18

REVELATIONS

‘GO ON, TELL THE SISTERS.’ REJOICE NGOBESE NUDGED HER FRIEND. ‘I’ll wait outside.’

Sweetness tried a hesitant knock on the half-open service entry in the old workshop door. Raylene was sitting at one of the nuns’ dining tables with her back to the statue of the Madonna. When Sweetness knocked a bit louder, calling ‘Ko-ko!’, she swung round frowning.

‘Yes?’

‘Oh.’ Sweetness stood confounded. She had expected to find nuns but here was the new young teacher who wore her hair like a sangoma, in many plaits with beads at the ends. She looked even crosser than Sister Immaculata.

‘What do you want?’

‘It’s me, Sweetness Moloi.’

‘Yes, I know. You’re in 7B. What do you want?’

The repeated demand confused her. She didn’t want anything. She was bringing good news. She blurted, ‘Teacher, it’s—’

‘Miss Jacobs, not Teacher.’

‘Eish. Sorry, Miss.’ She hung her head.

Her discomfiture made Raylene even more fierce. ‘There’s no need to cringe. Just tell me what you’ve come to say. Is it about homework?’

‘No, Miss,’ the girl whispered.

After a tense wait, Raylene said, ‘What, then? I haven’t got all day. My first class starts in half an hour.’

Sweetness muttered, still looking at the floor, ‘It’s Ma-Jesu, Miss. I’ve come to tell the sisters that I saw her last night.’

‘You sneaked in here without permission? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘No, Miss.’

‘What, then?’

Two radiant eyes rose and the pent-up wonder of the vision was released in a gush of words. ‘I saw her coming home from school. Like Our Lady, all dressed in blue like sky water, only she was alive.’ She indicated the Madonna statue with the knuckles of one hand, her fingers curled in respect. ‘She made the Sign of the Cross and I smelled peach flowers and vanilla cupcakes.’

The girl must be hallucinating or on drugs. She was sweating enough. This had to be stopped before it got out of hand; hysteria was catching in schoolgirls. Raylene got up and strode towards her in a furious clicking of beads. ‘Stop telling lies, Sweetness. The nuns will punish you.’

‘Is not lies! Is true, Miss. Cross my heart.’ Tears spilled out of her eyes as her right thumb made two emphatic movements over her chest.

Raylene felt the skin crawling on her neck. The girl’s gaze was steady, her hands now clasped in a fervent knot, her chest heaving with emotion. She believed what she was saying. ‘Is true,’ she repeated. ‘I saw her, Ma-Jesu. When she moved, it was like birds’ wings.’

What if she really did see …?

Raylene was not a good Catholic. She hadn’t been to Mass for years until the lack of jobs for botany graduates had forced her to take this ‘temporary country posting’ with the nuns, who stipulated that she must appear at their Sunday services even if she didn’t go to confession and take Communion. But the girl’s beaming testimony catapulted her back to her childhood when she had loved getting dressed up for Sunday school. Loved the songs and stories and incense wafting in from the big church, and the pretty gilded pictures of Mary and Jesus on the Bible cards they were given to take home.

It was the tangible details that began to sway her: the blue like sky water, the birds’ wings, the scent of peach blossom and vanilla cupcakes. Sweetness was convinced that she had seen a real person.

Could it be …? Was this how …? What if …? In Crocodile Flats? Raylene’s mind buzzed with alternating conjecture. Surely not. She must be trying to get attention. Must have read about the Virgin Mary appearing to those children at Fatima, read about Lourdes and thought she’d try the same stunt. It sounded so genuine, though. And would this schoolgirl who lived in a slum have access to writings about holy visions? Maybe. The nuns had books in their common room.

She reached for the girl’s arm and guided her to a chair. ‘Okay, Sweetness. Sit down so long. I’ll go and call one of the sisters. They must deal with this.’

Sister Immaculata had left early that morning on a round of visits to elderly parishioners, so it was Sister Hilary who heard the astonishing news next and blurted it to Sister Dineo and Sister Nokwe before running across the back yard to call Father Liam.

Five minutes later Father Liam hurried into the dining room that morphed into a church on Sundays, having asked Raylene and the sisters to wait outside. Sweetness was sitting at one of the tables weeping.

Father Liam pulled up a chair next to her and put his arm round her, smelling the smoke of early morning fires in her hair and clothes. ‘Come now, my child. Tell me exactly what you saw.’

Her pink lower lip jutted, slick with teary mucus. ‘I’m not any more a child.’

‘Sure, I’m sorry, Sweetness,’ he apologised. ‘Of course you’re not. I meant it in the ecclesiastical sense.’

‘Eh?’ She tried to pull away, tear-spiky eyelashes widening in alarm.

Father Liam could have kicked himself for using the baffling word. If he confused this already distressed girl, she’d clam up entirely.

‘It means to do with the church,’ he soothed. ‘I am a man of God, and in His name I need to know what you saw. It could be important. Please tell me.’

Her eyes were the shiny lava-black of the pebbles in the peat stream by the hayfield when he was a boy, so far away now he had almost forgotten. ‘A man of Ma-Jesu too?’ Doubt in her voice still.

‘Indeed I am. A most ardent disciple of Our Lady,’ he vowed, and his fervour convinced her. This Father always talked nicely – and he was here, listening, unlike her own father who had abandoned his family.

Under gentle questioning, Sweetness told him everything she had seen, even confessing her fears that she had imagined it all, as in her dreams of being famous.

When she finished, he sat turning over her testimony in his mind. She’d described a traditional vision of the Madonna, making her brown to accord with her role models, but there was one persuasive detail: the aroma of peach blossom and vanilla cupcakes. Appearances of Our Lady were often associated with the scent of roses. Could this manifestation be connected with the sign he’d seen: the silhouette of a man praying over a pregnant woman as a donkey brayed nearby? Possibly. And he believed in possibilities; wouldn’t have become and stayed a priest without them.

He gave her an encouraging smile and said, ‘Sit tight, girl. There may be somethin’ here. I’ll telephone the diocese in Joburg. They’ll know what to do.’

The sisters and Raylene, hovering, saw him come through the door with a look he had worn only once before, when he scored a try for Ireland at Lansdowne Road as half the population of Dublin rose and cheered. The shoulders under his shabby cassock had straightened out of the stoop of too many years spent in atrocious slums.

He said, ‘There is an outside chance that we might have an apparition. God be praised.’

Sister Hilary fell to her knees. ‘God and Our Lady be praised.’

‘Not a word to anyone else yet, right? Miss Jacobs too? I must call Joburg at once. So not a word, eh?’

Raylene’s fists flew to her hips. ‘You saying I can’t be trusted?’

‘It’s not a matter of trust.’ He was frowning. ‘We must keep this wonderful thing to ourselves because there’s a doctrinal problem. Sweetness is insistin’ that the lady she saw was African.’

‘She didn’t tell me that.’

‘Brown, she said, with high cheeks. Maybe from Somalia. That’s right next door to Ethiopia.’ With his voice dropping to a whisper, he added, ‘Shades of the Queen of Sheba.’

Sister Hilary closed her eyes in shock. ‘Mother of God.’

‘Sounds logical to me.’ Sister Dineo’s chin went up.

‘Mariam,’ buzzed Sister Nokwe. ‘That’s what they call her in Ethiopia. This is a wonderful thing, eh? A brown Madonna. Brown like us.’

Sister Nokwe was the first to couple the words that would become an African icon.