She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (14 page)

“My sister Doreen,” she says.

“What's she wearing?”

“That was the uniform at the children's home.”

“What?”

Fay blinks at me, surprised.

“Where we were put, afterward.”

I'm so taken aback I miss the cue. The conversation moves on.

My mother's portraits of her siblings stand up well against Fay's second opinion. Mike was the worst, with his practical jokes. One night, says my aunt, he burst into the girls' room, woke them up, put them in their school clothes, and dragged them outside so they weren't late for school. While they stood in the dark, catching their breath, he broke it to them that it was eleven p.m., led them back into the house, and gave them chocolate to say sorry. They all spent the night on the loo; it was a laxative.

Tony was a terror for different reasons, drinking and fighting and getting into trouble.

“My mother was fond of him,” I say.

Fay shakes her head and repeats what she said to me earlier. “He means well. It just doesn't always come out right.”

Doreen and Fay are next to each other in age. They have been through phases of being close and phases of not speaking to each other. A few years earlier, when Doreen found herself between addresses, she moved into Fay's spare room, where she lay around smoking and sulking and running up a huge phone bill until, after a blazing row, Fay asked her to leave. For a while, she lived back in Hillbrow, an inner-city area where my mother, too, had once lived. The neighborhood had changed since then. Doreen sent my mother a clipping from the local newspaper, illustrated with a photo taken during a shoot-out on her block in which a policeman crouched by a wall, gun raised, with arrows in red pen to indicate Doreen's door. Soon after that, she moved to the coast to be near Jason, her only son. She and Fay had made up and occasionally spoke on the phone.

“My mum said she was terrific fun, but you had to keep an eye on her,” I say.

“Ha,” snorts my aunt. “That's an understatement.” Her sister is in her late fifties, as Fay is. She had been a model in her twenties and fancied herself as a femme fatale. She flirted with everyone—men, women, teenagers, geriatrics. Mid-flirt, Doreen once encouraged a teetotaller called Joyce to drink an entire bottle of sweet sherry, until Joyce vomited so copiously she threw up her own dentures, and having no money to replace them, had to work her shift as a cashier at a movie theater toothless.

“Poor woman,” says Fay, and starts giggling. You were to lock up your spouse if Doreen came around.

My aunt sobers. “I sometimes wonder how much of Jimmy there is in her.”

And there it is; the taboo is broken. I don't miss it this time.

“What—?”

“I've never talked about it.”

“What, never?”

“Never. Not once.” My aunt says this proudly. She is trying to impress me, I think, which is to say, to impress my mother.

“And Victoria . . . ?”

“Doesn't know anything.”

There is a long pause. My aunt looks at me. There is only one possible thing to say in the circumstances. I reach for her glass. “Refill?”

•   •   •

THE REST OF WHAT HAPPENS
that night has had to be pieced together from notes I made a full two days later, when I could grip a pen again. The conversation circles around possible entry points. My aunt says her memory of events is very sketchy. She has a complete blank where the trial should have been.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

The word she uses is “psychopath.” “He was a psychopath.” There are two memories on either side of the darkness. The first is of a knife at her throat; the second is of a scene from the children's home afterward. Nothing in between.

It was her father holding the knife. The room was full of children. It was somebody's birthday party, she can't remember whose. Her father burst into the room, found his daughter, and while mayhem ensued, threw her against the wall and put a knife to her throat. He threatened to kill her if she said anything against him.

“After that, I don't remember anything.”

I am too frightened and ashamed to tell her I have read the court papers. It feels like an obscenity—to know what she said on the witness stand when she herself can't remember.

“I . . . do you remember any of the . . . ?”

My aunt's face shuts down. “I don't remember it at all.”

I look at my aunt and see the brave, articulate twelve-year-old who described incident after incident of abuse to the court and then fended off her own father's questioning. Remembering on that occasion got her nowhere. She has every right to remember nothing.

