Almost Grace Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  ALSO BY ROSIE ROWELL

  Epigraph

  Friday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Now

  Author’s Note

  Thanks

  Rosie Rowell

  Copyright

  ALSO BY ROSIE ROWELL

  Leopold Blue

  You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;

  you have a right to be here.

  And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

  Max Ehrmann, Desiderata

  FRIDAY

  At this time of day it is important to have something to do. It doesn’t matter what – the secret is in the doing. Holes in the day leave too much space for hungry thoughts to come creeping out. But as I’m currently wedged into the back corner of Brett’s new car, next to a pile of duvets and pillows with my feet resting on three crates of beer, doing anything other than breathing is proving a challenge. This triggers one of Mum’s fridge-decorating mantras: ‘Breath is life. When we channel our breath, we transform our lives.’ The words are written around a candle flame against a black background. The smug, flowery script makes you want to transform yourself into a drop-out crackhead. I shift around and channel my breath onto the window I’ve been leaning against, employing a Darth Vader noise, until it is so fogged up that the car next to us is nothing more than a smudge.

  Because the air con does not quite reach my corner this takes a fair bit of time. But we have plenty of that. We have not moved for the past ten minutes.

  I frown at the glass, not sure what to draw. What would Louisa draw? What would be clever, ironic and amusing at the same time? Only I could turn car-window graffiti into an existential crisis.

  The car ahead of us erupts into sound, as if it’s releasing gas.

  ‘Who are you even hooting at?’ sighs Brett from the driver’s seat.

  ‘He is hooting at his life,’ I reply, still staring at my window. I try for a retro campervan and write roadtrip!! next to it, but it looks like a childish school bus, so I wipe that away and start again. This time I go for curly wave patterns, which are even more child-like but at least they’re not trying to be anything else.

  ‘This traffic is nothing compared to Jozi,’ says Louisa in the passenger seat. She’s been making a holiday playlist. Her taste in music is eclectic to say the least.

  Brett catches my eye in the rearview mirror. ‘In Joburg traffic jams last three days.’

  I laugh. ‘In Jozi a man died in a traffic jam. No one knew until the queue started moving a week later.’

  ‘But at least in Jozi rush hour doesn’t start at two o’clock on a Friday,’ counters Louisa.

  ‘You can take a girl out of the mine dumps …’ says Brett, winking at me.

  Louisa tuts. ‘You people with your little mountain and your freezing sea …’ she replies in a withering voice. She and her family moved to Cape Town more than four years ago but Louisa still breathes Joburg air. She is a child of the city. Her reactions to even mild exposure to nature provide Brett and me with endless material to tease her.

  A movement in the car next to us catches my attention. The driver is waving at me. For a moment I’m confused. Then I realise he’s interpreted my car art as trying to get his attention. I burst into high-pitched laughter and turn away.

  ‘What?’ Louisa turns around again.

  ‘The guy in the car next to us thinks I’ve been waving at him,’ I say, feeling myself grow hot.

  ‘Nice work, Grace – he’s probably some kind of pervert who is going to follow us all the way up to Baboon Point.’

  At last we start to move. The cars that have been stacked around us seem to miraculously disappear and the road opens up. Louisa turns back to me. ‘Did your mum sit you down for the serious chat this morning about men with evil intent?’

  I smile. ‘No. She’d gone to work by the time I got up.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ Louisa says and rolls her eyes.

  ‘Did your mum say anything about the evil intent of eighteen-year-old boys?’ Brett inclines his head towards Louisa.

  Louisa laughs in her deep, gravelly way and ruffles his blonde hair. ‘Luckily for you, she didn’t.’

  I turn and look out of the window. You’re wrong, Lou. That’s exactly what Brett wants. He wants Mrs Cele, Louisa’s mother, to refer to him as Louisa’s boyfriend, not ‘that little friend who makes me laugh’. And I would have given anything for Mum’s ‘chat’ last night to have been about boys.

  With the Mother City and the mountain behind us, the scenery settles down into wide-open scrubland with a slash of blue Atlantic on our left. If we kept driving north, little would change before we reached Namibia and eventually the Skeleton Coast.

  ‘When do we get to Hermanus?’ asks Louisa. Hermanus is a pretty seaside town on the East Coast, famous for being the breeding ground of Southern Right whales. Some of Mum’s weirder yogi friends spend weekends there during breeding season ‘calling’ to the whales.

  Brett laughs. ‘Wrong coast.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The ocean on your left is the Atlantic.’ Brett catches my eye again. ‘You do know that South Africa has two coastlines, right?’

  Louisa smacks his arm and turns to look out of the window.

  I feel a stab of guilt. When Helen suggested Baboon Point as an alternative to the mess of school-leavers getting out of control at the ‘Plett Rage’, I knew that Louisa didn’t know what she was agreeing to. In these couple of weeks post exams, eighteen-year-olds from across the country descend on Plettenberg Bay to gorge on their new-found freedom. We’ve chosen a different option, but Louisa is still expecting lush and pretty seaside villages, not the wind-blasted, craggy coastline we’re headed for. Initially, it was a childish twist of jealousy that kept me quiet. Then I realised that Baboon Point is my idea of paradise: the beach is at least ten kilometres long and the town is so small and remote that the chance of being caught up in a week of wild parties is negligible.

  ‘Brett! What the fuck is that?’ Louisa tugs on his arm. ‘What is that?’

  ‘Koeberg Nuclear Power Station.’

  ‘We are going on holiday next to a nuclear power station?’

  This is why I love Louisa – she announced we were going to Baboon Point and now it’s Brett’s fault.

  ‘No, we’re going much further up the coast.’ He looks at her. ‘But you should see the weird fish you get in this bay.’

  Louisa looks at him then slumps in her seat. There is a rumble of words from her that even if I could speak Zulu I wouldn’t understand.

  ‘Ntombifuthi, leave the ancestors alone,’ says Brett in Mrs Cele’s voice, grinning at me in the rearview mirror. He has no idea what she’s saying either. We learnt Xhosa at junior school, and not very successfully. Louisa’s Zulu name, which means ‘it’s another girl’ irritates her intensely. Her mother uses it often, and pointedly, when Louisa’s being stubborn.

  ‘You liked the online picture of the house, Lou,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, Grace, I liked the house. No one mentioned that we are on a nuclear-active coastline. We’ll come back with radiation poisoning.’

  ‘And two heads,’ says Brett.

  Louisa turns off her playlist. ‘What are we going to do here for a week?’ she demands.

  ‘The surfing is great,’ says Brett.

  Louisa dismisses it with a click of her tongue.

  ‘It has sunsets,’ I offer.

  ‘Sunsets! Everywhere has sunsets, Grace.’

  Louisa reaches for a tray of mini cupcakes. Brett tries to help himself but she sm
acks his hand away. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this?’

  Brett laughs. ‘You arranged it with Helen. I thought you knew.’

  ‘Does Helen know?’

  ‘Of course. Everyone knows the West Coast.’

  She makes a face at him, then turns and passes the tray back to me. Suddenly her face lights up. She winks and flashes a knowing smile.

  ‘That’s not even funny,’ I say, taking the tray.

  ‘Don’t fight it, Gracie.’

  In our final school magazine, the ‘matric tribute’ edition, there was a section devoted to ‘Most Likely To …’ I was lying in the sun at lunch break, with my head on Louisa’s leg, reading it aloud. Louisa was most likely to become the first female president. Although she dismissed it, I knew she was secretly pleased. I was most likely to run a cupcake company.

  ‘A cupcake company? Where does that come from?’

  ‘You know, like the cute girl in Bridesmaids,’ said Louisa, laughing. It’s easy to laugh when you’re the president.

  ‘The fucked-up one with the failed cupcake company.’

  ‘You can do all the cupcakes for my state occasions.’ Louisa patted the top of my head. ‘What does it predict for Brett?’

  ‘Mechanic. That’s worse, right?’

