The Shouting in the Dark (12 page)

‘Look, we'll give it to him when we see him,' she says, patting her pocket. ‘Too late to send it now.'

At the Vrijeschool Ella paints on a big sheet of jotter paper an outline of Africa shaped like a huge human ear, a right ear. The outline is in red. Inside the ear outline she paints whorl shapes, bulgy swirls encircling smaller loops. Then she paints in brown the names of the towns where they have landed on their air trips up and down Africa, words full of round
a
sounds, Abidjan, Accra, Brazzaville, Luanda along the outer whorl of the ear; on the inside, within the smaller loops, Lumbumbashi, Nairobi, Cairo. In some places the letters fuse together. They look like shadowy knots of cartilage within her great red African ear.
Mevrouw
Kramer, her teacher, offers to pin the picture to the wall. It's very dramatic, she says kindly. Ella shakes her head, grabs the edge of the paper. She wants rather to store it in her folder.

It is terrible to return to Africa from the Netherlands. But then, Ella thinks, staring out of the aeroplane window, it's terrible also to leave Africa. The terrible thing is the travelling, flying up or down the continent in a blue-and-silver liveried DC-8 in the company of her mother. The first hour or so of every flight Mam spends screaming, until her pills finally take hold and she falls asleep. For her, there's nothing more terrible than flying – the whole appalling
nachtmerrie
of it, the deafening whoosh of the take-off, the shrieking of the brakes on landing, the awful distance away of the safe earth, being caught like some Soviet test monkey in a capsule in the sky.

But the problem with travelling up or down the African continent isn't only the flying. For the mother the flying is made worse by the regular stops they must make so that the plane can refuel. Sleek and modern though it looks, the aeroplane cannot complete the journey from far South to high North without one or two touchdowns to take on more fuel. It must go in stages, hurdling its way from one African country to another, each time plunging down through the storm clouds into the forest or savannah, then straining back into the bumpy sky, the engines yelling and the mother along with them.

From where Ella sits in her window seat looking out, Africa high up is all green gauze and grey cloud. Conical mountains point through the clouds to the sky. Closer to the ground, Africa becomes a broken ribbon, a narrow laterite airstrip bordered by red earth, unfurling in pieces of irregular length. The ribbon spreads to receive them as they land, peters away into the surrounding green when once again they lift up into the sky. At night Africa's darkness is dusted with silver lights the plane trustingly dives down to meet.

‘Look, Mam, see, the airstrip down there, how lit-up it is.' She taps the plane window.

‘Be quiet please,
kind
.' In her lap the mother kneads her knuckles till they go red. ‘Talking makes things worse. My only wish right now is that the whole of that landmass down there would just sink into the sea.'

The airstrips across Africa look a lot like one another on the ground as well as from the sky. When they disembark for fuelling to take place, oily silver mirages everywhere ripple across the tarmac. In the various transit lounges, plastic chairs are arranged in rows. They sit down and wait. Sometimes, paper cups of lukewarm water have been set out on plastic tables. The film of dust gathered on the water glistens under the neon lights. But if there's a war on in the country where they've landed, there are no paper cups and no tables, just a plastic container of water with a tap, though often not even that.

At a coastal airport late one night, maybe in Ghana, Ella notices that the place name over the main entrance to the transit lounge hall has been painted over in black. A new name is not yet in evidence, except for where someone has chalked
Viva!
on the wall in red. Another time, the town in Congo where they stop and wait has a completely different name from before. The pilot announces it before they land. Still, Lubumbashi airfield looks more or less like she remembers Elisabethville. The arrivals hall is the same hangar-like shed though this time it's crowded with soldiers.

Wherever in Africa a conflict is on the go, a steaming energy comes to meet them the minute they step onto the tarmac. Huge-shouldered men in battle fatigues escort them on their sticky walk into the transit hall. One by one the soldiers check their travel documents at the entrance: the taciturn white businessmen; the Dutch tourists in safari outfits, looking tense; the yawning fathers and mothers holding their grumpy children's hands. The soldiers direct the air stewards to join the queue. The humid air seethes.

The first time Ella sees soldiers on their cross-Africa journey is in Luanda, where a tank is parked beside the airport buildings. The soldiers standing around it look full of themselves, their automatic rifles held close to their sides, belts of bullets spanned across their chests. Without saying a word they make it known that here, on land, they and not KLM are in charge. If things got difficult, no airline would have the least leverage over them. In the transit lounge a soldier stands guard over the water dispenser and frowns if ever a thirsty passenger approaches it. When those who do approach take too long drinking, he flicks the tap to upright in front of their mouths.

