Time outside the house was what Marion enjoyed most. Inside was cloistered, regulated. From the age of eight she was allowed to walk up the street if her mother was on the stoep. This was her favourite thing. Marion counted the houses and she talked to them. Little whispers, little secrets that no one else had to know. And it was her love affair with those houses that made the one story that both her parents would go on to tell friends, or even just anyone they met. For instance, when Marion, much later, graduated from university, her parents, already divorced, came to the graduation dinner. They used whatever bravery they possessed to survive each other’s presence at the event. Even though they sat apart, Marion heard them at the exact same time telling the people they were sitting next to the exact same story. We once asked Marion what she wanted to be when she grew up and she said a house. We told her she couldn’t be a house, because a house was a thing and she was a human. She cried for a while. And then later she came to us and said she’d decided what she wanted to be. We asked her what. And she said – a human house. It always brought laughs, the story. When she was younger Marion hated to hear it, but as her parents grew old and dutifully told the story at every opportunity they could, she understood it was a kind of anthem for them. Like a psalm. Her parents were both uptight people. Marion had never seen them hug or kiss each other. Her mother touched Marion’s skin to scrub it, her hair to tidy it, her cheek to de-smudge it, her bum to smack it. Her father touched nothing, except on the odd occasion he would lay his hand on the top of her head, although Marion never understood what that was for. Much much later, only when Marion had children of her own, did she understand that for her parents the story, the remembering of it and the telling, was a deeper kind of touching.
She spent childhood managing herself. Despite sincere attempts, she frequently couldn’t help stepping over the lines her mother so carefully drew out for her. Her parents seldom had gatherings at the home, but there was one dinner party Marion remembered – not the reason of why, and not even who was there and how many. She recalled that it was a stressful occasion for her mother, who spent most of the evening in the kitchen and cried at the end after everyone had left. Marion remembered wearing powder-blue with frills, her mother in heels that she couldn’t walk in and her father quiet but smug. Marion remembered the actual meal. Delicious. And she, all of six years old, remembered feeling compelled to utter a sentence into a silence that presented itself: Ma said black is the same as Kaffir.
A few of the guests tutted their disapproval; mostly people laughed as if Marion had told a joke. Regardless, after everyone had left her mother gave her a hiding. Smacking her daughter was easier than feeling ashamed.
Adolescence was a tug-of-war. Sometimes it seemed like Marion was in fact a little lady, the kind her mother required her to be. And other times she burst out from the stitches, tore the seams.
When Marion was eleven, old enough to make accusations and old enough to know fear when she saw it, she asked her mother. Why hadn’t they given her anything – not even a religion, not even some uncles or aunties, nothing to remember, no rituals? The question had come from a place of loneliness, from a feeling that three did not really make a family.
Her mother decided to talk about something she’d never spoken of. She told Marion that she – Marion – was born on the twenty-first of June in 1933. Marion, of course, knew this already. When she interrupted to say so, her mother raised a hand in a gesture that was unfamiliar and so, for this reason, Marion hushed and listened.
Her mother had been pregnant on the ship. She and her husband sailed for South Africa from London, leaving behind the dormitory house they had lived in, with so many others, for a few months. It had all been a jumble of nightmares and rain. On the Blue Mary, her mother had been sick often. Sick with the sea, but also sick with the baby. Sick too with fear and a close sense of what is ugly about the world, what it is like to be hunted. She stood on the deck, Marion’s mother explained to her, when the seas calmed and she saw the shining waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
No one could ever know but, standing on the deck of the ship one evening, she’d considered jumping. Her bits of sick were bobbing down below on the waves. She felt a madness, like a fever, and the only thing to end it would be to jump, fling herself and the unborn child over the edge, give them both a simple kind of peace. She held onto the rails and, as if it was a fast wind, the feeling passed. She reasoned that if she could get away from the dark place they’d come from – not just physically – then she could be alright. She decided to make herself forget and she vowed that, henceforth, for every remembrance anyone, even her husband, attempted to inflict on her, she would slap it away. Because this would be a new life, away from a land that had turned on itself. And in the new life there would be no need for remembering. She wanted to forget and she wanted to be forgotten. After all the horrific attention, she longed to simply slip through life unnoticed.
Marion was surprised to hear her mother say so much, but it was a carefully made story with nothing fraying along its edges. Marion never asked again.
In the guest house in Katterijn, as the sun began to drop, Marion put the portrait of her parents back into the brown cardboard box full of worthless trinkets and forgettable memories. Stupid portrait. How ridiculous, the painting – worth something – and this photograph survives. This stupid picture that was irrepressible. She shoved the box with her leg and her heel complained.
From the window she could see the highway. Apparently if you looked carefully into the thicket you could pick out the Von Struiker Gardens, so said the receptionist. Marion narrowed her eyes as she glared at the view. Too little light, really. But the room was too quiet, and it felt less quiet if she stood at the window and looked out of it. She missed Alvar. Of course, apart from the painting, that had been the first thing Marion had wondered. She feared the worst but, like an exclamation mark to Marion’s failure as a parent, Marelena had taken Alvar in. Imagine. She’d taken the dog in and she’d put her own mother into a guest house. Marion bristled, but she found it difficult to despise Alvar for being favoured.