All That is Left

By Kirsten Miller

When Rachel’s brother disappears under mysterious circumstances, she must come to terms with his apparent death, though there is no body.
She travels to Joburg to support her sister-in-law, Maya, with the memorial – also to escape her stifling life as a wife and mother.
Rachel is unsettled when Max, her ex-lover, arrives. Despite poet Sizwe’s efforts to steady her, Rachel reels from grief and longing.
Then Rachel, Maya, Max and Sizwe are involved in a confrontation that will change them forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780795709944

Kirsten Miller

Kirsten Miller is the author of All is Fish, shortlisted for the EU Literary Award, Sister Moon, and The Hum of the Sun, winner of the Wilbur and Nino Smith Foundation’s Prize for Best Unpublished Manuscript. Her non-fiction book, Children on the Bridge, on working in the field of autism was longlisted for the Alan Paton Award. She lives in Durban.

Book preview

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

The cat lies curled in a rectangle of diluted sunlight while all else is cold and cast in shadow. A man sits at the desk below the window. Outside the sky swirls in painted shades while suburban trees stretch upwards like wanting arms, expecting something else. Across the wooden surface papers are strewn, reams of documents and forms and notifications and complications that rise in piles and mean nothing at the end of things. He leans forward and scratches the cat with one finger. She lifts her head and stretches a paw. Her mouth gapes in a yawn, but she keeps her eyes closed. On the lawn outside a grey hadedah needles the ground with its beak.

The surrounding walls hold the summary of the man’s life: a patchwork of photographs fastened carefully, deliberately through the years. There are hundreds of pictures, side by side, above and below. Together they form a pattern across the space and his eyes sweep the surface, taking in the extent of colour and composition, moments of time held captive. He is the magician who can ever still time with the gentle press of a finger, as the shutter closes.

Images of Maya, his wife, dominate the section of wall that is closest to the desk. He likes that she has never cut her hair, that when she works she still wraps it in a loose knot at the top of her head. Because of her work in nature, in taming the soil, her body has never grown soft. She exudes strength in these pictures, but there is still a sense in him that this is her most effective mask.

He rises from the chair, his boots hollow against the drum of the wooden floorboards. In the bedroom he reaches for a small volume of poetry hidden behind the row of books on the top shelf against the far wall. The pages fall open to reveal a wad of two-hundred-rand notes. He tucks the money into the pocket of his jeans, closes the book, and returns it to the shelf.

A soft and urgent pressure strains against his legs. ‘Hey dimwit,’ he says. He picks up the cat and buries his face in her fur. As though she can read his heart she allows him to hold her for seconds before she twists her body and growls low. He eases her to the ground, and she slinks away.

He pulls a small bag from the bottom drawer of the cupboard and stuffs a few simple items into it. Some clothes, a cap, and a second-hand camera retrieved from under the bed. He tries not to notice anything for too long. The red light of the clock radio that has never shown the right time blinks a repetitive warning. Maya’s sheepskin slippers lie discarded on the floor. A pile of books, purchased at the second-hand shop two roads down, waits unread. He takes a jacket from a peg behind the door. From the adjacent peg Maya’s soft white dressing gown drops like a waterfall, almost to the floor. He turns his eyes away.

In the bathroom the floor is wet in places from when she showered earlier. A thump increases inside him, and it takes him seconds to realise that the sound is his own heart beating. He brushes his teeth and washes his face and dries his hands on the rough cotton of the fresh towel. He breathes her scent and folds the towel across the silver rail, straightening the edges, corner to corner.

He places the bag in the kitchen beside the open door and brews a small espresso in the Italian pot on the gas stove. After he’s poured the thick dark liquid into a cup he adds milk from the fridge, heats it in the microwave, and drinks the coffee leaning against the doorframe, watching a weaver bird building a nest in the tree outside.

He imagines Maya coming home each day to this empty house. Her winter boots sounding on the floorboards. The bathroom tap running too long as she repeatedly tries to remove the dirt from beneath her fingernails. The television sound on low as she sits at the coffee table, painting her nails in an attempt to conceal the grime beneath them, the evidence of her hard work. The smell of onions frying in fresh herbed butter in a pan on the stove. The silence, the stillness of the house when she’s lying in their bed, her eyes still open, before sleep comes to take the emptiness away.

