‘You really know how to twist the knife, don’t you, Mum.’
‘Please just take her, Alistair. When she sees that there’s nothing there, she’ll lose interest.’ She hoped she sounded more convincing than she felt.
‘If I do, will it get you off my back too?’ Alistair sighed.
CHAPTER NINE
Hannah peered into one of the sheds and, when her eyes had adjusted to the gloom, she saw a small man sitting on a paint tin with his back to her. He was painting something onto an orange plastic ball and, when she approached, the smell of fibreglass resin singed her nostrils. Not wanting to startle him, she called out, ‘Excuse me, I’m looking for Kobie?’
The man looked over his shoulder at her. His face was lined with deep grooves from the sun. ‘Ja, Miesies, ek is hy,’ he said and, when he smiled at her, she could see that his front teeth were missing. She switched to Afrikaans.
‘Do you have a minute to talk with me?’
He gestured to another paint tin. As she lowered herself onto it, she found the seat was surprisingly comfortable.
‘Mrs Barlow said I could talk to you about the farm. She said you’ve been here the longest.’
He nodded and returned his attention to the fibreglass patch he was applying to the ball float. ‘I lived here my whole life – 1939 till now. My mother was also born here, 1921.’
Hannah watched his weathered hands brush the resin up and down. The stringent smell brought tears to her eyes but seemed not to bother him at all. She thought carefully about how she should approach the conversation.
‘Kobie, do you know anything about the war here, the South African War?’ He nodded, and she continued, ‘I’ve heard there was a camp on the farm from those days.’
Kobie lifted his head and, for the first time, looked directly at her. His eyes were older than his years, somehow, thought Hannah, struggling to grasp what she saw.
‘I know these stories,’ he said simply.
‘Can you tell me?’
He sighed deeply and looked away from her, over his shoulder. She followed his gaze to the rocky cliffs which climbed the view over the valley. ‘My ouma, my mother’s mother, lived with us. She was a young girl when the British came over the land. After the war, she had no parents, no family at all. She never told us what happened to them. Never spoke about those days. But in her last years, her mind drifted away from us. We had to watch her all the time, or she would wander out the house and get lost on the farm. She started speaking about soldiers and tents. She spoke of people walking like skeletons. She said weeping had soaked into the ground. That grief had scored the rocks. It frightened my sister and me. And then, when we started seeing things, we remembered her words.’ He looked back at Hannah and smiled, perhaps at how wide her eyes had grown, and Hannah realised she had been holding her breath.
Kobie dropped his brush into a glass jar of thinners and closed the tin of resin, hammering the lid with the heel of his hand. He leant down to inspect the patch on the float.
Hannah tried to rein in the excitement which seemed to flick through her like a live charge. ‘What did you see?’
Kobie sat back up and looked at his gnarled hands, picking off bits of resin. ‘When the oubaas ran big herds of sheep on the farm, I would walk or ride out to check them. I was often on the plateau at sunset. Especially when the dark comes early and the cold drops like a stone onto the veld. I’ve seen strange things. Not every time I was out, but some.’ The silence stretched unbearably before he softly continued. ‘Once, I smelt strong smoke, like I was in the smoke, but there was no fire. Once, up on the plateau, the wind carried a thick smell of sewage, so bad I had to cover my nose. There are no people up there, Miesies, no drains, nothing.’
Hannah’s thoughts scrambled. ‘Could it have been manure on the fields that you smelt?’
‘Manure is sweet – even pig manure – but human shit is different. It made me want to vomit. Do you understand?’
Hannah nodded, sorry she had interrupted.
‘A few times, I have heard far-off keening. You know what keening is? It’s not weeping. It’s a sound that comes out of someone’s stomach – a sound they can’t control, might not even know they are making. It tears out of them when they are too stunned by grief to talk. It is a deep, old sound that makes your hair stand up.’
Hannah felt the flesh on her arms and scalp rise. Kobie looked at Hannah, his own eyes wide now. ‘A few times across my life, I have seen women on the plateau. One was small and her dress came to here.’ He gestured to mid-calf. ‘She wore a kappie, you know this kappie? Like in the old days. The bonnet with the deep rim? I couldn’t see her face. She was carrying buckets, two heavy buckets. She walked and then disappeared, even though I was frozen in the same place.’
Hannah ventured carefully, ‘And you saw her more than once?’
‘Yes, a few times. Always in the same place, she walks a short way with her buckets and disappears. Like a movie reel at the bioscope, over and over. And there was the other woman who frightened me when I was young. She just walked. Tall and thin. She wore a long dress to her ankles and a kappie. My mother used to tell us she was looking for her children. I don’t know why my ma said that.’
The stories intrigued and thrilled Hannah. Yet her rational brain struggled to make sense of them. There was no doubt in her mind that Kobie was telling the truth, that he believed what he had seen. But did she? She had never considered ghost stories to have any root in reality, but then she had never heard one first-hand and witnessed the conviction on the teller’s face.
‘Kobie, have other people seen these things?’
‘My mother and my sister, Lena. We have lived our lives on the farm and we know every corner. I tell Miss Sarah when we were children. But white people, they don’t like things they can’t explain. And if they can’t explain something, sometimes they don’t even see it.’
Hannah saw the truth in his statement and thought of her parents, who debated and argued things into or out of existence, proud of their open-mindedness. How ironic that they were completely closed to the idea of the supernatural. Staunch in their academic atheism. She wondered where she stood now. She felt Leliehoek changing her. As if a different, brighter person were emerging from a dull, old husk.
‘Miesies, I don’t know what happened, but I do know that place on the plateau is restless – that something hangs in the air.’
Walking down from the sheds towards the farmhouse, Hannah took a deep breath, pulling her shoulders back and lifting her chin – as if drawing herself up to her full height would give her the necessary courage to face Alistair Barlow. She felt a clench of nerves as she knocked on the front door.
The sound of dogs on wooden floorboards rushed at the door, and she braced herself for the onslaught as the door opened. But the three big dogs just pushed themselves around her legs, sniffing her feet, their tails wagging furiously. She tried to stop a tail from lifting her skirt as she looked up into Alistair’s face. The white scar pulling his cheek crooked unnerved her. The picture of him in her mind had been dominated by his anger and now, seeing his face composed and deliberately neutral, the twisted mouth looked wrong. She felt the unfairness of his disfigurement, and pity welled up in her. Alistair stepped out onto the paving stones rather than inviting her in. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he waited while she looked at him. It was as though his pride had him stubbornly meeting her eyes and daring her to look away first. But she didn’t look away, instead saying, ‘I’d like you to take me up to the plateau. Kobie’s been telling me about the farm, and I want to see the plateau. Will you take me?’ She gritted her teeth and forced out, ‘Please.’