Hearing Helen Read online

  Hearing Helen

  Carolyn Morton

  Human & Rousseau

  For David, my parents and Hannah, with much love

  — C. M.

  *

  One

  MONDAYS ALWAYS FELT like going camping and waking up to find a lion in your tent. The only way to survive was to hide under the covers and stay there, not making any sudden moves until Tuesday came. Because if you tried to get up, Monday would be lurking round the corner, licking its lips in anticipation.

  Like that particular Monday.

  My cellphone alarm rang and I groaned, covering my face with my arms. I would have switched it off, but the phone had fallen somewhere under the bed, so it would have meant getting up and fumbling through all the clothes I’d been too lazy to put away.

  I pulled the edges of my pillow around my ears to muffle the alarm and shut my eyes tightly until I felt unwelcome hands tugging at the bedding.

  “Wake up, Helen! I promised I’d make you go to school.” My older brother, Hank, who was in matric at a different school from mine, ignored my muttered complaints and dragged my fading blanket from my grasp so I had to get out of bed.

  “I’m ill,” I protested, managing a convincing cough as he stalked out. That sometimes used to be enough to persuade Mom to let me stay home, but since she had to start working, she and Dad left together before I was awake. “I’m feverish,” I called after Hank feebly, and then raised my voice in case he hadn’t heard. “Feverish!”

  I was still describing my symptoms fifteen minutes later when I found myself being steered out the door. My brother was in such a rush, I only realised once I was at school that I’d left my lunch behind. Actually, I’d never even made my lunch. Mom used to, but she no longer had time.

  Monday really lived up to its reputation. Besides being starv­ing, I nearly failed a maths test and my locker combination jammed at break, forcing the caretaker to snap the lock. I stuffed all my books from the locker into my bag and staggered back to my class.

  I had just dumped my bag down on my desk when the seams of my ancient satchel split open. The desk creaked mockingly and lurched over, spitting out books all over the floor.

  “Ouch!” I yelled, as my maths book, probably designed by a weightlifter needing something heavy to keep him in shape, thudded straight onto my shoe. I grabbed my foot, hopping to the window ledge to support myself with one hand so I didn’t lose my balance.

  Through the classroom windows I could see out onto the fields, where all the empty chip packets in the entire windy city seemed to have gathered amid the vicious thorns that made any sport session an episode of Fear Factor for those kids who couldn’t afford proper sports shoes.

  Sperare High, my school, was stuck onto the original junior school and had started off as prefabs on the vacant land next door. At some point, an enterprising principal must have scratched together funding for more solid structures and later headmasters added on bits randomly. “They look like mismatched Lego pieces,” I had once told our teacher in class, and everyone had actually laughed. Usually, people didn’t take much notice of me.

  The high school still shared fields with the junior school, and I could see the younger children running around, laughing, pushing and tripping each other as they played. There was a bench, slightly isolated and rotting but comfortable still, where I usually sat at break, near the kids’ swings.

  Turning away, I hobbled over to my desk and crouched down on my knees, reaching through the frame of my desk to where my piano book had fallen. My piano teacher would kill me if it was damaged.

  “Helen Booysens,” a drawling voice addressed my back. I hastily tugged down the skirt of my uniform, which I always rolled up to make it shorter, and felt my face go red. “What are you doing? Your desk’s in my way.” It would be Kean who found me.

  He casually righted my desk so that he could get past me and even more casually threw the closest book onto my desk, leaving it with permanent dog ears.

  I quickly gathered up most of my stuff and ducked out from under the desk, hoping he wouldn’t notice that my blushing cheeks matched the ginger of my ponytail.

  “Have you been dusting for spare cash?” he asked, laughing over his shoulder while some of the other grade nines drifted in as the bell rang. His blazer was the only one with both the sports and academic honours braids, and he tugged it proudly as he watched me struggle to stand up.

