INSIDE YOUR BODY THERE ARE A HUNDRED CLOCKS. Joanna lay in James’s small bed, her feet poking out from the blankets, and jerked awake from the sweaty, shallow doze she had managed. In her dream James kept coming back, half-boy, half-car, trundling around on black rubber wheels with shiny silver spokes.
“Vroom,” Motor James said from the engine of his chest as he chased her down the passage. “Watch out, Mommy! Here comes the car!”
She always woke before he got to her. Joanna, blinking against the crust at the corners of her eyes, thought, It must have been a hearse.
Don’t you laugh when a hearse goes by. Oh, Joanna! You know why!
She lay on her left side, facing the blue wall, like one of the nine skeletons from the cave. They had all been buried that way, locked into the walls and slowly covered with middens. The survivors had hidden the violent ends: one skeleton had only half a head and no spine. An arm and a leg were also gone. The perfectly preserved spearhead was wedged in the small bones at the base of the skull. Because for other people, life goes on, doesn’t it? Even for the bereaved, it must. Above the graves are the peelings and shells of a thousand ghostly meals.
It was that baby skeleton that Joanna kept coming back to, wrapped in a buckskin, lying on a bed of leaves. The mother without her child.
Joanna could see James’s pinboard from here, with its cards and badges and pictures of cars. Her eyes kept dragging back to the lion, its cardboard mouth stretched wide: HAVE A ROARING BIRTHDAY! Clever Aunty Devi. He had liked that one particularly – although, Joanna thought, he was too little to tell her if he was having nightmares. She would have had bad dreams with those teeth above her head. She just had. But she preferred the nightmares about James to having nothing of him at all.
Joanna’s arms were tingling, but she didn’t move them from the medicine bag of the pillow. She lay on its red side, which pleased her more than the blue material on the reverse. As long as she held the pillow his smell stayed with her, a faint hamstery drift that she could inhale like incense.
The house, at last, was emptying. Joanna had wondered if the mourners would ever go away, and now they had. In her solitary confinement she lay, counting all the times she had wished herself away from James, each absence a cut that lacerated, that burned. Joanna, who had never been Catholic, felt her child around her neck like a fiery rosary, each bead a spiked hurt against her scar. It was so heavy that she wondered if the other people with their pot plants and condolences and covered dishes had seen it and crept away respectfully.
The difference between grief and mourning, she thought, was that mourning came to an end. One day you just woke up and realised that you weren’t sad anymore. That’s what visitors kept telling her, impatient with her silence, but those people, with their adult losses, didn’t know what it was like. Joanna, hopeless in the face of these conversations, searched her skull for responses. But there was nothing – no fright or rage or bitterness that she could work through and overcome and resolve, settle in some image bank that she could visit when she wanted, a safety deposit box filled with old photos that cracked as they curled up at the edges.
He was gone. She kept bumping up against the clear fact of it like a bee against a kitchen window. He was gone and she had been erased. She thought of the Japanese scientists who claimed that South Africa was one of the quietest places on Earth. The Karoo was so silent that their sound equipment could pick up the faint scratching of the atmosphere against the ground. With her ear to his pillow Joanna would hear her child when he called to her again, ready to re-enter the world, back in his rightful place. If she moved or talked she would chase him away: as long as she kept still, there was the possibility of return. He will come back, thought Joanna. Something will happen and he will be here. He will want to play with his cars; I must line them up for him the way he likes. But later. I’ll just lie here for a bit, because this bed is so comfortable and I need to sleep.
It made her tired to have cheerful living companions, with their chatter about the new school uniform at Fish Hoek High, or the man who had ignored the shark warnings at the beach. Especially, she did not want to be offered another cup of tea. What she wanted was to be left alone with her dreams about James, however mutilated they were.
At first people had respected her mourning. When she came to the door they stepped back from her bruised eyes, as if sorrow was catching. “Oh,” they would say. “I just thought I’d drop by and see how you were doing.” And then they would present her with something she hadn’t requested: a chicken casserole, a Peace-in-the-Home, or – Jesus wept! – a self-help book, The Journey. As if she wanted to nourish the body that had let her down so badly, as if she wanted to nurture life in anything else that wasn’t James, as if she needed to read more about the place she was trapped. Joanna would say she was tired, and that she was going to lie down, and then she would shut the door politely on them. It wasn’t a lie.
She was the kind of tired that was never going to go away, no matter how much she tried to sleep. Her head felt like a bag of cement burst open, dispersing in the wind that got going early in the mornings now that summer was well and truly here and didn’t let up until evening fell. Joanna lay as still as she could and willed herself away from the room and the people outside it in their houses, and the ones beyond that, like circles of hell, but it was no use. She stayed stubbornly on the bed, replaying all the dead baby jokes she knew.
What’s more fun than hitting a baby with your car?
Scraping it off the tyres!
It was funny when she was at school. She had laughed, hadn’t she? It made her sweat.
When she was still breastfeeding she had worried that Jan would smell the nightsweats the hormones brought, an acid stink like chlorine, but he had slept on beside her, snoring, oblivious. Joanna would get up to change her drenched T-shirt with the same guilty feeling she had had as a child after wetting the bed. The second shirt would soak through by morning, but by then she would have at least gone down between two and four a.m. Here the sweats were, back again, her body weeping from every pore.
It was the birds she dreaded: those fucking Cape White-Eyes and then the doves, who came later. She kept hearing James crying for her. Back then the clocks of her body had been reset to chime with his, repurposed for childbearing. Now they were pensioned off, running uselessly free, but the birds wouldn’t leave her alone. Joanna sweated and dreamed of her son and sweated some more.
Wake up, Mommy! Wake up! Wake up! Wake UP!
Only Devi had dared to enter James’s darkened room and found Joanna in his bed. She bustled over to the window and jerked back the curtains, her new boobs high and hard under her shirt. She shouted, “For God’s sake, let in some light!”
But it was precisely the light that Joanna didn’t want to let in. She felt as if it would burn her skin. She would redden, peel, have to be new. Without her consent her cells were replicating themselves, mindlessly starting over. While she only lay in the dim room at least she did not aid the process. She had drawn the white blanket back up over herself and turned her head away. Devi eventually left her in peace, saying even as she exited, “You’re going to have to get up sometime. You’re not the one who died. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. You have Jan to think of.”
Joanna snorted.
Devi paused at the door. “He needs you too, you know.”
Joanna gave in. She mumbled from the pillow, “And you would know.”
“What was that?”
Joanna sat up, hissing, trying to save her throat.
“I said, ‘You would know.’ He told me, Devi. How could you do it?”
Devi sagged. “I wondered if he would. It was wrong, I know. And I’m sorry. But I’m only going to say it once.”
“You were my friend.”
“He’s lonely, Joanna. He loves you.” Devi’s bottom lip pressed up hard, crenellating her chin. She looks ugly, thought Joanna in surprise. “You don’t know how you lucky you are! You were happy, and you didn’t appreciate it.”
“So you punished me?”
A single tear ran down Devi’s cheek. Joanna wanted to smack her face. She had a sudden vision of jumping up from the bed and pushing Devi to the carpet, putting her hands around her friend’s neck and hitting her head up and down against the floor until it burst.
“I didn’t have to punish you. You’re doing a pretty good job of that all by yourself.”
She turned and fled.
Joanna sank back down on the little mattress. I have no travelling name, she thought, and no alternatives. It’s always just going to be me.
Oh, Jesus. Now she would have to get up.