When the coffee is finished he rinses the cup beneath a stream of running water at the sink, and dries it with the sun-yellow dishtowel. He places it back on the shelf in the row with all the others. He does this for Maya’s sake, imagining her as she finds a single washed mug on the dish rack after he has gone, and what this might do to her. He picks the bag up off the floor and pauses to steady himself as he looks to the light outside.

After locking the back door, he places the keys in the cubbyhole of the car. The bag thuds down into the boot, and he shifts an empty five-litre plastic container for petrol beside it, patting his pocket for the small rectangular shape of the matchbox as an after­thought.

The cat crouches beside the wall. The writhing of a dismembered gecko tail slows beneath her paw. He goes to her and grips her by the scruff of her neck, and her focus on the lizard tail intensifies. Her eyes narrow, and the paw presses down hard. ‘Stupid,’ he says, and lifts her up by the scruff. Her front legs hang midway, suspended in the air. The gecko tail flinches one last time, like a hooked worm intent on living. The cat peers at Thomas and he lowers her to the ground, abashed. His hand runs from the top of her head to the tip of her tail before he stands upright and climbs into the car. He turns the key in the ignition and the engine rumbles as he revs it into life.

The cat bounds after the car like a shadow or an afterthought. At the end of the driveway she crouches, then springs to the top of the wall in a single movement. In the rear-view mirror Thomas catches a last glimpse of her, her head aloft, as she silently watches him go.

CHAPTER 2

The greats write their names across the sky, while the rest have forgotten how to live. The gulls’ sprawl, the spattering of pigeon wings are the voices of the common, while above it all, suspended from the clouds by their feather tips, the greats wait to swoop and catch us with their words.

Somewhere in the world a woman waits to be caught like that, with words and ideas that might take her away. She imagines herself snatched from the bed on which she sits, taken from the cry of the child in the next room, from the house with tight walls and damp summer air. She dreams of time suspended, a place where her body doesn’t move but where her spirit plays here and there, here and there, like the cockroach that she tried to kill the day before. Flat. To be a creature that darts, parallel to the linoleum, that squeezes into spaces no thought could dare enter.

The partings best remembered are those without closure. No concrete way to recognise the mini-death, the rebirth of another kind of life devoid of the one thing, the one person, who simply disappeared. She was twelve years old on the wall outside the first house where they’d ever lived. Twelve years old and listening to the hissing truck belch and gurgle as it swallowed the furniture, piece by piece. Strange men passing in and out of the house as they deconstructed her life bit by bit, table by chair, box by cupboard.

Her mother fluttered between the white pantechnicon and the old house like a moth, papers fluttering in the sunlight between her fingers. Phototropism. Thomas ran in bursts on strong and eager legs, while Rachel observed them all from her crow’s nest on the wall.

The truck closed its mouth, and moved slowly away. Her mother locked the house and took Thomas by the hand. She called to Rachel where she watched their life being folded away.

‘But what about Grace?’ Rachel asked.

‘Grace isn’t coming,’ her mother said, packing boxes into the boot of the car.

‘We have to wait for Grace!’ Rachel insisted.

Her mother stood upright, wiped a hand across her hair. ‘Rachel, just let it go. We’ve got a long drive. Please, come down from there.’

Her brother’s eyes blinked at her from beside the floral hip. You will dream of Grace all of your life, they told her. Rachel would not accept it like that. Where was the woman whose skin wept all the days she had toiled for their family? Where was the woman who smelled of disappointment and furious love all the times Rachel had held on to her apron, her soap-hardened hands, breathing in the skin and the smell and the songs that told in another language of another time entirely? How would she live with the absence of those hands, that skin and those songs?

We’ll make other songs. We’ll learn other ways of singing. Thomas’s eyes bored into her, but Grace’s were the only songs she had known so far. Rachel hollered, there on the wall. She wept until her mother’s face crumpled in exhausted exasperation, but it was only when her brother’s eyes said to her If you don’t move from there you will never sing again that she dug her heels between the bricks and slid her bottom towards the ground.

Now her feet are bare on the green carpet, tapping a muffled beat, a counterpoint to her own child’s cries and the insects that wait between the cracks until nightfall. She closes her eyes and feels the weight of her skin. She breathes a lifetime back to the moment when there was no child, no green carpet, no heavy air pressing down on her. She can barely remember a time when she was somebody else, someone other than this. She catches a glimpse of another life like a shadow or a wayward ghost, a fleeting shade across the space. And then it is gone.

