Bone Meal For Roses Read online

  When it gets dark, Poppy carries a few cushions to the cupboard, makes a nest in the bottom, curls up on them, and sleeps until it is light. When she wakes, she lies on her side for hours, finding faces in the knotholes in the pine cupboard walls.

  Much later, Poppy is sitting in the empty bathtub playing with Wombo when she finally hears the front door open. She freezes, her fingers tight on the dog’s greying plush body. Yolande’s laugh stabs through the quiet, followed by the sound of falling, more laughing, Karel’s voice. Poppy doesn’t know whether to get out of the bath or not. Its solid walls make her feel safe, like she’s in a little box. But then, people are buried in boxes, and Poppy can’t shake the image of lumps of earth raining down on her from someone’s shovel above, just like she saw happen on the TV one time.

  Poppy scrambles out of the bath, pockets Wombo, and creeps out to see if, by any chance, Yolande and Karel have brought some food home with them. When Yolande, who is slumped down into the corner of the sofa with a dull look on her face, sees Poppy, she opens her mouth very wide, stretching her lips back over her gums like a baboon from a nature documentary. Yolande holds the expression far too long for it to be a yawn, and no sound comes out so she’s not planning on saying anything. The menace in the gesture is riveting. Poppy stares at the raw red hole, unable to move or look away.

  At last, Yolande closes her mouth. She pulls a bent cigarette out of the pocket of her jeans and places it between her lips.

  ‘You wouldn’t mind being sold, now, would you?’ Yolande asks. The lighter in her hand hisses up its flame, and she leans forward to suck her cigarette to life before looking back at Poppy. ‘You must be dying to get away from me, hey? Just think. Maybe end up in the lap of luxury.’ Poppy is silent. She covers the lump in her pocket that is Wombo with one hand and gives him a squeeze. ‘More likely, you’d end up in the lap of some sick old fucker, though, wouldn’t you? Because life is just like that for ugly little girls with snot on their faces.’ Yolande pulls hard on her cigarette and Poppy can see her eye-weather changing from black frost to something wet and dripping and filled with sadness. It only lasts a moment before the wind blows the hardness back in. Ice chips and stone.

  ‘Just remember, even if you do manage to get rid of me, Poppy, I’ll always find you. You can bet on that.’ Yolande gives a strange, thin smile, eyes squinting against a wreath of smoke. ‘Hey, then I could sell you again. Twice the profit.’ Poppy squeezes Wombo so tightly that her fingers are shaking. ‘Although second time around I’d have to lower the cost for damaged goods.’ A cough-laugh, and at last, her mother looks away, releasing Poppy from her terrible trance. ‘Stop staring at me, for God’s sake. I don’t know why you always have to fucking stare like that. Go out and play. Go on. Out.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE METAL-HAIRED MAN arrives in Pretoria one windy Tuesday afternoon in late September. He climbs over a small heap of discarded rubbish and unopened junk mail to get to the front door of Karel’s shabby cottage. His knock sends the dust motes whirling and makes Poppy look up from the game she’s invented: using old matchboxes to build a little town on the floor in the corner of the room. The knock comes again. Yolande, awake and itchy, shuffles over to the front door and pulls it open. There’s a wide silence and then a sudden clatter of sound as she steps backwards into a pile of old CDs, sending them scattering across the floor.

  ‘Dad?’ Yolande tries to slam the door, but her reflexes are slow. It bounces against the worn farmer’s boot the man has placed in the gap and swings back open to reveal an upright figure in clean, car-rumpled clothes. His sun-wrinkled features are topped with a thatch of hair so uniformly grey it appears metallic in the fading afternoon light.

  The metal-haired man’s face pales when he sees the state of his once beautiful daughter. Her hair hangs in greasy strings around a thin, greenish face. There are mauve blotches around her nose and on the sides of her mouth. Some of her teeth are missing.

  ‘Yolande?’

  ‘What do you want?’ she snarls. Her breath smells like stale smoke and rotting meat. The metal-haired man tries not to flinch.

