HER KEY STILL WORKED, WHICH MEANT that Viola hadn’t got around to changing the locks yet. Good. Panting, Joanna struggled to turn the fractured spokes of her umbrella right side out again, but the thing was useless. She shook the broken wings in rage and disgust and leaned hard against the door to The Fish Hoek Valley Museum of Natural History.
“Welcome to the Crypt,” she told herself. She threw the umbrella in the corner. “Don’t forget that on the way out again, Jo-Jo.” She inhaled, smoothing her hair down against the rain that hammered away behind her, furious, on the wood.
God, she was going to miss this smell! The dusty warmth of the exhibition rooms reminded her of a movie theatre – the old, shabby one she had visited as a child in Kimberley, before the Ster-Kinekor Kiddies Club had taken over Saturday mornings and it was all laminated yellow membership cards and no-drinks-allowed and the big boys muscling her off the steps.
But it was too late for regret.
You should have thought of that before you told Viola she was a lunatic, said Doctor Renfield smugly.
“The truth hurts,” Joanna agreed. And she was suddenly hungry again, even as she felt her lungs struggling under their layers: muscle, fat, skin, cloth. She gave the roll at her side a spiteful pinch and her coat pulled tight under the arms. The fat wasn’t going away. She looked like Humpty Dumpty and she smelled like a damp dog. Why had she worn these jeans?
Joanna sighed and gathered herself. She had to speed things up. She felt for the main switch and threw the lights on in the tiny marbled foyer with its concession window. She made her way to the room on the right, marked in her most careful calligraphy: OUR FAMOUS PAST. Fish Hoek Man lay where he always did, in his climate-controlled casket, his skull dense black glass, Darth Vader, the Rock of Ages. The thought of kissing that face with its lipless grimace made Joanna shiver.
“Maybe later, Fish Boy,” she told the skull as she tapped his glass. “You’ll have to buy me a drink first.”
More light! Joanna flicked a brass toggle. This place would give you the grils if you let it. She was sleeping badly again as it was – on her last nerve, as her mother used to say – and no bloody wonder.
She would find a cardboard box in the storeroom, but she would have to sneak her things back into the house when Jan was away. How was she going to break the news to him? God, he was going to be so angry with her, losing her first real job since James was born!
She squeezed her bulk in among the boxes. The storeroom was filthy. The Museum was on a go-slow now that everything was changing, and cleaning was the last thing on the list. Depression bred entropy, or was it the other way round? Joanna hoped that she wasn’t getting dust in her hair. Dust, or worse.
Saartjie’s packing case still stood against the storeroom wall, a sarcophagus flimsy as a prop. Inside it her skeleton was debossed in the foam, expertly cut by the French transporters around the shape of each bone. Who knew that there were moving companies that specialised in osteology? Saartjie had been deconstructed and reassembled on different continents like a Build-a-Bear, and now no one was certain about what to do with the box she had come in.
Did you follow the Western way of thinking and regard it as packaging, like bubble wrap or those plastic peanuts? Or did you adopt the African approach, that everything that had come into contact with her was sentient and deserved a more respectful disposal?
Joanna didn’t know. The packing case hadn’t seemed sturdy enough to warrant preservation. She had been more worried about the glass jars that held Saartjie’s pickled genitals and brain. But the jars – one big, one small – were intact when they arrived, thick and tinged with green like the hundred-year-old Schweppes bottles she sometimes turned up in her garden in Plantana Avenue. Their insides were the cloudy grey of the primordial soup, and Viola had whipped them away before Joanna could get a really good look at them. Typical.
There had been so much back-and-forth about those bloody jars and their few tots of spirits! For ages the French government denied that they even existed. It claimed that these bits of Saartjie had been lost sometime during the nearly two hundred years that separated her death and her resurrection. The shelf broke; the bell jars smashed; they have been mislaid. Non, non, non.
But the bottles had turned up after all, like magic. It was strange what could be conjured when the cameras were rolling. But even then no one was counting how many jars there were supposed to be.
It wasn’t only the Musée de l’Homme. Joanna knew that the shelves in the back rooms of hundreds of museums were still stacked like supermarket shelves with boxes and bottles of human remains. It was hard to know what to do with the dead who were not dead. Things broke, things were stolen; things disappeared. The Valley Museum only had one husk to deal with, and Fish Hoek Man was enough of a handful. He probably wouldn’t even be on display much longer. He’d be moved somewhere more central, more officious, paraded as evidence of African scientific endeavour.
Get a move on, said Doctor Renfield. You’ve got your own transporting to deal with.
