MORNÉ

“And so we put on a little concert for the old people. A pantomime. Alice in Wonderland. Korrie made the most wonderful Mad Hatter, and she’s one with all her ducks in a row. There are a few around here who have lost their marbles, and I’m telling you now they can bury me the day I forget my own name.”

“You’ve got a nation to remember it for you.”

“They won’t remember my name. They’ll remember the characters I’ve played. By the time the nation is through with me, I’ll need psychiatric help on top of everything else.”

On the way home Alice stopped at the Rebecca Street cemetery and told Gerty just how much she dreaded her engagement that evening. It had been decided that her best option was to get out of the house a bit, to keep her body and her mind as active as she could. She was to attend the meeting of Gloria’s book club at her shop.

It didn’t matter that she hadn’t read the book, it would just be a group of ladies enjoying each other’s company for a bit. This month’s book choice featured a character named Hanna Schmitz, and Steve, having seen the recent film adaptation, had that morning summarized the plot. But Alice was not at all in the mood.

Upon her return home, Steve was nowhere to be seen. He had spoken of treating her to a movie, and so Morné, home from school, became her partner in crime instead.

Alice no longer walked Morné home from school, and instead he came to visit her only when his mother was home. She was still allowed to accompany him to the swimming pool, only to the swimming pool, but he was to keep an eye on her and fetch his mother immediately if Alice began to act odd. Why? What was wrong with her? Well, the thing about Alice was—as if she no longer existed as anything else. She had to be explained, and before long she would have to be explained away. But she accompanied Morné to the swimming pool nonetheless.

Alice watched the little boy climb expertly onto his throne, as if he’d been a prince all his life. She urged him to be careful, and was glad to see that nothing new had been graffitied on the garden wall. She listened, but it was silent on the other side. What she would have given to hear Evelina hum.

Two brothers had moved into the house next door. They were in a band and kept late hours, and Steve found the younger brother incredibly attractive, though she told him that he mustn’t let Wesley hear him say that.

“You’re my slave now,” said Morné, as she descended into the depths.

“I’d much rather be your friend.”

“That’s not the game.”

“Can’t I be your fairy godmother instead? Your wish is my command.”

“Can you tell me a story?”

“A story? I don’t know any stories. Uncle Silas is much better with stories.”

“You don’t know any stories?”

“Give me just a moment, I’ll think of one.”

The story that she told was of a ghost. Of a little boy who haunted an old man. Why did the little boy do that? She didn’t have an answer, she said.

Did he remember the story Steve told him that day when they were all down here together? That was a much better story, wasn’t it?

“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked.

“I saw one here before,” the boy answered.

“Was it a man or a woman?”

“Ummm, a lady!”

“And what was she doing? You weren’t scared?”

“No, she was dancing. It’s almost my birthday, you know.”

“How old are you going to be? Twenty?”

“Do you think my dad is going to come?”

“Do you miss him? It’s all right to miss him, you know. And no matter where he is, he’s part of you always.”

“Do you know how old my dad is?”

“Probably just a little older than Steve.”

“But not as old as you?”

“Not as old as me.”

When they returned home, there was a uniformed officer waiting on her stoop. She greeted the woman, who suggested that she take a seat.

Morné asked if they could look at her shells, and she told him to run ahead. The woman sat down on the bench beside her. What had Silas gone and done? Silas was her husband? Yes. When had she last seen him or heard from him? When he left the house for work that morning. The woman said that she was sorry to be the bearer of such news, but her husband was dead, having been run down like a stray dog in the street.

She didn’t ask if he’d been drinking, as it wouldn’t change the fact that he was dead. She wondered afterward whether the book club’s meeting would have been interrupted with the news had she decided to attend, and for just a moment she indulged in the fantasy that had she attended the news might never have been delivered and the whole thing might have been undone.

 

 

“We’re both a person poorer,” said Steve as they sat at the kitchen table attempting to fit the pieces of her swan planter back together.

“Luckily, I’ve been poor all my life,” said Alice. Her eyes were dry for the moment. “I’m just glad he’s in the ground. I’d have had him cremated had it been up to me. He can be grateful Deidre footed the bill. You know what his sister said to me? The wife always outlives the husband, and the one silver lining, if I wanted to think about it like that, is that I lived most of my life without ever knowing he existed.”

“It doesn’t make it any easier. And the women only live longer so that they can clean up whatever mess the men left behind.”

“It was her second funeral this week. Her housemate, Korrie, also died, and she left Dot her French-English dictionary, in the front of which she had written, And I still can’t speak a proper word. She was learning French. I must stop crying now, it’s over and done with.”

“It’s all right to cry.”

“You’ve as much to cry over as I do.”

