“Are we ghosts?” Agnes whispered, and I nodded but I could not explain to her: Soon we would be gone from this house, and it would no longer recall us; we would become part of the past, just as our father had become; and no one who moved into these rooms in the future would know of us. Bits of us would stay behind, the dust of our skin and our fingerprints, but in all other ways we would be forgotten.
~~~
Upstairs, our mother was still in bed, her body a narrow curve beneath the sheets. Agnes fetched her water in her toothbrush mug, and I polished a plum until it gleamed, but our mother pulled the pillow over her head and would not speak. So Agnes and I went to sleep, too, top and tailing in her single bed, my shivering feet pressing against the warmth of her back.
~~~
The next morning the packers were back. Again they worked with violence, sweeping from room to room. It was only as they began on the bedrooms that Agnes and I suddenly realized our mistake — we had packed no clothes! We had packed nothing! What on earth would we wear on the boat?
We raced up the stairs two at a time and, opening a trunk, began to throw items into it in a frenzy. Already half our wardrobes lay sealed in crates; we grabbed what we could from what was left on the hangers and shelves, stuffing things down with our arms. Cotton knickers and sheepskin slippers and a merino sweater, a cheesecloth skirt, flannel pajamas, a single walking boot, anything we could lay our hands on.
Next door we heard our mother groaning. Agnes glanced at me, then spun on her heels, her red hair streaming around her neck. The packers had invaded our mother’s room. They were opening her cupboards and clearing her dressing table, her perfume bottles, her silver-backed brush, her photograph of our father. Mummy sat upright in bed. Her nightgown had fallen open at the neck, and I could see the bones of her chest, as though her skin had been chiseled away.
Agnes stood in the middle of the room and stamped her foot. “Get out,” she screamed. “Get out! Get out!” And to my amazement, the men nodded their heads to her and left. Agnes began to pack the remainder of our mother’s clothes into the wicker laundry basket since we could not find our other trunk.
Our mother stared around in dismay, then lay back down again and shut her blue-backed eyes.
~~~
When the packers left that afternoon, leaping into the open back of their truck, their heads wet with sweat, Agnes and I sat on the porch steps and pulled the petals off the agapanthus that curved toward us. Everything around us seemed blue, an agapanthus sky arcing above Agnes’s pale angry eyes.
“We must do something,” Agnes declared, and so together we went upstairs and opened the trunk and the laundry basket and dressed ourselves in our finest attire. Agnes wore our mother’s silver high heels and her jade necklace and her fur stole and even sat at her dressing table and applied some powders to her face. I put on my confirmation dress and a beaded cap of Mother’s and a fringed shawl embroidered with parrots.
We both kept on our black mourning stockings, as to take them off seemed disrespectful.
~~~
It was early evening when we set out, and the town was quiet, all the shops shuttered up. We walked slowly because Agnes’s feet only filled half the shoes, taking in the light and the hibiscus hedge and the sudden silence as all the mining machines ground to a halt for the night. We walked down Digger and Hoog, seeing no one but a white dog with three legs that barked at us skittishly, then disappeared under a bush when Agnes bent for a stone. At the doctor’s house we hesitated on the steps; then holding hands, we marched up to the door and pulled the bell. A maid let us in, then led us down the yellowwood-floored hall to the dining room, where the doctor and his wife, Mrs. van Buren, were having dinner.
“Twee meisies vir u,” the maid announced in Dutch.
Mrs. van Buren’s face went pale, and she pushed her plate away with a sudden gesture. My mouth rushed with water; the van Burens were eating lamb chops that glistened with grease and baby carrots and rice and potatoes, and on the sideboard I spotted a trifle, the ruby jelly glinting between layers of custard.
Agnes explained our predicament. Our mother, the packers, how Nuisance would not be quiet, how we had no food, and the doctor’s wife kept exclaiming, “Shame, you poor girls!” Then, she said she would pack us some food and take us home in the car, but first she picked up her linen napkin and, dipping a twisted end in her water glass, she wiped the rouge and lipstick off Agnes’s face.
~~~
And so a week later, we found ourselves on a train to Cape Town. The doctor had organized everything; he had sent a telegram to Scotland and given our mother a compound that calmed her, although it could not seem to assuage her grief. The doctor’s wife sorted through our trunk with her mouth clenched like a fish and then took us to Garlick’s to buy us each a cotton dress, a jersey, buckled shoes, and three pairs of cotton knickers that she instructed us to wash in the bath each night so we might always have a fresh pair. At the station she helped us onto the train, overseeing the porters who lifted our trunk, Mother’s laundry basket (now well tied up with twine), and Nuisance’s gilt cage, and before we left she pressed a kiss against each of our foreheads with her furry lips and gave us each a gift. We waved good-bye from our carriage window, but our mother stared at the wall with her hat askew and eyes closed.
The doctor’s wife had embroidered us each a handkerchief: “A” for Agnes, “E” for Edith. Mine was so pretty, I could not ever imagine using it.
~~~
But how wrong I was. As I said before, ours was a voyage of tears. My mother wept in her cabin, and Agnes wept with her, until her handkerchief was dripping with brine. And me, I wept for another death, for an old man whose corpse I saw sewn with sixty stitches into a shroud early one morning and who, as the sun came up, was cast into the fiery waters. Of course now you might say I was crying for my father and not for a stranger whose funeral was so beautiful, it affected even the stone heart of a 5,221-day-old girl, but I think I was crying for even more than that. I was crying for what I was and what I would no longer be. All our lives we had lived a myth, that we were foreigners in the land we had been born in, and yet, as we drew out of Cape Town harbor, and the great flat mountain slipped beneath the horizon, I held up my hands in the light and counted my fingers, ten in all, but fingers nonetheless that were no longer familiar to my eyes. Somewhere along our journey, I had changed, become divided. All I knew and loved was now buried behind that distant indigo curve of the earth, and by extension, I was now fragmented. The ship rolled and dipped, the glare off the sea blinding. I shut my eyes. At Number 25 Long Street, another multiple of me sat on the swing, rose, then fell from the sky.
~~~
It was raining in Edinburgh. Agnes and I pressed our faces against the glass and examined the gray buildings, the eerie castle on its hill. The train clattered into the station and, with a piercing screech, lumbered into a stop. Our mother, suddenly animate, picked up her carpetbag.
“Come on, girls,” she commanded briskly. Agnes and I hurried after her, the parrot cage swinging between us. The air was clammy and rain seemed to be blowing in sideways from down the track. A single gull, pewter-eyed, stood one-legged on a post and glared at us. The wool of my jersey itched my skin. And then, while we were not looking, our mother stopped, and we both bumped into her.
“Girls,” said our mother, and we looked up and there stood a man, no, not just a man, our father, or a man just like our father, stoop-shouldered and thin-haired and pale-eyed, with the soft long mouth and hands dug deep into his pockets.
“It is your father’s brother,” my mother said softly, “his twin. Uncle Jock,” and behind her back, Agnes and I clutched hands, and I felt the crescent of my sister’s nail curve into my palm. I knew what she was thinking, Agnes, for haven’t I always known her thoughts? She was thinking how bewildering it all was to be separated and reunited, to be multiplied and copied, and she gripped my hand even tighter, so it was left to me to take charge, to drag her toward our uncle, who seemed to be more than our uncle, and who, in that colorless northern afternoon appeared to cast a light, an almost immoderate light, over our little family.
About Sam Grieve