  ‘The child. My granddaughter, where is she?’ He’s speaking in English. Poppy knows English from all her television watching, but she’s unused to hearing it spoken by people on this side of the screen and is slow to catch all his words.

  ‘Who told you there was a child?’ Yolande’s laugh is shrill and cracked like the caw of a crow. ‘Someone’s been telling you fibs, Dad.’

  ‘One of your loan sharks found us, Yolande. They were looking for the money you owe them.’ Two days have passed since that phone call, but the metal-haired man can remember the exact sound of the stranger’s voice on the other end of the line. It had been hard-edged and threatening, trying to scare an old man into paying off his daughter’s debts. But then there had been a pause and then the voice had gone high and soft and filled with horror: There’s a little girl. She offered to sell the kid to us. What kind of sick filth does that? It was the first the metal-haired man had heard of his daughter in seven years. It was the first time he discovered he had a granddaughter.

  Now, he looks down at the toes of his boots and balls his hands into fists, clenching tight. ‘Thanks to those low-lifes you’ve gotten yourself mixed up with, your mother and I managed to find out you were living here in Pretoria. We hired a private detective—’

  ‘How the hell did you two get it together to do that?’ Yolande lets out a screech of laughter. ‘Finally decided to come in from the garden?’ She crosses her arms, which are marked with scratches and little scars that look like they could be cigarette burns. ‘I notice you guys never bothered to get a detective to find me before.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Yolande. We tried. All the times we tried to get you to go to rehab. We’ve been wondering and hoping for years, and now, here…’ The unfinished sentence hovers, fading at the edges. The metal-haired man softens his tone: ‘Your mother isn’t well. She was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis soon after you left.’

  Yolande wipes her nose with the back of one wire-thin wrist.

  ‘She’s in a wheelchair quite a lot of the time now, but some days are fine. Some days you’d hardly know she was sick at all.’

  ‘Did you tell them?’ Yolande bites the corner of her scabbed lip.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The money-lender guys.’ Her eyes dart over his shoulder.

  ‘I was talking about your mother, she—’

  ‘Did you tell them what the PI told you… where I live?’ The metal-haired man is quiet. His large hands, sun-freckled and used-looking, clutch into fists and release. Clutch and release. Poppy can’t take her eyes off them.

  ‘Hey!’ Karel shuffles in from the bathroom. He scratches the pale patch of emaciated belly that shows between his boxers and his decaying T-shirt and scowls at the metal-haired man. ‘Who’re you?’

  Silence. Clutch and release.

  ‘Who’s this, bokkie?’

  ‘This is my dad, Karel.’

  For some reason, Karel finds this information hilarious. He doubles over and wheezes with laughter. Tears pool amongst the sparse lashes along the fuchsia-coloured rims of his eyes.

  ‘You’re both high,’ the metal-haired man says.

  He’s aching for air and is about to step backwards towards the exhaust-fume and uncollected-rubbish smell of the street, when he sees the child. She seems to materialise into being against the jumbled contents at the back of the room. For a moment, the metal-haired man isn’t sure if he’s looking at a human. She could be a creature from another world. She has large, terrified eyes, mouse-grey hair matted with dirt, and cheekbones that stick out too far.

  ‘Hey, little one?’ he whispers, taking a step further inside. ‘I’m your grandpa.’ He speaks in Afrikaans this time, but Poppy stays frozen still. Only her eyes move, flicking from her mother to the tall, metal-haired man in the doorway. He’s the cleanest, calmest-looking person she’s ever seen on this side o
f the television screen.

  ‘Go into the bathroom and lock yourself in, Poppy.’ Yolande has forgotten that Karel lost the bathroom door key weeks ago. ‘Go on.’ Poppy doesn’t move.

  ‘Her name’s Poppy?’ says the metal-haired man.

  And then he starts to cry. The first unexpected sob ripples through the stale air and ricochets off the grubby walls. When it reaches Poppy at the back of the room, it releases her, as if from some kind of spell. She takes a step, and then another. The oversized pink sandals she’s wearing make sucking sounds as she crosses the sticky linoleum and edges past the hysterical Karel and her frozen mother. She walks right up to the metal-haired man and places her small, filthy hand in his.

