When the Ground Is Hard

by Malla Nunn

  I shake off my bad feelings about returning to school. He is here and sulking is forbidden. When he is here, we are happy. When he is here, we are grateful and well-behaved so he’ll have a good reason to come back and visit us again. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, Mother says, and don’t believe what people tell you, miss. Misery might love company, but misery has to learn to shut up and take care of itself.

  I pop the cap from the beer with a metal opener, and white foam rims the lip. I step into the lounge room, and I remember to smile.

  2

  And the First Shall Be Last

  We are late. Of all the times and places to be late, the Manzini bus station is the worst. Men drag goats through the maze of buses while women hold live chickens with their feet tied together. The women push through the crowd while the chickens flap and squawk. Children and women sell roasted corn, boiled peanuts, and bags of deep-fried fat cakes to passengers about to board the smoky buses, from pans they carry awkwardly in their arms. Passengers also buy pineapples, mangoes, and bananas from woven baskets carried on sellers’ heads. Pickup trucks reverse out of narrow spaces, with their horns blaring, their worn tires flattened by the weight of the passengers packed shoulder to shoulder in their open beds.

  Dust is everywhere. The purple heads of the bougainvillea strangle the chain-link fence outside of B&B Farm Supplies: YOU NEED IT. WE GOT IT. Red dirt weighs the flowers down. A million motes suspended in the air catch the early-morning sun.

  Animals bleat, children cry, and bus-ticket sellers call out their destinations in singsong voices. “Quick, quick time to Johannesburg. No stopping. Best seat for you, Mama.” “Smooth ride to Durban by Hlatikulu, Golela, and Jozini. Brothers, sisters . . . all welcome.”

  We hurry through the dust and noise to the far end of the bus ranks. My heart lurches against my ribs. We are too late. All the good spots are already taken. If Delia, my best school friend, hasn’t saved a place for me, I will be forced to the middle of the bus, where the lower-class students sit dressed in hand-me-down clothing, or, worse still, I’ll have to make the long walk to the very back of the bus, where the poor and smelly students group together like livestock. I walk faster, and the corner of my suitcase bumps against my knees.

  “There.” Rian points to a decrepit bus with a faded blue wave painted on the side.

  All the buses have names. There’s Thunder Road, True Love, Lightning Fast, and finally, the Ocean Current, which drops students off at Keziah Christian Academy at the beginning of the school term and picks them up again on the first day of the holidays. It’s a public bus, but today the exclusively mixed-race students of the academy will take up most of the spaces. Black people with common sense wait to catch the next bus heading south to the sleepy part of Swaziland. They know that mixed-race children only stand up for white people.

  On paper, we are all citizens of the British protectorate of Swaziland, but really, we are one people divided into three separate groups: white people, mixed-race people, and native Swazis. Each group has their own social clubs and schools, their own traditions and rules. Crossover between the groups happens, but it’s rare and endlessly talked about on the street corners and inside Bella’s Beauty Salon for All Types.

  My sweaty palms grip the handle of my suitcase, and my shoulders ache from hauling its dead weight from the crossroads where Father dropped us off on his way back to Johannesburg.

  “See? The bus is still here.” Mother’s breath comes fast. She is annoyed that I rushed us to get here. “All that fuss over nothing, Adele. We have plenty of time.”

  I give my suitcase to a skinny black man, who throws it onto the roof of the Ocean Current, where another skinny black man, barefoot and shining with sweat, adds my case to a mountain of luggage already piled there. Faces peer out of the dusty windows. I look frantically from the front row to the back. I cannot see a vacant window seat.

  “Here.” Mother gives me a small cardboard box of impago, food packed especially for long road trips and enough to tide me over on the eighty-eight-mile journey ahead. Inside will be boiled eggs, strips of air-dried beef, thick slices of buttered bread, and maybe an orange. Whatever the cupboard had to give.

  I say, “Sorry for the rush.”

