Agaat (50 page)

Why does she think they lie so deep?

They lie around ready to be salvaged, compared with everything else she has carried in here from the cellar. Everything that I said we should throw away and burn and give away. Everything that we set aside for her to keep.

Like a stage-prop store it looks in here. Beach hat, fish gaff, old black bathing costume from the year yon. From day to day the exhibition is changed. She makes me smell everything, presses it under my hand to feel.

How does she think she's going to get everything out of here before Jakkie comes? Or is he not coming? Or is it all meant expressly for his eyes?

She's well-practised in the art of leaving tracks. It was one of their regular games. Follow me if you can. Broken twigs she taught him to read, spitballs in the dust, scratch marks on bark, turned-over stones. As I had taught her.

She jerked up the railing, rammed extra cushions behind my back, far enough from the bed-head so that she could reach easily behind my head, pushed the bed still further from the wall so that she could move around me freely. The black comb half protrudes from the top pocket of the apron, the curlers are clasped on both sides of the bib of the apron. A bottle of water with a spray head stands ready in the trolley. She comes and stands behind me. Ceremoniously. After the fashion of a salon. Chez Agaat. My stylist and I.

So, she says, today exactly a month ago we last cut and look, it's grown a whole inch.

With the comb she pulls a strand of hair away from my head so that I can see. A mouse tail, thin and grey. She looks at me in the hand mirror.

Just see how much vigour there still is in you, she wants to say. She bethinks herself. But the thought is a snare. She's already caught in it. In her own snare. I know it. The teeth are bared, the nails come out. It's a reflex. She combs hard, straight partings in my hair. She plucks up tufts
of hair, she pinions them in stiff crests with curlers. Now I am also in battle array. Sound the horn! Charge!

Grow forth! would be the wrong battle cry. She wouldn't dare shout it out loud. But it's a snake from which a string of white eggs slip. I see them rise up behind her cap like thought balloons in a comic strip.

A whole inch of hair! Without sun? Without bread? What are these strings that can grow from nothing? How many metres in a lifetime? And whom would you want to appoint to measure it for you? Because there are still the few inches that have to grow out in the coffin. Threads of a worm that grazed in poplars. Spun of last thoughts. At last all bright and clear. Silver-white hair. Pitch-black blood.

Is that what she thinks? I no longer know.

Ounooi, she says, don't perform like that. I know you don't like it, but when it's all over you always feel miles better.

She drags the comb through a few times, walks to the calendar, marks off the date with the pencil suspended there from a string. 11 December 1996. She taps the back of the pencil on the dates of the past days. Has now pasted the old paper on the reading stand. Middle column, last row. Agaat's periodic table. Bisacodyl suppository. Tap. Lactulose. Tap. Know it by heart already. But it's one thing she won't scrap from her battery. She's besotted with the bizarre names of the medicines, the sadistic language of the recommended treatments. Symptom: large bowel stoppage. Therapy: Exercise. Tap, tap, tap.

Not difficult to decipher, the tapping. It's Morse code for The Pan. It says: More hairs come forth from your head, Mrs de Wet, than dung from your belly. The Skull Pan is replete but the Other Pan is empty. Almost seven days nothing but winds in it.

Shit and hair. The last secretions of the almost-dead. Shit and hair.

Like old oil still leaking from an engine on the scrap-heap. And piss and nails. That's why they stopper you with a plug or two. So that you don't start oozing and spoil your coffin, or interrupt the sermon. That's why they draw a little net over your hair. So that your skull doesn't start rustling. And that's why they bind up your jaw. So that the tongue doesn't erupt in post-mortem gabbling.

Beloved, go forth in peace and pinch your noses. In the name of the Lord who created heaven and earth because He also designed the fragrant death. The jaw drops open with a snap. Bluetongue put out at the pulpit cloth. Lisping among the lilies.

That's the kind of disgrace that must be guarded against.

I look at myself in the mirror. Wordlessly my eyes blaspheme. How many watts worth of sacrilege? Blasphemy without the use of the
orbicularis oris muscles. That's what she wants from me. She wants to see how far she can push me. Drained to the last of the lees. On my knees in the sawdust. In the dry course of the drift. In the place where the last footlight fades to black.

