It’s only nine o’clock and I’m still on the first mug of coffee and here’s Charles, clattering his way into my office, plonking himself on the front edge of my desk and wanting to know how I’m doing.
“I’m sorry, Baas. I haven’t done my work for today yet so I’ve failed you and I don’t have time for idle chit-chat. If you’d care to come back at four-thirty…”
His laugh threatens to blast the paper out of my in-tray.
“Well I don’t know. You can’t get the staff these days. Never mind the work. How would you like to spend the day out? Friday’s not a day to be in the office and I’m sure anything you have to do can wait until Monday. There’s nothing too urgent, is there? I’ve cleared it with Mistress Megan by the way.”
There’re those invoices from Bentley Pipework to pay, I tell him, and I don’t get much further than that and a quick glance around at my shelves, a flip through the contents of my tray, before he’s up and rubbing his hands together and leaning over the desk to give me some sort of inspection.
“You used those size six safety boots last time we went out, didn’t you? They’re in the cupboard in my office. And grab a hard hat too. How’re you dressed today? Trousers? Good.”
“Lots of ladders to climb?”
He grins. “Let’s just say skirts can be a bit awkward on a construction site. There are some pairs of socks in the cupboard too. They’re all freshly laundered. Good. Right. The sooner you get going, the sooner you can be back and then you can go home early if you like. I’ll catch you later…” and he’s off towards the door.
I’m poised halfway out of my chair, in the act of trying to tip my bag into the bottom drawer on my right. “Wait a minute. The sooner I get going? Where am I going and how do I get there? Not with you?”
“Oh. Sorry, yes. You’re going with Nathan. I’ve got too much to do. The pumping station site at Hartley. Thought it was a great opportunity for you to get out and see it. Look, I’ll go with you to his office.”
He likes me to see the jobs for which I handle the accounts. It’s fine by me; these days out are a kind of perk to my job. I’ve never been to site with Nathan though. The edge has gone off the idea a bit.
The boots are still muddy from my last outing so I hold them away from my clothing. Debbie is rattling her typewriter and clinking her bracelets as we enter the reception area. The look on her face says it all as she eyes me – boots in one hand and the Concrete Structures Ltd hat in the other – up and down.
“Nathan’s still in his office?” Charles asks her and she nods in reply.
“Go through,” he says to me, “and tell him to pull finger. He’s probably still asleep.”
Nathan is, in fact, reading The Herald. The flash from his eyes as I push open the door is loaded with guilt. He looks like he was just about to flick the paper aside but he holds onto it instead and gives a short, self-conscious laugh.
“Oh Tessa. It’s you.”
“Just me. I caught you. You should be more crafty, like me. I keep my paper on the table in the corner among open files. I could be doing any number of things over there if Megan walks in.”
“I’ll remember that. I won’t tell on you if you don’t tell on me.”
He doesn’t quite succeed at being serious. He closes and folds the paper.
“You’re coming with, I believe. You ready?”
I hold the boots and the hat out towards him.
“Fully equipped.”
“Okay, let’s roll. Where’ve I put the damned car keys?”
He shakes the blazer slung over the back of his chair. It jingles encouragingly and he fishes a bunch of keys out of an inside pocket. The Mercedes emblem on a leather key tag glints in the light from the window. I haven’t been in the new one yet and I’m like a child that’s been promised an ice cream.
Charles has vanished and Debbie’s clearly waiting for us to appear; she’s sitting to attention and must have been staring directly at the doorway to Nathan’s office.
“Oh, hello Nathan!” Her blouse is straining at its buttons and her smile is luminous. She touches her thin gold necklace and moves her manicured nail down to the vee in her neckline.
She must know he has a girlfriend now, surely. Has Sherrie ever visited the office? I can’t recall her being here, unless she’s come on one of my college days.
“We’ll be back early afternoon,” Nathan says from behind me. “Please take any messages. Mike Black of Costain might phone.”
“Of course,” she simpers. “Just call me from site if you need me to do anything for you. ’Bye now.”
She does tend to use that little-girl voice when she speaks to Nathan. How many times has he been treated to a tantalising peek at her bra, I wonder? Assuming she has one on, of course. I have a good look, and she does; I can make out the faint shape of straps under her thin blouse.
“’Bye Debs darlin’.”
He pulls open one of the glass doors and motions me through and then from close proximity he gives me a wink that touches every possible area of his beautiful face. My legs stop moving on the top step outside and he passes me.
