Bone Meal For Roses Read online

  ‘Well that’s no good, is it?’ Anneke says. ‘Sam it is then.’

  ‘Will you tell Grandpa also?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Sam Sam Sam,’ the girl whispers, circling the wooden marker again.

  ‘Come along, Sam, it’s time to go in and have some breakfast.’

  PART TWO

  THE HORSE-GARDEN

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHEN SHE WAS still Poppy, Sam subsisted almost entirely on stolen sweets and scraps. Sometimes, when Yolande forgot about food for too long to bear, she’d go scrounging through whichever neighbourhood they were living in at the time, knocking on doors and asking for biscuits. On bad days, she’d hunt through the litter for crisp packets so that she could lick the broken, salty remnants out of the seams. Now, after three months of home-made peach jam and farm butter on freshly baked bread, mutton stews, butternut sprinkled with cinnamon, thick vegetable soups and oatmeal served with grated apple and honey, Sam has transformed. Her shins are no longer blades, her cheeks have filled out and she’s shot up almost two centimetres according to the markings on the doorframe of Anneke’s sewing room that has now become her bedroom. Even her hair has grown and thickened. She wears it in two puffy braids that reach to her shoulder blades.

  This afternoon, Anneke is in the kitchen rubbing crushed cardamom and orange rind under the skin of a big, bald bird in preparation for tomorrow’s special feast. Sam is outside in the rose garden, and every now and then she catches a whiff of citrus and spice wafting out from the open doorway. Tomorrow is Christmas. It used to be just a TV word, but the mysterious event is happening for real this time. Sam helped Jem string Anneke’s collection of old trinkets over the potted cypress in the lounge that serves as a Christmas tree, and they’ve been having dark, fruity mince pies with their afternoon coffee for the past week. Sam is in love with mince pies. She wonders if it’s too soon after breakfast to ask for another.

  Out amongst the roses, with the heavy summer heat cloaking her back and shoulders, the clover is cool and yielding beneath Sam’s bare feet. She stops at each rose bush, checking for acid-green aphids on the tender sprouting tips. When she finds them, she squishes their fat, sap-filled bodies between fingers already stained a brownish green, just like Jem showed her.

  Suddenly the quiet is interrupted by a loud cry:

  ‘Koewee!’

  Sam freezes, baffled by the shrill sound she’s never heard before. Is it a bird of some kind?

  ‘Anneke!’ Not a bird. Sam’s body goes limp with fear, and she sinks down on to her haunches, oblivious to the scrape of rose thorns on her knees. ‘Anneke!’ A stranger’s voice strains through the wooden barn gate. The latch rattles, as if someone is trying to open it from the other side. ‘I know about the girl,’ the voice says in Afrikaans. ‘I know you’ve been dodging my calls. Come on, you have to let me in!’

  Who is here? Sam quakes. I know about the girl, the voice had shouted. Yolande has sent someone to fetch her back.

  ‘Ouma? Grandpa?’ Sam whispers. ‘There’s someone… someone at the gate—’

  ‘Hold your horses, Sus.’ Anneke emerges from the house. Her face is white. She wipes her trembling hands on her apron and makes her slow way down the path. ‘Promise you won’t make a fuss, Sussie?’ she calls through the wood.

  ‘Oh, good heavens, Anneke, I’m not going to thump you or anything like when we were kids. I just want to know what’s going on. You can’t drop off the radar like this and expect me not to come barging round.’

  ‘No, you’re right there.’ Anneke pulls back the latch and a cloud of alien perfume overwhelms the green smell of the garden.

  Sam peers through the rose stems to see a bigger, smoother, more carefully put together version of her grandmother muscling her way in through the barn gate.

  ‘A grandchild, Annie? Seriously, you thought you’d keep that from me?’

  ‘I was going to tell you, but it’s been… I… we had to give her a chance to settle in.’

  ‘What’s going on, for goodness sake?’ Sussie glares into her sister’s pale face. ‘Why on earth do you look so frightened?’ Anneke clutches the corners of her apron, and Sussie lowers her voice. ‘You’re scared she’ll come looking for her, is that it?’ Sussie lets the question dissipate, unanswered, into the hot, thin air before resuming her rant.

  ‘Did you think I’d let Christmas pass without demanding to know why you just vanished off the face of the planet for the past three months?’ She peers around at the leafy garden. Sam squeezes her eyes shut to keep herself hidden.

