Leopold Blue Read online

  Contents

  Title page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Acknowledgements

  Rosie Rowell

  Copyright

  For Johnny

  CHAPTER ONE

  I lay across the middle of the Main Street. The sky above was a relentless blue. ‘Leopold blue’ was what Mum would have said were she not off making a nuisance of herself, but she was wrong. Leopold blue was the deep, fiery summer sky. This was a thin-lipped, wintery version, still waiting to be pumped with the warmth of spring. I rolled my head to the side. My sister Beth sat on the edge of the pavement, her head resting on her arms. Her long brown hair curtained over her legs, the curls limp with dust. Behind her and the row of rooftops, Bosmansberg loomed, a rolling wave caught in stone.

  In the last two hours there had been no evidence of life – not a human being, not a car, not even a drifting dog. Across the road Pep Stores advertised its Birthday Bonanza savings in yellow and blue. Yesterday, the last Saturday of July, the store had been bursting with farm workers on their monthly trip to town. The manager stood on the pavement with a loudspeaker and a boombox, inviting people in and laughing at his own jokes. Now the double doors were padlocked shut, an iron bar across the front. A Shoprite plastic bag humped off the pavement in a brief gust of air before settling back down.

  This morning I had opened my eyes to the same noises as yesterday, in the room I had slept in all my fifteeen and a quarter years, but today my bed – with its half scratched-off My Little Pony stickers – felt too small. The purple patchwork print curtains that hung limply in my window ridiculed me.

  Now, a sob slipped out, like trapped air needing to escape.

  Beth lifted her head. ‘What?’

  She didn’t feel the choking toxicity of the air here; she didn’t see that behind Bosmansberg, the rest of the world crackled and buzzed, while we remained caught in an endless empty afternoon.

  ‘Nothing.’ I stood up. ‘I’m going home.’

  ‘But nothing’s happened!’

  ‘You can’t play chicken when there aren’t any cars, Beth. It’s pathetic.’ An empty Fanta Grape can lay in front of me. I kicked it, ferociously. It clitter-clattered on the cement, unnaturally loud in the canyon of the Main Street.

  ‘Fine. I’m staying.’ Beth lay down in my abandoned spot with the air of a South African Joan of Arc – only there was nothing at stake. Dying of boredom, perhaps.

  After a few paces Beth popped up in front of me, hands curled under her armpits, flapping her arms. ‘Pu-u-u-u-k-puk-puk!’ She danced about, mimicking the throaty next-door rooster.

  Despite myself, I laughed.

  When she had finished, overplaying the joke as usual, we started together up the middle of the road, the last two people left in the world. A banner along the white-washed wall of the old Dutch Reformed church read ‘Leopold Flower Show 1993’. It actually read ‘Leopold Flower Show 1985’; a white page with the numbers 93 had been sticky-taped over the 85.

  Next to the church was the mechanics shop with its life-size cut-out of Naas Botha kicking his rugby ball into the window; and the library where tannie[*] Hester kept a stock of English romances for Mum, although she couldn’t bear them; and the pebble-dashed Volkskas bank.

  Beth stopped and sniffed the air. ‘Can you smell candyfloss?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. The town smelled musty, like a left-behind suitcase. It smelled of Sunday.

  ‘Let’s make milkshakes when we get home,’ she said.

  Even the Royal Hotel and its adjoining off-licence were deserted today. When we reached the Anglican church, I looked towards the sprinkling of gravestones in the churchyard. In the far right-hand corner, under a jacaranda tree, were four little crosses in a row. Between 1899 and 1902 a mother had lost four children in successive years. It was the saddest corner in the world. But that was Leopold.

  Beyond the church was the magistrate’s office and the bronze statue of the founder of our town, Johannes Basson Leopold, standing proud and tall. Prouder and taller, apparently, than in reality, but Dad said one couldn’t have one’s town founded by a little runt of a man. It wasn’t good for morale. The statue was a constant source of irritation to Mum, because the San bushmen were here a long time before Leopold and his ox wagons arrived, so the statue should be of a bushman. Of course bushmen weren’t particularly tall either.

  We passed the police station. The evil Rottweiler police dog, Kaptein, thumped his tail from his outstretched position on the front steps, but didn’t bother lifting his head.

  ‘Do you think Mum and Dad will be home when we get back?’

  ‘I don’t know, Beth.’

  ‘Do you think she is going to do this every weekend?’

  ‘How should I know?’ I snapped.

  ‘I hate Sundays without her and Dad. And Ronel’s mum says she is stirring up trouble.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She says all this talk about a deadly disease is upsetting the volk[*] and making the farmers angry with Mum.’

  I felt a familiar thud in my stomach. ‘So tell her.’

  Beth shot me a look. We both knew it would only invite a long lecture about social responsibility and righting the wrongs and AIDS is a reality and education is the only way. We’d heard it too many times.

