The Rowing Lesson (11 page)

You make mmntch, mmntch kissing sounds. Mickey grabs your arm, twisting it so hard the mountain almost cracks. You can’t make jokes when a chap’s done in, Maxwell says. Bastards, you’re thinking, bloody bastards, dressed up and everything. What if I was the one lying here dead, or at least in a few bad pieces? What then?

Maxwell looks at you, spots of blood on his glasses, the Battleship man, Mr. Montage. Don’t be so paranoid. We love your Royal Lowness. And with a couple of hail-fellows-well-met, they have you back under their wings, their own bright young chicken.

Who needs a mascot when you have Harry, your very own prince of George? Maxwell tells you this, and of course, you’re looking up, not down, at the extra inches of his head, balanced on a longer than normal neck, stacked, bone after bone, all the way down to his femur that you could almost fish with, it’s so damn long.

Dorothy May, Dorothy May, alert, Dorothy May. Mickey’s still taking the Mickey out of Miss May, behind the Hitler moustache, which is jagged now, with dried blood. She looks at the three of you, as if you’ve all stood upright for the first time, Homo Sapiens Australopithecus, fresh out of a smelly cave. Show us your froggy, is what you want to say but can’t. Show us the little green one in its froggy pond. Mickey is lighting a cigarette in the wind, cracked-up jaw and everything. Maxwell’s on an island somewhere, in a burrow with his beloved mole rats, all naked. It’s up to you, now. It’s do or die. Mole and toad, three men in a boat, and who would you think they’d be?

Towed in a Hole,
Maxwell says. Laurel and Hardy. It’s showing at the British Bioscope in District Six. Care to join us, Diss May? Dorothy’s a little troubled. Maxwell isn’t a subject she’s ever studied before and she’s worried she might fail. Don’t worry, you tell her, I always get an F. She flashes a lucky smile at you, and you almost fall into her lap. She’s wearing spots, tiny white spots dancing all over her breasts and her thighs, with a belt in the middle, like a drawbridge. She’s walking next you, and it’s not so bad. You can make her laugh. You can make all the girls laugh.

Mickey says, Watch out for
skollies
. I’m going home. It’s you and Maxwell and Dorothy May and suddenly, the wind has changed again, Devil’s Peak is shrouded, cloud- ed, and Dorothy’s eyes are on Maxwell’s glasses. She’s chasing her own reflection, as she tells him about goat moths and slug moths and loopers. The looper caterpillar! Maxwell acts as if the bloody thing is his long-lost uncle. And bagworms. Did you know that the female is wingless, maggotlike and remains in a bag for life? There’s the Maxwell plumebag dotlooper, you tell Dorothy, with a very large head. The male loves to tell lies, especially to the female bagworm. He’s an interloper, that dotlooper. A brown playboy, more common in summer.

The one with the delicate tail, the single eyespot? Dorothy’s in your hand now, her tiny tongue licking up traces of sugar. You’re dying to cross the drawbridge, carry her into the castle, swim the moat if you have to. Maxwell’s hovering, his bloody mole rats in his pockets, and one up his sleeve. Sergei Eisenstein’s right behind him, montage and all. Tell the Russian to get lost.
Vat jou goed en trek
, Ferreira. Back to the steppes.

You’re very funny, Harry. Dorothy’s leaving, and it’s you and Maxwell at the bottom of the steps, being left like this, high and dry. Unseasonal, unreasonable, two men and no boat. Let’s look into a tube, Maxwell says, study the female brain stem and all its attendant fistulae, as the sun drops into its socket.

Chapter 9

Outside this window, cars stream along De Waal Drive, the way the blood still flows through your veins, except in your case there are traffic jams and pileups and smoke streaming out of the bonnets of cars, whole sections of road that have been closed.

The room is suddenly full of uncles again, Ma’s brothers arranged like long, grey birds in white coats around your bed, First Prize, the oldest, rocking on his heels and looking particularly grave. I’m digging my nails into my palm because they’re talking your language, First Prize murmuring about a possible iatrogenic fluid overload in theatre, the others asking, Did he have an MI? Did he have kidney failure going in? Perhaps he shot an embolism. Their hypotheses unfurl into the air around you, circle you, enfold you but you can’t understand a word they’re saying. What I’m trying to hear is what you’re whispering to me in your sleep, what happened that night they brought you here in an ambulance, struggling to breathe.

You’re calling me to come over. Look, Betsy, at the cover of
The Lancet,
all my medical journals. See that symbol, the intertwined snakes? That’s Asclepius’ stick. Asclepius would put his patients to sleep with a magic potion, an ancient sleeping pill, and then he would put his ear to their mouths and listen to what they said. What he heard told him what had made them sick, and then he would find a cure.

I’M WATCHING YOUR dreams, Daddy, as you murmur to me. You’re dreaming of dancing knives, dancing girls, the mountain on top, Rock of Ages, a slip of a dream, when the warden comes into your room at Men’s Residence. It’s as if a billy goat is there, all woolly and unkempt, stumbling into the middle of the night. All he can say is, The Telephone. It’s bloody cold in the warden’s office in your flannel pajamas from your father’s shop, the last drizzly morning of the last day of August, 1939. The clock says two and that’s not a good sign. Nobody’s ship comes in at two unless it’s a pirate ship, all black and hulking, slipping into the harbour, hiding between the rocks like a big old bat. The same bat is in your chest, your lungs turned into something grisly and folded, your heart a frightened mouse trying to run away.

