Birdseye Read online

  Published in 2014 by Umuzi

  an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd

  Company Reg No 1966/003153/07

  Estuaries No 4, Oxbow Crescent, Century Avenue, Century City, 7441, South Africa

  PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

  [email protected]

  www.randomstruik.co.za

  © 2014 Máire Fisher

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0704-8 (Print)

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0596-9 (ePub)

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0597-6 (PDF)

  Cover design by Jacques Kaiser

  Cover photography by Black.Doll, Chris, andy carter, decar66, Valerie Everett, Gorupka, littlemisspurps, Andrew Robinson, Clyde Robinson, Chris Schmich and sleep (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en), and Jacques Kaiser

  Text design by Fahiema Hallam

  For my mom and dad,

  who gave me such a happy childhood

  that I had to imagine a difficult one.

  And for my darlings:

  Rob, Dan and Kiers.

  1995

  I was six years old when it became my job to keep you in the picture.

  Ten years of writing. So many words, scribble scribbled down. I open a book and flip through it. Words fly around my room, stories I was scared I’d forget, ones that go back to the beginning – to Orville and Annie and, of course, Ma Bess. Ma Bess, who lived at the top of a long staircase, who pressed her finger on the bell and thumped her cane on the floor when she wanted something. Ma Bess, who sat at the top of our house and ruled us all.

  I

  1

  Orville stood on the doorstep, his hand raised to the knocker, but the door opened before he could move. A tall woman stood there, dressed in white. As he met her blue stare, Orville saw where the girl he had met the night before got her pale-skinned beauty from. The woman’s skin was fair. Her hair, deep brown, shading towards black, fell in a smooth bob. Everything about her was chiselled, fine-boned and elegant. She didn’t smile. Nor did she greet him.

  Orville felt the Brylcreem on his scalp warming in the afternoon sun. His tie was a noose, strangling his voice to a squeak.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘My name is Orville Little. I’m here to call on Annie.’

  There was no reply.

  Orville heard a light step in the hall behind. The woman moved aside and Annie slipped through.

  ‘Hello, Orville.’ Her voice was easy, calm. ‘Shall we go?’ She tucked her arm into Orville’s and led him down the steps.

  ‘What time will you be back?’

  ‘We won’t be late, Mother.’

  The door closed behind them.

  ‘That was your mother?’ Orville asked. ‘She didn’t seem happy to see me.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about Mother,’ Annie said. ‘Her bark is worse than her bite.’

  Orville wasn’t sure. Given the chance, she’d probably gobble him up silently, without bothering to bark. One gulp and he’d be gone. One burp and his shoes, watch and wallet would be deposited in a neat pile on the front step, a warning to anyone else foolish enough to brave courting the daughter of the house.

  Annie squeezed his arm. ‘Where are we going, Orville?’

  There wasn’t much to do on a Saturday afternoon in Harbiton. Orville had no car, not even a bicycle.

  ‘I thought we could walk a while, maybe stop at the Hot Pot Café for a cup of tea.’

  Annie smiled. She was bright and quick and happy. Later she told Orville that if he’d suggested a trip to Mars, she would have gone with him.

  Annie and Orville never made it to the Hot Pot. They walked and talked the afternoon away. All the way along the beach to Lady’s Seat, the large flat rock at the end of the beach, back up to Moonrise Circle and into the small park overlooking the harbour. The sea was a blue pond, framed by the misty line of the Hottentots-Holland Mountains. Orville told Annie about working in Morton’s Photography Studio, getting fidgeting children to hold still, bribing beloved pets with doggie treats or catnip to look straight at the camera. ‘I want my own place,’ he told her, ‘to be able to experiment, hold exhibitions.’

  Annie talked about her job at Maddon's, on Beach Road, where she worked in ladies’ wear. ‘I started working there when I left school. Mainly to get out of the house. It was only going to be temporary, and look at me now. Six years down the line and still helping women decide whether they look better in pink or pale blue. They’re so kind to me,’ Annie said, ‘and I love working there, even when some of the customers treat me like a nobody. But it’s not what I want to do with the rest of my life.’ She leaned back and stretched her arms high above her head. ‘There’s so much out there, Orville. I wish I could go and find it.’

