Rotten Peaches Page 6

  During the fourth year of my postgraduate study at the University of the Witwatersrand, I fell into a deeper gloom than any passing funk previously experienced. Life was pointless. Nothing had any value or meaning. It was impossible to get out of bed. I stayed under the covers for days, the thick curtains drawn tight against the light. I had realized, without a doubt, that apart from my money, I had nothing to offer the world. Nor could I expect anything in return. Neither friendship, love, or companionship, or, that most alien of concepts, fun.

  I was unlikeable and unloveable. My own mother had been unable to love me. I was irrelevant to the human race.

  I was alone in Johannesburg at the time. My father was at the farm, and I couldn’t bring myself to call him and tell him I was hurting because it wasn’t pain, it was a terrifying numbness. That I got out of bed at all was thanks to Betty. “Madam, you must get out of bed. You have been in bed for two weeks now. You are not sick. If you do not get out of bed, I am going to telephone your father.”

  “I am sick, Betty. Sick in the mind.”

  “Lying in bed will not fix it. Come with me. Come on, get up.”

  Betty. By all rights, Betty could and should have left me after the ANC came into power, but she said she had her doubts that I could fend for myself. Certainly I could not iron, or make a cup of tea or cook a meal and she said why should she leave when I would just get someone else who would do a poor job? No. Betty said that she had looked after me all her life and until the time when I was happily on my own two feet, with a family of my own, she wasn’t going anywhere.

  I was grateful in a way that I could never tell Betty but I increased her wages, which drew scorn from Rosie. Rosie had wanted Betty to leave and she didn’t mince her words. Rosie didn’t mince her words. It was beneath her mother to clean up after a white princess, even if that white princess offered her mother more money when she said she’d stay.

  “Blood money,” I heard Rosie say. “Money from white men is blood money.”

  “And jobs are jobs,” Betty had replied. “And I like mine. I will keep it, thank you, Rosie.”

  I heard Rosie’s disgust at her mother’s comment. “One day I will make enough money so that you won’t have to wash the panties of a spoilt rich white girl.”

  So, after lying in bed for two weeks, when Betty knocked on my door, I did not tell her to go away. She came in and sat down on the bed and she stroked my forehead. I listened to her talk and I got up when she told me to.

  “We are going to bake,” Betty declared. “We are going to make a melktert and you are going to help me.”

  Food had never interested me and I sighed, wanting only to return to the safety of my dark room. The world stung my eyes and seared my skin.

  But, as I followed Betty’s instructions and mixed the butter and sugar together, I felt the slightest lifting of my spirits. I added the egg yolks and beat the mix until it was light and fluffy. I sifted in the cake flour, the baking powder and the salt, and I folded and stirred while Betty watched approvingly.

  “You are a natural,” she said and I wanted to smile but I grunted and added vanilla essence and milk.

  “This is fun,” I finally conceded. “Why haven’t you ever taught me before?”

  “You never lay in bed for this many days before. I couldn’t think of anything else to get you up.”

  This time I let her see my smile. “Ja well. You helped me, Betty. Thank you. Where did you learn to cook so well?”

  “My mother taught me, and she learned from a strict tannie who was a cook on a big farm. She learned traditional South African food. And your father, Mr. Ruan, he hired me for my cooking. He told me that he liked to eat well and he said he had a beautiful wife but she did not like to cook.”

  I laughed in agreement. “I don’t think my mother could make a piece of toast.”

  “You are right, she could not. Now, let me tell you my secret ingredient that nobody knows. I have added something along the way, to all these recipes.” She opened up the spice cabinet and I watched her closely.

  Yes, I learned each and every one of Betty’s secrets.

  “What will we do with this pie?” I asked once our melktert was ready. “Seems like a waste, only you and me to eat it.”

  “We must share it,” Betty said, sprinkling cinnamon sugar on the top. “Food is a blessing to be shared.”

  “I’ll call Theresa to come and have tea with us,” I said. Theresa was my best friend. My only friend, really, and I had ignored her during my funk.

  I took to baking with a passion that startled Betty and she struggled to keep up with my requests for new recipes. I baked cakes and pies and tarts and cookies and I gave them to the homeless people who hung around the strip malls looking for handouts. South Africa has no shortage of hungry people to feed and for a while I provided some of them with a steady supply. I baked my way out of the pit of despair and I studied Betty’s methodology, making meticulous notes, annoyed with myself for making the same mistake twice.

  I finished my doctorate as quickly as I could. I told Betty that, in my opinion, the fastest way for a person to become completely depressed and unhappy with their lives was to study psychology. The minute after graduation, I threw myself into developing my first book, a combination of baking and self-help and it was an instant success. Betty told me she was proud of me, as did my father, and my books became my life. I got hundreds of letters from people around the world, telling me how I had changed their lives and given them hope. I replied to every letter. I felt good about myself. I felt real and I mattered.