Joanna bent and grunted, lifting a Willard’s box – That’s Good Times! – and shook it upside down. The flaps opened like the hatches on an aeroplane and a Daddy-Long-Legs fell out, righted itself and scuttled miserably away. “I know how you feel, missus,” Joanna told her.
Her section of the office was undisturbed – as if Viola would be at work this early! – and Joanna turned on the fluorescents. She packed quickly in the surgical light: her Tretchikoff mug, her precious green lamp, the Black Madonna prayer card, the drawerful of empty Kit-Kat wrappers. She would have to come back for Jan’s stupid ergonomic chair. The reams of manuscript proofs she considered and then left. The book was long printed and flying off the shelves. Saartjie’s Ghost was done and dusted, and even Viola couldn’t gum up the works now.
Joanna took a last look round and peered into Viola’s section – that fucking La-Z-Boy, it only needed a leopard skin draped across the back – and then backed out of the office.
Wait. Just wait a minute, she told herself. There’s one more thing.
Don’t do it, Doctor Renfield said tiredly. You know it’s going to cause havoc.
“I don’t care!” hissed Joanna out loud. She dumped the box and marched over to Oswald’s desk on the other side of the partition.
On the bloody shelves.
That’s where he had showed her the jar, the teabags and sugar and mugs arranged casually around it, hidden in plain sight. Joanna couldn’t believe that Viola had got away with it for nearly four months already.
She reached up and took the little bottle off the shelf. The glass was cold. The tissue inside it bobbed as the alcohol was disturbed, bleached and flaking as a hospital specimen. “My lips are sealed,” whispered Joanna, and laughed shakily. “Oh, God, that’s awful!”
She buried the jar under some files in the box. There. It was done. That would show that psycho bitch. It served her right.
Joanna picked up her box – the contents clanked and slid – and shuffled backwards in a last look-round. There was the light switch. She bumped it off with her chin. If only the bloody box wasn’t so unwieldy! If she could just—
Joanna whumped into a warm body behind her. Fish Hoek Man! He was coming to get his kiss! She shrieked: she couldn’t help it.
“Easy,” said Oswald. He was grinning, his teeth like fossils in the gloom. “Lucky I have this cushion.” He patted his stomach.
“Oswald! You scared the bejesus out of me!” They stood together in the gloaming, two bears after hibernation. She snorted into the box.
“What’s so funny?” He flicked the switch for the lights.
You’ve lost your job. Wipe that smile off your face! said Doctor Renfield.
She remembered her father’s trick of dragging his hand from his forehead to his chin so that his smile turned down – and how he’d pass his hand the other way again to paste it back on. She had thought it was magic.
“Nothing.”
Oswald was holding her memory stick out to her like a baton. “You forgot this.”
“Oh ja, thanks. Ja, that would have been nasty, wouldn’t it?”
Joanna didn’t have enough hands. She motioned him to drop it on top of the other things in the box and then kept nudging her way towards the door. She wasn’t supposed to be here at all. Viola had threatened to call security if she saw Joanna on the premises.
“I’ll see you around,” Oswald told Joanna’s back. Of course he would. They both lived in Fish Hoek, for God’s sake.
“Not if I see you first!” Joanna called, false and merry, as she made her way back out through the front door. He would be having his first cup of tea of the day in one of his huge mugs, a bucket of tea.
Joanna hustled her box into the rain-washed yellow Golf and toed off her wet shoes. She was glad to be going, wasn’t she? She didn’t want to be there anyway, now that everything had changed. She jammed herself into the tiny driver’s seat, her jeans eating into the fork of her crotch. Joanna gunned the engine, gears jamming as she careened down Recreation Road, slick with rain. Would it ever end? God, the end of winter was taking its time!
Suddenly famous, the modest Valley Museum with its single world-class exhibit was getting a makeover and being renamed The Institute for Post-Colonial Studies. The first sign of the times was the deployment of Viola Cupido – Doctor Cupido – who knew very little about how to run a museum, but quite a lot about how to look like she did.
It didn’t matter to the good folk of Fish Hoek. The Museum had been there since the 1920s. It was just a house, really, one of those lovely old double-storeys built by a retired sea captain for a wife who had sailed out from England to join him, and then died of Spanish Flu on the dock. Port cities were always the hardest hit, she thought, hitting the hooter as she traversed the traffic circle with its forked pine tree. The man in the blue anorak jumped, but didn’t walk any faster, dogged in the rain. Why didn’t people look? Jesus!
She slowed down as the box shifted all the way to the other side of the back seat and then turned over, shunting the jar to the floor. Joanna pulled over abruptly up a side street and flew round to the back door in her socks, splashing in the stormwater runoff. The container looked okay.
