The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories

by Diane Awerbuck

  A short while later he had driven to join the rest of his family gathered at his grandmother’s house in Newlands. After commiserating with his grandmother, he had sat in the lounge and drunk some cold juice and in a small way joined the conversation about the particulars of the accident and his uncle’s idiosyncrasies that would be missed. It was not a conversation so much as a tentative sharing of disbelieving and fond remarks, sound to fill the silence. Conversations about the funeral and the practicalities of tying up the estate and recollections of the man would occupy the days to come. Now it was enough to be present.

  On Sunday he visited his grandmother again. In the kitchen he helped prepare some drinks and snacks for the unexpected visitors who had arrived to offer his grandmother their sympathy and support. A few times the phone rang and he answered it and was asked by the caller, a friend of his uncle’s or grandmother’s or a relative who had only just heard the news, to confirm and enlarge on what exactly had happened the previous morning on that sunburned strip of road outside Oudtshoorn. He told them what he knew: that his uncle’s motorbike had collided at high speed with a minibus taxi which turned across his lane and that his uncle had died on impact and his uncle’s girlfriend had died of her injuries a short while later and that the taxi driver had been injured and was in hospital. Each time, he sensed the caller’s relief at being able to talk to someone towards the edge of the bereaved family circle who could open up about the details of the accident and the character of his uncle and how his grandmother was doing and where to from here. He drew a kind of satisfaction from these phone conversations that appealed to his insider’s authority and he joined some callers in speculating about the accident, whether it was the result of the taxi driver’s negligence and his uncle’s well-known love of high speed that left no room for error and whether his uncle had been pursued by the traffic police at the time of the accident and what was left of the motorbike and which motorbike it was and how far down the road the bodies post-impact had travelled. But that afternoon when he returned to his garden flat and closed the door and lay down on his bed and listened to the wind thresh the branches of the trees outside, he felt cold sick self-betrayal at having spoken so brightly and easily with those callers about a death he sensed he should be taking harder than he was.

  4

  It was Monday mid-afternoon when he walked up the driveway of his uncle’s property in Oban Road, the driveway gate standing open as it always did, thin brown conifer fronds littering the paving stones. Warm sunlight lay on the bricks of the driveway and in the air the noise of a lawnmower grazing in a garden up the street. His uncle’s garden was unkempt, with twigs on the grass from a recent wind and weeks of leaves accumulated in the empty flowerbeds below the conifers and leopard trees. The curtains were drawn in the windows of the house.

  He sat on the doorstep that faced onto the driveway. He had sat there countless afternoons before on days he had visited, hoping to find his uncle at home. He would wait sometimes for an hour or more and then realise that whether or not his uncle returned to the house from work or errands while he sat there was not important. It was pleasurable enough sitting and noticing the sounds of birds in the empty garden and the movement of clouds.

  After a while he stepped up to the door and opened it with the spare key he had obtained from his grandmother’s house, setting off the warning squeal of the burglar alarm. He tramped down the passageway to the computer pad to enter the code to silence the noise. In the sitting room, he drew open the curtains and opened the peeling metal-frame windows to let in moving air. The burglar bars in the windows mapped squares of sunlight onto the brown carpet. Beside the faded green armchair lay two folded newspapers and on top of those some motorbike magazines. The remote control for the TV lay centred on the right armrest of the chair, pointing at the opaque screen in the corner of the room.

  He went through to the kitchen and opened the fridge and cupboards to scout for something to eat. He opened a can of beer that he found in the fridge and took from a drawer of the freezer a packet of salted peanuts, its top end fixed with a clothes peg.