  I glanced down at my knees and brushed them furiously. “I dropped my books,” I muttered. Now my legs were clean, but they’d transferred all their dirt to my hands. I looked like a chimney sweep from Mary Poppins.

  I watched Kean stand a bit taller as June came in, raising his voice to make sure she could hear him. She looked like a catwalk model on Top Billing, with a swan neck and hair down to her waist. Her desk was near to a large poster project on the swimmer Natalie du Toit celebrating her various victories and gold medals. June’s whole life was like a permanent gold-medal celebration, and people like Kean were her worshipping fans.

  “Look, guys. We’ve got a new cleaner!” Kean shouted and a Mexican wave of laughter spread across the class as they followed his lead. I felt I was drowning in it. June wasn’t smiling, but she looked beautiful even when she was serious.

  She sometimes allowed Kean to carry her bag; I dusted off mine, a khaki-coloured battered old thing that my dad had used in the army, and shoved it behind my desk in embarrassment.

  “Hey, Helen, will you come clean our house?” shouted Joe. He lived with his grandmother upwind from the industrial area and next to the abattoir, and Kean said that when he’d visited him once, he could hardly breathe, even with the windows closed.

  Without thinking, I grabbed my chance to swing the tide away from me. “Not till your neighbours become vegetarian,” I answered.

  Still June didn’t laugh.

  Joe ducked his head and his eyes slid away from mine. I hadn’t realised he could look so sad. Last year, my baby cousin had got sick and died a week or so later, and at his funeral his brother had hunched over in the front pew, refusing to look at anyone. I saw something of him in Joe. I half wished I could take back what I’d said.

  Kean smiled mockingly. “You think you’re clever, cleaner girl, don’t you?” he said, siding with Joe.

  My throat closed, like I was choking, or going to cry but couldn’t. Kean flashed his knee-buckling smile at June. Still serious, she moved to where he stood, and then passed by him, blushing a bit as she did. He hated it when she didn’t laugh at his jokes, but it just impelled him to try even harder. She picked up the last two books that I had dropped, dusted them off carefully, and passed them to me.

  “Right, guys, have a seat.” Mrs Smith had come in and was already fumbling at the giant-size reading glasses that hung around her neck. She took out her chalk and began writing, her nose almost touching the board.

  “I wonder what Goggles has in store for us today?” Kean said under his breath.

  Usually Mrs Smith was really strict; if we complained about stuff, like too much work, she just said firmly, “Such is life,” and we had to do it anyway. But when Kean made a remark like that about her glasses or how close she stood to the board, she flushed and said nothing.

  Although I always felt uncomfortable when he said stuff like that, I faked a grin, trying to get back on his good side, but his eyes slid past mine, bored. I knew where he was looking.

  Mrs Smith tapped the board with her chalk, where she had written in large letters:

  Pregnancy and Parenthood

  You could hear the ripple of nervous laughter as the boys sniggered to each other. Mrs Smith had brought her laptop to school and she clicked on a video of a grey, grainy image that looked like a tiny, pulsing worm.
<
br />   “Who can tell me what this is?”

  Joe and Kean were whispering together behind their hands, probably making X-rated suggestions. Mrs Smith silenced them with a look.

  “This,” she said, tapping the image with the chalk, “is you. Four weeks after conception.”

  “It doesn’t look like a baby,” Kean muttered, unimpressed. “More like a stick. What’s that weird grey thing that keeps moving?” He mimicked the movement with his hand, opening and closing his fist like he was reciting “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.

  “That is the heart.”

  The rhythmic contractions were mesmerising. I stared more closely, fascinated in spite of myself. I wondered if I had been like that at four weeks.

  Completely unconcerned about anything happening beyond myself, unfazed by comments or criticism that I didn’t look like anything much, my dot-like heart steadily beating away, regardless.

  By the time I shook off my thoughts, Mrs Smith had moved on to pregnancy vitamins and pre-pregnancy care. “What vaccinations should a woman have before conceiving?” she was asking.

