rooted in my strength as a young, successful mother and woman.
It had taken no time at all to find my new, white takkies.
But as I bent down to slip them on I knew I wasn’t really as strong as I hoped. I knew my boldness was a fragile thing and that it was already beginning to disintegrate as I hurriedly knotted my laces.
It was then that I executed the very smallest of motions, an almost imperceptible gesture that left no indent in the hardened plastic casing of the remote for the garage door. Just an invisible thumbprint. But nothing is ever truly invisible.
I opened the garage door … and he slipped in. I rushed forward, my fingers flicking pathetically in the afternoon air, gesturing to him not to enter my property, reminding him that I’d said I was coming out. But he’d already cut the distance between us with no more than a few easy strides.
I played the conversation over in my head.
“You’re not allowed here.”
And I heard his response again and again: “I don’t give a fuck.”
And with reflection, he was so right.
He didn’t. He really didn’t.
The knock on the door brought me back. My mother.
“Good morning,” she said, peering cautiously around the door, holding a cup of tea. “Can I open the curtains a bit?”
“No,” I mumbled, trying not to move my face.
“How you feeling?”
“Sore,” I said, indicating for her to leave the tea on my bedside table.
She nodded knowingly.
It was the only sign she gave – and we would never speak of it again.
As the tea grew cold, I lay unmoving.
I tried to block the light from my eyes, but it persisted and filtered through where the curtain fell away from the window. It wasn’t a bright, illuminating splinter of whiteness. More a separation of light from the dark. But still it penetrated. It split my thoughts and suspended me between time and place.
I knew as I lay in my old bed that if the best of all possible worlds was choice then I would never have come back. I had very little heart for this place. Sometimes it’s best to leave behind that which is over, but as I quietened myself it came to me that there never really are endings. Endings are a deception. Endings are not defined. They are arbitrary and inconclusive.
It was unnerving to know that, ultimately, I had not left; that instead what had taken me from this house had brought me right back.
Four
I was five-and-a-half years old when we moved to the first house my father built. It was the year my family relocated from the Cape to the Transvaal. It was here in Ana Landbouhoewes, thirteen kilometres outside of Brits, that my father found himself a plot of dehydrated land and bought it as his own.
I have no understanding of what about the place had truly resonated with him. Perhaps he was drawn to the concrete reservoir with its thick sludge that hung heavy over the water like a velvet mirage, offering a false promise of quenching the thirst of its surrounds. That he saw his own dream of settling when he happened upon the stone workers’ hut that offered some respite in the far corner, close to the boundary fence. There was nothing else to redeem those few hectares of land, just the reservoir and the workers’ hut, its walls burnt black from the daily wood fire. So maybe that’s all it was for my father; possibility, the prospect of new beginnings and our very own story that took us all from everything we knew to a place we had to negotiate and a language we had yet to learn.
Looking back, it was my mother who embraced our new way of life most readily.
My memory of her is of someone who seemed unfazed by the challenge, who fearlessly took to taming the veld around us. She had been born and raised in the heart of the Karoo, a land of arid air and cloudless skies, it could have been because she simply understood the brutality of the land and unflinchingly submitted herself to its harshness. Or maybe she believed that, just as the dried tolbos was swept in on the afternoon Highveld dust storms, to be tossed around before being flirtatiously flicked in the air as the wind took its aim, her life too would tumble in another direction. Either way, she knew to persist and had soon cleared the hem of the house, cut back the long, parched grass and provided us with a garden of roughly strewn stones and rocks.
Over the following two years these stones and rocks would be painstakingly collected and stacked for my father to eventually build us a permanent house a few hundred yards away. But first my father built us a grand shack with shallow foundations and uneven, concrete floors.
He, along with Charlie – who seemed to be born of the land and was there when my father first arrived – had built our temporary abode, wooden slat for wooden slat. Charlie would set aside his carved walking stick before hitching his oversized trousers into his waist, and together with my father they would sweat, saw and persevere as one to finally produce a structure suitable to be called home. As the night descended and it became too dark to drive another nail, Charlie would slip away and leave my father to breathe deep on his Texan Plains. He would sit content, as the rings of smoke from his cigarette curled through the night air to blend with the malty sweetness of his Lion Lager, satisfied that the profile of the landscape was changing just as he’d envisioned.
It didn’t take long for our squat, timber square to take shape. We – my mother, the twins and I – arrived to see it standing, splendid with its flat, corrugated-iron roof, its four cut-out steel windows and its hinge-panel front door. As we entered we needed to adjust our eyes to peer into the darkness. The interior had been divided roughly in two by way of untreated wood partitioning.
My mother placed the Sanderson couch in the front section, clearly dividing the lounge from the allocated dining area; further back was the kitchen and alongside it the bathroom. The bathroom was partially separated, allowing for at least some form of unlit privacy, but was too small to host the metal tub that was our bath. Every evening the tub took centre stage as my mother dragged it to the middle of the kitchen and a quarter filled it with pot-boiled hot water, before the squirming bodies of my brother, my sister and I were squeezed in. This not only saved on time for my mother but also simultaneously raised the level of the water. Our collective howls of objection would fill the kitchen as she grabbed at our feet and, with a hard brush, scrubbed the dirt that had become one with our soles. No child wore shoes on this side of the world.
To the left of the wooden room divider was where we slept. The front part had been half closed in for my parents, the back area a dark cavernous space with three beds lined up alongside each other like skittles. Given that I was the eldest, I was afforded the privilege of choosing my bed first, so the bed on the left became mine. It was a good spot to have as it was the closest to the light – and the closest to my parents. The twins fought it out between themselves for the next best spot. My brother won.
My father, being a practical man and one of great ingenuity, saw the pine panelling that separated us from the living area as a perfect storage opportunity. Stacked high up along the top shelf were the Afrovan removal boxes that would be unpacked only when needed. Those boxes on the ground stood much taller than me, and when arranged above me they loomed large like skulking monsters that came to devour children as they slept. During the day I stored away the gnawing fear, but as the night settled in, ominous shapes began to take form between the shadows of those imposing cartons. I would lie there frozen, frightened and breathless, telling myself that the folded blanket was not a python coiled and ready to strike. But I was never able to believe it. My eyes were fixed on the serpent, too scared to blink in case it moved and then disappeared, only to reappear as it slithered over me and covered me in the dust of its scales.
Snakes became a part of our new lives. My brother, my sister and I would soon learn to identify one serpent from another, but thankfully nobody ever needed to use the antivenom stored