The Rowing Lesson (20 page)

You’re bursting to tell him the truth, stars flickering in her dusky armpits, all the blackness that’s fallen on you, as you sink into the mud, the primeval slop of the river around your knees, stones rubbing your ankles. The freckles never ended, Maxie. The leopard changed her spots. I couldn’t keep up. I’m sinking, Maxie! Stella’s satin petticoat slithers between your fingers, whistling the same scared song that’s in your ears, that’s dribbling and gurgling around the next bend, and the next bend after that, and the next one after the next one after the next one. The terror of living is the same as the terror of dying. They’re dancing together, the Peanut King and his awful wedded wife, hitched to his side, forever and over.

It’s only greasepaint, Stella whispers. I switched colours. You stare at her, in the dappled light, spots in your brain. She unbuttons her shirt and faces you in her brassiere, her brown-painted stomach stippled with white dots, like a faun. Maxie told Leonard, Leonard told First Prize. And of course, First Prize told me. Here, she hands you the box camera Uncle Oscar gave you just two days ago. Take my wedding picture. Tell Maxie I won. You take a close-up of her abdomen, a slab filling the frame. A pox of confetti, a new rash for
The Lancet.
Palloris Tenebrae. Maldoris Outfoxedyou. Give one to Maxie and please let me sign it.

She poses with her shirt tied in a knot, and then you pose with a handkerchief over your eyes and then she sticks her tongue out at you, and you take a picture of her standing like that, arms crooked on her hips, blowing a rude noise. You clasp one of the elder stinkwoods and swoon into its broken leaves. Stella wipes mud on your cheeks, and you cross your eyes, and pant like a puppy. You throw a hand full of leaves into Stella’s hair and she shakes her head in quick bursts. Cooo . . . whooo. . . . Margie’s calling you, hoo-hoo-hoo, from the bumpy boat.

Stella brushes the mud off your face and you brush the leaves out of her hair. Thank God, the terror of happiness is behind us. Bliss isn’t sitting in the boat when the four of you get back in. Stella lights a cigarette, blowing smoke upwards at the ghost of the moon dangling in the upper afternoon. Margie’s cheeks are raw from kissing and Ike isn’t finished yet. He tried, though, and so did you. It wasn’t everything. Everyone’s still dying, all over the world. With every dip of the oar, another set of knees buckles, another young chap pitches forward, biting the dust.

Chapter 16

He wanted to drop down dead, Simon says. At work.

What about us? I say this so quietly that you’ve got to hear me this time.

Then Simon bends over to you, puts his mouth close to your ear. Remember the third test-match in 1965, when the Springboks snatched victory from the jaws of defeat?

He’s crying now and the tears are dripping all the way day to the edge of his nose, and he rubs them with his hand and I’m on your other side and I don’t know what to say and then the machines start hissing and beeping and talking to us, and there’s a picture on the computer screen right next to your bed of Simon and me dancing and singing.

For he’s a jolly good fellow, for he’s a jolly good fellow, for he’s a jolly good fellow, . . . and so say all of us.

SIMON AND I are waving sparklers because it’s almost your birthday, your forty-seventh one. For once, you’re feeling very chuffed with yourself. This is going to be a happy birthday after all, goddammit!

Mahmoud Kafaar just jumped off a Coca-Cola lorry stacked with bottles of Coke and caught his shiny, new wedding ring on one of the bars. He came to you at ten o’clock in the morning with a giant, reddening bandage wrapped around his hand. You slowly unwrapped the whole bloody mess and saw that he’d almost sliced through his finger. That’s marriage for you, you told him, touching the slippery ring. He gave you a weak smile.

So you spend hours and hours carefully sewing his finger back on, working your way through the digital arteries and nerves, the dorsal interosseous muscle number 4, clamping and stitching and cleaning all the way to the fourth metacarpus. You hold your breathe around the ulnar nerve, the one that goes all the way up to the elbow. By the time you finish, two shifting grids of black spots pulse behind your eyes.

You come home for supper and pour yourself a nice Scotch, steadying yourself. I’m in bed with a temperature of a hundred and two and Ma brings you into my bedroom, and you lay a cool hand on my hot forehead, steadying me too. It’s my birthday, chaps, you tell us. I’m forty-seven, the same age my father was when he died, when he stopped under the shop with the train on his brain, when he left me and Maisie and Bertie and Mum at the top of the river with a boat but no bloody oars to row home. Don’t be so sorry for yourself, Ma says. You take your hand off my forehead and it looks like you’re going to give her a
klap
in the face but you don’t.

Ag
, it’s later, much later, and you’ve had most of a bottle of Bellingham Shiraz when somebody rings the doorbell and you feel a tugging inside, an upside down heartbeat.

