The Bed Book of Short Stories by Hannah Morris

Author:Hannah Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC029000, book
ISBN: 9781920397296
Publisher: Modjaji Books
Published: 2012-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

On a Broomstick

Liesl Jobson

Rina stares at the liver spots on the back of her hands. The darkened patches are the same chocolatey colour as the thread she is using to adjust her husband’s cummerbund. The brown is not ideal against the black fabric, but she doesn’t have time to buy more black thread now and she reasons that the stitches will be concealed. It’s not as if he’ll be dancing.

Boeta, her six-year-old, cocks his head, then snips the length of thread with the scissors, like a precise and delicate bird.

‘Thanks, son,’ she says.

‘When can I help you again?’ he asks as he hops from one foot to the other, waving the scissors about.

‘As soon as I’ve finished this stitching you can snip the thread,’ she says. She enfolds the small hand containing the scissors and prises them away gently. The last time Jacques wore his dinner jacket was at his retirement function, which coincided with the twins’ twenty-first birthday. He had decided to celebrate the double event in style. ‘Not too shabby,’ he’d said as they drove down the tree-lined entrance to the Mount Nelson Hotel where the festivities took place. The event brought relatives together from around the country – and it took nine months to settle the credit card bill.

Jacques had looked like a wildebeest that night. His great mop of hair, which shook when he laughed, had been silver-grey, streaked with brown, and his skin was radiant and tanned. He’d twirled her around the dance floor, his hand firm in the small of her back and said, ‘If I was twenty-one again, I’d marry you all over again.’ She was glad he didn’t ask her, ‘Would you?’

How long ago was that? A year? Eighteen months? She couldn’t figure it out.

Now his dinner jacket is three sizes too big and his head is bald. He shaved off his hair before it fell out, saying he was perfecting coolth, like Koos and Danie.

‘Gotta go the whole way, Pops. Get the body piercings too,’ said Koos. She knew it was an attempt at humour, to smooth over the gruesome truth, but she hadn’t even tried to laugh.

The twins’ body piercings had been a sore point. The boys had dared each other over too many beers at The Junkyard one February afternoon when the waves at Muizenberg were too calm to surf and the sand shimmered in the heat. While they should have been sitting in a first year engineering lecture hall they were picking out barbells and learning how to keep their wounds clean. When they returned home that evening, Danie’s tongue was too swollen to eat and he lisped when he spoke. Koos kept prodding the silver stud perched above his eyebrow.

‘You didn’t go to some backyard operation, did you?’ asked their mother.

‘Hell, no! We did it ourselves,’ said Koos.

Rina clucked her tongue; Jacques laughed.

‘Ag, Ma, we went to Kippie’s Paleis,’ said Koos, patting her on the shoulder. She shrugged off his hand. ‘It’s legit. They used sterile needles and stuff.

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