Grace Read online

  “It’s a great pleasure to meet you, Miss Klein.”

  His voice was low and smooth. Her hand found his as her gaze settled defiantly on his face. This time he would not look away. He would make her look away. She was a woman; she would not dare challenge him a second time. But Mary Klein didn’t look sideways or down or away. She held him with eyes as steady as he wanted to hold her. Her palm burned into his. Not a single emotion stirred in her dreamless black eyes. Standing over her, anger stirred in him. He could not fathom why he was so moved by this girl. Her thin smile now seemed to be a sneer, mocking him. His grip tightened on her hand. She winced and he let go. Her spell broken, Patrick turned his back on her without a further word and left the room. The old ladies chuckled up their sleeves.

  Two nights later, having first sought permission from the head of the family, Patrick presented himself at the Kleins’ door. He did not own a suit, but had pressed his trousers and was wearing a crisp, starched shirt. His shoes were polished to a high gloss; his only tie was plastered straight down the middle of his proud chest. His sturdy frame filled out a borrowed blazer, only slightly mismatched in colour to his pants. Patrick knew that he looked good: clean, decent, reliable, solid.

  Mr Klein welcomed him to their modest home with an offer of a drink. Patrick declined. As Mary entered the living room, ready for their evening out, she hesitated, gazing almost quizzically at him, before extending her hand in greeting. At the moment of hesitation, Patrick sensed some kind of force, a shifting, but after it melted into the next, he wasn’t sure. He convinced himself that it was nothing; that he had imagined the little movement he’d seen flutter across her soul.

  He took her to see a film, some cheap Western which neither of them could remember afterwards. Then they took a long, slow walk down the main road, avoiding all shortcuts. Patrick’s hand rested in the crook of her elbow. When Mary stumbled he grabbed her and steadied her. They spoke about this and that; nothing and everything. When they reached her home, five minutes before she was due, Patrick knew with a certainty that death would be the only force strong enough to separate them. Three months later, on Mary’s eighteenth birthday, they were married.

  3

  Sometimes Grace wished her father would just die. She knew it was wrong, a mortal sin to have such thoughts, but she couldn’t help thinking how much easier life would be if he just got sick or had an accident or something. She tried to halt her thoughts before they formed but once her head went in that direction, she found herself cataloguing the ways in which it could happen: car accident, work accident, stabbed in a fight while drunk. All of these had already happened to him, but he was still with them.

  “Onkruid vergaan nooit,” her mother sighed down the line to Aunty Joan after another one of his misadventures. Mama and her sister Joan spoke every day on the phone, but her aunt wasn’t allowed to set foot in their house.

  Grace was lying in bed, turning over this macabre catalogue of possible demises in her mind when her mother appeared with a cup of tea.

  “You’re awake, my girl!” Mary said, her appearance belying what had happened the night before. “Sleep okay?”

  Grace nodded.

  Mary flashed a bright smile, make-up flawlessly in place. For the millionth time Grace marveled at her mother’s beauty, while awe’s twin, disappointment, burrowed further down in her chest. Mary’s looks had skipped a generation. To have a mother so beautiful and not resemble her in any way, to get so close yet to have missed out, was one of the lesser crosses Grace bore, sometimes with fortitude, this time with spite. This morning she was again awestruck at her mother’s ability to paint a fresh face over her sad night-time one with a few deft strokes of the hand. No matter what happened in her bedroom at night, Mary emerged transformed in the morning, coated with a new, resilient skin scraped from the jars on her dresser.

  “Drink up your tea while it’s hot.”

  Her morning gift, brewed to apologise for last night and to coax Grace out of bed, came in a dainty floral cup and saucer. Pretty things mattered to Mary. Something beautiful to look at or hold against your skin could get you through a lot. And though the house might be crumbling around them – paint peeling, doors broken and unhinged by drunken fists – Mary had mastered the art of carving out, in the midst of this ugliness, a personal trove of beautiful objects: a pretty tea set, a luxurious blouse, an expensive coat. Things to stroke or smell, things from which she derived a direct sensual pleasure. These were her pretty little secrets. She lied to Patrick, always, about the origins of her luxuries. A gift from her mother, or a distant aunt. Patrick would growl for days whenever something new and pretty appeared. Sometimes he’d break them in the fights that followed.

