The end of Eden began in a dream. It was dark and hot. I was fourteen years old and it was December. I can always remember the geometry of that house, but never the details. I can’t remember the view, or if there was a window in the room.
There was a time when home was a place with an address. All the post arrived there, and the telephone number stayed the same for so long I thought it would never change. I still remember that number: 843-005.
Trees abounded in the suburb where we lived, giant and generous avocado trees; jacarandas with juicy purple petals that squelched under car tyres in the spring. Our house was on the top of a hill, just north of the city, which I could see hugging the shoreline in a great sleepy curve from my bedroom window.
But there were no trees here. This was not my bedroom. This was not my bed. I don’t remember the view from the window. I remember only that my body was lying in tune with the river in that bed on the south side of the house, closest to the Umgeni River. The only remarkable thing about that house was that it was close to the bird park. My aunt and uncle had rented it as an interim measure in a time of financial need, which they were praying would be temporary. It’s amazing how long temporary can be. My aunt’s hair turned grey in that house.
I see the room from above, like a bird – like one of the big grey hadedas that flocked about the banks of the muddy, red Umgeni. Big, hulking African birds they were. Sometimes, when I was alone in the house, I would have conversations with those strange-shaped birds with their big bodies and their long thin beaks. Not many things could make me laugh when I was fourteen. But the hadedas could – just by being there. So awkward and ancient and out of place – like they’d been left behind by the dodos and the dinosaurs.
‘Ha-de-dah,’ they’d call out in plaintive ribbons of sound.
‘Ha-de-dahhhhh,’ I’d yell back to them, extended ribs straining against the tight bodice of my new school uniform.
‘Ha-de-dahhhh,’ they’d reply, loud and wild. ‘We’re still here. We’re still here.’
In the room was the bed in which I had the dream. It was a single bed with brass knobs and a white cotton cover intricately embroidered with petite flower patterns – ‘broderie anglaise’ they called it in domestic science – pretty and remote now, from a polyester world. My head lay to the east, nearest to the sea – the big, warm, wavy Indian Ocean. I remember the alignment. My body lay on the same longitude as the river, which flows from high up in the Drakensberg Mountains – the holy heights of the ancient green mountains of Zululand to the sea and beyond.
How warm and slightly wet I felt beneath the hot covers. Hot breath and damp nape of neck in the quiet, humid darkness. And that awful aching feeling between my fourteen-year-old thighs – an adolescent ache for all the beyond that lay on the other side of the sea, far, far away. Under the inconstant rhythms of the straggling late night traffic on Umgeni Road, the broken exhaust pipes and sudden angry accelerations, I imagined the flow of the river and beneath it, the constant low hum of earth. I remember what it was like to lie in that bed and dream. Umgeni. Hadeda. ‘Lala kahle, umfaan. Tula baba, tulantwana. Tula baba, tulantwana.’ Even while dreaming that dream, I knew it was coming true.
I dreamed that my mother was dead and speaking to me from the grave. She looked like herself, but also like a child. In the dream I was hysterical with loss, so empty that not even gravity could hold me. My body kept rising up to the ceiling. And I kept screaming and crying and railing against the injustice of destiny. Begging for somebody to pull me down again. But my screams didn’t seem to reach my mother or affect her. She was present, but gone. She just stood there smiling neutrally, as if she was beyond the tragedy of her own death.
When I awoke I tried to forget the dream. It was summer in Durban and I was staying with my aunt and uncle while my parents were away in London on holiday. All the girls in my new standard seven class at Girl’s College were in a frenzy about who to take to the end-of-term party. One afternoon, I was sitting in the lounge agonising with my aunt about what I was going to wear, when the phone rang. My aunt answered.
‘How’s London?’ But then after a while, her tone seemed to change slightly. ‘Oh, I see ...’. And then she suddenly she seemed jolly again. ‘Right. Okay, fine. No problem. Right, I’ll pass you on to her then ... It’s your father on the phone. He’s got some news for you.’ I took the receiver.
‘Hello, Dad. How’s it going over there?’
‘Hello, my darling. How are you doing? How did your exams go?’
‘I’m not sure yet. We haven’t got our marks back. How’s London?’
‘I can’t even describe how beautiful it is. It’s even more fabulous than we could have dreamed of. And yesterday, it snowed! You wouldn’t believe how brilliant everything looks in the snow.’
‘How’s Mummy?’
‘She’s fine.’
‘Can I speak to her?’
‘Not right now. She’s just taken a walk to the shops. But listen, I’ve got a surprise for you guys. We’ve decided that we want you two to join us for Christmas.’
‘I thought you’d be home by then.’
‘Yes, but it’s just so beautiful here, we thought we could have our first white Christmas together as a family. So as soon as school is over, you and James are going to be flying over to London to join us.’
‘Wow, I don’t know what to say. London!’
‘Make sure you bring lots of jerseys. It’s freezing here.’