  ‘You can, Annie, we both can.’

  That afternoon, Orville learned the truth of all the expressions he had read and heard about love. He drank in Annie’s blue-eyed beauty. He floated, lighter than air, through the hot golden hours. But people who float tend to land with a bump. A shock, then, when Annie looked at her watch and said they could go back to her house for tea. They hadn’t mentioned her mother once, but now she was there, blocking their view of each other.

  ‘Are you sure your mother …?’ He spoke carefully.

  ‘Oh,’ Annie’s light dimmed. ‘Of course. If you’d rather not?’ Her hand slid from his.

  It was then Orville realised he could scale mountains, even if they took the shape of a blade-slim woman. After all, didn’t all heroes have dragons to slay in the quest for true love?

  The dragon met them at the door. ‘Actually,’ Orville would say, when he reached this part of the story of Orville and Annie, ‘more an ice queen, or a wicked stepmother. Beautiful, but very scary. One of those people it’s dangerous to relax around.’

  When he walked into the sitting room behind Annie, he saw her mother’s throne before the fireplace, flanked on either side by an occasional table. On one stood a jug of water and a cut-crystal glass. On the other, a Delderfield novel in a red dust jacket, the pencilled illustration showing a chaos of bombed houses and wardens manning a spoke-wheeled fire engine.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Mother? Orville?’

  The she-dragon said nothing, and Orville nodded a weak assent. He stepped his way to a rattan-backed sofa, dodging another small table, narrowly missing tripping on the fringed end of the Persian carpet that covered most of the floor.

  Annie left the room, and Orville felt his body squirm deeper into the heavy cushions. He sat tilted back, his spine at uncomfortable odds with the carved wooden frame, his head touching the wall. He inched forward, only to sink back under a question from his hostess.

  ‘What do you do?’

  Orville wasn’t sure whether she knew his name. He certainly had no idea how to address her.

  ‘I’m a photographer’s assistant,’ he said, ‘in a studio in town.’

  A small snort from Annie’s mother. Almost a harrumph.

  ‘Not very ambitious then?’

  Her voice was icy, but behind the chilliness there was something smouldering, just as behind the expressionless blue eyes something dangerous and heated was caged. Ice and fire, cold seeping into his bones, a flick of fear darting in his head. Pushing him deeper into the cushions, forcing his head back. Making him worry about the small smear of grease that would remain to reproach him after he left.

  Annie came back in, the tray heavy in her slim arms. Orville pushed himself to his feet, glad to be able t
o take it from her, even gladder to reposition himself on another chair. Were they all designed to make visitors as uncomfortable as possible? Keep them flipped back, or teetering on the edge, like this one, with hard pink velvet buttons nudging his bum?

  Whenever Orville told us children this story, it was the chairs he mentioned. The rest of the room hardly came into the picture at all.

  ‘English are you?’ Ma Bess’s voice, cold and hot in his ears again.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, but now Annie was here to fill in the gaps for him.

  ‘Orville’s parents immigrated to South Africa ten years ago, Mother.’

  ‘Well, that’s something, I suppose,’ her mother said. ‘Where do they live?’

  ‘My father bought a small farm near Grahamstown,’ said Orville. ‘My mother’s quite frail – they thought the climate would suit her.’

  ‘Your brothers and sisters? What do they do?’

  ‘I’m an only child.’

  ‘And your surname? What was it again?’

  ‘Little,’ he answered.

  ‘Orville Little. How very odd that sounds.’

  Orville met her basilisk stare. He had never come across such naked dislike, or such unveiled rudeness before. He was aware of Annie, her cheeks scarlet, her lips set in a nervous smile. Thankful that his cup had grown cold, he stood. ‘Thank you so much for the tea, Mrs—, Mrs—’ he stammered, painfully aware that he had forgotten Annie’s last name. He racked his brains, trying to remember their introduction the night before.

