the dream’s insistent grasp. She did not know how Alette knew. They didn’t share a room, but somehow Alette seemed able to sense her distress.

  ‘Here, drink this, you’ll feel better.’ Alette had returned to the room carrying a glass of her mother’s homemade ginger beer.

  The tart bubbles tickled Isa’s nose and she sneezed.

  ‘Shh.’ Alette closed the door and then walked over to the window, pulling back the curtain. Moonlight flooded the room. The two girls sat down on the wide windowsill and Isa drew her knees up to her chest and hugged herself. The night was warm but she was feeling cold.

  For a while it was silent between them. Outside everything was bathed in a milky light. White banana trees, white sugar cane, black shadows.

  Isa glanced over at Alette. She was leaning forward, her forehead pressed against the pane of glass.

  ‘Alette …’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘How come you know?’

  ‘Know what?’ Alette pulled away from the window.

  ‘How come you know every time I have a bad dream. Do I shout in my sleep?’

  Alette shook her head.

  ‘So then how?’

  ‘I just know. It’s like I’m dreaming and you’re dreaming and somehow I manage to wander into your dream. No, that’s not quite right.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t know how to explain it. But I know that I can see you in there although you’re not able to see me yet.’

  ‘Yet?’

  Alette shrugged. She blew her breath against the windowpane. In the grey patch of moisture, she traced with her finger three words: NON OMNIS MORIAR.

  Isa leaned over to take a closer look. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Something we learned in Latin class.’

  Latin was not one of Isa’s electives and the words made no sense to her. ‘So what does it mean, then?’

  ‘It’s a quote from Horace,’ Alette said dreamily. ‘It means, “I shall not altogether die.”’

  Isa stared at the three words. The letters were already disappearing—only the M of MORIAR standing strong and clearly etched.

  Alette spoke again. ‘Siena says our dreams live on after we die. Even when our bodies are cold, our dreams are still out there and will haunt the dreams of the living.’

  Isa shivered. ‘That’s creepy.’

  ‘No, it’s cool. It’s like we’re never really gone. All our passions survive. All our desires and fears, the things we care about the most. And we can influence those who are still alive.’

  Isa watched as Alette reached out her hand and wiped the pane of glass clean with the side of her fist.

  ‘Are you okay now?’ Alette looked at her. ‘Do you want to talk about your nightmare?’

  ‘No. It was the same one.’ Broken bodies and mangled cars. Death and guilt. The little boy had been only three years old.

  ‘You sure you’re okay?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  Alette got to her feet. ‘So let’s go back to bed then. It’s late.’ She waited until Isa got under the covers and touched Isa’s forehead briefly. ‘Call me if you need me.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Although I’ll probably know anyway.’

  ‘Yes.’ Isa smiled. She suddenly felt immensely comforted.

  ‘Do you want the door open or closed
?’

  ‘Open, I think.’ Isa watched Alette as she walked to the door. ‘Alette …’

  ‘Yes?’ Alette was looking back over her shoulder. In the uncertain light her eyes were black.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Sure. Sleep tight now.’

  Isa pulled the sheet up to her chin. She was just about to turn over when she became aware that Alette was still standing motionless in the doorway, watching her.

  ‘What is it?’

  Alette hesitated. ‘These dreams I … we … have. Maybe we should talk to Siena about them.’

  ‘Okay. If you want to.’

  Alette nodded. ‘It’s time.’

  • • •

  SIENA WAS ALETTE’S AIA: her nanny. She was Zulu. Her skin was deeply black and her voice as deep as a man’s. She was the one person, Isa always thought, who truly had a hold on Alette’s affections. Alette was dismissive of her mother and tolerant of her father’s adoration. She was certainly very fond of Isa. But Siena she adored. The only time Isa would ever see Alette weep would be after Siena’s death.

  Siena had looked after Alette since the cradle and as such occupied an important position in the household. But it wasn’t her role as caretaker that made her a person of influence on the farm and in the larger community. Siena was a mystic: a diviner—or, as people like Aunt Lettie insisted with obstinate ignorance—a witch doctor.

  Siena had children of her own: two boys, both grown. The one worked in a restaurant in Johannesburg, the other was a lab assistant at the University of Natal. Neither one seemed quite at ease with their mother’s pursuits and Siena had told Isa that in many ways Alette was closer to her than her own sons. It was from Siena that Alette got her interest in all things mystical. And Siena recognized Alette’s psychic abilities. ‘This one,’ she’d say, ‘this one has the power.’