I’m looking at a rear view of faded blue jeans, veldskoens, an open necked shirt of pale blue striped cotton, sleeves rolled up. I’m looking at muscular forearms and a lean body inside the shirt. And inside the jeans. Tessa, you complete ninny. How come you’re just admitting this to yourself now? Have you always known this in some corner of your soul, been blind through sheer naivety and now, today, this instant, you’ve put Debbie’s, Sherrie’s, Karen Melton’s and Rosie’s eyes on like a pair of glasses?
The morning sun reflected off the polished bonnet of the car is dazzling me. He’s waiting by the driver’s door, wondering why I’ve stalled. I force my legs into gear and run.
He drives easily through the traffic of the city, relaxed but watchful, eyes flicking from the road ahead to the mirror above him, to the side mirrors, and before he changes lanes he glances over his shoulder like a motorcyclist. I watch every move out of the corner of my right eye, watch his hands caressing the leather steering wheel and the gear shift and have thoughts I absolutely shouldn’t have. Oh yes, I do reckon I’ve always known. Well, not always. Since that day we hacked out together, the physical contact, the electrocution and the ache. I’ve buried it without even realising I’m doing so because there’s been no sense in reflecting on it. It can’t be acted upon so best to ignore it and move on. And that’s what I’m going to do now.
Turn. Look out of the passenger window. Don’t let him see, or even sense, that something’s going on in your head. Those hands are spoken for. You can’t have them. Sherrie Fletcher has them. You have Danny’s, if you want them.
If he wonders why I’ve gone silent, he doesn’t show it.
Salisbury is thronging with people going about their business. Pedestrians are threading their way amongst the traffic with single-minded determination and apparent lack of self-preservation. It’s like nothing has changed since Independence and it’s hard to believe this is a brand new country, painfully born with a bloody struggle and now falteringly taking its first steps in the world.
My car and Dad’s car have handle operated windows. This one doesn’t. I probe a button in the arm rest beside me and admit a blast of warm, fresh air that lifts my hair across my face so that I have to catch it and clutch it in my left hand. Out on the open road, beyond the city’s limits, the air is scented with the sweet smokiness of farm compounds. The rich, red loam has yielded good crops for these farms; the tops of the maize plants are already out of reach of a tall man and the cobs on them are fat.
He turns his head and looks at me but I don’t respond. He fumbles in a compartment in the console between us without taking his eyes off the road and extracts a cassette, which he flips over with a brief glance and slides into the stereo unit. We get The Jackson Five, and they’re competing with the road and wind noise coming through my open window. I know I’m messing up the effect of the air con but I need this rush of wind. It lifts my depression, just fractionally, but enough to make me want to keep it going. I want it to blow my eyelashes and my hair while I lean against the head rest and take in the unlimited, empty blue sky of Africa, the lush summer vegetation, the ochre and grey rock formations that have scattered themselves on either side of the road like the abandoned building blocks of a giant child. The Hunyani hills are blue and mauve on the horizon.
The Mercedes hugs the tarmac, whispering past the smoky compounds that are dotted between the stretches of cultivation, past rich paddocks grazed by prime Friesland herds, and the hills creep closer. Between two tracks on the tape he asks if I’m thirsty. I am, and we pull into the petrol station at the junction with the road that leads over the hills to the western reaches of Lake McIlwaine. He parks to one side, away from the pumps. A middle-aged woman standing beside her Toyota pick-up while the pump attendant cleans the windscreen watches us walk past her to the kiosk and I fancy that she’s admiring him and wondering if we’re an item. I step a little closer to him because I want to enjoy this. Why not? It’s harmless, even though I said I was going to ignore it.
She’s paying the attendant when we come back out with our bottles of Fanta and in her line of sight I get all impulsive and clink mine against his in a toast – “Here’s to a good day out!”
“Oh yeah, cheers!” He looks surprised and pleased but I hope to God he doesn’t think I’m just real strange. We get back into the car. I’m foolish. I shouldn’t have done it.
The pumping station site is just north of Hartley, on the route of the new pure water pipeline to a reservoir in the town. Some sections of the line have already been laid, Nathan explains, and so far only the floor of the structure has been cast. Labourers are tightening props on the barricade of steel formwork that surrounds it and there’s a lot of shouting coming from the direction of the concrete batching plant.
“It’s deep. Are they going to do the walls now, then? The crane looks ready for action.”
“Four metres below ground level. And yes. They’re doing the first lift today. Oh, there’s Mike…”
Mike is in the shadow of the tower crane, yelling something up to the driver. He reacts to Nathan’s hollered greeting by holding up a hand, and carries on yelling. I’m sure the crane driver can’t hear what he’s saying. I’m not keen on Mike. He’s loud and full of himself and he sometimes comes into the office wearing a T-shirt identifying himself as a Chick Magnet. I don’t think so.
