BEFORE THE MAY OF 2002, Joanna had believed that everything important in your life happened before you were eighteen. After that it was too late to change.
She had had nearly thirty years to think about the fact that she wasn’t a seamless whole the way other people were. When terrible things happened, you sent your mind away. Joanna was cracked, but she wasn’t broken, and mostly it didn’t bother her. In fact, she felt sorry for people who still had to experience what she had endured the summer she was eight – the blistering year her mother had vanished, when Joanna had found that she did know some magic after all.
Noreen Renfield was ahead of her time, the only woman in Kimberley who wouldn’t go out bare-headed in the midday sun. “Mad dogs and Englishmen,” she said to Joanna. “Here. Put this on, and make sure you do your ears.”
Aegis. That was the name of the sun cream. It smelled like holidays to Joanna. It smelled like coconut and their stripy canvas umbrella and one week every year in Jeffreys Bay. There was nothing in the smell, at least – apart from the mildew that grew between the unused leaves of the folded umbrella – to indicate that the sun cream was poison.
The same parabens that preserved Aegis when it stood on the shelf at Munro’s Chemist were absorbed into the twin blood-streams of the Renfield women, mimicking oestrogen, lodging deep in their breasts and ovaries. Her mother’s cancer was of the skin and the breast, which was horrible but not terrifying.
But then it was of the bone, and then it was both of those things.
Joanna had thought then that what you were afraid of would probably never happen. If you could imagine how you were going to die, the thought could prevent it happening. But now she knew that magical thinking for what it was. Joanna, if anyone had asked, would just have said that inside women there were a hundred female clocks. My mother’s stopped, but mine didn’t, she told herself. That’s all it was. For cancer, none of the alarms are turned on. I was too young, but she was Goldilocks, she was the porridge, she was just right.
Joanna remembered her mother – she must have been sick already, sick but still upright – standing over a pot in the kitchen, where she was making tomato soup. She was wearing an apron that pinched her in at the waist like a bee, and Joanna, who was supposed to be revising her times tables, was reading jokes to her instead. They were the ones from her father’s latest joke collection, The Hee-Hee-Scree! Book. He explained that that was the sound of someone splitting their sides. Joanna’s job was to test them out on her friends but she was trying them on Noreen first. She was saving the awful ones – the Mommy, Mommy jokes – for the end.
“Mom, what goes croak-dot-dot-croak-croak-dot-croak?”
“I don’t know,” said Noreen, starting to laugh in little puffs.
“Morse toad!” shrieked Joanna and clapped her hands over her eyes with delight. Her mother was laughing, properly and loudly.
Noreen dropped her wooden spoon and the soup splashed back bloodily over the knobs and the nameplate: defy. She sat down on the floor, holding her stomach, halved with mirth.
“Morse toad …” gasped Noreen. The tears were trickling down her face.
She flopped back onto the floor and drummed her heels against the Novilon.
“Morse TOAD!”
When Joanna thought about her now, she kept that memory pressed close. It balanced the horrific ones that had come later.
In the end Noreen wasn’t the only person to dematerialise – people disappeared all the time. Now you see them. Now you don’t – but she was the first. She was there in the bed at home in Kimberley, with the curtains drawn, talking softly to someone Joanna couldn’t see. Then she was at the hospital in Bloemfontein for a bit, with a bag of cloudy yellow liquid beside her that was warm to the touch. Her hands were cold and swollen, like a drowned woman’s, but the tips of her ears had been burned by the radiation. My throat is so dry, she whispered to Joanna. I drink and drink, but it doesn’t help. Everything she used after each treatment had to be incinerated. “Sy straal uit,” said a nurse, as if that was an explanation. They gave her paper plates and plastic cutlery, which she hardly touched, but she drank from the cups that were so thin they buckled when she held them in her balloon-fingers. Joanna couldn’t understand how she had grown so fat when she couldn’t eat anything.
Finally, her mother was back in Kimberley, but this time she was in the hospice – The Sister Henrietta Stockdale Home. And there she was no longer straaling uit. It was all very quiet, no one screamed, or wept, or even – as far as Joanna could make out – tried very hard to stop the treatment that seemed worse than the condition. Certainly the priests were visiting less often than her mother had wanted. Her father kept himself at the desk in his study, where he was writing another one of his joke books: Knock, knock. Mommy, Mommy. Knock, knock.
After the funeral, Joanna tried to behave the way a daughter who had lost her mother would, but when she went into the empty room, or looked in the cleared cupboards, she felt relieved. She quite liked having her aunts say fiercely, “You will never be an orphan! Not while we’re here, my girl.” And her father let her do what she liked, which was mostly listening to music, or reading unsuitable books, or being quite good at English.
