Zoe Wicomb - October

Nicky sits up muttering; he rubs his eyes, and looks around bewildered. Mercia takes his hand. Come, she says, we’re going to help your mummy to make brawn.

Just then Jake shouts from the room: Sylvie, come. Where are you? Sylvie, come, quick.

Mercia wants to plug her fingers into her ears. This, the sound of her own people, this is what she needs to get away from.

Mercia is sent out of the kitchen by Sylvie, who says that she doesn’t need any help, that it won’t do having a child perched on a chair with a knife in his hand.

It’s a blunt dinner knife, Mercia protests, but Sylvie the mother says, Whoever has heard of a child chopping onions? She helps Nicky down and turns on the television, with a warning that he is not to fall sleep.

What is happening to Mercia, the carnivore, here in Kliprand? Is this the measure of her distance from the place, from her home, her people? The smell of meat and onions boiling in her mother’s old cast-iron pot from Falkirk makes her gag, so that she goes out to the very end of the garden where Sylvie has planted a frangipani. It is still young; its stark bare branches like amputated limbs against the evening sky conjure up the legendary demons and ghosts of long-dead slaves from the east. From some of the puckered stumps, clenched fists of flower have pushed their way out, the perfume of the young buds still locked away. Mercia wills a remembered fragrance to drive off the smell of sheep’s head and trotters. Which can’t be so different from any cut of mutton cooking, but the smell is inexorably linked to the image of the hideous head.

Is Mercia growing fastidious about meat, about the killing of animals? She doesn’t know. This is home; everything is topsyturvy here. She would like to think that it is only the head, the face that is after all so like a human’s, that is repellent. She remembers, as a child at Sunday school, the picture card of John the Baptist’s severed head on a plate, which made her stomach turn. Hideous and barbaric, she thought, and squeezed shut her eyes, although the afterimage of curly hair and beard, and glassy eyes, would not go away. Even years later, in Italian museums, she winced at the paintings, Caravaggio’s and others’. Botticelli’s held her in frozen horror, foregrounding as it did a sweetly smiling Salome holding the head on a plate. Focusing on the richly adorned rim of the plate, Mercia understood that it was indeed the plate, that statement of cultural refinement, that doubled the horror.

No danger of a gilt plate tonight. Sylvie will cook the head with onions and spices, and the meat floating in the jellied liquor will be picked from skin and bone, so that there could be no picturing of the head in the brawn. But it makes her gorge rise all the same. Transformed in the cooking it may be, but Mercia knows that she will not be placated. The problem is how to get round it, how not to offend Sylvie.

She returns to the question of why she finds meat difficult to eat here in Kliprand. It is not only the head. The faint nausea that has gripped her over the last couple of days is undoubtedly linked to meat. Is it connected with Sylvie, the butcher girl?

Back home in Glasgow, Mercia had no such misgivings about meat. She would pound ginger and garlic with cumin and cardamom in a marble pestle and mortar for her signature dish of Moroccan lamb, having herself pickled the lemons, quartered and salted and packed snugly in their own juice some months before. Lately, she has made a point of continuing to have friends round to dinner; she would not retreat into lone spinsterhood. Besides, there was the relief of having no Craig to appease, Craig who so loved dinner parties, but always, always complained beforehand. Always complained that he’d had enough, that he hated the fuss and bustle, that it was too much trouble, that they should think of an excuse to call off the dinner party. Please could she say that he had pneumonia. Or a brain tumor. So that she shut him out of the kitchen.

Cooking for friends was a pleasure she would not have spoilt by Craig. Mercia would turn up the music and dance to Karoo blues, whilst stirring and waiting for the spices to fry slowly, on the gentlest of heat. Ek will huis toe gaan, she crooned along with David Kramer, ground her hips and dipped her shoulders hotnos style, waving her wooden spoon defiantly. Or hummed and shimmied along to a Klopse tune where Ibrahim’s piano allowed, where the beat picked up, and the cuts deferred to Basil Coetzee’s sax. Then, as the smell of fried cardamom rose, repeated its aroma and weaving through coriander and paprika revised its fragrance, she savored a bittersweet homesickness.

And always the moment of hesitation — should fennel not be given its rightful place with coriander? Always the sound of her father’s voice that could not be dislodged: soos vinkel en koljander — like fennel and coriander. The recipe does not call for fennel, but Mercia cannot imagine coriander without a dash of its twin. They were lookalikes, meant to go together, inseparable and, according to the Afrikaans idiom, interchangeable. Like the collie dogs Nicholas gave to Mercia and Jake, the puppies already named Vinkel and Koljander with their identical white collars, so that the children would not argue. Jake said that they were sheepdogs for Nicholas’s own convenience, but Vinkel attached himself to Jake, so that even he could not resist the adorable creature.

Craig, for all his bad temper beforehand, would be the life and soul of the party. He boasted about Mercia’s Cape dishes, her use of spices, learned, he announced to guests, at her mother’s knee. Mercia did not correct him. Did not say, no, that she learned from Jane Grigson’s recipes, the inventive English cook who borrowed, gloriously freed by the fact that there is no oppressive tradition of fine British cuisine which demands slavish adherence. Instead, Mercia dredged up stories of Lusitanian navigators, the Cape as refreshment station, the Cape of Storms turned Cabo Esperanza in the establishment of a spice route. Vinkel en koljander brought to Cape shores in exchange for scurvy-fighting fruit and veg. Once she spoke of slaves from Goa, Malaysia, East Africa, sizzling their spices in the shadow of Table Mountain, which was not nice, so that Craig explained that Mercia had had too much to drink. No one said that eating meat was not nice.

Ag, it’s the time of day, the dipping light that makes her vulnerable to sentimentality. All this nonsense about food when she should be thinking about her work, or rather, about Jake. Mercia, who has never had any difficulty in meeting deadlines, is anxious about the scholarly work that has given up on her. It is only October, but the temperature seems to have risen today and she simply cannot think, cannot come to grips with the argument. It is in her interest to leave Jake alone, to wait for him to come round and to observe in the meantime how things are with Sylvie and the boy, but without her work she is growing impatient, enraged by his slide back to drink.

The icon of the memoir beckons from the desktop, offers itself as diversion from the awfulness of being in this house. Mercia thinks of this writing as private, but she can’t help wondering what Jake would make of being translated into these words. Still, how else is she to get through the days in this place called home? How is she to manage sly nostalgia that creeps into the hole left by Craig? It is infuriating, this need to recollect a past that cannot be considered without irony. Is it in fact nostalgia? So layered are the fragrances of the past, so spliced the memories of places, that nostalgia will have to do without an object. This home where Jake snores and Sylvie squeals is not a place to yearn for a dubious past.