When we got home she insisted on reading my fortune so I pulled a few cards out of the deck and placed them on the table. She reckoned I would be about thirty-three years old, but made no mention of a man or children. I was thirteen back then so it seemed like a reasonably ripe age, since I didn’t know that her granny had just spoken about the death of a thirty-three-year-old woman and my friend probably just wanted to sound like a credible fortune-teller.
FORTY-EIGHT
The boy doesn’t want to play with other children or the ball I bought him. He prefers to stick close to me, and sit outside on the deck under the porch, watching me read or looking up the myths of ancient Greek gods. He also likes to lie on the floor by the fireplace, writing words and drawing pictures. One of them is of a little child holding the hands of two women, one of whom has a swollen tummy. After that he draws thirty pictures of Hercules in a row.
“So, you see, his macho-ness may not be buried as deep as you think,” I say to the music teacher and mother of this deaf child.
“Are you afraid of the other children? Are you afraid of what’s outside? I don’t ask him these questions; they’re not the sort of questions one asks a child.”
Sometimes the child sits totally still for long periods, as if he were somewhere far away. Or he rocks to and fro like an old man. But in between, he’s like just any other kid, always agitated, like the sea. He reminds me of one of those deadpan actors from the days of silent movies or a professional mime artist from the south, whose facial expressions can switch hundreds of times in the space of a few moments. His hands create images that I can understand, although not all of them yet.
Someone knocks at the door at ten-forty one morning, a potential friend for him of about his age, holding a DVD for over-twelves in his hands. It’s his father who has brought him here. Tumi’s eyes light up with hope as he stands beside me, eager with anticipation.
“I saw you at the co-op and it occurred to me that they might get on,” he says, pushing his boy in and trying to close the door, which is suddenly blocked by his son, who sticks his foot through the gap.
“Don’t you have a DVD player? Or even a TV?”
The man quickly sizes up our home, which we’ve decorated with the model of the church, the portrait of the sheep, the foggy window words Tumi has copied onto paper, and thirty drawings of Hercules on the wall. Then the man walks one circle around the living room, knocking on the walls, as his son follows right behind him.
“Well then,” says the father, “this obviously won’t work out then.”
He tugs on the sleeve of his son, who seems to be quite interested in the flames in the fireplace, and drags him back towards the entrance where he shilly-shallies at the door.
“I remember your grandmother very well,” he says finally. “I used to stay in the blue house sometimes when I was a kid. I used to play a bit of guitar back then and compose. I still write a bit of lyrics.” Then he suddenly shuts up, as if he’d suddenly remembered something more important:
“Are you here to protest against the dam and stuff?”
I hear him say goodbye as he quietly closes the door behind him. I can’t quite make out whether that’s a look of regret I see on Tumi’s face, as we melt a whole bar of chocolate into two cups of cocoa and spread butter and jam on some bread.
FORTY-NINE
The sun sets over the harbour in the mid-afternoon, as the boats unload their catch. There isn’t much to see, travellers passing through here would say. But they’d be greatly mistaken, because they don’t know what goes on behind closed doors.
I’m beginning to be able to picture myself living here with my boy and to be able to imagine that, in fact, I’ve been living here for the past thirty-three years and that, even though I may have gone away for brief spells every now and then, my life is rooted here. This creates a new feeling in me that grows in these surroundings.
Bare-footed in my plimsolls, I await my fisherman on the pier. I spot his blue sailor’s sweater in the wheelhouse of the boat heading for the harbour. The yellow fish glisten, yes, that’s right, the fish and sea water are soaked in oil. He stands at the bow, as the boat pulls into land, coming home, smudged in fishy scales and slime.
The men look at me in wonderment. The other women are at home preparing dinner and getting the children ready for bed. I don’t have to prepare my child for bed, he’s big enough now and rehearsing with his band, I think.
“You’re lucky to have a man like him,” says another sailor’s wife to me, “when mine’s not at sea, he spends most of his time down on the shore.”
That’s how I picture it all.
A man walks off the boat and crosses the gangway in two steps. He reeks of fish and his fingertips are salty when he slips them into my mouth, one after another, to make me lick them. A slightly odd ritual to an outsider’s eye, but that’s how it goes.
Afterwards we draw the curtains his mother made for the windows. The teenager is still practising on his bass guitar in the garage, I imagine, which is why we allow ourselves to draw the curtains.
“Are you going to eat bare-chested?” I ask the man of my life, once we’re seated at the table with the freshly pan-fried catfish.
“Hang on, does it matter? It’s just the two of us, you and me, right?” He’s forgotten the teenager, just like I have.
“Yes, but I was brought up to expect people to come fully clothed and combed to the table and to talk together. Dad often told me, my mother and brother stories at the table and we’d also take it in turns to tell each other how our days went. One day Dad told us the story of an unemployed pianist, who often lay awake at night. On one of his sleepless nights he invented a special screw for the propeller of an airplane, or a bolt or something simple like that, that made him filthy rich. And not just him, but three generations of the Jack Wilson family.”
“You don’t have to tell me all the stories in the world just to get me to put a shirt on.”
“And Mum used to doll herself up before he came home for dinner, put on lipstick. Then she’d put me in front of her so that I’d run over to him. She always let my brother be. I sometimes felt it was a bit unnecessary to be pulled out of a game and to be appointed as my father’s welcoming committee. It wasn’t that my joy was faked, since my days were pretty uneventful anyway, and it was always better to get a visit from Dad in the evening and night than nothing at all.”
“Would you like a little house reading maybe, to read from the Bible?”
First row. It’s the conflict of opposites that keeps life going. I admit that I find it difficult to get the adolescent to help out at dinner time. Nevertheless, I clear the plates and keep the food warm, in case he re-emerges from the garage before we go to bed.
Afterwards, my husband empties the washing machine, stretching socks and shaking T-shirts before hanging them up on the line. We laugh a lot, though, on most evenings and sometimes into the night. Too bad if we sleep in an unmade bed at night. The boy hasn’t come back by the time we turn in. Sometimes we also have a giggle in the morning, except when we say goodbye; he’s always surprised to see how sorry I am to see him go.
We’ll be seeing each other again this evening, at seven-thirty, he says, trying to lighten the separation. The boy isn’t up yet. I’m not even sure he ever left the garage last night.