  The real reason I have rushed us to the bus station is my secret. Mother grew up in a shack with dirt floors, and the poor girl that she was still haunts her: the two pairs of underwear made from old flour sacks that chafed her skin, a broken comb with six uneven teeth to do the combing, and the daily walk from a mud hut to Keziah Academy in shoes with more holes than leather. She never caught the Ocean Current to school, so she has no idea how the seating on the bus works. If she knew, she’d smack me for playing a part in keeping the rich students and the poor students apart, so I’m not about to tell her.

  “Be good.” She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and blinks back tears. “Mind your teachers and keep up your marks.”

  “I will.” I let her hug me in front of the crowded bus. Snickers come from the open windows. Hugging is for babies. I love the feeling of being held close, but I keep my face blank. Showing my emotions will get me teased by the bully boys for weeks.

  I pull out of Mother’s embrace and go to ruffle Rian’s hair. He steps back and offers me his hand instead. Already man of the house. Rian’s independence annoys me, because showing him affection in public is actually allowed. Everyone knows that Rian is sick. The last time he had a major asthma attack was smack in the middle of second term last year. May 12. I remember the date. Mr. Vincent, the white American principal of Keziah Academy, drove the dirt road from school to the Norwegian hospital in Mahamba with the high beams on and the accelerator pressed to the floor. Steep mountain passes fell away into darkness, and stones pinged the underside of the car. Death rode with us. We heard it shortening Rian’s breath, willing him to surrender. To stop breathing.

  Mrs. Vincent sang the Halls of the Holy hymn book from the first page to the last while I clutched my brother’s hand and prayed—not for show, the way I do in chapel, but for real. Please, God. Don’t take him. Take another boy. Take one of the mean ones. Take Richard B, Gordon Number Three, or Matthew with the lazy eye. Please. They deserve to suffer.

  The doctor at the Norwegian hospital said that Rian had severe asthma—up until then, we’d called what he had “the struggles”—and he needed a mother’s care and a clinic nearby. Our house is three miles from Christ the Redeemer Hospital, where the Catholic sisters inject the sick with needles and pull rotten teeth out with pliers.

  Now Rian stays home and gets his lessons via the mail. In any case, he’s too delicate to survive the bullies who control the boys’ dormitory, and I am secretly relieved that he has stopped coming to Keziah. Although I tell him I miss him at school, things are easier now that I don’t have to defend him from Richard B, Gordon Number Three, or Matthew with the lazy eye.

  “Be a good boy for Mummy,” I say. “See that she doesn’t get too lonely, and make sure to read all the books that Daddy brought you from Johannesburg.”

  “Of course!” Rian is offended by my advice, which is, after all, just me repeating words I’ve heard grown-ups say to children.

  The ticket seller leans out of the bus with one hand clinging to the top of the chrome lip above the door. He whistles to get our attention. “Ocean Current to Durban, leaving now, now, now!”

  I tuck the box of impago under my arm, throw Mother and Rian a last look, and climb aboard. I am sick with nerves, because I know what I will find when I reach the top of the stairs: rows of occupied seats stretching all the way to the poor children at the back of the bus. Unless Delia has saved me a place, I am doomed to four hours in rough company. I buy a ticket with the money that Mother gave me and pocket the change. It’s enough for me to buy one item a week from the school store.

  I step into the aisle and check the first two rows. Both are taken by black
teachers from the Cross of Nazareth, a native school fifteen miles from the academy. Mr. Vincent, our American principal, has told us to be polite to the black teachers and to show them respect. We do as we’re told, not because we believe that natives are equal to us—they are not—but because we’re afraid of being punished for our rudeness.

  From row three on, mixed-race students in every shade, from eggshell white to burned charcoal, stare up at me. They are waiting for something, but I can’t tell what. I start walking and see Delia in the fifth row. There’s an empty seat beside her. She’s saved a place for me. Praise be. I hurry toward her, ready to shimmy past her knees to claim the window seat.

  I grab the metal handle on the chair back and blink in disbelief when a cinnamon-brown girl with glossy braids dressed with Vaseline pulls a bag of peppermint chews from the box at her feet and sits up in the seat that’s meant for me. I don’t know her, but her mint-green dress is brand-new, and the heart-shaped locket around her neck is sparkling silver.

  “Oh.” Delia pulls a face and makes a soft sound of apology. “Sorry, hey. Sandi got here before you. There’s no room left.”