“You’ve seen worse, haven’t you? Sorry. I’ll drive more slowly.”
She got back into the driver’s seat, shivering. Why hadn’t she brought a towel? Now she was going to get sick – and then James would get it, then Jan, and she didn’t have the patience for Man Flu on top of everything else. That damn rhyme was in her head again. It was Armistice, they say, that brought the final wave of Spanish Flu. In 1919 people were hugging in the streets – and passing on the virus with each transporting kiss. Once she had heard that horrible little ditty, Joanna had not been able to get rid of it, thinking of the children who had watched their healthy parents foam from the mouth, haemorrhage, turn blue and shit themselves. The kids in their Edwardian frills jumped rope and sang:
I had a little bird
Its name was Enza
I opened a window
And In-flu-EN-za.
Da-da-DA-da! If you could just avoid contact! That was it, thought Joanna. Splendid isolation. She looked out of the window as she waited at the zebra crossing outside Marina Gardens. Someone had once told her that to get rid of an annoying song she should sing it through to the end. She tried. In-flu-EN-za! It didn’t work.
Nothing’s changed, she thought. Now it’s Bird Flu or Swine Flu or aids. Everybody’s sick with something. She worried when the staff at the Museum asked her for Disprin. Even poor James had had a chest infection since June. The paed called it The Hundred-Day Cough. James wasn’t going to die from it, but still, the sleep deprivation was killing her in increments and it was impossible to concentrate on all the admin that had come with the sudden upsurge in interest in the Museum.
It had had precious few visitors before 2002, and Joanna had preferred the peace. Now she was churning out pamphlets and guides and content for the website too, and that wasn’t in her contract. It ate into her research time, and she had to meet more frequently with Viola. She felt like spitting out of the car window. She pushed her wet hair from her face. God, she was glad to be free of that woman, with her ridiculous turbans and her I-am-an-African-womanist diatribes! Who did she think she was? Alice Walker?
Actually, interrupted Doctor Renfield, that’s exactly who she thinks she is.
Joanna snorted, not caring if anyone saw her talking to herself. In Fish Hoek there was space for crazy. Besides, she had bloody good reason to be at the end of her tether. And the year had started off so well!
The bits of the job that were hers alone were lovely. She had generally been the first one in, apart from Oswald, a man so avuncular he’d been cast in a series of cellphone adverts because, according to the brief, he was “the kind of black who wouldn’t frighten whites.”
But he – with his slow, half-lidded eyes and his endless cups of tea – had to go back out every morning to fetch Viola from whichever b ’n’ b she was in and drive his boss back to work. She refused to drive herself. Joanna shook her head. At least Viola didn’t show up until ten. When she did get in, she tried to make Joanna fetch her coffee. This was doable in Fish Hoek – just – but it was annoying. The only place in town that made a half-decent brew was Espresso, but you had to crawl from the parking lot to the counter like a pilgrim. The staff hadn’t got the hang of who was behind the till and who was waving the wallet.
And anyway, Joanna hadn’t been hired as the goddamn coffee girl! She was a freelance writer and researcher, and they paid her per thousand words, not fucking star jumps. She had her pride, didn’t she? She vroomed around another circle. She, Joanna Renfield, was a Writer! An Establised Author! Digging at Dawn was in The Kalk Bay Book Shop, wasn’t it? That was more than Viola, who had been touting her own Saartjie manuscript for years, could say. As far as Joanna could gather from the rumours and the gossip at the Museum – she meant Institute – every time Viola was close to clinching the deal, she would do something odd to scupper it and the publishers ran scared. Khaya Books wouldn’t even return her calls – and Joanna knew, because she was the one who had to make them.
Not in the contract! sang Doctor Renfield.
It wasn’t hard work, and Joanna had had her share of rogue overlords: six months at the Grahamstown Spur while she studied had hardened her sufficiently to abuse. She just hadn’t expected a woman as violently partisan as Viola to be in such a position of influence. She had informed Joanna on her first day that she – Viola – suffered from Post-Colonial Syndrome. “My people were slaves!” she had hissed at her new researcher from the leatherette La-Z-Boy. “I am an African womanist of mixed-race descent who has suffered atrocities at the hands of the imperialist patriarchy!” She didn’t need to breathe to say it, either; the words had the hum of the well-rehearsed script.
Joanna, with her liberal-arts degree and unexamined parentage, had assumed Viola was joking, parodying the visiting lecturers who spoke in exclamations. But as the weeks rolled by and she was boxed in by the partition, dutifully editing the conference papers that gushed noisily from the pen of her superior – not in her contract, either – Joanna began to understand that Viola was very serious indeed.
