EXPECTING. THE WORD HAD THE RIGHT SORT OF OMINOUS ring to it, thought Joanna. Something was coming, and you knew its shape but not its details. Those were left in the dark, the way that you could get disorientated in a familiar room on your way back to bed in the night.
Joanna had lived quite nicely so far without the unexpected. She had enough of that growing up with her dying mother and her drinking father and she would – she would! – have a new and buxom happily-ever-after.
She had known Jan was The One when they walked together on the Grahamstown pavement and the lights went out, as they always did, and the world went still. When they came to the whitewashed wall of a house in New Street, he pulled her against him. They kissed – it was a good kiss, but it didn’t set the world on fire – and the streetlamp overhead came back on, with an audible ting. It bathed them in its lone circle of brightness like a couple doing the tango on a stage.
It did seem choreographed, after that. There was the wedding – not that she wanted to be married, per se, but she wanted a big old party where there were drunken uncles doing the two-step, with their shimmering wives shaking their short hair out of its careful waves. You could imagine the lives they had had before one another.
She and Jan had chosen the wine farm at Diemersfontein. There was nowhere else. No teary father was going to give Joanna away; her mother might have walked next to her as she paced down the aisle, but Joanna would have been the only one who felt her. There was no other reason to get married in a church. Jan had been inoculated against organised religion by a stint in India during his twenties, and the cathedral that had housed Joanna’s childhood was in Kimberley. Her family had been baptised there, confirmed, worked as servers and sacristans and subdeacons. Some of them lay resting upstairs in the dusty rose-coloured columbarium of Saint Cyprian’s, but the place was empty of the people she had known as a child. No one, she thought, would even remember me if I went back there now.
So they got married on the long lawns of the wine farm one weekend, with the sunburned shoulders of the women gleaming beneath their spaghetti straps, and the galvanised iron tubs clinking with bottles of Belgian beer so cold it made you swallow hard just to look at them.
Joanna wasn’t nervous the way other brides had been. “I can’t remember any of my three weddings,” her mother had told her, half mournful, half proud, from her hospital bed, trying to pour the wisdom of her accumulated years into Joanna’s eight-year-old cranium. “Someone gave me Calmettes, and everything’s a blank now.”
Joanna listened to the sermon, and said her lines, and felt happy to be keeping Jan by her side. She looked at the guests they had gathered, their new acquaintances as well as their childhood friends, and she suddenly saw the pasts in all of them; she was confounded with the narrow escapes, the nine lives, the things you can’t see on the outside. She wanted to grab Jan and point to each person, to tell him how each one was special. You see that guy? He used to have cancer. But he doesn’t anymore. And look at her, that girl. The one with the silver shoes. Her uncle used to hold the record for pissing across the street outside the Star of the West. And those two. Jeez. They tried to burn the school down once, but they found them in time.
At last they all sat down at one immense table covered in white linen and set for a banquet; there were quartets of glasses gathered at each place, giant roses weeping their petals onto a hundred plates. The sun set. They were together in a strange place for the first time in their lives, the old families. Joanna drank her chocolaty pinotage and looked at everyone else doing the same. She thought. Eat and drink. The dead mothers and missing sons are chewing and swallowing with us. They’re watching us now. They must be. And then she thought, I’m one step closer to belonging to the human race – really belonging, like a keystone in a genetic arch. She held Jan’s hand very tightly under the tablecloth.
After all the speeches and the jokes and the courses, the guests shifted their chairs back and moved in a living crowd to the dance floor. There the ghosts left them. For a bit there was only silence, no knuckles and kneecaps clicked beside the bride and groom like castanets, and the only grin was the wide one worn by Jan.
He loosened his fingers from Joanna’s and stood alone on the dance floor in front of the band. Someone had passed him a guitar. He moved smoothly with it, even in his tuxedo. Joanna thought, God, look how young he is! And he was serenading her. Jan sang a verse from a song and his voice was rough and untrained and he didn’t care if he looked silly, and because he didn’t care, he didn’t look silly at all. Be-mine-be-mine, sang Jan. Joanna stood two feet away from him, corseted with happiness in her silk, her hands in loose joyful fists against the material to stop herself from leaping into the air.
Later, after everything, Jan’s father was standing like a messenger against the door to the outside. When the couple tried to pass him he grabbed Jan by the arm. He leaned in close, and his liver spots were dark patches, lichen on a northern rock, in the flashing lights from the dance floor.
“Don’t,” he said in a hushed, advisory tone, “don’t let her think she’s got you. Don’t ever let her think that.”
Jan looked at him and shook his arm free gently, and then they went on outside to lie in the sweet long grass because they were too drunk to dance anymore and the night was fine. “Papa Don’t Preach” blared from the speakers, and they laughed.
Joanna saw him again, the old man, her new father, just before they made their way out of the celebration.
His wife had found him. She was leading him onto the dance floor, and they had always been together. Meek and mild, he was following her, blushing (Be-mine-be-mine) like a bride.