Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [157]
Perhaps with Jakkie if he comes. Perhaps she will herself, of her own accord, set a place for herself at the table with him. Perhaps not, perhaps that’s my dream for her, more probably he will have to make her sit with him, a meal for two when everything is over, before he returns. And she will sit down and pretend to eat.
Would it really be for Jakkie that she now all of a sudden wants to tidy me up? Or does she want to take it out on me that he still hasn’t let her know when he’ll be coming? Or has he? Tomorrow perhaps? Eye-wash! This hair-cutting has nothing to do with anybody else. It’s just she who wants to get at me.
First she washed my hair. She dropped the back railing of the bed, released the brake and rolled it away from the wall. She brought up the small trolley. I could lie back with my head in the washbasin with the neck-support. She massaged my scalp, shampooed with anti-dandruff tar shampoo, rubbed in conditioner, rinsed three times, rubbed dry. Special treatment. An ultra-thorough itch-repellent delivery. Energetic too. Where she gets it from.
It can’t be from absent-mindedness that she doesn’t want to fetch the maps. She will remember them, she had to unpack the whole sideboard that day to fit in the fat roll of maps from Jak’s office in the back. I remember I found her there on her knees in the sitting room surrounded by all the stuff with the blue booklets tied with string on her lap. So what is this then? she asked. As if she wouldn’t have remembered.
Just old stuff, I said. Throw it out, it just takes up space.
I could see she had other ideas. Her jaw betrayed her. But she said nothing.
With the last clearing-out, when I was half paralysed already, the diaries put in another appearance. The string on two of the packets had fallen off. I was sitting in the Redman Chief next to her with the Royal Reacher. I could still pick up or move the odd thing here and there. I manoeuvred the blue booklets aside, the third pile that was still tied up.
Onto the bonfire with that, I said. Take a little suitcase from the top of the cupboard in the passage and pack all Jakkie’s things neatly in that, he’ll want them one day. One day he’ll want to see again what his teachers wrote there, his first composition book, his first swimming and rowing diplomas.
Suddenly I remember the whole hullabaloo. She made everything tumble down from the passage cupboard in searching for the right size of suitcase, small enough to fit into the sideboard, large enough for Jakkie’s things. It sounded as if she was kicking around the suitcases there in the passage.
The house has always spoken up when Agaat has taken a vow of silence. When could she have gone to replace the blue booklets in the sideboard? And how long ago did she start reading the first two packets? Just wasn’t up to the first little lot? 1953 to 1960, it’s written on the cover, the dates. That was how I divided them up when I tied them that time.
I could hear from the way in which she pulled up the railing of the bed’s head again that I was going to be subjected to more than hair-washing. That it was only the start.
Now she wants to manicure the whole imminent carcase. The full treatment. Everything has been set out neatly in a line.