Not a Fairytale (18 page)

I see you in the faces of other children as you flit by in pursuit of your childish goals. I am despondent; I can never hold you, never make eye-contact with you as we share a joke, and never see you smile at me sleepily as I tuck you into bed at night.

You will not have to face the anguish of adolescence. You will never taste a first kiss.

We will never go shopping for your first suit. We will not discuss women. Or men. I will not be able to complain about your brothers’ taste in music; you will not roll your eyes at my maudlin musical choices when I drive you to school. You will never go to school.

Your tongue will never again taste my pancakes made sweet with sugar, fragrant with cinnamon and tangy with the juice of a fresh lemon.

Your eyes will not catch mine during a poetry reading, when the words jump from the voice of the poet into your heart.

We will not walk together on the beach, sand stuck in our underwear and toes. We will not jump up together to dance to the melodic beat of “our” song.

Of course, you will never have to compromise. You will never have to worry about being too fat or too thin or not rich enough. You will never be hurt. You will never know fear. You will never be sad. You will never stub your toe. You will never break your heart.

You will not be lonely. You will never have to swallow your pride. You will not fail. You will never lie. You will never be late for a plane. You will never commit a crime. You will not doubt yourself. You will never face sorrow which leaves you too frozen to breathe. You will not hold my hand when I die.

I miss you every day.

All my love

Your mother

Gingerbread Boys

125 g butter

2 tbsp golden syrup

¾ cup sugar

1 egg, beaten

2 cups self-raising flour, sifted

¼ tsp salt

2 tsp ground ginger

½ tsp cinnamon

½ tsp ground cloves

Lightly cover a baking tray with non-stick spray. Melt the butter and golden syrup in a pot, then add the sugar and the egg. Lastly, add the flour, salt, ginger, cinnamon and cloves, and mix well.

Roll out the dough to ½ cm thick and use a gingerbread boy biscuit cutter to shape the biscuits. Make faces with icing sugar, sultanas and chocolate drops, or leave undecorated.

Bake at 160° C until a delicate golden brown, for approximately 10 to 12 minutes.

The spices in these biscuits make them wonderfully flavourful, and they satisfy childish cannibalistic tastes.

I watched her eyes, horizontal blades of spring grass, half-closed and heavy lidded, as though she’d recently left his bed. I liked her eyes, even as they grew wide and hollow like empty teacups as she took us in, lying in bits and pieces, like broken dolls on a rubbish heap.

She closed the door but not before dropping that tattletale key into a brown blood-puddle. Poor thing. Her story was written the day of their wedding. I knew the anguished hours she would spend trying to clean the key and her mind of the blood. Trying to make excuses for herself and him. I’d done much the same. Only I’d walked deeper into the room, hypnotised by a waxen face that mirrored mine, a sister-me who had already committed the crime of disobeying him. The icy breeze that often played through the rooms of the house followed me into the blood-soaked room and waved the dark curls of my torso-less twin about, like a finicky hair-dresser.

I fled in my mind but my body, already awkward with child, and my white satin slippers, betrayed me. I fell, belly first, into brown smears of rusted powder. It stained the key and the white silk dress he’d made me wear every day since I told him of the pregnancy. Soon I joined my co-wives; our stories all the same, all different.

When the door opened, my spirit sighed with sadness. He always made us mute witnesses to his murders. Some he killed swiftly, some he mutilated while their broken bodies still breathed.

She walked into the room first, her torch-eyes lighting the gloom for the others who dragged his beaten body behind them like a carcass. While he accounted for his crimes the men stared at our naked limbs with a revulsion that brought a blistering blush to my chilly cheeks.

She and another, whom she called sister, touched our rigid flesh with capable white hands, washed our skin with sun-warmed water, cleansed us of caked blood stains, encrusted imperfections, and unwanted maggots. Then they matched our limbs, fingers, toes, heads and torsos like human pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and wrapped each piece in soft, red velvet shrouds. And as we were made whole, bone to bone, he was minced by the men who locked his sentient remains in our former burial chamber with his glowing red key.

She visits our graves; we are not forgotten. We live on through her.

T
HE PHONE RINGS
,
BUT SHE CANNOT BRING
herself to answer it. It looks and sounds sinister, foreign. Everything seems different now, yet she’s been away a mere two weeks. When she blinks she expects to see the clinic bedroom, all cheery, non-intrusive colours, but instead she’s in her perfect kitchen, with its marbled counter-tops and steel appliances. There are the framed photographs of her sons next to the coffee machine, and there is the phone which won’t stop ringing.

Who could be calling her? It is 8 am. Zuhra will be asleep in her faraway time zone. She cannot get up to answer the phone. She feels like an unsewn dress, held together with straight pins; one false move and the whole fragile structure will fall apart.

The phone stops, abruptly, one ring left hanging in the air, like a question mark.

Maybe it’s Zain, checking up on her. He’s become uncharacteristically attentive since he convinced himself that she tried to kill him; he sees this as a sign of her devotion. She’s heard there are people who view abuse – broken bones, bloody gaping holes where teeth should be – as a sign of love and passion. She sees no romance in violence, nothing tender in watching your skin change colour and waiting for welts to heal.

The phone rings again.

She should answer it, it will bring her closer to the coffee machine. She stands up cautiously, moves over to the phone. It stops ringing.

If it rings again she’ll answer it, she promises herself.

