The Shouting in the Dark Read Free

nothing.
    Ella likes the space under the floorboards for how roomy it feels, how its dry sandy floor is good to sit on. She likes that whenever she plays here Charley keeps watch at the grille, making a tall shape against the light – just as if, she thinks, he was her big brother. She tells the Afrikaner children who play in the street she has an older brother called Charley, eighteen years old, but when they laugh and say that the only Charley they can see around is the Zulu boy, she clicks her tongue at them and walks away.
    From the eastern edge of the garden is a clear view of the Indian Ocean. After work her father, still in his ink-stained bookkeeper’s shirt and navy blue Lukes Lines tie, likes to stand here in the shadow of the casuarinas and follow through his binoculars the movements of the merchant ships and tankers from distant lands lying in the roadstead outside Port Natal harbour. He presses the binoculars right up against his black-rimmed glasses. Looking at the ships, trying to read their flags and signs, he feels freer and happier, Ella can tell. He’s back in the days when he worked with ships in those same distant lands, so he says. And she, standing beside him, trying to make out with her naked eye the ships his binoculars are pointing at, feels freer also. The air around her father feels somehow lighter when he gets out his binoculars and looks at ships.
    Her father has the same freed look on his wrinkled face when, on occasional Sundays, never often enough, he takes her down to the docks to see the ships at close quarters. Side by side they stand on wharves stained pearly with oil and watch the big square cranes silhouetted against the Bluff unloading their containers. They watch the tugs steaming out to dredge the sandbank and the trains rolling up to the very edge of the quays, the deckhands flinging ropes around the iron-ringed capstans as if lassoing them. He points out the different flags of the world flying from the ships, so she can learn them, the ones from the East especially, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Ceylon. His narrowed eyes behind his thick glasses trace the rows of containers stacked on the ships’ decks, as if he were matching the loads against the figures in his blue-lined bookkeeping ledgers.
    One day they see a group of stevedores shoulder a coffin made of packing-case slats down a gangplank. ‘They’ll be glad to get rid of that,’ he shakes his head. ‘Bad luck to have a stiff on board.’
    On hot afternoons Ella sits in the shade of the gatepost with the mother’s Ridgeback dog Rex. She has a boy’s short haircut and freckles on her nose. She and Rex survey the goings-on in the street, the Zulu cleaners gossiping over their crochet work on the grass verge, the Afrikaner children kicking stones. Those children aren’t of our standing, says Mam, so Ella isn’t allowed to play with them. Listening hard, Ella tries to discover whether she can follow the cleaners’ Zulu. When her father has visitors from the good old days in the East she also tries to follow the English that’s mixed in with their Dutch. Zulu is as softly up and down as English, but English is more mumbling. Afrikaans is very mumbling, but the words are sometimes like Netherlands, so she gets it better than Zulu.
    At home there are no opportunities to learn Zulu, only English from Dad. Because they are Dutch, that is, foreign and civilised, the mother and the father don’t employ a black servant. Irene is fresh out of Holland, fresh off the boat, people say. She’s all high colour, long arms, long gangly legs. In her few years in South Africa the foreign hasn’t yet rubbed off her. She says she wants it to stay that way. Charley doesn’t count as a servant, in her opinion, because he works outdoors.
    The mother likes Charley. Some mornings she drinks her coffee with him out in the kitchen yard. Early on, she asked him questions