These words has lost its meaning

These words have lost its meaning, let’s start a brand-new story now …”, boomed from somebody’s radio somewhere on the Cape Flats, far below Table Mountain’s slopes. Sixty-year-old Gudrun jerked her head away from the sound and pushed her opened palms against her ears. The song taunted her, because it echoed the torture of her past, and the present, where a vicious circle paved her life back to hell. It drained her to an empty shell.

” I will love, cherish and take care of you until the day I die…” he had promised her. In the ivory wedding dress, she was a princess, when his blue eyes seared her hazel ones. The reserved moments in his office at his clothing factory, which soiled her day, dissolved into nothing. The gossip of the girls in her sewing machine line, also, came to nothing. He married her. She was his wife. Her life started anew.

A gust of wind loosened the red silk scarf tied around her short silver-streaked brown hair.  Then, it whisked away the sound of the Bee Gees song from their unkempt garden in the privileged part of the southern suburbs’ Claremont, wedged in, alongside the main Cape Town railway line. A cloud blocked the late afternoon sun; she looked up, and watched it being swept away from the mountain. It drifted over Bokmakierie, the council-housed location where the rain fed the green-slimed squalor in the canal, that flows towards the Liesbeeck River, all the way to the Cape of Good Hope Castle in the central city, where all the half-breeds, like herself, originated from, she often heard him mutter.

‘She is such a good cook, her boboties and curries are to die for ...” he boasted when she cooked for their first business dinner together at their home. She tolerated the compliments that followed with withdrawn breath. She felt used. Afterwards, when he ushered the last of them to their car door, her efforts were thrown into her face.  His failure to secure another merchandise offer, catapulted onto her. His cold eyes bored into hers. He swept the plates off the table with one hand and smashed glasses against the wall.  Luckily, this time, she was spared.

His apology the following morning, did not recover her senses. And, rightly so, because deep down inside she realized her situation. He chose her carefully; from the hundred other girls, whose livelihood he controlled, he could have taken. Her meek indisposition, etched by years of hunger, abuse and neglect suited him perfectly. He never enquired about her background, not even on the day he interviewed her for the job. She was so nervous, she spilled some of the mug of coffee he offered her on that day onto her yellow-flowered dress. She still wondered why he did that. She never had the nerve to ask him, not even now, after 30 years of married life, because he never kept up to any of the marriage vows, she was now afraid of him. These words have lost its meaning, let’s start a brand-new story now …”,

He waited for her inside. The crash of a glass on a table sounded. She turned towards it as the shadow of the house masked the long weeds of what was once a lawn, the dark of it entered her soul. She squeezed her arms across her chest. The cold inside her seared her skin on her fore-arms. I’m no longer your concubine, your maid or your slave, she whispered. My time has come.

She glanced at a rosebush next to the moss-covered brick-paved pathway. Mildew dotted its leaves black. One of its unopened buds hung limp. It’s rotting away, just like I am. Cold trembled through her thin body. She blinked. She cupped her hands over her eyes and through her fingers, watched the last rays of the sun creeping away behind the browned yellow leaves of a gnarled oak tree on the pavement behind the high black steel railed fence.

I need a new chapter and ending for my life. I must start over. Not tomorrow, but now. This one is not deep enough. We gave each other everything except what we wanted afresh from life. Somehow and at some time everything remained the same, as it was, long before I met him. Too soon, he gave me nothing new, other than the childhood shame, humiliation and pain I planned to escape from since I came to my full senses. I’m trapped in the past.

I still wake up to the stench of old wine in the house, still cringe at drunken antics in public spaces and still fear sudden assaults on me.   Once, I could huddle in a quiet space outside in the bushes next to the canal to escape all of this, except for the one time, when a man tried to pull me out and on top of him. Just like he sometimes does. Her body trembled. The tenderness of their first night remained only for that time. Time after time, he relieved himself inside her stiff body without any show of affection. She dreaded night times for ages. These words have lost its meaning, let’s start a brand-new story now …”.

 She froze in front of the glass sliding door at the living room entrance and glared at the figure inside. Her insides squeezed, her chest heaved and air whistled out silently from her tightened lips.

Something inside her exploded.

After every breakfast, of each day, these past years, since his retirement as manager of his family-inherited company, Harold ‘s alcohol-limped legs stretched over the Persian rug and his bare feet twitched underneath the antique wooden coffee table, where the huge fitted LCD television on the opposite wall loomed in front of him; his body engulfed by his winged leather arm-chair.

She opened the door. He glared at her.

“You took your sweet time to get back inside, didn’t you?”

“Why are you waiting for me?”

“What?”

“I asked why you were waiting for me?’

“What kind of question is that?”

“You wouldn’t know, would you?”

She stepped in front to him. Her fist lifted into the air. She smashed it onto his head. She grabbed the bottle of whiskey off the table and crashed it into his face. Blood spurted onto her green jersey sleeve. His eyes glazed. He slumped out of the chair. I don’t have to leave this house to start anew, she realized, I’m in charge now.