WHEN I ASKED KLAUS about Elijah’s papers, he said there was nothing useful there, just an obsessive habit of cutting articles out of newspapers. There should have been much more than that but I said nothing. Elijah’s pencil notes had probably been discounted as indecipherable scribbling. Klaus muttered something about neurosis and a meaningless daily routine. The notes dated back twenty years. At first Bloom must have sorted them into categories, but later on they were just filed chronologically in a big box file, year by year. And he had grown less diligent about his filing in the latter period − there was very little current material. When I asked if I could have them when the police had finished with them, Klaus said that usually all personal effects were returned to the family. Later Klaus called back to say the family lawyer had instructed him to incinerate all the documents and files taken from Elijah’s office. We were both silent, contemplating a vengeful bonfire. Klaus said he would get someone to drop the boxes off.
On one of those hazy fear-filled anxious nights, I come home to find our apartment engulfed by cardboard boxes that hold folders and ancient scuffed box files with Elijah’s handwriting: 1990, 2001, 2007. Simone is barricaded in her room. When I eventually convince her to open the door, her eyes flash blue lightning. The boxes give her the creeps. She doesn’t want them here. They smell funny. She’s been scratching an open oozing pimple on her chin. Her hair is dishevelled and the freckles stand out dark and stormy against her pale brooding face.
‘I’ll make an omelette,’ I say wearily. ‘I didn’t realise there were so many of them … We’ll put them in the study.’ That morning she hadn’t gone to school because she had her stupid period and her back was very sore. As I’d predicted, the dreaded menstrual event had duly arrived and now she was no longer, to her relief and mine, the only girl without her period. The first time her period arrived, she’d panicked and told me she had terrible stomach cramps. When I’d asked from what, she’d said it was probably food poisoning from a chicken pie she’d bought on the way home from school. It was only when I’d found her soiled panties thrown away in the dustbin that I’d realised what was going on. In her usual way she’d quickly adapted and seen the possibilities.
I reason that an absent day here or there is not going to make a big difference to her schoolwork. But each time I dutifully pen an absence note to the school, I have to shake off a queasy feeling that I have no answer to her stratagems – which makes me a bad mother.
Simone informs me with a smirk that Klaus delivered the boxes himself and that he called her a spoilt teenager because she had refused to help him bring the boxes upstairs. I’m too weary to be provoked; privately I wonder if Klaus doesn’t have a point. We eat supper surrounded by the plentiful reminders of Elijah, crumpled cardboard box files that should rightfully have energised an incinerator. After we’ve washed up, Simone mumbles that she’s going to sleep – no goodnight – and I’m left alone in the lounge, not even sure I understand why she’s so upset. I have the absurd desire to smoke a cigarette from the hidden pack that reminds me so powerfully of Daniel. Instead I open up the box that is closest to me.
There are several folders inside, one for each local daily and each of the major weekend papers; each folder holds endless tales of missing adults and children. An Argus headline shouts ‘Grieving for child missing since 2001’ and beneath it ‘Mother now lives on the street’. Jacqueline Matthews is a careworn woman whose bloodshot eyes have the look of someone who can’t find her way back from hell. In another folder, the parents’ cruel loss is spelt out in newsprint ink that blurs as I rapidly leaf through: ‘Mom still hopes son will return’; ‘Novellen said, “I’m coming now” then he left and never came back’. Daisy Solomons is a weeping wreck. I remember avoiding the series ‘Open Docket MISSING’ in the Weekend Argus. It was too depressing.
I keep opening boxes late through the night, not sure what I’m looking for. There are two parcels that seem out of place, so I leave them for last. There’s one long carton, held together with masses of brown packing tape: ‘Elijah Bloom’ is scrawled on it in big black writing and underneath, in smaller print, ‘Personal Effects – checked’ with some scrawled initials and a date a few days after Elijah was killed. I have left it to the end because it’s clear that it shouldn’t be sitting in our lounge. The contents have been packed well enough to survive a trip around the world. The layers of cardboard eventually give way to my determination, and Elijah’s well-worn beloved metal detector reveals itself. The police label is still attached with a number and an address described as ‘Victim’s Domicile’.