  “Flu,” said Joe with great confidence, remembering the nurse who’d visited our school during the World Cup to inject us against swine flu.

  “Think of an illness that could harm the baby,” Mrs Smith told him.

  “Yellow fever,” grinned Kean, whose father had taken him on holiday to Kenya last year.

  June stared in front of her for a moment, thinking before she spoke. She never seemed to do anything impulsively. “Measles?” she suggested.

  I could see Kean looking at June the way my brother Hank gazed at Caryn from down the road when she cycled past on her way to school, his eyes glazed and his mouth slightly open like she was a fudge sundae.

  I shot up my hand at once. “German measles,” I said confidently. A few years ago, all the girls had had the vaccination, just in case we were precocious, the nurse had said. “Otherwise when someone has a baby, it could be born deaf.”

  Mrs Smith nodded.

  “Or with really weak eyes,” added Kean.

  Our teacher suddenly looked sad, and I wondered if that was what had happened to her. I imagined rewinding through Mrs Smith’s life until she was nothing more than a pink-orange jelly bean with unformed fingers and a cord attaching her to a life-giving placenta.

  I imagined the German measles like the green-horned thorns on the field, slipping through the defences of the placenta, like spies crossing into enemy territory to destroy. Perhaps I would also keep quiet if I were her and Kean called me Goggles.

  I had been so lost in thought, I didn’t realise we’d been instructed to team up with others for our term project, and so I ended up alone. Usually, Mrs Smith noticed and assigned me to a group. Today, she just wiped her eyes with chalk-tipped fingers, leaving a dusty smudge on her lenses, and gestured to Kean to hand out the project guidelines.

  Her mouth was as taut as stretched elastic while she watched him, and I wished he would stop mocking her. Just then, the bell rang, but before I could make my escape, I heard someone call me from across the room. I turned and saw the last person I wanted to speak to.

  What do you want? I thought.

  *

  Two

  THE GENTLE VOICE repeated the question. “Are you walking home?”

  I looked up in surprise at June.

  “I always walk home.”

  With Mom working at the hardware store till six and Dad finishing after 7de Laan, I didn’t have much choice, but I didn’t tell her that.

  “I’ve been thinking about the baby project.”

  I tucked my useless bag under one arm and the books I needed to take home under the other. “Yes?”

  We started walking together out of the school building and across the car park, June taking out the sandwiches that she had not yet finished. The tantalising smell of salami reminded me that I hadn’t eaten. I tried holding my breath without her noticing so that I wouldn’t feel hungry.

  “Perhaps we could work as a group? You seemed to know more than most of the class about it.”

  I was going to say no; I saw enough of her in class, but then I noticed Kean, a few metres away, waving at her awkwardly as we went past. He usually walked home, but today his dad and his dad’s girlfriend had come to fetch him. You could always tell his dad’s girlfriends by the length of their skirts. Kean said that he secretly called them all Mini.

  The latest Mini was standing next to the car in a pose that showed off her legs. She was leaning affectionately towards Kean but her eyes kept flitting back to his dad to see if he was impressed by her maternal attitude. Kean’s dad was lounging in the driver’s seat, basking in his designer stubble and trying to look twenty-five while messaging on his BlackBerry, so she switched off the charm and dumped Kean’s bag on the seat.

  I turned back to June. “Who’s in your group so far?” I said cunningly. “Do we need to ask anyone else?”

  “Joe was going to be, but he’s moved to another group. Shall I ask Kean?” June suggested so quickly that I knew she’d have asked him even without my trying to manipulate her. “I can give him a ring this evening.”

  “If you like,” I said a bit too casually. Our eyes met, and we both looked away quickly.

  “Your sandwiches look nice.” How lame. I’d said the first thing that came into my head to break the awkward silence.

  “Would you like one?” she asked shyly.

  “Sure,” I said offhandedly, trying not to snatch it in my eager­ness.