I recognise the resident engineer too but his name escapes me. Small, wiry, fair haired and red faced, he comes galloping out of one of the site huts with an A4 hard-backed book in his hand and is breathless as he congratulates us for coming at just the right time. Mike chooses to grace us with his presence and the three of them talk at length about mixes and slumps. Now Charles has told me about such things so I act all knowledgeable but there are far more interesting things going on down in the gaping hole on my left.
The crane has hoisted up a skip of fresh concrete and it’s swinging towards us. Two labourers astride the formwork grab it and jostle it and one of them jerks its base open, allowing the liquid concrete to spew out and rattle down into the cage of reinforcement. Together they give the skip a good shake, one of them raises a thumb and it soars aloft to be returned to the mixer. A third man hauls on a buzzing poker vibrator and drops its nose into the wet mass, lifts it out, drops it in again. I can’t imagine what sort of sensation travels up his arms when that thing hits the steel bars in there. It sure as hell produces a ghastly screech and I must be pulling a face because Mike says, “Sets your teeth on edge, huh?”
Nathan is also watching the vibrator man. “Fingernails on the blackboard. By the way, Mike, you need to tell that guy with the poker to wear a hard hat, hey. Get someone to fetch him one.”
Mike shouts with laughter and slaps his right knee with the open palm of the same hand.
“I wouldn’t worry about him. That kaffir’s a long way from being the sharpest knife. I’d be more concerned about the damage to my skip if it drops on his head!”
He sniggers, beams, waits for us to appreciate his joke. The RE has gone an even brighter red and Nathan’s face is a still, expressionless shield like it always used to be. When he speaks, his tone is not expressionless – it’s acid.
“Don’t give me that bullshit. You will be concerned about damage when it’s your head that rolls if there’s an accident. Get the man a hat, Mike.”
The foreman pouts and withdraws and we’re left staring after him. Nathan catches my eye and when he speaks his tone is once more engaging.
“Let’s show Tessa some of the drawings Tom. Then we should talk about the calcs for the thrust blocks and that fuel issue.”
Tom, that’s his name. Tom.
Tom is keen and rushes ahead of us into the timber site hut. It’s like stepping into a sauna and even when he’s flung open all the windows, the stagnant, soggy air doesn’t move a millimetre. He distributes iced water and I rest the insides of my wrists against the glass before drinking any. Cools the blood, I was told once, but I reckon it’s an urban myth or a tall tale spawned by one of my grandmothers. Half an hour of engineering drawings and bar bending schedules passes and I can confirm my interest is inversely proportional to the amount of sweat I’m producing. I can feel it trickling down my lower spine and along the insides of my arms. This isn’t something a girl should admit to, but I do in the hope that the information will serve a purpose. It’s not cool outside, but it’s the better option.
“Bloody disgusting,” Tom agrees. “At lunch times and afternoon break times when I was on the sewage treatment works site at Gwelo I used to take my book and sit inside one of the ten-fifty diameter concrete pipes we’d laid for the incoming line from the intake works. It was about ten degrees cooler than on the surface and there always seemed to be a breeze drifting through.”
We down the glasses and make for the door. Nathan says, “Good one, Tom. I’d never have thought of that. Right. Come, Tessa. Let’s check on progress here and then get back to Salisbury.”
A pathetic waft of air lifts my hair fractionally away from my neck and stirs my blouse. The sunlight is achingly bright after the interior of the hut so I move my sunglasses down into position from the top of my head. The workforce is still busy with the concrete pour and all the men are wearing hats, including Mike.
Next to me – very close next to me, so the hairs on my forearm tell me – he reads my mind.
“Don’t take any notice of that idiot, Mike. He’s only been with the company a short time and at the rate he’s going his time will remain short. I don’t care for him and neither does Charles. Did you find the morning interesting, though? Useful?”
It was interesting, genuinely, but how to phrase it so it doesn’t sound like I’m just trying to be polite? I turn a few words around in my head and catch myself staring at his body and wondering why he can’t undo the buttons on his shirt a bit. He might feel cooler. I’m on the brink of saying, look, I’d like to come out here again with you, soon, so I can see how the work’s progressing, when that grating, angry vibrator-hitting-steel-bar sound slots his words onto my tongue instead of my own.
“Ouch. Like fingernails down a blackboard at school. That’s what you said.”
