JOANNA WAS PLEASED TO SEE AUGUST. Saartjie’s Ghost was selling well; Viola had run out of steam; Jan was working away from home on assignment. The winter had been a hard one, with an endless series of colds that kept James awake at night, weeping and coughing. And if James didn’t sleep, neither did Joanna. Jan – “There’s no sense in everyone staying awake. I have to be at work at five” – slept solidly and cheerfully in the guest bedroom. Joanna could hear the bed squeaking when he turned.
The childless paediatrician had warned her about the winter, the phase, the unavoidable curses of childhood.
“This year is the worst for illness,” he said, his face smooth and healthy and pink. “Playschool. They infect one another over and over. You’ll get the bugs that are doing the rounds, too – but afterwards.”
When he saw her expression he’d laughed. “Don’t worry,” he’d said, and checked his watch reflexively. “It gets easier. Once their immune systems are built up they have more resistance.”
Joanna kept telling herself that as she sat, week after week, with the heaving, congested two-year-old as he flailed weakly against his pillow. I just need to get through this season. Next year all this will be over.
The skin under James’s nostrils was still raw and rough, even though Joanna had tried to dab it with Vaseline whenever she could. James wouldn’t let her touch his nose after all the wiping. The memory of the snot running like cold green candles over his lips made Joanna shudder. Sometimes the small things felt like the end of the world.
But this morning the sun was out at last, and James was in his red wellies, staring at his feet as he stumped along, saurian, the master of his particular universe.
“Dinosaur,” he said pleasantly. “Argh!”
“My poppet,” said Joanna, shepherding him to the gate where the pram stood waiting like a carriage. “You’ve got those on the wrong feet.”
He looked down. It made no difference to him. Joanna sat him down in the courtyard and swapped the boots around. His feet were floppy; they went on easily.
Joanna shooed him to the gate, pushed the dog back, closed the gate again and gripped his hand in hers while she fiddled with the second-hand pram with its second-hand catches. She was going to make him walk to school from tomorrow. Honestly, it was just easier all round, even though he was so slow.
“Stay with me, koekie-loeks,” she told him. “Don’t go in the road. I don’t want you to get squashed by a car.” She hitched his satchel higher on her shoulder – when was he going to carry the damn bag himself? – and counted the things that should have been inside it. Notebook. Two nappies. Change of clothes. Sippy cup. Yoghurt. Muffin. God, she was starving.
“Cars,” agreed James. “Many, many cars. Pee-pah! Pee-pah!”
Today was Thursday: bin day and Lighthouse day. Joanna liked to make the trip between the postbox and their recycling bin as quick as she could. Joanna held James’s hand and wrestled with the various boxes. The post was depressingly predictable. How did you make people stop putting crap in your postbox? It was stuffed with Game supplements and Checkers specials every few days and a shiny, free lifestyle magazine called Orb a couple of times a year. The whole edifice was perpetually threatened by a papery landslide of mail for the previous occupants, whose eldest son had fallen foul of the Traffic Department.
There it was. Another painfully handwritten letter, the third in a series of long and heart-felt missives in faint blue ballpoint, from someone named Cynthia. They were all addressed to The Householder, to whom Cynthia wanted to explain the Epiphany of Joy she had experienced, and would Joanna like to telephone her on the number below and possibly meet for tea and Sharing? Joanna examined the latest letter in disbelief, shaking her head, “Give it up, Cynthia. There’s only one cup on this table. Jeez!”
James corrected her: “Jee-zus Christ!”
“Don’t say that, poppet,” said Joanna, guiltily.
At least he knows when to use it, piped Doctor Renfield. There is that. You’re not a complete failure as a mother.
It was just that Fish Hoek was so freighted with piousness! Joanna sometimes thought that the opposite must also co-exist, though she could hardly credit the polite, eyelinered schoolkids with being card-carrying Satanists. None of it really mattered to her except as an abstract idea. When she was asked, around once a month, if she had found Jesus, Joanna cheerily said that she hadn’t known He was missing.
The sadder, more brittle, truth was that she had probably begun losing her religion when she was eight: the belief hadn’t stayed in her, rooted and obstinate, like her mother’s, who had died with her faith intact. “Stony ground,” said Joanna. She wasn’t averse to a good phrase from the Bible every now and again.
She lifted the mailbox lid again. She thought she knew who Cynthia was. The Lord spoke loudly in the village – in confined spaces the acoustics were good – and Joanna had seen the white couple (Americans, for sure!) going from door to door every few months. There was the man, in his fifties, a jocular type who showed too many teeth when he smiled, and his partner, Cynthia. Joanna had refused to open the gate, then lied and said she was Jewish, and then hid when they came back. She didn’t trust anyone who wore beige stockings in summer. Really, she didn’t have the energy to engage with them – not like Jan, who enjoyed a rousing debate. He had once boasted to her that the Jehovah’s Witnesses kept a file on him. Joanna had thought he was joking until one day they had opened the door to two men in dark suits and light shoes, been introduced, and had the short, sweaty one say, “Oh! That Jan Lykken!”
Joanna held the copy of The Lighthouse between her forefinger and thumb. She was about to crumple the community paper up in disgust. It offended her as an atheist and as a writer, and not only because she had once done some reporting for The People’s Choice. There was always a solitary features-editor-cum-news-hound, usually a woman in her twenties who was beginning to realise that she’d been tricked into generating the content for an entire publication week after week. It was a bit like being a single parent – or like the old woman who lived in a shoe. Joanna shook her head: this twat couldn’t even spell Masiphumelele. It was the combination of the chummy us-versus-them tone and the outright scaremongering she found so repulsive. It was one thing to report on – yep, there it was on page 2 – house-breaking in Clovelly, or the shocking state of pensioners’ basic living conditions (page 3, with a grey-faced man in stokies sitting on the edge of a rumpled bed). Then you could, at least, provide some kind of constructive suggestions – simple, concrete activities, like joining Okuli, if stomping around the neighbourhood at night with a torch and a flask of Ricoffy was your thing.
It was something else to report endlessly, negatively, hopelessly, on the small and horrible things that human beings did to one another, with the constant subtext that this-country-was-going-to-the-dogs. Finuala Dowling once said that all countries were always going to the dogs, and that about summed it up for Joanna. The complaint was a slogan, a motto, a secret handshake. Pensioners greeted each other with it in the Valleyland Spar. Honestly, if you only read this rubbish, you’d think that the apocalypse came to Fish Hoek weekly, and in Comic Sans.
The headline took up a fifth of the page. WHY DID THE FROGS CROSS THE ROAD? Joanna checked on James – “Don’t go into the street, baby” – and went to toss the paper in the recycling. Maybe this rag did have something interesting to say, but she wasn’t going to find out. It was probably another ad for the happy-clappies.