The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories (8 page)

On Sunday I go to church mommy says go to church on Sunday stay out of trouble I don't drink wine the doctor said I can't drink wine wine tastes bad. On Sunday I go to church I wear my best suit I sit by myself I don't drink wine mister Ardin says hello. Mommy goes to hospital church mommy told me on Thursday mommy phones me on Thursdays.

I sleep a lot I'm like a bear bears aren't domestic animals. I read my bear book I like honey I'm like a bear I like to write answers in my bear book. I like my computer my computer works my lights don't work there is light in my computer I read my bear book with my computer light.

On Monday I clean the house mommy says clean the house on Monday a house must be clean for visitors I clean all day. On Tuesday mister Ardin comes with bags he takes the old bags he puts the new bags in the fridge he says good Tommy the house is very clean. Mister Ardin goes home I have mail it's a new job my client in Sea Point wants me to murgle a fucking noisy dog the photo is a white dog with a medal I write it on my calendar.

On Wednesday the internet says a bus ride is fifteen rand I have enough my calendar has the address I'm good at the calendar the phone rings.

 

Hello.

Hello my love it's mommy.

Mommy phones on Thursday today's Wednesday.

Today's a public holiday sweetheart, so I'm giving you a call a day early. How are you doing?

I look at my calendar the internet says my bus is leaving soon.

When's mommy coming home I'm busy on Wednesday mommy calls on Thursday.

You're busy? What are you doing today my love?

White dog.

What about a dog? Are you playing with a white dog?

Mommy says stay out of trouble I'm undercover I write on my calendar.

Write. Writing class on Wednesday I go to class every Wednesday I write.

Oh that's wonderful sweetheart, I'm glad you're getting out of the house. I worry that you're spending far too much time on that computer of yours.

I'm going to miss the bus mommy it's fifteen rand I don't want to miss the white dog it's Wednesday mommy calls me on Thursday.

Ok Tommy I'll call you tomorrow. Enjoy your class sweetheart. Mommy's always thinking of you. Don't forget to stay out of trouble.

 

The white dog was a noisy dog it had a medal like Scooby Doo I'm busy on Wednesday.

 

On Thursday mommy phones phone rings.

Hello mommy.

Hello boy, how are you today?

I'm good I hurt my foot I fell I'm ok now.

You fell? What happened? Are you alright?

I'm undercover on Wednesday I go to writing class mommy says stay out of trouble.

I fell I'm all better now I fell at writing class.

Aw, sweetie. Did you at least have a good time?

Same as usual the bus was fifteen rand I got a medal.

You got a medal? That's great my love, congratulations! I'm very proud of you.

Thanks mommy I got a medal when are you coming home?

As soon as I can sweetheart. I don't know when yet, I have to wait for the doctors to tell me when it's ok and then I'll come home. Tell me more about this class, I want to hear all about it.

I write I'm good at writing in my calendar I can write in other places on Wednesday I went to the white– class I go on Wednesdays.

Well I'm very happy to hear that sweetheart. Keep it up! Have lots and lots of fun for mommy!

Thanks mommy I will try harder I will get more medals.

That's the spirit! Ok sweetie I have to go, I'll call you next Thursday. Stay out of trouble.

Ok mommy has to go goodbye mommy see you soon.

 

On Thursday mommy phones me mommy already phoned today today is Thursday I have nothing to do. I have nothing to do until Sunday I play computer my computer has mail I have a new job I'm busy on Wednesday nights. The address is close I can walk to the address buses cost money I write the address on my calendar. This attachment is slow on Wednesday I murgle cats just send me the address a photo I want to see the cat it's free of charge. The photo is not a cat the photo is a blonde person people are domestic animals. The blonde person has a church medal mommy says I must try harder I should get more medals mommy is very proud of me.

