S. Naudé - The Alphabet of Birds

Zelda notices the way Ondien looks at Stanley while speaking. Zelda shakes her head slowly, as if the movement is demanding more than she has left in her.

‘Nothing wrong with his brain.’ She is speaking Afrikaans again.

Just the inherited mental pathology, Ondien thinks.

‘I try to see and hear things from his perspective,’ Zelda says, ‘through his eyes, his ears … Bedtime,’ Zelda says to Stanley.

The child makes a sulking noise. He slinks off his chair and runs to the television. He lies down on the couch, flicking through the channels frenetically.

Zelda sighs. ‘The same story every night. I’ll find the energy to deal with him later.’ She gets up, draws the curtains on the street side, ensures every window is locked.

‘South African habits?’

Zelda looks over to the child, back to Ondien. Afrikaans, again. ‘It’s about Cayle. I’m scared he’ll find us. We just got this house. After the last court order.’ She shrinks her shoulders. ‘He always finds us.’

‘What was the threat this time?’

Zelda looks Ondien in the eye. ‘To cut out Stanley’s intestines and feed them to me before I’m forced to eat my own.’

Upon her saying the word ‘intestines’, the television halts on a channel. Stanley’s head turns slightly.

Ondien looks away. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’

‘There’s been worse. Once, elsewhere, before the protection programme, before we had a secret address, he tried to break down the front door with a spade. Stanley and I waited inside for the police, or for the door to break.’ Zelda looks smaller and smaller as she is speaking. Her hair is dull. ‘A few months ago’ — Her sister looks as if she has to concentrate hard to unearth the story — ‘I had to travel for work. I tried everything, but I could find no one to look after my child. Nothing was working out. The after-school centre is just for day visits; others who had looked after him before didn’t want to do it again. I had no choice; he had to go with me. On the plane he grabbed my laptop and smashed it on the floor. Ran around like a crazy person. A stewardess threatened that he would become a safety risk if I didn’t control him.’

She tells Ondien how the hotel in Florida arranged a minder so that she could attend her meetings. A Mexican woman arrived. Zelda was explicit: they were not to leave the hotel room. When she returned at dusk, they were gone. For weeks she had barely slept. Her psychological defences were down and the shock hit her like a fist in the throat. She phoned the concierge, who phoned the police. She took the lift down. Outside, in the street, there was a limousine with dark windows. She suddenly became convinced that Stanley was inside, that someone was abducting him. She ran after the car, hitting against the opaque windows until her hands ached. It drove away. She just kept standing there, in the street, amongst the traffic. Heavy American cars, Ondien thinks. He was gone, Zelda continues. Across from the hotel, behind a wall, was a funfair. Zelda could see the coloured lights flickering, could hear the merry-go-round.

The concierge came and led her away by the arm. Inside, next to the lift, she slid her palm over the concrete wall. Someone had told her once, she remembered, that, when the core of a large building is poured, a labourer sometimes falls in, occasionally even more than one. Because the process cannot be stopped, every building apparently has one or two mushy spots somewhere deep inside. With her fingers she searched for a suture in the concrete, imagining the grey silence of a cement grave. A congealed nest. A cool mother’s womb. Filled with peace.

Back in the hotel room, she looked out the window. There, on a path at the funfair, in the light of merry-go-rounds, they were. Stanley and the Mexican woman. Stanley looked up, and it felt as if Cayle himself was looking at her. She realised that she did not want the child back.

Stanley jumps from the couch, runs to the front door and slips out into the dark. Zelda’s shoulders are drooping, her eyes are shot through with blood. For a moment Ondien thinks Zelda is going to faint. The conversations — Ondien’s exegesis on brain-damaged children and Zelda’s own hotel story — have only exhausted Zelda further, Ondien realises.

‘I’ll fetch him,’ Ondien says. She walks out the open front door. A last remnant of light creates a pale fringe over the mountain peak. The mountain looks higher than in daylight, and closer. She hears Stanley’s footsteps in the backyard. She walks around the house. There he is. She cannot make out whether he is looking towards or away from her. She feels a chill in her stomach: a piercing sound, as of steel on steel, emanates from the child’s throat. It stops as suddenly as it began. He moves nimbly, disappears through the wooden fence. She follows, just able to scrape through the hole herself. The fence smells as if it has been freshly sawn. Behind the fence the landscape starts rising. She calls after him, but the little figure keeps running. She follows. When she stops for a rest and looks up, he is standing right in front of her.

She is out of breath.

‘Something is seriously wrong with you, Stanley,’ she says to the child, in Afrikaans.

He comes up with a string of swear words and sexual vulgarities which take her breath away. ‘You fuck your dad,’ he says in conclusion. ‘You tear your cunt and rip out your heart.’

She winces, shocked. Another noise comes from his throat, more muffled now.

‘Relentless little fucker,’ she mumbles in Afrikaans, breathlessly, ‘ duiwelsgebroed ’.

The child instantly ceases its screeching.

‘Devil,’ he says brightly in the silence. Her mouth opens. There is no longer anger in his voice, rather the satisfaction of a pupil who has answered a question correctly. She catches her breath, takes in the landscape, her eyes now used to the dark. The desert air is cool. Small stones are shining, shards of mica are shimmering in moonlight. Stanley burrows in his ear, takes something out. He offers it to her. She hesitates, then takes it. His hearing aid. It feels waxy. He is as quiet as a mouse, points to her ear. She inserts it. Nothing but a hissing sound. She smiles slightly, for the first time in months.

‘I can hear it,’ she says and nods. ‘Yes, I’m hearing it.’

He turns and runs, homewards. When she comes back and enters his room to return the device, he is lying with shiny eyes in the dark, under his comforter. On his bedside table, bottles of psycho-medicine are arranged in a row. On the desk is the gift that Ondien brought with her. He has unwrapped it. Opperman’s Kleuterverseboek , an anthology of Afrikaans poems for children. All the way from South Africa (and even there no longer so easily obtainable).

Breakfast.

‘Give the child up, let his father have him. Come back to South Africa.’

Ondien does not know why she is saying this. Perhaps just to bring hope. She does not want to return to South Africa herself. But here she wouldn’t want to stay either, in this godforsaken, bloodless landscape. She looks at her sister. She is grey. Ondien suddenly feels guilty about what she has said. She thinks of the child in his bed last night when, for a moment, he was almost vulnerable, like a puppy in a bag with a rock just before it is hurled into a river. But it was a brief pause. Before breakfast, when Ondien approached him again, trying to build on the moment they’d shared last night by reading Stanley a poem from the Kleuterverseboek , his face twisted again. Someone else, the little brute that lives deep under his skin, had gained the upper hand again, overnight.

The child was still in his bed, warm with sleep. She leaned over him, opened the Verseboek between them, and read in a soft voice: