LITMIR.BIZ

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decent girls learn at school. All we ever learnt was how to kick a guy in the crotch, but the PT teacher said that’s very serious and you should only do it if you’re being raped.’

      Rhonda nodded sympathetically, but didn’t say anything.

      ‘She didn’t say what you should do when your baby dies and your husband drives you out of the house,’ said Griet.

      ‘You were very badly hurt.’ Rhonda leant forward a little on the red sofa, her eyes peaceful, as always. Griet felt as though she could sink away into those still pools, down, down, down, with stones in her pockets, like Virginia Woolf. ‘And you hide it under this terrible anger.’

      She didn’t want to beat him to death any more, she told her therapist. She wanted to torture him to death slowly, but she didn’t tell anyone that. She wanted to lock him into his own house, without a telephone or newspapers or books or any contact with the outside world. She wanted to flush his sleeping pills and his depression pills down the lavatory. She wanted to install a remote control video camera in every room, and watch him as he slowly went mad.

      Sometimes her own madness frightened her.

      ‘He says he can’t understand why I’m so angry. That’s the worst of all, that he can carry on with his life as though nothing had happened, as though I were a page that could simply be torn out. Not a page with words on it, not something you’d miss if it disappeared from a book, not even a bloody advertisement page! A snow-white, completely blank page.’

      ‘Isn’t it perhaps possible that you want to punish him in some other way now?’ Rhonda asked carefully. ‘Now that you don’t want to hit him any more?’

      ‘How do you mean?’ Griet asked, just as carefully.

      ‘Didn’t you think about him the night you put your head into the oven?’

      ‘I knew you’d ask that,’ said Griet slowly.

      Grandpa Big Petrus, who’d been punished with the Hand of Death, often spoke to the angels. That was long before there was a hole in heaven, but he had his own methods of making contact with celestial beings. He’d simply take a long walk in the veld, look up into the cloudless sky of his beloved Karoo, and hear the fluttering of angels’ wings.

      He agreed with them that he lived in an extraordinary country. Especially after he’d lost his farm during the depression years and had to live as a poor relation on his nephew’s farm. People said he never got over the humiliation, it had affected his mind, he’d started hearing voices.

      But little Griet knew that since childhood he’d talked to the angels like other children play with fairies and gnomes. He told her himself, when she was still very young and he was already very old, one day while she was listening to the fluttering of wings with him.

      ‘He was a good man,’ Grandma Hannie said after his death, ‘but he was too proud to be a poor relation. That’s why he was punished with The Hand.’

      Grandma Hannie always spoke with great awe of The Hand.

      ‘He was meek and mild,’ Grandma Hannie always said. ‘He only got angry once in his life. Then he struck a man stone dead. He didn’t know his own strength. The magistrate said he’d been punished with The Hand of Death and he might never again strike anyone, not even his own children.’

      Grandpa Big Petrus was a giant of a man – so big that Grandma Hannie had to make all his clothes for him. He had feet like mountains and hands like hills. Little Griet couldn’t keep her eyes off his hands, especially not that deadly one that had sent a man straight to his grave with one blow. The Hand was as brown as the earth and baked rock hard by a merciless sun, cracked like an empty dam in a drought.

      Grandma Hannie was a tall, sinewy woman with long sinewy hands, but when she knelt beside Grandpa Big Petrus, he folded both her hands in one of his. Grandma Hannie’s hands were covered with blotches and blue veins that always made little Griet think of villages and rivers on a geography map. But Grandma Hannie’s fingers were light as feathers when she dried Griet’s hair.

      ‘My prettiest sister died of wet hair,’ Grandma Hannie always told her. ‘She had curly golden hair like yours, only much longer, almost down to her knees. She washed her hair every day, and sat brushing it in the sun for hours. Like a mermaid, the people always said. One evening she got caught in the rain and she went to bed with damp hair. The next morning she was lying in bed with her hair wound round her body like a golden cloak. Stone dead.’

      Grandma Hannie was the youngest of sixteen children who had all come to bizarre ends.

      One brother broke his neck when his horse shied at a ghost one night. It must have been a ghost, people said, because he was the best rider in the district. He wouldn’t have fallen off his horse, even if he’d been drunk.

      It was the ghost of the sister with the wet hair, the family whispered. She was taking revenge because he’d snipped off a tress of her hair after her death. He’d apparently wanted to give his daughter a doll with real hair.

      Another brother had married seven wives – sometimes more than one at a time, went the gossip – and suffered a heart attack on his seventh wedding night. The bride was a good forty years his junior, and six months later she gave birth to a child who inherited all his money and, according to the chagrined family, didn’t look like him at all.

      But the strangest death of all came to the brother in the tower. He’d ended up the richest of all – because he was the stingiest, Grandma Hannie always said, but money couldn’t buy him happiness, she never failed to add. Never a very cheerful soul, in old age he gave himself over to gloom completely and built a tower that soared up to heaven on one of his farms. He sat in it all day scanning the horizon, on the lookout for the Communists or Judgement Day, whichever came first. One day he heard the roaring of lions and the trumpeting of elephants and decided Judgement Day had dawned. The Communists wouldn’t bring elephants along, he reckoned. He hurried down but, in his haste, he tripped on the tower stairs and broke his neck.

      The elephants and lions belonged to the first circus that had ever toured the district.

      Griet thought about her family, that night she wanted to get into the oven, and wondered whether committing suicide like this wasn’t awfully unoriginal.

      ‘I probably thought about George too. But I was fed up with always considering other people, what they’d say, how they’d feel. For once in my life I wanted to think of no one but myself.’

      ‘But you couldn’t do it,’ said Rhonda carefully. ‘You couldn’t do it because you were still thinking about other people.’

      ‘I couldn’t do it because a cockroach gave me a fright.’

      ‘I know it’s going to sound strange to you,’ said Rhonda, writing something in the file on her lap, ‘but the fact that you considered suicide, considered it seriously, but didn’t go through with it … indicates a degree of progress.’

      ‘Progress?’

      ‘Up until now you have simply hidden behind anger, Griet. You’ve refused to accept any responsibility for anything that happened. Now you’re beginning to face reality. That’s the most difficult part. It’s understandable that you would sometimes think about suicide.’

      But I think about suicide all the time, she wanted to argue. I think obsessively about suicide and cancer and starving children and about what the hell is going to become of this country if heaven doesn’t help us. I have anxiety attacks about death and the possibility of getting Aids – maybe I already have Aids! – and that I could be raped or necklaced by a furious black mob, and then I think what the hell, if I do it myself at least I can choose the way I go. What’s finished is finished, Grandma Lina always said.

      But suddenly she felt too tired to argue with her therapist.

      ‘Can you remember how you felt that day? Did something happen, no matter how slight, something that could have been the last straw?’

      She hated

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