The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories (24 page)

Adeela strokes her head. Lilly's hair has been cut into a Chinese bob and Adeela tucks a stray end behind her daughter's ear. At the base of her neck, just where it begins to curve into her shoulder, is a small tattoo, the shape of the African continent.

‘I was sure you were a girl, long before they could tell one way or the other, and by then I was already calling you Lilly,' Adeela says. ‘When I went into labour, I knew I had chosen the right name. I knew you would arrive that night, even though you were taking so long. And you did. Quarter past eleven on the twenty-fifth of September. The same day as Lillian Ngoyi.'

‘Lillian Ngoyi? Who's that?' Lilly lifts her head and looks at her mother. ‘Was she an aunt or something?'

Adeela is quiet, looking out the open French window, at her tree.

‘Somebody in South Africa, or somebody here?' Lilly prompts. Her mother doesn't ever talk about her family, doesn't like to talk about when she lived in South Africa at all.

‘They called her the Mother of Black Resistance, the woman I named you after.' Adeela takes a sip of water. ‘Have a look in the box, Lilly. There are a few pictures of her, near the top.'

Lilly puts the box onto her lap and lifts out a clutch of papers. There is a set of black-and-white commemorative postcards tied in a striped ribbon. She pulls the ribbon, takes a card and turns it over to look at the photo. A middle-aged African woman looks away from her, her eyes gazing off to one side from beneath a high, pointed forehead framed by tightly combed back hair. There are deep lines running down from the sides of her nostrils to the edges of her wide-mouthed smile. It's a formal picture, taken in a studio, maybe.

‘She looks like she's seen something that has made her really sad,' Lilly says, passing it to her mother. She always thought being named after a flower was lame, but she's not so sure about being named for some politico either. Lilly looks at another postcard. Four women in old-fashioned clothes are linked arm in arm; behind them is a whole crowd of women. One of the four is wearing a sari; another is in a smart suit with a handbag draped over her left arm. She has dark glasses on under a careful hairdo.

‘That's Lillian.' Adeela points out the third woman, the one with a wide-collared shirt tucked into a full, calf-length skirt, two lines of braid stitched just above the hem. ‘That's Helen Joseph' – she points to the dark glasses lady – ‘and this is Albertina Sisulu. I can't remember who this is just now. Her name will come to me … Sophia something.'

‘What are they doing? Looks like a march of some sort.'

‘Yes,' says Adeela, ‘a very famous women's march, in protest against the passbooks African people had to carry with them wherever they went.'

‘So I am named Lilly after a South African activist? Not the flower?'

‘Mhhh. I wanted to be like Lillian Ngoyi when I was a teenager. She was an incredible woman, Lilly.'

‘What happened to her?'

‘A few months after this picture was taken, she was arrested for high treason with hundreds of others, including Nelson Mandela. That was 1956, before I was born. She was kept locked up until she died. 1980. I started high school that year. She wasn't just an activist, like those bourgeois types marching around Central Park shouting the odds for gay rights or gorillas in Uganda; she was a real heroine. She sacrificed her life fighting for an end to racism and sexism. I used to think our generation would finish that fight.'

Her mother is sitting upright in her chair now, twisting the big silver ring around and around her finger, staring straight ahead. Crystal said she would have energy surges. Is this what she meant? She looks kind of crazy. Lilly wishes Crystal would come. Her mother is sweating. Little beads of it line her top lip; there are damp stains under her arms – and she smells. Lilly gets up to close the doors, pulls the curtain over a little, sits down again. What's with her mother, anyway? Why couldn't she just have left that damn box well alone? Why does she have to give her the whole damn name-story thing now? What difference does it make why she's named Lilly? Yeesh, but an activist?

‘So you want me to go to law school rather than art school, then?' she says.

Adeela sinks back into her chair, puts a hand on Lilly's arm, ‘I didn't call you Lilly because I wanted you to be an activist. I did it to remember how strong a woman can be when she really believes in something. Do you understand?'

Lilly desperately wants to understand.

 

Adeela takes a tiny piece of watermelon from the plate Lilly put next to her and takes a bite. Lilly watches. Enough chewing, she wants to yell. Swallow, damn it, swallow. Adeela swallows.

‘It's late for watermelons, isn't it?' she says. ‘It is watermelon, isn't it?'