•   •   •

MY MOTHER MUST
have been devastated, I say, when the trial failed. I let my voice wobble, and alongside my aunt's perfect calm it sounds self-indulgent. She shrugs. “Your mom tried. But he was cleverer.”

The only one of them he left alone was Doreen, says Fay. I've never heard this before.

“Yes,” she says. And then she says, “I think she was jealous.”

“What?”

“Yes.”

•   •   •

AT THE TIME
I put this down to sibling warfare so vicious no insult is taboo. Later, I speak to a therapist, who tells me that molestation is often presented by the molester as a gift. In households that are violent it is usually the only affection on offer, and the child is made to believe it is a form, if not of love, then at least of selection. As we talk on, I find myself wondering where the eldest of my mother's brothers were, why they didn't do something, and then recant the thought guiltily. What could they do? They were children, too.

•   •   •

INSTEAD, I SAY,
“It nearly killed my mother when she got news of Mike. It seemed so unfair.”

“What?”

“That he should die of a heart attack when he was so fit and healthy.”

Fay looks at me strangely. “Who told you that? Mike drank himself to death.”

Fay was fifteen when my mother left. I had never thought about her departure from the perspective of the other side. Her claims to have led a central role in the lives of these people didn't square with their absence. Except that it did, I see now. They are people with whom you can't be in a room because their pain is your own. “I was devastated when she left,” says Fay. “But I understood why.”

I say something tactless then: that my mother didn't come back to visit for seven years because she “didn't want to get sucked in.” This hangs in the air.

“I would never have left this country for personal reasons,” snaps my aunt. But she relents a minute later. There is a memory she has of her older sister from when they were living in De Deur, a town in the sticks to the south of Johannesburg. It's where my mother caught the bus every day with Denise. Their house was in the middle of nowhere, down a track and surrounded by grassland. On my mother's twenty-first birthday, the children clubbed together to buy her a present, a pair of pink silk pajamas. She was so delighted, says Fay, she stripped off then and there, and putting them on, walked clean out of the house, the children running behind her, screaming with delight.

My aunt smiles. “Everything that matters came from her.”

•   •   •

HERE IS MY AUNT'S
second memory, fading in from the black. It is of their father. After the trial, he came to visit Fay and her sisters at the children's home, as was his right. He had charmed the staff so thoroughly, she recalls, that they read his letters aloud to one another. Incredibly, Fay and her sisters were made to keep a photo of him by their beds.

Fay remembers so little, but she remembers this: her father walking toward her in the home, carrying a suitcase of clothes for her. She told him she didn't want them. He persisted, and again she said no. In a temper he slammed down the suitcase and left. It was the last time she ever saw him.

•   •   •

WHEN I WAKE UP
the next morning, it's in a single bed beneath the window in my aunt's spare room. I lie there for as long as I can and then, bent double, shuffle to the bathroom. I look down at the sink and at my own hands, which, through the prism of my hangover, look utterly foreign to me. Still bent double, I walk down the hall, past the photo display, and into the kitchen, where I look around in vain for something to heal me. The counters are fanatically orderly, everything put away in cupboards or Tupperware boxes. There is even a padlock on the washing machine, to stop the maid from using it.

Through the window I see my aunt pegging out washing. I step outside and feel the sun strike me like a skewer, inserted into my brain via the ear. The grass is as coarse as a doormat. I make it to the center of the lawn and, kneeing Fay's dog away from my crotch, lie on the ground. My aunt pauses in her duties to peer down at me. The expression on her face makes the hair on my neck stand up: serene, detached, sympathetic to my mortal status in contrast to her godlike invincibility. One of my mother's textbook looks. Of course. I put my head on the lawn and prepare to die.

“Aren't you feeling rough?” I groan.

“No,” she says, as if to be hungover is the most bizarre outcome of a night of heavy drinking. Fay laughs. “I don't feel a thing.”