  When Louisa has turned back in her seat, my cupcake joins the handful of NikNaks and bunch of grapes in the sandwich bag in my pocket. I think back to Mum last night, home from her hot yoga, staring at me as if I was insane. I was yelling at her, I couldn’t help it. ‘Rory said a lot of things, all of which are bullshit!’ It strikes me that what is particularly tragic about that conversation, particularly representative of my life, is that while Louisa’s mother was preaching to her about unwanted male stranger-danger, I was yelling at my mother about a middle-aged man who had effectively ‘dumped’ me six weeks ago and yet is still messing up my life.

  ‘Helen’s texted to say there’s a house party on tonight,’ says Louisa.

  ‘Awesome,’ I reply with a thud in my stomach.

  She turns around. ‘You sure?’ she says with those watchful eyes.

  ‘Of course!’

  A year ago, I would have meant it. I would have been planning what to wear and demanding to know who else would be there. But over the past few months I’ve developed a habit of crying at parties – it has something to do with watching everybody else looking effortlessly happy. It makes things awkward, so I do my best to avoid them. The very low point was the school leavers’ dance – I didn’t even get there. I saw Mum’s expression in the mirror when I put my dress on – a mixture of heartbreak and horror – and went into the bathroom and made myself sick so that I didn’t have to go. Apparently my partner – a friend of a friend – got so drunk at the ‘before’ party that he was sent home.

  By the time we stop at the Shell Ultra City my bladder is about to rupture from the need to pee. The air outside is different to Cape Town. It’s hotter and drier. The sky seems bigger with each kilometre that we travel. A week away from my head and my life and my mother’s double negatives: ‘We are not not going to talk about this, Grace.’ I do a cartwheel next to the car to make Louisa laugh.

  Safely inside the loo cubicle I open the sanitary bin and deposit the bag of snacks.

  ‘Grace!’ Louisa’s voice is just the other side of the divide and makes me jump.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t sit on the seat!’ she says and giggles.

  ‘You’re just like my mother,’ I say.

  ‘Do you have loo paper?’

  I pass a wad of it to her under the cubicle wall.

  ‘We should have gone to Plett,’ Louisa says as we’re washing our hands.

  ‘Nah, you’re going to love it,’ I reply. ‘I promise.’ I look at the two of us in the mirror. A few days ago I cut my hair short and bleached it. It looked good at the hairdresser’s. Mum’s only comment was ‘Is this a Miley Cyrus thing?’.

  ‘No, it’s an Agyness Deyn thing,’ Louisa replied for me.

  ‘Is that better?’ asked Mum, looking back at my hair with those permanent frown lines.

  Louisa keeps her hair cropped close to her skull. It drives her mother crazy. ‘It’s so ugly. Why do you want to look like a boy?’

  ‘Why do you want to walk around with fake hair?’ is Louisa’s reply.

  She looks up now and catches my eye and starts belting out the lyrics to ‘Ebony and Ivory’ into an imaginary mike.

  I join in, harmonising, just as we’d spent hours practising – and we both start laughing.

  Louisa and I have been friends since the first day she arrived at school. We used to be a girl band. We called ourselves Lace. ‘Half part Grace, whole part soul.’ We rehearsed at Louisa’s house to begin with, until her sister paid us a monthly rate not to practise there. After that we set up our studio in the spare room at mine. At first we recorded CDs of our favourite covers, and made countless tribute videos. Our signature look was each of us wearing an elbow-length lace glove. I’d found the pair at the back of my mum’s cupboard. We thought the nod to Jacko showed how sophisticated we were.

  Then we decided Lace needed to move in a new direction and started writing our own songs, one or two ballads, but mostly rap.

  Some days we all are prone

  To feel that we’re alone

  No one calling on the phone

  But if you stop and stare

  There are people everywhere

  Who need someone to care

  We might get in your face,

  But that’s who we are, we’re Lace.

  We thought we were achingly cool. It was only a matter of time before we’d win The X Factor and tour the country.

  Brett auditioned for an Eminem-type role – his looks are perfect – but he didn’t pull it off. He was our beatbox and our groupie. Truthfully, he would have dressed up like a donkey just to be able to hang out with Louisa.