The present can so easily, with one word, be shoved aside by another time, another place. It happens to me now. Blackboard. How do I link Nathan Owen with a blackboard at school? Lines. Lines we had to write.
We must all learn to be honest and admit to our mistakes.
We must consider the implications of our actions and how they might endanger others.
Ten years ago, but so like yesterday. Mr Westfield and the momentous collapse of the judges’ tent. The ensuing chaos, and me staring directly into Nathan’s eyes across the heads of the other children and almost hearing his thoughts:
I know you think I did it!
Before I have a chance to register what I’m doing, I’ve halted and reached out for his left arm. This time it’s not some silly, concocted attempt to pretend he can be mine. It just happens.
“Hey! That makes me remember… You… Oh God.”
He’s hindered by my clinging and is by turns uncomprehending, amused, amazed and then concerned.
“What? Tessa? What’s up?”
“I have a question for you. Why has neither of us, in all these years, ever once made reference to that gala? You must remember The Gala – capital T, capital G? The day the tent… Yes. You do, don’t you?”
You. I can see that you do. The vision is dancing between us. When you draw your forearm in closer to your waist, I get pulled in with it and of course I do nothing to resist. Your voice is so soft it’s like a whisper, your eyes over the top of my head.
“You know, when things went wrong in class, like someone got hit by a piece of rubber flicked from a ruler, or perhaps a stink bomb got let off or something went missing and turned up in an odd place, the teachers always suspected me. I don’t know why, because I never had any such inclinations, or even thoughts about such inclinations. And I didn’t care about myself enough to protest my innocence.”
This isn’t what I’d intended with my dredging up of the past. I wanted us to have a laugh but the memory has hurt you.
“I’m sorry.”
You lower your head and search my face.
“Sorry? Why?”
“For making you remember things you might not…”
We’re both trapped against each other, knowing there’s so much unsaid. So much unknown. I don’t understand your past fully, I’m afraid, but I do know that I understand you. You’re whole to me now, not a series of disconnected, unfathomable parts and disjointed, meaningless exchanges of dialogue.
“I didn’t care about myself or anyone else in those days so why would I try to make trouble? I would’ve had nothing to gain by playing pranks. No-one ever proved I was the culprit and usually the whole class was punished by having to write lines in detention, or whatever, just like the whole school after that gala debacle. I knew who tied the car to the table but I couldn’t be arsed to do anything about it because it was nothing to me. I can’t blame the teachers. I didn’t do anything to help myself, did I? Always the one no-one could figure out. It’s because…”
Both of us know you’re not going to finish that sentence.
“I saw you near the tent, but…”
“You didn’t think I’d done it.”
A statement, not a question.
“No. Even then, when you were a complete stranger to me. I couldn’t imagine you doing such a thing, if you must know. When the Headmaster demanded information from anyone who had seen anything I didn’t squeal.”
“I know you didn’t. And I was more grateful than you can imagine. I said no-one could figure me out, but you saw something nobody else did, didn’t you? I mean… I don’t… it’s just… Well, that’s what I always thought. Maybe you didn’t and I was imagining it.”
“No. You weren’t.”
For a few beats you’re silent and I’m conscious of the dampness of your shirt against my forearm. You give me the gentlest of pushes and we disentangle.
“I know whodunnit if you really want to know?”
All traces of the uncomfortable recollections have been wiped from behind your eyes. There’s a daring, conspiratorial twist to your mouth.
“Go on then. Who?”
“It was twin brothers who were in Standard Five at the time. Robin and Edward Napier. One of their classmates… er… oh God… no, his name escapes me but I can see him like it was yesterday… was in on the conspiracy as well and I spotted Robin and this other guy standing in front of that tent whispering. They stayed there for some minutes and there was something very shifty about the way they kept looking behind them. Edward appeared in between them and then they all scarpered. It was the mid afternoon break, wasn’t it? I was all on my own and I couldn’t resist a quick scout around the tent to try and find out what they’d been up to, but I was actually petrified that I would be caught so I didn’t hang about. I didn’t spot that they’d tied the table to that car. I wasn’t on my own though, was I?”
No. You found me up there on the stand and I remember wishing myself a long, long way away from the school.
“To be honest I never saw you as the letting off stink bombs type. Although Mr Parker was. Were you there when he prepared some hydrogen sulphide on Parents’ Day and placed a beaker of the stuff near the lab doors so that the gas permeated the entire corridor, or was it after you left?”
“Did he, the old reprobate? No, I don’t remember that.”
You’re edging towards the car.
