Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [158]
What does she think it will consist of? Gears, ratchets, cogs? A central axle driving everything? A little black humming box in which the motor is housed? A film on a reel, conducted through all the channels and grooves and spools? That’s where she wants to end up, at the still frames, to see what I think of her resistance, to find out what more I want, to see why on earth I carry on whingeing like that. Preferably she would want to dismantle me, unscrew all my components.
Why does she think they lie so deep?
They lie around ready to be salvaged, compared with everything else she has carried in here from the cellar. Everything that I said we should throw away and burn and give away. Everything that we set aside for her to keep.
Like a stage-prop store it looks in here. Beach hat, fish gaff, old black bathing costume from the year yon. From day to day the exhibition is changed. She makes me smell everything, presses it under my hand to feel.
How does she think she’s going to get everything out of here before Jakkie comes? Or is he not coming? Or is it all meant expressly for his eyes?
She’s well-practised in the art of leaving tracks. It was one of their regular games. Follow me if you can. Broken twigs she taught him to read, spitballs in the dust, scratch marks on bark, turned-over stones. As I had taught her.
She jerked up the railing, rammed extra cushions behind my back, far enough from the bed-head so that she could reach easily behind my head, pushed the bed still further from the wall so that she could move around me freely. The black comb half protrudes from the top pocket of the apron, the curlers are clasped on both sides of the bib of the apron. A bottle of water with a spray head stands ready in the trolley. She comes and stands behind me. Ceremoniously. After the fashion of a salon. Chez Agaat. My stylist and I.
So, she says, today exactly a month ago we last cut and look, it’s grown a whole inch.
With the comb she pulls a strand of hair away from my head so that I can see. A mouse tail, thin and grey. She looks at me in the hand mirror.
Just see how much vigour there still is in you, she wants to say. She bethinks herself. But the thought is a snare. She’s already caught in it. In her own snare. I know it. The teeth are bared, the nails come out. It’s a reflex. She combs hard, straight partings in my hair. She plucks up tufts of hair, she pinions them in stiff crests with curlers. Now I am also in battle array. Sound the horn! Charge!
Grow forth! would be the wrong battle cry. She wouldn’t dare shout it out loud. But it’s a snake from which a string of white eggs slip. I see them rise up behind her cap like thought balloons in a comic strip.
A whole inch of hair! Without sun? Without bread? What are these strings that can grow from nothing? How many metres in a lifetime? And whom would you want to appoint to measure it for you? Because there are still the few inches that have to grow out in the coffin. Threads of a worm that grazed in poplars. Spun of last thoughts. At last all bright and clear. Silver-white hair. Pitch-black blood.
Is that what she thinks? I no longer know.
Ounooi, she says, don’t perform like that. I know you don’t like it, but when it’s all over you always feel miles better.
She drags the comb through a few times, walks to the calendar, marks off the date with the pencil suspended there from a string. 11 December 1996. She taps the back of the pencil on the dates of the past days. Has now pasted the old paper on the reading stand. Middle column, last row. Agaat’s periodic table. Bisacodyl suppository. Tap. Lactulose. Tap. Know it by heart already. But it’s one thing she won’t scrap from her battery. She’s besotted with the bizarre names of the medicines, the sadistic language