You see your breath, your own life puffing in front of your lips, as Uncle Oscar speaks to you, your mother’s oldest brother who lives on the other side of Muizenberg. You’ve seen the train from his house. He tells you that your father got influenza on his way back from the wedding in Johannesburg. There’s a whistle and rattle in the phone as if the phone has influenza and you shake the mouthpiece. He died, Uncle Oscar says. Just now. The whole bloody mountain lifts up and sinks into the sea. Far, far away you see your mother’s old letter dancing in front of you, the one you got today with its happy news of the wedding and such, and her birthday wishes to you, and her funny line, Like all good things, it is all a good old has been by now. Yes, she mentioned a cold on the train but it was a cold alright, a sniffle or two, not Death. You tell Uncle Oscar. But it’s not true, he had a cold in the head, a cold in the nose, nothing but a bloody cold and this must be your idea of a joke to wake me up like this and I’m going to fail my exam and it will serve you right. Your voice is very small (the mouse is talking) and you’re shrinking inside the pajamas which were two sizes too big anyway, just in case you grew and grew while no one was looking.

No, you say. No. The billy goat is back in the room snuffling and shuffling and he sets a big cup of tea down in front of you. That’s when you know it’s true. The message is floating up to you in the steam from the teacup, in the uncommon kindness for something very uncommon. You sit down next to the tea and Uncle Oscar is telling you about another letter which your mother wrote two days ago which is on its way to you but now it’s too late. He’s dead already. Yes, she did make a telephone call but you were at a Botany class looking at Dorothy May’s frog and you heard that he was sick but sick isn’t dead. Sick isn’t even dying. There’s a problem with the tea because you’re crying now and the tea is heaving over the side, not really a storm in a teacup but a real storm, a real fight in your chest between the black bat and the mouse and it looks like the mouse is winning.

The goat has an overcoat over his pajamas and he brings you a Scottish blanket which you pull around your mouse shoulders. Uncle Oscar is coming to get you in the morning, with Uncle Herman. Pull yourself together, Uncle Oscar says, Think of your poor mother. Maisie’s been in the shop while your father was so sick and Bertie was lost yesterday and they almost thought there were going to be two funerals but then they found him in the kist, all crumpled and wet. Silly bugger, all crumpled and wet. A little flicker of light for a second, and then back to the general dark, the vast blanket of misery that seems to have dropped down onto everything. Buck up, Uncle Oscar is saying, You’re the man of the house now. It’s raining in George. (You can’t help remembering the George license plate CAW, Cold And Wet.)

You’ve turned into the Snow King, your heart shot through with icicles, your feet two frozen paddles slapping and cracking against the cold stone floor of the courtyard. Your room is nothing but notes and books and the signs of former times. Tickets to the British Bioscope which you saved—possible collector’s items, when all is said and done—and the letter dated early August about Auntie Lieba and the wedding. You collect all the pieces and put them in a drawer which you lock. If you lose the letter and the tickets, you’ll be sorry.

Of course the wooden bathmat is gone—used for the toboggan races—and there’s no hot water to shave with. Shaving cleanly is your forte. You leave no hair unscythed. But then, what? Looking at your face in the mirror is like looking at someone’s ugly brother, the one with the terrible nose and bloodshot eyes, the one who didn’t really grow up properly, with one foot on land and the other on a boat that’s drifting away from the dock, the one who always lands up with his arse in the bloody river. You see your father pedalling away from you on that stupid bicycle and you suddenly want to kill him, even though he’s dead already. Who said you could go and die like this, just take a breath on a train and die like a fly. Your pointy face looks back at you. I was the one who was supposed to die. I was the one with scurvy and rickets and crickets and every kind of cough and scritch and rash, blephiritis and pneumonia, epiphora and meganoma.

You sit, slumped, on the edge of the bathtub. You’ve lost a leg or an arm, a big chunk of Harold has just gone down the drain. Your father told you once Harold means “Powerful Armies” and that’s a big joke. You’re never going to be ready when Uncle Oscar comes.

Dad’s Dead. It sits on top of you all the way to George in the car. It looks out of the window with you, at the Garden Route washed in grey, blue-grey, dove-grey, lost love–grey. Of course you don’t eat and Uncle Oscar doesn’t even
skel
you out. He just gives the chicken sandwiches back to Herman, his brother. You can’t eat chicken that’s been cut up, laid flat between bread, stained with tomato juice. You can see the bloody thing walking across the yard, the one called Harold and his soulmate, Maisie. They should never have killed Harold. They should have left the poor bugger alone. Mickey packed for you, although he was still drunk from the night before. Who knows what he put in your suitcase, probably empty bottles of Scotch which you’re never going to be able to wear to your father’s funeral. When he barged into the bathroom to take a piss, he said you reminded him of Sad Samuel, his boy cousin, He helped you get dressed and everything, the drunk helping the bereaved. Grieving, dream, wheat, is what you’re thinking as you drive through wheat country, fields of winter stubble, the opposite trip, the backwards birth, the horrible return.