And worse than that, Viola wouldn’t be edited. For the first month Joanna had tried to excise the most embarrassing refrains, and then left off cringing or trying to explain. I don’t care, she told herself. This has nothing to do with me. In any case, she didn’t accompany Viola to the conferences in Norway or Germany or the U.S. so she didn’t have to watch her boss haranguing the donors with invective. At some level they must like a good show, Joanna decided. We don’t do things unless we enjoy the response. Let the Swedes listen to Viola – the product of a Mitteleuropean finishing school and an American university – shouting, “We are poor! We have struggled! The white man has stolen our heritage!” It served them right for throwing their money away.
That same funding meant more freedom for Joanna. The Saartjie Baartman affair had given the Museum a free pass. Who would have thought that Saartjie was related to Fish Hoek Man? The photographs of the bones were everywhere, and just as well, thought Joanna. You couldn’t get near the remains now. The legislation regarding the treatment of human remains had got a whole lot tighter after the fiasco with the extraction of the mitochondrial DNA and the infighting among the French and South African scientists. But it was all over. Soundbites from the KhoiSan Collective littered the airwaves. For the first time ever the Indigenous Peoples Summit in Kimberley had received international coverage.
Saartjie’s remains would be safely reburied on – Joanna squinted at the Old Mutual calendar lying in the footwell – Women’s Day, August the ninth. She could get back to her other research and never have to deal with Viola again. She might even give poor old Fish Hoek Man his day in the sun. He deserved his own book, after having his bones treated so lightly for so long. His own fate was still undecided. No one was stepping forward to claim ancestry with him the way that they were with Saartjie. He’d be whisked away once The Valley Museum was rechristened, and lie anonymously somewhere in a storeroom.
Before she had written Saartjie’s Ghost – “the book that caused all the trouble,” Jan called it when presented with new evidence of Viola’s craziness – Joanna had imagined that the work would be simple. There were a hundred identical books already published and set out on a thousand bookstore shelves like shrunken heads, familiar, unknowable, gathering dust. She had planned to present – ta-da! – the usual plundered facts coated with a chatty feminist gloss, like lipstick, that would save Saartjie from the scummy academic pools she was otherwise doomed to drown in.
And even while she was wading through the writing and the rewriting and the overwriting, that had been fun, too. Often the best part of Joanna’s work was the bits that didn’t involve anyone else. She pictured herself hunched over the books or staring at the screen, her skin reflected blue as a Hindu goddess. I am an alchemist, Joanna had told herself then. Writing can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary! I have the power here to make a difference! I am the very engine of history! Look at me go!
The responsibility ought to have made her hesitate, but instead the words flowed as easily as if they were being dictated to her by someone else. The boundaried work governed by other people, with a structure and a deadline and a point, was the most manageable kind of project, no matter how fractious or unreasonable they got towards the end of it. Joanna knew that she would always hand over the manuscript, eventually be paid for her efforts (apart from that one horrible experience with the Robben Island people), and shrug off the subject like a cardigan too hot for the balmy days of rest she allowed herself afterwards. Once it was done, she wouldn’t have to think about it again.
It was, she thought, the very opposite of having a child. It irritated her wildly to hear a person – and particularly a man-person – refer to writing a book as giving birth to it. She had recently had a crash course in both events, and she could testify to the fact that the two were nothing alike. Joanna ignored the stop street at the end of her road; she could see what was coming.
The problem was, since Saartjie’s Ghost had been printed, Joanna had changed her mind. While she was still pleased that she had reproduced herself in the flesh of James – Whew! said Doctor Renfield – she felt that the paper house she had built around Saartjie Baartman would not stand up to scrutiny. Joanna sighed and drummed the heel of her hand against the steering wheel. Would she still have to go on national television and stand next to Viola and defend this awful fabrication? Bugger. Bugger. Bugger.
The dead had no voice. They said what we made them say: they were dragged onto the stage and prodded while the audience gawked and gasped. All they wanted was their rest. Maybe Saartjie had been at peace before, and the attention, this insistence on addressing her directly, had called her up. Joanna was the same as the rest of them, when you got right down to it, a grave-robber. Yes, she said to herself, a resurrection man. The San themselves never knowingly cross the place where someone has been buried, but we merrily drum our heels against the ribcages of the dead.
She wanted to take it all back, rewind the clock of the last year and refuse the job offer that had seemed so perfect, sit on her flabby arse in the Plantana Avenue house and be a stay-at-home mom. How did you erase the past? Was there some spell for reversal?
She pulled into her driveway and killed the engine. The box could bloody well stay in the car. First she had to be sure that Jan was gone.