  Liar. Delia’s not sorry at all. She is glad to turn me away in front of a busload of our schoolmates. She is the most popular girl in my year. She is the girl who all the other girls want to be friends with, and till now, she was my friend. Tears well up in my eyes, but I can’t speak, because the tears are in my throat too.

  “This is Sandi Cardoza.” The name is velvet in Delia’s mouth. “Sandi’s parents met and married in Mozambique. They moved to Swaziland just before Christmas. Sandi’s mother is Lolly Andrews, from the Andrews family that owns the Heavenly Rest Funeral Home in Manzini, and her father, Mr. Cardoza, owns the hypermarket on Louw Street. You know it?”

  I fake a smile. “I’ve heard of it,” I say.

  A vast understatement. The hypermarket is the newest and the nicest place to shop in Swaziland. It has all the latest fashions from South Africa and an actual makeup booth. It is the place to be seen spending money. No wonder Delia is lit up. The daughter of a Portuguese businessman and a mixed-race woman whose family owns a funeral home is a big catch. Together, she and Sandi will be the queens of the school.

  I’ve been dropped for a rich girl with a silver necklace and bag of peppermint chews in her impago box. I blush with shame at being left standing in the aisle, and I turn away to hide my face.

  * * *

  • • •

  I hurry past the first nine rows of students, whose “sometimes fathers” and “always here fathers” have paid their school fees in advance. They wear neat, freshly ironed clothing. Their suitcases are packed with new school uniforms and new school shoes with fresh laces. They have clean faces and nails. They are top-shelf, and the lump in my throat makes it hard to swallow. It’s not fair. I am one of them. My “sometimes father” is a white engineer. My fees are paid in full, and my skin smells of Pond’s cold cream and lavender soap.

  It doesn’t matter. The first-class seats are gone. No one offers to move to the back. Why would they? Giving up their prime position would be the same as admitting they are inferior. I move into second class.

  Here, students with “sometimes fathers” and “always here fathers” wear a mix of hand-me-downs and new clothing of varying quality and age. Their school fees are paid in installments or whenever money becomes available. They are the middle shelf, and right now I’d give up the best food in my impago box to take a seat among them.

  Claire Naidoo, a half-Indian girl with long black hair that is the envy of every student with kink or hard-to-comb curl, shrugs to say, Sorry. I feel bad for you, but I’m keeping my place. Other students stare at their hands, their feet, their knees. Anywhere but at me. They are embarrassed for me. Mortified by my public dumping and free-falling status.

  I reach the third-class seats, where the bottom-shelf students sit with jutting elbows and sprawled limbs. Between them, they have a mix of “always here fathers,” “sometimes fathers,” and “many fathers” who pay the school fees whenever and however they can: a pocketful of spare change, a wagonload of chopped wood for the school cooking fires, jars of homemade jam for the kitchen, and loaves of corn bread steamed in corn leaves for the teachers’ morning tea.

  Third-class parents have no money. If they have jobs, the jobs don’t pay well enough to afford the full school fees. Some have no jobs. Mr. Vincent and his wife raise money from overseas to help pay for the poor students’ fees. I count five students wearing old school uniforms, and others with holes in their shirts and patched-up shorts. When we get to the academy, the missionaries will pick items out of the donations box for the poor students to wear on the weekends, when our uniforms are being washed.

  There are two vacant seats in third class, both equally bad. One is next to Matthew with the lazy eye, who says dirty things to girls. Definitely not. My thighs will be bruised blue by his filthy fingers, and my ears contaminated by sly suggestions that involve physical acts that I’ve never heard of and don’t understand.

  “Psst . . . Adele.” Lazy-Eye Matthew winks his good eye. “Come, girl. You and I can be friends.”

  Never! Never!

  The other free seat is next to Lottie Diamond, who is half-Jewish, quarter-Scottish, and the rest pure Zulu. Lottie is light-skinned, with blue eyes and brown wavy hair that is hacked short—no doubt to help pick out the lice that live there. And even though she turned out very nearly white, she lives in a tin shack on the edge of a native reserve outside Siteki and spends her holidays washing laundry in the river and mixing with the native Swazis.

