JOANNA KNEW THAT THEIR SMALL GROUP WAS suffering a touch of cabin fever, but that was too bad. She wasn’t going to struggle along outside in the wind with the dog and James at the same time, and Jan could amuse himself. He was awful to be around in winter, when there were fewer movies being shot in Cape Town, and fewer stills photographers being hired.
South Africa was the new California, and The Industry was maggoty with foreigners. Jan specialised in mostly German and Polish TV series that were set in game parks. The female leads were improbable chocolate girls whose shirts were often transparent with sweat. He took the photographs that were used for the dvd box sets in the bins marked SALE!! 2-for-1!! Joanna didn’t think there was a real distinction between erotica and porn, but Jan defended his career, indiscriminate as a housefly. “Hard talk and soft light,” he said, fiddling endlessly with a new lens, or looking for deals on Gumtree. “That’s all it is. You South Africans are such prudes.” Joanna, setting his files to rights, flinched. He was never going to see her properly naked, was he, even though she took her clothes off. A marriage contract only meant so much. You missed the fine print on your partner’s thighs.
Jan’s work, like the hedge on the side of their house, needed sun. Off-season he checked his equipment, or brooded. You’d think he’d be used to it. What did people in Europe do when they couldn’t go outside? What Joanna remembered from her single trip to Norway with Jan – apart from the Edvard Munch exhibition and the potent drink her new mother-in-law had pressed on her afterwards – was her amazement that more of them didn’t kill themselves or each other. Inside your body there were a hundred clocks, and they weren’t meant to be reset with the seasons. Some days there was no sun, and some days it never set: when she closed her eyes she saw red.
It made the Fish Hoek rains seem bearable, even with the mud and the chaos of the renovations on Main Road. They were digging up the underground sewage pipes from Muizenberg to Kalk Bay: the entire coastline was in a single-lane tourniquet. It would take three years, said the municipality, and the Clovellyto-Simonstown stretch was next. Joanna was dreading it. Even the mountain route on Ou Kaapse Weg would be impassable, and they would be well and truly trapped in the Valley.
In heavy storms – pardon me, rain events – Fish Hoek was under siege. Waves swamped the railway line at the lagoon mouth: Main Road flooded and the drains sometimes coughed up sewage. The men who raced up and down the mysterious stairs at the substation – DANGER GEVAAR INGOZI – moved even faster after the wet August weekends. The sandbags at the beach were the low-tech solution, but Joanna thought that global warming would eventually take care of the town. If James still lives here, she thought, he’ll have to deal with it.
“It’s the storm drains,” Oswald had explained. “Small pipes, low-lying areas. Businesses throw their rubbish into the drains.”
He didn’t seem bothered. Everything amused him: Joanna wondered what it would take to get him upset.
There were only ever ten or so chaps working at a time, leaning on rusting spades, or watching someone else dig in the Zen garden of the substratum. Sometimes a man got into an earthmover and turned a slow, showy circle in the face of the traffic. From behind her slanting picture windows Joanna heard it out there on Sunday afternoons, even when it was raining, the ragged exhausts coughing up poison, the hooters blatting at the corner of PRAWNS! PRAWNS! PRAWNS! ALL YOU CAN “EAT”! Hundreds of people were staggering up and down Main Road among the cars, dragging skottels and towels and two-litre bottles of Jive. They hunkered on the damp sand in tents like Bedouin refugees: they had travelled a long way to get there and they weren’t going home until nightfall.
“Batten the hatches,” she told James. “The Jivers are out again. Let’s see what’s on TV.”
“Copcorn,” said James. He could easily eat his own weight in the stuff. Joanna had to stop him chasing the last unpopped kernels around the bottom of the bowl. Then again, so could she. Sometimes parenting was fun, like living with a housemate you liked instead of the one you had married.
Minor annoyances aside, James was doing everything he was supposed to do. He would hold a nappy or a shoe or the curtain over his eyes, and one or the other of them would have to pretend to be puzzled.
“Where is James? I can’t see him at all. Where can he be?”
And then the hysteria, the delight, as he whisked away his disguise like Zorro.
“Oh! There he is! Boo! What a surprise!”
Repeat, repeat, repeat.
It thrilled Joanna to think that James was taking his place in some ancient tradition, that millions of children before hers had played according to the same rules of manifestation and dis-apparition: now you see me, now you don’t. There was something luxurious about sprawling on the floor. It gave her leave to be silly. So this is what it’s like, Joanna said to herself. She tried to shunt the worries about not-writing and not-earning and not-loving back again like the insistent dogs they were, wet-snouted and annoying.
“We’ve made it through the hardest part,” she would say to Jan, and he smiled at her with the old sweetness that she saw replicated and expanded in their child. It made Joanna miss grown-up love, the feel of an adult arm around her shoulders rather than two little ones tightening around her neck. Why do I have to choose? she wondered. The smell of damp dog was making her irritable.
