The World Beneath (7 page)

They brought out bags and bags. All colors, and stuffed with what looked like clothes and presents.

So they hadn’t been to the hospital. They had been shopping. Joshua had been thinking all day of Mrs. Malherbe, and now she was laughing.

R
obert’s cheerful face appeared around the hedge that hid the pool from the garden. “Hey, you! Come on in!”

Joshua hesitated. Had he done something wrong?

“Come on! The Madam’s waiting for you!” Robert grinned at him. His curly hair fell forward as he shook his head. “What are you waiting for?”

Joshua took the net gently from the pool and laid it on the crazy paving. He followed Robert up the steps to the side veranda and into the house. He’d never been in the living room before, and he stood awkwardly on the parquet just inside the door.

The sofas were huge and pink, with curly wooden legs. There were two wing chairs by the fireplace, great falls of cream curtain touching the floor, and in the center of the patterned carpet, a pile of shopping bags, with brightly colored tissue paper spilling out.

“Well, boy, what are you waiting for?” asked Mrs. Malherbe. She was sitting in one of the wing chairs with a large gin and tonic in her hand. Smiling.

He felt a little clutch of anxiety. He had never seen her smile in this way before. The smile reached her eyes, and her thin face was glowing.

He didn’t know what to do. Robert laughed, waded into the pile, and handed him a brightly striped sweater.

He looked at it. It must be for — whom? Did Robert have children? He didn’t think so.

“Try it on! It’s for you!” Robert was laughing at him.

His face grew hot. He pulled it on over his head. For a moment the blood roared in his ears. He could hear nothing but the beat of his own skin and smell the slight chlorine smell of himself, the himself who had been quietly dipping and scooping the net into the dimpled pool, alone. The way he liked it.

Then Robert was pulling the sweater down, smiling at him, and spinning him around by the shoulders.

“Just look at him, Ma! He’s a new boy!”

Mrs. Malherbe raised her glass to him. It was empty, he noticed. She smiled again, but the merriment had left her eyes. She waved carelessly at the rest of the clothes. “Take them,” she said. “They’re all for you. You don’t have to try them on here. Let me know if any of them don’t fit.”

“Thank you, Madam,” Joshua said, bobbing his head.

“Robert — get me another one?” She held out the glass.

He carried the folded clothing carefully back to the room in one of the big bags. It had
STUTTAFORDS
written on the side in big curly dark green letters.

He thought his mother would be angry with him, although he wasn’t sure why. But she wasn’t. She said nothing, just took the clothes from him and ran her hands over the T-shirts, the sweaters, the corduroy trousers with cuffs, the long khaki shorts.

She put them away in the drawers. There was plenty of space: he had only two pairs of patched shorts, two secondhand, long-sleeved shirts, and a sweater. Then she went across the yard and into the house, though it was her afternoon rest time.

Later he found out that she had gone to Mrs. Malherbe and said, “Madam, I will pay you for the clothes. You can take it out of my wages.”

Mrs. Malherbe and Robert had laughed. She had said, “No, Beauty. They are a present. Your son works in the garden. He’s a good boy. We don’t like to see him wearing those ragged clothes.”

Or so his mother told him. What they did not understand was that the gift itself was a kind of insult, a wound that went so deep that Beauty could not express it.

Joshua understood, and when she told him, he hugged her hard and said in a muffled voice against her shoulder, “We can give them back. I don’t need them.”

But she pushed him away and said, her voice rough with fatigue, “No. We will keep them. It is like they are giving you wages for your work. It is fair.”

He thought he would not wear the clothes, out of loyalty to her, but after a few days he put on one of the T-shirts. Then he pulled out the new shorts and ran his hands over them. They were so soft!

Beauty came back into the room and saw him. “You must wear them,” she said. “Otherwise the Madam will be upset.”

He helped his mother in the house. Once a week she did a big cleaning in the kitchen, and on those days he would climb the stairs with their wide polished banisters to collect the dirty clothes and damp towels from the floors of the bathrooms, the dressing room, and the bedrooms.

Joshua stood in front of Mrs. Malherbe’s long oval mirror, wearing the long-sleeved khaki shirt and shorts. He had never bothered with mirrors before. But he looked grown-up now, he thought: serious.

He gazed deep into his own eyes. They were dark brown, like his mother’s, with veins in the white parts. He had a long face, with a dimple on one side when he smiled, but his mother’s face was broad, with high slanted cheekbones. He wondered what his father’s looked like.

He glanced down at his hands and turned them over slowly. They were dark on the backs and light on the palms. Why was that? He turned them again, considering. Aside from the darker creases across them, his palms could almost pass for white. But he couldn’t. His coppery darkness meant he lived in the dark. In the back of the white house. Under the stairs. In the backyard. Down at the bottom of the garden. At the bottom of the heap.

These clothes made him feel different. Just like a darker, smaller version of Robert. He had legs and arms, like Robert. Teeth that were even and white. Strong hands. But would he ever drive a car like Robert’s? Would he ever be so happy?

