Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [69]
Let me finish, she said.
Do you want to carry on being his dog? You know that you’re now the mother of his child. You know that you can keep him at bay with the same arts with which you caught him. Don’t think I didn’t notice how you worked him. But you can do more. You’re now a fully fledged woman. People will listen to you now. You can tell people what’s happening, your woman friends, your mother. We women may be the weaker sex, but we’re actually in charge, you know that as well as I. We just work in different ways. We needn’t be scared. We’ve got hold of them where it hurts most.
She stretched out her hand. The elbow was stiff. It was only half bent, slightly extended in front of her. You wanted to look away, but you couldn’t. The hand cupped itself around something imaginary, from below, caressed it, the fingers writhed, grabbed, twisted. At last she dropped her hand. There it lay, in her lap, large, weathered, with gnarled joints.
A story, she said, is an easy thing to spread.
You couldn’t look away from the hand. You thought, let go of me, I’m infected already, you can’t make me any sicker than I am. You don’t know why you thought that. All the time in that little room you felt undermined and underpinned at the same time. Fed and fed-upon at the same time. You rolled your shoulders and blinked your eyes to get rid of the feeling, you tried to see her as she was, tried to hear what she was saying, because for the first time in a very long while she was actually trying to talk to you.
If the story hasn’t spread already, she continued. There’s nothing, is there, like a good housemaid to send the truth into the world. You need only speak the word. They’re women. They know about things. They live for their mistress, what else have they got to live for? Their husbands? You need only encourage one of those a bit, and there it runs, a veld fire. Kitchen, co-op, consistory. You have quite a few here, don’t you, that you can recruit. The little young one strikes me as particularly suited to the purpose. A rumour in these regions, I’m telling you today, is the best way of keeping a man in his place. If the people know, they’ll look at him askance, pass him by, push him out of places where it matters to be seen, to belong to. Then he’ll come and cry on your shoulder. He’ll come and ask you to help him. Then you can set your terms. He’ll do everything and anything to get back in favour. He’ll stop, I know the kind, then he’ll stop.
Ma, stop, you said, it’s not your business.
I know the kind of man he is, Milla, take my word for it. I’m your mother, and I know you too. They find strong clever women attractive, men like Jak, they can’t exist without approval. They live on reinforcement and affirmation as if on air. They’re like children. As scared as children are of the dark, so scared are they of not being liked.
The corners of her mouth pulled down, she pushed her lips forward as if she was gulping something down.
So, you decide what he’s worth to you from now on and use him accordingly.
You wanted to scream, I know it! I’ve known it for a long time! But that you didn’t want to concede to her. It was a snare. She was provoking you, she was jealous, she wanted to run down your dead father to you, your father who had loved you just as you were, unconditionally, she wanted to find out how far things had gone with you and Jak. She would use your reaction, whatever it was, against you. She spoke loudly on purpose. She looked at you meaningfully, with every word she rolled her eyes in the direction of the yard and the doors and the passage. There were soft footsteps in the passage.
What old wives’ tales are you spinning here?
Jak appeared in the doorway, leant against the door frame, hand in the pocket to strike an attitude. He was in his socks.
You were sorry for him. He looked small. His face was confused. Your mother got up and brushed past him. In the passage she turned back and looked at you from behind his back.
The SPCA, Milla, do they have a number in the book?
The phone book is there in the passage, Ma, see