  ‘And then I heard about the girl. Where is she? Yolande’s child?’ Sussie asks. Sam holds her breath. Yolande’s child. It’s been months since she’s heard the name out loud, and hearing it now, spoken as if Sam is HER possession, brings the memory of the feel of Yolande’s nail-bitten fingers encircling her wrist, stretching the skin till it burnt. Sam can feel the wrench inside her shoulder joint as her mother pulled her along the pavement, and the way her feet skidded in their oversized sandals, sending her toppling down. Blood on her chin and a dirty brown-pink blob of discarded chewing gum on the ground, like some kind of hideous creature that had crawled out from a crack in the pavement, waiting to jerk back to life and suck her down.

  Sussie’s voice brings Sam back to the garden: ‘I can’t believe you’ve been hiding your granddaughter from me for three whole months!’

  A light breeze stirs the leaves of the olive tree, showing their secret silvery undersides. Sudden colour flows back into Anneke’s cheeks.

  ‘Ag, come inside, have some coffee and calm down to a mild panic, would you?’ She jostles her sister’s arm to uproot her from her spot in the gateway. ‘It’s true, we do have a new little family member here, but it’s complicated, Sus. There are reasons for my silence.’ Sussie allows Anneke to propel her towards the house. ‘You’ll understand when I explain.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ask for my help?’ Sussie’s voice has softened. She puts a protective arm around Anneke’s shoulder to take her weight as they walk up the path.

  ‘The girl has been adjusting to a new environment. The last thing she’s needed is you swooping in here and bossing everyone around.’

  ‘Me? Bossing everyone?’ Sussie says, and both the women burst out laughing as they disappear into the house.

  Sam lies down in the clover and tries to remember how to breathe.

  *

  Sussie brews the coffee while Anneke unpacks a plastic tub of home-baked vorm koekies from the depths of Sussie’s voluminous handbag. Sussie always bring something sweet. Vorm koekies, with their jammy, coconut centres, are Anneke’s favourite.

  ‘So you brought her back here, and just like that, she’s yours?’

  ‘Well, we hope so. Jeremy said that Yolande was in no state to look after herself, let alone a child.’

  ‘I heard from Sanet van der Westhuisen that you and Jem brought a little girl in to see Dr Cilliers in Robertson. She said she was as skinny as a spider leg and covered in sores.’

  ‘That Sanet must be in seventh heaven working as a doctor’s receptionist. She always was a gossip, and now someone can’t even have a corn on their toe without her releasing a bulletin to the whole of the Western Cape.’

  ‘Well if it wasn’t for Sanet’s great big mouth, I’d still be in the dark about the child. I can’t believe I had to get the news through a gossip, Annie!’

  ‘Enough with the guilt. I haven’t been able to talk to anyone about her yet, Sus.’ Anneke takes the offered coffee mug. ‘We just want her to be safe here first, that’s all. Didn’t want anyone… Yolande…’

  ‘You’re scared she’ll come back and take the child?’ Sussie asks again.

  ‘We are,’ Anneke admits. Outside, unseen in the shrubbery, Sam listens in, her whole body quivering.

  ‘From what Sanet said about the state of the child, it doesn’t seem like Yolande would care enough to bother.’

  ‘Yes, but with Yolande you neve
r know.’ Anneke takes a sip too soon. She breathes out to cool her scalded lips. ‘You never know what idea she’ll get into her head.’ Just outside the doorway, a gasp of breath, too soft for the women to hear.

  ‘Jem said Yolande and her current man were living like feral animals in a forgotten cage. Nothing clean, no food, scratching around in filth to find something to get high on.’

  ‘Ag, that’s terrible.’

  ‘Little Sam was just a scrap when he found her. You wouldn’t believe how much she’s grown since.’

  ‘Sam? Same as your old horse?’ Sussie asks with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘She chose it.’

  ‘Ja, but really?’ Anneke shrugs, and Sussie changes direction. ‘Any idea of her age?’

  ‘We think about five going on six. The doctor said that undernourishment may have stunted her growth, which is why she seemed so much younger when Jem found her.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Well who are we going to ask, Sussie? Guessing is all we’ve got to go on.’

  ‘You could… Yolande might—’

  ‘No,’ Anneke snaps. The kitchen is very quiet in the wake of the word’s violence.