•   •   •

IN ALL THOSE
hours of talk, we had not talked of Marjorie. Of everything, it feels like the most taboo subject. Fay might understandably feel vestiges of loyalty to her. “Did your mother betray you?” is not a question I have the nerve or the heart to ask. She is the blank in the story. And yet she wasn't always a villain. I think of her listing in my mother's address book, under “Mum.”

I am too frozen on Sunday to have much of a reaction to what my aunt told me beyond a sense of relief—that we are on the other side of something and have both survived—and gratitude for her generosity. I am almost embarrassed by the lurid nature of the memories. It's an inadequate response, but at some level all there can be is incredulity: who bursts into a kids' party and, in front of everyone, threatens to kill his own daughter with a knife? I mean, who
does
that? All those exaggerated looks of my mother's suddenly seem not theatrical but entirely proportionate.

That Sunday morning, I slowly recover and we have breakfast at the round dining-room table. My aunt is brisk and cheerful. “Sit,” she says, and brings out coffee and yogurt. When the phone rings, Fay picks up and, eyebrows shooting into her hairline, says, “Yes, a very long time. Yes, she is. Hold on.” She holds out the phone and says, “It's my brother Tony.”

On the way back from Joan's, I had asked the driver to take a detour to Tony's last known address, a house way out east where no one answered the door. I had torn a page from my notebook and scribbled a note saying I was Paula's daughter and he could catch me at Fay's over the weekend, and shoved it through the door. He had moved out, but one of his sons still lived there. On the phone now my uncle sounds hesitant and a little stunned—both that I have managed to find him and, even more amazingly, that despite being the Most Chaotic Member of the Family, he has managed to call me back. The distance covered in this one act is so vast that if he had been patched through from Mars, the surprise on both sides couldn't have been greater.

You'd think Tony's reputation for going off the rails would be meaningless in the context. But he went for it in such cinematic style it was almost conventional, an adhering to type that everyone could get behind being dismayed about. From what Fay has told me, the family's overriding image of Tony as a teenager is one of him completely drunk, driving a car across a cornfield, but my mother remembered him as a little boy she felt guilty about. When he traipsed after her and Mike, they whipped around and told him to bugger off home. “Shame, Tony,” she always said.

My uncle says the credits on his phone are low, but we can talk until they run out. “It's strange to hear your voice,” I say. “My mum was very fond of you.”

“I didn't think she noticed me,” says my uncle, gruffly.

“That's not true. She spoke of you often. She kept all your letters.”

By all, I mean two. The first was dated October 1960. I found it in the secret drawer, after her death, on two bits of paper torn from an exercise book. “To dearest Pauline,” wrote the nineteen-year-old tearaway to his departing sister:

I want to take this last chance to wish you a pleasant journey and all the success of the future and I wish to thank you very clearly for all that you did and sacrificed for our sakes, whilst times were hard. Those are things of the past, but we will always remember and appreciate all that you did for us, the same way a child will come to its senses at some time, and start being thankful for all its mother has done. This has been a dream of yours for a long time and I'm so glad for your sake that it is actually coming true. We all hope you have a wonderful time. God bless you, Paul,

Tony.

The second arrived in the last year of my mother's life. “I've had a letter from my brother Tony,” she said when I walked in the door. It was open on the kitchen table. I picked it up and turned it over. “Where does it start?”

“It just starts.” She giggled. “It's very peculiar. Read it to me.”

Finding a suitably ridiculous voice, I began reading: “And God commanded the sun to rise and it sent out its searching rays . . .” I looked up.

“I told you,” said my mother.

I continued, “. . . and lo, the daylight revealed a pathetic conglomerate of rabble sheltering under a lone thorn tree.” My mother giggled again.

“Is that you, the pathetic conglomerate?”

“Who knows. It's very peculiar. He seems to have found the Lord.”

I read on. “From the midst of them stood up a young maiden, tall and beautiful, she stretched and yawned, dusting herself off after a troublesome night. But nought”—I snorted—“but nought could daunt the courage of this young maiden. She turned smiling at our mother and said—” I paused.