The Enumerations Page 14

  79.

  Day 16 / 14:44

  Vuyo travels with a cushion, which she positions carefully before she sits down to eat or join group. Once she’s seated, she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a notebook. It contains column after column of neat figures – just like Noah’s, Juliet thinks, only hers records the steps she’s tried to take, the time spent sneaking in exercise, all weighed against how many calories she’s consumed. She’s not allowed to come to morning exercises, but Juliet’s seen her lying on her bed, scissoring her legs, cycling in the air. She lifts herself onto the balls of her feet, then relaxes as she waits in line for food, circles her feet under the table while she slices her food into minute mouse-sized pieces. Like Noah, she takes her notebook wherever she goes. She writes in it before meals, and after, stares at the figures written there after her twice-daily weigh-ins.

  Vuyo’s eyes are drooping, but she sits up straight when Ms Turner asks if anyone else would like to share.

  ‘Me, I suppose.’ Her voice is light and breathy. ‘More weigh-ins. More phone calls from my mother, wanting to know if ‘it’ has arrived yet, because, don’t you know, the most important thing in her life is whether her daughter will be able to give her grandchildren.’ Her hands twist as she speaks; their knuckles deceptively large, their skin dry and flaking. ‘“Not yet,” I tell her. She’s not worried about the school work I’m missing, how I don’t stand a chance of getting into medicine if my grades aren’t right up there. No. It’s the babies I might not ever have that are giving her sleepless nights. That’s what she said on the phone. I’m giving her sleepless nights.’

  She shivers and huddles deeper into her denim jacket. It’s lined with sheepskin and Juliet feels sweaty just looking at her.

  ‘But hey,’ Vuyo grins, her teeth large in her stretched mouth, ‘it’s not like I can do much studying anyway. I try, but I’m not remembering much. I used to be able to scan a page and memorise it all. Who knew? Anorexia, the scourge of the photographic memory. Seems food is useful for something after all.’

  She shifts in her seat and Juliet wonders what it must be like, having bones so close to your skin that it hurts to sit on them.

  Vuyo’s pen slips from her fingers and Noah bends to retrieve it. She takes it from him, her grip loose.

  ‘I’m writing a lot in my journal.’ Now her voice carries an angry edge. ‘I have to, there’s nowhere else to talk. I’m so worried about my forum friends. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to them. They’re going to wonder where I am, how I’m doing. And I can’t let them know because I don’t have any Internet privileges.’

  Even if you did, you’d be blocked from those sites, Juliet wants to say, but Vuyo’s pinched face stops her. Juliet’s heard of them, the pro-ana and pro-mia websites, the bloggers and vloggers who post regularly about their progress, the tens of thousands of anorexics and bulimics who belong to them.

  Anyway, Vuyo wouldn’t have been able to say goodbye to them, when she arrived at Greenhills. She was in a wheelchair, too weak to walk, at risk of being intubated unless she started to eat, started to slowly but steadily put on weight. And she must be. Juliet’s heard her weeping after weigh-in, betrayed by the upward-creeping needle on the scale.

  80.

  26 July 2011 / 19:35

  ‘I’m ravenous.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  Dominic has collected Maddie from gym, a late practice. His daughter’s been on the go since seven that morning and it’s well after her normal supper time.

  ‘Did you remember your lunchbox?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maddie said. ‘Good old Mom.’

  Kate’s school lunches were the envy of Maddie’s friends, designed to keep a small engine called Maddie running at optimal speed. But the fuel had run low now and the smell of pizza from the back seat was making Maddie’s stomach rumble.

  ‘Have a slice, Mads.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  Maddy’s pizza was in the top box. Veggie Deluxe, all the toppings. Maddie leant back, snagged a napkin, and pulled a slice free. She took a huge bite, then settled back happily.

  ‘Better?’ Dominic glanced over at her.

  ‘Mmmm.’

  Dominic indicated, then slowed, ready to turn left. He beeped the remote and the gates opened. There was something—

  ‘Dad! Stop!’ Maddie fumbled with her seatbelt.

