The Offering (7 page)

We heard a shout and there was my father striding along the quay. His jacket was slung over his shoulder and he was whistling loudly. I saw the children become still when they saw him. He swung himself into the front seat and said: ‘Ice creams.’

My mother nodded.

‘No money,’ he said. ‘The bank’s on strike.’

My mother stopped eating. ‘On strike?’

‘Aye, we’ll have to make do with the cash we brought over.’ His eyes were shining. He didn’t seem to think it was bad news at all.

My mother looked straight ahead. She said: ‘Did you see any work advertised?’

‘No.’

She turned to him.

‘It’ll work out, don’t worry. Did you have any good discussions?’

‘No,’ my mother said, in a deeper voice, flatter, weary, with no hint of pretence. She would usually have lied to him.

‘Well, you tried, that’s the main thing,’ he said. With his hand along the back of her seat, he began to reverse.

The children’s eyes followed me as we pulled out. I lowered my head and studied the pattern of the stitching on the back of my father’s seat, the way one stitch replaced the next, the way the staples held the leather tight. Then the endlessness of it was suddenly too great and I could not look any more.

That afternoon we shopped at a supermarket that we reached through a covered walkway between an electrical and a sports shop. The supermarket was like a warehouse with high white ceilings and crates of unpacked boxes. A song was playing over and over. It went: ‘Better by day, better by night, better buy here to get it right!’ The words were like a chain that kept revolving. They made me think of the stitches, and then I thought of the men killing eels, and if I managed to push one image out of my mind, the others took its place.

My mother bought fruit and vegetables. I noticed that not many of the other people did, that most of the other people looked as if they had just been gardening or come off a farm. The other women weren’t wearing make-up as my mother was, their hair wasn’t blow-dried, and they were wearing jeans and fleeces and T-shirts. I could see one woman’s nipples. At the checkout my mother looked closely at the new coins and the cashier had to find the right change for her. The cashier had rosy cheeks and was as broad as a man. Her hair was brown and wiry and parted at the side like someone from an old film. My mother thanked her warmly but she didn’t smile back and rammed the till closed. I took two bags of shopping from my mother, though she protested, and held onto her hand. I wanted to tell her about the children once we were back at the bungalow but I knew that I wouldn’t. She would try to think of something to say and she would worry.

On the way home my father whistled but did not honk the horn. I couldn’t sing along now and neither could my mother. I glanced at her face in the mirror. It looked as if the props had been removed from it. I tried to read her eyes but they were glazed and empty.

For the next few days my mother and I made a tunnel through the gorse that grew on the bank at the back of the bungalow. We worked for hours, our arms covered in scratches, slashing at the branches that snapped with tiny puffs of dust. On the third day we broke through to the other side where there was a quarry with stony banks, a lake of cobalt water at the bottom. I was glad to be with my mother because then I could watch her. Thwacking away at the gorse, she seemed to be happy, to have forgotten the town, the fact that my father did not have a job and the bank strike. But over the coming weeks she stayed indoors more and more, and I went to the quarry mostly with Elijah, who sat panting, blinking at the sun, while I dug myself into the shale, a peculiar weight in my chest, and let the sun’s light wipe me out. I replayed what had happened in the town. I turned it around in my head and looked for the hidden truth but it was like the water at the bottom of the quarry, which glittered, drew you in, but revealed nothing beneath the surface.

Time spent at the bungalow now felt like a reprieve. I felt sick whenever we went into town. I saw that I was wrong to think life would be bright and balmy on the island, full of the feeling of school holidays and weekends. In some ways it was worse than being in school. Father and Mother had thought I would be better off not mixing any longer with unbelievers. But with my being removed from people completely, I found any contact doubly intense. School had given me a skin of sorts, albeit a painful one. Now I had no skin, or I was shedding the one that I had. We all seemed to be shedding something.

My mother was glowing but restless. She cleaned out cupboards, beat carpets, made a timetable for schoolwork that we never got round to, sewed a new cover for our three-piece suite and painted the wicker furniture on the stoep, forgetting to cover the steps; then had a frantic few hours washing paint off before my father came back.