“With my mother, it is different. It was expected, you know?”

“Nobody lives forever, Stevie. We could any of us go at any minute. I am sorry about your mother.”

“I’m just glad I’m not living in that house. That would be worse, I think. You know, the absence. The void. Not that Uncle Silas’s presence won’t be missed in this house. And we may each of us be a person poorer, but we’re a star richer as well.”

“Fat lot of good that will do me.”

“And someday they’ll shoot across the sky and come to live on the earth once again.”

“Do you truly believe that?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always liked stories. And when there’s nobody left to tell them to you, you begin telling them to yourself.”

 

 

The morning was growing long, and Alice was beginning to tire of her own thoughts. All she had accomplished so far was titivating, as Silas would have called it, but somewhere in the course of the morning she had misplaced Bart’s book. It might even have been stolen. Steve and Wesley had left early, and Steve had taken his painting things and his camera along.

In Steve’s room she came across a series of photographs of Wesley, several of him in the nude, and she could not help but blush. She was glad they were giving it a go. She wrapped Morné’s birthday present, a red toy motorcycle, and when Steve and Wesley still hadn’t shown she retreated to the kitchen where there was always a handful of dishes waiting to be washed, not that she did much cooking now.

She might have managed to avoid dirtying dishes altogether, but what would her idle hands find to do then? Her diet had come to consist of toast, sometimes spread with margarine, or fish paste, or jam; Steve sometimes cooked eggs, and she always drank out of the same cup.

The party, the picnic, was to be held at the Botanical Gardens, and Alice was certain that Morné’s day would be made as long as Steve, with or without his red motorcycle, showed up for the occasion. Alice was looking for the dish soap when she heard Steve and Wesley enter the house, about time as they would have to get going soon, and a moment later Steve entered the kitchen with his camera around his neck and his sketchbook in hand, while Wesley entered with her book.

“I don’t know whether to hug you or hit you over the head with it. I’ve spent the morning turning over the whole bloody house.”

“I needed it for a prop.”

“It was all for a good cause,” said Steve.

“Not unless you were teaching him to read, and I very much doubt that. He’s a smart boy, most of the time.”

“Now that you mention it, he was holding the book upside down the whole time, so it may not be such a bad idea after all.”

“Good cause, my foot. You didn’t make off with the dish soap, did you?”

“Here, have a look.” Steve opened the sketchpad on the kitchen table, and there lay Wesley reading her book, without a stitch of clothing on. She looked up at him and felt her cheeks redden, though he wasn’t shy about it in the least.

“You two must watch out with that child running around. You can’t just strip as you please, when and where you like.”

“Where is he?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if his grandmother is having him scrub the floors.”

“That would explain the missing dish soap.”

“When did Auntie Alice last have a bubble bath?”

“Don’t talk nonsense, Weston.”

“Wesley.”

“Just Wes.”

“In any case, there wasn’t a soul in sight, promise. It was at the bottom of number thirty-five’s swimming pool.”

“You know wherever you go that child is never far behind.”

“Sorry, Auntie Alice.”

“And you must clean that room of yours, it’s a bloody pigsty. Are you two ready for the party?”

“Shit, I still have to wrap his present.”

“Get going then, get out from under my feet. Shoo!” As long as they didn’t go too far.

Her only other visitor had been Heinrich, who wanted her to persuade Mitzi to come home. She’d nearly laughed in his face. Only afterward did she wonder if that was what it would take to see Mitzi face-to-face again.

Steve was back in the kitchen in a moment with another book in hand.

“This is from Gloria. She gave it to me yesterday to give to you, and I keep forgetting.” It was a slender volume titled The Girls of Slender Means, and to the cover was attached a note:

 

Our book for this month. It’s a wonderful story, but if you don’t end up reading it, come and join us anyway. Thinking of you, Gloria.

 

“You must thank her for me,” said Alice.

“You’ll have to thank her yourself,” said Steve, and exited the scene once more.

—

On the way to the Botanical Gardens, Morné sat beside her in the back seat of his grandmother’s car. His mother had given him a one-size-fits-all haircut after an outbreak of lice at school. Alice could not help but wonder how much he resembled Silas’s little boy and thought again of what Deidre had told her. Did all little boys threaten at one point or another to run away?

“You know Chris and Renee just bought that beautiful little place—”

“Well, why don’t you go and live with them?”

“They don’t need me.”

“And I do?”

“You do, even if you’re too blind to see it. You know, I never did like Peter much.”

“Could you not talk like that in front of him? Peter is still his father.”

“In name only if he’s abandoned him without a second thought.”

“Do you really think this is the time?”