He heard a footstep on the stairs, grabbed an armful of washing from the floor, and dashed for the back stairs, his heart beating fast.

I
t was morning; bright and cold. Joshua ran across the yard, came into the kitchen, and stopped. His mother and the gardener were standing, looking at the radio on the windowsill. Goodman never came beyond the back door. And even more astonishing, Tsumalo was leaning against the doorjamb, holding a tin mug.

The radio was saying something that Joshua could not understand. Something about stones. Something about schoolchildren. Something about shooting.

“Mama, what —” he began urgently.

“Sssst!”
They all turned on him.

Then the man stopped talking. Beauty turned off the radio. There was silence among them.

“Aaai,”
said Beauty. “It is no good.” She was trembling.

“It is what we want. It is the only thing.” It was Tsumalo. He crossed the room and clattered his mug into the sink. “You want to stay as you are?”

He looked scornfully at Goodman, who said nothing, just looked at the floor.

“I am afraid,” said Beauty.

“Afraid!” His face was close to hers. “What is there to be afraid of? The worst thing has already happened. And it has happened to you.”

His forehead shone with sweat, and there was a tiny bubble of foam at the corner of his mouth.

“The worst thing is how we live. Like animals. Like oxen for the plow. Like beasts! When they don’t want us anymore, they can shoot us. Just like they shot Sipho!”

Joshua felt a fist close hard about his heart. His mother flew across the room and held him, as if that could erase what he had just heard. But it was too late.

Sipho. Sipho. He tore himself away and ran out of the kitchen, down the path, into the shrubbery. When Tsumalo found him, he was up the oak tree, fist stuffed in his mouth, tears streaming down his face. Sipho.

Tsumalo reached up and laid his heavy hand on Joshua’s back. “I am sorry. I should not have said. I thought you knew.”

Joshua said nothing. Streams of snot ran down from his nose, and he scrubbed at them with his new khaki sleeve.

“Your brother was a hero. He died”— Joshua gasped and cried out for the first time —“he died fighting the police. But remember, he was a hero. Because of people like him”— Tsumalo grasped Joshua’s resisting form in his arms —“you and I will be free one day.”

Joshua wriggled from Tsumalo’s hold, dropped to the ground, and ran again. Tsumalo did not follow him.

M
r. Malherbe was still away in Jo’burg on business, and soon Robert had to go too, the red Alfa chuntering up the road, and the house returned to its usual torpor, basking in the winter sunlight, the sound of Beauty’s polisher whining over the floorboards.

Betsy swam in the pool and made them laugh, solemnly treading a circle with her huge paws, her ears spread out on the water beside her.

There were no more news reports.

Joshua cried in the night for Sipho. Beauty shushed him gently, half asleep, turning and holding him close; he could feel her own body shaking with suppressed sobs. “I am sorry that I did not tell you about Sipho,” she told him in the dark. “You are still so young. I did not want you to grieve for him.”

One morning he got up early and tiptoed across the yard to get her a proper cup of tea. But as he stood on the red-polished
stoep
, fitting the Yale key in the door, he thought he heard a heavy tread inside the house. Mr. Malherbe. He ran back, thudding into the bed with his feet cold from the yellow dust of the yard.

He lay in the half-light, listening to the doves practicing uncertainly in the trees. Then Beauty began to stir, and he got up to put on the Calor gas ring to boil water. He would have to use an old tea bag from the night before. He put sweet Carnation milk in the cup and brought it to her, the steam spiraling in the cold air.

“I went to bring you real tea,” he said. “But I heard the Master.”

She smiled at him and put her hand softly on his head, then took the cup and drank. “He is still away,” she said.

Later, as he ate cornflakes and milk on the back step, he heard strange stuttering roars in the distance, with gaps in between. It seemed to be coming from near the Red Cross children’s hospital at the side of the common.

He didn’t like the noise. It seemed to make the house shake. It sounded like big guns. He put the bowl down, stood, and looked toward the back of the yard, in the direction of the big square of open ground where the children’s hospital stood on one side and the white girls’ school on the other.

He went back into the kitchen. “What is this noise?” he asked her.

“It is only the roadworks,” she said. “They are drilling the road to make it wider.” She checked the wall clock and switched on the radio. They sat down at the table.

The green baize door swung and swung on its hinges. Mrs. Malherbe swept into the room and stopped, her attention caught by the pips on the hour. Slowly, she pulled out a chair and sat down, chin propped on her arms, eyes fixed on the sunlit yard wall by Beauty’s room with its tracery of vine branches. When the bulletin finished, she twisted the dial to zero and stood up.

“From tonight, and until the Master comes home,” she said, “you are to sleep in the house. You and the boy”— and she nodded at Joshua.

“Make up a bed in the back spare room. And I want Goodman to put extra bolts on the doors. The side doors too and the swing door. Betsy will have to sleep out here. She can take her chances. We should have a proper dog.”