EXILED FROM THE MUSEUM, JOANNA FOUND that real work and housework weren’t that different. She rushed through everything she did so that she could do something else. She fed James and sucked his fingers clean; she ate the food he left. When he dropped a rusk on the kitchen floor she caught herself chiming cheerfully, “Whoopsie! Five-Second Rule!” and rescuing the soggy brick from the dog, who circled them like a satellite.
You don’t really believe that if you pick it up fast it will still be clean? asked Doctor Renfield.
“Kids need to boost their immune systems,” said Joanna aloud. “Mind your own business.”
She knelt like a cavewoman and wiped the remains of the rusk from the table; she left Bella the crumbs on the floor. She said to herself, I am a Doctor of Philosophy. I write books. I know poems: But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot, hurrying near. Slow-slow, quick-quick. Inside your body there are a hundred clocks.
She had always had a strong stomach, the legacy of her father who liked raw onion with his sardines, and Durban curry, and radishes that tied the tongue. When James was at Busy Babies and she was home by herself, Joanna ate boiled eggs and stir-fry and a box of boudoir biscuits in a sitting, fish fingers and brat-wurst and mash. She would be thinking of the next thing even as she masticated. Salty next, she would think. Then, okay, something sweet. Or hot, I could do with some chilli. Food helped her think, and it helped her write. It helped her to get happy.
Think of your liver! cried Doctor Renfield as she chugged two mugs of Milo.
“Don’t care,” said Joanna, searching the pantry shelves for the last half-packet of Chuckles. “I’ll get myself a new one.”
She knew that she was putting more calories into her body than she was burning up. She saw them settling on her hips. But so what? Jan had no interest in seeing her naked and anyway, he didn’t have The Best Wors in the Western Cape, so they were quits on that score. Joanna didn’t care if she never had sex again, although she did regret having told Devi about Jan’s tiny penis. Her friend had taken to calling him Long John, but never to his face.
Joanna was, in any case, disinclined to frolic in a bikini on the beach. Part of her liked the extra layer: she felt more substantial, more there. It was archaeological. She kept thinking of that long-ago march. You have struck the women. You have struck a rock.
Not a rock, my dear, said Doctor Renfield. A mudslide.
Joanna chewed and chewed and swallowed and swallowed. I have to nourish myself at the moment, she thought, because who else will do it for me? I must be healthy; I must be strong. When things are calmer, I’ll definitely cut down. When I have some work. When James is sleeping through. What’s a couple of Bounty bars? Some animals eat their young.
She thought of all the things she would do once James was independent, once she had her old self back. On the one side of Recreation Road was Valleyland Centre, but on the other side was a stand of trees where the kids had made a bike track. If you followed it for long enough, you found yourself in the wetland, and if you were still feeling energetic ( Joanna never was), you could hike up to Peers Cave pretty quickly. She had always meant to get there, straight up the trail, one time, ka-zoom, in twenty turbo-charged minutes. There would be some residual magic in the cave, the walls bleeding moisture, more bodies in the rock like catacombs.
But it had been nearly two years and she was less and less inclined to do it. The idea of puffing behind Jan as he leapt nimbly from rock to rock made her despair. It wasn’t fair: men’s shoulders were where their weight went, whereas women’s went to their hips. She patted the fat at her sides. They were only love handles if someone else was holding them.
Besides, the fynbos was haunted by the living daylight and the ugly things in it: not the kids, even, but gangsters, who held knives to your throat and took your wallet and phone, the kind who would rape you if they had time, just because they could. Joanna would be too slow to get away. She thought of that terrible joke, another one you wouldn’t find in The Hee-Hee-Scree! Book:
How do you fuck a fat chick?
Roll her in flour and look for the wet spot.
No one went into Peers Cave anymore. The enchantment of the dark place was gone, the many potential adventures sharpened into just one that would hurt, a flint shard beside a body.
Joanna could see the gateway between the rocks from wherever she was in the Valley. At first she had used the cave for navigation. Now, aimless, she searched for it by habit. She always thought of the story her mother had read her about Ntunjambili, a great rock that had been split by lightning. It had started with the little Zulu twins whose parents had hidden them at birth. When the bad luck babies were discovered, the village tried to drown them – drown them – in the uThukela.
The story had spoken loudly and persistently to the six-year-old Joanna. Demana and Demazana’s mother and father had been persuaded to give them back to the ancestors, hadn’t they? And not just that – tried to drown them. Joanna had looked carefully at her father that night when he emerged from his study to test his new jokes on them. She couldn’t imagine him trying to hold her under the water. There was nothing remotely murderous about him. When he checked on her in the bath, he only said, “Come on, Jo-Jo. The soap isn’t even wet! Face, fanny, feet.”
But they had survived, the Zulu twins. They had, but others hadn’t: lucky Demana and Demazana. The rivers were full of people who had come to unlucky ends. Their bones rolled along the beds; beneath the water there were spirit-villages and cattle and crops, like the Langebaan fossils.
The twins were saved by the Nunus, the Little People who were the guardians of small things. The orphans were spirited away to the Nunus’ home, Ntunjambili. Inside it they found animals that had been caught in traps, birds and insects with broken legs, lonely souls in need of recovery. The kindly Nunus gave them shelter and told the twins that all sad hearts were mended there.
Fat Joanna sat at her pc and whispered the words to herself. All sad hearts are mended here. They would make a fantastic tattoo if she could just think of a place that wouldn’t have stretchmarks on it. The books said they would fade to silvery lines, but hers were still angry and purple.
Time passed. The twins ministered to the sick creatures, who grew well and left. The boy and his sister began to forget their near-drowning, and to regret leaving their parents. They appeared again to their father, the sad man who came daily to the river to mourn. They took pity on him, and listened when he persuaded them to go back with him.
But the twins didn’t belong with their family. Their mother’s love, starved of its food, had grown thin, and one night the two children slipped out from their parents’ hut. They stole back to Ntunjambili, where the Nunus were waiting for them. When they saw the twins coming, the creatures called out, “Come in, Demana and Demazana! We have been lonely without you.”
It still made Joanna want to cry. Where was that book? She had to dig it out and read it to James. Of course she would. She would call up the romance of Ntunjambili wherever she was; she could make it happen. Because it was magic, but not the sort that could be summoned up. It was the other kind of magic, the one that heals and serves because it is merciful and because it pays attention.
It was not the kind of love that Jan had for her. A few days ago she had seen him in the mirror, looking at the roll that squeezed out from under her bra strap.
There was a song that the Zulu twins had sung to enter the rock when they passed back and forth between the worlds:
Ilitsha li ka Ntunjambili,
Ilitsha li ka Ntunjambili,
Ngivulele ngingene.
Alivulwanga abantu;
Livulwa yezinkonjane,
Zona zindiza phezulu.
Ngibulele ngingene.
Rock of two arches,
Rock of two arches,
Open and let me in.
It is not opened by man;
It is opened by the swallows,
Those that fly above.
Open and let me in.
Joanna hummed it, putting a tune to the English words. Maybe one of these days I’ll go up to Peers Cave and see for myself, she thought. It’s not like I have anything else to do. Last week in the storms she had looked up and seen a couple on the ledge outside, the man in a blue windbreaker that was flapping in the rain. They looked like the last people in the world or – take the clothes and hiking boots away – like the people who had always lived there, time-travellers keeping an eye on the traffic, wondering where the eland had gone. There were two of them, and no one else, and they belonged.