THE BOX HAD BEEN THERE FOR THREE DAYS before it really started to smell. The weather around the end of July had been dry, then wet, then dry again, the hard north-wester about to leave off and its cousin, the harder south-easter, about to take over for the summer months. The wind had done what it came to do. The cardboard was disintegrating under the assault.
Joanna hated the wind. It turned her inside out and made her hair stand up in its follicles. And there were still months and months to go! She quivered, bristling like a pin-cushion, and kept herself and James inside the house as much as she could. But there were a thousand things to do, like today. She had to shop but she couldn’t face the other people on Recreation Road – the learner drivers and the old codgers, all of them peering over their steering wheels, creeping, then lurching, into her way. The pedestrians were worse. No wonder there were 7 000 fatalities a year in the country, according to The Lighthouse. Defensive driving, it was called, and Joanna was sick of doing it.
She tried to jolly herself into her chores. She could do it – she could – just carry the groceries home the way she had when she was a Rhodes student. Her arms had been really strong then, and they had grown even stronger now. No one told you that motherhood made a weightlifter of you whether you liked it or not, a sweating man-woman with a corset but no waist.
And, Joanna promised herself, today she would stop and look inside the box at the bus stop outside Marina Gardens. She wanted to know what was in it. She half-knew already. Nothing still alive smelled like that.
As she latched the back gate, Joanna felt her chest expanding with the few hours she had to herself. The worst part of being a parent was that you were expelled from the daydreaming cosmos and exiled to the plain, flat world of the body. It was all about feeding and bathing and dressing – yourself and the baby – and then doing all of it again in reverse. She felt like Gulliver, strapped to the sand with a thousand tiny ropes of responsibility. Each one was not, in and of itself, going to hold you down, but add them all together and you were tied up pretty tightly. It was nothing less than the fight against entropy: Joanna versus the dogshit in the garden; Joanna versus the fungus in the fridge. Why didn’t Jan feel it? On some days it drove her demented: a toast crumb on the sole of her foot would send Joanna into a multi-tasking frenzy. And then I just do everything badly, she said to herself. Better just to sit on the couch with a big cup of tea. Ceylon, not fucking rooibos.
As she walked, Joanna could see how women got depressed. It might be nice to curl up into a little ball, or draw your legs in like a beetle on its back. It was not that she minded taking care of James, Joanna corrected herself quickly, but that she had always been a lingerer, a loiterer, a spy. It was part of what made her a good writer and researcher. The reviews of Digging at Dawn had singled out what they called her eye for detail, and she was proud that she noticed things that other people didn’t.
She especially liked to think about what the world looked like from above. It made her feel that there was a bigger, more sensible picture than the one she could see from the sticky middle of it. Sometimes writing was better than living: surer and less messy, that was definite. But you had to live in order to write, didn’t you? Joanna thought that in a year or so she would have solved the conundrum of motherhood, but for the moment she felt like her hands were tied. People said that a lot, but she meant it literally: it was as if she was actually, physically, sitting on her hands. “And it’s making you a little crazy,” Joanna muttered. “You can tell because you’re talking to yourself.” Then again, ha ha, at least she was getting quick, intelligent answers.
In the meantime she entered the lives of others, which was also a kind of research. There was a deep satisfaction in knowing that people were busying themselves with repetitive activities, like those Richard Scarry books that James loved, with all the animal characters bustling about in offices and police stations and classrooms, or hopping in and out of cars.
Those animals knew the rules. There was always someone to ask, and they would know what to do. Joanna could stand still and imagine herself on the centre of the page without having to do anything. It frightened her to think that everything would end someday – not only Fish Hoek, but the universe as she knew it – when the grand machine ground slowly to a halt, its parts unoiled, its fuel too precious to squander on cars or air-conditioning or fridges. The people who had driven it would disappear, extinct along with all the animals they had methodically hunted to death. The village would be quiet, rusting in the south-easter, a true ghost town. All that would be left would be the books, their pages flipping in the wind, their covers fading to blue.
But Fish Hoek still had a while to go. No one there was on Plan P – Packing for Perth. Joanna was glad she and Jan had moved here, because it could have gone so horribly wrong. She liked the big house with all the higgledy additions the previous families had made over the decades; she liked that they had copies of the original plans, which were handed over with the title deed. She liked their sandy suburb, with the Norfolk Island Pines (“Monkey tails,” said James); she liked the racial mix, where people just got on with their ordinary lives. Devi had said that Fish Hoek had always voted liberal, but Joanna didn’t care. She just liked the ring-roads and traffic circles, like jewellery around the neck of Nefertiti – the superficial organisation of them that was nothing of the kind at a second look.
If you got up high enough you would see the perfect pentacle made by the roads. They radiated outwards like a starburst or a stink bomb, or a spread-eagled human being. The original plans of the Castle in town looked the same, the blocky sheriff ’s badge that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. In real life you just walked from point to point, murmuring “Katzenellenbogen”, a name like a spell that made the lips buzz. Joanna hadn’t been into town – certainly not on foot – for so long that when she did venture there again it would feel like a holiday. But she still spoke the names of places aloud, even here on the outskirts where she and Jan could afford the property prices because they had given up their place at the epicentre, even if there were other pedestrians or visitors close by.
Now, walking alone, Joanna felt light. She had her wallet in her pocket, her cellphone stuck somewhere that didn’t invite theft, and she wasn’t carrying a child or the child’s bag or the child’s pram, the ordinary wrestling of Jacob and the angel that the childless didn’t imagine or respect. God, it was a beautiful day! She would never get tired of living here. Joanna ambled along, occasionally tapping the streetlights as she passed, just to keep herself touching the Earth. Here were the two ancient ladies with their plaits, holding hands like twins; here was the one-legged man, swinging along on his crutches.
