She stopped sobbing after a while and dabbed at her eyes with the damp towel. ‘He was the best. The very best of men.’ She said it so softly I knew she was speaking to herself.
We talked about this and that deep into the hot morning. Big Hettie did most of the chatting as I had developed into a listener. Once I had been a regular chatterbox but school had changed all that. A person of my status was not expected to talk much, and besides, listening is a good camouflage. I soon discovered that it is also an art. You learn not simply to listen to what people say. It’s what people don’t say that is important. If you listen hard enough you can hear the most amazing things going on behind the speaker’s voice. Quite often there is a regular conniption going on. It takes years to make a good translation of this secondary soundtrack and as a small child I could only define it as friendly or otherwise. For camouflage reasons this is often sufficient.
Around noon Hettie dozed off; this time her breathing was much better. Outside the compartment window the bushveld baked in the hot sun. The sunlight flattened the country in the foreground and smudged the horizon in a haze of heat. It is a time when the cicadas become so active that they fill the flat, hot space with a sound so constant it sings like silence in the brain. While I couldn’t hear them for the clickity-clack of the carriage wheels I knew they were out there, brushing the heat into their green membraned wings, energising after the long sleep when their pupae lay buried in the dark earth, sometimes for years, until a conjunction of the moon and the right soil temperature creates the moment to emerge and once again fill the noon space.
In the heat the compartment seemed to float, lifting off the silver rails and moving through time and space. Through hours and days and weeks and years, off the blue planet, past the moon and the sun, into centuries and millenniums and aeons. Skirting planets, weaving through the stars. Coming finally to a black hole in space, further even than the mind can think, beyond even the curve of infinity and the silver cord which rings the cosmos. There I would remain safely hidden until I could grow up to be welterweight champion of the world.
‘Are you asleep, Peekay?’ I opened my eyes to see Big Hettie looking at me. ‘A glass of water if you please.’ She ran her tongue over her dry lips and removed the towel from her forehead. She handed me the towel and I gave her the glass of water which she gulped greedily. She handed the glass back and I refilled it. ‘You’re one in a thousand, Peekay,’ she said gratefully.
I wet the towel, folded it and placed it over her head. ‘One in maybe even a million,’ she sighed. I could see she was restless and kept licking her lips. ‘What’s for lunch, do you think?’
‘Meneer Venter hasn’t been yet, Mevrou Hettie,’ I answered.
‘Ag man, I didn’t mean that lunch. A person can’t eat a train lunch. Breakfast is tolerable, lunch unbearable and dinner unthinkable. Open up my hamper, Peekay, and let a person hear what is inside.’ She laughed. ‘I’ll tell you something, I wasn’t concentrating too well when I packed it last night.’
I withdrew the slim bamboo rod threaded through the wicker and opened the large basket. Inside was enough food to feed an army. ‘Tell me what we got in there, darling,’ Big Hettie said anxiously.
‘Two roasted chickens, nearly a full leg of mutton, some corned beef, three mangoes, lots of cold potatoes and sweet potatoes too, two oranges and there is also a big tin.’
‘Thank the Lord I brought the tin,’ Big Hettie said with obvious relief. ‘Open it, Peekay. Quick, man, open the tin!’ I was surprised at the urgency in her voice. I lifted the large round tin out of the hamper and, clamping it between my knees, struggled to remove the lid. It came away suddenly, sending me sprawling backwards on the bunk, and the tin slid over the edge of the bunk, spilling half of a large chocolate cake onto Big Hettie’s stomach. In two swift movements her arm rose and fell, the edge of her hand sliced through the thick layer of deep brown chocolate icing rending the cake into two large pieces. She had started to pant and her eyes were glazed as she crammed her mouth full of cake. She grunted and snorted and even moaned as she demolished the first hunk and then reached greedily for the second. Her face was covered with chocolate icing. Stuffing the last bits into her mouth she sucked at her fingers as a small child might, two at a time. Then she plopped her thumb in and out of her mouth several times and ran her hand across her bosom, her fingers moving like a fat spider hunting for any cake she might have missed. She looked up at me and I dropped my gaze, ashamed and frightened, though at the same time I instinctively knew I was watching a sickness or a sadness or even both.