  From the kitchen he wandered down the corridor towards the bedrooms, the floorboards creaking underfoot. The spare room was immaculately tidy, the bed tucked and smoothed for its next occupant. In the main bedroom the doors of the clothes cupboards stood ajar and a pair of socks and underwear lay crumpled on the carpet at the foot of the chest of drawers. On the bedside table, a luminous yellow light blinked on the telephone answering machine. He looked at the digital display, mulling a mouthful of beer. He let the message play aloud: a woman named Charlene phoning just to say hi, just to chat and find out how you are and how things are going, I hope you’re well, it would be lovely to catch up over dinner sometime soon.

  In the sitting room he sat for a long while on the poorly sprung couch facing his uncle’s favoured armchair. Drinking the dead man’s beer and eating his peanuts, he sat facing the space where the grey-haired man used to sit and eat his frugal lunch and dispense his advice which brooked no contradiction. He put aside the packet of peanuts and set the empty beer can on a coaster on a side table. Up the road, the lawnmower had ceased its noise and now there was just the occasional loud rush of a car accelerating up the street. He sat on the couch and gazed at the sunlight all parcelled out in blocks on the brown carpet and for all the bracing recent knowledge of his uncle’s death felt dimly as if nothing had changed, nothing at all could change if one just sat calmly enough in this room.

  5

  The funeral was set for Thursday afternoon. His mother had relayed to him his grandmother’s suggestion that he, the youngest nephew who had some talent for writing witty birthday poems, say a few words about his uncle, who by all accounts was a ‘character’. He spent Monday morning at his desk jotting ideas onto paper: recollections of his uncle’s habits, expressions, achievements, behavioural tics, values. He had no difficulty evoking the man from his memories and spent hours of the next two days talking aloud these disparate impressions into the confident shape of a speech. For security, on the morning of the funeral he wrote some keywords onto a piece of paper and put that in his pocket and at two o’clock left the house to walk in the windless sun of a flawless spring afternoon the short distance to St Thomas’s church in Rondebosch where the funeral would take place.

  Since the news of his uncle’s death he had not properly cried or felt more than a vague sense of loss. He felt tears should have come more easily than they had: on the Monday and Tuesday night it had taken some bottles of beer and maudlin music to bring the tears, after which he had felt a bit better but still disappointed, as at a brief drizzle from thunderous rain clouds.

  As he sat in one of the front pews of the church, his mind was not on his emotions but the words he would have to speak when the priest called on him after the reading and hymn and song and sermon. Save for the occasional wedding of a cousin he had not sat through a full church service since he was sixteen and preparing to be confirmed in the Anglican church up the road from his old family home. He had dropped out of that confirmation course because none of the facilitators was able to give a satisfactory answer to his questions about certain passages from the Bible. The confirmees had been encouraged to ask questions but while others’ questions were politely tentative, more obedient than serious, his own were more deep-reaching and found no convincing answers.

  Sitting now in a church in Rondebosch, he listened to the priest speak about death as something enabling a higher life in a world beyond. His mind moved in a different direction to the priest’s consoling words. He sat in trance of fresh amazement that he and others could live as if death were not a ubiquitous reality. He felt a tight scrunch of emotion at the thought of its absolute finality. His mind baulked and he narrowed his gaze on a vase of flowers that he realised must have been prepared specially for the occasion. Flower-arrangers, priests, life-insurers, undertakers – who else works the edges of others’ grief? From the front of the church the pri
est spoke his name and he rose as if he were another person and walked up the steps to the lectern and turned to a church full of faces and a waiting microphone.

  6

  He had only ever attended one other wake, six years before for a family friend who had died at twenty-one, also in a motorbike accident. On that occasion he had not spoken much to anyone and had stood in the dining room where the cakes and biscuits and sandwiches and drinks were arrayed, looking out the window at an enormous creeper-hung tree in the family’s front garden. A girl had spoken to him and he had turned to see the late young man’s girlfriend who of all people asked him why he looked so sad.