 

You made my mother so angry that she couldn't even come when you called for her. She wouldn't allow you to manipulate her for the last time. What was the harm, I thought; you were dying and then she could move on. But whatever happened between you two went deep, deeper than I will ever know. The bad feelings rubbed off on me too. There you were, like a queen, living up on the hill, refusing to walk anywhere and heaven forbid anyone suggest you use the bus! Wouldn't learn to drive either, so you tried to bribe, bully or manoeuvre one of us into doing your bidding after Pa died. It must have pained you to have to ask outright for help. You know, we all saw right through those elaborate plans you sat hatching when you couldn't sleep.

There was this grandmother in the book I was reading, a difficult matriarch, described with love and I wondered why I didn't try that: to describe you. You know what? I kind of like you more now. Perhaps it was all that cigarette smoke which got between us. Do you have any idea how irritating that was? You lit up and left your wands of death to emit cancer into the air. There was smoke in every room, forgotten cigarettes burning holes in furniture from the front room, down the narrow passage and into the kitchen. Ha! You gave a new meaning to chain-smoking.

Remember when no one cared whether or not it was okay to sell cigarettes to eight- or nine-year-olds and you would bribe us to go up to Mr Allie's shop for Cavalla Cork in the green packet? I only found out recently that you had been smoking them since you were fifteen when you worked for the factory in Woodstock and they paid you in kind. And then when Rembrandt bought the company long after you had left, you switched allegiance to their cigarettes in the yellow box with gold trim. You would hold the cigarette between red-tipped fingers and I would watch, mesmerised, as you'd take it to your red Elizabeth Arden lips, which left their mark on the filter.

Not as mesmerised, though, as my brothers who decided to see if they could smoke but instead of trying a real cigarette they rolled up the thin paper which lined the box, stuck it into their mouths and one of them lit up. It burned more quickly than expected, leaving the guinea pig minus eyebrows and with a scorched face. That cured them both of smoking.

Actually, you didn't pass that addiction on to any of us. But then none of us needed a crutch to cope with being sent to District Six after both our parents had died, clutching a bag with all we owned, and three younger siblings in tow, to be taken in by an aunt we had never seen. And we didn't have to go out to work in a dimly-lit factory to earn a pittance and the rest in cigarette off-cuts. Or lose a baby during the war because of contaminated milk and watch an epileptic brother taken to a mental home because that's what they did in those days. And later it was a husband to cancer.

No one believed you when you said you were sick. She's at it again, they thought. It was the smoke that took you away.

 

I was cycling home, along the canal and I noticed that the water seemed an odd colour, so I stopped to take a closer look. When I got near to the water, I noticed a reflection of something waving in the tree above me. I looked up. That's when I saw the trousers, little trousers, hanging in the tree. They looked clean. Like they had just been unpacked and hung out to freshen. They were green pants. A child's pants. That was the first thing I saw. Later I saw more clothes.

 

Ms Burkhardt started planning in 1990. The unfamiliar sound of glasnost had woken her from a decade of barely remembered sound bites delivered weekly into the scruffy microphones of community radio. It had not come a moment too soon. Thank God for Gorbachev and the price of grain. Without them, she might never have lifted her head from the damp bedsit of self-doubt. In her hot youth, necking sherry with shiny comrades, eyes still stinging from tear gas, she had never conceived that commitment could be so lonely and so unheroic as it had been these last years. Enduring the awful food and the smug newspapers was hardly the same as standing against a baton charge, yet its tepid, obscure cruelty had stretched her to tissue paper. Now perestroika and glasnost had handed her the bottle again. Change was coming to the world, perhaps even to her allotment. She bought new clothes for the first time in years and stationery with a personal letterhead that read ‘
From the Office of Ms Fraus Burkhardt
'. She began to trace her old friends from the Struggle, friends who had slowly receded into their own hollows, slipping, as she had, into the haze of voluntary exile.

She discovered that some of them had died. They were anonymous clerks at pharmacies or call centres whose families back home could not afford repatriation. They were drinking, fighting, social-grant poets hoping for posthumous recognition. They wished they had never left or been forced to leave. They wished they had been imprisoned.