  ‘Maddie! Wait!’ Dominic didn’t know what had happened, all he knew was that his daughter had to stay in the car. ‘Don’t move.’

  Dominic got out and closed his door as quietly as he could. He stood still, eyes straining in the darkness. Then he heard muffled noises coming from a strange mass on the driveway. Suddenly it dawned on him.

  ‘Kate? Noah?’

  Kate was shaking, screaming through the ball of cloth in her mouth.

  Noah was silent, his head hanging.

  Dominic ran to them, knelt, his fingers fumbling with the tight knot at the back of Kate’s head. It was impossible to loosen.

  Scissors, he needed scissors

  He looked at the house and then at his wife.

  ‘Kate, are they gone?’

  Kate’s chest was heaving. She swallowed, looked at her husband and nodded.

  Dominic turned to signal to Maddie but before he knew it, she was out of the car and at his side, keening. ‘Mom, Mom. Noah.’

  ‘Maddie, Mom and Noah aren’t hurt. Do you understand? They aren’t hurt.’

  Kate and Noah nodded.

  ‘Maddie.’ Dominic said, until his daughter tore her eyes away from them. ‘I need you to stay right here. Will you do that?’

  Maddie started scrabbling at the knots in the plastic rope and Dominic put his hand over hers. ‘Easy Maddie. Easy. I’m going into the house to get some scissors.’

  ‘No, Dad! What if—’

  Dominic’s voice was soothing. ‘They’re gone, Maddie. Let’s stay calm and help Mom and Noah.’

  81.

  2012

  At the beginning of his Grade 11 year, Noah told Maddie and his mom about the exams that year and the following one and what they all meant.

  ‘I need to do well in these if I want to get provisional acceptance into Engineering,’ he said. ‘They look at your Grade 11 results, then your mocks in Grade 12. And obviously how you do in your finals. But they’ve made lots of decisions by then. Places have been allocated. So the sooner I get a head start, the better.’

  And from then on, it seemed like Noah did nothing but study. Closeted away behind his bedroom door, nose in his books. At first, all he stuck up above his desk was a study timetable, with coloured blocks identifying specific subjects. Advanced Programme English and Maths, Physical Science, English, Afrikaans, Engineering, Information Technology.

  He’d appear at supper pale-faced, his hair spiky, his eyes tired, and slump into his chair.

  Kate began to worry. ‘I know these exams are important, darling,’ she said one evening, ‘but you look exhausted. Are you sure you’re not overdoing it?’ She placed a casserole dish on the table carefully, as if the oven gloves holding it had turned to tissue.

  He nodded, looking so tired Maddie wanted to get a pillow and let him put his head down on the table and sleep until the circles under his eyes faded and her brother looked like he did before.

  Noah leant forward and repositioned the spoon that had been knocked out of place when their mom put the dish down. ‘One, two, three, four, five.’ The numbers were scarcely a murmur. He ran his fingers through his hair, then patted the spoons as if they’d done a good job.

  But Maddie had heard him, and after that they were everywhere, as if by naming them softly he’d allowed the numbers out of his head and into theirs. She heard her brother counting his steps under his breath as they walked to the car in the morning. More and more, she noticed him taking a notebook out of his pocket, jotting things down. What time they left the house, when they arrived at the school, the number of steps it took to get to the school do
ors.

  He started writing lists and doing sums, plotting his day as soon as he woke up. Each time Maddie went into his room, the wall above his desk held more and more detail: charts, lists, timetables broken down into an ever-growing number of differently coloured squares, all constantly adjusted and readjusted. Asterisks followed by small notes at first, and then ones that grew longer and longer, until he had virtually written an essay on each action of his day. A purple block recorded exactly how many seconds it took him to brush his teeth, whether the food he had eaten affected the time, the degree to which this impacted on the time he had in his day, so that tooth brushing after mince and spaghetti cost him one minute twenty-three seconds more than vegetable soup, but one minute and forty-nine seconds less than lamb chops (flossing = extra seconds).

  His activities crept off the main chart and onto separate sheets of paper. Dressing (a bright yellow block), broken down into the separate parts of his school uniform, including shoes, changing out of school uniform and into cotton pyjama pants (in summer) or tracksuit pants and sweatshirt (in winter). School tie – never undone. Where to place clothing for maximum efficiency.

  Meals (a pale green block), whittling down the time spent at the table, bolting his food so that he could get back to his room to study.

  But he wasn’t studying. Instead, he was breaking his week down into days and hours and minutes and seconds, counting one thing off against another, rushing out of the schoolyard and mumbling his way into the car, counting faster and faster and louder and louder. And then he was home and pushing the gate open and running up the path and Spit and Spot were racing to meet him, but he only had time to give them each a cursory pat on the head. Maddie wondered when that too would find a place on his walls, when he’d stop fondling their ears and saying, ‘Hello boy, hello girl.’ Just like he’d stopped saying, ‘Hi, Mads!’ to her in the morning. Now, he was too busy looking at his watch, tapping his foot and telling her they had fifty-seven (or forty-two, or twenty-six) seconds to make up.

  The tapping. That was another thing. He tapped his left foot in sets of five and then it was both feet and soon it was both hands and both feet. Then he started tapping his face, his upper arms, his thighs as well. At school, she saw him running his hand along the walls, stopping at each corner to tap five times. Sometimes, he’d turn back, walk the passage again, tap at the corner and then move on.

  If he actually made it to class – and sometimes he didn’t now – he’d fret his way through lessons, checking his watch against the classroom clock and the bell. He’d tell teachers if they went over the period, again right down to the second, complain at the office that the bell wasn’t ringing on time. Maddie wasn’t there to see that, but she heard about it often enough. His classmates laughing about Nuh-nuh-Noah Groome and how weird he’d become. Because of her need to defend him, protect him, and because of the fights she got into as a result, people started avoiding her too. Only her very best friends stuck by her; for the rest she was Nuh-nuh-Noah’s sister.

  Mad Maddie and Nuh-nuh-Noah, the crazy dude who counted every step he took, every word he spoke, every minute of his day.

  When Maddie told her mom about it all, Kate sighed and told her not to worry. ‘It will come right once the exams are over, you’ll see.’

  But it didn’t. It didn’t come right at all. Because a+ student Noah Groome barely scraped through his Grade 11 exams.

  82.

  Day 17 / 12:38

  Whenever Noah thinks about the way things spiralled out of control in Grade 11 he has to fight to keep his body still.

  What happened before that? Why not take a quick look at those memories?

  Noah’s not going to stop writing, he’s not going to be forced to go back to where it all started. Not now. He’ll get to the end of Journal Time, keep writing, no matter how sharply words dig into him.

  He has to trust Ms Turner when she says that what he writes in this journal is private; she won’t read it, no one will.

  ‘Things are going to be confusing for a while, Noah. I’m going to be asking you to shift habits, try different patterns, be a bit looser. It’s going to be tough. But you’ll have your journal, and you can write in it whenever you want to. Sometimes the clutter in our heads makes more sense if we can put it down on paper. Get it all out and into order.’

  She smiled and he knew she’d used that last word deliberately – sort of like a carrot to get him writing. But he didn’t mind. She knew that he knew, so it wasn’t like she was trying to trick him.

  He’d like to write how he feels about visiting hours. But instead of words about his family and how his father hardly looks at him these days, he finds himself remembering more about the beginning of the timetabling, when he moved from being neat, orderly and sort-of quirky and became a freak ruled by time.

  Noah stops. Listens.

  Not a word, not a sound, nothing gloomy and forbidding gathering.

  An added bonus. Writing keeps the Dark out, quietens the voice that’s always telling him what to do. If it means that he’ll get some peace, he’s good with that.

  83.

  26 July 2011 / 19:43

  Very gently, Maddie’s dad slid a scissor blade between Kate’s right cheek and the cloth holding the gag in place. He did the same for Noah, flinching as he saw his son’s black eye. He cut through the plastic ties at their wrists and ankles and snipped into the plastic washing line. The moment they were both free and stumbling to their feet, her dad gathered his wife into his arms.

  ‘Kate, are you all right? Did they—’

  ‘No, they didn’t.’ She sobbed, huge sobs. ‘No, no, nothing like that.’

