Alive Again Read online

  But I was looking at life through a cloud of mist. Shapes moved around me, but they were blurred. Sounds were muted.

  The only visit I remember quite vividly was Lindiwe’s, the shy girl who had confessed to me that she had been raped. She gently pulled the blanket off my face, and when I yanked it back over my head, she said, “I understand. I understand. But please don’t turn your back on people who love you. You have so many people who believe in you. Let them help you.”

  I turned over, my back to her. But I heard her last words, just before she left, very clearly.

  “Don’t sink as deep as I did, Nandi. Trust me, it’s really hard to climb out of that hole.”

  * * *

  Maryke kept her word. She didn’t tell Bheka.

  But he was not one to be fooled. When a few days had passed and I had not answered his calls, he phoned my mother. She didn’t know that I didn’t want to talk to him, so she passed me the phone.

  “Don’t ever call me again, Bheka,” I said. “Forget about me. Please. Forget you ever knew Nandi.”

  “What’s going on?” I could hear the shock in his voice.

  “I can’t talk,” I said, turning off my mother’s phone.

  My mother, who had been lingering in my room, said with her thunderstorm face, “You’re making a big mistake. You have to tell him. Don’t chase your friend away – you’re going to need him. If you don’t want to tell him what happened, I will.”

  I fell back onto my bed and pulled the blanket over my head again. “Whatever. I actually don’t care.”

  There and then my mother dialled Bheka’s number. I heard her telling him everything, whispering into the phone.

  “He wants to speak to you,” she said after a while.

  I crawled out from under the blanket and took the phone.

  “I’m not who you think I am. I’m a bad girl. My father was right. I don’t deserve a boy like you.”

  “You’re innocent, Nandi. Nothing has changed. Nothing will ever make me love you less. You have to believe me!” There was a desperate note in his voice.

  But I did not believe him. And when he pleaded with me to allow him to visit, I refused. Without even saying goodbye, I passed the phone to my mother. Then I got out of bed, took the two portraits he had sketched off the wall and shoved them into the back of my cupboard. I got back into bed, pulled the blanket over my head and disappeared into the familiar darkness again.

  The strange thing was, I had started desiring that darkness. It was the only thing that made me forget. The only other thing which helped, a bit, was to bath, three, four times a day. But no amount of soap and water could wash away my shame.

  It clung to me like a layer of tacky grease.

  9

  Late one afternoon, a week after my discharge from hospital, my mother came into my bedroom. She was going to weed the vegetable patch at the back of our house, and she tried her best to encourage me to get up and join her. The winter sun was warm enough for me to sit outside while she worked, she said, opening the curtains.

  I sat up, squinting against the light of the setting sun.

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to go out, thanks, Ma,” I said.

  I lay down again when she left. I could vaguely hear my brothers playing outside, but inside the house was quiet as a grave.

  Suddenly, I became aware of a familiar smell. The stench of my father when he had been drinking and smoking dagga. Like a bullet I shot out of bed, out of the dead darkness, into the red light of sunset that fell through the window.

  Etched against that light was my father.

  Before I could shout for help, he grabbed me, stuffed a cloth into my mouth, pulled the blanket off my bed and dragged me down the corridor and out the door. Barefoot and dressed only in leggings and an old pyjama top, I was shoved under the canopy in the back of his bakkie.

  He threw the blanket over me and within seconds, he sped off.

  I yanked off the blanket and pulled the cloth out of my mouth. I lunged for the back door handle, but it was locked. Screaming, I banged on the inside of the canopy. I crawled to the window that separated me from the front of the vehicle and hammered against it. I could see the back of my father’s shaven head, his big hands clenched around the steering wheel, an empty beer bottle and a packet of cigarettes on the seat beside him.

  I exhausted myself screaming, but he didn’t glance at me once. At last, tired out, I wrapped myself in the blanket and drew into the darkness again.

  Kill your feelings, Nandi. Numb your feelings until nothing matters.

  Your footpath has turned away from the sun.

  I don’t know what time it was when we arrived.