  Six years later now at his uncle’s wake at his grandmother’s house he was spoken to by nearly every guest who wanted to say how much they had enjoyed his eulogy. He felt proud and sure, as others told him, that his uncle would have been proud of him too, mainly for the thread of irreverence in what he had said. But he also felt it was vaguely inappropriate to feel this glow on such a black day that was, after all, not about him but the man now forever absent. The full impact of his uncle’s death had perhaps not yet hit him but he had had a taste of it in the closing lines of his speech when his eyes had blurred and his voice choked. Now it seemed alright. He had a beer in his hand and people were stopping and taking him by the hand or putting an arm over his shoulder and telling him what a fine man his uncle had been and how he had captured him so well in the words he had spoken that afternoon. Guests were smiling and drinking and someone was talking to him and he was smiling back and trying not to think too much about anything. He was among the living.

  7

  A photograph of his uncle laughing, sitting in a lime felt armchair with one leg crossed over the other, in one hand a glass of wine. His uncle bare-chested, in short trousers and slip-slops, talking over some fine point of bicycle maintenance or car mechanics. His uncle sitting in his sunlight-filled lounge eating a frugal lunch from saucers on a tray laid on his lap.

  The rain had stopped a while ago and outside his room there was a myriad shifting and bristling of plants and grass and birds in the quietness of the afternoon. He put away the folder of keepsakes and photographs and sat in an armchair that was one of the larger items that had come into his possession when the contents of the tenantless house had been sorted and allocated. There had been a cat too and even that had found a new home. He sat now in this armchair in his garden flat, the same armchair his uncle would occupy forever in the photograph, and reflected how easily a lifetime’s accumulation of possessions is dispersed into other people’s lives, other people’s homes. Nine months had passed since his uncle had not returned from the motorbike rally in Oudtshoorn.

  He thought about that: packing a bag of clothes and some toiletries for a weekend away, getting onto a motorbike and gliding onto the freeway out of town on a Friday afternoon before the thickening late-afternoon traffic, opening up on generous country roads, the skies wide overhead, the road a hungry promise. With the grace of two wheels at speed, who would think the ground could be so hard?

  In Loving Memory

  Caitlin Tredoux

  Valerie swivelled on her chair and tapped her pencil against the desk. The computer in front of her hummed tunelessly. It was getting a bit old and noisy, but she was fond of it in a strange way. For all the fondness she felt towards it, at this moment she had to restrain herself from slapping it on the side, from shaking the screen or even throwing her pencil at it. Throwing her pencil felt like it would be the most satisfying.

  She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear to try and hide her frustration. Mostly she liked her shoulder-length, sandy hair. Her mother often told her that the colour made her look mousy, and that she should put highlights in. Valerie had learned to ignore all her mother’s comments. Today the thin strands kept falling across her eyes and annoying her. She had probably missed a few pieces when she’d put in the butterfly clips that morning.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mr and Mrs de Klerk. The design is just loading.’

  Mr de Klerk nodded. Mrs de Klerk didn’t even glance up. Her eyes were fixed on the photographs clutched in her hands.

  ‘Okay, here it is.’ She turned the screen slightly towards the young couple.

  Mr de Klerk swallowed visibly as he read the words.

  ‘What do you think, Marelize?’

  ‘It’s fine.’ Mrs de Klerk hadn’t even looked up at the screen.

  Mr de Klerk looked at his wife. He cleared his throat and read from the screen. ‘Corné de Klerk. Beloved son, grandson and nephew. Then the date of birth and,’ he cleared his throat again, ‘death. Psalm 23, verse 6. Now safe in the arms of Jesus. Always in our memories.’

  Valerie watched the couple in front of her. The husband’s dark hair was cut very short. She wondered if the grey hairs starting to appear were a result of the stress of his son’s illness. He looked like a professional of some kind. Neat black pants, casual open-necked shirt. If she had to guess she would have gone with accountant or something similar. Mrs de Klerk was slim and short. Valerie looked at the gorgeous wavy hair that hid her face from view. The hair was beautiful, something out of a Renaissance painting, but Valerie could see that the locks lacked shine and life. The reddish hair was frizzy and the unsympathetic electric lights gave the woman an odd halo around her bowed head. Mrs de Klerk was very pale. She had been quiet for most of the meeting. Only once giving her opinion when they had to choose the gravestone. Her husband had wanted a stone shaped like a teddy bear. She had simply remarked that their son had been too old for teddy bears.