  Lottie is exactly the kind of girl that Mother, because of her own impoverished background, wants me to be polite to. On the other hand, Delia is the top-shelf girl that Mother, because of her impoverished background, wants me to be fast friends with. I’m supposed to be an improved version of Mother: kind to the poor students but accepted by the sorts of snotty girls who once spurned her.

  “Over here, Adele,” Lazy-Eye Matthew whispers in a hoarse voice. “Come by me, Adele. Adele . . .”

  The Bartholomew twins, dressed in matching blue pinafores, snort with laughter at Matthew’s raspy voice. Lottie Diamond shuffles over an inch, a small gesture that invites me to sit down—or to keep standing in the aisle—while Lazy-Eye Matthew croaks my name like a bullfrog looking for a mate. I slide into the seat next to Lottie. I am humiliated and furious at being dumped in front of forty witnesses. I hate Delia, and yet I want to be back by her side, where I’m supposed to be. My bottom lip trembles, and tears sting my eyes.

  No, I can’t.

  If I cry, the others will call me Waterfall or Sprung-a-Leak, or any other clever thing that comes into their heads, for the rest of the term. I will be an easy target for jokes, and the teasing will never get old. Lottie stares out the dusty window and ignores my red face and wet lashes.

  I grab the chance to hunch over and slot my impago box between my feet. I stay hunched and press my eyes against my skirt until the cotton absorbs my tears. My stomach aches. Everything inside me hurts. I replay the last five minutes in my mind, hoping to find that my demotion to third class is the result of a terrible misunderstanding. No. The truth is simple. Delia dumped me.

  I should have seen it coming. Delia wants the best of everything: the prettiest dresses, the best gossip, the most popular friends. Sandi’s rich Portuguese father loved her mother enough to take her to church and make promises in front of God while my father, well, he only made promises to Mother. Mother says, Hold your head up high, Adele. I’m as good as any church wife, but the married women and their baptized children know they are superior. Their names are written in the official marriage registers and in the Great Book of Life on God’s bedside table. If properly married women are diamonds, then the unmarried “little wives” and their unbaptized children are tin.

  Delia has traded me for a diamond.

/>   Now I’m stuck next to a girl from the bush, who spits and swears and fights with boys and girls. Lottie wins all her fights, but still . . . it’s not nice.

  “Hey.” A finger taps my shoulder, and I glare at Lottie from my tucked-over position. She points out of the window and ignores my sharp expression, which says, We are not friends. We will never be friends. Our being next to each other is a horrible mistake. A catastrophe. It means nothing in the long run. She taps the window again, insistent.

  I sit up and lean across her to squint into the swirling dust of the Manzini bus station. Mother and Rian stand on the dirt footpath, their bodies backlit by the strengthening sun. They seem unreal. Phantoms from the life that I’m about to leave behind for too many months to count. The thought of leaving suddenly terrifies me. I don’t want to go back to boarding school, where I’ll be alone and have to hunt down new friends. And there’s a small chance that no one will even have me now that I’ve been dumped by the top girls. I want to get off the bus and lug my suitcase across the fields until I’m safe at home again.

  “Wait . . .” Mother pulls a book from her bag and runs to the window. She reaches up on tiptoes to give it to me. “Daddy forgot this in his car. It’s for you. All the way from Johannesburg.”

  I grab the book through the open window and glance at the title: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. The book is thick, which is good. Thick books take longer to read. Thick books soak up the time between study hall and dinner and help to make the long Sunday afternoon hours fly by. Books are better than gossip, though Delia doesn’t think so.

  Mother says, “Be good, Adele.”

  I force a smile and say, “Of course.”

  I am always good—polite to teachers, reserved with the other students, and all “hallelujah, praise his name” in chapel. That’s why what just happened to me is so unfair. If there was a God, I’d be at the front of the bus, where I belong. Mother is right. God is too busy to notice the hurts of a bunch of mixed-race people in a little landlocked African country. The real gods, she says, are the white men in England who draw lines on maps and write the laws that say go here, but don’t go there.