And here was the box, outside the old-age home. It was leaning a little to one side, rhomboid, leaking, as were the inhabitants of Marina Gardens themselves. Okay. On the way out, she would definitely look inside it. Today was the day.
Joanna passed the box at the bus stop as she walked James to Busy Babies in the morning and back again in the afternoon. She kept him on the other side of her when they passed it, even though that put him closer to the traffic on Recreation Road. She peered at it now. The cardboard had stood up to the rain, absorbent, darker at the bottom where something sticky dribbled out into the last puddles on the pavement outside the centre. Looking back over her shoulder, she knew that there was something wrong with it. Joanna, godless but not a bad person, thought that whatever it was, it couldn’t be meant for her. And when she came back, she would check it out. For sure.
Valleyland was open for business – of course it was – and calm. It was made for pensioners – a Mica, a pharmacy, Karen’s Kozy Nook (Best Value Breakfast in Town!!) – and they kept any hours they liked. Their decrepit clocks ran free, even though they maintained the same cycles as everyone else, preserving the fiction of retirement. When you were that close to the end you were stripped down to your essentials, thought Joanna: keeping the machine ticking over, a zombie, an automaton. You know what to do or say, and how to do or say it, but you were invisible to most of the population. Joanna watched the old folk walking steadily, wheeling their wicker baskets like Rupert Bear on some eternal picnic. Raddled men in houndstooth caps and sports jackets flapped like pelicans behind their wives: there was something festive about their deliberate cheer in the face of the death that was written on their bodies. I wish I was old, thought Joanna. I want all my mistakes behind me – divorces and diseases and disasters – so I know where all the evil is, have it laid out one-two-three so I can live in peace. No more fighting for work or chasing invoices or trying to make Jan read my stories. No shirts streaked with someone else’s vomit or poo or porridge. Just sleep. It isn’t fair, thought Joanna, that some people have all the time in the world, and others – and by others I mean me – have none.
Her trolley was brought up short by a display in the middle of the funny brick courtyard of the centre. It was an enormous tree made of wire, its leaves tipped with beads that caught the sun. There were translucent ones for fruit. The small wind blowing the rain away reached even here, sneaking over the roofs of the other shops and tweaking the beads until they rang like tiny bells. Joanna found herself in the lines of the Cinderella rhyme, the box forgotten. James was too young to understand the story: last night she had read it to herself. Rustle and shake yourself, dear tree, and silver and gold throw down to me.
WISHING TREE, said the placard propped up against the wire trunk. There were little pieces of stiff paper next to the tree, like business cards. You were supposed to write your wish on it and then clip it in the branches with the little pegs provided. There would be a draw: someone would win a car. I know what I would wish for, thought Joanna sourly. A good night’s sleep. Just one. The kind that Jan gets all the time but doesn’t appreciate, the bastard.
There were hundreds of wishes already on the tree, even though it had only been installed for a day, magicked into place while dogs barked and everyone else in the good dry suburb of Fish Hoek – but not Joanna – slept.
There was more writing on the explanatory card. Joanna moved closer. Oh. It was part of some promotion. You had to write your cellphone number on the other side to win the competition.
Those poor people. Their wishes weren’t going to come true.
Joanna left her trolley and moved in to copy the wishes into her notebook. It wasn’t like she was stealing anybody’s thoughts. The wishes had already served their purpose, like prayer flags.
I wish for an XBOX.
I wish Nurya Adams would love me.
I wish my daughter’s coffee shop would flourish. I wish for a big house so we could be a happy family.
I wish for a hamster.
I wish for a child.
I wish for new and funky tattoos.
Happy birthday anyway, Suela.
I wish for snow so we could play in and throw balls.
I wish for a sponsor for my studdies.
I wish for R1250.
I wish for a job even as something like a driver. Please contact Eric.
I wish for a BlackBerry for my small business.
Peter. Peace. Release.
I wish for food and baby food over the coming year. I am seven months’ pregnant.
God I wish me and my wife gud get back two gedder.
She couldn’t write them down. Joanna’s throat closed against all the poorly spelled wishes. All the wrong turns and regrets! Oh, I hope it isn’t a spam scam, she thought, putting the Moleskin back in her purse. What if they sold your number on? Imagine getting beeped by the Wishing Tree people. You would try to read the SMS as fast as you could, because this was it; maybe they were going to grant you your innermost desire; maybe something good was going to come out of the year after all. And then you would read R50 SALE NOW ON AT LABEL!! OR else BOOK NOW FOR ‘THE PHANTOM’ AT THE DOME! HAPPY WOMEN’S DAY FROM TICKETY-BOO!!
Disappointed, she leaned her weight against the trolley, her biceps fighting the wheels. Always the one that pulled to the left. Some days everything was stacked against you. Joanna left the tree and went into the little shop, where sometimes Pampers were on special.
She shopped in the ferocious trance run by the motor of anxiety, squinting at her own scrawl on the back of a Telkom envelope. They overcharged for the landline but, boy, the bills came in handy at the Spar.
Nappieslinersmilkbreadtoiletpaperbatteriescarrots. Chocolatechocolatechocolate she didn’t have to write down.
She retrieved her starved purse and the angry trolley and trailed across the car park. She always bought far more things than were on the list, and now she hadn’t even brought the car. Stupido, came the criticism in Jan’s voice. It generally did.
Joanna began to unpack the trolley and arrange the bags evenly across her body. She straightened up, patient, a donkey under the weight. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the cardboard box. It was still there, outside Marina Gardens, and the inmates were still inside, translucent in the windows, dusty flowers pressed between the pages of an autograph book.
The box, thought Joanna. Oh, there isn’t time. I can’t stand the idea of putting everything down on the ground and then having to pick it all up again. I swear, I’ll come back and look at it tomorrow.