My father was leaner than I had ever seen him; his hair bristled with purpose, his eyes gleaming. I could smell his skin and his hair when he came in from sawing a fallen pine or from mowing the wild grass at the front of the bungalow with an old mower that tore the grass rather than cut it; I remember the vehemence with which he pushed it, almost tripping as the wheels shot forward. I saw him one day on the stoep with a look on his face that was feral, and when he caught my eye he shifted as if I had disturbed him and said, almost savagely: ‘All right?’ He was wearing a pair of bright blue shorts.

‘Yes,’ I said; I was going to say: ‘Are you?’ but thought better of it.

He set off around the side of the bungalow, the sinews in his legs taut and athletic, covered in virile blond fuzz.

Every day he went into town to see whether the bank was open, if he could find a house or find work. It wasn’t, he couldn’t, and there was none, but everything was ‘wonderful’, the roads not riddled with potholes but full of ‘character’; people weren’t rude but ‘gave it to you straight’; the water was the best thing he had ever tasted; the young people were respectful – two said ‘Good evening’ to him in town (I thought it might have been sarcastic; something to do with the fact that he was wearing a tweed suit and twirling a stick). To my father the island was still a paradise, and we were as good as on holiday.

It was true that those first two months at the bungalow had the loosely woven feel of a holiday, but it was a disconcerting one: time was dislocated and the story unravelling. Sometimes, when we could make ourselves, my mother and I did schoolwork. It was strange working for her. I wanted to try harder but often I tried less. Perhaps she had the same problem, because as often as we studied Pythagoras, we studied buttercups, as often made pies as pie-charts, as often wrote songs on a guitar with four strings as wrote essays – all while Elijah waited in the open door with his head on his paws, his ears pricking at the merest suggestion that class was over.

Sometimes we went walking. There were things to be learnt outdoors too, my mother said. The lanes were breezy, the mornings long, the skies benign, the clouds rolling. It felt peculiar to be wearing dungarees at eleven in the morning.

‘Will I ever go back to school?’ I said. I meant: go back to life.

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘What will I do when I’m grown up?’

‘There are lots of things you could do,’ she said.

I couldn’t think of a single one.

That spring was crisper than any I had known. There were new flowers in dark soil and freshness in the mornings that stirred my stomach. At dusk you could see for miles through bare branches across fields laden with emptiness. There was pink in the sky near the earth. It looked raw, it looked cold, and there was a quiet that spoke of great distances. The land, like us, seemed to be expectant. I would walk back to the bungalow in the evening, and the light would be pink and golden, and the fields already asleep. The distant sounds of cows, the purr of a tractor, the retreating rush of a car or a van on the road made the world seem endlessly spacious and endlessly light. Every so often the treetops surged as if stroked by some invisible hand, the fields kept on rolling and surging; they jostled and shimmered and gave way to each other, hill after hill, rising and falling like swells in the sea, and in the endlessness of it all – in the grasses, in the dizzy activity of butterflies and birds – a chink sometimes opened, and on the brightest of days the world grew suddenly darker and suddenly still.

I had always wanted to know God, to be close to Him, feel His presence beyond doubt, to be ‘One’ with Him, if that was possible. What else was a child raised to think of God constantly expected to do? It was as natural to want God to pay attention to me as it would have been to want to be acknowledged by an absent parent. It was as natural to want to feel some sort of union with Him as it was to desire union with an absent lover. Of course, if other things are missing, that desire may be stronger.

When I look back now, I don’t really know what my essential motivations were, but I remember it wasn’t long after we arrived on the island that I promised I would find God. Such a discovery would be an absolution, I reasoned; an absolution, and an absorption into something larger. I had realized, lying in the shale with the weight in my chest, that this was what I wanted. Did not God dissolve even as He protected and excise even as He embraced?

I heard that men had seen God in fields, glimpsed His face in rivers and clouds. Jesus taught in the countryside, watched suns rise, passed through vineyards and olive groves, fields of barley and wheat; if I was to find God what better place than the country to look? What was more, I thought I was on the right track.

‘I think I’ve discovered something,’ I said to my mother when we were walking one morning.

‘What?’

‘Lots of small particles, buzzing like snow.’