Christmas in London. Nothing strange about that, I kept telling myself. Snow and holly and mistletoe. I tried to recall these things from story books and movies. Famous Five and Secret Seven. Yorkshire pudding, mince pies, scarves and mittens. But outside the Umgeni was thick and muddy, the water running feebly down the centre of the riverbed, leaving the banks exposed and red against the golf course’s mowed plains of green grass. It was a still, humid Thursday afternoon and I had nobody to take to the end-of-term dance. My friend, Helen, was starting to volunteer her coolly aloof older brothers. Nothing felt right.
The dance came and went like a fever, and one day in mid-December my brother and I were dropped off at Louis Botha International Airport. Nothing international about it in those days. We waved goodbye and were ushered through the gate at departures by an air hostess wearing a blue-and-orange scarf and stuck smile fixed with pink lipstick.
I sucked on a nauseating lime-flavoured Lifesaver for take-off, sticking my tongue through the absence in the centre until it stung with tiny cuts. The whole way through the safety instructions mime I tried to ignore a creeping nausea accompanied by the thought of being aloft and unable to get down from somewhere vast and empty. What would happen if my father was alone in the arrivals hall when we came through the gate? What if my mother wasn’t there? That would be a bad sign. I tried to think of something else. I put on my airline socks with their sleek flying springbok logos and focused on the choice between Chicken à la King and Beef Curry and Rice written in gold cursive on the menu card.
Then, to cancel out the sign, I made a deal with myself. If my father was alone, there was still hope. There had to be another reason for it. But only one. If he was alone, the reason had to be that he had come to collect us in a Rolls-Royce because he wanted to surprise us. So if my father was waiting for us alone at international arrivals, I wouldn’t panic. I’d wait until we reached the garage where the car was parked and if there was no Rolls-Royce there, then I’d know for sure. I didn’t know where the idea of the Rolls-Royce came from. But I knew for certain that if the Rolls-Royce wasn’t there, we were in serious trouble. I couldn’t have stacked the odds against myself any higher. I’d never even seen a Rolls-Royce other than in my father’s old copies of Motor Sports magazine that lay in a slowly ascending pile next to the toilet in the upstairs bathroom at home.
When my brother and I came through the gates at Heathrow my father was waiting alone.
There was no Rolls-Royce in the parking garage.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said to my father whose expression changed suddenly from jaunty to carrying all the sadness of the world in his eyes.
‘She’s got cancer, hasn’t she?’
‘How did you know?’
‘I don’t know. I just knew.’
My brother had always been a bit bewildered by the world, as if being born was too much of a shock. He had difficulty tying his shoelaces and seemed always to be spilling his Fanta on restaurant tablecloths. On family outings he would invariably get lost, or drop his soft-serve ice cream on the sea horse mosaic in the pavement at Nick Steyn’s water wonderland. My mother would spit on a paper napkin and wipe the chocolate off of his cheeks. And then there would be tears and it would be time to go home. Even as he grew older, he could never brush his curly blond hair into shape. He would wake up in the morning singing songs that nobody else knew the words to.
But now he was the contained one, strong in his silence and glued to the LCD screen of his electronic game console. Fixated with the small sequentially flashing objects, he tried again and again to beat his own record, as my father and I sat staring out of the rented apartment window onto the skeletons of trees in this strange snow-covered city, leaking arias.
Down the road from the apartment was a Russian restaurant where we went for dinner one night. The table seemed unbalanced. The legs were holding it up fine, but there was a white linen space where my mother should have been. The symmetry had gone out of things. Knives and forks stayed still in the place where she should have been, cold and metallic. Between Russian silences, we reassured each other that we were lucky. ‘She’s in the best possible hands,’ said my father, moving my brother’s Fanta glass away from the invisible rim of the hidden place mat. ‘What a blessing that we were in London when she found the lump. She’s getting the best possible medical attention here.’
We sat there eating our borscht and thinking of nothing but her. Then a string quartet began to play some sad old Russian tunes and the three of us burst out laughing at the same time. We laughed and laughed until we forgot why we’d started. But that cutlery never moved.
Every day we’d drive to the hospital. It was one of the first operations of its kind in the world – ‘conservative surgery’, they called it. It didn’t work.
My mother’s struggle lasted for three years. The remission and then the mastectomy. The septic wounds. The chemo. The vicious scars. The inescapable asymmetry. The hair loss. The depression. The hope. The scans. The lump. The op. The courage. The waiting. The check-ups. The treatment. The waiting. The tests. The courage. The vomiting. The bloating. The weakness. The unending hope. Our desperate belief in the face of her great suffering. And then one day it was over and she was gone.
She died on a Thursday morning shortly after my eighteenth birthday. Even the warm waves were still. After we left the hospital on South Beach, my father took the regular route back home. We passed the old run-down hotels on Gillespie Street. Instead of taking the freeway that runs along the edge of the sea, he took the city road that passed the drive-in across the road from the ice-rink and the huge cinema where we’d all seen Quest for Fire. We passed the sports stadium and the turn-off to the Lion Match factory. Then there was that mowed green stretch before the Umgeni, where we drove along the edge of the same golf course we’d passed every other day of our lives – as green, quiet and flat as ever. I noticed a black man bumbling in the bushes for a white man’s ball. The course was neatly mowed, as it was the day before and the week before. After the golf course we crossed the bridge over the Umgeni River and then I was finished with that dream and everything changed and kept on changing.