  ‘Is there anything else you want on there, sweetie?’ Mr de Klerk glanced at his wife after having read the inscription.

  Mrs de Klerk shook her head. ‘It’s fine.’

  Mr de Klerk met Valerie’s eyes. She nodded and turned the screen back to face her. ‘It’s a lovely inscription. And it will be marble with white lettering. On the top it will be the angel with hands folded in prayer. I have all the details on this form. If you have no further changes that need to be made, please sign here.’ Mr de Klerk nodded again and took the form.

  Valerie had learned how to read couples. Some stayed together to support each other. Others needed to get away from this moment, to bury their marriage alongside their child.

  ‘You said that you needed it by the middle of March. We’ll be in contact as soon as it’s finished and further arrangements can be handled then.’

  ‘Thank you, um …?’

  ‘Valerie. My office phone number is on the card. Please call if you have any questions.’ She leaned slightly forwards in her seat. ‘Mr and Mrs de Klerk, I know that nothing I can say can even begin to touch on what you’re feeling right now. Just know that I am here to help you take care of all these details.’

  Mr de Klerk thanked her again and held out his hand to shake hers. Valerie got up and took his hand.

  Mrs de Klerk stayed seated. ‘We have to choose a picture to put on the funeral service,’ her voice faltered and she cleared her throat, ‘but we can’t decide. We have so many of him.’

  She held out the photos to Valerie. Valerie walked around her desk and took the seat Mr de Klerk had just vacated. She took the pictures.

  A little blond haired boy on a tricycle. The picture taken from a high angle and the boy laughing up into the camera.

  The little boy seated between his parents. All three were wearing red shirts. It looked like the sort of picture that too-good-to-be-true families put on their Christmas cards to show their extended family and friends how happy and together they were.

  The little boy playing at the beach. A bright blue swimming costume, light blue hat, bucket and shovel.

  A close-up of the little boy eating ice-cream. Chocolate all over his mouth.

  Valerie’s heart beat faster. The boy in the pictures was only slightly older than her own son. Every time she had to do a stone for a child, she tried to imagine what it must be like to be on this side of the desk. To be the grieving parent ins
tead of being the one helping to make arrangements.

  ‘They’re all beautiful. The one with the tricycle is great.’ She handed the photos back. ‘My son has just got a new tricycle for Christmas. He loves that thing.’

  Mrs de Klerk smiled and wiped away a tear. ‘Ja, Corné couldn’t wait to get a real bike.’

  Valerie and Mrs de Klerk stood up. The couple left, holding hands as though their physical closeness could reach across the emotional divide.

  Valerie sighed as she sat back down at her computer. She opened the design, checked it again and printed it. While the computer was grinding and whirring through the commands she had given it, she pulled the couple’s form towards her. She filled in the delivery date and attached the form to the warm piece of paper which had emerged from the printer.

  She walked across the building to the workshop. The noise from the sandblaster was such a contrast to the air of peace which she tried to create in her office.

  ‘Hey! Dave!’

  ‘Hi, Valerie! What have you got for me?’

  He took the pages, put on his glasses and scanned the design.

  ‘Okay. Sure. I’ll let you know when it’s done.’

  ‘Thanks, hey.’

  Another client was waiting as she got back to her office. Her days were filled with people coming and going. Sometimes she didn’t remember those who had come to see her. She remembered their engravings. She remembered the dead more clearly than she did the living. In Loving Memory of. With love we remember. In remembrance of. In ever loving memory. Husband, father and grandfather. Daughter and sister. Son, grandson and nephew. Wife, mother and friend.