— Will there be scars.—
That was all he could dare to say.
And it didn't stop him, it didn't stop them. It only made me cruel. That Sunday night. I wanted to go to my room and take out from behind my old soccer boots and roller skates — kid's things you never throw away — the dead head of a sunflower, and fling it at him.
He never tried to explain anything. He no longer cared enough for us to feel the need — to try and make us understand what had happened to him. Oh he was shattered that night and there was no-one to help him. The three of us were in the kitchen together, and he was alone. I had thought — had I? — he would break down and confess, we would weep, it would be all over, he would take my mother in his arms, she would take him in her arms. 'Will there be scars': that's all. Our presence, my mother's and mine, drove him away alone to the sitting-room, that he and my mother had been so proud of, a decent place for her, at last. He sat there alone in the dark. She put milk on the stove to heat and I watched her make cocoa and take it in there, to him. I don't know if he said anything to her. She seemed to know he wouldn't eat. Still so considerate of him, my mother; still so respectful of this husband and father who had gone to prison for the future of our kind.
Baby was his favourite child — I always knew that — his daughter was his darling, his beauty, even though he quoted Shakespeare to me and wanted me to bring him glory by growing up to be a writer just to please him. But although the child he used to be so in love with had now wanted, even if only for a mad moment, to die, and no-one dared get her to say why, he couldn't come back to her. He couldn't stay in the house with us. When my sister was 'better'—what she had done to herself became an illness or accident that had happened to her, that was the only way we could deal with it in our house — she and my mother and father discussed what she wanted to do. All was resolved as a matter of the right occupation. And he was the one to know all about guidance, career guidance, he was once a schoolteacher. Her whole future before her etc.; the usual parents' stuff, as if they were the usual parents. My sister fell in with the spirit of the performance. I heard her say it, Oh she was sick of studying. She wanted to take a job. For a while; she'd study again later. (This thrown in, I know, for darling daddy and his old ambitions for his children to be useful, therefore educated, citizens.) She knew my mother wouldn't believe her, my mother knew she would find some other life, unplanned for her. He knew, surely, that something had driven her out; he didn't stay to find out why. He fled the house again with that briefcase — did my father keep a toothbrush in it or was he so thick with that woman that he used hers?
And what I couldn't get over was how my sister made it easy for him. Perhaps she did it for my mother's sake, too, but the fact is it had the effect of letting him off the misery he was sentenced to those first few days; she made it possible for that to be shed with her bandages. She appeared with brightly-painted wooden bracelets on each wrist — African artifacts. He didn't have to see the scars. She has beautiful straight shiny hair, like my mother's, and she had it frizzed; in her 'convalescence' she went about the house, one of my old shirts tied under her naked breasts, midriff showing, her Walkman hooked to a wide belt and plugged into her ears, moving her hips and head to a beat no-one else could hear. It was tacitly accepted that these were signs of a natural girlish independence; she wanted to earn her own living, she had offered.
She talked to me about that Saturday night as if it were some particularly daring party escapade to boast about. I couldn't see how she'd want to; she should have talked to him, really, it was his affair just like his other affair. She was determined to bring it up with me. — You never open your mouth, but I suppose you wonder why anyone'd do such a stupid thing.—
— Like what? — But she knew I was stalling; and she didn't want to come right out with it, either—'trying to kill myself.
— I'd had a bust-up with Marcia, she's always so nosy, like into everything, sticky fingers getting in my hair. I don't know why I let her pester me to spend the night, anyway. And the crowd that turned up at her place because they knew her folks were away, Jimmy and Alvin and that lot. I can't stand them, really. She said Jackie and Dawn and them (how many years had my father spent trying to get his Baby to drop her peers' bad grammar) were coming but she's a liar, she did it to persuade me to stay with her, because they never came. What was there to do but smoke. So I was rather stoned, and on top of it, when I wanted to get away from them and their lousy yakking and yelling and dancing like a pack of drunk wildebeest, there was a couple busy on the bed. They hadn't even shut the door.—
I nodded and kept my head turned away. She saw I didn't want to be presented with this version, this performance — an-other one, in our house.
— The bathroom was the only place to get away.—
The packet of Gillette Sword, the dagga and the self-pity. I wish I didn't have so much imagination, I wish that other people's lives were closed to me.
— They just made me sick. Sick of them.—
Now I knew what Baby was really telling me. I knew who 'they' were; known to us both, not the crowd at Marcia's place on a Saturday night who were not my crowd.
She wanted some response to help her inveigle me — her innocent dumb brother — into an attitude she wanted me to adopt. She was trying buddy-buddy with me.
I only listened; she had to say herself what she hoped I would. — I suppose I could have gone home. It's not far. But you can imagine the fuss, with Ma, me arriving at two in the morning when she thinks I'm tucked up giggling in bed with a bosom friend. That's the problem with not having your own place. Living with the family. Parents, okay. Even the best parents in the world, we're different, not like them. Once you're grown up you've got to forget about their life. Let them have it, it's their business and you've got your own life to live. You have to have a place. — She looked at me to see if she was succeeding. — Can't go running to them, they've got a life of their own.—
Now she chattered away from what she had got said, gabbling about the flat in another grey area she and Jackie and Dawn and two Indian fellows, probably, were going to share, they'd take her in as soon as she got a job, and I understood what she'd been telling me when she was supposed to be confessing why she wanted to die on a Saturday night among strangers. Baby was covering up for him, again. My father. She was warning me off: his life. Poor Baby. His Baby, still.
He was able to forget so quickly.
She encouraged him — she's just like him, after all, although she looks like my mother, she's devious and lying as he is. She found a job with an insurance agent (I think one of the fellows who were sharing the flat and perhaps she was sleeping with him) and she would come flying into the house when it suited her, bringing flowers or a ripped hem for my mother to mend, hooking an arm round my father's neck and kissing his ear, if he happened to be there, and calling, if he was not — as she left, her mouth full of some of my mother's goodies she was carrying away: —Don't forget to give Pa my love! — She was pretty and talkative and amusing, mimicking and laughing and begging for gossip about family and friends she never saw, any more.
I don't know whether my mother ever told him what Dr Jasood said about her animation. Her vulgarity splashed all over my mother. Yet she said to me more than once — As long as Baby's busy and happy— My mother, too, was saying something else: that since nothing could be done about Dr Jasood's diagnosis of my sister's state, my mother was thankful she was proving resilient enough to divert it to some purpose of her own.