  Sussie looks around the room, looking for a change of subject to fill the humming-fridge silence. She frowns at the sight of the half-seasoned goose on the kitchen counter. ‘I’m guessing you two bringing Sam to the main house tomorrow for a decent family Christmas is out of the question?’

  ‘It’s too soon for her, Sussie. She’s only just becoming herself.’

  ‘Is she, you know, all OK?’ Sussie bites into a cookie and apricot jam squelches out and sticks to the corner of her lip. ‘Don’t give me that look, Anneke, it’s a perfectly fair question to ask, given the circumstances she was raised in.’

  ‘If you’re trying to find out whether she’s retarded or anything, she’s not. She was undernourished, frightened and dirty. She had bruises on her skin and, I’ve no doubt, bruises on her soul, but she’s clever and loving and she’s ours now, so everything’s going to be fine—’

  ‘Don’t cry, Annie. I didn’t mean to make you cry.’

  ‘It’s just…’ Anneke rubs wet cheeks. Her fingers smell like rosemary and orange rind. ‘I’m just so glad we found her, that’s all.’

  *

  Slowly, throughout that first long, hot summer, Sam softens, like a lump of hard wax held in the palm of a warm hand. Her English vocabulary grows, helped along by Jem, who reads to her every night before bed, sitting with her on his knee in his favourite easy chair in the lounge and letting her turn the pages. She seldom smiles, but sometimes Jem can coax a light flutter of a giggle out of her, and the sound of it is so wonderful that he finds himself playing the clown more and more of the time.

  Every morning, Anneke brushes Sam’s hair, taking her time to tease out the night’s knots and smoothing the cream-coloured strands until they shine. Sam sits with her eyes fixed on Anneke’s in the mirror during the brushing, her features relaxed and unguarded, and her small shoulders releasing some of their perpetual rigidity. Once Sam’s hair is brushed and braided into two pale ropes, Anneke sits in the chair and passes the hairbrush to Sam. An hour can easily pass at the dressing table in Anneke’s bedroom.

  ‘Groom, groom, groom. You two are like a pair of monkeys,’ Jem likes to tease. ‘Some days I’m scared to come in here in case you both grab me and wrestle me to the ground and start picking nits out of my hair.’ Sam smiles, and Jem tugs at the grey woolly hair on his forearm and asks her: ‘How many braids could you give this, do you think?’ He is rewarded by a burst of breathy, delightful laughter. He catches Anneke’s eye in the mirror, and then sits on the edge of the bed to watch Sam weave her grandmother’s hair into a wonky, lopsided braid. At his back, the curtains move in the breeze, ushering in the scent of the roses.

  Sam is at her most relaxed, however, when she’s in the garden with a job to do. Jem and Anneke soon learn to give her little tasks, because as soon as she gets going, Sam seems to transform. She scurries around busily if the job requires it, or sits at her duties with a look of quiet intensity on her face, humming to herself. With a vital place in the running of things, Sam seems to grow more solid, to fill out around the edges, as if she’s suddenly realised that she has value. She is not afraid of working hour after hour on the dullest of tasks, like carefully extricating the roots of items to be transplanted from their clinging soil, and isn’t the least squeamish about picking fat, white cutworms out of the turned compost and putting them into a bucket of suds.

  ‘Couldn’t be less like Yolande,’ Anneke whispers to Jem, and he nods and thinks that they are the ones who are really different. No more shutting out. No more just the two of them. Not like the old days when Yolande was young.

  *

  Winter brings a dusting of white to the distant mountain tops, a chill wind that sneaks in beneath the door and around the edges of the window frames, and even more rain spiders than usual. There’s one near the kitchen ceiling, right now, high up above Anneke’s head. It knows, Sam thinks, and stares out of the window, trying to see through the icy rain to the place where she once put the spider-jar.

  It knows what I did.

  When she first arrived at the farm, Sam had been terrified of the large spiders, with their long, curved legs and motionless watchfulness. One afternoon, she managed to catch one which had been haunting her bedroom, using an old jam jar. She closed the lid tight and carried the jar outside, where she left it, with the spider still inside, pushed beneath the shrubbery at the far end of the garden. Every day, she would go and check on the spider. Every day, she found the spider feeling along the smooth curve of the glass with its delicate feet, looking for an exit. She wanted to release him, she meant to, but each time she went to check on the jar, she couldn’t do it. And then one day it was too late and the spider stopped moving and she felt even worse. It took weeks for the creature to die, and Sam ached each time she thought about how she never set it free. When Jem finally discovered the jar with the dry, spider husk in it, he took Sam onto his knee and gave her a hug and explained that rain spiders were the good guys.