  Dad blamed Mum’s social conscience on her bleeding-heart, lentil-eating leftie friends in England. But I thought she was being selfish – what was the point of spending your weekends travelling the countryside, visiting desperately poor people, only to tell them about a disease that was probably going to kill them and their children? How did that improve their quality of life? It was typical of Mum; no doubt she secretly likened herself to Princess Diana, when she was simply making everyone miserable.

  At the top of the Main Street we stopped and looked back down the length of the town. Nothing in this snapshot bedded us in the present. On an afternoon like this, Leopold’s dead seemed more alive than the living. If, with a blink, you could shift your focus, or change the lens, what ghosts would we see crossing the street? What would they stop and say to each other?

  ‘I’ve got to do a tourist brochure for English,’ Beth said. She was dyslexic and not much taken with school. When she was six, Dad had asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. She’d looked at him blankly and said, ‘Me.’ Beth didn’t need to be anything to complete her.

  ‘For where?’ I asked.

  ‘For Leopold, dummy.’

  ‘Jeez.’

  Only two events might entice a stranger to Leopold: the wild flower show in August, or the annual agricultural show in April. Other than that you would have to be very lost to wind up here. The town wasn’t signposted – local opinion was that if you didn’t know where you were you had no business being here. Mrs Franklin, the girls’ school headmistress, had suggested linking the town with a Dutch equivalent, so that we could have a board that said ‘Leopold – twinne
d with Schoonvergeet, Holland’. This, she said, would set us apart from the handful of other hopelessly small towns of the surrounding valleys. But the locals, most of whom preferred not to leave the region, had no intention of being linked to a town full of foreigners.

  ‘Write about the tea,’ I said, ‘or the veldskoen[*] factory that makes David Kramer’s red shoes.’

  ‘Nah.’ Beth wrinkled up her nose.

  ‘Or the bushmen paintings. Or the mountain hikes.’

  Beth shook her head.

  ‘You have to write about something.’

  Beth scuffed her takkie[*] back and forth on the road. ‘I’m going to write about Dad and Mum and Simon and Marta. And you. All the people I love in this town.’

  I looked at her and shook my head. I worried about Beth. She was content living here. She was happy.

  Out of a rattle and a roar and a cloud of dust emerged a battered Toyota Cressida, electric blue apart from the front passenger door, which was yellow. It stopped abruptly a few metres off. Marta emerged from the canary-coloured door, in the blue and purple Mothers’ Union uniform she wore to church every Sunday. She leaned back through the open passenger window and said something to the driver, who reversed and clattered away in the direction of the Camp, Leopold’s name for the overcrowded streets where the coloured community lived.

  ‘God have mercy, children! What business do you have here?’ she scolded as she walked towards us, her small body favouring her right side more than usual after a day on her feet praising the Lord.

  ‘We were –’

  I stood on Beth’s foot and said, ‘We were taking a walk.’

  ‘Don’t you “taking a walk” me!’ she said. Father Basil must have produced a particularly fiery sermon because Marta’s crinkled black eyes looked fearsome. ‘Look at the sight of you, sulke skollie[**] children wandering the streets on a Sunday afternoon. Wragtie![***] The shame of it. Take my hat, child,’ she said, shedding her burdens, ‘and my coat.’

  ‘We’re going to make milkshakes,’ said Beth as we turned in the direction of home.

  ‘You are not!’

  ‘But Mum’s doing her thing again. And Dad has to go with her in case she gets a puncture. So we’re in charge.’

  I glanced at Marta. Her lips were drawn in a disapproving line. ‘How did you know where we were?’ I asked her.

  She clicked her tongue. ‘My Father in heaven tells me everything. There are no secrets between us.’

  We turned the corner and saw our house. It was a squat square with white-washed walls. Its heavy thatched roof gave the impression that it was sinking back into the ground rather than rising out of it. It was built around the remains of Leopold’s original homestead and was therefore the oldest house in town. This had not impressed my English grandmother, whose house in Salisbury was only a little younger but still standing very nicely. But the most unfortunate thing about the house, according to Salisbury standards, was that it sat directly on the street. ‘Not that it’s not much of a street,’ she’d added, looking around.

  With no sign of our maroon station wagon, Beth turned to Marta and squeezed her arm. ‘I love you, Marta!’ she said, ‘And so does Meg. You’ll never leave us, will you?’

  ‘What?’ said Marta. ‘I’m waiting for my Romeo and then I’m off!’

  ‘Where will you go?’ asked Beth.

  Marta turned and looked up at Bosmansberg. We were surrounded by hills. Our valley was wedged between a series of foothills that rose gradually into the actual mountains a slow hour’s drive away. ‘Saldahna,’ she answered, referring to the fishing town she grew up in. ‘I’ll end my days sitting in a chair, watching the boats and getting fat on calamari and chips.’

