‘It’s only me, Ms Gee,’ I say.
She shuffles along the railing. Using her stick, she hurries down the wooden steps until she reaches the yard. I want to scream, ‘Abort! Abort!’ but Gaynah is too focused on the leaf to pay me any attention.
Gaynah makes a final lunge at the branch and catches the edge of a leaf. She curls her fingers around the stem and yanks at it. The leaf slips through her fingers, and it splits, so all that’s left in her hand is just a small piece of guava leaf, but for her it is enough. She turns on her heels and disappears down the gully.
I watch her go, wondering if she will hand the leaf in, then come back to share the blame.
But I have a sinking feeling she won’t be back. Before, when we got caught, we got caught together. She would not leave my side, and I would not leave hers.
‘Clara?’
I turn to Ms Gee, who is glaring above my head with such intense rage, I think she might self-combust.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Get in the house now.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
These days, I face Ms Gee alone.
Chapter Five
The sun sinks into the horizon, welcoming another cool evening breeze. The night air fills with loud music and laughter from our house.
It feels so lonely down here in Ms Gee’s house, wrapped in the quiet but still able to hear people in the distance.
As I finish ironing the last of her clothes and begin to fold them, the new girl bursts into Ms Gee’s bedroom like a firework.
‘Hi, I’m Rudy. What’s your name?’ She has a strong English accent, her face round like a dough ball. She plonks herself on to the bed with a smile as wide as the room.
‘Clara,’ I say as steady as possible. My heart is beating fast and I don’t know why.
I feel her eyes on me and wait for the questions—what were we doing in Ms Gee’s yard, what kind of person sneaks on to someone’s land just to get a leaf. I can imagine how bad it must have looked.
I turn my back on her to place Ms Gee’s flowery skirts in the second drawer from the bottom.
‘So, what were you doing?’
I place the skirts neatly in the drawer. ‘When?’ I don’t look at her because for some reason I feel guilty, and Ms Gee must be close to her, so maybe she’s mad at me.
‘Before, when you were creeping around the house.’
I swallow hard. She’s only been here one day. She knows nothing about us or our game. I press the skirts down so they fit in the drawer while counting under my breath.
I can’t afford to lose my temper in Ms Gee’s house. If she hears me, she’ll find something else for me to do, and I could be here all night.
‘I wasn’t creeping,’ I say as calmly as I can.
The girl lies down on Ms Gee’s bed, staring up at the zinc roof. ‘My mother says if you’re creeping, you’re not doing anything good.’
This girl has lost her mind. I mean, who does she think she is! I don’t even know her, and she thinks she knows me.
Count, Clara. Count.
‘Well, maybe your mother was only talking about you,’ I snap. ‘Creeping seems to be your thing.’ My voice is loud and crackly. My chest is rising and falling fast, and I’m pointing at her like Mama waves her finger at me when I’ve done something that disappoints her.
The girl turns her head to look at me, completely unfazed by my outburst.
‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’ She sits up and dangles her feet off the bed. ‘I only wondered what you were doing, that’s all.’ She walks around the bed and heads for the door.
I listen to the door close and her bare feet skip against the pinewood floor.
I hurriedly finish my chores and rush by a woman in Ms Gee’s kitchen. She smiles when she sees me, and I assume it’s the English girl’s mother because they look the same, except her hair is short and dyed red. Her face lights up when she smiles, and her teeth are almost as white as Pastor Brown’s.
I find Ms Gee in the same place I left her, on the veranda. I don’t bother to ask if she wants to come to dinner because I know what she will say. ‘Do you think I can’t cook for myself? I don’t need your charity or your mother’s poisonous food.’
Instead, I wait impatiently as she reels off the chores on her list one by one, demanding to know if I have completed them just the way she has asked. I don’t know why she needs me. She has a live-in maid for the summer. I cast a fiery look over at Rudy, who is sitting on the veranda wall again with the same book.
‘Can I go now, Ms Gee?’
She responds with the folding of her arms, leaning back into her chair, and staring into the night sky.
As I walk down the steps, the English lady comes out on to Ms Gee’s porch and asks if I want her to walk me home.
Ms Gee scoffs before I can answer. ‘Walk her home? She’s got two feet, hasn’t she?’
‘Clara, is it?’ the woman asks, ignoring Ms Gee, and I think she must have heard me talking to her daughter. I flush, realising that she might have heard everything I said.
I nod.
‘It’s pretty dark out there, Clara. Do you normally walk home by yourself?’
I look from the woman to the girl to Ms Gee.
‘Yes, I walk home by myself,’ I tell her, and I am aware how different my accent is from hers.
‘By yourself?’ she repeats, her eyes wide, as if I just told her I have no mama and papa.
‘Yes, by herself,’ Ms Gee snaps. ‘She’s been walking round here since she learnt how. What do you think we’re going to do to her?’
The woman’s face tightens, and she folds her arms across her chest just like Ms Gee does after she explodes.
‘I’m not saying that, Mum, but in London…’
Now it’s my eyes that are wide. Ms Gee is her mother? I can’t hide the shock as they argue back and forth. I didn’t know Ms Gee had a daughter. I try to memorise their conversation so I can tell Gaynah when I see her. She loves talking about other people’s business.
‘Yes, yes. This isn’t London. This is Sycamore, and there isn’t a soul on this hill that would harm that girl. You used to go off by yourself too. You would remember that if you hadn’t gone gallivanting to England.’ Ms Gee shoos me away as if I were a hen trying to climb her stairs for crumbs. ‘Go on, go.’
I hesitate as the woman begins to say something else, then changes her mind and returns into the house, slamming the door behind her.
It is a dark walk back from Ms Gee’s house. The only light comes from the half-moon hovering above me as a guide. My feet sink into familiar ditches as I skilfully manoeuvre over the ground, climbing the embankment, then jumping over the same nest of stones that dug into my feet this afternoon.
I can’t stop thinking about Ms Gee having a daughter. I wonder why she’s never mentioned her. They don’t seem to like each other much, but that’s no surprise—no one likes Ms Gee much. And the new girl isn’t the person I thought she would be. Turns out she’s just an annoying girl wearing too many colours and with too much to say. She and Gaynah will have plenty in common.
The screech of crickets in the trees above can be heard between the outbursts of laughter coming from home. As I climb the hill to our house, I see people filling our veranda and spilling out on to the yard. Our house is like this every night. It becomes a meeting place for people when the sun goes down. Papa is handing out drinks and sharing a joke with Gaynah’s father. Papa’s tall, thin figure makes a shadow on the wall of the house, and his twisted hair falls just below his ears. Mama can never get him to sit down long enough to do those twists, so sometimes she’ll do it while he is sleeping.