JOANNA AND JAN BELONGED TO THE GOOD FENCES Make Good Neighbours School of Civic Responsibility. They could agree, at least, on that. One of the things that Joanna appreciated about Fish Hoek was that people kept it clean. She saw them in the evenings, and heard them on Saturdays mowing their lawns. Oswald rested his chunky arms on the iron railing outside the Museum and spoke amiably to passersby. Joanna had once overheard him telling a group of schoolkids to pick up a chips packet – and mirabile dictu! – they had. Just Zappit in the Zibi, Joanna wanted to call out, and giggled to herself. zappit in the zibi! Zappit in the Zibi Ca-ha-han!
So it was strange that people were leaving the cardboard box alone. Joanna had a few theories.
“It’s muti. It’s definitely muti,” she told Jan as they lay drinking tea one morning. He was reading The Lighthouse. James lay on Joanna’s side of the bed, kicking her, his bare bum getting some air. “And everyone’s too scared to move it. The white people are avoiding it because it isn’t any of their business, but really because it smells wrong.” Doctor Renfield was thinking aloud, and Doctor Renfield believed that in the backs of people’s brains there was still a skittering mammal that chattered and leapt from one branch to a safer one lower down, cowering away from the light. That’s what’s happening when we say that our skin crawled, she thought.
Jan grunted. As far as he was concerned, muti was what you gave cows when they were sick.
“And black people,” Joanna went on, “won’t touch it because they’ve seen other signs around it. Or else they can tell who put it there. They know muti when they see it.” She patted James on his bottom. Who hadn’t wished for more luck, a better job, true love and satisfaction?
She poked James in his tummy. “Did you know that the person has to be alive when they harvest the organs?”
Jan kept reading and said mildly, “You know, Joanna, you can be really morbid sometimes.”
“And reading that crap” – she stabbed at the pages with her index finger – “isn’t?”
She gave up and drank the cold dregs of her tea. God, he was so selfish!
Anyway, did it matter who had made the spell? She didn’t think so. The box was there, and the thing was done. It was done and it could not be undone: The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. The box just confirmed her conviction that passed for spirituality: that something is watching us, counting our karmic advancements and retreats. You could call it the ancestors, separated from us by the thin curtain of the flesh, or you could call it God the Father.
Fish Hoek was devoted to a particular brand of cheerful and muscular Christianity that gave Joanna the heebie-jeebies. She found the blandishments of the charismatic churches on every corner a bit much. St Paul’s nearby especially had a lot to say for itself; evidently the man’s letters to the Ephesians were insufficient. Pastor Pete (one named Peter, one named Paul) had set up a billboard in his garden on a corner of Kommetjie Road. As he liked to expound, he was an Ideas Man.
Grammar, not so much, said Doctor Renfield.
Joanna’s favourite was the most recent. THERE ARE NO HYPOCRITES IN THIS CHURCH! it blared, in purple traffic-stopping letters. And then below, the strapline:
THERE’S ROOM FOR PLENTY MORE!
Joanna had often considered knocking on the door like a Jehovah’s Witness and telling Pastor Pete that the ambiguity fatally undermined his message. But she didn’t, because it made her smile every time she passed it, and because she liked to think that somewhere in Fish Hoek Satan was rubbing his hands.
And could a place be all bad if it had a Baby Safe? There was one in Sun Valley that serviced the area for hundreds of kilometres around. It was inevitable in a place that was suffused with impoverished locals and refugees from all over the continent, where you couldn’t get a job but the disease was free. You deposited your child in the wall, where it was kept warm in a specially designed box, and someone came to fetch it – in minutes, they promised. It was supposed to be adopted into a Christian home.
But the cardboard container on Recreation Road. It fascinated Joanna, but she didn’t think there was anything truly malevolent in that box. She did not believe in the sort of evil that, for example, led two young men on a lonely Port Elizabeth road to rape a woman, eviscerate her, and then say that the devil had made them do it. What was the woman’s name? Alison? She thought back. Those photographs.
One day, months ago, the pregnant Joanna had been in a book shop. She was looking for clues about ghostwriting, about – let’s face it – how to throw your voice. Joanna had paged idly through I Have Life, the memoir of attack and the miracle of recovery. At least, she had started out idly, and then sat down on a fortuitous footstool as if she had been deboned like a duck.
The photographs in the centre of the book were black and white, and there was something of the death camp about them, the smelly rooms where women without the mercy of anaesthetic were cut open with mild experimental interest and a sharp knife.
The doctors had had to shave Alison’s pubis to sew her up again. The fresh scar ran like a black zip from her mutilated crotch to her sternum. It reminded Joanna of a penguin that she had had as a child: you stuffed your pyjamas inside it. Somehow she had always expected its face to change. She had looked at the photos, entranced, horrified, the same look people had when they saw specimens in jars, the wrongness ringing through them. Our bodies aren’t meant to look like that, Joanna had told herself at the shelf in the book shop, her fingertips greasy with recognition and marking the page. And then she had thought, with the first leap of the true terror of pregnancy and a little help from Doctor Renfield: You stupid woman! This is exactly what will happen to you in the labour ward! You have something inside you and it has to come out!
But that photograph, at least, she had expected. It was the other one in the book that made Joanna feel a cold hopelessness jump up against her heart. The two men had been caught outside by the camera, lolling against the courtroom wall in the sunshine. One of them was drinking orange juice and smirking. The thing is, thought Joanna dismally, there is nothing to set the rapists, the murderers, apart from the rest of us, the clean people, the plain-faced citizens of every town in the world. They had mothers, had had their ears washed in the bath, had been sent to high schools, worn uniforms and written tests. They were the concentrated hopes of their families, the evolutionary high points of a hundred thousand years of human aspiration, cultivation and defence, from Fish Hoek Man all the way to the baby boy that even then had been struggling against the springy walls of her uterus.
We all started out the same way.