WHATEVER ELSE WAS HAPPENING, she wasn’t sorry that they had made the move to Fish Hoek. Woodstock had been getting noisier, more polluted, more dangerous – not because of humans, Joanna thought, but that last frantic phone call from Natalie up the road, telling them to evacuate because the fire had jumped the freeway, had spooked her. When you had a child you couldn’t move as fast. She looked around the tiny house, the one she called Jan’s bachelor pad, and wondered what she would grab in the likely emergency. When she was small, right after her mother had died, Joanna had kept a brown cardboard suitcase packed full of essentials: five pairs of panties, scissors, and about a kilo of sticky tape that she had unwound from the original spool and wrapped like a bandage around an ice-cream stick. It looked like a sore thumb.
As an adult Joanna knew the impetus for what it was, and she didn’t yet think it was silly. She kept tallying up her precious things, after James, of course. She and Jan weren’t immune. The old people in Ritchie Street, Malcolm and his mad wife, who used to play the trumpet in the navy band, had lost their house. Anything could happen.
Why not move away so completely that it would feel like a different city? There was nothing keeping them close to town. Jan worked on location all over the place, and she worked from home (that euphemistic phrase for low-level panic and inadequacy!) They could do what they liked. They were grown-ups.
But when they did it there was something sordid about house-hunting. Trailing through rooms you would never ordinarily see was vicarious, intimate, pathetic. All houses are haunted, thought Joanna. She knew when she smelled the inside of someone’s house whether they were happy or not, and she wasn’t going to live in an unhappy-family home. It was catching, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t try to explain that to Jan.
So far she hadn’t had to. They agreed, at least, on what they didn’t want. In every lounge with wood-veneer panels they were friends again, looking at each other without having to speak. Not this one, the eyes said. There was a hopelessness in the carpets that couldn’t be dispelled with a vacuum cleaner or Smoke-Eeze, a sad and smothering spell.
The worst one was the boy – he couldn’t have been more than sixteen – who was trying to sell his home in Muizenberg. He was wearing a tie, and told them his name was Kevin. He had winced visibly when he showed them his own bedroom. The mismatched furniture and torn posters had reminded Joanna of Sharon-Sorry-Isis, and she had pushed against Jan to speed up the tour. She would have picked him up and carried him bodily to the door if he hadn’t already been there.
Back in Woodstock, which was looking more and more attractive in comparison, they braced themselves for further Sunday afternoons of the screaming James in the tail-to-bumper traffic on Boyes Drive. But on their second or third weekend of roaming the show-houses near the sea, passing through homes that had been split into fractions with rhinoboard, or had two kitchens and no garage, or had gardens paved over with cracked cement – and were all, in any case, beyond their budget – it just happened.
One shrewd agent, with boobs too young for the rest of her, had taken a look at them and said, “I don’t think this one is for you, lovies, but there is something more alternative just down the road that I think you’ll like.”
It was their first experience with the famous circles of Fish Hoek. “It’s like hell,” said Joanna. She was trying to speak lightly. Jan had descended into one of his moods. “We’ll never get out again!”
The estate agent had directed them to Plantana Avenue, where the white pennants planted outside on the grass made their hearts sink. Joanna didn’t want somewhere that was being shown to viewers more canny than her and Jan, somewhere that warranted flags. It made her panic to think that they were in competition with people who were expert in the search.
“What if we choose the wrong house?” she had burst out. She wanted him on her side. Jan had given her a sidelong look and wrenched the steering wheel towards the kerb. At least with a person you knew right away, didn’t you? Even if the relationship turned sour afterwards. There was a spark of sexual recognition, a feeling of familiarity and old ground, though you were sure that you hadn’t met them before. But property – that was different. You couldn’t know until it was too late, like The Amityville Horror, where blood seeped through the treads on the stairs and the father of the house took an axe to his family. She had seen the film parodied in a Mad Magazine, and somehow that was worse. To have your fears not taken seriously added a whole other dimension to them. Stereotypes and clichés also suffered.
When Joanna and Jan and James had sorted themselves into a movable group, they reassessed the house from the pavement. The bottom level of the garden wall was made of stone – proper stone, the sort that if it began to crumble or dislodge would need an old-fashioned stonemason. The wall itself had large, deliberate holes where it met the pavement. Wasn’t that dangerous, though? A small dog might wriggle through and get hit by a car.
A small dog, said Doctor Renfield, or a rat.
“What are those for, do you think? Drainage?”
Jan shrugged. He would speak animatedly to the agents, but not to her, as if his silence was a punishment. Joanna was already dreading the long drive back to Woodstock, smack in the middle of Suicide Hour. Maybe James would sleep.
The garden was established – “Oh, look!” said Joanna. “A vegetable patch!” – and looked mostly indigenous. Someone had put in a lot of effort over the years to make it seem like it was part of the mountain. The smell of the little purple flowers on the fynbos in the late afternoon was sweet as Quality Street. Joanna’s stomach rumbled with longing.
The house wasn’t pretty but it was sturdy, the sort of place they had seen a lot in Fish Hoek, where things had been built to outlast their owners. It had large windows that seemed to angle out into the garden and reminded Joanna somehow of the deck of a ship – an oldish cruise ship, she thought, not a modern one with a sauna. It was the kind she envisioned when she heard Rodney Trudgeon on Fine Music Radio advertising genteel cruises to St Helena. Joanna had always wanted to live in a place like this, dreamed of it as a teenager in Kimberley, where there was only a thin rime of Victoriana and then the wide, flat plains of functional facebrick. Even before she saw the inside of the house on Plantana Avenue, Joanna knew that this one was The Place: she had been looking for it all her life.
She knew because there was a frog squatting on the gatepost, sculpted in cement. It was the flaking green of boarded-up wells, of patchy spores behind the fridge. Its tongue was still bright red. The creature’s head was angled up, as if it had just snared an insect and was savouring the sensation. It reminded her of an illustration for Thumbelina she had once seen with Jan in a museum in Oslo.
Joanna couldn’t help herself. She reached up and touched the footman with a finger, half expecting it to pulse. Its body was warm from the afternoon sun. She looked across to the other post, but it was empty. Had there been two, and some awful froggy fate befallen one partner? Did they mate for life? Joanna had recently been disillusioned about the domestic arrangements of swans.
And not only swans, she told herself. But maybe things will be better in Fish Hoek.
They made their way under the creeper-covered arch – a bower, said Joanna to herself in delight – and up the series of stone steps that led to the front door.