sister moon
KIRSTEN MILLER
Contents
Title
Copyright
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Published in 2014 by Umuzi
an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd
Company Reg No 1966/003153/07
First Floor, Wembley Square, Solan Road, Cape Town, 8001, South Africa
PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa
[email protected] www.randomstruik.co.za
© 2014 Kirsten Miller
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
First edition, first printing 2014
ISBN 978-1-4152-0702-4 (Print)
ISBN 978-1-4152-0586-0 (ePub)
ISBN 978-1-4152-0587-7 (PDF)
Cover design by Martin Endemann
Cover photography by iStock
Text design by Fahiema Hallam
For Debs and Dali, with whom it is always a Friday afternoon
One
We are driving past forests, away from the city. Gum trees as tall as giants feather the edge of the road; they’re all aliens now and they don’t belong, though these forests have been here longer than I have.
The man beside me is looking at the trees. He runs his fingers through the hair that recedes from his broad forehead – it too is facing a slow and steady deforestation. His face is turned outwards though he’s stuck in the car with the rest of us. He bites the hangnail on the side of his thumb and lets out a small sigh. I’ve learnt to interpret the variations in the rhythm of his breath. That’s what years do, what communication becomes when words don’t matter any more. He’s my husband. He’s Auster.
My mother walked among those trees all of her life and she’d say there’s no reason why they need to be cut down now, now that the indigenous is in favour and what’s exotic is not. She’d say we’re all aliens in this life, one way or another. If she were alive.
Auster turns from the window, swings his body around and puts his arm over the back of his seat, resting it on his elbow. My eyes reflect in the rear-view mirror to follow his line of vision. I know this road. I could drive it with my eyes closed if I had to. The places where we close our eyes, uncover laughter, other lies— My sister Devin would tell me never to look back or I’d become a pillar of salt.
‘So, Pop,’ Auster says to Samuel in the back seat. ‘Looking forward to your new place?’
My father mumbles in return about the way of the world and having no choices left. He’s different now; over time he’s become someone else. The end of the song overlaps with the slow, rumpled voice of the disc jockey, and I reach forward to turn the volume down. I have no idea if Samuel’s thinking of my mother, or of what he’s still got to face. His face is cracked with lines; a slow erosion set in long ago. His hair is thinning at the crown, the rest combed away from his face, a curtain drawn backwards with no fear of exposure.
‘It’ll be just fine,’ I say.
The sky is blue and clear and there’s a cold wind blowing. Before we left the house Samuel shivered, still refusing to wear the new lined jacket I bought him for the winter. Auster had to take his seat belt off and lean over and help Samuel close the window against the bite before we’d even left the city. I asked Samuel where the jacket was but he acted like he’d heard nothing or I was speaking to someone else. I can’t say much more than that to him today. There’s not much I can say to anyone.
The long mountain accompanies us all the way towards the smaller bays where village life still prevails and the inlets of water still look so innocent. All I can think is that I was born down there. I started my life in these parts and I feel like I’m driving backwards, as though I can’t see the cliff and there’s still a long way to fall. The air is thick with wind and sun and the abundance of light, and to the left is the flat of the sea, the silver surface that I know by heart and with my eyes closed.
I’m not proud of bringing my father out here. For months I’ve been telling him about the view – the mountains that he’ll see from his new room, that they’ll have live entertainment every Saturday afternoon, and that there’ll be plenty of space for his own things. What I didn’t say is that I chose the place because of where it is, the proximity to the sea. I didn’t say that perhaps I really chose it for me.
The girl on the back seat beside Samuel tenses momentarily and then lets out a pathetic little whoop at her game. Hayley’s only ten, but the way she’s handling the iPhone, you’d swear she’s already practising to be a two-thumbed concert pianist. I bite my lip to keep from telling her to put that thing away, that you can waste too much time doing things that mean nothing and thinking that life is elsewhere, inside a little machine even. Auster sees it differently. He says that today’s technology is something too late for our generation to catch up with, that I’m jealous of my own daughter and her interests and abilities. In a way he’s right, but not in the way he means it. I’m not jealous that she’s ahead of me in realms I’ll never live. I’m jealous of the time she spends on these things, that eventually they’ll take her away from me. One day I’ll reach out my hands to hold her, and I’ll find her already gone.
The people I have left in the world are all inside this car: Auster, Hayley, and Samuel. I want to touch them, to feel the rough creases of their clothing and the variance in the texture of their skin, but my hands are steering us away, in the direction of my own decisions. I feel only the way my mouth pulls, and I think again of my mother and her guardedness.
‘I’ve lived in enough strange rooms in my life,’ my father says suddenly. ‘Where the fuck are we going now?’
‘Samuel!’ My voice is sharp and tight like the hands that grip the wheel. Auster moves his arm from the seat and his hand is a warning on my leg.
‘Cat—’
But I’m insistent. ‘Not in front of Hayley. I won’t have him swearing and cursing and teaching my child bad language.’