  Grace straightened up and took the cup from her mother’s outstretched hand. Mary had taken extra care with her appearance this morning. Pressed curls framed her face, cascading around her shoulders, and a new shade of blush warmed her cheeks. Her brown-black eyes were lined, the lids shaded just so; her lips were the right shade of peach. Mary always stressed the importance of grooming and professional looks in her line of work, especially to Patrick, when his suspicion about her dollying up poisoned the house. Hers was the steady paycheck – always larger than his, even when he had plenty of work – which kept them housed and fed when Patrick was out of work; another of Mary’s sins. She was the first line of contact any customer made, one of the few coloureds behind an actual desk. Once, having locked herself out of the house, Grace had paid a surprise visit to the bank and found herself transfixed by a strangely familiar woman. It took a few seconds before she realised it was her mother. Mary had looked like a different person: light and animated, not cowed to deflect the next accusation, the next blow.

  Grace sipped her tea while her mother stood over her with a faraway smile. She was already wearing her coat, with her leather handbag on her shoulder. In a few moments she’d be gone, getting on with her day in a world far away from this oppressive room.

  After Mary’s departure with a quick, “Be careful today,” Grace lingered in bed for a few minutes. A weak sun tried to poke through the bedroom curtains while outside, the southeaster moaned in low complaint. It had been blowing for days, enough to make anyone mad. Grace pulled herself out of bed, swallowed the last bit of tea, cold now, went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth. The sleep creases in her school uniform would straighten out in time and the blazer would cover the stain on her chest, she told herself as she pulled on fresh socks and her scuffed Bata shoes.

  In the mirror, she attempted to tame the bush of tight, frizzy curls around her head but gave up after two sweeps of the brush. A hair-band would have to do. It smoothed down the front of her hair just fine, but everything else stuck out like thatch behind it. She turned away from the mirror, unable to stand her reflection, and headed out the door.

  The sun made a feeble attempt to warm the day. Grace felt hollow. She eyed the house next door. Johnny would have left for school by now. Normally he waited for her on the corner, but she had lain in too long this morning. Just as well he’d gone. She wouldn’t have been able to look him in the eye after last night’s commotion on their front stoep. He must have heard Patrick’s outburst – all of the neighbours probably had. They were used to his drunken rages, but the children of the neighbourhood never tired of mocking Grace the next day. Thank God Johnny wasn’t like that. But she still couldn’t bear the thought that he had heard.

  As she turned the corner of Saturn Street to join Main Road, the wind unleashed its full fury. White grains of sand peppered her legs, her eyelids, the soft inside of her mouth. Pulling her blazer tight around her, Grace hunched forward, pitting herself against it. The devil was dancing in this wind; she felt it in the violent tugs. The southeaster was a male wind, it was said, always trying to lift women’s skirts.

  She approached the school from a side street – for weeks she had been avoiding all main roads to keep out of the way of the police. As she climbed through a hole in the fe
nce behind the main school building, a row of armoured vehicles rolled slowly down a deserted Main Road past the school’s front gate. She thought about turning and running back home, but the emptiness of the house and the thought of being alone for hours propelled her across the soccer field towards the first class of the day.

  The school bell whined a shrill warning as Grace ran across the field towards the quad where students lined up before classes began. Something wasn’t right. The kids were huddled in little groups. Instead of the usual line-up, they were milling around, congealing in small circles. She saw the science teacher, Mr January, come running out of his classroom, his tie fluttering in the wind. Like a good herd dog, he tried to round up the younger children and shoo them inside. As she neared the quad, Grace saw him tugging at one of the older boys’ sleeves. They tussled for a bit before Mr January gave up, turned, and went back inside.

  Mounting chaos, a frenetic energy, grabbed hold of the school. Students poured out of classrooms, like confused ants in the usually neat quad. Grace tried to make her way to her maths class, wanting nothing to do with this politics, but she was jostled and pushed up against an inchoate flow of bodies. Skilled at the art of making herself invisible, she stood with her back to a wall and waited for a gap. As she passed Mr January’s classroom, she heard his low voice, gravelly from too many cigarettes and years of shouting at students, his muted plea directed at no one in particular. “God help us.”