  As we neared my home, I saw Hank cycling out of the drive­way. He’d obviously just gone home to change before heading off to work as a learner assistant at Maths Magicians, a small company helping high-school kids who struggle with their sums.

  Even though he was in matric, he still had knees like a blue crane. Mom said he would fill out one day, but the only thing that seemed to get bigger was his hair. At the moment, it was sticking up in the wind, bright orangutan orange.

  Suddenly self-conscious of how similar we looked, I put my hand up to my ginger ponytail, hoping I didn’t also have a wild halo of frizz around my head. I waved at him without success. He would have cycled right past if I hadn’t shouted, jumping up and down like an aerobics instructor. He braked, frowning.

  “You’re so rude!” I yelled across the street.

  Hank pushed his bike across, glancing at his watch. “I didn’t see you,” he said, still frowning.

  He didn’t seem to “see” anyone these days, except Caryn when she cycled past our house, which was probably why he started using his bicycle. She also went to the Music Academy in Mill Park, like Hank, but her parents had the money to send her there, whereas my brother had won a piano scholarship.

  His teacher, Madame Pandora, who worked with several select pianists at the Academy, also taught piano to a few of us at my school. She said that she contracted work at various schools around Port Elizabeth out of the goodness of her heart – to nurture talent and give opportunities to those who couldn’t afford the Academy – but I secretly thought being able to bustle continually from one school to the other, looking constantly busy, reinforced her conviction that she was terribly important.

  Somehow, she decided that I was worthy enough of the lofty privilege of being her student – not that she ever seemed to think that my playing had much promise.

  “The heart,” Madame Pandora always declared passionately to me in her foreign lilt, stamping her foot at me as I stared blankly at my music book. “It must, must, must be from the heart, not the fingers!”

  Her eyebrows were arched to perfection, and her skin was so smooth that I imagined her home had drawers full of empty Botox syringes. She always dressed like a member of a philharmonic orchestra, with layers of loose black chiffon almost succeeding in blocking any glimpse of the marshmallow softness of her chest, which preceded her into the room whenever she made an entrance.

  Hank was still looking at me, annoyed, and I gathered my thoughts
quickly.

  “This is June,” I said.

  He nodded, but I could see he wasn’t really noticing her. It made for a nice change to see a guy, even if it was my brother, whose eyes didn’t bulge at the sight of her.

  “Hey, June,” he said absently. “I’m off to work now. Helen, did you remember to buy dishcloths, like Mom asked?”

  I sighed. “I forgot. Can’t Mom do it on her way home?”

  “Pep will be closed by then.”

  I kicked a few stones of gravel into the gutter, where they sank silently into the rubbish-clogged slush that was welling from the manhole. “Isn’t there anywhere else she could go, like Clicks?” I knew the answer even before I asked.

  Our cemented driveway, its uneven cracks being pushed even further open by determined moss, and our low wall which leered at an angle at us over the gnarled roots of the neighbour’s tree, shouted the answer to me. Since my dad lost his job and had to start up again at a construction company, everything we bought had to be the cheapest.

  “Never mind,” I snapped. “I’ll do it. When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know,” Hank replied.

  “I suppose you’ll be practising for the competition afterwards?” I said, resentful that once again I would end up doing the dishes while Hank had another lesson with Madame Pandora.

  “What competition?” asked June.

  “There’s a yearly piano competition at my school that’s open to all grade elevens and twelves in PE,” answered Hank. “The winner …” He stopped, looking suddenly much older than seventeen.

  “Whoever wins gets piles of money,” I said. “Hank will be able to study medicine and become a doctor, like he’s always wanted to.” I turned to look at the cracking driveway and wobbly wall and imagined Hank being able to fix them.

  My brother followed my gaze and jumped back onto his bike. “See you later,” he shouted over his back, his shoulders hunched over his handlebars.

  “We’ve got a stack of dishcloths that were given to my sister when she got married,” offered June hesitantly. “She doesn’t need them, and they’re just taking up space. You’re welcome to them if you like.”