Tears prick at my eyelids. I’m not prepared for this, but it comes back to me. After witnessing Elijah’s murder, I’d sat in Klaus’s office trying to make sense of events: somewhere in the midst of my distraught ramblings, I’d mentioned the bond Elijah had forged with Simone on their beachcombing expeditions and that he’d promised to buy her a second-hand metal detector for her birthday, but that he hadn’t made it that far. Klaus must have made a mental note.
The other parcel is shoebox size, its rectangular shape packed in brown wrapping paper. There’s a label on it: ‘Simone Sarrazin’s bedroom, Sarrazin House, 15/12/2006’ – the day after she was rescued. The police had cordoned off the house as a crime scene and removed everything that might be useful as evidence against the Sarrazins.
I tear the paper away and lift the lid off. Inside the shoebox, cushioned by bubble wrap, is one of those cheap pink music boxes that I’d found vaguely disturbing as a child, feeling sorry for other girls who got them as a gift from Father Christmas. When I open it, a pink ballerina springs up onto pointes, plastic arms in the air, and pirouettes mechanically, maniacally … Simone Sarrazin’s bedroom. The knob of sorrow in my throat grows so big I can hardly swallow as I listen to the tinny Tchaikovsky.
‘Pretty pretty little girl … I’m a pretty pretty little girl …’
There are tears streaming down my daughter’s face. She has an open penknife in her right hand and she’s holding it up in the air like Lady Macbeth aged fourteen in shortie pyjamas. The door to the balcony is open and a cool sea breeze plays around the room. Her skin is blue gooseflesh. I’m used to her sudden mood changes but this is terrifying. She is chanting her litany in the voice of a five-year-old, but her eyes have the gleaming mirror-coldness of a feral child. I shut the lid and it bangs shut, but I have to close the cheap clasp, my fingers fumbling blindly, to contain the jack-in-the-box dancer, the effigy of a real girl. I don’t take my eyes off the knife.
The melody stops as abruptly as it started. The box has a gold key sticking out of it. Somebody charged it up before sending it over. Klaus?
‘Simone, how long have you been standing there?’
‘Shhh …’ she admonishes me, putting her left index finger up to her lips. ‘They’re always listening. You mustn’t tell. They’ll hurt you if you tell.’
I struggle to gather my scattered wits. I get up carefully and walk towards her very slowly. I’m standing right in front of her. Her blue eyes are as big and soft as a helpless baby animal, her hair is as rumpled as … That’s when I finally get it: she’s sleepwalking. I put a hand out to touch her and she flinches, but she doesn’t move, as if she’s told herself to be brave.
‘I know how to make you happy … Just don’t hurt me … please …’ my daughter mumbles.
‘Nobody is going to hurt you,’ I say quietly, trying to control my heartbeat so that she doesn’t sense my panic. ‘Will you let me brush your hair?’
I don’t know where the words come from. But when she’s at peace with the world she’ll arrive with the hairbrush in our bedroom and say something like ‘Stop being so lazy, mom-person. Brush my hair …’ No ‘please’, no ‘thank you’, but her little waltz out the door when I’m done tells me all’s well.
She cocks her head to one side but her eyes look past me.
‘Hmm … pretty pretty girl …’
All the way to collect her hairbrush and then back to my room she sings the words ‘I’m a pretty, pretty little girl …’ to the ballerina’s tune.
‘Simone, can I have the knife?’
She shakes her head mutely, sitting primly on my dressing table stool, waiting for me to start. She still has the open knife clenched in her hand and somehow seems to be aware of it because she hasn’t injured herself or me.
‘Can I have the knife now?’ I ask a little later.
Another slow mute shake of the head.
I consider her response as I brush, evenly, steadily, with powerful strokes through the thick fair hair that lies heavy in my hands.
When I imagine she might not be so tense, I try once again, using as casual a voice as I can muster.
‘Do you think you could close the knife now? It’s just us, Simone.’