“Sooner or later you’re going to have to face the facts. He cheated on you with some slut. Not only that, he abandoned you and your child for her.”

“That’s not how it happened and you know it.”

“Let me ask you this: Where do you think he is? Curled up in some corner feeling sorry for himself? I think not.”

“I asked him to go.”

“And that makes it all right? Just look what good that’s done. You should have paid more attention, my darling, and made sure he had reason to stay before you asked him to go.”

“What is that supposed to mean? Why are you viciously attacking me?”

“What do you know about vicious attacks? All I’m saying is that a man who gets all he needs at home doesn’t go looking for it somewhere else.”

“Just stop it.”

“Someone has to say it as it is—”

“Shut up. Just shut up.” Alice had never attended a boxing match, but she imagined that what she was witnessing couldn’t be far from it. It now seemed unlikely that the boy’s father had been invited at all.

They settled their party on the grass near a bench, beneath the shade of a tree. Alice and Nora, Rita’s mother, occupied the bench, while for the rest a blanket was laid out.

Morné’s mother was taking him to the waterfall, they’d become insignificant in the distance, and Steve and Wesley were sprawled out on the blanket, whispering to each other every now and then. The old women were left to keep each other company.

“I wish she would take him to get a proper haircut,” said Nora. “You can tell when she does it herself.”

“It looks all right to me. Boys aren’t one for fuss.”

“What must they think at his school.”

“That he’s a little boy who doesn’t like sitting still while strangers cut his hair. She took him over to Gloria’s not too long ago, but you can never be too careful with lice.”

“Even when I was pinching pennies, I always made sure that my children looked presentable. It wasn’t easy after my husband died.”

Did you devour him outright or stew him balls and all in a pot? But she could never say a thing like that.

“Steve works in the salon, and now that he and Morné are such bosom friends, I don’t foresee it being a problem in future.”

Steve looked up, and before long he and Wesley departed.

“What does your husband do?”

“He’s deceased.” A fact was a fact, but it felt strange to hear the words leave her lips.

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Did you have him cremated? My second husband was cremated, I’ve always thought it best. Cleaner, somehow. More respectful. Not merely left for the worms to eat.”

“He was buried,” said Alice.

“I see. Well, at least there’s a grave to lay flowers on.”

Alice was grateful when Morné and his mother returned and Nora took him to track down the ducks, which were apparently not to be found in the water. Steve and Wesley returned separately from their wandering, and while Rita and Wesley made small talk on the blanket Alice and Steve took a walk through an area known as the Cactus Garden.

Steve said that she mustn’t go broadcasting that he worked at the salon because he worked at the salon no more. He was nothing but Gloria’s skivvy, and he couldn’t stand it one minute more.

Wesley worked as a waiter in a restaurant, and Steve would apply for a job there instead.

“I’d have thought he earned his living posing nude. You could get back to tennis,” suggested Alice.

“Oh no. I’ve been too long out of practice for that.”

“Then make something of your art, of your paintings.”

But the problem, he said, was that he loved each of his paintings too much, and couldn’t bear to think of parting with any of them, even for a profit. That was how he knew he’d never be a true artist.

“You didn’t bring your camera along.”

“I wanted everyone to relax. Nobody, especially not a group of women, ever truly enjoys themselves with a camera around.” He wasn’t wrong.

The longer the day wore on, the lazier each of them became, and by the end of it few considered it to have been a success. Steve and Wesley had argued, and Alice was bitten while attempting to feed one of the ducks, though with the guinea fowl she had more success. Their moods improved upon consumption of the birthday cake, in that they were triumphant, but the bliss did not last.

Morné opened his presents. He glowed upon receiving a motorcycle helmet from Steve, but even his mood turned sour when they began to pack up and he realized with certainty that his father would not show.

When Steve offered to take Morné home, his excitement could not be contained, and Rita allowed it only to spite her mother, who thought it utterly unsafe and said so. She did not trust motorcycles, and she didn’t trust young men, either. Was Steve thinking of Morné’s happiness or of Wesley’s irritation when he made the offer, being that Wesley had no other transportation home?

They were four again in the car on the way home. Wesley sat beside Alice, and his face looked as if it would at any moment drop into his lap. She wanted to ask what he and Steve had argued about, but didn’t with so many other ears around.

Alice began to worry when evening approached and Steve and Morné were not yet home. She lit a cigarette in the yard and wondered at the level of anxiety next door. Was Nora wallowing in triumph? Surely even she wasn’t as heartless as that. When her eyes became tearful, Alice shook her head and sighed, and looked admiringly at the reflection of the moon in the windows of the flats on Hepburn Street.

It was shameful, really, the way in which the boy, Morné Morné Morné, had been used.