Tell them I’m not here. Take two Disprin, call me in the morning. Go away.
Voertsek
. I’m forty bloody seven years old! Ma is pursing her lips as she takes the bottle away from you. Mahmoud Kafaar got into a fight. He buggered up his left hand.

You meet him at Coloured casualty and what you see makes you blind with fury. His finger is black and swollen and the circulation isn’t there. You bloody bastard!

I have to cut off your finger! He almost falls down he gets such a fright. Some of the patients in the waiting area start to cheer. Come on,
dokter
, get him! Someone ululates, whoops. Mahmoud shifts away from you, sullen.

The only way you can get through this is to to keep swearing. For each stitch you have to undo, each mangled piece of tissue you have to cut through and clean up, there’s a motherfucker and a son of a bastard, a son of a gun, a son of a bitch. Eventually it’s time for the bone saw and now you’re really the hell in. Mahmoud is out like a light, of course, and even the anaesthetist is out of the theatre, busy with the next patient. The room is brighter than hell and you pick up the saw which you once borrowed from the hospital to cut a nice neat circle in the pointed end of an ostrich egg. Simon and I watched as you removed the disc from the top of the egg and poured all the thirteen yolks into the sink.

This time you’re not pouring egg down the drain but all your years of training, all that time spent trying to save and fix and patch and heal. You never ever liked bones, remembering with a sick thud in your nether regions the time Professor Beaton knocked a pin into a man’s femur—thock, thock, thock—and the floor suddenly swept up to meet the ceiling. Everybody had the one thing they hated. For some it was blood. Others hated pus. Fluids never bothered you. It was bone that sickened you, more than anything else.

In a bigger hospital, a bigger town, you wouldn’t be the one doing this, undoing what you just did, chopping off the finger of a boy you delivered from his mother’s womb, a boy who could almost have a bright future if he wasn’t Malay and it wasn’t South Africa, and if he didn’t have nine fingers now instead of ten. You bloody bastard! You can’t stop shouting as the bone-saw whines and whines. When it’s over, your voice still echoes, coming back to you like a ghost whispering, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Everybody gets it in the end. We’re all going to die.

You stop to talk to the nurses for a while on your way out, their teeth flashing white with embarrassed laughter at your jokes, brown nurses in their white, white uniforms, on the other side of the hospital. Give him hell when he wakes up, you tell them. Make him pay. I still remember the day that
klonkie
came into the world. What am I going to say to his ma?

By the time you get home, Simon is closed up in his bedroom doing his homework and Ma gives you the evil eye. Betsy’s fever just went up to a hundred and three, she says. Were you talking rubbish to the nurses again?

The grid behind your eyes pulses once, twice, then it shatters, a cascade of all the bones of the finger and hand that you memorized and studied, that you crammed into your head, and then unwound, on a long spool as you stitched Mahmoud’s finger. All the phalanges and metacarpals scatter, rolling under the table, behind the couch, under the chair Ma is sitting on. I’m losing my marbles, dammit!

Here. I saved you some fruit salad. You take the little bowl from her with its nicely chopped chunks of paw paw and pineapple and apple, and the cosy little dollop of ice cream nestling up to it and throw it all on the floor, where that bitch made you drop all the bones of the hand. You jump on the fruit salad. No bones here! You stamp it into the ground. The bowl shatters, the ice cream is all over your shoes, the fruit seeps into the carpet. It’s your wedding all over again, glass shattering under your heel, but this time there’s something extra. A nice big mess to clean up. And I’m not going to be the one to do it! Stampety, stampety, stomp, stomp.

My fever goes up, up, up as you jump, jump, jump. Ma! I can hear my own voice, my own little bone-saw, thin and insistent, calling for help. I’ll Ma you! you shout back. Ma hisses at you, the girl’s very sick. You go into my room and I’m suddenly very afraid of you but I sit up anyway, my black eyes flashing into your black eyes, my cheeks red with fever. The whine of the bone-saw turns into the putt-putt of the engine of your little red-and-white boat, and I’m curled in the front, your very own fox. I grit my teeth at you, Go away. I want Mommy.

You pull the blanket off me and it’s freezing. I’m shivering, fighting back tears. You know what, my girl, you say, your teeth clenched. You know what I’m going to do one day? I’m going to kill myself! I look at you, sucking in my breath. A wheel spins off your old car, CW 4545, plowing right into me, knocking me flat.

You lean in even closer, your face blotting out the ceiling, the walls, all the edges of the room.

I’m going to kill myself, you whisper.

BUT YOU NEVER do. In the mornings, I brush my teeth in the only bathroom in the house as you shower and soap those goat thighs, that chest feathered with black, springy hair, Ma seeping in the bathtub, all of us stung with steam. I’m sixteen and using your razor to shave my legs and your tweezers to pluck my eyebrows in the long, boring afternoons. I pluck and pluck and pluck until the hairs almost all disappear, till I have an Elizabethan ghost forehead, without the extenuating crown.

