Girl Child
I am standing in almost total blackness except for a sliver of fuzzy muted light filtering past the overlap of heavy curtains in front of me. I move towards this crack, feel the floor sloping up towards the ‘exit’ sign. The light contains a universe of suspended and orbiting dust particles.
The cinema is a large space and I sense rather than see the rows of seats disappearing into the darkness on either side of the aisle. Some hold people shapes, most are empty. A matinée showing of an underwater film beckoned my mother and me into this cool cavern to escape the blistering afternoon mid-summer heat in Ndola, then Northern Rhodesia.
In one scene, black wet-suited divers moving with flippers and masks explored a shipwreck. One catches his leg on a sharp metal rod on the hull and the water begins to turn murky pink with blood. Immediately there are several sharks circling the divers. I feel my mother slump forward; her body slip off the seat onto the floor. I move along the empty seats in our row to the central aisle and walk up towards the shaft of light. Only now do I make any sound and my voice rings out in the stillness of the auditorium.
“Where is the manager? Where is the manager? My mother has fainted”. The voice of a four-year old child. A girl-child, a daughter, first born. I had become responsible for dealing with accidents and wounds.
Much later we learnt of my mother’s congenital heart valve defect, which seemed to account for fainting at the sight of blood, or even at the thought of it.
* * *
Aged 28, my mother recently travelled with two small daughters by train from Port Elizabeth to the Copperbelt, where my father had found architectural work. For the first time she had left her home for another country, leaving my grandpa Charles and granny Jean on the platform waving their white handkerchiefs until we couldn’t see them anymore. Port Elizabeth, the ‘friendly city’, disappeared.
A telegram had arrived from my father with the request that we join him as he had work and a place for us to stay. ‘Please come soon’, and so this little family was on its way to join him.
The journey became a rite de passage soon after leaving Pretoria, as the train snaked through flames from veld fires for hours. My mother wiped us down with water from the small metal basin in our compartment, keeping us cool and trying to be calm as she led us towards the unknown. The dropped blinds in our compartment blocked out the Danté-esque vision of burning bushveld, but I see her slim form in the corridor staring out at the illuminated night sky, sleepless.
* * *
My earliest musical memory is from this train journey. It merges with heat from the fire, stuffiness in the compartment, naked four-year old thighs sticking to the green leather seats and the feeling of brown leather straps holding the smallest-sized accordion over my bare shoulders and torso.
As I pull my hands apart, the instrument inhales, expanding its bellows. My fingers find some white notes and black buttons and, as I gently squeeze the breath out of my little instrument, the surprise of sound. Sound. A universe of different sounds under my hands. Magic.
* * *
I had been told numerous times of the 24-hour labour, my mother resisting the use of forceps and struggling with my face-presentation entry into this world, the circle of white-coated, note-taking medical students witnessing this one-in -a-hundred birthing. I had gone through most of my life believing that I was somehow special, my birth marking me out.
During a therapy session in 1995, when the therapist said, “Your mother had a difficult birth with you”, I reflected on the context and later asked my mother,
“How was my birth? How was it for you?”.
“I don’t know darling,” she answered, “I fainted”.
On hearing by telephone in Port Elizabeth of a wound in Cape Town, she’d be found slumped on the floor. A call for plaster from the kitchen where I’d cut myself slightly with a bread knife led to a thump as my mother hit the floor upstairs with her image of my amputated finger.
There was much about my life and experiences that I was unable to share with my mother. The passage into womanhood with first menstruation was a ritual shared, not with my mother or other older women, but with my father, whom I telephoned at his office from the call-box at school when the excruciating pains began in my lower abdomen and the first sticky dark blood began to flow. It was my father who arrived quickly with the ceremonial requisites in a brown paper bag, and a box of chocolates. Tenderness in his eyes. I remember my relief and gratitude as he escorted me from the classroom and drove me home in silence, the implications of my new status hanging in the complicity between us.
* * *
There was one significant exception in my mother’s response to blood. I was five years old and it was Christmas in Ndola. A large suitcase lay open on the floor, packed with memorabilia from life in Port Elizabeth, and we were excitedly rummaging through preparing for our Christmas away from ‘home’. The treasure chest brimmed with coils of tinsel, small Christmas trees, glittery pine cones, bunches of tiny coloured lights, gaudy, shiny decorations holding the promise of presents under the tree on Christmas morning. I stretched forward to grab a familiar something, lost my balance and fell backwards, small buttocks landing in the forest of small pine trees.
There was blood and my mother did not faint. Somehow she got me to a doctor, who examined me on a cold table, my legs wide apart, being prodded and stared at. A feeling of deep penetrating pain.
My mother’s anxious question, uppermost in her mind, was, “Is her hymen intact?”. It was not. I had been deflowered by a Christmas tree, its spiky decoration, or perhaps by a stocky red-suited, white-bearded, father Christmas. I was confused and remember intense physical pain and a sense of vulnerability as the adults scrutinised evidence for my disappeared virginity. Even stronger was the
sense of outrage and anger welling up inside me as I saw the door ajar, the eyes of the doctor’s son staring, fixated on the bloody space between my small legs.
But, my mother had not fainted.