  The man looks to his daughter. For a moment, he sees fight flame inside her bloodshot eyes, but then, as if milk has been spilled somewhere behind them, it flickers out. Yolande gives an almost imperceptible nod and then drops her gaze.

  ‘You can come too,’ the man whispers to Yolande, but she turns and walks towards the bathroom. Her back is hunched beneath her T-shirt, making Poppy think of a cockroach shell. ‘Yolande?’

  ‘Fuck off out of here before I change my mind, Dad.’

  No one says another word, but Karel’s wheezy, retching laugh follows the metal-haired man and the little girl as they walk out of the flat and down the stairs and away.

  *

  The metal-haired man drives Poppy out of Pretoria in a well-used old bakkie with springy seats that send her shooting into the air every time they hit a bump in the road. Each time she flies up, the seatbelt cuts into her collarbone, but it also means that she can catch a glimpse of the pale grey stripe that unwinds like a ribbon ahead of them, ending in a grey fuzz of blocks on the horizon.

  ‘That’s Johannesburg.’ The metal-haired man has stopped crying, but his face looks burnt out and hollow. ‘But we’re not stopping there. We’re going all the way to the Cape. Have you heard of the Cape?’

  Poppy says nothing.

  The metal-haired man’s large brown fingers tighten over the steering wheel. Poppy thinks he might be about to cry again, but instead he says: ‘My name’s Jeremy. Your ouma calls me Jem, but you can call me Grandpa, if you like.’

  Silence swims back into the hot cabin. Beneath the grinding noise of the bakkie’s engine, Poppy’s sure she can hear the echo of Karel’s laughter. She cranes her neck to make sure that he’s not hiding in the back somewhere, but she’s too short to see around the seat.

  ‘We’ve got a long journey ahead of us, I’m afraid, but we’re stopping at the next garage for some food. How about a burger? That sound good?’

  Poppy looks at her grandpa with wide eyes. Burgers are what television people eat.

  *

  Jem phones his wife from a payphone while he’s waiting for Poppy to use the bathroom at the rest stop south of Johannesburg. The roadside air smells of diesel and dried grass, and his fingers slip on the buttons. The phone rings and rings. He can imagine Anneke making her slow way over to answer it in their small, bright home. He can almost hear the soft thud of her walker on the wooden floorboards.

  ‘Hello?’ Her voice comes through clear and strong.

  ‘I’ve got the girl, dear heart, I’m bringing her with me.’ His wife, Anneke, sucks in air as if she’s been holding her breath ever since he kissed her goodbye two days ago.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Poppy.’

  ‘Poppy,’ Anneke repeats. ‘But Yolande always hated plants and flowers.’ A granddaughter. ‘How old is she? Is she all right? What’s she like, Jem?’

  ‘She’s a tiny little thing. Needs some feeding up.’ It’s a pathetic skirting-around of the facts but Anneke will see for herself soon enough. ‘It’s a good thing we found her when we did.’

  There’s a pointed silence where Anneke doesn’t ask about Yolande, and in the uncomfortable space between her breaths, Jem can hear the loan shark’s voice: Sell the kid. Sell the kid.

  His heart suddenly skips and then thunders. The little girl is all alone inside the echoing tiled expanse of the female bathroom where he can’t enter. What if someone’s taken her? What was he thinking, letting her go in there alone? He’s about to drop the receiver and rush off to check when the tiny, grimy rodent-like creature emerges from the bathroom and takes a cautious step towards him. His insides liquefy with relief.

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Jem?’

  ‘It’s all right. It’s going to be all right, my love. Your granddaughter will be with you tomorrow afternoon. I’m driving through the night.’

  ‘Be careful.’

  ‘Always.’

