False River by Dominique Botha

Author:Dominique Botha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2013-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

unfolds this

winter morning

blade clear,

against which a soft

shoulder of snowbirds:

in a dry country

the sun will

unskin the land

but here

where we lie

throat against

throat,

(along the handbridge between us)

unfolds

an absence of knives

I allowed myself one thought about John after each folding of the watermelon syrup. I turned his words over and over until they had the right consistency. They always curdled. Ma wanted to know if he was my boyfriend. The last time I saw him, he took me to his room, locked the door and pulled the striped curtains closed. I sat perfectly still in the moth-coloured light of the late afternoon. He unbuttoned my blouse and lay me down on his bed. His mother was downstairs in her office marking first-year papers on economic theory. He ran his fingers along my arms and into my hands. The erythrina outside his bedroom window knocked against the glass. It was in flower. They call it a coral tree in Natal.

I wondered who Paul was in love with then, when he wrote the poem. I was no longer instructed to walk thirty metres behind him in public, like he had made Christiaan and me do sometimes when we were little, but I continued to lag. A credulous Gretel trampling the undergrowth. I felt I knew what Paul meant in his poem. The landscape widening within, harriers tracing wind in a bone-marrow sky. The promise of a drought breaking.

Pa came down to the house to listen to the weather report. He put the radio on. “Mooi weer en warm.” No rain for us. Some reports of hail in the east. Ma walked in through the happy door and Ouma followed behind with her hair coiffed.

Ma sat down at the breakfast table holding an opened envelope. Ma took her glasses off and buried her face in her hands. Ouma Celia stood in the doorway holding Spokie.

“What’s wrong Sandra?” Pa asked.

“Your son has been kicked out of university. He did not write his final exams either.”

Pa jumped up. “Let me see the letter.”

“You know what this means,” Ma said. She pointed to an envelope that lay underneath the letter from the university. It was Paul’s call-up papers. He had to report for military duty on the 2nd of January. Ma pulled her pendant from the folds of her blouse and jerked it against its flimsy chain.

Pa ranted up and down the corridor. “What a waste of money! Now he will have to go to the army. That will teach him a lesson. Teach him that actions have consequences!” Pa shouted at all of us. Oupa Bob stood quietly at the sink washing grease off his hands with strong soap. The smell of caramel drifted from the hob. I ran to get the burnt syrup off the stove. Ouma Celia kept stroking Spokie and said, “Ons mooiste en ons slimste. The best one of the lot. I love that child so much. I am bitterly disappointed.”

Pa sat down again. “He had better get back here and explain himself. I am not going to be entertaining this indulgence.

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