“Come on, you. Let’s get some lunch.”
This is turning out to be the oddest of days. We make small talk on the short journey back into Hartley. You tell me that Barry and his wife and kids, including a new baby daughter, have left for Australia, did I know? I did, I say, Gill told me last week. I can conjure up that day I met Barry for the first time. It would have been after the infamous gala, but when, amongst all these memories? Memories of the 1970s, one of Gill’s many birthday parties, Barry starting National Service in the RLI. You, Nathan, there but not there, watching me watching you. And the spectre of the war – a spectre that somehow wasn’t quite malevolent enough to make us realise just how far gone the situation was.
Barry survived the war, unlike so many. Unlike Julie Foster’s boyfriend, who never even got to be drafted.
“A work friend of my father’s emigrated with his family back in September. Dad used to call him The Android but they were good mates. Uncle Dudley and Aunty Pauline, I call them. Uncle Dudley got offered a job in Klerksdorp, which is sort of west of Jo’burg, I think. One of his daughters had a boyfriend who died in a land mine incident in the Eastern Highlands while he was still at school.”
You cluck your tongue. “Senseless. Utterly senseless conflict. Lots leaving now though, like some sort of Exodus. Rats and sinking ships come to mind, although to be fair the ship hasn’t actually started sinking yet.”
“Lots think it will. Jess Marsh has gone. She got a provisional place at the University of Cape Town, subject to the results of her M Levels. Did you meet her? She wants to teach maths. She was my best friend at school and I never thought we’d be separated. It’s the end of an era.”
“Will the last person to leave the country please turn out the lights.”
You move your left hand down to the gear shift and for a crazy second I think you’re going to put it on my knee. You’ve taken your watch off and there’s a pale band on the skin of your wrist where it normally sits.
“I’ve heard you talk about Jess. She was the swimming champ?”
Swimming champ and academic and friend. We helped each other, learned from each other, fell out sometimes, but always knew the other was always there.
“Jess-and-Tess, we were known as. I don’t mind admitting we cried like babies together the evening before she left. How stupid is that? She’s only gone south of the border.”
“Of course you’ll see her again,” you reassure me. “The world is getting smaller. Travel is easy.”
True. But nothing in Africa is certain, is it? She was certain that we’d see each other again at my wedding, but I’m not going to tell you that. It’s a step too far. She was bemused by my lack of comprehension, giving me what’s known as a searching look.
“When you and Danny get hitched? Come on Tessa, it must have crossed your mind, surely?”
When I changed the subject I could see her thinking about dragging me back to it, but she didn’t.
Your hand is still there right next to me and I tuck both of mine under my thighs to remove any possibility of me taking hold of it. Not that I would do such a thing. I babble on a bit about Jess’s letters, her descriptions of the Cape coastal scenery that made me ask why she never considered a career as a travel writer, her curiosity about the mixed up, muddled up South African politics.
“We’ve debated the Rhodesians-never-die-they-just-fade-away-and-become-South-Africans thing at home many times, Tessa. I’m not sure why so many Rhodies are flocking Down South, to be honest. South Africa’s a pariah as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Don’t you think its time as the last white-ruled bastion in Africa is nearly over?”
Precisely. And it’s where Danny wants to go, with me.
“What about you? You’re not going to disappear Down South are you?”
My eyes flick up to your face, but you’re only focussed on the road ahead. Expert horseman and expert driver and expert reader of thoughts. Your hand goes back to the wheel.
“Me? No. No chance.”
Just outside Hartley there’s a small, untidy roadside store. The pale blue paint is flaking off its walls in between tattered advertising posters to reveal the grey-green plaster underneath and there’s a collection of mismatching, tired looking trolleys in a log-jam amongst dented railings next to the entrance.
The interior is dark after the glaring brightness of the car park, and it’s busy. Shoppers are threading round and stepping over both upright and flattened cardboard stock boxes. We’ve arrived at shelf filling time, but most of the shelves appear to be empty. I blink, trying to accustom my eyes to the gloom and nearly bump into you at the head of an aisle.
Looking down at me over your shoulder, you ask, “Ideas for lunch?”
In here? It’s not a very inspiring place if you’re thinking gastronomy. We come out with a couple of packets of Willards crisps and some chocolate bars. Back in the car I declare that maybe the chocolate wasn’t a sensible choice.
You watch me lick my fingers and the palm of my hand, then announce that you’re still famished.
“I’ll go back in and get some pork pies. Do you like them? Provided they’re actually in the refrigerated section of course. If not, I’ll give it a miss and eat back at the ranch.”