  A professional photographer took my portrait for the book and the results were pleasing even to me. I looked less like some kind of alien, bug-eyed sea creature in print than I did in real life. I even looked pretty. My father insisted that I was pretty in real life too. He said I made the mistake of comparing myself to the wrong people. By which, of course, he meant my mother. Would it have made a difference if she had told me I was pretty? Or showed me how to fix my hair or apply makeup? Or shown me any kind of attention at all? Sometimes I wished she had hit me, or shouted at me, anything, just to prove that she knew I was there. But I was never a part of her world and I hated myself for not being able to get past my need for her love.

  Apart from Betty and Theresa, I kept the boundaries of my life close, limiting my love affairs to short-lived dalliances with married men who were good in bed. No one breached the barbed wire perimeter of my affections until Dirk. Big, powerful, charismatic Dirk.

  Dangerous Dirk, whose affiliation to the secret underground group, the Volksraad, poses a torpedo threat to my untarnished reputation.

  The Volksraad are a group of racist Neo-Nazi Afrikaans South Africans. Their mission is to inflict as much damage as they can to fragile, post-apartheid South Africa, in a bid to keep their language and culture alive. It is absolutely imperative that no one ever finds out about Dirk’s allegiance to this powder keg group.

  I am dismayed by the onslaught of uncomfortable memories and fears that my unfortunate encounter with JayRay has stirred up. I don’t want to think about my mother or my past. Of course, I can’t stop thinking about Dirk, but that’s another matter. By this time, I am safely ensconced in my hotel room and I pace up and down.

  But how could JayRay have found out about the Volksraad? They were news to me, but I must not have been reading the newspapers carefully because after I found out Dirk was a member, I saw mention of them everywhere.

  Is that what JayRay was going to tell me? But what else could it be? I couldn’t risk hearing what he knew. It was better to walk away, even if it meant not knowing what cards he was clutching in his horrible con man fists. Was there a way to find out what he knew? No, it was better to ignore him; he was a one-way ticket to trouble. What a mess. Dirk, JayRay, everything.

  After I found about the Volksraad, I wanted to tell Dirk to leave. I wante
d to tell him that I knew what he was up to and that it was despicable, but I couldn’t say anything. He’s the only man I’ve ever loved. I am so in love with him that I will do nearly anything to keep him by my side, but I also know that associating with a Neo-Nazi is the kind of bad you don’t recover from.

  I remind myself again of the famously disgraced journalist Jani Allan. So beautiful and so untouchable. At the pinnacle of her power, she trotted off blithely to have tea with Eugene Terre’Blanche, leader of the Afrikaaner Weerstandsbeweging, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement. Her meteoric fall from grace was both spectacular and mesmerizing. The country watched in fascinated horror as the blonde beauty and the hefty boer met secretly in parking lots and left embarrassing messages on answering machines. Buttock sighting through keyholes were gleefully reported and the whole affair was career suicide for Jani. And all because she had been “transfixed on the flame of his blowtorch eyes.”

  I was only a child of ten when she sued Channel 4 for libel, but her story hooked me from the start. Who on earth, I wondered, could be so stupid as to let someone that damaging into their lives? Where was Jani’s sense of self-preservation? Where was her discipline? I vowed that lust would never lead me down the garden path of any such stupidity, but now it appeared that I had not only walked that path, I had opened that very door, the door to the secret garden which, unless I was extremely careful, would not remain a secret for much longer. And it would be my undoing.

  I can’t let myself be damaged by Dirk. But neither can I live without him.

  I’m exhausted. I can’t think about it right now. I strip off my clothes and throw them in the trash. I want to destroy the evidence of this ghastly day. But I fish them out and pummel them into the corner of my suitcase. There’s no point in throwing out an expensive outfit. Betty will clean it and fix it, like always.

  I have a long hot shower, wrap myself in a toweling gown, and turn on my laptop. If there isn’t a message from him, I will die. There has to be a message.

  Hundreds of messages flow into my inbox and I scroll through them quickly. All from fans, congratulating me on what a great job I did. Nothing from him. He is telling me that me and my pain come second to him and his family, and that he doesn’t care. He won’t let himself care. He is married and he is an honourable man, an opregte Afrikaner who will stand by his wife and his children.

  I hate him. How could I have let this happen?

  I lie down on the bed and curl into a ball. What if we’d met at university? He wouldn’t have looked at me once, never mind twice. But he looked at the blonde Afrikaans girl in her bobby socks, didn’t he? And he did more than look.

  He got her pregnant in their third year at university. He sat in his future parents-in-law’s living room and ate homemade rusks while he apologized for the unspeakable predicament by asking for her hand in marriage. He would be an honourable man, he told her parents, a good man. He tried to look responsible and serious as he dunked the rusk into his tea, fearful of looking gauche for doing so, but more terrified of spraying crumbs everywhere.

  “Her roommate came to me,” he told me. “She said ‘Chrizette’s late.’ One didn’t say vulgar things like ‘she fell pregnant’ or ‘she missed her period.’ You just said ‘she’s late.’ I knew what she meant. I replied instantly, ‘I will marry her.’ I meant it. I never thought she’d look at me in the first place. Never. But I noticed her the minute I walked into the lecture hall. She was sitting in the front row. The Sunshine Girl I called her because she was so wholesome and so beautiful, and when I asked her out and she said yes, I couldn’t believe my luck. And she fell pregnant and we got married and I promised her I would be true and I will stick to my word.”