  4

  Her own classroom was in disarray: no teacher present to take the register and boys from the higher standards standing on desks and leaning out of the top windows, the only ones that could open to allow air in. There was a smattering of the usual thirty-five students in the class. In a back corner a group of girls had bunched their desks together into a protective laager. They sat nervously, clinging to each other for comfort. Grace joined them. She started to ask a question but was silenced by Lorraine, an older girl, as the group tried to catch snippets of information from words drifting down like scraps of paper on the wind from the boys, who provided a halting commentary on the activity outside.

  “That one, over there! Unmarked police car.”

  “You can see them, the Boere!”

  All week members of the Student Representative Council had been planning this protest. Grace had heard details but she’d tuned them out. There was enough going on at home. Banners had been drawn and placards prepared. The protest would be peaceful, demanding what any sane human being in this society would want: Mandela released, apartheid ended, this gutter education brought up to standard.

  The message had been echoing through the courtyards, the hallways and the classrooms for weeks.

  Free Mandela! Unban the ANC! Unban the PAC! Bring our leaders back home!

  Today it came from a loudhailer in the main quad. Seated at their desks the young girls heard the protest begin.

  “Let’s go,” said Lorraine. “Let’s go join it.”

  “No, I don’t want to get involved in this,” Claire said. “My parents warned me to stay away from politics.”

  Grace followed the debate, not sure whose side she was on, nor daring to insert her own voice. Always the quiet one, always going along with everyone else, she hated herself for not having an opinion and not stating it firmly like these girls could do. What would she say, anyway? She knew apartheid was wrong, but hadn’t it been drummed into her at home to respect authority above all else? Challenge the rules and you could get hurt – at home or at school. She wanted to be decisive and quick, to know what she thought. Instead she just sat there watching Lorraine grab her stuff and leave while Claire’s face contorted with disapproval. Two others remained with them, afraid of the wrath of the policemen lining up outside.

  Outside in the quad, the student rally was hitting its stride. “Amandla!”

  “Ngawethu!”

  The crowd, growing denser by the minute, grouped around the head protesters, eager to respond to the leaders’ demands. An older boy stood in the middle of a clearing of bodies, loudhailer glued to his lips.

  “We demand freedom! We, the young people, are the future of this country. We want justice! Viva the ANC, Viva!”

  “Viva!” the crowd responded in unison.

  “Viva the PAC, Viva!”

  “Viva!”

  “Viva Mandela, Viva!”

  “Viva!”

  The crowd took over chanting: “Mandela! Mandela! Mandela!” A tall, lanky boy, made for the role of flag bearer, waved a big green and yellow banner imprinted with Mandela’s image. Grace, peeking out of the classroom door, took it in, wondering: who was this Mandela? Since the beginning of the year his name had hummed beneath the surface of her life at high school. They sang about him, chanted his name, demanded his freedom. He was locked up somewhere, wrongly, for wanting to end apartheid. This much she knew. Nobody knew what he looked like. His picture wasn’t in any history books, newspapers or on television. She had never heard his name spoken at home, not when the going was good between her parents, and certainly not during the bad spells. The image on the flag seemed ghostly, like the only grainy picture of a long-dead relative who had been important and influential, but who you didn’t know at all. Who was this Mandela they were shouting for, really? Would he get them the vote, get rid of apartheid and Botha, and bring peace to the troubled streets? Did he beat his wife? Or would he, if he was free to do so, if she didn’t do things the way he liked?

  “Mandela! Mandela!”

  The chants rose up louder. The group started toyi toyi-ing to the rhythm of the freedom song, spilling out of the quad, ready to take to the streets. Banners waved furiously. Grace ached for the quiet of home, wishing she’d stayed there.

  “Fok! Hier kom hulle!”

  The sentries who had remained behind in her classroom jumped from the desks and ran out to warn the others of impending disaster.

  “The Boere are coming!’