  The bakkie stopped and I heard my father get out and slam the door. He called out to someone. I strained to hear. A door opened and I heard a woman’s voice. It sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it.

  The door of the canopy was opened. In a gruff voice my father instructed me to get out. I crawled to the opening and did as I was told. I climbed out and wrapped myself up in the blanket, shivering in the cold night air. In the light of a candle I saw the face of my father’s mother, standing in front of the little house she had lived in ever since I could remember.

  I knew immediately why my father had brought me to Gogo’s house. She lived on the other side of Lydenburg, or Mashishing as it is now called, in a remote village far from town, which meant that no one would find me. My father also knew that Gogo was going to obey his every word. My mother always said that her mother-in-law allowed her husband and sons to get away with murder.

  Holding the candle, Gogo’s gnarled hands were shaking. She looked small and terrified. My father shoved me towards her.

  “The little flirt has been raped. She asked for it. She and her mother think she will go to university and be a lawyer.” He spat on the ground.

  I watched him. Deep inside, something moved, just a little bit. A tiny part of me wanted to lunge forward and kick him, throw him to the ground. But I was caught in a nightmare. Paralysed.

  “It’s time she learnt about real life. About cooking, cleaning, washing clothes and planting seeds. You teach her. She’s been at school long enough now,” said my father, barking at his mother like a dog.

  Gogo nodded, submissive as always.

  I felt sick. My father barked further instructions: his mother must keep her mouth shut and not tell anyone where the girl is, especially not the child’s mother. If she does, he will shoot all his children and his wife. And then he will come after her.

  Gogo nodded again, before looking up at me. There was something in her eyes that surprised me. Whereas she had looked at my father with fear, she looked at me with something strong and caring. For a moment I felt relief, as if I was in the presence of a friend, an ally.

  “Here’s money,” said my father, thrusting a wad of notes into Gogo’s hands. “Now go inside,” he barked, before speeding off in the bakkie.

  “Come, come, child,” Gogo said, putting a comforting arm around me. “It’s cold.”

  We entered the tiny lounge, separated from the dark kitchen by a low wall on which a single candle was burning. A faint, sweet smell of wood smoke hung in the air. In the flickering candlelight I saw that Gogo’s little house had not changed since we had visited her at Christmas. The same four white plastic chairs, a faded green couch, a small, threadbare floor mat and flowers in a glass bottle on a white plastic table. Gogo always had flowers in the house, picked in her small, neat garden or in the veld surrounding the village.

  “You must be hungry. I baked bread today and I made potato soup. The stove is still warm.” Gogo pointed to the black, wood-fired stove in the corner of her kitchen. “I’ll make you some –”

  “No!” I interrupted. “I want to sleep, Gogo. I just want to sleep.”

  I knew when Gogo took me into her cramped little bedroom smelling of camphor cream that I would have to share her bed. I collapsed onto the mattress, wrapping myself tightly in my
blanket.

  With muffled voice, I spoke into the dark. “We must get antiretrovirals tomorrow.”

  Soon after that, I fell right into that hole which Lindiwe had spoken about.

  Far away I heard Gogo mutter that she was going out but would be back soon. She shuffled to the front door and locked it behind her.

  What happened next has made me believe in angels.

  Earth angels. Angels of flesh and blood and bone, who live and work among us.

  An angel arrived at the bedside in Gogo’s tiny bedroom a short while after I had collapsed and Gogo had shuffled out into the night.

  I was still lying with the blanket pulled over my head when someone smelling faintly of roses sat down on the bed, close to my curled-up legs.

  A soft but firm voice said, “I will not let you lose your way, girl.”

  Just that. Nine words which hit me like one of those huge trucks that transport oranges from Mpumalanga.

  Nine words which penetrated the darkness and drew a river of tears out of my dead, paralysed body.

  I don’t know for how long I cried, lying against the angel’s welcoming, warm body. It seemed to go on for hours. She didn’t say a word, she just held me and softly sang a lullaby I remembered from my childhood. I was swamped by tears, drowning in a salty river of grief.