The wars in Africa nowadays, the father back in Braemar says, are either civil wars or wars of independence, struggles for so-called freedom, but who's to tell the difference? Either way, Ella thinks, these Luanda soldiers look like they've just taken over the country. They walk about like men in command.

Later, after Luanda, on other journeys, there are more soldiers corseted with arms and ammunition, in Lubumbashi and also Accra, and these men, too, look full of themselves and in command. If freedom is what these soldiers have got hold of with their frowning and posing, Ella decides, it must suit them. She has never seen black people looking this tall and big-chested in South Africa; nor, for that matter, white people in Europe.

In the transit lounges they visit across the African continent, time passes slowly. The fuelling process seems to take hours, sometimes a whole night. The hands of the broken clock on the wall don't move. The passengers sit in their plastic chairs with their cups of water placed on the floor in front of them. Their heads loll and mouths fall open. Some people sleep by crouching forwards. A courageous few lie down on the ground to sleep but, with the soldiers patrolling, are soon roused. Sit back down, the soldiers motion with their rifles.

The mother sleeps with her head held upright, her eyes squeezed shut. Ella tries to stay awake. She thinks about all that Africa out there, the huge, unsinkable bulk of the continent. What goes on beyond these baking buildings, that skinny airstrip? She measures herself against the feeling of danger pushed out by the frowning soldiers. Is she bigger than this feeling? Is she brave enough to look them in the eye? So far, she has only glanced at them aslant, making as if to stare out of the window.

From far away she hears the sound of singing and drumming, the same as she can hear in Braemar on weekend nights, from the direction of the African township. Or maybe she's making it up, maybe it's no more than the whining of the neon lights overhead, the bristling insects bombarding them. She watches the chins of the other passengers drop slowly onto their chests.

Late at night, when even the soldiers standing guard seem to let their eyes sink closed, she stands up, pretends to stretch and yawn. No one takes any notice. Keeping the corner of her eye trained on the soldiers, she goes over to the window, peers out into the darkness. It's an ordinary darkness, lit with a few points of light. A roar of frogs and insects bears down from all sides. If it has rained, the fresh smell of vegetation seeps through the locked doors. Once, from far away, comes the sound of sporadic machine-gunfire, a burst, a short pause, another burst.

 

Ella can sense whenever the time has come to leave the Netherlands. Nothing's said, but under her skin she knows it's time. The mother is suddenly jumpy, just like she is back in Braemar. When she opens her mouth small gobbling sounds pop from the back of her throat.

Ella feels she is a bird, a swallow maybe, tossed on a great wind that blows now north, from South Africa to the Netherlands, and now south again, away from Europe. When it's time for her direction to change she senses the atmosphere begin to fibrillate around her. A moment ago she was faced north, now there's a strong force shifting in the opposite direction. She hears doors shut behind her with firm closing clicks, the Vrijeschool's cheerful red door, the sliding doors to Oma's old age home, finally the door to the rented apartment. Mam parcels up
stroopwafels
, spicy biscuits, Vitamin E face cream, out-of-date magazines she hasn't yet had time to read – a pile of lumpy necessaries to sweeten their life in Africa.

In the cousins' living room Lieke ceremonially invites Ella to switch off the television for the last time. Ella listens to it crackle into stillness. She will miss the television – the television, and Artis and the polar bear, and all the other favourite things, the ventriloquist in the park, evenings with Lieke, the frost patterns on the window, the gang and the building-site playground, Oma's Sun-Maid raisins.

The mother spends a last afternoon with Oma. She is meant to be saying goodbye but when she picks Ella up from her cousins', she tells Tante Suus with fixed, reddened eyes that her mother was impossible. All she, Irene, was allowed to do was tidy the room yet again, for the hundredth time. Her mother responded to nothing she said.

But it's not like Oma to be troublesome, Ella knows. Probably she just didn't want to say goodbye. Yesterday she and Oma agreed not to say goodbye, only
Tot ziens
, see you later.

‘
Moedertje, moedertje
,' Ella later hears her mother cry into the telephone but there seems to be no one talking back to her. ‘
Ik kom terug, hoor
,' she sobs, ‘I will return.'