Agaat puts the mirror down flat. She wipes my eyes, she wipes away the spit dribbling from my mouth.

Who needs the old mirror anyway, she says, rather look at what I've displayed for you, the whole of Grootmoedersdrift, Ounooi, from front to back. Better than the movies.

I hear another language in the clacking of the scissors.

What more can you want? Speaking of hair, it gets into my hair, I can tell you, it gets into my hair looking after you like this!

Tchip. A big shiny swallow with two sharp wings, a flying dive narrowly missing my eyebrows.

A dirty-grey skein of hair falls on the sheet. More than an inch I'd say, more than two even.

Agaat likes an open face.

It carried on for three days, the carrying-in. Where she had stored it all, everything that had been on the discard heap, I don't know. In the cellar? Sometimes I heard a bumping and bustling here under me. Other items emerged from the storeroom, from the outside room. Everything that she'd removed from the room here has been restored. The built-in cupboards are filled with my clothes again. She brought in armloads at a time with hangers and all and piled them up on my bed, spread out shawls and skirts before me, pressed the jerseys against my cheek. The soft red mohair, the little maroon one that smells of Chanel No. 5 that she was so mad about when she was small. The dances, the mountains, the snow, the sea. Everything back into the drawers.

The hat-stand, the walking stick stand with all the umbrellas, the walking frame, the trolley. She came wheeling in here at speed, in one or other of my wheelchairs, first with the Spyder as if she were taking part in a paraplegic race and then all whooshing with the Redman and then standing in the IBot with the knee-support flapped up. Like the Popemobile it looked. All that was missing was for her to wave blessings. The head-dress everybody would have recognised.

I went to sleep intermittently with all the activity. Sometimes I thought I was dreaming. When I woke up there was a clattering in the passage and then yet another object was dragged in from the shed. A bag of guano, a bag of chicken feed, a can of dipping fluid, a can of vaccine, the ploughshare from under the wild fig tree and the pipe for striking it, a silver corner post, three droppers, freshly-tarred, feathers
of the red rooster, feathers of the white rooster, a sheaf of wheat, a bag of compost, a ram's horn, a horseshoe, a skein of the finest wool. Held in front of my nose for me to smell, all of it. Rustling, the grasses, the pods. Struck, the gong, shaken out, the coir sacks, just about the whole farm carted in at the back door on a wheelbarrow from sheep-shears to rake. I heard her give the labourers three days' leave so that she could complete it all in peace. Because whom would they suspect of being crazy? They know I just lie here. They know it's been a year since I said anything.

The trocar and cannula.

The lip-halter.

The mowing-snaffle.

A bray-pole.

A tine of the shallow-toothed harrow.

A rowel from the seed-hopper.

The tool with which the fencing-wire is twisted.

One by one she came and held the things in front of me. Until I signalled no, that's not what I want to see. Sometimes I thought she wanted to put the snaffle under my tongue, fit the halter to my upper lip, punch a hole in me with the trocar between my short-rib and my hipbone in hopes of deflating me, so that the sound from my hip would sound the word for her, the name of the thing that I'm dying to see, the old maps that for her own murky reasons she cannot find in her heart to go and dig up in the sitting room. As if she's scared that something might bite her there in the sideboard.

Tchip, tchip, tchip, go the scissors, faster and faster. I feel the blades against my ear. Hair goes flying. The whole awning is full of snippings. I see them dry, the little wet tails becoming fluff, puffing up, starting to roll around and disintegrate, thousands of crescents stirring in the slipstream of my stylist as she moves around the bed. Here comes the spray bottle. Zirrrts, zoorrrts, from all sides. As if I were a rose-tree full of lice. Rosecare. What's in a rose. Young Miss Redelinghuys. The rose of Tradouw.

She starts a second round of snipping.

I want to see the mirror, I signal. Now!

Wait, she says, I haven't nearly done. All the old fluff in the neck, she says.

Grrr, grrr, grrr, she saws at it with the serrated blade. My head is cold.

Almost done. Here's another loose strand. Here's another tuft. Oh well, that will have to do, Ounooi, it's not as if your hair is what it used to be.

