Your knees started knocking. Nausea welled up in you. You gulped to swallow it down. Once you looked back. The front door was closed and the shutters fastened against the heat of the day.
Come let me carry you the last little bit.
You bent down and lifted the child onto your hip. You felt the pelvic bones against your waist, the wiry body straining away from you. And then. A twist, a slip, a duck, under your arm, a sinewy thing slithering down your side. She left you standing, swiftly, swerving, between the bushes and the tussocks aiming for the cottages to the left of the dam.
You were off balance when you started running. You crashed down. Coming to your feet you were missing a sandal. Over bush and tussock you leapt, within a few paces you were right behind her. But you felt clumsy, you couldn’t anticipate the child’s sidesteps. Your one bare foot crippled you.
I must pass her, in a straight line, you thought, I must get ahead and cut her off, before she’s seen, before Joppies sees her. Because they wouldn’t have told him, or perhaps they would. Both possibilities could spell the end.
The end of what? it flashed through you. You did think that then. A grey streak of lateral considerations that streamed past you along with the tussocks and the ant-heaps and the bushes.
Nothing has really begun, you thought, I can let her go, I can go home, I can go back to the farm and just carry on where I left off. I needn’t put myself out. Not if the child herself doesn’t want to. Not if nobody else, not even my own mother, cares, if not even my husband is going to support me. Not if it seems that I’ll have to fight for something that’s the self-evident duty of civilised people.
You thought it all, as you ran and jumped and grabbed after the child.
Stand still! you screamed, watch out! as you cut in in front of her and grabbed her by the waist and fell down hard with her. The child tried to scrabble away on all fours. You dived after her full-length, grabbed her by one foot. Hand over hand you hauled her in. Ankle, calf, thigh, rump, arms, shoulders, till you were sprawling half on top of her. The dust billowed around you.
You coughed and scolded. You had to wrestle against the wriggling that persisted under you. With arms and legs you had to stop her, on both sides, from worming her way out from under you.
You’re not getting away! you managed to say. I have to look after you. You’re mine now. And now you open your ears and you listen to me well, I’ll thrash your backside blood-red for you if you don’t behave yourself now. If you’re good, I won’t do anything to you. If you carry on being naughty and running away I’ll tell the kleinbaas and he’ll take off his belt and flog you till your backside comes out in red welts and then we’ll tie a rope around your neck and tie you to a pole like a baboon, the whole day long until you’re tame.
The child’s breath juddered. A squeaking sound emerged.
You realised what you’d said. You pressed your head against the child’s collar-bone.
No, that’s not true, I don’t mean it, I’m stupid, stupid, stupid, forgive me, I promise you never ever again, never will anybody hurt you again. And you’re not naughty, you’re just scared. Because you have to go away and because you don’t know what’s going to happen. Don’t be scared, just don’t be scared. Nobody will beat you, not I and also not the kleinbaas. Everything will be fine, I promise, your stick is there and the wheel, Lys packed them. And your moleskin. Tonight when we’ve got to the farm over the mountain you can have them and play with them before you go to bed and all day tomorrow.
You wished the child would cry. Then you’d be able to comfort her. Then you could soothe her and coax her and make promises and give assurances and hold her and offer her something to drink, something to eat. But you were the one who cried. The child went limp. You picked her up and walked on towards the dam with her. She was light. Your tears dripped on her.
Never mind, you said over and over again, never mind, there’s nothing to cry about.
Your dress was torn out of its seam at the waist in two places and your knee was bleeding. The child was grey with dust and full of scratches.
I must use this limp terror to get her cleaned up, you thought.
At the dam you drew the child’s rags over her head. You tucked your own dress into the elastic of your panty. You stopped talking. There was another feeling. Pretty words, you thought, are not what’s going to put matters straight between us, not now and perhaps for a whole long time yet. You I’ll have to rule with a firm hand.
You put her down and went and stood in front of her and pulled her off the dam wall. On the first contact with the water there was another squeaking sound, but softer and feebler this time. The child pulled up her knees, but soon lowered them again. You clamped her with one arm around the chest and started washing her with the other hand. The water left dark lines on the dusty skin. On the wet skin there were still other darker stains, here and there reddish ones that looked like burn marks, spots of scabies, ringworm, and older inflamed scars. You kept on splashing water till everything was dark and then got out the handkerchief that you had in the front of your bra and started washing her, first wiped the face, behind the ears and then the neck, that was badly encrusted. You shuddered at the thickly-caked frizzy hair that had certainly never been combed or plaited or even washed. But that would have to wait. You started to wash the child’s front with the handkerchief. Under your hand you felt the bump of a carelessly tied-back umbilical cord, a tension in the body when you wiped across the lower body. You didn’t go any further, just splashed a bit of water up between the little legs and at the back in the cleft of the buttocks.
There, you said, more to yourself than to the child, now at least one of us is more or less respectable.
Jak was there already with the bakkie. It was parked at an angle with one wheel across the wall of the irrigation furrow, you recognised the sign. You took a detour around the back and dressed the child in a clean bleached dress that you got from the hessian bag. Then you locked her in the outhouse. You peered through the slit to see what she was doing. She scrambled onto the plank and pressed herself up against one corner, fist in the mouth, staring fixedly into the sitting-hole. There wasn’t a lid. A smell of Jeyes Fluid hovered in the air. The outside toilet was no longer in house use. Only the maids went there.
Don’t fall into the hole, there are bats down there, I’ll be back just now, you whispered before you turned the catch and hooked in the latch. An image flitted past your eyes, of the child trying to crawl to the light ahead through an encrusted pipe poppling with human turds. You rubbed your eyes to get rid of the image. The pit didn’t have an open sewer to the outside.
You had to keep your head and act, as fast as you could.
You knew Jak would be in the living room with your mother.
Be there in a minute! you called as lightly as you could and ran down the passage to the bathroom where you had a lightning-quick bath and disinfected the cut on your knee. You went through the bathroom cabinets and found ointment and plasters. You rifled through your mother’s medicine bottles. You slipped three sleeping pills and a bottle of valerian drops into the pocket of your dressing-gown. Rubbing your wet hair with a towel you stepped into the silence of the living room and through the towel planted a kiss on Jak’s cheek. He just stared straight ahead. You babbled through it all.
Heavens, Jak, you must have driven like the wind and then almost into the irrigation furrow, did you see where your front wheel is?