  Grace saw Johnny in the quad. He looked her way and waved at her, mouthing, “Go!”

  Another wave of boys swept down the corridor. “Out! Out! Get out!” they screamed at the petrified girls.

  “Get the fuck out and run home as fast as you can! The Boere are coming!”

  Claire, ever the ringleader, declared, “No, we’ll do what we want!”

  The group of girls, Grace included, followed her across the classroom, to where some of the boys were still perched as lookouts. Grace clambered onto a desk and strained to reach the top of the window. Row upon row of armoured trucks were rounding the corner of the street next to the school’s front gate, helmeted soldiers protruding, guns ready. For one insensible moment they seemed to Grace like play cars, a convoy of army trucks like she’d seen the littlest kids next door push back and forth, back and forth; cute, harmless blocks of wood. Toy trucks for a staged fight, where the good always triumphed over evil, where everything was cleaned up and packed away afterwards and everyone went home friends. It hit Grace that the armoured Casspirs were blocking off the school gate, cordoning off the way out. An unearthly ringing started in her ears, and unable to stir or look away from the approaching Casspirs, her limbs went limp.

  Then, suddenly, Grace was moving fast, out of the classroom as if winged, her feet barely touching the ground. Johnny must have come running up the stairs to fetch her. He had her by the collar of her blazer and was hustling her onward, out, out. In the quad, they stopped to hear the soldiers, with loudspeakers ten times more powerful than the students’, command: “You have five minutes to disperse! Five minutes!”

  From every direction children poured into the quad. Like sheep rounded up by an unseen herd dog, bodies ran, walked, churned against each other, not knowing whether to go or stay, not knowing how to leave. Mindful of a stampede, the leaders tried to induce some order. The teachers were nowhere.

  Then: shots. One, two, three. A shooting star hung briefly suspended above them before landing in their midst, unleashing its poison. A small dust cloud bloomed into full
evil, and Grace knew in that instant that she was going to die. The gas ripped into her, into the delicate tissues of nose, eyes and mouth. The top layer of her skin was being eaten away. She couldn’t breathe. Tried to cough. Gasped for air but swallowed fire. Throat melting, eyes burning out of her head, she could not see a thing. She was aware of only the burning, burning.

  She started moving again, without volition, amidst the sea of bodies being swept out by a current to God-knew-where. In the press of bodies the students rounded a corner out of the quad and then Grace was breathing again, her lungs greedily sucking the air. She felt a hand at her back: Johnny’s, pushing her away from the main school building.

  “Run, run! Go to the hole in the fence. Run home!”

  Lungs still burning, Grace ran with a crowd of students across the soccer field towards the makeshift exit in the school fence, but the soldiers, guessing their escape plan, rolled in their Casspirs towards it, rifles ready. Fear became the fire in her throat, the burning of her insides, the liquid running down between her legs.

  All running together, but each alone, the students’ race against the soldiers seemed futile to Grace even as she ran with the herd. There was nowhere to hide, just the soccer field with no chalked lines and browning patches of grass. Throats on fire, they ran the length of the field, not daring to look up or back or around. Johnny had disappeared. With skin and eyes burning, tears and snot streaming down her face, Grace shot forward with the crowd.

  Another dull pop echoed across the field. Another teargas canister launched at them, thudding on the earth. Faster they ran, trying to outrun the convoy rolling towards the stream of kids congealing at the hole in the fence. Turn around or continue forward? Everyone else kept moving forward, so Grace stayed within the safety of numbers.

  At the hole, the group bottlenecked. Dancing to the invisible flames of teargas, some fell, while others trampled over prostrate bodies in their haste to get through the gap that allowed passage to only one person at a time. Grace felt herself being pushed up against the fence. She managed to break free. As the stream of children halted, she took a gap and decided to leap through the fence. She was about to step through the hole when her knees collapsed and her body hit the ground. The noise of the approaching armoured trucks deafened her. She felt harsh rubber soles treading into her back. Then unseen hands lifted her quickly, securely, and shoved her through the fence. She turned back for a second, expecting to see him, but there was no recognisable face, just an endless blur of children crowded at the gap.