WHILE JAN STAYED AT HOME, JOANNA WOULD DRAG James and Bella down to the beach, starting from Kalk Bay – the wrong end – where dogs were allowed. With her arms stuck out in front of her (dog on lead, child in hand) Joanna chivvied them all past the Okuli Security van, which looked like it sold ice-cream. On the sides of the van were stickers with vaguely Masonic eyes on them, wide open, unblinking, the lines too perfectly rendered. James always wanted to rattle the handle and call “Knock, knock!” and Bella wanted to piss against the tyres. There was never anyone in the van. Joanna liked that about Fish Hoek, too, that no one was seriously bothered by crime. No one, at any rate, that she knew.
Bella had finished chewing at her lead and was looking for the most inaccessible spot to empty her bowels – somewhere that Joanna would have to clamber, mittened in plastic, to undo the stinking effort to the soundtrack of James’s whimpering at the water line.
The tracks of the birds on the sand were just as business-like, direct: there was work to be done, said the missionary footprints. Joanna and James had meandered behind them, glancing up at the dunes with their ineffectual signposts, the grey bridges over the wetland, piers without boats.
“Bridge,” said James, yanking at the trailing lead. “Goats.”
“Yes, my baby. Trip-trap, trip-trap, over my bridge.”
The landscape was overlaid with the books they were reading. James got attached to a particular story – “Troll! Troll!” – and refused anything else for months. So far she had not had any success with the children’s section in the library in Fish Hoek either. While it turned out that James liked maps – really, really liked them, and kissed the pages when he opened an atlas – he also wanted to keep them. She had found My First Round-the-World Trip missing its central double-page spread, torn carefully away from the spine.
For Joanna the beach was blessedly free of story. It was the one place she could do some not-thinking. When she looked at the sea she wasn’t bothered by having lost her job, feeling ignored, being an insomniac. She liked to look at the water coming down from the mountain in streams, right by her feet. It just went past her and she didn’t have to do a bloody thing to it.
It was interesting how quickly they had come to think of Fish Hoek as theirs, now that the name-change carnival was back on again. Cape Town went through cycles of avid and expensive purging and then lapsed back into torpor, exhausted. The real business of getting by went on with no discernible change. The magic wasn’t in the words.
And now it was Fish Hoek’s turn. Poor Recreation Road, thought Joanna. How was that oppressing anyone? She usually relied on Jan’s snorts to fill her in on the headlines, but the most recent story had made her take notice and reread it more carefully herself. It was a luxury, these days, to make it all the way through an entire newspaper article, and Joanna didn’t like to squander the opportunity.
The journalist, Moneeq Perskeboom, informed her readers that the municipality was going to hold a public meeting about renaming the road to the sea Saartjie Baartman Boulevard. She mentioned the link with Peers Cave, up on the hill, where archaeologists were fairly certain that they had unearthed the remains of several of Saartjie’s ancestors. She made it sound like the place was a mortuary or mausoleum, but Joanna knew that it was just a popular spot, dry and sheltered, with an unrivalled view of the valley. Even Herry – Autshumato – was rumoured to have lived there once, coming down sporadically to translate for the Dutch settlers at the Cape and the people who lived along the coast.
Bella raced past, her tail a Jolly Roger, barking madly at a small and blameless coloured child playing in the lagoon. The little girl squealed and tried to escape, falling over in the knee-deep water. Her weeping was audible all the way along the beach.
“Sorry!” called Joanna and ran to grab the dog by the collar. Far back in her puppyhood, Bella had been a streetkid’s consort in Stellenbosch, and she had never recovered. She made Joanna look more racist than she was.
Joanna, dragging the dog along, thought that she might go along to that civic meeting if she could get Jan to look after James. It was going to be absolute chaos. And the mooted name-change was only the half of it. Ms Perskeboom had got right down to the heart of the current controversy, the nerve of the rotten tooth. This time it was one of Saartjie’s descendants, a man who’d been landed with a less famous patrimonial. What he wanted was recognition for that side of the family – the Treurnichts – that was tangentially Baartman. More specifically, he was campaigning for their glorious double-barrelling on all the signage. Imagine the English tourists pronouncing that, thought Joanna. It was funny; it was sad. She pictured the Treurnichts all riding on Saartjie’s rump like the Cupid in the cartoon, the sort of people who would take a two-litre of Jive to the beach and leave the bottle there. She wished Saartjie would shrug them off. The passivity of the dead irked Joanna.