  “Ja, but you’re not true to her,” I said, wanting to crush him under the boulder of his lies and self-deception. “You love me and you know you do. And I am sick and tired of hearing how you thought she looked all wholesome and pure and I am sick of hearing you congratulate yourself for being an honourable man. You visit me and you come in my hand and you come in my mouth. And you still call yourself an honourable man!”

  “I have never been inside you,” he said, his eyes pebble cold. “My penis has never been inside you. Therefore I have never slept with you. Therefore we have never had an affair.”

  “You’ve been fingering me and making me come for a year,” I spat at him. “A full year. We celebrated our anniversary. We shared secrets, fears, hopes, and dreams. And yet we are not having an affair?”

  “I have never been inside you,” he repeated as he got dressed. “And now I am leaving you for good. Good luck with your trip. You’ll be amazing, you always are. You don’t need me in your life anyway.”

  “I hate you,” I said and I threw a box of chocolates at him and they flew through the air, a hail of brown stones. “You and your stupid chocolates. You stupid hypocrite.”

  And that was the last time I saw him before I left. And now there is no message from him. I fold into myself, with my arms hugging my belly, and I cry. I wonder how many times I have let him shatter my heart and I wonder if this really is the end and, if so, how will I carry on with my life? How many times have I let him shatter my heart? Is this really the end? And if it is, how will I carry on with my life?

  “Some things aren’t forever, poppie,” my father once told me. “You take what you can while you can and then you try your best to live with it or let it go.”

  I miss my father. I have no one to talk to. My agent is fed up with hearing about my stupid love life. Theresa is tired of hearing about Dirk and Betty doesn’t count.

  I pick up the phone and order a bottle of red wine. Then I sit down and attend to the texts and emails. I attend to them with professionalism and dignity, while tears pour down my face and I drink my wine.

  7. LEONIE

  I LEAVE THE DOCTOR and walk back to my hotel. I am worn out. My face stings under the large bandaid on my cheek and I’m worried the cut will leave a scar. I wonder if JayRay will be waiting for me, drunk, angry, and truculent. I hope not. We always give each other room keys although usually JayRay stays with me.

  I slide my key card into the lock and open the door hesitantly.

  “JayRay?” There’s no reply for which I am grateful. I close the door behind me and lock it. After everything that happened, I need some quiet time. I run a bath of steaming water and climb into it. But I keep my phone close to me and as I’m about to sink down into the water, it rings.

  It’s JayRay. I was on the mark. He’s drunk and truculent. He spews his rage like vomit and I’m unable to get a word in edgewise. I soon tire of listening to him. I put the phone on speaker and lay it on the toilet lid, and his voice echoes out into the bathroom. I crack open a tiny bottle of vodka I grabbed from the mini-bar. JayRay’s rant continues and I wonder why I don’t hang up. Eventually his vitriol sputters to a halt, replaced by silence. I pick up the phone.

  “You still there?” I ask into the void.

  “Yeah. What are you up to?”

  “I’m in the bath. Listen, I’m sorry it didn’t work out, baby, I really am. Bernice is a bitch. I’m sorry I wasn’t more supportive. She pissed me off too, made me feel like I was a cheap whore.”

  “I just wanted to get us a farm,” JayRay starts crying. “I was only looking out for our future.”

  “I know. We’ll figure out something else, okay? We’ll come up with something.”

  “But what? This was our golden egg. She was our goose. But I’ve got something on her, I do, I wasn’t lying. I’ve got a Plan B. I wanted Plan A to work out, but it failed.”

  “Forget about Plan B, JayRay. You heard her. Leave her alone. She’s brutal. You do not want to fuck with her.”

  “But I’ve got the goods, babe, I’ve got them. I can make her pay.”

  “You can’t get near her to give her the goods. Let her go, JayRay. End of the road. Accept it.” />
  He is quiet for a moment, then he says, “But what if I can’t let it go?” and he sounds so sad it makes me want to cry.

  “Then you won’t see me for a while.” It’s an idle threat but one I have to make. This can’t go on, this Bernice obsession.

  “You don’t mean that,” JayRay is confident and I sigh.

  “I’d like to mean it. C’mon, babe, let her go. We’ll figure out a new angle.”

  “And we go home tomorrow.” JayRay states the obvious.

  “If you think that depresses you, think how I feel. Back to being a wife and a mom.”

  “I want to marry you,” JayRay says out of nowhere. “I want you to be my wife.”

  “A bit complicated unless I divorce Dave.” I sit up straighter in the bath and slosh water onto the floor. Mine! He will be all mine! But I can’t let him know what this means to me. I force my tone to stay neutral and I even manage to sound a tiny bit amused, as if challenging him to make the impossible happen.

  “We’re in Vegas, let’s get married. Have a ceremony. Come on. We’ll know it’s true, you and me. True love.”

  “I’d like a proper proposal,” I say and I stand up and slosh more water onto the bathroom floor. “You know, you on bended knee, with a ring. Anyway, you hurt my face.” I want him to know that what he did is not okay. He can’t pretend like it didn’t happen.