The blue eyes stare into the mirror, looking at something, someone, far far away, and she sits as stiff as a plastic girl. I expect another refusal, but this time the blue eyes blink once and then I hear a click and the knife is mercifully closed.
I brush her hair for a very long time and it’s very quiet, only the distant roar of the sea coming in through the open door. Eventually, my arm exhausted, I suggest she should get into her own bed, and she obeys me, walking to her room with me following behind.
I sit on the bed and watch over her until I’m sure she’s properly asleep.
Klaus meant well, but that music box can’t be given to Simone, not if I want to keep her mentally stable. I was pretty sure she’d woken up to the melody from the music box, and that some long-ago associative memory had been triggered. I consider throwing it away, but that doesn’t seem right. What if she remembers last night and wants her music box after all? What if that music box is important to her long-term recovery in some way I can’t even imagine right now? She has absolutely nothing else from her childhood. But I can’t leave the knife with her. What if she sleepwalks again and tries to slit her wrists? Or my throat?
I’m in the lounge, trying to make a rational decision, when I hear her go into the bathroom. I slip into her bedroom. The night light is on; that means she’s awake, not sleepwalking. A long shining hair of flaxen gold lies on the pillow. I freeze as a forgotten dream from the night before rises to my mind: a blonde child in a white nightie being chased around a long dining-room table, toppling expensive alabaster statues and bronze eagles as she runs, trying to find an opening behind plush purple velvet curtains, with a bald plump man in a dinner suit in pursuit. Then a scream, and he has her. I’m thinking all of this as I roll the sheet back and find the knife. I hold it in my hand, weighing everything up, and then, contrary to what my common sense tells me, I put the knife back under her pillow, careful not to displace the long blonde hair, next to the box of Smarties that is constantly replaced by a new one. We never talk about it. She makes her own bed and I provide the pocket money that buys a regular stream of Smarties, Simone’s comfort hoard.
At breakfast she is pale and defiant but to my relief it’s just a continuation of our weeklong stalemate over my refusal to let her attend a birthday party of Lois Kennedy, a cool girl two classes higher. Her war of attrition against her unfair mother (who isn’t actually my mother!) had been interrupted by Klaus’s arrival with the boxes. I’d even forgotten what the issue between us was this week. When she looks for her hairbrush and I say it’s in my bedroom, she looks puzzled and then recovers, her eyes flashing righteous indignation.
‘How did it get there? You know you can’t use my hairbrush. It’s not hygienic!’
So I’m pretty sure she has no recollection of last night.
And now Simone has a knife – what kind of a mother leaves her daughter with a knife and doesn’t even talk about it? I’ve decided long ago that I have to make up the rules for us as we go along. There is absolutely no official guidebook for our situation. The only guideline I have is to try and understand what my daughter has been through and why she might feel safer carrying a vicious-looking penknife. I even admit to myself privately that the knowledge of that knife on her person will give me some comfort when I think of her walking alone on the side of the road, or going into a public bathroom, or being anywhere on her own. Just seeing her go off to buy an ice cream used to leave me perspiring. Occasionally my imagination still creeps up on me, but, for the most part, I’ve learnt to clamp down on the ugly images and to focus on acting natural.
In the early days, just after she’d run away and Heidi had found her and brought her back to me, we’d had one of those sensible discussions with Simone that adults have when they’re trying to avert tragedy in whatever way they can. I had issued strict instructions to myself: let Heidi talk, she’ll listen to Heidi. A list of go-to points was made with Simone. Stay away from places that are isolated. Avoid walking on your own. Memorise the emergency numbers on your mobile. If there is any kind of problem, shout as loud as you can, and don’t stop shouting until help arrives. On and on it went, an implacable litany. Simone listened and Heidi talked. When she’d finished, Simone asked a single question, her voice quiet, resigned.
‘What if it happens anyway?’
‘Do what they tell you. Do not panic. Have a plan to escape and be patient. Wait for the right moment.’
Heidi’s reply was succinct. There was a long moment of silence. Simone was looking out the window, her face as blank as a mirror, but she was playing with her fingers on her lap as if she wanted to break them. When it started to get uncomfortable, Heidi spoke.