‘Where?’ she said.

‘Everywhere.’ I pointed to the hedgerow, I pointed to the air.

She looked. ‘I can’t see anything.’

‘It’s like atoms,’ I said.

‘You can’t see atoms.’

I said: ‘It’s particles of God. I see them in the evening too in the barley field, and in the morning when the sun hits the water in the quarry.’

My mother said: ‘Perhaps you need glasses.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re real.’

We carried on walking. She looked worried. To distract her I trod on her shoes, then she trod on mine, then I ran off and she raced me. We drew neck-and-neck and I caught her around the middle and swept her nearly off her feet while Elijah jumped around us, barking.

Many days we spent in balmy lanes with bibles and bags. We rarely got to open the bags, much less the bibles, and sometimes people’s doors shut before we had begun speaking. I don’t know how they knew who we were. My father strode ahead of us, whistling loudly. Although on maps the island was small, from the inside it seemed to be vast. Lanes led onto others, roads stretched in straight lines for miles. My father walked on, filling his lungs, calling: ‘Look at that!’ We followed in long skirts that clung to tights that furrowed at ankles, blouses buttoned to the neck and cardigans buttoned over blouses. Breezes lifted the hairs on my arms, my nipples grazed cotton, my collar chafed, seams scratched, labels made me itch, fabric twisted, creased and clung; my shoes rubbed. Before, I had never noticed my skin, nor my clothes, but suddenly the two seemed incompatible. When we got home I tore my clothes off and threw on a holey jumper and dungarees. Sometimes I went out barefoot with a stick.

I kept watch for the particles. It was on the mornings when my mother and I were walking that I saw them most. We’d go for miles, I in a sort of trance, and there they were, eddying, jostling one another, floating around me. They were a little like the dots in the paintings by the Dutch man in a book of my mother’s. Those paintings were filled with just such dabs: blue, turquoise, magenta, green. I didn’t mention them to my mother again for fear of worrying her, but I thought about them. Were they the stuff everything was made of, I wondered, that was always in motion? I was sure that if I looked long enough and thought hard enough, I would be able to learn something.

I was noticing other things too, too many to keep count of. The air, for example, was like no air I had ever encountered: it pricked and pierced, even on warm days. The light seemed to be wilder, to come from a different place than any light I had seen before; it also seemed to me to be terribly bright. These things were not unusual enough to talk about, but they were different enough to let me know I had better pay attention. The whole island was a book I couldn’t decipher and it evoked feelings I had no sphere of reference for. I could not say I was happy or sad or excited or afraid. Those words were all inadequate. That is why I began writing the journal in the beginning, and why from that time onwards I always carried it with me, in an attempt to turn the nebulous into something I could read, or at least put down in words:

A man in a suit walking along the road with a briefcase in his hand and a rucksack on his back covered with polythene …

A man in a shop who growled at his son like a dog …

Thirty-five geese that flew by …

A dead cat with white eyes on the road …

A man firing a gun, rooks everywhere …

A woman screaming: ‘Don’t look at them!’ Holding cross up …

No gardens but small, mown fields with fences …

Processions of cars following hearses …

Sunday, people dressing up and going to the three big churches in town …

The smell of dead animals on the side of the road. Brown, beige, sickly. Pink. Purple. Little flies.

Throughout that spring we continued to preach. It was our offering, the fruit of lips, my father said. Christ died for the world, could save lives if his sacrifice were known, and it was our responsibility to tell people about it. Mornings were times of porridge and prayer. Porridge was cheap, prayer was invaluable. We sat at the Formica table by the kitchen window while the sun rose over the barley field. My father said: ‘Thank you for this day, bless our efforts, forgive us our sins.’ The prayer having been said, spoons descended on the glutinous mess, slow farts pocking obscenely, then shrinking back into spermatic soup. The remainder settled into a tepid brown tarpaulin scaly to the tap of a spoon. At the table we read about Moses getting up early in the morning and building an altar at the foot of the mountain. We read about God producing the manna and sending the quail and making the rock spout. ‘Bless us, forgive us, give us this day—’ but my father did not find work and the bank did not open and the shops would not cash his cheques.