A sound floats from inside the house, music that isn’t hers but someone else’s sense of a life gone, another place and another time into which she doesn’t fit. A lilting female voice sings as a guitar stumbles beside the melody. She stands, crosses the room, fighting the air to breathe. She closes the door against the child, against the music. She leans her head against the painted wooden doorframe. The sounds have faded but they are not gone – the music, the child, the feet of insects. Only the heat stays with her completely, while she continues to breathe.

The knock comes like a bolt through her memory. Kamal enters the room as though afraid of what he might find on the other side of the door. When he sees her his shoulders soften, but he ventures no closer, and now she won’t go to him. The child’s voice flows into the room and he stands between them in that small ocean of sound. His eyes travel to her across the room but they speak of other worlds, and she can find nothing there that she recognises.

This morning when he reached for her she moved across the sheets, away from him, and left only ripples where her weight had been. Then she felt their differences, encased in separate skins. The weight of experience, of history, of family, the knowledge that she and Kamal are not the same. Since then he’s kept away from her. Now he’s in the doorway, telling her that the child is crying. She looks up and replies that she really doesn’t care.

To add to the sound of the child and the music there’s the shrill cricket-cry of the telephone in the hallway. It startles them both and she looks at him, tells him that he’s closer. He retreats from the room and the ringing ceases. The child stops crying but the music continues.

She wants to close the door again, to shut herself off from them, but before she can move he’s there, his eyes on her as he says that it is Maya, it is her brother’s wife, on the telephone.

She picks up the receiver and hears Maya say, ‘Hello? Hello? Rachel, are you there?’

The child begins to cry again. Kamal curses in an ancient accent. He goes through to the bedroom with their son in his arms and Rachel shifts the receiver to the other ear. ‘Yes, I’m here,’ she says. ‘Sorry. It’s Jack, he’s impossible at the moment.’

‘The funeral’s on Saturday,’ Maya says. ‘Simple, in the Gardens. No church.’

‘Okay,’ Rachel pauses, unsure of what she wants to do, unsure of what is expected of the sister of a dead man. ‘Are you sure you want to do this? Are you really ready?’

‘I know people will think it’s about the money.’

‘I don’t think that.’

‘The money means nothing. The court might not even grant it. I need to close the chapter, Rachel. I can’t keep wondering if my husband is suddenly going to walk through the door.’

‘It’s only been six months.’

‘Six months of hell. Nobody says it, but I think even the police suspect the worst.’

‘There might at least be some insurance.’

‘I don’t want anything, Rachel. I have two hands and a working body. I can make my own money. Forget money. All I want now is my peace of mind. I want my life back.’

‘And some memorial in the garden will give you your life back?’

‘Don’t start – you, of all people.’

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean …’

‘He was your brother! Don’t you want closure too?’

‘Of course. I just … I just don’t want to call him dead when …’

There is a softness in Maya’s sigh. It remains between them, suspended.

‘I’ll book a flight,’ Rachel says eventually. ‘When do you want me to come?’

‘As soon as you like.’

‘You don’t want to be alone right now?’

‘Are you kidding?’ Maya says. ‘The house feels so empty.’ Then, as an afterthought: ‘If you can bear to be here, Rach.’

I can’t bear to be anywhere, Rachel thinks, but she doesn’t say it aloud.

All day she moves around the house, touching objects to make herself remember, holding things in her hands as though such random acts can bring back time. ‘She wants to make him officially dead,’ she tells Kamal when they pass each other in the passageway.

‘It’s been a long time, Rach,’ he says in return.

‘She wants to have a … a wake, or memorial, or whatever …’ her voice fades out to nothing.

‘I think we all need that,’ Kamal says. ‘Maya can’t go on with no end point. You need some kind of full stop.’

‘What I need is to know is if he suffered.’

‘What will that help? If he’s …’ Kamal stops, mid-sentence.

‘Say it.’

‘Dead. If he’s dead, he’s dead.’

‘Do you think he is?’

‘I can’t imagine that he’s not.’

Later Kamal takes the child to the shopping centre for milk and bread and afterwards to the park where he sits alone on an empty bench. Jack toddles on the grass at his feet and scrunches crisp leaves in his small fists. Rachel stays in the house all day, and she doesn’t think of them at all.