  ‘Mrs Marchbanks-Hall,’ Annie’s mother supplied. ‘Not a little name at all.’

  ‘I must be on my way,’ Orville said. ‘My landlady expects me for dinner at seven.’

  His feet clumsy, Orville walked from the room. He bumped into one small table and then another on his way to the door.

  He and Annie stood on the stoep, the silence awkward between them – none of the flow, the easy talk of the afternoon. Orville searched for some way to say goodbye. His fingers moved to his collar to loosen the tie at his throat. Mrs Marchbanks-Hall had sucked all air, all courage, from him. His lungs were seared, hot and aching. He looked down at the clean line of Annie’s parting, the dark cloud of her hair.

  ‘Goodbye, Orville.’

  ‘Goodbye, Annie.’ He was formal, polite.

  She turned to open the door, to walk back into the lair.

  It was then that the slumbering hero in Orville truly awoke. He shook off the miasma that had clouded his brain, and saw Annie’s face, still and bereft. He squared his shoulders, cleared his throat, reached for her hand and pulled her to face him.

  ‘Annie,’ he said, ‘may I call on you again?’

  ‘Yes, Orville, of course you may.’

  ‘On Friday afternoon? Perhaps we could catch the train into town, go to the bioscope?’

  Annie’s face was alight. ‘The bioscope would be lovely.’

  ‘I’ll call for you early, then,’ he said. ‘At half past five. We can have a meal first.’

  Annie’s hand rested on the doorknob. Orville saw again the darkness she would walk back into, and resolved to rescue her from this house, take her from this small seaside town, away from her mother.

  ‘Goodbye then, Annie.’ He squeezed her hand, and, made suddenly bold, bent to drop a small kiss on her cheek.

  Annie raised her hand to her face. ‘Goodbye, Orville.’

  Orville ran down the steps and into the street. He looked back at the house. He tipped an imaginary hat to the she-beast and headed home.

  2

  Orville courted Annie throughout the summer of 1967. Each time he had to encounter Mrs Marchbanks-Hall, and each time he would gird his loins and call on the strength of his love for Annie. She was his girl and he wanted to marry her, move with her some place far away. Her mother would become a yearly ordeal, someone they would visit once a summer.

  As they spent time together, Orville learned more about Annie, how she had grown up in a world where her mother’s word was law. There were rules about eating – ‘Elbows off the table, Ann, hands in lap’ – and being polite – ‘Speak when you are spoken to, Ann, and not before.’ And even then, she didn’t get a chance to say much, because Ma Bess believed that children should be seen and not heard. If she broke any of these rules, Annie was sent to bed without any supper and expected to have a suitably contrite apology on her lips the following morning.

  ‘My father never really stood up to my mother,’ she told Orville. ‘He tried, though, to add joy to life, a little lightness. He’d kidnap me for an afternoon and we’d escape to the beach and build sandcastles or walk all the way to Lady’s Seat.’

  But they’d always have to go back to Marchbanks, where Annie’s mother was waiting. ‘It was positively Victorian,’ Annie would laugh, but when she told us these stories, when we were children, I found it hard to laugh too. I hated the thought of Annie, small and alone, being sent to bed with no food in her tummy until morning. And for minor infringements, like climbing trees and tearing her dress, or interrupting Ma Bess when she was speaking. But these weren’t minor as far as Ma Bess was concerned. She frowned on unruly behaviour; it was to be nipped in the bud and never allowed to bloom into something unmanageable.

  Annie told Orville how her father had walked out of the house one day, hat in hand, holding his briefcase as he always had. He had climbed behind the wheel of his maroon Riley and driven away. Annie had grown up alone with her mother, but traces of her father remained for some time after he left. His shaving brush and razor were still in the medicine chest in the bathroom; his clothes still hung in his cupboard in their room – reminders of the man who had dared escape.