Jesus Christ, the girl’s got trichotillomania! Ma isn’t impressed by your diagnosis. She looks at you over her knitting or her sock-darning or her cross-stitching, She’s just plucking her eyebrows, for God’s sake. Can’t you see holes she’s digging into her own skin to get to the hairs before they even appear? Severely disturbed children pull out their hair, schizophrenics pull out their hair. Sometimes they even pull out their pubic hair. Tell me, is she plucking her pubis?

Go see for yourself, Ma says. She likes to tell you what a miracle our bodies are, bursting into adulthood. There’s nothing more beautiful than a girl whose breasts are just starting to grow, or a boy turning into a man. Keep the bathroom door open. Let the steam peel off the mirror. Look at what you’ve produced!

I float in the bath, closing my eyes, my wild hair spreading like ink in the water, while you both stand at the door, watching. Ophelia, Ma whispers. That’s right, you say. Sent into the world to drive her father mad.

Get thee to a nunnery! Off with your head! You catch me kissing Marius in the kitchen on top of the ironing table late on a Friday night, after the flicks. I’m sorry, Dr. Klein. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. The poor chap blushes so furiously he almost bursts into flame. At least he isn’t a rubbish like some of the other ones, the ones you won’t let me see, small town
skollies
with their half-smoked cigarettes and chipped teeth or the chap who paddled down the river at the Wilderness in a canoe, more than an hour of paddling just to see me, sweat on his bare chest, a signet ring gleaming on his left hand. You sent him packing and I spent hours and hours weeping big, salt tears which fell into my tomato soup like rain.

Sometimes children eat the removed hair, which turns into a hairball, you tell Ma. I’m drifting to sleep on the swells and troughs of your voices. A Trichobezoar, you announce proudly, remembering a word you learned at least thirty years ago. No wonder she’s always complaining of a stomach ache! Bezoars can cause all kinds of complications, from constipation to loss of appetite, vomiting to severe abdominal pain. Ma loves it when you speak disease, viruses and ailments and symptoms pouring out of you, not to mention the stack of medical journals in the lav, with their photos of ulcerated legs, bulbous tumours and disfigured faces. She stops her knitting and asks, What’s the treatment?

First you have to find the hairballs, either by doing a barium X-ray exam or a gastroscopy. Then you do a gastric lavage, a thorough washing out of the stomach. I can smell the grimace on your face, your sour down-twisted smile. Is she eating the hair on her head as well?

Remember when she was two or four or six, Ma says, clucking over a dropped stitch. How she’d twirl curls around her fingers, playing with her hair endlessly. Perhaps that was a dress rehearsal for the terribly plucked brows, the scabs and the sores and the stomach aches? If it goes on, you say grimly, we should definitely look into it.

You don’t wait longer than that night. You and Ma tiptoe into my room and creep towards me in the sleeping dark, an advance of the Shapeless Snuffling Night Terrors. I’m lost in the black cloud of hair on my pillow. You stand over me, watching my sullen mouth, tongue finally quiet, the swaddled baby you brought home from the nursing home suddenly grown immense. You have a small flashlight in your hand, the kind you used to look down sore throats. I lie very still as Ma runs her fingers through the dense cloud, searching for holes, bald spots. The moving circle of light from the flashlight turns my hair into a field of billowing grass and you are the field mouse darting between long stalks, trying to find a clearing. You don’t see my half-tickled smile as I moan and shift, sinking under the mountain of your shadows. The light moves down, down as Ma lifts a corner of my nightie and you shine the flashlight onto my Mons Veneris, my rounded eminence. My eyes are squeezed shut now, and there’s a sudden draft of icy cold sweeping over me, beginning where you are, at the root of my tightening thighs.

Ma steps back. You flick off the switch, put the light in your pocket. Exactly how many candles did Betsy blow out on her birthday cake? Sixteen? Seventeen? Mrs. God beckons and you leave the room as I pull the covers over my head the way I used to when I was five, six and seven.

You can’t count anymore. There were too many candles crowding the cake, too many inches between us plus the thousands and thousands of unaccounted for hairs. You shake your head. There are no holes on my head or my pubis that you can clearly see but you remember the groaning, my hand drifting over my lower abdomen in the dark. Perhaps there really is something there, yesterday’s hairball or the large colon tying itself into a granny knot.

In the morning you tell me about the barium X-ray. You shouldn’t have breakfast, my girl. We have to clean out your large intestine. I take the laxative you give me, just as I always take your medicines and treatments, trained from infancy to be a good patient, excellent at succumbing. Ma writes a letter to the school which says that I have pain in my lower gastrointestinal tract. I spend hours and hours in the toilet, reading Regency romances, a lost world filled with upswept dos and Empire waisted dresses, phaetons and fops. The next morning you and Ma take me to the hospital at the crack of dawn, to get it over with.