‘Like I haven’t heard that word before.’ Hayley speaks without lifting her eyes from the electronic screen in front of her. She throws the words from her mouth while her gaze remains focused. ‘Anyway, Grandpa’s supposed to pay me five rand every time he says it.’
We come to the end of the road, a T-junction where turning left will take us around the side of the mountain that looms above us, blackened by fire. A right turn will take us over the top with its vista of a silver-plated sea.
‘This area is so developed now,’ I say. ‘When I was a kid there was nothing here.’
When I was a kid, I had her beside me.
‘When you were a kid there was n
othing anywhere,’ Hayley says. ‘When you were a kid there were no computers even.’
‘Oh yes there were.’
When I was a kid I dreamed that life could be lived and endurance wasn’t yet a word. When I was a kid the sea was a liquid blue marble and I could dive into it and lose myself.
I turn the car and drive and turn again, right this time. We’re going over the mountain today, not around it. Auster keeps his hand on my leg, but the comfort I need can’t come from him.
‘To kick an old man out when he’s half-buried anyway,’ Samuel says, and I reduce speed to make a point to him. My foot is too heavy on the brake and I know I’ve overdone it.
‘Easy, Cat.’ Auster is good at tempering my reactions with a few quiet words.
‘Fuck it, Samuel; you said you didn’t want to live with us any more. You said it was time for you to go; we agreed, we spoke about this.’
Hayley looks up sharply, surprised. ‘That’s five rand from you too, Ma.’
‘Just drive, Cat.’ My husband is looking at me sideways. ‘Don’t engage, just drive.’
Don’t engage. Auster’s had a clean life, a quiet life. He has no idea of the implications of disengagement, and I don’t hold it against him. I just know that it separates us, him and me, every time he says something similar. The sky stretches limitlessly upwards and the blue swallows me as my breath is taken by the expanse of the world in high-up places. I want to live in that world, blue and liquid and unknowable, where the rock face carries hidden secrets to be walked upon, to be trampled further into the earth. To belong to a tribe or a group of people without encumbrances, to walk nomadic on the ground and take and feel only what is needed. To take and let go. And to let the old people walk into the wilderness when they are ready for eternity.
It’s too much for me to decide.
I want to get out of the car. My foot flexes down again, pushing the brake pedal hard and I swerve to the gravel shoulder and the vehicle stalls. ‘Please,’ I say, trying to steady my own breathing. ‘Leave me here and take the car. Fetch me on the way back.’
‘I’m not leaving you here.’ Auster looks straight ahead. He’s scared of what might be if he looks at me too much. ‘Go, Cat. I can drive if you want me to. It’s not much further.’
I don’t want to go down there. I can’t see the small village even though we’re almost directly above it now. To go forward I must go back and it seems impossible to me, incongruous.
Something clicks behind my right side, and in a swift movement my father has the door open and he’s out of the car. I swing around and catch sight of his face. It’s like a still from a moving picture, a pause button hit to hold this moment in place and his face is ashen, his hair too dark for his face, but if he dyes it, I’ve never seen the bottle. ‘Catch him, quick, he’ll be gone in a second!’
‘You stopped the goddamn car.’ Auster says it like it’s game over, like I’ve lost something before I knew I was playing.
I open the driver’s door and fall out into a run after him. After my father, the man I’m driving away from my own home.
He’s quick but his faculties are diminished and he’s like a rushing blind fool stumbling through the skeletons of burnt trees. He trips over rocks that are not there, he misses great boulders. To me they are obvious; to his wind-grey eyes they are blurred dark shapes that might be shadows or gravestones to mark the end of his world.
Burnt grass crunches under my feet. Samuel. Samuel.
He’s only gone a few metres over the coarse terrain when his foot catches on something insignificant – a stone or a rock or an invisible snare. He dives head first and too fast for his arms to respond and break his fall; his legs root to the spot as his torso falls like a dead tree.
When I reach him there is blood on the arch of his brow and it runs down into the hollow of his right eye. His eyes are closed and there’s a resolved peace, an acquiescence to his face. For a moment I think he’s asleep, or dead. Auster’s hand falls on my shoulder. In seconds my father’s eyes are open and he pushes away from the ground like an old gymnast remembering his moves. I kneel beside him with Auster tall above me.
‘Bloody hell,’ Samuel says. He shakes his head as though to release something that we cannot see. ‘There’s no escaping this one.’
‘Why are you running? Where on earth do you think you can go?’
‘There’s no escaping this one,’ he says again, but not to me. He says it to the ground and the sky and the thin arms of the waiting trees, but not to me. He wipes at his eye with a hand blackened from the burnt ground and the blood smears war paint across the breadth of his forehead where a small cut has sliced his brow. It’s just a nick, a scrape, an injury from which any child’s skin would quickly recover. Auster bends down and holds onto Samuel’s arm with one hand. He takes the hemmed corner of his shirt and lifts it to my father’s face and wipes off most of the blood.