Kamal lies beside her, stealing the air from the night. She’s awake, her body stuck in a heavy mattress, longing to dream. Kamal’s neck has thickened since their marriage; now it blocks the passage of air in his sleep, night after night. Her eyes feel the grit of the morning not yet come to light, a saltiness at the back of her throat that is the taste, the bitter spice, of stolen rest. He breathes and she waits. She waits for sleep, for morning, for the will of her muscles to rise. She waits for the child to cry in the next room or for something to call her. She can count the seconds according to the steady metronome of his breath. It renders her immobile.

She wants him to place the weight of his arm on top of her, to root her to the bed so that she can’t move, so that she knows her place beside him. Instead he breathes and dreams without her in an intensity of colour with which she can’t compete. She turns to face his back. She watches the summit of him and wonders about men and mountains, and what it takes to move them.

She shifts to the edge of the bed, and makes the move to the floor. Tiptoeing across the carpet, she shudders at the squeak of the door handle, but his snoring continues, uninterrupted. She closes the door behind her; she’s out, and she’s free.

Jack’s room at the end of the passage looks over the garden. Rachel keeps the blue-and-white train-print curtains open at night. She wants her son exposed to as much natural light as possible. She read somewhere that natural light maximises the production of the sleep hormone melatonin. She dreams that a perfect child would wake up with the sun and close his eyes when the moon rises.

She stands at the edge of his crib as Jack continues to sleep, just like his father. In the darkness she can barely make out his form. From the soft sounds and the shape of the mound she knows that he’s there and breathing. She remembers Thomas in his cot. Her mother’s child. She remembers their mother’s cry of surprise when he smiled for the first time, though it was not at her or at anything of the world.

She looks at Jack now and thinks of another time, a place that has slipped away from her. She doesn’t know how long she stands there. When she leaves the room she thinks it must be possible that a lifetime could pass, and in the end it would feel like only a few hours.

Beside the child’s room is the study, and on the desk a computer sighs like a sleeping beast, a medieval dragon waiting to be called. There’s a photograph beside it, her father and mother, she and Thomas as small children in black and white, smiling blithely into the sun.

She sits in the high-backed office chair. Her right hand manipulates the mouse over wood, light on the screen and a soft breathy whine from the box beside it. She opens the email programme from the selection of icons scattered on the screen, and clicks the button to Send and Receive. Four new messages, waiting to be read. The first is an advert from Kamal’s bank, offering a financial loan for a substantial interest rate. There’s a short sympathy mail from an old school friend who received news of the memorial, and a catalogue from a national chain store selling everything from Apple computers to zebra-striped couches. Then, for a moment, nothing moves – not in her eyes or the muscles of her hands. Her mouth doesn’t open or close and her breath remains even and still. Inside her appears a vision of the past, a time when she had another name. She had the same hair and eyes though her skin was smooth then, her body more rounded, but it is a vision of a time when all of her life was different.

19 Feb 20:46 Max Adams Re:

The subject line is blank. Now, after all the years, Max returns as a message on the screen. She hates it that Thomas has again brought Max into it. She wants her own obliteration of the world to be untouchable. She thinks that she could leave now, she could go back to the bed, to her breathing husband and the time that stretches out like the dark ceiling above them. She positions the arrow over Max’s name with a small movement of the mouse. Her breath draws involuntarily inward as she clicks. The opened message is short and to the point, and more disappointing than she can imagine.

From: Max Adams

To: Rachel Naidu

Cc:

Subject:

Dear Rachel

Flying into Joburg on Wednesday. Maya has offered me accommodation. Hope that’s okay with you. See you soon.

Love

Max

Max. If she believes the words there they descend on her as a time warp, the three letters of his name negating everything that surrounds her: the chair in which she sits, the computer and the desk, the child in the next room and the man who breathes and sleeps in the bedroom beyond.

Love. What right does Max have to sign the message in such a way? He who has been gone so many years, his presence nothing but a ghost that has slipped in and out of conversation. Nothing but an idea that has lessened too, now a simple flicker of the heart, like a moth’s wing beating from time to time. Her mouth draws in, tightening the skin on her neck. Max’s idea of love was never the same as hers. Once he’d told her about a film he’d watched, featuring a high-bred woman from a wealthy family and a labourer without many prospects. They never married but over the years they saw each other repeatedly, each time falling back into that same passion despite the years, despite the husbands and wives and lovers and children and commitments that passed through their separate lives. Is that what Max has imagined for them? That they would meet again through the years, while he