  I smiled and felt worse than before. When I was little I had liked to think of myself as a Georgiana (Meg was not a heroine’s name), a mix of Anne of Green Gables, Nancy Drew and Queen Isabella of Spain, the protagonist of countless adventures; beautiful, steadfast and astonishingly brave. But no adventure or tragedy had come my way, nor ever would, not in Leopold – even though Leopold was a pretty tragic town. Despair hovered in doorways and oozed down telephone receivers. It formed a film over the eyes of those who had lived here forever, who would and could never leave. It was contagious. And I was Meg, not Georgiana, with my straight, muddy-brown hair and rooinek[*] complexion, and time was running out. Without some miraculous intervention, I was in danger of getting stuck here, being me for the rest of my life.

  *. An auntie or an old lady

  *. Farm labourers

  *. Traditional leather shoes, originally homemade, worn in the bush

  *. Trainer

  **. Such hooligan

  ***. Truly!

  *. Englishman

  CHAPTER TWO

  Marta had two children: Angelika, whom everyone called Angel, and Simon. Angel had been Marta’s favourite until she fell pregnant by a ‘good-for-nothing-rubbish’ at the age of thirteen, the same age that Marta had given birth to her. Angel now lived two hours away in Portaville with the child and we didn’t talk about her anymore.

  Since Angel’s ‘fall’, Simon had become the focus of Marta’s life. She took to bringing him to work every day rather than leave him with her sister. Simon became a sort of big brother, four years faster, taller and brighter than me. However I wasn’t allowed to yell at or tell tales on him as one would one’s own brother because he had so little. It wasn’t unusual to grow up with your maid’s children. The difference was that in our house Mum used it as a way of ‘fighting the system’. Mum was devoted to fighting the system, hence her current campaign of scaring the farm workers with her AIDS education. Dad didn’t find the system as intolerable as Mum, but he liked having Simon around because he doubled the number of boys in our house. The arrangement didn’t win us any friends amongst the townsfolk. Here in Leopold, it made us downright odd.

  When Simon was twelve, his teacher declared him too clever for the tiny coloured school up the road. Marta was distraught. Everyone knew that bright kids were the first to get into trouble. Dad secured him a scholarship to a private school in Cape Town. Simon was the first coloured boy to be educated outside of Leopold; he would be the first person in his family to finish school.

  ‘He carries a heavy burden, that boy,’ Mum said the first time he’d left.

  ‘What burden?’ I’d asked, feeling the first twist of my stomach that would return each time his name was mentioned.

  ‘The hopes of a community.’ She looked wistfully after the retreating car.

  I had burdens too, but Mum wasn’t interested in mine. For five long years we were fed one Simon story after another, until I’d automatically stop listening at the mention of his name. There was a photo of him stuck on our fridge, taken on his last day of school, wearing an academic gown. His short, curly black hair was hidden under a square cap with a tassel hanging down. His eyes were crinkled almost shut. His normally wide smile was pulled tight with embarrassment and impatience. He was trying to look ironic. His skin was brown ochre. We knew this because one day we had found an old paint sample colour wheel and decided to code ourselves. Beth’s hair was chestnut brown; my eyes were dolphin blue. Beth claimed they were pigeon blue but she was jealous because her eyes were definitely rusty. Mum said my eyes were the colour of the sea in winter.

  Simon’s glorious ‘A’ won him a place on an international exchange programme. He left as soon as he’d finished school and had spent six months travelling around Europe. At first Marta couldn’t wait to show off the postcards he sent home. Every sentence she spoke started with ‘Simon says’. But now that Simon was due back in a couple of months, Marta hadn’t mentioned him recently. I tried not to think about his return. My life was bad enough without him prancing around with his academic genius and overseas adventure.

  Marta stayed to cook us a Sunday roast. She insisted that we bring our unfinished homework to the kitchen table.

  ‘Start that again,’ she said, leaning over Beth’s exerci
se book.

  ‘Why?’ asked Beth.

  ‘Because neatliness is next to Godliness.’

  ‘It’s good enough for me,’ said Beth.

  Marta leaned close to Beth and said, ‘Well, it’s not good enough for me,’ and straightened up with a menacing look.

  Beth laughed. ‘Why do you have to go back to church, Marta? You spent all morning there.’

  ‘Don’t whine,’ I said. ‘You sound like a baby.’

  ‘Until the peoples of this country put down their guns and pick up their bibles, we should all be down on our knees.’

  ‘That too,’ I said. Beth pulled a face at me and turned back to Marta.

  ‘Will there be koeksisters[*] and cakes and samoosas[**] and doughnuts at the end?’ Beth had never forgotten the one post-service tea Marta had taken us to.

  ’Of course!’ Marta sniffed. ‘Father Basil’s services feed the soul; it is up to the Mothers’ Union to feed the body.’

  By the time my parents returned Beth and I were at the bottom of the garden, spread out under the pecanut tree. The last of the winter sun was making a slow retreat across the lawn. Beth flipped through a pile of Archie comics. On my lap lay The Grapes of Wrath, but I was thinking about Sinead O’Connor. She sang into my Walkman; her voice filled my head. The tape was stretched and the batteries were running low, but when I played it at full volume, all her anger and longing were trapped inside me and I felt better.