One day in that terrible blank summer after the funeral – God, it had been so hot! – Joanna had been brushing her teeth and noticed in the mirror that her face looked different. Sometime during the last months dark patches had crept like the fungus in the umbrella over her cheekbones and forehead, a butterfly mask from Mardi Gras, except Joanna couldn’t take it off.
She tried. She scrubbed and scrubbed at the mask but the patches were stubborn as birthmarks. Joanna had had eight light years, and now she was dark: some mournful photochemical effect had marked her out, like the Polaroids her father sometimes took. She had been positive; now she was not. Why hadn’t she noticed them until it was too late? It was as if they had arrived during the night. It was her punishment for wanting to get away. Don’t look at me, she wanted to tell the kids at school and the people she met. I know I’m the Giraffe Girl. Just don’t look at my face.
She threw the Aegis away. The smell made her sick.
Joanna took more books out of the library – adult borrowers could take six at a time on their red cards. Six! – and stayed in her room. That scalding year was also the year of Dracula and Frankenstein and The Monk. She didn’t understand some of what she read, but most of it she did. She was reading herself squint.
Her father didn’t say anything. She moved the bottles when she found them in their pathetic hiding places in the garage, behind the square, brown Tupperware bin. Joanna couldn’t stop him, but she did her bit to slow him down. When she heard the mournful music start in the evenings, she went back to the books in her room. Her father would sit in the lounge, playing the same Barbra Streisand record over and over. He would drink Klip-drift without ice, gaze wistfully at the album cover and say the same thing, as if the revelation struck him anew each evening: “That nose. But what a voice!” And then he would weep into his moustache. He didn’t tickle Joanna or ask her who had written Spots on the Wall. If he had, she would have been ready with the answer: Who Flung Dung.
The marks faded eventually, but that took years. In the interim Joanna learned not to care about what she looked like. She learned to care about books. Really, really care about them. With books you had options. You could see what was going to happen.
When Joanna thought back on that time now – the time of weeping and enforced listening to Barbra Streisand – it was somehow twinned with the Bushman therianthropes that graced the rock shelters and the glacial beds of the farms around Kimberley, that were still printed on the back wall of Peers Cave in Fish Hoek. Half-leopard, half-girl, Joanna said to herself in the mirror in Plantana Avenue, where no trace now remained of the chloasma. I thought I escaped the grief but it turned me into an animal.
Since she had had James she was more and more Joanna, as if he had given her a reason to revisit the sunny and shady places of her childhood. The two of them hung around in the toy shop on Fish Hoek Main Road that was dedicated to finding things that grown-ups had owned when they themselves were young (it did a brisk trade in vintage Fisher-Price). She made and smooshed nourishing meals; she taught James little rhymes; she trimmed his nails without flinching from the disaster in each implicit snip.
But her writerly self, the self that had saved her from becoming an animal completely – The Good Doctor Renfield – wasn’t ever entirely banished. He kept popping up behind the tree stump in the garden, or between the pages of a book. Doctor Renfield wasn’t a real person – Joanna was odd, although she wasn’t crazy – but he was handy in a corner.
He had first begun visiting her when her mother was in hospital in Bloem – and what a year that was! – and Joanna had been thinking a lot about the kind of doctor she would have liked to treat her mother. At Kimberley Junior School just that week they had been herded into the big hall to watch The Royal Wedding, and while Mrs Grobbelaar fiddled with the televisions, had been made to sing a ditty that went:
Miss Suzy called The Doctor!
Miss Suzy called The Nurse!
Miss Suzy called The Lady with the Alligator Purse!
The song had not sufficiently cleared up for Joanna what you should do in the event of your baby choking on the bath. Her doctor, however, the one she invented and who would know what to do, was Doctor Renfield, a tallish and thinnish man with black hair that was kept back with a kind of shiny boot polish. He had long moon-shaped dimples in his cheeks when he smiled, which he did most of the time. Doctor Renfield liked a good joke.
In the library (which was the Beaconsfield Library back then, with its few, tiny rooms and the wooden threshold that was concave with thousands of book-loving feet, long before the New Library was built) Joanna had had no joy from the children’s section in finding believable books about doctors. My First Visit to the Dentist had been the closest she could get to a medical drama and it was, she felt, unsatisfying.
It was then, on the green carpet that always made Joanna feel like the eight-ball on a pool table, that she had realised that she could just write the story herself. Mrs Holmes was always trying to get stories out of her in class: What I Did on My Holiday, or How to Beat the Heat.
Back in her room, Joanna had commandeered one of her school books with a margin and Irish lines (you could fit more writing on the page) for Doctor Renfield and the Mystery of the Missing Bag.
This was easy! It went quickly, too. When Joanna had looked at the clock in the kitchen on her way to get something to eat – writing made you hungry – she saw that she had lost two hours.
Writing was magic. You could speed up time!
Inside your body there were a hundred clocks.