  Have you ever seen a river flood its banks? I have, often. In the rainy season, the Crocodile River near KaNyamazane pushes right up to the Crocodile Bridge sometimes, so that cars and buses and taxis have to turn around and take other routes to town. My tears would have flooded the banks of the Crocodile that night – that is how it felt.

  Suddenly the angel put a cellphone into my hands, in the dark.

  “Phone your mother. She will be out of her mind with worry.”

  “But,” I said between the sobs, “my father said if Gogo tells my mother, he will shoot –”

  “It is a long drive back to KaNyamazane and he won’t be home yet,” the angel interrupted me.

  The room was so dark I could not see the expression on Gogo’s face. She was standing at the foot of the bed: a dark, silent shape. I expected her to say no, to submit to her son’s demands. But to my surprise she agreed that I should call my mother.

  My mother cried more than I did when she heard my voice.

  “I am sick with worry. When I finished weeding and saw you were gone, your brothers and I searched everywhere. I was just about to go to the police,” she said, sobbing.

  I cried so much that the angel had to take over. She left the room and while I drifted gradually into sleep, I heard her muted voice talking to my mother. I must have fallen asleep soon after that, because all I remember is waking up the next morning and asking Gogo where the angel was, the one who had visited me the night before.

  10

  When Nobuntu Mazibuko visited me that morning, I could see that she was a very different kind of angel. Not a regular angel, I thought as I watched her standing in the doorway of Gogo’s kitchen. She was an angel in a tight red dress, black high-heeled boots, an angel with sparkling eyes, bright-orange lipstick and a mass of natural, curly hair kept from her face with a pink headband. An angel who tossed her head back when she laughed, and who looked straight through me when she was serious.

  An angel who – so I found out later – worked as a counsellor for abused women for a countrywide organisation based in Mashishing. She was also the daughter of Gogo’s best friend in the village, Ant’LaMazibuko. When I had arrived the previous night, Gogo had wasted no time in calling Nobuntu, who lived with her mother nearby.

  “First thing we need to do is phone your mother again, so that she can hear your voice sounding happier this morning,” Nobuntu said, handing me a box of antiretrovirals, a chocolate bar and a big yellow apple.

  “But what if my father is with her?” I protested, looking across the kitchen at Gogo, who was loading wood into the stove.

  Gogo paused, a piece of firewood in her hand. To my great surprise, she agreed once again that I should phone. But she did suggest that we first find out from Zanele or her mother when it would be safe to speak to my mother.

  “But Gogo, you agreed when my father warned you not to tell my mother,” I said, puzzled.

  “Just to keep us safe, child. He was drunk. And smelling of dagga. I didn’t want to risk our safety.” Gogo gave a little snort. “He thinks I’m still afraid of him, but those days are over. Nobuntu has changed my mind about a lot of things.”

  I was speechless. If Nobuntu could make a free-thinking woman out of Gogo, if she could make Gogo disobey my father, she was an angel indeed.

  Laughing, Nobuntu did a little dance in the kitchen, her dress a bright swirl of red. “And your father thought he was punishing you by leaving you with your gogo!”

  Gogo and I laughed too.

  After Nobuntu, Gogo and I had taken turns to speak to my mother, and she was reassured that I was in the best possible hands, Gogo looked me up and down and said that what I needed was warm clothes, shoes and toiletries.

  “I’m going into town today. Come along, and we’ll get what you need,” said Nobuntu.

  “I want to stay! Please, please don’t make me go anywhere!” I exclaimed, breathing fast, feeling lightheaded and faint.

  Calmly but firmly, Nobuntu made me sit down. She instructed me to breathe in very deeply, hold my breath and breathe out slowly. I had to repeat this a few times, until my breathing was regular again.

  “Then I will go shopping for you. And you can stay right here,” she responded.

  When she asked for my size and some idea of the kind of clothes I liked, I blurted out, “Jeans. Big, loose jeans. And big shirts. A baggy shirt with a big hoodie.”

  “Shoes?” she asked.

  “Sneakers. Size 6. Any colour.”

  “Toiletries?”

