The Rowing Lesson Read online

  One day I’m going to have my own bloody boat, you say to the monkeys. If you want a turn, you’re going to have to apply for one, in triplicate. The trees are coming closer and closer, as Ike pulls the boat towards the river’s source, its first breath. Ssssh! Stop! Ike pauses, oars akimbo. Stella and Margie sit with their arms folded over their chests, and look at you. You point to the ragged cliff, pocked with holes and stumps of bushes, growing sideways. The buggers are sitting in those holes, and watching us. They’re watching us watch them, and they’re not amused. Sometimes you can see the Knysna loerie, a rare tree bird. Today there’s silence. Nothing moves. None of the monkeys have anything to say. The loeries are buried in the trees, branch-hopping.

  Ike is a land surveyor and he’s been all over the place with his instruments, measuring and looking. He’s climbed the Drakensberg mountains. He’s seen elephants, on horseback. Poor bloody horses, you say and Stella giggles, shifting the plume of smoke between her fingers. You pass the small beach where Gertude scratched her thigh getting out. Stop, you say, but Ike wants to go to the very tippy-top of the river, to the beginning of the beginning. You can’t. It’s far too shallow. We’ll scratch the bottom of Wolfie’s boat.

  You’re trying to explain the memories in the orange-brown water, of Maisie and old picnics, the tablecloth and Gertude’s soft skin, your pals chopping up the water as they laughed all the way upstream but no one’s listening. This is becoming honeymoon dreadful, all the actors on stage and no one in the audience, everyone waiting for the show that never begins. You can’t tell Ike or Margie or Stella about the tangled love that’s hanging from the trees. There’s a lump in your throat the size of a river stone.

  The war will wash it down. The Bulge was closed months ago, in your summer, their winter. The Germans are toppling all over the place. Stalin just arm wrestled Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta and twisted Roosevelt’s arm so hard that it drove his clavicle straight into his heart and killed him. Churchill almost got eaten by his own black dog. I’m itching to fight, you tell them all.

  Margie says, Poor Ike. He can’t go because he’s got bad feet. Look at them, dull knives, flat as pancakes. Silence again, all of you bent forward listening for monkeys. Ike keeps rowing and rowing until the boat gets stuck between this bank and that bank.

  Wolfie’s going to kill me, you shout. Look what you buggers have done! There’s a screech of white paint on a long flat rock sitting under the water like a bloody torpedo. All you can do is pull Stella and her cigarettes out of the boat, before the hull cracks and you’re all stuck here forever and ever, at this impossible place where the river ends and there’s nothing to see. The ebb is an eking, a backwards yearning and you can never tell which way the river goes. When the bush started burning, there was nothing before and nothing afterwards, you say to the reeds and Ike’s back, as he helps Margie lift her skirt out of the water.

  Stella’s telling everyone about how you took her to the mountain and the cross she couldn’t even see because the mist was so bad. What are we supposed to be looking for, Harry? She slips on a slime-covered stone and almost falls flat on her bum but grabs Ike instead. He steadies her, and leads her onto the pale beach, ringed by giant yellowwoods and stinkwoods. Margie’s smiling at you, and gosh, her big speckled eyes and her brown hair are old friends. She grabs your arm and her hand is so big that it wraps around your Humeral Region like a tourniquet, slowing the blood to your heart. This is a bridal bower! Margie says, looking at the ferns higher than your head, the ancient trees with their mottled trunks. Where time begins, you whisper, and suddenly her hand on your arm drops. There. Down. To the left. Careful. The words make a circle like a silent O. She can’t tell what you’re thinking. Her eyes are on Ike, who’s right behind you, a gemsbok waving his horns, pawing at the ground with those ridiculous feet.

  There’s the crisp smell of cigarette smoke in the air as Stella leans against a knot in a tree, her arms closed over her chest. Hey! I’m over here. You brush past the gemsbok to get to her. The beach is much smaller than it used to be. We used to have picnics. Now it’s so overgrown you can hardly sit down. You told me about the picnics. Stella picks a leaf from your collar. A hundred times.

  There’s a twig cracking, a muffled thud behind you. The buffalos are making a bed, Stella says. You have to inhale her last breath in order to hear. Gemsbok, you answer. Look at the twist of the horns. There’s not much space between you and the red-hot coal glowing between Stella’s fingertips. You take the cigarette, crunch it, and grind it into the ground between her feet and yours. Now they’re back in the boat, Stella says, her voice soft. Over there! But you don’t turn your head. You don’t want to hear the wobble in the water as Ike presses against Margie, as Margie lifts her eyes to the leaves, sinking into the sky without birds.

  They’re wrestling inside their clothes. All their buttons are locked. Their shoelaces are so tight, their eyes are bulging out of their heads. Stella’s telling you this, fumbling for her du Mauriers. You catch her hand and bite her little finger. When she screams, you cover her mouth and kiss it, pinning her head against the tree, the rest of her slowly slipping down until she’s below you, so far down that she’s the size of a nice brown hen, a chicken for the Sabbath. You bury your head in her feathers and she pecks at the air in the middle of your ear. Ouch! You reach up and she almost lights another cigarette but you grab her hand and hold it between you like a trophy, as you lean towards her and kiss her properly, without words, or smoke, before God created light or dark. There is no sound but the drip of the river and it comes to you then, you cannot heal the sick, or bring back the dead but you can hear the beginning of the world. You follow the beat of Stella’s blood, the gush of fluids in her bowel, her kidneys flushing the tea she drank for breakfast, in the little cottage facing the lagoon. At last she’s swimming in your waters, tasting your salts with the tip of her tongue. You touch her face. The sky turns and she’s dark in your hands, the colour of her own soot. Her white skin with its cinnamon freckles is now ash brown, with shifting white spots, so many spots that you can’t keep counting them. Maxie’s laughing, because you lost the bet. You gave up, old chap.

  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 yo
ur 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

  IF HE WAS awake, would he say goodbye? I ask Simon, who’s sitting in the chair Ma was in, almost falling asleep. His eyes flutter open and he looks stung, as if I put those alligator clips on his ears and he’s the one who’s going to leap into the air now.

  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!