Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (9 page)

Will rolled onto her stomach and propped herself up on her elbows. The paper looked no better from the new angle. “I know.”

“It's . . .” Simon screwed up his face. Will grasped her ankles and pulled the soles of her feet to meet the back of her head. She rocked to and fro, trying to squeeze the nervousness out of her chest.

The first page showed a dark-haired girl sitting on a sofa holding a book. There was something careful about the girl's smile. On the second page the same girl and two others were shaking hands with a tall man with gray skin.
They all, Will thought, had astonishingly neat hair.

Under the photograph was a caption,
Leewood girls meet the school governors!

And she saw that the whole thing was like that. Across the paper, exclamation marks abounded, like a rash.
The girls tidying their comfortable, cozy rooms! Tidy rooms, tidy minds!
And
We work hard, and we play hard: Leewood girls busy with a board game!

Other than that, there was very little writing; the presence of the girls seemed to have crowded all the text into the bottom of the final page. Will read it quickly, scowling in concentration, gulping it in. It left an unpleasant taste in her mouth.

“Si, listen to this. ‘The small size of Leewood School ensures that the best students are selected and the best care is given. Our girls become accomplished and successful citizens, prepared to reach fulfillment in all areas of later life.' What does that
mean
? And here. ‘The school system aims to deal with both inter- and intrapersonal relations. It promotes good manners, academic excellence, and, above all, personal authenticity.' ”

Will stared at the paper, her forehead folding in on itself.

“Is that
English
? Si, I—I have no idea what they're talking about. I don't think . . . It doesn't sound very . . . happy.”

Simon put a finger on a picture of a girl with long plaits.

“Watch out for this one, hey. She turned too quickly, she could have your eye out with those things.”

In silence, they looked down at Will's wet hair. It was thick and very tangled, especially at the back, where Cynthia said it was
getting really shocking, Wilhelmina
. It had never been cut. They looked dubiously at the plaits. There seemed very little to say.

Simon flicked his forefinger at the photograph, at the dark-haired girl, again, with her hand high in the air. He grinned. “Oh,
sha
.” “
Sha
” meant something like, “Oh, dear. Oh, bother,” but larger. It meant, “There aren't words.”

“I don't think there's words for this one.
Ja
.” He sucked in his breath. “Words'd be defeated before they began.”

Will nodded. “Defeated,” that was the word. She brushed the rain from her face. I will
not
be like that, she thought. Will caught at the thought and gripped it hard, compressed it into three words, and wrote them behind her eyes with an imaginary pencil.
I will not
.

She said, “I'll come back,
ja
.” And Simon said, “Of course,” but too quickly. She could tell when he was being polite. Neither saw a way.

“When I know how bad it is—”

“
If
, Will. It might be okay, hey.
Sha
, Will—don't decide to hate it already.”

Will shook her head. “
When
I know how bad it is—because you're not going to be there, are you?”

He punched her arm—not softly. “No, hey, it might still be okay. You're not psychic. You can't know till you get there.”

Will frowned, and then smiled a little, and kicked him. He stepped on her toe. She elbowed his ribs, but gently. He pushed her softly into a puddle. But Will couldn't find the will to fight properly. They were just going through the motions. She said again, “When I know, I'll work out a way to get out. I'll come back. They can't stop me,
ja
. They can't tie me to the bed with horse rope.”

“You hope.”

“
Ja!
And even if they did, I'll take a knife.”

That was an extra thing to add to the list of things to do before she left—thin out Shumba's tail, weed the giant thistles out of the flame lily bed, force the captain to smile, find a knife, make a plan.

Simon turned the prospectus over. “So, this is what real girls are like?”

Will tried to smile up at him. “What does that make me, hey? Some kind of root vegetable?”

“No.” said Simon. “You're Will.”

Will flushed. The paper of the prospectus was turning pulpy in the rain; Will tore it in two, spat on it, and hurled it into a bush. “Come on, Si,” she said. “Let's go.”

T
HE NEXT SIX DAYS PASSED
in loud, unhappy activity. The farm had no telephone, so frequent trips to borrow the Madisons' were made. The school had to be contacted, and the farm itself put up for auction. Most urgently, Will had to be equipped with clothes for an English winter. She had never owned a coat and had only one sweater. It was six inches too short in the wrist, and its hood, often used for smuggling fruit, smelled of elderly banana.

It was Cynthia who took her shopping. Will loathed it even more than she had thought she would. She had not wanted to go, being unwilling to spend a whole day of her last week away from the farm, “Look, Si,” she'd planned, “I
promise I'll get through it quick. I'll come back before dark,
ja
, and we can roast the potatoes and we'll ride with Peter and the boys, okay?
Ja?
” But she had thought the actual shopping would be new and enticing.

Instead, it was humiliating. Will stood in her gray underpants in bright lights, shivering in the too-powerful air conditioning, longing to be outside, longing for a drink, too bewildered to ask for one. Mrs. Browne was brisk, efficient, and businesslike. Looking neither at Will nor at the friendly women serving in the shop, she pointed one long French-manicured finger at Will, saying: “Skirts.” Or, “Cardigans. Four. One blue, three yellow.” And always pointing, pointing, as though, Will thought angrily, her mother and father had had a fit of madness and named her “Shoes, Size Six, Extra Narrow Fit” or “White Knickers.”