James was also irritable. He tagged along behind Bella, the two of them grizzling, refusing distraction. He hated the feel of the sand on his soles; Joanna was trying to persuade him to like it. She would make him into a beach baby. She saw, very distinctly, James at fourteen, his wetsuit peeled down to his waist. He was walking along Recreation Road – which had survived the renaming – with his friends, and they were all carrying surfboards. James was the tall one, ducking his head, his curls tipped with the sun. In the meantime, he clutched his Matchbox ambulance and whimpered behind her. She ignored him in favour of Future James, walking just a little too quickly. If she let him near her, he just clung to her legs, bleating, “Up! Up!”, his cries mingling with the eerie whine of the shark siren.
Slowly they came to the lagoon mouth, where the sea had carved out a channel like the Grand Canyon. When Bella dashed across the stream she loomed gigantic, chaotic, her ears turned inside out like roses at a gypsy carnival. Under the scrabbling paws the sides of the channel gave easily. If I’m not careful I’m going to twist my ankle again, thought Joanna. She saw herself sprawled, lame, on the beach, while James boo-hooed at her, Bella ambled off and freezing night fell. Joanna was the last line of defence. That was the truly frightening part of having children: it was only you versus all the things that could happen.
She stepped into the water. It erased her prints, lapped around her ankles. I’m wading through iced tea, thought Joanna. When she stood still the current pulled at her. She always thought of Ophelia in the brown river, her hands thrown up in mockery and surrender. When she was young she had found the picture tempting. Now that she had a child, things were different. She walked carefully, wherever she went. Devi had once told her that parenthood meant that you were never completely carefree, ever again.
James was still lagging behind. God, he could be provoking sometimes! Joanna hoped that dead bluebottles had lost their sting. She had a moment of panic, imagining him wrapped in their tentacles, caught and flagellated for no good reason. But he was fine, kicking at the sand, running at the dunes, sitting down and getting up again.
Joanna kept going up the stream. She liked to be able to see the bottom under the water. The sand was rippled and giving under her feet, prising her toes further and further apart until they split into claws. Concentrate, she told herself. You’re a writer. You have a life outside the house. Look up. What colour is the sea today? What would you tell someone who asked you?
The dead gull was only seaweed at first, a kelp necklace. But then Joanna saw its feathers riffed backwards by the stream, fingered by the tidal flow. It was caught fast, bobbing as the water tugged at it. The claws were grey, folded neatly below its body in perch or prayer, like the chicken feet that women boiled up at Fish Hoek Station. She looked the gull in its empty eye. It was one thing to let your dog crap in the dunes, but this thing was poisoning the water. When he wasn’t whining, James also sometimes played in the lagoon where the water was warm and shallow. She thought of Roman wells, of cities under attack.
She had to get rid of it. Joanna looked about for a staff of kelp dry and thick enough to catch hold of the thing. She would tip it into the dunes, the way she used to flick the rock-heavy hockey ball into the net. But for once there were only weedy strands, anorexic branches that snapped or wilted as she tried them. Bella growled and grabbed each likely stick. “Go away, you stupid dog,” panted Joanna, tugging them from the dog’s muzzle. “I’m not playing with you!”
At last she gave up. I’ll just use my fingers, she told herself, and then I’ll scrub them with sand and rinse them in the water. The sea is antiseptic, said Doctor Renfield loftily. Joanna leaned over the corpse, but the bird hadn’t bloated or bleached. It looked fairly peaceful, a lady on her back at a day spa.
She hooked her fingers around its throat, anticipating a rip that would separate the head from its body. The ligaments held, but the head flopped bonelessly, and Joanna thought, Oh, Jesus! Someone has twisted its neck!
With a grunt of distaste, she lifted the gull. Its dead feathers flattened and the water streamed down: it wasn’t a big bird after all. Joanna, thinking of discus throwers, hurled the body into the dunes.
She walked further up the stream, looking for a spot where she could be sure the water was fresh off the mountain. She dug her hands hard into the wet sand and scoured the grains against her flesh. It was just like a sugar scrub, really. Her skin tingled. How useful she was!
The squeal of happiness brought her head up sharply. James had scrambled up the dunes.
He moves pretty fast when he wants to, Doctor Renfield observed. The little boy was holding something up, like an athlete on a podium. “Mommy! Mommy! Look!” he shouted – only it came out Yook!
“Birdie!”