Holding Up the Sky (45 page)

We spent two days in Launceston with the family, Mello making fast friends with Carolyn and Phil's two children, both just a little older than she was. They were fair-skinned and blonde-haired, as I had been as a child, in stark contrast to Mello's dark looks. If the three of them were an odd sight around the streets of Launceston, no one seemed to notice. Barton, Carolyn's youngest, was so taken with Mello that he asked her to come to school for show and tell. Putting aside the objectification of my child as a cultural relic, we all happily went to Barton's primary school and Mello bravely stood in front of the class and told them where she lived and what it was like. I watched Barton bursting with pride at having an African cousin.

Uncle Jim suggested that we go down south to Hobart and to Port Arthur for a few days, before returning to Burnie and our fight home. Carolyn thought Mello might like to stay with them instead of doing another car trip and to everyone's surprise but ours, Mello agreed, more than happy to stay with the cousins she had only just met. My family were unaware that she had been doing this kind of thing since she was a baby and saw nothing unusual in the suggestion.

We were to leave the next morning so Teboho was keen to go out and see some of the night life in Launceston before we left. He was much more of a night owl and big city person than I, and I suspect he had been missing the pace of the city. I was tired and knew we had an early start, so I was less than enthusiastic. Undeterred, Teboho suggested he explore the city on his own, which I was more than happy to agree to.

I went to bed early on a mattress on the living room floor but kept half an ear open for his return, only to wake up hours later to an empty bed. My first thoughts were that something had happened, an accident perhaps. How would the authorities know where to contact me? I lay there for perhaps half an hour, running gruesome scenarios through my head, before I heard him come creeping in. It was almost five o'clock. He told me he had been dancing at a few different clubs and had a great time, but when he realised how late it was, he had come straight home.

I lay there in the dark fuming. I felt he had embarrassed me in front of my family by behaving this way and I told him so. What would they think, him being out all night on his own at nightclubs? It was a rare moment when the anger I felt was the anger I spoke, not translated into a cold silence or taken inwards and held inside my body. After telling him how ashamed I felt, I rolled over, giving him my back.

A snake then rose up in the darkness, fared its hood, bared its fangs and struck. I had not known Teboho had this cruelty inside him, but it seems he would not allow me to speak to him this way, to emasculate him so.

‘Do you know what it's like to be aroused all night?' he whispered into the darkness.

‘What?'

‘While I was dancing, while I was talking to a woman I met at the club.'

‘What are you telling me?'

‘I was turned on while we were dancing together. I danced with her at the first club and she followed me to the second. When I realised it was getting late, I told her I had to leave but she followed me outside. We kissed, then I left her there and came home. She gave me her phone number though.'

The snake's poison was travelling through my system now, making it hard for me to breathe. Dawn was beginning to break, pushing light into the room. The household would soon be up. No anger could be spoken now, for the house would shake if what I should have said left my mouth.

Psychologists speak about the ‘necessity of betrayal', the moment that moves us from child to adult, the moment we understand that we live on this earth with humans, not heroes. My experience with Sizwe could be deemed my first betrayal, the experience of feeling alienated from ETHOS another. Perhaps I should have been ready for the next, or at least better able able to bear it. But those cruel words whispered in my ear left me in a state of shock.

Had I been stronger, less committed to the fantasy of my marriage and my ideal life in Africa, had I been able to do what needed to be done right there whether my extended family were witnesses or not, I would have taken him on, wrestled with him until we got to the cause of what he had done and said.

But I was neither ready nor brave and felt only numb, unable to process what had happened, unable to believe it was
my
husband who had said and done these things, my Teboho whose words were always like sunshine on my face, whose integrity and devotion were unquestionable. None of this resonated with the man I knew, with the life I had led up until that point, nor with the life I wished to lead. In a nightmare daze, I left it where it was and got up to prepare to leave for Port Arthur–a desolate ghost town to match my desolation. Teboho had also drawn into himself as we packed up, perhaps understanding that no more would be said between us for now.