She makes her coffee, heaps the grounds into the machine, puts a stick of cinnamon and three cloves for protection into the pot, as Zuhra as taught her, and adds enough water for two cups.

The phone rings again.

As she reaches for it, her right eye twitches, a sign that something good is going to happen.

A stranger’s voice asks: “Hello? Is that Salena?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t know me, but, well, I know you. I’m Daisy.”

Daisy. The name means nothing to her. Why would anyone name their daughter after a flower?

“I … I want to talk to you. About Zain.”

There is no sinking feeling, just her right eyelid ticking like the hand of the clock she can see stuck at an odd angle on the wall. She’ll fix it as soon as the caller hangs up.

‘What about Zain?”

“I’m his … well, he’s made me pregnant. And we want to get married. But he says that you won’t divorce him, he says—”

Salena doesn’t wait for her to finish. “He’s never asked me for a divorce. But of course I know about his affairs. He’s hardly discreet.” Salena pauses, takes a deep breath. “I think we should meet. Do you have a pen? I’ll give you my address.”

Daisy hesitates before answering. “No, that’s okay. I know where you live.”

Of course she does. Salena remembers calling Zain from Zuhra’s home earlier that year. During the stilted conversation Salena had heard a subdued girlish giggle; she’d assumed it was the
TV
.

Again, Salena stops to examine her body, her emotions. Nothing, just the tick tick ticking of her right eye.

“Okay, shall we say midday?”

Salena smiles at the phone, then walks over to reposition the clock. The call is not a huge surprise. By the time she was pregnant with the twins, Zain’s infidelities had become commonplace, another of his character traits to which she adapted. After a brief hunt she finds the Yellow Pages nesting in the cupboard under the sink, and makes herself comfortable with the phone and another cup of coffee.

The woman who arrives on the doorstep is precisely what Salena expected. A young girl with yellow hair and a pinched, glum expression. Such a typically South African Muslim male thing to do. Marry a “fair” wife during apartheid and get a white replacement for her when it’s over. Salena almost feels embarrassed on Zain’s behalf.

She offers Daisy a glass of lemonade, but she refuses it, nervously twisting the fabric of her skirt in her slight hands with their pale pink polished nails. Ma would approve of her colour choice. She is wearing a white dress, ridiculously virginal. Perhaps Zain bought it. He never did have much taste.

As she invites Daisy to sit down, the locksmith arrives. She excuses herself, lets him in, and gives him her orders.

She goes back to the kitchen, where Daisy is tearing at a tissue and crying silently. Salena feels maternal towards this girl. She takes her in her arms and assures her she will not stand in the way of her marrying Zain. She’ll give him a divorce and he will be free to marry Daisy and live happily ever after. She hopes for Daisy’s sake that Zain is in her thrall, that he is prepared to give up his familiar comforts. He’s never liked change. Not that Salena will give him a choice about the divorce; she’s already made an appointment with a lawyer from the Yellow Pages.

Then she invites Daisy up to her bedroom and suggests she pack a suitcase for Zain while she checks on the locksmith.

After Daisy leaves, Salena stands next to the fig tree in the front garden, watching the sun play in its leaves. She catches a glimpse of a chameleon on one of the branches, trying to blend in with the green-brown of his surroundings. For the first time in her life Salena realises she can hang up her cloak.

He says he won’t go down on me anymore; I smell fishy. For the love of Neptune, how else is a mermaid supposed to smell? When I think of what I’ve endured for him. Drinking the sea-witch’s excruciating potion, losing my tongue, giving up the gift of my dazzling singing voice, becoming mute with infatuation of him. My powerfully built tail bartered for puny powerless legs, which are okay for dancing, I suppose, but only you don’t care about the excruciating pain.

I never believed her when she said that each tread would be agony, that every step would feel like walking on sharpened swords. But she was right. Other girls got colourful, spongy petals strewn in their paths; I got a lifetime of intangible broken glass beneath my feet. Still, I thought the suffering would be worthwhile. When he married me, I would get a soul.

But now he’s got someone else. He calls her his little flower, and he wants to marry her. What’s special about flowers anyway? They can’t sing, they can’t swim, they wither without sunlight and they don’t have souls. Yet, it’s the decorative blossom he wants, not the mermaid who has surrendered everything for him: family, voice, the ability to breathe under water.

Well, two can play at this game. My grandmother always used to tell my sisters and me, when we were hungry, “There’s plenty of seaweed in the sea.” My sisters, my lovely kind-hearted siblings, have renegotiated the contract with the sea-hag. In exchange for their striking tresses, she’s given me a few days to find another man. She says any man will do, they’ve all got souls. I’m not so sure about that.

I was scrutinising the waves the next dawn, after another night spent alone, watching them change shades from the silvery sleekness of my eldest sister’s scales on the tip of her muscular tail to the sapphire of my grandmother’s sparkling eyes. He was standing behind me, fishing rod slung over one shoulder, but he looked in my eyes when he asked me if I was unwell, unlike Prince-jerk, who never raised his gaze above my cleavage.

He married me and willingly offered up part of his soul. He bought me bottles of sparkling mineral water and topped them up with sea-salt whenever I looked a little dehydrated. We swam together every evening. He wasn’t blind to my pain. He purchased a motorised wheelchair, and one of those computer-operated voices. I was no longer inexpressive. He listened to my words, as if they were the pearls my granny cultivated in her secret oyster garden. He said my stories were his treasure. He reminded me I was a princess; I could do as I pleased. And I did.