The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley
Page 4
The girl runs into the kitchen from the glittering outdoors and finds paper. She is wearing her big white cotton knickers and a cotton vest, her kit for humid summer days. The exercise book she uses for drawing lies open on the red gingham table-cloth on the kitchen table. But there is also scrap paper in a pile on the father’s desk, and more drawing paper in her bedroom, if she wants it.
The girl likes all paper, blank or printed. When she was small, smaller than she is now, she liked it so much she ate it, any paper lying about but especially the pages of the telephone directory. The telephone directory had a special sweetish taste, sharpened by the peppery flavour of the ink. When well mixed with spit, the paper went slick and pasty and could be squished through the gaps in her teeth, a feeling she very much liked.
To eat the telephone directory she first softened a page by sucking on a corner, then tore away tiny bits with her front teeth, savouring the taste, till the day she nibbled off a number the father needed and he stored the directory on a high shelf from then on, out of reach.
The girl grabs the exercise book off the table and the pencil lying beside it. She crouches down on the cool green tiles of the kitchen floor, the tiles that will later be covered by the father with the sticky orange linoleum the mother will say attracts every grain of passing dirt. Her head is slightly under the table, protected within its shadow, as if in a cave. Her forearms lie flush against the green tiles to soak in their coolness. Her fat sweaty knees make two fuzzy circles of condensation on the tiles. She spreads her left hand on the opened blank pages of the exercise book to steady it, as she has been taught at her Dutch kindergarten, and holds the pencil neat and tight in the hook of her right. She begins to write down her words.
The words came to her just then as she was skipping outside in the kitchen yard beside the windy-drier that looks like a daisy with its single green-painted stem. Wait for it; how did they go? Feet feet. No, that wasn’t it. Silver, silver, ah sold ah sold.
She has a head full of noises. Just-about-words, almost-words, nonsense sounds, they buzz in her ears all the time. A-ta-tuh-tuh, a-ta-tuh-tuh, as her legs skip the rope. Drah again drah again drah again, walking home from school, a sound that beats through her friend Linda’s chatter. Ffffff-fee as she and her Dad and her Mam drive down the long hill into town. Ffffff-ffeeee. And overriding the low humming almost-words are the big keynotes, ah no no no no ah no ah whrrreee, high pitched, shrieking, the noise that is everywhere when she lies in bed at night waiting for sleep; ah whrrreee and whaa-woe, whaa-woe, its undertone, that goes in time with her heartbeat.
These tones and pulses, she knows, come from inside her ears, but at the same time they encircle the everyday noises she can hear from her bed, sounds that come from her white-haired father who sits out there on the veranda, smoking and slapping at mosquitoes, now and again saying something to himself, gruff, like a swear word.
Godverdomme, Godverdomme.
But today the words that buzzed as she skipped gathered themselves for the first time into a shape. Step by step the words make a wobbly square, a column of rhymes, a stalagmite. Here, she has it now, she is writing it down.
My feet are made of silver
My hands are made of gold
My arms are made of crystal
And now I’m sold.
Just as it came to her.
She sits back on her heels and softly chants the shape through. Just right, yes, she has it, and each word spelt just so, even crystal. The y in crystal makes a sharp point, sharp like the shards of crystal you get when the cut-glass champagne flutes brought over to South Africa from Holland break during washing up, as they seem to do whenever they are used. She thinks of the fleck of glass in the eye of Hans, the boy bewitched by the Snow Queen, whose heart turned cold. His shard was like the y of crystal.
She chants the rhyme through again, louder than before but still softly. She doesn’t want to attract notice. There are Sunday visitors on the veranda with her parents, the visitors who occasionally come, as grey and wrinkled as her Dad, to relive the good days back in the Far East, wherever that is. It sounds like a place not on earth. Skipping, she can hear their ragged bursts of conversation and makes sure not to slap the rope too hard on the ground. It is not a good idea to attract the guests’ attention. If ever her presence is detected, the mother dispatches the guests to say hello. They come upon her crouched with her book and break out in exclamation.
What funny girl! What interesting talents ! Wat een wonder!
And their cries rouse the mother once again to drive her outside. Now Go and Play, Ella. Play some Outside Games, Go and Play Outside. What Weather in Africa, Go and Enjoy it, Go and Play.
She tears the page out of the exercise book and stores it in her bedroom under the mat beside her bed. Now she would like to lie flat on her stomach on the cool kitchen tiles and read something but she knows this is asking for trouble. So she goes outside again and finds the skipping rope coiled on the ground. It is in the shape of small letter a: a is a pretty, loosely knotted letter. She begins again to skip, the wooden handles whistling in her hands, the rope whirring, a white blur, zzzzzzzzzzz, and this time she has a whole rhyme to skip to, a wistful, mysterious rhyme, all her own.
Arms made of crystal, Arms made of crystal,
Sold, sold, now I’m sold.
Silver, gold, now, now, sold.
The rhyme sticks in her head all day, like songs do, Lo-co-mo-tion on the radio, Al-le-menschen on Mam’s Philips radiogram. The rhyme bounces in amongst the other things she hears, snatches of the visitors’ talk, the father beating his knee, telling his stories, till she’s sick of it, till she nearly ruins everything and hums it out loud, which is as good as saying, Look what I did! and quenching it for good.
In bed that night the rhyme’s still there, thumping lightly, arms, gold, now sold, now sold. She’s happy she kept it to herself because saying it over begins to sound like a secret lullaby. The words as they come pull her thoughts out thin and straight like hair through a comb. They drown out the sounds filtering in from outside, the whining of the veranda light, Dad’s talk, shouts, also the patter of the heavy roses against her window, tossed by the breeze, the low drumming that drifts most weekends from the township when the wind is in the right direction, the sound that arches over all the others, the thin ah whrrreee whaa-woe that must be the sound of the universe, the light of the stars boring through the darkness.
The words and numbers she swallowed when eating the telephone directory, she thinks, must have seeped into her blood and from there into her brain, so heavy is her head with sounds and letters, like a sponge with water.
So she turns on to her stomach, her face pressed into the pillow, away from the window where the yellow veranda light leaks in, the heads of the roses dance like the savage Indians in Mam’s Winnatoo stories, and she says her rhyme:
My feet are made of silver
My hands are made of gold
My arms, my arms, my arms are made of crystal
And now … and now ... and now
Godverdomme.
Drumming, whining. Godverdomme. Ah whrrreee. The darkness shrieking.
Ostrowski’s Superbus
Halina Boniszewska