That night, when Uncle Jim had gone to his room and I was sure he was asleep, I slipped outside into the open field in front of the motel, with only an old white horse for company. I wept loudly and bitterly over all the emotions I had been holding in during the day. I was still too upset to try and deal with what had happened and what it meant, still unable to reconcile the events of the previous night with what I believed to be true about Teboho. Great sobs racked my body–I feared something was broken that could not be fixed.

After a time, Teboho found me and put his arms around me, saying that it would be OK, that nothing had happened, nothing had changed. He begged me to come back inside and sleep, said he couldn't bear to see me this way. I don't remember if he apologised, but he did keep repeating that nothing had happened. It seems odd to me now. I think he meant that because he had not slept with her, nothing had happened and so no trust was broken–but that couldn't have been further from the truth. Stranger still, part of me wanted to make everything OK, put things back the way they were so that we could live the life we had planned. Is that what women do, when we are afraid, when we can't face reality? Do we compartmentalise what we cannot face and rationalise its existence? ‘He's not like that when he's sober.' ‘He promised he would never do it again.'

As we walked back to the small motel, I felt the space that had just been created inside me, one in which I had locked a piece of myself so I would not be quite so vulnerable in future. That smallest part of me that wasn't in denial knew Teboho could no longer be trusted in this regard. Perhaps the lesson for me was that I could not live my life completely trusting everyone around me; that to live in the world we need to hold something in reserve; that we need not only to acknowledge the capacity of those around us to disappoint, but also to acknowledge our own capacity for betrayal–humans not heroes. But these were things I was yet to understand as, in many ways, I was only in my adolescence at that time.

If my optimistic self thought this was a one-off event that would not repeat itself because Teboho had seen the pain he caused me, I was wrong. Later the next day, when Uncle Jim had stepped out of the car to take a photo, I asked Teboho to give me the woman's number.

‘Why do you want it?' he asked casually.

‘To destroy it', I replied, nonplussed.

‘But I want to keep it. She's just a friend and I could give her a call some time. You said you wanted me to make friends.'

‘But we won't be coming back to Tasmania and she's not your friend. Please give it to me', I said, almost begging.

‘No, I want to keep it', he said, closing the conversation down as he turned to stare out the window.

Looking back, it is clear he was giving me a message, even if it was an unconscious one: ‘I will not be contained and if you attempt to contain me, I will punish you'. Though I had no conscious understanding of this threat at the time, at a deeper level it was well understood. Unbelievably, we never spoke of these events again.

Perhaps I should not have been so surprised that Teboho knew how to inflict pain, whether he intended to or not. His life had contained more pain than security, more agony than love. And yet his actions were so unrecognisable to me that I separated them off as if they had been perpetrated by a stranger. I looked across the car at him as he stared almost contentedly out the window and knew, for the moment at least, that the man in the car was a stranger–one I hoped never to meet again.

Mello's first Australian Christmas was spent at my brother's apartment in the beachside suburb of Manly. Jon had returned to Sydney after three years in London and was now the CFO of a broking firm. Sadly, he and Helen had split up as she could not imagine a life in Australia and Jon did not wish to live anywhere else. He was living a bachelor's life once more, just a few steps from one of Sydney's most beautiful beaches.

Unfortunately, it was an overcast day, not the sublime beach weather that had blessed most of my childhood Christmases. Despite the weather, we celebrated being back together in Sydney and gave in to the pleasure of having a child with whom to enjoy the occasion. Mum and Dad gave Mello a huge teddy bear that was almost as tall as Mello herself. I was astonished when she named him Reggie, as she had never spoken of her father up until this point. Every photo from that Christmas has Mello clutching Reggie, beaming up at the camera, with each one of us looking as happy as she clearly was.

