JAN STAYED OUT OF THE HOUSE. There had been no screaming at him, either. He went to work and did whatever it was that he did. Probably he saw Devi. Joanna didn’t care. He was useless at organising anyway, and Joanna didn’t want him touching James’s clothes. What if he gave the wrong things away?
She knew mothers who had lost their children – lost, as if they had been careless with an earring, a parking stub, a set of keys. She had seen them. They walked around, shopped and worked and made supper, read the newspaper and drank tea. How did they do it? Did you split yourself in half, like a pomegranate, smiling all the time? Did you have more children? One of them had told her that she had listened to a song she liked, over and over again, because it made her cry. The woman had looked cheerful enough, her hair completely white but her nails newly painted. Her daughter had shot herself in the stomach.
It would never be like that for James and Joanna. She would roll the beads of the rosary between her fingers, and remember. Ten, twenty, thirty years down the line, she would hear the sound of his two-year-old feet in their canvas sneakers clopping in the passage, or squeaking as he pushed off on his bike. The rubber on the toes was worn away, the embossing smoothed flat with the drag. You couldn’t tell exactly when it had disappeared, Joanna thought. One day you looked at the soles and the pattern was gone: the change was incremental.
The shoes were the worst reminders, the shape of James’s feet retained in the canvas. Joanna knew that if she put her hand like a puppet into a sneaker, it would feel warm and slightly damp, earthy and committed, as if he’d only just taken it off. She could feel his small foot in her palm, its weight, if she closed her eyes. It made Joanna understand foot-binding.
She thought of the black and white photograph Jan had once showed her, of an old Chinese lady who had died far away from her home country. The woman was lying on a mortuary counter, a tag around her toe. They had had difficulty in attaching it, because the bones of her foot were so deformed that they were joined, as if she had followed some reverse journey back into the sea or the womb: I am leaving, I am leaving. Dying is obscene, thought Joanna. The old woman had never meant her feet to be seen without their socks. The smell of her rotting toes would have driven her husband back in disgust.
Joanna imagined the clocks of her own body, how they were still faithfully keeping time: they did not slumber or sleep. She wished that she could just stop breathing. People did that, sometimes. They died of broken hearts. If she really loved James as much as she thought she did, she would just give up the ghost right here in his room. She imagined her body sinking in on itself – already her hipbones were blades against the foam and springs of the mattress – until she became a kind of compost, and then a layer of dust that collected beneath the bed ready for sweeping. She thought of Fish Hoek Man, his black and polished skull, and of that baby, arranged with his beads and his rattle of Conus shells.
Grief is time travel, thought Joanna. She wished last year back, when colds were the most difficult thing she’d had to deal with, when her most heart-rending decision was whether to let James into the Big Bed with them at two a.m.
She had thought of bundling up his clothes for the Saint Luke’s charity shop, but each time she handled something that had belonged to him, his sturdy unmarked limbs lived inside the dungarees, the dozen socks, the tiny Spiderman underpants set aside for the toilet-training that hadn’t happened.
Joanna circled the house, folding and unfolding them. If he comes back, she told herself, he will need his clothes. I must keep them for him. And she, a dragon curled around her treasure, tucked them back into the compactum and wouldn’t think about passing them on.
But the blue nightgown wouldn’t be contained by the chest of drawers. It was too fluffy. When she tried to pack it away with the other clothes it bulged over the top, soft and menacing, the fur on a Saint Bernard. The resistance made her panic. She would have to hang the gown on the back of the door, where it would hang down over the 1950s ABC Joanna had painstakingly laminated, the one that James had ignored. Her fingers were stiff. She loosened her grip: there were flowers of sweat in the fluff.
James had slept in that gown because he kicked off his blankets and quilt. The only way to keep him warm in the winter was to double-bag him. She lifted the garment to her nose. The collar of the gown smelled deep and rank and lovely, like a squirrel’s fur, dusty and sweet. The oil from his scalp had made her salivate: he smelled like Jan, back when Joanna still loved him.
Now the scent triggered more weeping. It was everywhere in his room. How many days had she lain on his bed, her cheek where his had been? Her grandmother had made that pillow, sixty, seventy years before, one of a pair to kneel on when she got married. They were passed down to Joanna’s mother and then to Joanna herself, smelly but unscathed. Until James had used it the pillows had made Joanna think of dead ducks, the ghosts of them layered under the heads of humans. Somewhere one pillow had been lost or given away. Joanna thought of her granny’s knees on the pillow, and her mother’s, and then of how much time she had spent on her own, begging God to bring James back.
She held the pillow against her body, bending over the musty feathers of its insides, an acquiescent poppet, a doll. James had felt like this when she hugged him, this small human package, the embodiment of her future, her past. Without him she was tethered to an endless present, where there was only horror and emptiness. Joanna leaned between them, like rugby poles: first horror, then emptiness. And then, for variety, emptiness, then horror. It was the combination of the dull and the terrifying that so undid her, the words she was forced to mouthe, as if it was her job to comfort others, as if anything they said would be solace to her. It was so simple: with James gone there was no point. Joanna wrapped the pillow in the nightgown and she held onto the little haunted corners.
Even in her sadness she was glad that she had thought ahead. He had worn that nightgown forever, and it was well and truly saturated with him. Her mother had always said that Joanna was practical; Joanna was thrifty. For James she bought clothes a size or two too big, so that for the first season everything he wore made him flounder, a climber in the snow on Kilimanjaro. He negotiated his clothes with goodwill every morning as Joanna made him drop his cars so that she could find his fingers, chiming, “Arm through sleeve!”
The battles she expected hadn’t materialised. The Terrible Twos, people called them, but it was all still coming – the days and nights she should have had of him, the eighteen good years that she was owed. Sometimes when she’d looked deep into his eyes Joanna had felt that she was travelling somewhere else: each gold stripe on his irises opened another door, and another, and another, like an advent calendar. Beyond each one was an experience that hadn’t yet arrived.
Now she couldn’t believe that she was going to be cheated of the thousands of days every parent deserves, the matric dance, the graduation, the twenty-first. And the other ones: the boring, angry, sulking days, the days of waiting up and the days of talking down. Because she would miss all those ones too, thought Joanna. She had had one chance at happiness, at being a real person and belonging properly to the human race, and now it was gone.
The world was divided into the people who had already lost what they loved, and the people who hadn’t yet. On the eternal postcard hillside the houses were gabled or facebricked, double-glazed like bell jars. They were stocked with the requisite numbers of things: tables and chairs. At them and on them intact mothers and fathers sat, and their children variously cried or smiled or sulked. These were the houses over which the Angel of Death had yet to pass: on each one of them was some secret sign that Joanna had not learned in time to paint above her lintel. All at once Joanna understood why it was that Zulu people believed that there was a finite amount of luck in the world, and that each person was allotted their quota. You could make yourself more luck – a sangoma could arrange it – but only if you stole someone else’s portion the way Jacob stole Esau’s. Somewhere there was a lucky person who had seen her oversized share and spirited it away. Joanna, who had been lucky and not known it, was now unlucky and knew it well. Maybe the box had been meant for her after all. The worst really had happened, and James was somewhere else, with her and not with her.
There was no more lucky or unlucky, was there? No muti or charm or talisman would protect her or advance her cause.
Joanna, without ancestors, was no longer afraid of anything at all.