Maybe

Ellen du Plessis

As the weeks pass towards the end of the year, people start having all kinds of expectations for next year. Next year will be better, it cannot be any worse than this one. Maybe … I will meet the right person. Maybe … I will learn to sleep. Maybe … "heaven will fall", as Granny used to say. Maybe.

The past year was eventful; I did not plough through a mess of emotions. I stood up to the demons that caused me so much pain. I looked forward to occasions, laughed, cried; I lived. Children grew up and questions were answered and just as you thought it was the end of one chapter, another began, to change your life forever.

My ability to be knocked over by the waves of life and stand up again, is but one of the reasons why I am still breathing. I know very few people who have not contemplated ending it all - my family has even produced a number of successful attempts, and still I am too stubborn to give in to the norm. They all tried to alter the direction and pace of plans that were laid out long before we all existed. Whatever god you believe in, ancestors or truths in cards or the stars, they all agree that our paths have been laid out long before our parents looked at each other with sparkling eyes. One of those gods or stars probably knew, all those years ago, that I would never have been able to handle the embarrassment of being away from work without permission should my one and only attempt at suicide fail. I was convinced that I had so much bad luck that the tablets that I was planning to swallow would only let me sleep for a couple of days and then I would really be in trouble. So, instead, I did not drink the pills that could take away the pain that I was going through.

Many things added up to that day, but the most convincing event that led me to believe that I did not want to live anymore, were the events of that day.

I went out for lunch, like I did every day. Sometimes I just walked across the street to the café and had a cup of coffee. I remember soaking up the flavour and drinking more of the sunlight than the coffee. I was satisfied with life. We had problems in our relationship, but that morning, for the first time in weeks, he kissed me goodbye and with a smile he told me that everything would be all right. I returned before lunch was over and Mrs White was waiting for me at the front door. The heat rays of the summer sun tried in vain to melt the frozen fear on the elderly woman's face. She stood there and trampled like she had the bladder of a pregnant woman in front of an occupied toilet. All that she could utter was, "My child, it's Bradley and it is terrible." I did phone the telephone number that she managed to give to me before covering her face with her hands.

I started loving Bradley long after I had begun to share my life with him. Strange, how you understand things only long after they actually happen. Strange, how you never understand these things when you really need to make sense of them.

I did not understand what Mrs White was so upset about, but at that young age I could not have been prepared for the months that followed.

At the other end of the line, a very calm and placid Dr Van Greenen said: "Bradley was in a car accident and there is nothing more we can do for him." That was what I heard. What he actually meant to say was that their facilities at that small hospital were limited and that they had transferred him to the nearest city with better equipment; but I could do nothing - not sit, not stand, and not listen. I could not even breathe. For the next few hours I was like someone who was trying to remember, after a tense session of Tequila-drinking the previous night. My tongue started feeling like the foundation of a birdcage and my intestines started the third world war.

The 255-kilometre drive to the hospital felt more like a trip to Cairo. Every breath of hospital became thick, as if I just could not take it in. As I entered Ward C, the smell of injury and pain jerked me back to reality and in front of me I saw the swollen face covered in bandages. Nine months later I could still smell it, if I just closed my eyes.

The same smell of helplessness covers me as I sit next to the hospital bed of my mother. I am staring at her as if I can transmit every fragment of energy that I ever possessed into her. As if that telepathic bond that she believed we had for years, would really work for the first time. After they divorced, she moved to Graaff-Reinet and like only a mother could, she always phoned me when I needed her most, as if she knew that her comfort was required. Nine times out of ten she was right.

I wanted to spring into action and care for her, just like I was forced to when Bradley was released from hospital. I did not know he was coming and when his friend interrupted my badminton tournament and informed me that the ambulance was on its way I could not care less what the score was of the tough game of singles that I was playing. He was bedridden and he needed me and I took care of him. With his serious head injuries and his inability even to go to the toilet for himself, I took care of him. The energy of my youth started to depart from my body. I became innovative. Without the money for a bedpan I cut a two-litre Coke bottle in half for him to urinate in. I thought it was sensual when Bradley washed my hair, but there was nothing sensual about washing his hair for the first time after the accident. The hair that had not been washed for months, combined with rotten blood, dominated my nightmares for months. I can smell that, too, if I only close my eyes.

