the third denial,’ he said with a knowing sigh. ‘As a Catholic, I’m sure you’ll appreciate the significance of that.’
‘I’m not Catholic,’ André spluttered. ‘I never was.’
Father Majola held his hand out to André in a gesture of reconciliation.
‘As children we go where our fathers take us. I understand that also. Let us help you, Elias. Perhaps we were a little too …’ He glanced towards the bride and groom’s table where Andiswa and her new husband sat smiling among glittering fairy lights and garlands of white flowers.
‘Insistent,’ he said. He spat the word out of his mouth as if it were distasteful. ‘Perhaps we were a little too insistent when we first met you.’ He sighed again as if he were consumed by regret. ‘I’ve always prayed that one day, God would grant me the opportunity to apologise to you in person.’
He clasped his hands together and bowed his head briefly as if in prayer. André didn’t wait a second longer. He turned and pushed his way through the throng of wedding guests and was gone.
CHAPTER 12
It began to rain as André ran to his car. As he drove off, large raindrops dashed themselves against the windscreen and slithered down the glass. It grew chilly inside the car and his hands tightened on the steering wheel. Elias. He remembered Mrs Frederiks, his nursery school teacher. And how she leaned over him every morning, her breasts pressed against his back and her hand cupped protectively over his.
‘Let’s count out the horizontal lines together, Elias. One. Two. Very good. Now the last one. Just one more, Elias. One more.’
But before Mrs Frederiks could step back and say, ‘Well done,’ he’d have added a raft of extra lines to the first letter of his name until his capital E looked like a small comb standing on end. He never understood why Mrs Frederiks took it so badly. He got all the other letters right, didn’t he? But every time he caricatured a capital E and couldn’t spell out his own name, red blotches would appear on Mrs Frederiks’ cheeks and her nostrils would dilate in the most alarming manner. Humiliated, he’d sit on his little stool and try not to listen to the rest of the class shrieking and hooting with laughter. They laughed so hard you’d think Maria Snyman had shat her pants again.
‘Mr Barnes, we really need to do something about Elias,’ Mrs Frederiks declared to André’s father one afternoon. She’d seen him drive in and had run outside to waylay him in the carpark. She had her hand on the window sill to stop him from rolling up the glass.
André’s father bared his teeth and growled at her. ‘I’m in a hurry, young lady.’
Mrs Frederiks sighed with exasperation. ‘That’s the problem, Mr Barnes. You’re always in a hurry. I’m sorry to say this but neither you nor Elias’s mother appears to take the slightest interest in his development.’
She leaned into the car and waved André’s work under his father’s nose. The sheets of paper crackled loudly and André, who was standing behind her, wished he could run away and hide.
His father’s face darkened and he looked up at Mrs Frederiks with a sneer. He hadn’t been elected to the city council then.
‘Why don’t you just fuck off and leave us alone?’
Mrs Frederiks drew up in shock. She stumbled backwards into André, battering his head with her bottom. She smelled of freshly washed linen and something else he couldn’t quite place but remembered as oddly pleasant.
Defiantly, Mr Barnes revved the car engine. He’d bought the Toyota a few months ago and it was the only model of its type in Bloemfontein. André stood rooted to the spot. He didn’t know whether he was meant to go with his father or stay there with Mrs Fredericks. Then his father leaned out of the window and roared at him.
‘Come on, boy!’
He was climbing into the Toyota when the car lurched forward with a loud squeal of rubber. His father slammed on the brakes and André tumbled into the well behind the front seat. He was still upside down and trying to right himself when his father swore at Mrs Frederiks again.
‘If he can’t get “Elias” right, you can call him what you bloody well like! Call him André, for all I care.’
It had been as simple as that. He was hardly ever called Elias again. Not until that night in the chapel in Bloemfontein. Not until Father Majola. Not until tonight.
Elias.
Angel boy.
It was raining heavily now and the windscreen wipers thudded vainly from side to side. He wanted to stop right where he was and get out of the car with his violin and play. He didn’t care that there was a storm raging around him and that the water would ruin the instrument. He pounded his fist against the steering wheel and moaned out loud. What was it Father Majola had said? That he was doubly blessed? Well, he was wrong. He wasn’t doubly blessed, he’d been cursed twice over.
The first time the angels appeared, André was ten years old. He’d caught a slight fever and his mother had decided he must stay in bed and not go to school. His father had left for work already and by a curious sleight of physics, Trevor Barnes’ absence filled the house with light. The sounds of his mother tidying the house drifted up to André, a chattering of cutlery and the soft clapping of wooden drawers as they opened and closed. The radio in the scullery was tuned to classical music, an indulgence for his mother when his father was not at home. He thought the gushing of water from the kitchen tap was like intermittent bursts of applause.
All of a sudden, André heard a sharp knocking outside his window. He glanced up but no one was there. Just the crooked branches of the olive tree swaying in the wind. He pulled the bedclothes over his head and lay down to sleep when he heard it once more.
Rat-tat-tat.
‘Come in,’ André said in a small voice.
The knocking stopped and André felt a tingle of excitement as he watched the window. He half-expected it to open but it stayed firmly shut. ‘I must be imagining things,’ he muttered to himself after a few minutes. He was settling back into the pillows when a powerful downbeat of air swept past his head.
He should have been afraid, but strangely enough, he wasn’t. There were three angels that day, with wings so large they shouldn’t have been able to fit into the small bedroom. But somehow the walls seemed to move apart and gave André the sense of unlimited space. The angels had been more playful then. They swooped around André’s bed and turned cartwheels in the air, chasing each other in a perpetual game of catch.
André reached out his hands and tried to touch them but they stayed tantalisingly out of reach. Then the radio in the kitchen switched to an advertisement about car tyres and just as suddenly as they had come, the angels plunged through the window and were gone.
They came every day until André got better and he couldn’t make excuses to stay in bed anymore. His mother had to drag him out of his room because he would have given anything to stay at home.
‘But the engele!’ André wailed.
‘Be quiet!’ his mother snapped. She glanced warily over her shoulder. ‘I told you already. Your father won’t like to hear you talk like that.’
‘But I saw them! They were right here!’
Marietjie gave her son a conciliatory kiss on the top of his head. ‘Now hurry up or you’ll be late for school. I’m sure the engele will be here when you get back.’
She stood at the door and watched him go. When he glanced back, he caught in her drawn, anxious face something in her expression akin to fear. He waved at her and she quickly pulled her features into a nervous smile. When he’d tried to tell her that the things he’d seen were kind and gentle beings, she’d said: Of course; after all, weren’t children little angels too? Then he went on to say that the engele touched each other. And at first she’d thought he meant they made