‘Do you think we could have some coffee, Paola?’
I took the hint and left the room. Their voices were low; I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Is that when she asked Heidi for a knife and Heidi agreed to get her something small but deadly enough if used at the right moment? Or did Heidi offer it? Should I thank Heidi or wish we’d never seen her? I was taught that violence begets violence. Now I simply don’t know. Their shared experiences have made them accomplices. Heidi was one for bald facts and planning ahead; Simone respected that. It was cool to know someone like Heidi. Someone who, we were sure, had killed men who tried to hurt her. Heidi was fearless. Life had done its worst to her and she’d retaliated in kind. Who wouldn’t respect that?
The music-box episode was still fresh in my mind when Simone came out the bedroom one afternoon wearing the bum-cheek-revealing denim shorts and a T-shirt that said MEOW.
‘Do you realise that MEOW spelt across the front of a T-shirt is a huge come-on to every male creep on the planet? Unless they’re neutered,’ I muttered.
‘Shouldn’t you be worried about female creeps too?’ she suggested helpfully. ‘I think they’re a worse problem these days.’
‘Simone, stop it! Do you think this is funny? What kind of message are you trying to send out?’
‘That I like cats?’ little miss-madam suggested coolly. ‘Sam’s waiting for me.’ She vanished out the front door before I could ask where the offending item came from.
I knew it wasn’t a PC view – they held annual slut-walks in our city, for God’s sake – but I didn’t care. I wanted her to disappear into the woodwork, to be as invisible as possible; if I could have dressed her in mouse-brown outfits and nerdish glasses, as well as a full headscarf, like the Muslim girls, I would have. But Simone had her own sartorial ideas; her standard weekend outfit was a pair of tiny denim shorts worn with a cutaway white T-shirt, long striped black-and-white socks pulled up over her knees, and black sneakers. The overall effect of flashes of bare girlish legs combined with the loose strawberry blonde hair was guaranteed to halt all male traffic within 10 metres. When I told her all she needed was a pair of platform heels to apply for a job as one of those girls that carry the placards in between wrestling bouts, she reflected for a moment before replying, ‘You think so? Rad.’
Moments like that served to confirm my suspicion that I wasn’t good mother material. Occasionally, if I got lucky and it was chillier than usual, she’d wear black stockings under the tiny shorts and a big thin black jersey that hung off one shoulder.
When she returned hours later that afternoon, flushed and tired from a braai with Sam’s friends at Clifton, I asked her where the MEOW T-shirt came from.
‘Jessica gave it to me. She didn’t like it.’
‘Jessica’s got more taste than I credited her with.’
Silence.
Me again. ‘It’s brand new. She could have changed it.’
‘She forgot. Jessica’s rich, she doesn’t need it.’
‘Then we should pay for it. I’ll talk to her mother next time I see her.’
‘I hate you! You treat me like I’m five years old!’ my daughter cried, leaping off the kitchen bar stool. ‘If you speak to Jessica’s mother I’ll run away,’ she hissed, fists at her sides, ‘and this time nobody will find me, not even Heidi!’
Tell me a secret (VII)
https://secrets.net/chatlounge/
(Everyone. Has one. What’s yours?)
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diable: |
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Hello nocturnal butterfly. No school tomorrow? |
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butterfly: |
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I’m awake. Tell me a secret |
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diable: |
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Mommy tells excellent bedtime stories |
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butterfly: |
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How old are you anyways? |
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diable: |
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Rip van Winkle in experience |
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butterfly: |
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Do people die in her stories? |
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diable: |
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In the most inventive ways |
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butterfly: |
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Scary lady |
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diable: |
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Mommy and you would get along. Your turn, nectar princess |
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butterfly: |
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I have a knife |
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diable: |
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Are you planning to hurt someone? |
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butterfly: |
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If I have to |
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diable: |
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They still want to take Josh? |
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butterfly: |
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He did that just to scare me. He wants to punish me for making him wait |
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diable: |
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He has a name? |
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butterfly: |
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Not yet. When I’m ready |
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diable: |
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For you I’ll let the demons out |