I’m not going to sit waiting in this oven of a car, so I get out and lean against the passenger door. There’s no shade; the sun’s directly overhead, but, as I discovered when we left the site hut, the heat’s marginally more bearable in the open. Away to the north there are ghost images of thunderclouds, just visible through the bluish haze.
Ten minutes later, handing me a Colcom pork pie in a box, you tell me, “I apologise that it’s not a particularly nutritious lunch. Let’s eat these on the road. No point hanging about here when we can have air conditioning.”
Sometimes life throws up such simple pleasures. I get to slice your pie, crudely with the penknife from the glovebox, and hand the pieces to you. My lid is well and truly flipped.
For a while you drive and I watch the world go by without actually registering what I’m seeing. Then, just as I’m inventing a conversation I’ll hold with Danny tonight on the phone that will get me out of seeing too much of him this weekend, you ask, “Are you still going out with Danny? I haven’t seen him for a while.”
How does this keep happening? I get elation and despair in equal measures, bombarding all regions of my head and body and respond rather stupidly, shrugging, opening and closing my mouth, studying my hands because I can’t look at you. I use up a few moments by wiping the knife with a tissue from my pocket, pulling open the glove compartment and replacing the knife.
What am I supposed to say? Launch into an analysis of all that’s wrong with my relationship and conclude with a jolly account of that disastrous night club affair two weeks ago? I haven’t even told Gill or Jess about that debacle yet. Patching things up with Chipo in the Dunking Donut last Saturday was bad enough. I’ve never seen her so tongue-tied or dejected, determined to prove she’d never set out to deliberately deceive me, telling me how scared she’d been of my reaction to Paul’s background. I sat there thinking, how can friends be scared of saying things to each other? Remember me and Jess and sex? We didn’t know what to say to each other about that did we? The older you get, the more complicated your relationships, for sure.
Danny did try to make it up to me when he invited me to that braaivleis at Eric Blakey’s place, but I had show jumping at Lewisham Riding School the next day. He asked me why I was refusing his invitation for Saturday when the show was on Sunday. I tried to be patient. I explained my training regime of giving each horse a couple of hours of nice steady exercise the morning before. I said, why don’t we go to the braai later in the afternoon? But no. If he couldn’t go at lunchtime he didn’t want to go at all. He didn’t go as far as saying my plans were a damned nuisance, but that’s clearly what they were. I tried to decide if it was his intolerance or my selfishness that was the issue. I didn’t come to a conclusion either way.
No reason to recite all this. I stutter some words like oh, um, yes, well, it’s. Then I dry up.
“He’ll be coming to the wedding?”
An age ago, when I accepted Mr and Mrs Charles Owen’s formal invitation to Miss Tessa Harmand and Mr Daniel Proctor, he said of course he’d be there. It was exciting to receive the invite even though I’m chief bridesmaid and my attendance is obligatory. I assume Mr Nathan Owen, best man, was an invitation item with Miss Sherrie Fletcher.
My defensive self wants to say, “Yes, of course,” but my cold-light-of-day self butts in and comes up with “I really don’t know.”
You don’t reply. After five minutes or so, you flip the cassette in the tape deck. Jimmy Cliff and Stand Up and Fight Back is followed by Steve Harley pleading to someone, somewhere, to come up and see him and make him smile.
“You can’t say I don’t have a variety of music on my tapes,” you say to me.
Smile? All I want to do is cry.
*
This hot stillness is flat and unyielding. Why do air conditioning units break down when they’re most needed?
I’m not sure how much more of this I can tolerate – my clothes sticking to my skin, my hand damp against the paper as I write. I don’t think I could sweat any more if I tried. I close the blinds to keep the searing glare off my paperwork but that makes the office even more claustrophobic and oven-like. This depression I can’t shake off isn’t helping.
I push back my chair, get up and sidle over to the window. Pulling the blinds apart a crack lets in a band of dazzling white light. Squinting, I see a few lethargic pedestrians, no traffic and a whitish sky with a couple of small, woolly clouds suspended above the south-eastern horizon.
Maybe a cold drink will do something for me. The remnants of the coffee Sylvester made for me this morning have well and truly dried on the base of my mug.
It’s a bit cooler in the green-tiled corridor, and silent. The kitchenette is empty. Poor Sylvester is most likely sweating in a queue at Southerton Post Office. After I’ve had something to drink I’ll go home because, unlike him, I’m lucky enough to get flexi-time.