  ‘I’m sorry Mom, sorry Dad.’

  ‘Noah? What on earth—’

  ‘I should have stopped them.’

  ‘Darling.’ Maddie’s mom held her son tight, rocking him back and forth. ‘They had guns, Noah.’

  ‘Guns?’ Maddie’s voice was shaky. She’d heard all this before – from friends who’d had friends who’d been hijacked; from Miss Godwin, a teacher at school who was held up at gunpoint outside her home just the week before; from the news every night and sometimes in the mornings in her dad’s car. ‘They had guns?’ Maddie burst into tears.

  Every day, people are held up, their cars stolen, their lives stolen. The stats are on the news and in the newspapers, and now crime is here, in their driveway.

  The Groomes have become part of a national statistic.

  84.

  Day 18 / 14:17

  ‘When-I-was-little, I had stomach aches when I had to do something in-front-of-other people.’ Simon’s reading from his ‘5 Things’ list, the words coming out in spurts. ‘Just thinking about it made-me-sick, my heart would beat-really-quickly and I couldn’t breathe. If Mom said people were-were coming-to-our-house, I’d feel a headache, a weird sort of pressure-in-my-head and I’d get dizzy, room spinning like it-would-never-stop. All I wanted was to stay-in-my-room, never-come-out. I still want to do that.’ Simon smiles wryly and for a moment he looks his age, not ten years older.

  ‘“That’s not an option, Simon. It’s-simply-not-an option.” That’s what Mom says. And Gran—’ he stops. ‘Gran says, “Get-that-boy-to-a-doctor-Ingrid-my-bet-is-constipation.”’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’ Juliet’s voice is amazed.

  ‘No.’ Another small deprecating smile. He clears his throat again and looks at his list. ‘Okay. Last-thing. My body still reacts the-sameway, only now I-can-add depression and panic attacks-to-the-list.’

  He looks over to Ms Turner. ‘Is-that, is-that enough? You said to try reading out five-things about how-my body-feels. And why.’

  ‘It’s not a freaking test, man,’ Morné says. Sadie sniggers.

  Simon sits further back and folds his list into ever-tighter squares.

  Ms Turner leans forward and manages to catch his eye. ‘You might want to file that, Simon,’ she says. ‘Put the date on it. It’s the first thing you’ve read out in
group. Thank you.’ She gives him a huge smile and he ducks his head, his cheeks flaming.

  ‘Right then. Does anyone else want to say something?’

  Noah’s hand is in his pocket, pebbles slipping through his fingers.

  It’s time.

  Oh no, it’s not. It is absolutely not time.

  But if he doesn’t start now, he never will. He takes a deep breath, raises his hand. He’s got his lists. He’s not using the sheets any more, he’s writing them out in the back of his current notebook.

  And now he’s ready to share, but he’s going to be careful. He won’t give anything away. It’s taken him a while to decide what to say; he’s going to have to adjust his timetable to make up for minutes lost (43, to be precise), but it’s been worth it. He’s making an effort, following Juliet’s advice, and so Ms Turner will see that he’s prepared to try. On top of that, he’s volunteered to speak.

  ‘Noah?’ She sounds surprised, but she wasn’t in his room, feeling sick, heart hammering, when Juliet told him about The Work. It’s got capitals now. ‘Do The Work if you want to get out of here on time.’

  He doesn’t want to get out of here. He has to.

  He flicks to the back of his notebook and clears his throat.

  ‘Interesting facts.’

  Noah reads his heading and then he pauses.

  ‘1. The English language has 5 vowel sounds.’

  Everyone looks at Ms Turner.

  ‘That’s not—’ Sadie’s objecting, but Ms Turner holds up a hand. ‘Let’s not worry too much about that. Let Noah finish.’

  She nods at him and he clears his throat.

  ‘2. 5 lines hold music in place, ref. also pentatonic scale.’

  Ms Turner smiles and nods again, so he continues.

  ‘3. Olympians are linked by 5 circles, each representing a continent of the world.’

  Sadie’s nudging Morné, but he ignores her.