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By Root 597 0

or wingless chicks). Snakes slide onto our veranda, slithering from flooded holes. Frogs breed energetically in the pool and in the fishpond, where the toads grow so fat and large we suspect them of having eaten the last of the goldfish (which were plagued with unsightly growths anyway); monitor lizards are washed from their swamps and one of these six-foot lizards even wanders into the sitting room where I am legs-tucked-up-in-a-chair reading a book.

When we peer (lifting tired eyes from books and games of cards) into the gray rain and over the grass fence, we can see the tenants’ children run, knees high through puddles, mahogany-colored arms shaking into the air, heads thrown back, pink mouths open. The very little children are shining-naked. They look polished and ecstatic and I am jealous of them.

The daily rains mean that we can no longer camp at the lake and so now our weeks lump ahead of us in a dreary patternless marathon of tobacco planting, trays of tea, card games, beer drinking, rain gazing. Weeks pass. The rains have set in and their generosity is assured. It will be a wet year, and now we all long for one or two days’ reprieve. The rains are no longer a cause of daily celebration and relief, as they were a month ago. Even the tenants’ children have stopped playing when the heavens burst upon us. Now comes the playless, earnest task of ensuring that all the crops are in before the fields become too wet. And now the flush of weeds, which have sprung up like tufts of unruly hair, must be snatched from the earth before they sap precious food from tobacco and maize. Through the gray, hanging afternoons, tenants and their children are bent over freshly turned fields pressing raw, startled tobacco seedlings into ridges and dropping maize pips into tiny raised mounds of hot, damp, welcoming earth.

Vanessa rescues a rain-sick, one-legged chick from the coop. She keeps it in a shoe box near her bed and spends most of her day trying to tempt lumps of Pronutro porridge down its sickly beak until the porridge oozes out of its nostrils and the creature suffocates. Vanessa wears a black scarf to the sodden funeral in the garden and after that she won’t be coaxed from her room except for beer and cards in the evening. Nor will she allow Doud to clean away the deceased chick’s shit-smelling shoe box. The house takes on the smell of Vanessa’s dead project.

It is too wet for me to get the motorbike through the vlei which cuts through the middle of the farm. I walk the farm for days, but the wet is persistent and soul-rotting. I give up and read my way through Mum’s library.

Mum presses herself into gumboots and spends her mornings hovering over the tobacco seedbeds watching the limp-necked plantlings as they are loaded onto the trailers and taken to the tenants’ fields. But when the seedlings have all been transported and planted, there is nothing left for her to do except wait and hope that most of them survive the ordeal. She comes home and we lie on her bed and read books.

I dye Mum’s hair a streaky, porcupine blond and shave my legs just to see if I need to.

Vanessa experiments with eye shadow and looks as if she has been punched.

I try and make meringues and the resulting glue is eaten with clench-jawed dutifulness by my family. Mum encourages me not to waste precious eggs on any more cooking projects.

Mum—hair job

I learn what I hope are the words to Bizet’s Carmen and sing the entire opera to the dogs.

Vanessa paints a picture of a girl with long blond hair. The picture depicts the girl drowning and screaming, her hair spread out around her. She calls it The Scream—Mgodi.

Mum rinses her hair in purple wash and her porcupine blond streaks turn silver.

Dad teaches me to drive the old truck. I have to balance on the edge of the seat to reach the pedals, and the steering is so loose that it bucks my thin arms into the air when we jolt over a bump.

I smoke in front of the mirror and try to look like a hardened sex goddess.

Vanessa declares, hopelessly, that she is thinking of running away from home. I stare