Late that afternoon, after the popcorn, James had been hiding behind the favoured curtain, folded into the yellowing silk of her last bargain from Frock You. He was holding himself flat against the window and it was the light – it must have been the light, the golden hour after the rain, the hour of magic – that made Joanna suddenly certain that he really was somewhere else. She would twitch the curtain aside like the magician’s girl, and there would be nothing there of James but a pair of empty canvas sneakers, size 4. Children disappeared all the time, she told herself. They fell ill from preventable diseases and didn’t recover, were abducted and raped by neighbours, or dissected alive for muti – or else they were ignored so soundly by their families that they might as well not exist. Some hideously high percentage of them had been sent on errands from which they did not return. Joanna imagined the thin legs, the dialogue, the obedience: “Lienkie, here’s money. Now run to the corner shop for mommy’s smokes, ag, please. And I want all the change, hey!” It gave her the same feeling she had when she paged through that Maurice Sendak book, Outside Over There. So many ordinary, terrible things were waiting to happen.
Joanna was absolutely sure that when she whipped away the curtain her son would have disappeared. He hadn’t. Of course he hadn’t. He was holding his hand in front of his new teeth and trying not to laugh. The feet in his shoes were flesh and blood, this-little-piggied, hot with life. He had a sense of humour, thank God. There was something of her in him after all.
James had grown out of teething and swaddling and formula, and into awareness and games and conversation. But peace just didn’t sit well with Joanna. Knowing that she had too much time to think, she still found herself casting around for some other worry to fill the space, a lady explorer in a solar topee, shading her face before striking out, surveying the plains.
The landscape was disappointing.
As she carried James to his bath – “Help, Daddy! Help! Help!” – Joanna thought that she was not one of those silly women who had thought marriage would change things. She was long done with kissing the frog (although she saw it repeated in her friends where the urge lodged, pesky as herpes). Wasn’t that supposed to be the definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome? They saw each other only occasionally, when her varsity friends were visiting South Africa on holiday, stretching their blue-veined limbs in the sun and saying how happy they were to be back. The women compared notes. They called it catching up. Joanna came away from the extended teatimes thinking, At least I’m not as bad as Bron. Or, I wish I had Natalie’s luck.
Joanna ran the water lukewarm, added two drops of lavender oil so that James might sleep the whole night through. She had seen Jan for what he was when she met him. It was just that they weren’t growing old together softly in quite the way she had imagined. Joanna’s vision had excluded the twenty hard years of childbearing and child-rearing, and skipped straight to the white-haired walks on the beach. It was brought home to her when Devi, now newly single and with a child – the worst of both worlds, she joked – had told Joanna that she envied her own parents’ relationship.
“But, Devi, they’re seventy. Their lives are over.”
“They’re still in love with each other.”
“How do you know that?”
“My father, he makes her tea in the mornings.”
“So what? Your mother does everything else. And she has a job too. She’s not retired.”
“Yes, but he does it properly, with a teapot and a nice cloth, like she’s a guest. He arranges it all on a tray and he takes it in to her before she’s properly awake. He knows that she doesn’t like mornings.”
That gentleness, that willingness to compromise, was what Joanna couldn’t master. She wanted things as they were supposed to be, not as they were.
And it was two against one. James had inherited her finickiness. He had a very clear idea about where objects belonged, for example. After he was in bed she would make the tiny discoveries and track his movements (“Pee-pah! Pee-pah!”) during the day: the TV remote packed neatly into the boot of his child-sized car, or three Matchbox cars parked in a row on the pantry shelf. He reminded her of herself.
Besides, you could afford to be nice to your children. Husbands often just needed a good kick in the backside. Like now, for example. She had been entertaining James the whole afternoon when she could have been writing. Why was it her job to bath babies while Jan watched an arbitrary rugby match?
She couldn’t be cross with James, though. He was splashing happily through some convoluted chase sequence with a toothbrush and a car, although he was scared of sitting flat in the tub. When she lifted him out he sometimes had pins-and-needles from being on his knees. He refused to change position.
It’s not like Jan even knows what’s going on in the game, Joanna told herself crossly. He’s Norwegian, for God’s sake. I know more about rugby than he does. But he stayed on the couch, closely focused – As if he’s trying to work out the solution to some maths problem, thought Joanna, waving a plastic bath-book at James. It had a hooter built into the cover, and a lurid come-hither button that said Press me. I squeak! Jan had looked at her with that spotlit attention, hadn’t he, seven or even five years ago? Maybe he had just come to the end of Joanna, with her problems and her solutions.
“Do you want to read this lovely book, James? It’s called Freddy the Frog. Look what it does.” Joanna listened to the infantile voice she used with James, and hated herself. She depressed the squeaker, hard. There was something satisfying about it.
Freddy’s face squished under her thumb. The rain fell harder against the bathroom windows.
Press me. I squeak! Press me. I squeak!