The Shouting in the Dark Read Free Page A

about the ins and outs of gardening in this hot, sticky strip of coastal South Africa. Charley mostly advised her to avoid overwatering the flowers, especially down here within the rain-belt of the African shield. More recently, they’ve moved on to talking about his family, his hopes for the future. He often mentions his many aunts, his mother’s sisters, how all of them are teachers. He confides that someday he aims to become a teacher like his aunts. As Charley and Mam talk, Ella hangs about behind the windy-drier listening, dangling her skipping rope.
    One morning the father catches the mother in the act, the misjudgement, stupidity, trespass, he doesn’t quite know how to put it–– With Charley standing by, shuffling, still holding his coffee mug, the father spells out to the mother in Dutch, right here in the yard, that whites in Africa don’t consort with natives, no, not even when they’re good workers like Charley and aged just eighteen.
    â€˜In this country it isn’t for blacks to aim high. That’s the country’s strength. It’s for the white to aim high. Blacks can’t aim high, they don’t have the mental power. Charley is being plain brutaal drinking coffee with his Madam. Cheeky, Irene, brutaal , setting himself above his station. Don’t encourage him.’
    The mother puts her hands on her hips and puffs out her cheeks but makes no reply. Ella keeps out of sight behind the windy-drier.
    At the end of the month, the father releases Charley from his employment. ‘Self-respecting Europeans should avoid relying on black labour,’ he says.
    Ella pushes further into the hidden hydrangea passages in her garden. She finds a tiny den so deep inside the bushes not even the monkeys would be able to find it. Here she takes off the funny built-up shoe that’s meant to correct her wonky left foot. Most of the time it doesn’t bother her, but it gets sweaty in the heat. Though Charley’s gone, she still wishes she had an older brother, tall and caring like he was, but she makes do chatting with Friend.
    The next Christmas they move house. They go fifty miles inland from Durban to the dormitory town of Braemar. The father takes early retirement from Lukes Lines, the American shipping company he has worked for as a bookkeeper without promotion for all of his fifteen years in South Africa. He says he’s had enough of the sea. He doesn’t want to keep living in the past. He’ll set up now as a freelance bookkeeper, take part-work from some solid land-based companies, nothing as binding or soul-destroying as before. Durban reminds him wherever he looks of the days of his youth, the happy years spent on the lip of the Indian Ocean. Ella thinks of his face when they’re down at the docks and doesn’t believe him. How he can be tired of Durban when saying lip of the Indian Ocean makes his straight-line mouth turn up at the sides?
    The first time Ella and her mother see the neat streets of Braemar and their new house is the day they move in. The father settled for the town and then the house, a tidy bungalow on Ridge Road, after a single sighting during a Sunday drive on his own. He can’t have stuck around long that first time, Ella thinks, or he might have noticed that, by way of waterways, Braemar has no more than a narrow ribbon of dry riverbed clotted with eucalyptus and poplars and, a few miles downstream, a shallow reservoir called Victory Dam.
    But this is what I like, the father again assures them, the fact that Braemar with its well tarred streets lies a world away from ships and wharves.
    â€˜The grind at Lukes Lines was a living hell,’ he says in his loud voice, as if to convince them, ‘whereas here, from this verandah open to the sky, you’ve a picture of perfect freedom. In Durban, remember, the verandah was the size of a porch, low-eaved, dark. Here the wide world itself spreads out at the