  ‘When I was a little girl,’ Annie told Orville as they strolled along the beach, ‘I would slip in there when no one was watching. I’d see his silk ties – burgundy, navy and green. I’d breathe in the smell of him. On his dressing table were the brushes he used on his hair and a small bottle of pomade. I’d use his clothes brush on the sleeve of my dress and imagine him stroking my arm. Then one day, about a year after he left, my mother told Thelma to do a proper clean-out. “I don’t want to see a single thing that belonged to him.” But she didn’t say anything to me.’

  She gazed out to sea.

  ‘And that was it?’ Orville asked. ‘You never heard from him again?’

  ‘Never,’ Annie said. ‘Mother never spoke of him and I learned never to mention his name. All I wish is that he’d taken me with him.’

  After her father left, Annie no longer heard bedtime stories. She wasn’t taken to the beach to build clumsy castles in the sand. No more visits to the Hot Pot Café where the Peach Melba melted before it reached the table.

  Annie didn’t know whether her father sent money. She did know, however, that her mother had a considerable private income. Hers had been one of the first large houses built on the hill overlooking the small town of Harbiton. ‘The Fortress’ the locals called it, and with good reason. It stood dark and solid against the mountain, frowning on all who dared to come too close. Its real name was Marchbanks, engraved in bronze on the pillar at the front gate. The house was a stern-faced block with a long stoep, part of which was screened in to create a sun porch, the remainder deep and cool, shaded by a curved galvanised iron roof trimmed with broekielace. The architects had tried for a graceful flourish with this last addition, but the overall effect on the disapproving façade was of a downturned mouth, its upper lip fringed by a white loop of whiskers. Above, the windows blinked into the sun.

  ‘I remember,’ Annie would tell us, ‘when I was very small, living alone with my mother. When I was in my bedroom, I was snug as a bug in a rug. Everything was my size and when I opened the wardrobe or looked in the drawers of the dresser, everything there was scaled to suit a little girl. My shoes, my slippers, even my brush and comb were my size. But the moment I opened the door and stepped into the house, I became very, very tiny. The walls and windows were so tall. Everything in the house was built
on a grand scale, and I rattled from room to room, one small bug, alone.’

  Annie’s mother had no childhood tales to tell, and so Annie never learned why she had left England and come to South Africa. Just as Annie never knew why she had been left fatherless by the time she was six.

  When Annie’s father was still at home, he and Annie and Ma Bess went every Sunday to St Andrew the Apostle, the Anglican Church in Harbiton. Everyone admired her parents as they walked in: he spruce and handsome in a dark suit, she tall, regal and very beautiful in white gloves and a wide-brimmed hat. They sat in the same pew every week. After the service was over, her father would stand outside and shake hands with some of the men and smile at the ladies, while her mother waited, aloof, for him to join her.

  The first Sunday after her father had gone, Annie’s mother stood in the hallway for a long time, adjusting her hat, tweaking the collar of her sky-blue dress. Then she turned around, took off her hat and went back to her room. And after that their churchgoing ceased.

  Annie’s mother took to wearing shades of cream and white, black and grey. No more brilliant blue, or icy eau de nil. No bright saffron or arresting scarlet. Her clothes were as expensive as ever, but, from the tips of her polished shoes to the top button of her severely cut blouses, everything was monochromatic. The only real colour on her was the sparkle of rubies, sapphires and emeralds, blinking from the many rings on her long fingers.

  Annie laughed as she told Orville the tale of her mother’s mutation. ‘I must have been the only girl in town who looked for her real parents in their wardrobes. My father’s left-behind clothes, mothballed for eternity. My mother’s – row upon row of bright suits, dresses, gowns. Pumps, and open-toed sandals.

  ‘I told myself stories about my parents,’ Annie continued. ‘And as I created new lives for them, they became people they had never been. My mother, young and sweet and kind, sweetness turned bitter, kindness leached from her when she found herself alone. And I sent my father out on a quest, one from which he could never return, because he had been called away by a power greater than he was, by a need that trumped duty and fatherly love.