couldn’t handle it, Margaret,” Auntie Maria explained. She had taken him back to the hospital and left him there. She told Ma that their house became too big and empty once the children moved out. Her husband died shortly after; he did not know who Maria was. Ma, fighting back tears after listening to Auntie Maria, pointed at us and said we were now also her children. The two women had burst out laughing. Many years later, after my father’s death and Ma’s breakdown, Auntie Maria became our other mother.
* * *
Doctor Thusi arrives. Sizwe opens the gate and lets him in. After a polite exchange of customary greetings and passing words of comfort to the grieving mother, I lead the doctor to the room with Fikile’s dead body. The hearse has not arrived.
He sits next to her, lowers the blanket covering her face, and stares with afflicted resignation, wounds raw. Doctor Thusi loved Fikile. Years ago when she and Thiza were separated, years before her cancer, Doctor Thusi had declared his intention – he wanted to take Fikile as a wife. My sister declined his advances. The doctor was wounded. He wrote Fikile a long letter, his writing precise and not resembling the medication scripts he scribbled daily for his patients. He wrote that he could not understand how she refused him when he was offering her so much more than the man who had fathered her two children, a man not worthy of a fine woman like her. My heart will forever yearn for you, the doctor ended the letter. And it did, long after Fikile went back to Thiza and fell pregnant with Bafana, and he, Doctor Thusi, married a nurse from the local hospital and built her the loveliest house in New Hope.
Doctor Thusi takes Fikile’s limp hand, holds it to his chest. I look away. “Your sister was a beautiful soul. I’m sorry I couldn’t save her,” he says, choking on his tears. I want to tell the doctor he can’t possibly blame himself for Fikile’s death, that, if anything, he had given her the gift of a few more years with us. Instead, I pat his shoulder and leave him with his despair.
Dawn begins to break.
One by one, the children file out of Ma’s bedroom wiping sleep from their eyes as they stumble to the fully occupied lounge. A hysterical Lesihle squeezes her slim frame in between her grandmother and Auntie Maria. Ma’s voice is cool and controlled over Lesihle’s fiery screams. Mvula cries, and Bafana looks at me with tears filling behind his eyelids.
The hearse arrives. We stand outside on the veranda watching it take Fikile’s body away. We slowly walk back inside the house.
we do not have a history of cancer in the family
Doctor Thusi found a lump in Fikile’s left breast eight months after she gave birth to Bafana. My sister was thirty-one years old. I had gone over to Fikile’s house as I often did in those days to drop off basic groceries and relieve her of baby duties. I also had my own good news to share, having finally taken the pregnancy test that morning after my period was a week late. I wanted her to be the first to know.
As I approached Fikile’s kitchen, I was greeted by aromas of rosemary and lemon and spices. I found her sitting by the table surrounded by mounds of half-chopped vegetables. Fikile gestured for me to place the bags on the sink counter.
“What is it?” I asked, examining her face. Having cooked for Ma, Mbuso and I throughout her teens instead of loitering with friends, exchanging notes on boys and writing pop music lyrics in A4 college exercise books, Fikile loathed cooking. In the early years of their relationship, Thiza had complained about Fikile’s lack of domesticity, the absence of rich meat stews and pap and Sunday’s seven colours at the lunch table, and when it was clear that Fikile was not yielding to his pressure, he had told her jokingly that she shouldn’t be surprised if he went elsewhere to be fed like a man should be. Fikile had snorted and said she would bet a cow that even if she cooked all day for him, he would still go out and poke his penis in other women’s vaginas.
I looked around the kitchen that afternoon, at the cut meat pieces marinating by the fridge, the steam bread bubbling on the stove. This was a feast; my sister was not known for cooking up a storm randomly.
I took a seat next to her, alarmed. “Fikile, what happened?”
“Nothing, I’m just being a good wife cooking for her family. Is that a crime?” Fikile’s voice was strained as if she had been crying. She coughed to break the phlegm. “I do cook sometimes, you know.” A tight smile appeared on her face. “Your problem is that you’re always suspicious. Relax, I’m fine.”
I regarded my sister once more. She shook her head and continued grating the piece of carrot in her hand.
“Okay, sisi, if you say so. Where is everyone? Where is my boy boy?”
“The baby is sleeping. The others are out there in the streets; home is boring you see. My children are complaining that I make them do things – fetch this and that, make me tea, rub my feet – they don’t like that. Lesihle is pissed off by the whole baby thing. She says I don’t even talk to her except to tell her to do something. To retaliate, my children make themselves as scarce as possible.”
“Must be hard for her, all the attention taken away from her by someone who can’t even say Mama.”
“Tough luck. We’ve all had to contend with younger siblings. You were the same with Mbuso.”
“No, you lie. I loved that boy.”
“Ask Ma, before Mbuso came it was you and dad. I was sick with jealousy. Then he happened, and ruffled the order. Not that Dad loved you or me less, but Mbuso had him wrapped around his tiny finger. And him being a boy made Dad gooey with affection.”
“I wish Baba was still alive,” I said to Fikile who was mixing the grated carrot and cabbage. I stood and took out mayonnaise from the fridge and handed it to her. I was dying to tell my sister about the growing bundle in my stomach, but was determined to figure out what had triggered this uncharacteristic behaviour. I did not believe that it was nothing.
“Me too. Life would be different, good, I believe.”
“Anyway, where is the man of this house?”
Fikile rolled her eyes. “Seriously?”
“Never mind. What can I help with, have you eaten, taken a bath at all today? How long have you been stewing in this kitchen in the name of good housekeeping?”
“Everything is under control.” Fikile was silent for a moment, then burst out, “I have something to tell you.”
“I knew it. What?”
“I saw Doctor Thusi this morning.”
“Is the baby okay?”
“Yeah, Bafana is fine,” she paused, started to chew on her lower lip. “It’s me. Doctor Thusi found a lump, a sizable messy thing, right here,” she said touching her left breast, the culprit breast, as if to reprimand it. “I went to see him because of a pain in my breast just below the nipple that refused to go away, even after taking countless painkillers.”
“What?” I said out loud, unintentionally. “What?”
“A lump, here. Can’t you see it looks funny?”
“A lump?”
“It’s here, been here for some time, don’t know how I missed it. But then, when was the last time I checked my breasts? When was the last time you checked yours?” Fikile lifted her shirt and bra, exposing her breast. She raised her left arm over her head in the way I’d seen illustrated in magazine articles and pamphlets on how to check your breasts for lumps and other unusual things. I couldn’t remember the last time I touched mine that way.
“Is it serious?” I asked, touching the spot her index finger was pointing to.
“Here.” Fikile took my hand and guided it to the area just beneath her full breast.
I only felt the softness and warmth of her skin. I shook my head, withdrew onto my seat, my hand trembling. “Is it cancer?”
“I