The hot water doesn’t seem to be working again. I’ll boil some in the kettle to wash out my mug. With a glass of orange squash in my hand, I lean against the counter to wait for the battered white enamel kettle to do its thing, my brain in idle-mode, roving around the tiny room. The surfaces in here are spotless; there’s not a trace of a drop of spilt tea or coffee nor a ghost of a mug ring anywhere. Sylvester must work at it twenty times a day.
Idle-mode gaze gets round to the north-facing window and takes a sharp snap back into reality-mode. The sky out there is nothing like the one I’ve just seen from my office. My dark mood and foreboding feelings are all out there, piled up. Squadrons of them. Tall, dense cloud masses, black with silvery crests, are billowing up into the clear sky across the field of my vision and merging together at their bases into a dark grey haze that reaches down to the horizon. They’re very distant, but it’s impossible to tell how fast they’re travelling.
Check my watch. Three-thirty. I flick up the wall switch and the faint hissing from the kettle subsides. The water will be hot enough. A squirt of washing-up liquid and nearly-boiled water will do for now. Back in my office, I shove papers into a flat file, put that and another few files away on the shelf and gather up my bag and my holdall. The weekend has begun.
I’d better tell someone I’m going. Charles is out and said he’s not coming back here today, Debbie will see me go but won’t care or be bothered to pass a message on, so it will have to be you, Nathan. Honestly, I’d rather slink out without seeing you. You’re inextricably linked to my miserable turmoil through no fault of your own. No choice, though.
I ease open the door to your office and poke my head around it. You’re engrossed in adding up a string of numbers, punching at the buttons of a calculator with one forefinger while following the lines of figures with the other. As soon as you become aware of my presence, you glance up briefly from under your eyebrows and I get the silent message, “Hold on, I’ll be with you in a sec.”
I hover near the door until you jab at the equals button and exclaim, “Ah!” in a tone of deep satisfaction, then raise your eyes to me.
“It must be an omen.”
“An omen…?” With black clouds matching black moods still in my mind, I leave the question trailing.
“I have added up all the prices on this monster Bill of Quantities twice in a row and got the same answer each time. It’s a miracle. A sign.”
It’s difficult not to laugh at your awed expression.
“A sign of what, do you think?”
“A sign that, er… well… how am I supposed to know? I’m not an nganga.”
I jerk a thumb over my shoulder. “Well I’ve just seen a sign. Distinctly ominous thunderclouds heading this way. I shall foretell that there will be an almighty storm in the near future. I thought I’d go now, actually, to try and beat it home. Okay?”
“Of course.” Your eyes and voice are soft. “See you over the weekend?”
“Probably. At the stables. ’Bye.”
I’m just closing the door when you call out, “Oh, Tessa, wait.” Leaning back into the office I watch you come around from behind the desk and lean one elbow on top of a steel filing cabinet.
“This should’ve been said so long ago and never was, but thanks for not splitting on me after you’d seen me behaving suspiciously at that gala. I can still see you now, up there on the stands. A little blonde girl with an absolutely horrified expression and eyes boring into my brain. I did try to tell you it wasn’t me.”
Simultaneously we both make a fractional move towards each other and then both have second thoughts.
“It’s a good thing I didn’t split on you, Mr Owen, since it turns out you were innocent all the time. It still remains The Greatest Mystery That Ever Was. I’ll bet old Mr Westfield still has nightmares about it.”
“Mr Westfield!” you breathe, almost in wonder. “I’d forgotten his name. God, that was a long time ago. Like a past life. Well, there was always going to be a storm today I guess. It’s been building up all day. Off you go then, Tess.”
Out in reception, Debbie ignores me as she clatters away on her typewriter with customary speed. I reciprocate, and my eyes are drawn to the painting above her. It’s been thrown into relief by the afternoon sun and I visualise the footprints of my imagination treading along the dusty road in the centre of the scene. What does lie around that corner? Is it the answer to my dilemma?
I turn my back on it and Debbie and get out.
Opening the door of my car releases a blast of super-heated air that hits me with physical force. I throw my bags across onto the passenger seat and slide in, gasping as my hands touch the burning, black leather steering wheel cover. I’ve been known to aspire to having leather upholstery in the past, but right now I’m being thankful this is linen.
Holding the wheel with finger nails only, I start the engine and ease into reverse by gripping the gear shift itself instead of placing my hand over the top of the knob, so I don’t get 1-2-3-4-R branded onto my palm. I don’t have the luxury of either air-con or electric controls in this one so I have to lie across the passenger seat and wind down that side window, then my own. I set all the air vents wide and join the traffic stream, laying my head back against the headrest.