Will was thrust into changing rooms and squeezed into blouses and sweaters that cost more than her entire wardrobe, and brand-new blue jeans, and nylon tops that gave her electric shocks. It was not, she told Simon later, that she hated the clothes. They were wonderful, starchy and crisp—although, she would have chosen different colors. She would have liked bright orange T-shirts against light blue denim—“To be like the sunrise,
ja
. Please?”—and pink trousers with grass-green sweaters, and an all-in-one denim
jumpsuit like the tall, muscled mechanics wore at Tatenda Motors. But Cynthia laughed with a curled lip. “Those are for
working
boys, my dear.” And then, Will had been astonished by the way passing women had walked in on her, had cooed over her, calling her sweet, adorable, a pretty little dear.

“Pretty little dear! You?
Sha
, Will. . . . They don't know you, struze fact.”

•  •  •

The hatred did not come until later. In the dim light of sunrise, Will found her wooden trunk—
her
trunk, the only thing she really owned, inherited from her mother—standing open outside her door, the padlock forced, and the new clothes replacing the squares of flame lily curtain she'd cut out to take with her, and replacing the plastic bags full of msasa pods and sticks for catapults and her collection of dried mangoes. They lay in a pile on the floor.

Choking with rage, her brown eyes thin with misery, Will snatched out the now foolish clothes—blaming the clothes themselves, swearing, how
dared
they wipe their stiff shop-smelling newness against her mother's love—and threw them into the kitchen fire. She added anything Cynthia Vincy had touched—the old dresses from the captain, her khaki shirt, the underwear that Cynthia had
washed for her—until she had only the shorts, T-shirt, and sweater she was wearing. Cynthia would probably beat her. Will lifted her chin defiantly. She did not care.

•  •  •

Will was not beaten. Mrs. Browne was cold and rigid, icy hard.

“You will have to learn to control yourself, child.”

“But you
broke into it
!” cried Will, hugging the padlock to her chest. “You
broke
my lock!”

“Because—there—was—no—key.” Mrs. Browne spoke as if Will were deaf, or an unusually stupid toddler.

And Will, physically shaking, unable to see anything but mist and madness, shouted, high and wild, “
I
had the key!
I
had the key! It was
mine
! From my mother—my mother—oh, my mama, Mum, Dad, Papa—” and Will choked, fell silent, finding that there were no words that matched the feeling of
loss
, or
lost
. Loss is a vacuum, in which no living word can exist.

O
N THE DAY OF HER
departure, Will's resolution broke. Having sworn that, for the captain's sake, she would go quietly, it felt suddenly impossible. She ran into the bush and hid—from the one adult's silky triumph and the other's helpless regret.

Mrs. Browne, stalking down from the house in a trim khaki dress, saw Will's legs hanging from the baobab tree. She set her jaw. She would be glad to see the back of those legs.

“Will!”

Will jumped. “Dammit,” she muttered under her breath. False as “dammit.” But aloud she said, “Yes, ma'am?”

“Will, we've been looking everywhere for you! Come down! It's nearly time to go.”

“Yes, Mrs. Browne, ma'am,” said Will. Time-to-go, said the beat of her heart. She dropped to the ground. Time-to-go.

“
Cynthia
, Will. I asked you to call me Cynthia.” Cynthia Browne bared her teeth in a smile. “Not that it matters now.” Then she looked more closely at Will, something she usually tried to avoid. “Are you planning to wear that on the plane?”

“Ja.”

“Shorts? You're going to wear filthy shorts and farm boots on an airplane?”

“This is what I've got.”

“And whose fault is that?” Mrs. Browne gave up the effort of her patient face. “What was I saying? You've made me forget what I was going to say. . . . Oh, yes. The school has arranged for someone nice to pick you up from the airport. I've put your passport by your box. And”—Mrs. Browne made gulping noise, as if to swallow disgust—“Lazarus has put a stem of bananas out for you. They won't let you take them on board, but the man simply won't believe me that they'll feed you properly.”

“Oh,” said Will. And, “Yes, ma'am.”

“So . . . this is good-bye, then, Will.” Cynthia bent down and tried to embrace her. Will stiffened her shoulders, and she locked her hands behind her back.

Cynthia let out a little hiss of annoyance, and released her. “I must say I'm disappointed by your attitude, Will. Look, I'm
sorry
if you're not happy with the situation. . . .”

Will didn't believe it. She stared at her feet.

“Will, these changes haven't been easy for anyone. Life”—Cynthia's voice became shrill—“isn't easy.”

•  •  •

Captain Browne said the same thing when he called Will to say good-bye.

“Life isn't all mangoes and milk tarts, Will.”

He had aged in the past months; his thin, mobile face had become gaunt. He was dressed in new trousers, new shoes—brown brogues, not his old cowhide—and he crossed and uncrossed his legs, rubbed his thighs, unable to settle.

“So it's good-bye, is it, little Cartwheel?” he said.

Perhaps the captain saw something in the expression on Will's face at that moment, because he sighed deeply, which would not have been so bad, Will thought, except Captain Browne did not sigh. He would have said it was “dramatic and indulgent, girl.”