After we'd been in Australia almost a year, I noticed that Teboho's usual effervescence was becoming suppressed. We'd had a few conversations throughout the year about how he was adjusting, and we had both been hoping things would improve. But there was a disjuncture between the acceptance he felt socially and the rejection he felt in the workplace. Just before it was time to register for the new semester, he raised the issue of finishing our studies more quickly than anticipated.

‘If we took a fulltime load, we could finish it by the end of July and then go home. I know we agreed to stay longer, but I just can't feel at home here.'

‘I understand', I said, after a moment's hesitation. ‘I've seen that it hasn't been good for you.'

‘In some ways I've loved it, but not being able to find another job is wearing me down. I didn't come here to clean other people's toilets. If I'd wanted to do that, I could have stayed at home', he added with an uncharacteristic hard edge, his anger targeted at the situation, however, not at me.

I couldn't bear to see him being discriminated against, not after all the pain he had suffered in his life, and my heart went out to him. ‘Of course we can. Why don't you stop the cleaning job? I can cover our costs with what I get and then you can focus on your studies.'

‘No. I want to pull my weight.'

‘Why don't you focus on finishing up? There'll be plenty of time for weight pulling back in Jo'burg.'

And so it was set. I told Mum and Dad about our change in plans. They were obviously sad, but understood. They had also seen heaviness about him over time and knew that it wasn't ideal for him here.

We had one more trip planned before we left. It was to drive down to Melbourne over Easter to visit Karen, a friend of mine since I was a teenager. Her father, Dave, was a youth worker and speaker who did a lot of work at my old church and Karen was his youngest daughter. I got on well with all three daughters but it was Karen with whom I developed the most enduring friendship. Over Easter, we were keen to see both Karen and Melbourne. We drove down with Dave, stopping in at the various Australian icons such as the Dog on the Tucker Box at Gundagai.

On our first day in Melbourne, Karen took the four of us for a tour of the city. We walked for several hours, seeing all the sights. When we stopped for lunch, I mentioned to Karen that I was feeling a bit strange in the stomach and would be giving lunch a miss, very unusual for me who, despite being slim, was always up for food. A week later, I discovered that the strange feeling was in fact the early weeks of pregnancy.

When my period was uncharacteristically late, I bought a home pregnancy test. I very much wanted to have a baby while we were in Australia so that I could have family around me. Teboho and I had been off contraception for over six months with no results, so I was attempting to keep my expectations in check when I went to the bathroom. I laid the test on the sink and then went to wake Teboho.

‘Do you want to come and see the results with me? I'm a little nervous', I whispered towards his one slightly open eye.

‘Sure', he replied, dragging himself from the warm bed.

We entered the bathroom gingerly, as if it was already a nursery, and approached the sink on which the test strip was perched.

‘Two stripes for yes and one for no, right?' Teboho said, looking down on the two purple stripes.

‘I'm pregnant', I squealed as we began to dance around the small bathroom.

As soon as we had finished jumping around, Teboho suggesting it might not be good for the baby, I ducked upstairs to wake Mum and Dad.

‘Mum, guess what?' I beamed as I dropped onto the bed, waving the purple stripes in her face. ‘I'm pregnant!'

‘Are you sure?' she said, peering at the test strip. ‘How reliable are these home tests? I wouldn't want you to get your hopes up.'

Mum had taken nine long years to fall pregnant with my brother, although a stream of doctors could find no reason for the delay. As a result, she had been cautioning me all along about not getting ahead of myself, that these things take time. Even now, with the evidence in front of her, caution borne of her own heartache still took centre stage.

‘I don't think you should get too excited until you see the doctor.'

Holding back excitement isn't one of my core strengths, but I knew she was trying to protect me so I told her I would try.

After breakfast, I phoned Jon to tell him the news. It was no surprise when he repeated the identical advice Mum had given me: ‘Don't get too excited until you've seen the doctor'. Growing up, they were always peas in a pod.