Auster says nothing but pulls the old man to his feet and walks him back to the car, to where my daughter sits with my iPhone and a pair of earphones in her ears. Once again she’s missed it all – what’s just happened in this world because she’s so stuck inside another one. She pulls the earphones off as my father’s weight falls into the seat beside her. ‘What happened to his face? Mom, he’s bleeding!’
‘He fell.’ My voice blocks her out as she always blocks me. If you aren’t paying attention, don’t expect me to tell you about it later. I don’t mean to do it. Responses have been etched as a pattern to follow, automated and without thought.
Auster goes around to the front passenger door and opens it, then climbs back into the car. I slide in behind the steering wheel while he fiddles with the radio, turning the dial with his long fingers. It’s a distraction, something to do with his hands. The sight of those fingers causes a movement deep in the abyss of my gut while the sky falls like a plate of blue that stops abruptly at the top of the mountain. I start the engine and move us forward, my grip too tight on the wheel.
The main road skirts the village, all the way down to the sea. A searing pain strikes above my eye, a memory this road brings that I’ve never managed to erase. My eyes prickle, but I don’t want to cry in front of them all. Hayley brings it up first: ‘Ma, can we go to your old house?’
I slow down, peering at the road names as though trying to remember where I’m going, but really I know it like the back of my hand, like I know Samuel or my own self. ‘We don’t have time to look at the house now,’ I say. ‘I want to get Grandpa in and unpacked before lunch.’
‘I used to live around here,’ Samuel says.
‘We all did,’ I reply, but my daughter is quick to tell me that she didn’t; she wasn’t even born then.
‘I lived here with your mother and your grandmother,’ Samuel says. He leaves her out. He doesn’t mention Devin. ‘Left here and right. First Avenue, fifth house on your left. Double storey. Roses in the front.’
‘It looks different now, Dad,’ I tell him. I never call him that. I say it purposefully, and then I hope he hasn’t noticed.
Auster looks at me. ‘You missed the turning to the home.’
‘Home?’ Samuel growls in a voice of gravel, sharp and cutting. ‘What home? Monkey? Are you putting me in a home?’ He’s already forgotten. I continue to the traffic circle, double back and veer into the road I should have taken first. Two blocks down I turn into the driveway of a large face-brick building surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, a fortress, the last bastion of life. The gate is closed and I press the buzzer. Within seconds it opens before us as though controlled by the invisible hand of God. There’s enough parking all the way along the hedge on the left side and I fit the car in neatly between two other parked vehicles. A sense of security. Safety in numbers.
‘Thanks,’ my father says. He flips the lock and opens his own door. ‘This is perfect. I’ll easily find my way from here.’
My hand rests on the gear lock, motionless as I look at Auster, whose eyes widen at me in his
own brand of wordless communication. ‘Find your way where?’ I ask.
‘To the house,’ Samuel says.
‘What house?’ I turn around and look at him. Confusion crosses his face in an invisible film. A small nugget of shame settles in my chest. I don’t want to make him a fool. I could weep for him, or perhaps for myself. My own father.
‘They say it looks different now,’ he says, leaning back and closing his door again. ‘I’ll wait until we get there.’
‘We are there, Grandpa.’ Hayley’s voice is like silver paper, light and shiny and so young as she leaps from the car with an enviable energy. She slams the door and runs around to the other side, to his side, opens the door and takes his hand to pull him out. His face glows and I am grateful to my daughter, to this little girl. For once I have an inkling that a day will come when she will be wiser and stronger and braver than me.
Samuel falters from the car to the building, frail and unsteady on his feet, but he shouldn’t be, he’s not old enough yet for that. At my house he still makes it up the steps two at a time to get ahead of Hayley. ‘This place looks like a ruddy hospital,’ he says. It’s only two storeys high, but there are three women in white uniforms edged with purple trim, huddling together outside. One of them is smoking.
‘It’s a good place, Pop,’ Auster says. ‘You get pudding every night.’
‘Never eaten pudding in my goddamn life.’
‘There’s a garden,’ I say. ‘And a gardening club. You can help them dig up the weeds, plant some herbs for the kitchen.’ Samuel has never belonged to any club in his life either. Not one that required any kind of membership anyway.
At the reception desk a nurse takes over and she talks to my father like he’s an honoured guest at a function where no one knows the order of events. ‘Welcome, Sir. We’ve been looking forward to your arrival. Always nice to have another man around. The ladies will love it.’
‘I’m married,’ Samuel says curtly. The bewilderment on his face crushes me as the nurse takes his elbow and leads him forward. Auster and I follow them, and Hayley trails us all like the tail of some lost comet, the small phone still glowing in her hands. My father’s back has straightened and he loses his fumbling awkwardness. Soon a slow smile creeps across his face and he aims it straight at the nurse.