The northern sky is even darker than it was fifteen minutes ago. I’m sure I’m not imaging things. The traffic is light at this time of the afternoon, so twenty minutes later I’m home, although even that was too long in this Datsun Greenhouse.
Rosie’s out at her tennis club. How frighteningly energetic of her, I think as, clad in shorts and a sleeveless top, I take a glass of granadilla juice out to the patio and settle in one of the loungers. My ice tinkles satisfactorily, it’s shady here, and relatively cool in a faint breeze that’s found its way under the eaves.
“Are you all right, dear?” Mum calls from within the house. “You’re very quiet.”
“I’m fine thanks. Just hot,” I shout back, and close my eyes.
*
On such still air, the storm takes its time coming. Dad and Rosie come home in turn and it’s only when the red-gold sun has sunk below the horizon and the daylight is fading with customary swiftness that the first low rumbles of thunder reach out from the north like a bass note to the shrill song of the cicadas. After sunset, the indirect heat is pleasantly warm and enveloping and I stay outside until the mosquitoes emerge, whining for my blood in the enclosing dusk.
The grumbling voice of the storm is, for a long time, infrequent and muted, although lightning plays continually at the cloud bases. As the evening wears on the thunder rolls begin to follow each lightning dagger with an ever-diminishing time delay, booming endlessly into the distance.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Mum persists again later.
“Yes,” I lie again.
What can I say? She’s so locked into the idea that her daughter is happy with her perfect boyfriend that the concept of any real conflict in the relationship will be beyond her. She has no clue that I knew this has been coming; I’ve never told her of any of my doubts, any of the tensions. She won’t believe I’m learning to accept the fact that my first serious romance is simply fading away. She’ll try to reassure me, tell me that we’ll get over it. She’s delighted with him and so should I be.
So what do I do? If I let Danny go I’ll have no-one, and to cap it all I’ve fallen prey to a ludicrous crush on someone I can never have. Am I doomed to an embittered spinsterhood, forever mourning lost love? The Miss Havisham of Salisbury?
Over and over in my head, like a stuck record, I keep telling myself I’ve known Nathan Owen for a little over ten years. Why do I now suddenly think I’m in love with him?
I’m not. It’s just that – a ludicrous crush.
In bed, I snuggle into the pillow and relax, but sleep won’t come. The storm is still grumbling away, threatening but never any closer. Perhaps it will go away. A cooler breath of wind feels its way through my window into the warm stillness. Fitful at first, the breath becomes a steady flow that rustles the leaves of the trees and then, during a brief lull, I hear the first large raindrops seep from sodden clouds and splash onto the earth.
It goes on for a while; intermittent plops on the roof tiles and in the trees outside. Then it all ceases and after a few minutes the cicadas tentatively start up their shrilling again. With one eye I watch the merest hint of a breeze caress the curtains. I close the eye and all is peaceful.
Next second I’m upright in bed, clutching the sheet, heart pounding, the blinding flash and the single whiplash of lightning and thunder together gone before I even open my eyes. There’s a hissing roar from outside. The curtains billow like sails and through the gap the trees that should be visible at the edge of the garden have dissolved behind a misty veil.
Fall out of bed, slam the window shut against the deluge. From the rest of the household, voices, footsteps, metallic banging, laughing, swearing.
At each thunderclap the rain intensifies as if the violent movement of air has squeezed the clouds like sponges. A new sound; the gurgling and splashing of the rainwater pouring through the downpipes from the roof gutters onto the concrete moulds before being channelled away to the stormwater pipes. Together in Mum and Dad’s bedroom we watch pools of water forming on the lawn and in the flower beds. The drainage ditches each side of the road will fill and become miniature raging torrents, pouring through the culverts and emptying into the natural watercourses down on the vlei.
It passes. Back in bed, I can’t believe the drop in temperature and haul the blanket back up over me. Cleo materialises out of the darkness and purrs and kneads next to my shoulders. She plonks down and yawns expansively, extending one paw to sink her claws into the blanket. The deluge has eased to a drizzle, leaving the spluttering gurgle of the drainpipes that much louder. The ripping brilliance of the lightning has died to a soft flicker, only occasionally followed by a rumble.
*
How long have I been asleep? Cleo has gone. I slide out of bed and re-open the window, setting it as wide as it will go. There’s a fresh smell and the drizzle has stopped, but something’s still dripping somewhere outside. A car swishes past in the road. The omen has run its course and my mind is as clear as the sky, which is now awash with bright stars after the last of the tattered clouds has trailed away.