Others she saw every day in the papers. These were the ones achieving success in exile as musicians and writers and artists with political pedigrees, the voices of the struggle who were invited to places and who could afford cabs in the rain. There were also the high-profile representatives of the struggle abroad who met with the money-men and decision-makers of Europe. Some even wore suits and tailored coats as they were interviewed by the BBC.

But most were just dry scalp on the struggle's shoulders, shuffling along to the tube each morning. She wanted to escape this half-lived destiny, to breathe in the change and rediscover the distinction she had once felt, photographed in her prime by the state police. She wanted to be painted purple again. She wanted to demonstrate her usefulness and her vision to those who deployed. She had, after years of diminishing, regained inclination, and was well on her way to finding full-blown direction.

 

The first thing I thought was that it must be some kind of art, some kind of artist's project or something like that. All these clothes and blankets and things. There is a guy who wraps things in plastic, huge things, and I thought maybe it was something like that. So I wanted to take some photographs.

 

The travel agency where she worked was called Canterbury Travel, although everyone referred to it as Cant Travel. It was one of the major players in the market, delivering some four million holidays each year. Its slogan was ‘Cant Travel Can', which Ms Burkhardt found difficult to say on the phone. She had become the Edgware Road branch specialist in affordable charter tours. She knew every aging, mid-sized plane in the south-east, where they were willing to fly and how many souls they were prepared to hoist. She knew which planes were exaggerating their range and which were fudging their maintenance records. She knew those planes to avoid in the European winter months, and which planes couldn't hold their liquor. And she could structure the costs. Your average Fokker F-28, with a capacity of seventy-odd passengers, would ordinarily go for about £1,700 per hour, excluding permits, overnighting, catering, airport taxes and so on. She could bang it down to £1,600 all inclusive. She knew an Embaer 145 that could take fifty people to North Africa or the Middle East for under £1,100 per hour. You would battle to find better in London.

She knew about every major pilgrimage – religious, sporting or otherwise – as though she were herself devoted. She worked eight hours a day, five days a week, with very few distractions. And she smiled a lot, as required. She would probably never use her Fanon or Chomsky at Cant Travel, but she knew the weather over the Mediterranean like the back of her hand.

‘Sir, if you travel a week earlier you will probably hit the mistral, which … the mistral, it's a wind, a strong wind, that blows from the north, so … no, no, it will actually save you money because it will be a tail-wind … a little bit of turbulence, but your flight will be an hour or two shorter, which is almost £2,000 saved … that's right, the mistral, it's a wind that cleans … well, it brings fresh and clear weather … ja, I suppose you could call it that … ja, a wind of change.'

And then she smiled, even though the person on the other end of the phone couldn't see her, she smiled.

‘May your hajj be blessed, sir. Goodbye.'

She wasn't sure if the smile required of her had kept her from complete depression or driven her to the edge of despair, but recently it had come more easily. As the addresses and phone numbers and even fax numbers for the peripheral, forgotten comrades accumulated, she found herself walking more upright into the agency's tea-soaked premises, despite the drizzle in her collar.

The day she penned her first inquiry was a fortnight before Nelson Mandela's release from prison. It was addressed to a middle-aged man she had known twenty years earlier, a teaching student then, with a scarred bottom lip and his own car. He had asked her name as she sat smoking on Jorissen Street and then insisted on calling her ‘Vars' instead of Fraus. She had been offended and perhaps, in that unintentional protest, he had seen someone worth a bit of effort. From there she had met other lifestyle liberals and even one or two genuine articles. His name was Jonny Boonstra, a coloured man from Westbury, and he wrote angry pamphlets. Jonny was never happier than when he was angry. Ms Burkhardt had liked him. It is possible that kissing him was her first real act of sedition. Her first heroic gesture. He was, she supposed, the thin edge of the wedge, although to credit him with such significance, given his anaemic contributions to the struggle since then, left her feeling sour. He lived in Stoke, where he continued to write angry pamphlets about ‘neo-colonisation' and white hegemony. He only ever shouted. In her opinion, he had never evolved.