Then, at last, it is as if the lights dim around them and everything gradually goes quiet. They begin their walk down the shimmering tubular tunnel that is Schiphol airport. At one end of the tunnel, far behind them, as if suspended inside the wrong end of a telescope, stand Tante Suus and the cousins waving. In front, Schiphol's polished walkways and smooth conveyor belts weld into a long continuous passageway that leads at the very end into the jet bridge into the plane. The mother clutches Ella's hand till it goes dead.

They interrupt the smooth walk just once, in the Ladies beyond Customs. It is time for the mother to take her pills. No pill can properly crush her difficulty, they both know, but still she taps several of the triangular tablets into her shaking palm and swallows down the lot without water. Ella makes a screen of her body so that the queue of women waiting for the toilets, already looking away, cannot see Mam crouching down here in the corner, her arms around her knees, whimpering.

Their journeys are always like this. There is always this time of preparation. At the other end of the journey, leaving South Africa, it's no different. When a flight is imminent nothing but a palm-f of pills can help the mother, and then only just. There the same as here she cowers in the corner of the Ladies pressing her temples. There, too, Ella stands over her holding their hand luggage, her eyes trained on the ceiling.

‘It'll soon be over,' Ella says carefully. ‘When the plane refuels, there'll be time to get some air.'

But the mother has ears only for the sounds coming from her own tight throat. ‘Not yet, please, Ella,' she moans, ‘Help me, not yet. I can't breathe.' Ella raises her hand to the
Push
plate on the toilet door. Her mother struggles upright, braces herself between the wall and the sink, grabs her wrist. ‘No, Ella, no. God, let me breathe. Before I reach the plane I'll fall over, I know it, my lungs will shut down. I'd rather die than disgrace myself.'

Ella gives her fingers to her mother to be crushed. Like a drowning dog, she can't help thinking, a drowning dog in a tank, Mam's nails scraping the walls.

Holding hands, they edge step by step out of the Ladies' door. Ella makes a rough calculation based on the numbers of wrongs of the Dutch fathers and the Dutch mothers that have already passed down to her. The off-kilter foot. The towering height. The widow's peak. A lot of wrongs. Considering the law of averages, she might just about be safe from inheriting the mother's terrible fear also.

The truth is, she doesn't mind flying. She likes being swept up high while feeling safely strapped in. She thinks of the plane boring through the starry sky like a rocket and tries to ignore her mother completely.

But it's never for long. Within moments of take-off, sometimes when the plane is just ascending, often without warning, the mother undoes her seat belt, pushes herself upright and starts yelling. Ella can't then blank her, not easily. When air stewards come running to force her back into her seat she can't pretend they don't belong together.

‘Yes,' she nods when they ask, ‘Yes, I'll hold my mother's arm, I'll try to help her stay in her seat. I'll ask her to keep her seat belt fastened.'

Hardest is when the plane meets with tropical storms. Around the equator the turbulence is often bad but for noise and bumpiness the thunderstorms over West Africa take first prize. Hurdling its way north or south over the bulge of the continent the plane is tossed like a rubber ball from thunderhead to thunderhead. Lightning bounces off the plane wings in broken zigzags. The mother crouches by the emergency exit retching, beating the door with her hands.

‘
Moeder, O moeder
,' she cries, her mouth making a dark circle, ‘
O mijn moedertje, mijn lief
. O Ella!'

The passengers adjust their eye masks, light up a fresh cigarette. Ella sits on her hands and chews her lips hard. She fixes her eyes on the slow blue spiral rising from the passenger smoking in the row ahead. She wishes she might watch the lightning but the mother long ago pushed the window shutter down. For all that she believes her mother will now really die, just as she has long threatened to do, she doesn't want to reach down to her. If she did reach down she might want to shut her up. She might want to clap her hand over her mouth and make her stop her dreadful yelling. More than anything she wants to stop that noise.

One night, about an hour out of Accra, flying south over the Gulf of Guinea, there is a violent electrical storm, even by West African standards. The white-lit turbulence shocks the mother from her tranquillized slumber. She shudders upright, then falls suddenly to the ground. As she drops she strikes with her strong Dutch forearm the head of a passenger in the aisle seat opposite. She doesn't mean to; her arm, her whole body, drops down out of control. But the passenger, jolted, cries out in shock. Within seconds a bump appears on her forehead. Her husband beside her leans on the call button.