‘Nice, huh? I found it this morning, down at Gianni's. Have another piece. Look, I took all the pips out.' Lilly knows her mother thinks it's criminal to eat anything that's been flown in from the other side of the world.

The watermelon feels good in Adeela's mouth, cool, like drinking from a mountain stream, but it tastes like coal. How does she know what coal tastes like? She doesn't. Okay, then it tastes like black, pitch black. She knows what that tastes like. Adeela takes another little bite. She wants to see Sukey tonight. Sukey, like the watermelon (Lilly can't fool her) is also flying in from the other side of the world. And she wants to see Lillian turn nineteen. On Monday.

‘I wasn't named for anyone in particular,' her mother says. ‘Adeela is the Arabic word for equal.'

‘Equal? To what?'

My father named me that because, he said, I was an equal disappointment to my mother and my sisters. He'd wanted a son.'

‘Yeesh, Mom. Why did your mother let him call you that?'

‘I was born the day they first began demolishing houses in District Six, where I grew up. My mother said she could hear the bulldozers from where she lay in the Peninsula Maternity Hospital. By the time she got back home, a dozen houses in her neighbourhood were gone. My parents were among those who refused to move. It was a long, long fight. Eventually they gave up.'

‘What's that got to do with your name?'

‘Muslims believe it's a child's right to be honoured with a good name. The barakah of the name is its lifelong blessing. My mother believed in equality. She said I'd come out fighting and that she hoped I'd keep on fighting, all my life, for things like justice and equality. I couldn't do it though, Lilly. I tried, but I couldn't.'

‘Mom, it's all right. Don't cry. Mom.' Adeela has her eyes screwed closed. Even so, tears run down her cheeks. ‘It's okay, Mom. It's okay. Really, don't cry.'

Adeela opens her eyes. She wants to tell Lilly she'll be all right, just give her a minute, but her daughter is only a silhouette with a voice that seems to come from the other side of the room. Adeela feels a band of dampness spreading down her back. The smell clogs her nostrils; she is repulsed by the stench, short of breath. The pain in her gut tightens like a tourniquet. The glare hurts her head. The room seems to be fracturing into thousands of moving coloured pixels.

‘Mom? Mom? Are you okay? I think you'd better lie down now. Mom?'

Lilly half-carries her mother to the bedroom. Shit. Where is Crystal? ‘Crystal will be here any minute to give you your meds, okay? Then you'll feel better and can have a good sleep,' she says. ‘I promise I'll wake you in time for a bath before Sukey gets here. Okay, Mom? We can wash your hair and I'll get out the new sweatpants Vanezu brought you at the GAP sale and your favourite polo neck. Okay, Mom?' Lilly is close to tears. ‘Okay?'

‘I want to tell you …' Adeela whispers.

‘No more talking, Mom, okay? Sukey can tell me everything, all right, Mom? Here. I'm going to give you some oxygen.' Lilly unhooks the oxygen mask and fits it over Adeela's mouth and nose, slips the elastic behind her head, then lowers her gently onto the pillow. She turns the dial and checks the flow. Where the fuck is Crystal? Of all days to be late. Lilly sits on the edge of her mother's bed, watches her chest as her breathing slowly eases. She takes her mother's hand and begins to hum ‘Thula Baba'. It's a lullaby Adeela used to sing her when she was little. Hush now, be quiet. But Adeela is restless; her free hand picks at the embroidery on the duvet cover. Her left leg jerks in a sudden spasm of pain. Lilly wonders if she can administer the morphine herself. Should she give her mother a sedative? Maybe wait five more minutes. She wishes Vanezu would come, or Victor. Lilly closes her eyes and sings louder. She sings all the names she can remember her mother ever mentioning: Ryder, Huda, Amina (not that she's ever met or even spoken to any of them) and Peter, her own father (killed by the security forces, Sukey tells her much later, before you were born). She sings the places Adeela has talked about: District Six, Table Mountain, Lavender Hill (where drug lords and gangsters rule and little kids are killed in the crossfire – she's read about it in the
New York Times
). ‘Thula thu, thula South Africa, thula wena.' She sings for Vanezu and for Victor, their longing for Zimbabwe. She sings for Adeela's homesickness. ‘Thula thu, thula mama, thula thu.' And for her own ache to be African.