  For about four months we wrote a blog, ‘Keeping Pace with Lace’, and recorded a live interview with ‘DJ Brett’ when our single ‘Prone’ reached number one. It actually got two hundred hits on YouTube (and a lot of abuse). Then one day it just seemed silly. It’s like that cringey feeling when you read old diary entries – you know you wrote the words but the feelings don’t belong to you any more. These days I get that cringey feeling pretty much every time I speak.

  I look at Louisa. ‘What was the official line about why Lace split up?’

  Louisa shakes her head sadly. ‘Usual story: “financial problems”.’

  We share a smile in the mirror. The moment is broken by my stomach starting to rumble.

  ‘Are you still hungry?’ asks Louisa.

  I shake my head. ‘Indigestion.’

  Louisa gives me a look but leaves it at that. I follow her back to the car. She and Brett make a far better ebony and ivory. They make each other seem more exotic. Louisa makes Brett’s side-sweep of surfer hair and blue eyes look authentic; Brett makes Louisa look like a regal African queen. Could anyone balance me in that way? I resemble an anaemic, odd-looking boy – who in the world would complement that?

  Brett is right – Baboon Point is much further up the coast than the nuclear power station. We pass turn-offs for well-known beach resorts and, later, turn-offs for nature reserves. It feels as if we’ve run out of turn-offs and we’re going to keep following the coastline north through seemingly endless scrub bush and distant hills that look more like air bubbles under the earth’s surface. I must have nodded off, because I jerk as Louisa shouts, ‘Baboon Point!’ and claps her hands.

  As we follow the signs into town we pass a sprawling township with a large soccer stadium in the middle of it. At first glance Baboon Point could be a ghost town, or after-hours on a movie set. Brett parks outside a downbeat cafe. As we get out and stretch, the change in the air in startling. It is hot and dry and salt-heavy all at the same time. After the crush of Cape Town’s mid-afternoon traffic, the emptiness and space feels unbalancing. The shop seems
deserted until my eyes adjust to the gloom and I make out the cashier in the corner behind an electric fan. The shelves are stocked with fizzy drinks, instant coffee, matches, toothpaste and loo paper – the kind of things you leave at home on a weekend away. It has a ‘deli’ counter, with some thirsty-looking samosas and a large roll of lurid pink polony. Mmm, ground-up pigs’ trotters mixed with pink slime. When I asked the shopkeeper if she has any celery, she frowns at me and says, ‘We don’t stock herbs.’

  There are two cars parked outside the police station and one outside the hotel opposite. By the time we find the estate agent’s house to pick up the key for our house, it’s late afternoon. There is a hot wind blowing. The woman looks at us dubiously. Her hair is a deep maroon-red. She’s wearing an orange tracksuit that emphasises her vast stomach.

  ‘Please remember to lock the outside rubbish bins as the baboons make a disgusting mess,’ she says as she examines the cheque my mum sent up as a deposit for breakages.

  ‘Real, live baboons?’ Louisa asks.

  The woman nods. ‘And keep your house locked when you’re out or they will move in before you’re back.’

  ‘Perfect,’ mutters Louisa. ‘Any other forms of wildlife we should expect?’

  ‘Well, of course the boomslangs1, but we haven’t had any reports of them on your property,’ the lady replies in an uninterested tone. I can’t tell whether she’s simply trying to get a rise out of Louisa, but it’s working.

  ‘Where are the shops?’ asks Louisa.

  This makes the lady laugh. ‘I hope you didn’t come here to shop. You passed the cafe on the corner; that one with the big Coke sign. Then there’s the Chinese one over the road.’

  ‘Is that it?’ asks Louisa.

  ‘No, there are the two liquor stores,’ replies the woman as she pushes a piece of paper for us to sign. ‘And the hotel and the Kreef Kombuis2 restaurant, but that’s not open this week, and the Strandloper3 bar. I wouldn’t go there if I were you. Oh – and the police station.’ She ends with emphasis. ‘For anything else, you need to go to Lambert’s Bay. Enjoy your stay. I hope I do not hear from you.’