She brings the drier. The little hand twists and tosses my hair under the stream of hot air.

It's too hot, I say.

Too this too that, says Agaat. She switches the drier to cold.

Don't come and complain to me if your nose runs, she says.

She brings the mirror closer again. Last time I looked like Liza Minnelli. Before that like Mary Quant.

It's the magnifying face of the mirror that she holds in front of me. My chin and cheeks bulge and distort, my haircut falls beyond the frame.

And then God saw that it was good, says Agaat, are you also satisfied?

Thank you.

Rather stingy with compliments tonight, aren't we, says Agaat, use your imagination. You look exactly like Julie Andrews.

The hills are alive with the sound of music, Agaat hums. One phrase, then she changes her tune.

My grandma's mangy hen.

Clack, she pulls the tape from the player. Too many tunes for one throat.

Now the ears, she says.

Well and good, my ears are exposed to view now.

The top comes off the little bottle of Johnson's ear buds. Plop. Agaat shakes the bottle so that it looks like a porcupine full of quills.

First wet, she says, then dry.

She dips the end of the ear bud in a bowl of water.

The deaf adder that stoppeth her ear, she says, full of old wax. Say if it's too deep.

She looks into my eyes while she pushes the lukewarm bud into my ear.

Just let me be please, I signal, it's been too deep for a while now, you don't need clean ears to die.

Oh yes, says Agaat, you do, St Peter sticks in his key to check.

She twists and twirls the stick. Liquid gushes in my left ear. It blocks up. One half of the world mutes.

Still waters, says Agaat.

The stick emerges with a dark-brown lump on its point. She holds it in front of my nose.

Well-greased, she says. Very healthy still. Pure turf.

She examines it minutely before she wipes it on the sheet and pushes the other end into my ear vigorously.

Please, don't you have any respect? I ask.

It could have been worse, says Agaat as she takes possession of the other ear. Her voice cracks, she swallows the rest. But I inspect her jaw. It's pushed far out and it's agitated with subterranean rumbling.

At least you still have ears to hear! If your gut looks like the inside of your ears we don't have a problem! Pure sweet-potato peat! All the way to the portals! Don't keep looking at me like that! What more can I do? Everything is here now. Must I then divert the water from the godgiven drift itself through this room for you? Install a pump down there and lay a pipe to the room and flood everything like a deluge? Well, let me tell you, it's dry! The drift is dry! There's nothing left in it.

Forgive me.

How's that?

Forgive me!

I didn't say anything!

Or do you think perhaps that you're in the ark here? That I have to cart in two of everything? You and I! That's the two! That's Two enough!

Forgive me!

Give you what? Arsenic or arsenite or arsenate? Don't be silly. We'll start with the usual medicine, otherwise it will just have to be an enema again. You can't lie here like this. You'll poison yourself.

She thinks she can scare me with her talk. I don't scare any more. I'm tired. She tires me. I tire her. There are dark circles under her eyes. Her ankles seem swollen. When she sits on the chair, I see her knees, bloated like those of a pregnant woman. We wear each other out. How is this to end if she doesn't want to make an end of it with me?

She puts on her glasses for the next task. Now the nails, she says, you know you dig holes into yourself. Just see what it looks like here, ai!

She straightens the fingers of my right hand. I've been feeling it for a while now. The cutting into my palms. But it wasn't on the list. When I looked at my hands to try and draw her attention to them, she briefly rubbed them or tucked them away under the sheets. She shies away from the shrivelled little claws of mine, I can see it in her face. But tonight they're on her list. Now that the room is full again, I'm the one who must be pruned back, scraped out all the way to my cuticles. So the wheel turns. Hip up, hop down.

In my right palm the nail of my middle finger has cut through the skin. The other nails have curled upwards where they've been pressed against the inside of my hand. Two are ingrown. That shuts Agaat up. Neglected area. Nothing that can inflame her more. She works away at
every problem systematically. Little crescents of nail-clippings fall on the sheet amongst the hair. Into the quick the ingrown nails are filed away. The cuticles are pushed back. The cuts in my palms are disinfected, are given fresh plasters.