 

 

Crystal has her own key, but always uses the buzzer, just to let them know she's arrived and on her way up. She doesn't like surprising her patients. She pauses on the landing to catch her breath, unlocks the front door and steps into the apartment. Things are not going well. She knows that before she has taken three steps. Lilly is in Adeela's room, crooning. The French windows are wide open and the curtains are standing straight out in the stiff breeze. As if it wasn't chilly enough anyhow. Crystal crosses the room and closes the doors, startling a little bird, one of those nondescript sorts she doesn't know the name of, from its perch. She turns her back on the tree and looks around. The room is tidy, really very tidy, except for an old painted cardboard box (one of Lilly's latest creations? Hell, no! I know what that is) and a few leaves blown across the floor. The magazines and newspapers have been tidied away. The poetry book she gave Adeela last Thanksgiving is lying on the kitchen table. Crystal recognises the cover at a glance: a naked woman with two pendulous breasts half shielded behind a hand whose fingers are thickened by age or disease.
Body Bereft
, that's the title. The poet's a South African. She thought Adeela might like that, even if the poems were shit. Crystal couldn't tell. She didn't know a shitty poem from a good one, not back then. Next to the book is a bunch of white roses, the tips tinged dark green just where the petals begin to curve slightly away from each other. They are still in their plastic sleeve. The place looks poised for a party. Ah, yes. This is the day Adeela's long-lost friend is coming from South Africa, Sue something. Crystal makes a mental note to put the roses in water as soon as she has a moment.

 

September 23, 15h00

Pulse rate low. Temperature 103.1. Breathing shallow. Patient required oxygen to stabilise. Severe pain in lower back and abdomen. Circulation poor. Urine: smoky. No bowel action.

Fluid intake: +/- 75 ml

Solid foods: 1 small piece of watermelon

 

Crystal flips back to the previous entries … that's less than yesterday, less than the day before too. Actually it's the least she's eaten in a week. She will have to let Dr Clare know.

 

Medication administered

60 mg oxycoloidn (oral) + 30 mg oral soln-Roxanol (injection)

 

And she will have to speak to Lilly. Though the poor girl can probably tell.

 

Crystal can hear Lilly in the bathroom. Toilet flushing, the rush of water as she turns on the shower, groans from the old plumbing. She sits a moment, her back to her friend, and stares out of the big sash window, past the tree with its wizened leaves to the slice of wall with half a window opposite. She wonders who lives there and what they are doing. She hopes they are thirty-something, having wild Saturday-afternoon sex, or cooking a meal together. That there are bright mango-coloured tulips in a vase, music playing … jazz maybe, or something more upbeat. Crystal wants to be invited over for dinner. She wants to go into the home of the healthy, the virile, the rosy-cheeked. She wants to suck marrow from big meaty bones, lick her fingers before wiping them on linen napkins. She wants to pick the olives out of a bowl of glossy green leaves. She wants to be offered a third helping of crushed potatoes with lashings of butter and cracked black pepper just so she can laugh and shake her head – No, I couldn't possibly manage another mouthful, thank you. She imagines licking a smear of chocolate mousse from the side of her lover's mouth. Yes, she imagines having a lover. Brazilian. Or French. But Crystal is fifty-seven years old and newly divorced. She is shapeless the way rising dough is shapeless. Her hair is beautiful, though, long and thick. Crystal never colours it, is proud of how dark it still is. She keeps her hair coiled up in a twist at the back of her head and secures it with a large hair grip. This she does often during the day, letting it down and coiling it back up. Fastening it with the hair grip. She wears men's shirts, good quality and well-cut, buttoned to her throat. Sometimes she adds a silk scarf or a long rope of heavy beads, sometimes an antique brooch. She is particular about wearing natural fibres close to her skin. She has two pairs of Levi's jeans which she wears on alternate days. She likes the old 501s because she doesn't have to wrestle them over her hips. Crystal sighs. She knows having a lover is as likely as Adeela seeing snow fall again.

 

They met, Crystal and Adeela, only three years ago, on the stairs outside the centre. Adeela had been standing face turned up to the falling snow. They were going to the same case-meeting, had coffee together afterwards across the road where Crystal had noticed Adeela often before. She was always alone, always reading. Crystal did not read much. And certainly not poetry. Adeela had been gentle with her.