You don’t know what was on that train that roared across the Karoo from Johannesburg to George. Was it the boy with the yellow sore, the
oupa
with his wet, wet eyes, or something from the ground, a tiny germ that went from the ground to a sheep, to a piece of sheepskin somebody wrapped around their gun that they cleaned on the train, just in case. You never know what flew in and out of the compartment, or the stinking toilet, or what your father touched or rubbed against or breathed in, or whether it was the tummy thing your mum mentioned in the last jolly letter from George. Thank God you’re in a car, even though Herman smells of chicken and pickled tongue and the only way you can stop thinking about the smell is to press the tip of your nose hard against the window. How green is my deviated septum, how long and steep is the Valley of the Shadow of Death?

Riversdale, Heidelberg, Albertinia. Mum, Maisie and Bertie. You’re scared of their faces. You’re scared of George, the Outeniqua Mountains, the drizzle and the broken everything. The only place you’re not scared of is the wooden bridge over the Gouritz River. You stare out of the window at the immense drop and for a moment your heart lifts out of your shoes, and you feel intrepid, crossing the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Romantic. This deep slice into the side of the world, this fantastic chasm, takes your breath away. The rickety bridge sings its frail and wonderful song as you cross.

Little Brak. Great Brak. You’re almost in George. Rain beats down on the roof of Uncle Oscar’s car, Eliot the Second. Eliot is Charlotte’s husband. You married them outside Swellendam, when you went behind a tree to pee. What’s going to happen to Charlotte? What’s going to happen to all of us?

A train chuffs past you, going in the opposite direction, and there’s a special van on the train, donated by South African Railways, carrying the coelacanth to Cape Town. Uncle Oscar read about it in the newspaper. The lady who found the fish is on that train, accompanying it to the South African Museum. Best Fish Story in Fifty Million Years, Uncle Oscar is saying, but you know it already. They called it Latimeria chalumnae, after the Latimer lady who found it. Latimeria chalumnae. Is that what Dad got on the train, the wrong train, a breath of bad fish, some spring tide from a million years ago that sucked him away, that stole him from his place behind the counter, selling beans and jam and umbrellas? Latimeria, malaria, a bite from a fish with teeth older than Moses. Or a sheepskin, its fleece gone sour, the man with the sopping wet eyes, the leaky boy. Nothing is clean or dry. Nothing is safe. You probably killed him yourself with your tap dancing and knobbly knees, all the worries you gave him and your mother, the basket of mystery and misery that came to them the day you were born. That’s probably when he started dying.

It’s four o’clock in the afternoon when you get out of the car in Meade Street, George. Your mother comes out of the house and says, Did you ever think this could have happened to us? She’s standing in the rain, crying and shouting, and Uncle Herman and Uncle Oscar beat a path into the house, past the vale of tears. Mum is powder turning into paste, her shoes in a puddle, her hair lost and loose. For the first time you push her, a rough brokenhearted gesture. Better not get wet, Mum. Better not get a cold. The castle’s collapsed and the party’s over but everyone’s there, under the same old roof. The commercial travellers won’t come and the music’s stopped but your suitcases are back in the room you share with bad brother, Bertie, who’s suddenly old, a tiny man in suspenders sipping tea.

Maisie’s mum now, unpacking the dirty shirts Mickey packed, his crumpled packet of cigarettes in the middle of the pile. Was it all that good anyway? She’s got escape under her wings, an eye on the door, the waiting car, another life. Of course it was! Don’t you remember how Mum laughed like a drain, how she peed on the floor and everything? Have you forgotten the stars under our feet, the laughing house, all the strangers that Dad brought home? Maisie’s shrugging, not so. Mum didn’t like it, you know. All the food and the money we spent. It’s all over and now the till is empty. I saw it with my own eyes. Of course she bloody well liked it! You slap her in the face so hard that she falls on top of old man Bertie who yowls, and bites. There’s a mark on your hand and Maisie’s crying, and Bertie stamps his foot on yours. This is the way it always goes! Don’t you remember? The flying bell, the smashed potato, smack after smack for bad behaviour. But suddenly there’s light poking through the window, a stripe on the open suitcase. See! You hug Maisie. The sun’s coming through the rain! A monkey’s wedding.

Maisie lights one of the cigarettes. The smoke hangs in the air, bad breath over your father’s dead body. He would have killed you, you say. Bertie takes a cigarette and breaks it open, dribbling tobacco. It was a happy home. You can see the words written on the floor, curling shards of tobacco telling the truth. Maisie nods, but the foghorn is bleating, and she’s going, going, gone. To the chap in the yellow car. Bertie’s telling you about him and how he smokes cigars and chuckles. He’s short, but fast, and the car is a nice one, Harold. He’s got the Ford dealership in De Aar and all across the Karoo. A knife is cutting off your other leg. Chicken Harold and Chicken Maisie are in the soup, but not in the same pot.