The Shouting in the Dark Read Free Page B

verandah’s edge. See how the terraced lawn goes down the river valley, how the green fields stretch to meet the misty-blue horizon. Here you can gaze like a king upon miles of rolling Zululand hills. I worked myself to pieces for that view,’ he adds, slapping his knee. ‘The best highlands farmhouses on the continent would envy it. It’s a verandah for a westerner, an Englishman – and mind you say verandah and not stoep like a Boer.’
    But Ella’s mother isn’t convinced. Rural Zulu Braemar is too far from Durban’s concert hall and shops for the lamps in her eyes to stay alight. ‘I’ve lost everything coming here, Har,’ she tells the father every day, handing him his morning coffee on the verandah, ‘I’ve lost my life.’
    â€˜You think only of yourself, mens ,’ he mutters, scowling. ‘How you go on. We lost the light of our lives long ago, the day our beloved Ella departed from us. For a change, spare a thought for parties other than yourself.’
    As for Ella, ever since the house move she misses Friend. Friend somehow knew the gardens up here on the African shield would have no bush, so she stayed put in Durban.
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    In Braemar, once night falls, strange wild cries leap from the father’s mouth. Swaddled in a scarf of Rothman’s Plain smoke, he sits on the verandah as if keeping watch, a tumbler of brown liquid on the rattan table beside him. The words he once spoke to the starry sky in his ordinary voice, back on the porch in Durban, now come out as shouts, raw noises that tear at his smoker’s lungs. ‘ Idioot ,’ he shouts, ‘ Klootzak ! Keep on, now, keep on!’ The mother leaves him to it. After dinner she goes straight to their bedroom, tugs the door closed behind her with a click.
    The father’s noises pull Ella to the window. She can’t help herself. She’s seven now, almost eight, far taller than she was back in Durban. She can see over her bedroom windowsill. She likes to go over and watch as he keeps watch, to see how the hills fade into the dusty purple sky and the first white stars flare out like distant beacons. Then, at an invisible signal, the sounds begin to come from him, the groans and sudden ragged shouts, the swearing, choking, spitting.
    Some nights, the sounds settle into the shape of stories, flashes of tall tales. When the friends from the East stay over, Ko Brink, Henk Vroom, Koen Zwemmer, Pim Faithfull, mostly one by one, sometimes in pairs, the mother long in the bedroom, the father calls up tales of their former days and doings. He tells of the roaring times they shared in the distant ports whose names Ella now knows – Singapore, Calcutta, Rangoon, Jakarta, Colombo. ‘How hard we worked and played,’ he says, passing round the Old Brown Sherry bottle. ‘And never were the worse for it, were we, we sturdy cogs in the wheels of those great, continent-spanning European shipping companies that the war smashed into pieces?’
    The listening friends know the stories well yet each time ask to have them again. ‘Old chap,’ they say, ‘Remember that day?’ ‘Tell us again— ’ And the father turns in their direction, towards Ella’s bedroom window, his voice sliding into sharper focus. ‘Well, yes,’ he says, ‘You remember, it was in the Great World Club and that crazy Commodore, trying out the foxtrot . . .’ He turns away and his voice dissolves into the dark, mixed with night-time noises, trucks droning on the highway to Durban, the sharp barks of distant dogs. The unfamiliar names burr in Ella’s ears. ‘Pfah, the cheeky fellow yelped, spinning my boater into the bay, Colonial Outfitters, Kalverstraat, Amsterdam – we don’t wear that kind of thing out here!’
    And the friend, Henk or Ko – mainly it is Ko – leans back in his chair, head to one side, a small smile sitting in the