With open eyes now, I smell Copelia. Mom has always been fond of it and I took it upon myself to ensure that she got her favourite perfume at least once every year. Another mission of mine is to colour her hair every two months, as I am responsible for each and every grey hair. I fought with everybody, with life in general, and when my father started his aggression stage, I was more than willing to finish the fight, no matter whom he picked a fight with. I see the moon shining on her crown as the colour of the previous dye washes out. She calls me her "wild one", maybe because of my smoking since primary school or maybe just because I have never had the ability to keep inside what I was feeling.

Brave I was at the age of nine already - I started fighting with my father even before he started his arguments with anyone else, because I knew it would end that way when he drank too much. I knew the pattern, we all did. He would find fault with something, just anything, then he would start to argue with Mom, and just before the devils of his short-man-syndrome would totally take over and hurt her I would step in and provoke him to the point where we would both end up a bloody mess.

Things were so predictable when I was a child, so easy were life's challenges; the routine was predictable. Maybe my adult heartache could have been spared me if I had just learnt not to jump into a situation head first. Maybe it could also have been prevented if I had the capability to love only partially. Maybe, then, I would hurt only partially. Maybe I should rather have hidden away under the bed in a dark room when they started to argue and waited for the storms to pass. Maybe …

Arms wide open and head first, I dive into every situation; then I give everything.

I feel, I hurt and I am happy with everything I have got, and it shows as visibly as the sun rising and setting every day. John always said that my eyes talked to him even if I did not utter a word. He was my first, first love, first voluntary sexual experience and my first realisation that I could make a difference in someone's life. My whole existence spoke to him and the language was more and always more. Thank God that we parted ways, continents from each other. There was an undisputed connection between us, every time we were together. Just as intense as our love, was the intensity of our arguments. They could scorch everything around us.

Distance faded that attraction and every time we were apart, he directed his attraction to another. When he came to town, it did not matter whether he had been away for a month or a year, the connection was still there. Nothing could neutralise that fire - not our combustible arguments, not the fact that we'd ended the relationship, not even the fact that he was in town to introduce his fiancée to his parents. He came to visit me one night and we were meant to go out for a drink. He left only the following morning, totally satisfied, just as I was. I will never forget our first kiss, it was horrible. I taught him how to give the perfect kiss and kissing each other kept two hormone-charged, almost-adults satisfied for only a couple of months. One night I went to sit down on Mom's bed, almost like I am doing now, and I told her everything. I almost spat out the terrible secret that I'd kept hidden deep inside for almost nine years.

I told her about that weekend when I went to visit Francois, as I had so many times before. I told her that everybody had to go out of the boarding house and that it was during that period that she left Dad to live in Cape Town. I told her that we listened to music and that he suddenly tossed me onto the bed and tore my clothes from my body. I told her how he started ramming himself into my body, whilst covering my mouth and my throat with his hands. I told her how he kept on asking me if I was enjoying it until I could not feel any more of the pain that consumed my whole existence. I told her that I needed to feel that same awful thing with John, but that I was not afraid of it like I was that night.

I met Bradley after ending my relationship with John. Just when I was convinced that John was going to be in my blood forever. Bradley was different from the gorgeous, blonde man. He was tall, sensitive and he was there. John had to be away for months at a time - because of a permanent position in the army, I thought.

Bradley was in the police and it was with one of their vehicles that he had the accident. And two weeks after he started working again, he ended the relationship with me. Maybe it was the fact that he'd recovered from that near death experience. Maybe because he knew that, after all his efforts, John was still not out of my system. Maybe it was because he was too ashamed to face me, after knowing that I wiped his backside for all those months. Maybe.

He left and I fell into the deepest emotional pit of despair. A tunnel so dark that the air in it was too thick to inhale. I did not want to inhale it anymore, I was tired. Tired of feeling, tired of trying to understand, tired of struggling. And so very tired of hurting.

My sorrow was greater than all the anxiety of Dad's drinking. It was bigger than my lust for John. It was even bigger than my pain when my innocence was taken from me by pure evil. Strange how unstoppably you can cry, over events that meant the least in life.

Trying to avoid this sorrow again, I became allergic to mankind for the next two years. Another failed relationship and then another two years of allergic reaction seemed to be the pattern that replaced the ritual of Dad drinking, arguing and me intervening before he took it out on Mom.

There were other men too, and I have no doubt that she does not want to hear all the explicit details of my sex life, but I am telling her this now as well, just like I did all those years ago. This is not good for her blood pressure, I am sure. She was raised in the Karoo, together with eleven other siblings. Maybe she had a similar flammable connection with my father as the one I had with John. Maybe she was just too naive to see the warning signs of alcoholism before she married him. Maybe she was just too ashamed to go back to the farm and tell her family that she'd made a mistake. Maybe she was too vulnerable to stand up against his illness. Maybe.

She was twenty-one years old, highly pregnant with yours truly and married to a man that needed alcohol as much as we need oxygen.

I was nine years old when life taught me not to look forward to important things. Bursting with anticipation, I climbed onto the kitchen table and sat down next to the bottle of anguish that troubled our family. I asked my father to choose.

He did … he chose his destructive habit without hesitation and that fuelled this long-haired, blond, green-eyed girl with more determination and expectation than the whole country's old-year's-eves combined.

Whether I am too stubborn to give up on love, or whether I am just too stupid to learn from my mistakes, I don't know. Maybe that first disappointment at nine made me painstakingly committed to getting the "right" response. With each and every embarrassment my need for it grew stronger than ever before.

Like the time my father sent the police to fetch me at a school function once. There I stood in front of all my friends and teachers, talking about how much money we made in the tuck shop, when the two officers came to fetch me and took me home in a bright yellow police van. After that night I managed shame others caused, without wishing that the earth would swallow me whole.

Humiliation is something experienced by people that had never experienced anything worse than they were suffering at that precise moment in time. On a daily basis I deal with people that I could never even think of introducing to my father, not because I would not survive the humiliation, but because he should not have to feel that uncomfortable. He is my father.

Maybe sadness overwhelms me because I miss him so. Maybe because I have my monthly visitor and all my hormones go into overdrive. Maybe I could have prevented so much pain if I had dealt with things differently. Maybe.

I have filed all those emotions in my computer's registry and sometimes, when I least expect it, they pop up on my screen of experience. I remember my utter disbelief when I found out that John had cheated on me.

Afterwards, I understood why he had tried to forbid me to go out with male friends.

He was standing behind the door, hoping to find me there. I remember being thanked for being "Florence Nightingale" after Bradley started working again, as if that justified his decision to leave me. I remember the poor men that strived so hard after that to be let inside my heart, whom I dismissed with no despair.

Mom, please wake up, I need to tell you something. Remember how angry I became when relationships ended? Dad's fits of rage when he drank too much altered my opinion of violence, but I felt them just as intensely. Remember when I gave all Jake's clothes to the welfare department because he had cheated on me with my roommate? You were very ashamed of your "wild one" then, but I never told you how I urinated in his aftershave and gave it back to him. The last time you looked at me, my face was filled with poison and a smile could rip my face apart, but I am not angry anymore, Mom.

Maybe the doctor will have better news tomorrow. Maybe I will have the opportunity to tell you my big news. Maybe there will be a cure for your disease soon, Mom.

Maybe.

Ellen du Plessis "I am 33 years of age and permanently reside in Grahamstown (Eastern Cape). I am employed by the Department of Justice, specifically: Children's Court."

LitNet: 15 Desember 2004

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