When she had finished Big Hettie was in a lather of sweat, the front of her dress soaked in perspiration, covered with cake crumbs and stained with chocolate icing. She used the damp towel to wipe her face and then lay there panting heavily, her eyes closed. I watched as tears ran down the side of her face, but she said nothing for a long while.
When she had recovered her breath she opened her eyes, which were red and looked puffy. ‘I am sorry, Peekay. I am very, very sorry,’ she said, her voice almost a whisper.
‘It is nothing, Mevrou Hettie, it was only that you were hungry. Chocolate cake makes me feel like that all the time.’
‘I’m sorry I ate all the cake, Peekay. But now you get first pick of everything!’
It had been a long time since I had been given first pick of anything and I laughed. ‘There is enough for the whole train in here, Mevrou Hettie. I will have cold roast potatoes, after that sweet potatoes, they are my two favourites.’
‘And maybe a nice piece of chicken, heh?’
Granpa Chook’s death was still much too close to me. The prospect of eating one of his distant relatives, even if this chicken hadn’t been a proper chicken person or even a Kaffir chicken like Granpa Chook, was impossible to contemplate. Biting into a delicious golden potato, I shook my head.
‘To be a welterweight you must eat properly, Peekay. Meat will make you strong. Some mutton perhaps?’ she said coaxingly.
When pressed by my mother to have a second helping, my granpa used to say: ‘A cow has eight stomachs but I, alas, have one. A cow must keep on chewing but I, my dear, am done.’ I swallowed the potato and recited this to Big Hettie. It was bound, I felt, to cheer her up.
Instead she started to cry again.
‘I’m sorry, Mevrou Hettie, I’m very sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry again, it is only a silly thing my granpa says to my ma just to tease her.’
Big Hettie sniffed, blew her nose and wiped her eyes. A piece of chocolate icing from the cloth smeared on the bridge of her nose. ‘It is not you, liefling. It’s old Hettie. She’s the one I’m crying for.’ She smiled weakly through the tears. ‘What the hell, Peekay, what do you say?’ she sniffed. ‘Might as well die eating as starving, pass me the leg of mutton, my good man!’
I handed her the leg of mutton, one half of which had been sliced away almost to the bone. Resting the big end on her chest, she commenced to happily tear away at the meat on the bone while I demolished a large sweet potato and a mango.
When she had finished, the bone had been picked almost clean. To my surprise, she asked me to tear up one of the chickens and place the pieces on her stomach, also to put the slices of corned beef with it. She tore at the chicken as though she were starving, even crunching some of the softer bones. The chicken and the corned beef were soon demolished and with a soft sigh she wiped the grease and sweat from her face. Using the cake tin, I gathered up the chicken bones scattered over the area of her stomach and tipped them out of the window.
I then washed the mango from my face and hands, and set to work, soaking and squeezing out the only remaining towel. This I handed to Big Hettie and retrieved the old one which I washed with a bit of soap, rinsed and hung over the compartment window sill to dry. I had seen Dum and Dee, our kitchen maids, do the same thing with the wiping up cloths at home after dinner, so I knew I was doing it right. Only they used to hang the cloths from a small line at the side of the big black wood stove so the dry cloths always smelt a little of soup.
Big Hettie put the new cloth, wet as it was, over the front of her dress. ‘It’s so nice and cool and the heat of my body will soon dry it,’ she said, but I knew it was an attempt to hide the chocolate and grease stains. I thought about having to wash Big Hettie’s dress. It would take all day and would need a basin as big as a small dam.
There was a sudden rattle as the compartment door slid open and Hennie Venter appeared. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so long, Hettie, but Pik Botha says he can’t walk and is sulking in the guard van and I have had to do conductor duty because Van Leemin the guard is drunk again. But also I have had to serve lunch,’ he finished in an apologetic voice.
‘What’s for lunch?’ Big Hettie asked.
Hennie seemed surprised by the question. ‘Beef stew with mashed potato and peas like always.’
‘Keep it! The boy and me would rather starve than eat that pig’s swill,’ she said haughtily.
‘Banana custard for pudding today,’ Hennie said enticingly.