  *

  Clutching her Styrofoam container of leftover burger, Poppy sleeps with her cheek pressed up against the seatbelt for most of the long journey from Johannesburg through the dry flat vastness that lies between the cities of the north and the mountains and valleys of the fruit-producing farmlands in the south. Dawn comes as they cross the last of the Karoo, and when the sky begins to lighten, Jem searches for signs of himself or his wife in the girl’s mouse-tiny, slumbering features, but beneath the dirt and the smeared hamburger sauce, and with those hollow eye sockets and angular cheeks, it’s hard to tell. She looks nothing like Yolande did when she was little, with her chubby rounded limbs and curly brown hair. Poppy’s hair is grey, which puzzles Jem until a sudden shaft of morning sunlight reveals that it isn’t at all. Beneath the accumulated dirt, Poppy’s hair is a creamy, lemon-pith blonde.

  Anneke’s hair was the exact same colour when they first met.

  The forty years that have passed since then have aged her blonde to an unearthly white, so that now his wife looks as if she’s wearing a silky veil made of dandelion seeds. Jem’s throat tightens. He didn’t want to come on this trip without her, but the pain has been bad this month, and the bumpy roads and poor suspension of the old vehicle would’ve been torture for her. He calculates the hours that have to pass before he sees her again, and presses a little harder on the gas.

  Once the rusty sand of the flat Karoo is behind them, the road twists and bends its way first between low brown hills, and then larger greener ones until, finally, they’re in the mountains. By the time they reach the winding road that leads towards town, Poppy still hasn’t said a word.

  ‘Town’ is little more than a wide dusty main street with a shop that sells a small bit of everything, a liquor store, a church and a post office. A few side streets with quaint old houses sprawl out on either side, just waiting for the tourism board to notice their charm and put the town on the map like its bigger, prettier neighbours. Jem drives through the town and out again in minutes. A short while later, they crest the last rise before the valley dips towards the dirt track that will take them home.

  ‘We used to own a lot of this land, you know, Poppy.’ Jem’s voice is scratchy from lack of use, but after the hours of silence, it still seems too loud. ‘It was all part of your ouma’s parents’ farm. We inherited our half from them long before we had your mom. I became a farmer! Fancy that? An English city boy like me. It was falling in love with your plaas-meisie ouma that did it. A real farm girl, I would’ve become a dung beetle herder or a rocket scientist if that’s what it would’ve taken to spend my life with her.’

  Poppy’s finger makes a squeaking sound as she collects the last remnants of sauce in the now empty takeaway container.

  ‘Luckily, with her help, it so happened that I wasn’t too bad at the whole farming thing. We grew plums and olives and walnuts, just to begin with.’ He glances across at Poppy. She is still not looking at him, but something about the tilt of her head tells him she’s listening. ‘And d’you want to know something? Each time I dug into the soil, something burrowed deeper into me, some kind of love. You see, Poppy, you have to love a piece of earth in order to make it grow something for you. I fell in love with your ouma, and with the ground she walked on.’ He’s said this to Anneke so often over the years, and still, she indulges him with a burst o
f laughter every time. Poppy, however, remains expressionless.

  ‘But your ouma isn’t well, I’m afraid, Poppy. She’s got something called rheumatoid arthritis, which is a sickness that makes her sore and tired a lot, and means that a lot of the time, now, she has to be in a wheelchair.’ Poppy sits motionless. Jem keeps on talking.

  ‘Seven years ago, when we found out that she was sick, we sold off most of the farm, and kept just a little piece of it for ourselves. But don’t you worry, there’s more than enough space on our corner of the valley for a lovely little Poppy.’

  Jem counts off each familiar clump of trees, each cairn of apricot-skinned rock that marks the track back to Anneke.

  ‘I can tell you’re wondering why we sold the farm.’ In truth, Jem has no idea if Poppy even understands what he’s saying. Does she speak English or Afrikaans? Yolande grew up speaking both, but the person who was once his daughter is now a gaping chasm in his understanding of the world. His mind slips over the thought of her, threatening to skid into darkness until he brings it back to the hot, silent cabin.

  ‘We sold it because we didn’t know how much time we’d have left together, you see.’ Jem’s hands are sweating on the steering wheel as the sun burns in through the windshield. ‘We didn’t see the point of slaving away to keep it all going. All those hours and hours. Farming is hard, you know, Poppy, not just the planting and growing and harvesting but dealing with the buyers and the farmhands and money and paperwork. Why would we want to spend our last years together, not-together, I ask you?’