  “Just a toothbrush and toothpaste. Deodorant. And soap, a few bars of soap,” I muttered.

  “Body lotion? Lip Ice? Nail polish?”

  I shook my head. I did not tell the angel that I wanted nothing that would make me look pretty. But I could see in her eyes that she knew anyway.

  “You might not be coming shopping with me, but you and I are still going on one hang of a journey, girl. I advise you to put your seatbelt on,” she said, looking right through me, before disappearing into the mist of the cold winter’s day.

  * * *

  For what seemed like a lifetime, Nobuntu took me on that journey. I can now see why she urged me to put on my seatbelt! There were many times when I fell headlong down paths so steep they made Long Tom Pass seem like a low, gentle rise.

  But the journey began on a false note. Why false? Because, quite suddenly, on the second day after my arrival at Gogo’s house, I saw no reason to go on any journey at all. In fact, I thought a lot of fuss had been made about nothing.

  “I’m actually quite okay,” I said to Nobuntu when she arrived in Gogo’s kitchen for a cup of tea and the first leg of our journey. “To be honest, I’m over it. Let’s just give my father time to calm down, then I’ll go back to school. By the time I matriculate, my mother will have found a way to chase him out of our lives and I can carry on with my dream.”

  I heard my own voice. It was dead calm.

  “Sweetheart,” said Nobuntu, sipping her tea slowly, “let me explain something about this journey we’re going on. The first phase is called Shock. Shock makes us numb. It’s a natural protection against the horror of the experience.”

  I nodded. I could identify with the shock part of it, for sure.

  “So the second phase is when you get over it?” I probed, drinking my tea hastily and feeling impatient. I was super-ready to move on.

  “No, the second phase is something called Denial. You’re not consciously aware of it, but right now you’re pushing the impact of the trauma down into a dark corner, into hiding, so that you can cope. To everyone else it seems unrealistic, but to you it feels totally cool.”

  “So what’s wrong w
ith cool? Can’t you see I’m better?” I was irritated.

  I put down my teacup so hard on Gogo’s small kitchen table with its plastic cover and spindly legs that the table shook. “Just let me get on with my life.”

  “If I didn’t know you were putting up a roadblock to avoid the journey ahead, I would have walked out right now and left you to get on with it.” Nobuntu kept her eyes firmly on mine. “I’m leaving now. But you can bet that tomorrow I’ll be back. And we can start by talking. About your feelings. Remember, we’re on this journey together and although I may sometimes push you from behind, mostly I’ll leave you to find your way. Just know that Nobuntu is right behind you.”

  She kissed Gogo on the cheek and gently touched my shoulder. I turned away. I was not at all sure any more that she was the angel I had thought she was.

  * * *

  Often, in those first weeks, I lost all hope. More than once, I wished I could die. There were many days when I lay in Nobuntu’s arms, moaning, “I want to die, let me die, let me die! I am a slut, my father was right! I am dirty, dirty, dirty!”

  But Nobuntu would not allow me to believe a lie about myself, and she would not let me die.

  My journey with Nobuntu reminded me of the time in grade 7 when our Geography teacher took us on a hike in the Mkonjwa Mountain Range near Barberton. The Mkonjwa are said to be among the oldest mountains on earth. For two days we walked up steep mountainsides, down into valleys, through streams. Sometimes we sat down to eat, or to rest our tired feet, overlooking the awesome, wide De Kaap Valley.

  In exactly the same way, my journey with Nobuntu felt like a difficult, endless climb at times: while I sometimes ran downhill, at other times I stood on the edge of cliffs so high that it took all of Nobuntu’s strength to hold me from falling into the dark, deep dongas below.

  It was a journey that took place, mostly, in the safety of Gogo’s house. I feared going out. I was so afraid of strangers that I refused to walk anywhere by myself. Nobuntu and Gogo asked their friends in the village to be my walking companions. They were more than willing to accompany me whenever I had to fetch water from the village’s communal taps, or when Gogo sent me to the traders who sold baskets of vegetables and fruit from under rustic reed structures.