  ‘They don’t bite people,’ he’d said, ‘they just like sitting near the ceiling and chomping on mosquitoes all night long so that you can sleep in peace without getting itchy bites.’

  Why didn’t I just let it go?

  Anneke, trying to warm her aching fingers around a mug of hot soup, watches as the girl’s shoulders tighten, and her face seems to pale and shrink in on itself.

  ‘What are you thinking about, Sam?’

  ‘I just wish I could go into the garden.’ She needs to go to the spider-jar place, crouch down, and whisper sorry. Again.

  ‘You’ll be able to, soon. Just wait and see what Grandpa’s bringing home from town. That’s him arriving now. Can you hear the bakkie?’ Sam nods, her gaze fixed on the rain.

  ‘I got the catalogue,’ Jem announces when he walks in, treading puddles of brown water onto the kitchen floor. ‘Take a look at this lot.’ He hands Anneke the thin booklet, and she spreads it open on the tabletop.

  ‘Come, Sam, come and choose your gumboots.’

  Sam approaches the table with slow steps, and sucks in her cheeks as Jem lifts her up onto her cushion-tied-with-pantyhose chair. She blinks at the bright printed colours. She knows something is expected of her, but she isn’t sure what.

  ‘You can pick any ones you want. Aren’t we lucky that the local store doesn’t sell such small sizes, hey? Because look at all your options in here.’ Anneke taps a picture of a pair of gumboots in sky blue with a pattern of sunny yellow polka dots. ‘What about these?’

  Sam stays silent.

  ‘If we get you some gumboots, lovey, we can bundle you up to go outside, even if it’s raining,’ Jem says.

  Sam stares at the catalogue, glancing up at Jem and then back again, touching the flimsy paper, running her hand over the rainbow of options.

  ‘Do I get just the picture or the r
eal thing?’ she asks, and Jem and Anneke exchange a look.

  ‘The real thing, Sam. They’ll be your very own special gumboots for gardening in the rain.’

  ‘These.’ Sam points to a pair at the bottom of the page. They are a sober olive, just like Jem’s.

  ‘Are you sure? Not the pink ones, or these juicy-looking red ones?’

  ‘These,’ she insists.

  ‘Good choice, dear heart,’ Anneke says, and gives the girl a squeeze. ‘Very good choice.’

  *

  Spring. Beneath a new blue sky, the espaliered rows of fruit trees burst into clouds of blossom, covering the valley with a chequerboard of fluttering pink and white. In amongst the fynbos, dense patches of wild vygie flowers blaze luminous pink against the brown. From the sheltered, secluded garden, however, it’s impossible to see any of this.

  ‘You’re missing out, Sam,’ Anneke encourages when Jem suggests a short drive, but Sam has not stepped foot out of the boundaries of the garden since their trip to see Dr Cilliers in the week after she was rescued, almost a full year ago.

  ‘Come for a drive, lovey, just a short little one. We’ll be back here before you know it.’

  ‘I’m coming too,’ Anneke coaxes, already waiting by the gate. ‘Look, even with my sore hips, I’m dying to see the fairy kingdom.’

  ‘I don’t… want.’

  ‘The orchards are beautiful, row after row of blossoms. Don’t you want to see?’

  Sam bites her lip. Jem takes her hand, and Anneke the other one, and together they walk through the gate and into the barn where the bakkie is parked. Sam’s fingers tighten around her grandparents’ and her breath comes in sharp little snorts.

  ‘No,’ she gasps, coming to a stop.

  ‘We’ll just drive up the road, look out over the orchards, and come back again, dear heart.’

  Sam starts to tremble and her face goes chalk white, and Jem thinks it is as if she has become embedded in the garden, like a plant with filigree roots that will be broken and damaged if someone tries to move it. He is tempted to give up and take her back in, but he knows that if the girl continues to stay inside, her fear of leaving the place will only grow, and her sanctuary will one day become her prison. Steeling himself against her heart-wrenching expression and the tears that now gallop down her cheeks, Jem picks Sam up and carries her to the car, fighting tears of his own as he buckles her limp body on the front seat beside him. He helps Anneke into the vehicle beside the girl, and walks around to the driver’s side.