He lived in a room behind the house, in the servants’ quarter. The room was spare and clean. Like a jail cell, almost. So it struck her. It was stone, and it was white. It had a concrete floor; the bedframe was iron. She peeped in whenever she could. Maybe Ficksen would reveal to her some essential key to himself, in his room. But he didn’t. His room remained austere – mute – as ever.
Ficksen was lean. His skin was dark, almost ebony. Sometimes she thought of him as a shadow, merely. She might see him, of a hot afternoon, slowly skimming the pool surface with the special net, the net that caught in it all the leaves, the debris that fell from the trees overhanging the water. It seemed like slow motion, his long, fluid movements.
Sometimes, turning the corner at the end of the garden, under the willow trees, she’d see him disappearing behind the pool house with a barrow of weeds, a garden scissors in hand. He was part of the landscape. His clothes were navy, or a tattered tan. A camouflage.
She, watching him, had a camouflage too. A girl, supposed to be doing her homework in the cool house. In her room – enclosed - with its silent, reproachful desk; with her books and pencils. But she was never doing her homework. She was in the garden. Where there was mystery in the dark shrubs, and behind the trees; beetles that burrowed; a life, underfoot. She’d sit in the treehouse she and her brother had built. On the sturdy wooden platform, hidden in the leaves.
The pool – the pool that he cleaned – was, in the afternoons, filled with the splashing children. Home from school, in their many-coloured swimsuits, they shrieked and flashed through the water. They were her brother and sisters. She didn’t swim much. She preferred playing in the shadows of the garden; being alone in the treehouse. She liked watching the shadows as they danced on the grass, on the leaves.
And she could see the pool through the trees. She watched it. It was a crystal: a pale sapphire, many faceted. It glinted in the sun.
One weekend, the family went away, to the country town where their grandparents lived. Ficksen was left at the house. As they drove off and she watched him waving goodbye, a dark figure at the white garage door, she wondered what he would do while they were gone. At the closed-up house, in the hot paved yard where his room was, in the still, still garden. He would have the weekend off, mostly, her mother said. He was to keep an eye on the house, feed the dogs, maybe keep the pool swept (skimming the leaves), to make the job easier on Monday. Those were his instructions.
As the car drove from the house through the leafy streets, to the highway, and out of the city, she thought about the house, with its cool, enclosing walls; about the yard, with its hot paving and the sleeping dogs; about the still garden, without her in it.
Saturday, at the house, was hot. Ficksen fed the dogs. His friend, the gardener from down the street, came over. They drank tea in the yard. They laughed a little. They sat in meditative silence. Later, his friend gone, Ficksen went down to the pool. It glinted and beckoned, as it always did, blue and cool.
He stood watching the water. How quiet it was. A distant dog barked; the willows rustled gently. He sat on one of the wide stone steps that led down to the pool. The steps held the sun’s warmth within them. He watched the ripples in the pool, and the dragonflies that hung.
After a while, he lay down on the stone, on his back, his arms folded behind his head, and fell asleep.
Later, stretching awake, he walked over to the pool chair, the green-and-white striped pool chair, and sat down on its edge. Uneasily, he sat. There was the silence around him. There was the high white wall, the dark shrubs, the hanging trees. That was all.
And then he took off his shirt. It felt so free. The breeze on his skin. He stood up, suddenly, and took off his shorts. He folded the shorts and shirt and laid them on the chair. On second thoughts, he took them off the chair and put them instead on the grass to the side.
He walked to the edge of the pool. Perhaps he would jump in, as he had seen the children do countless times, with their shrieks of joy. Or perhaps he would wade in, very slowly and tentatively, from the shallow end, as he’d seen the woman of the house do. Then again, there was the man of the house and the many lengths he swam, back and forth, back and forth, every morning, powerful as a fish. Which would he do? For Ficksen had never swum before, had never been in water deeper than his knees. Ficksen had grown up on a dusty farm. He had moved to Johannesburg, to the city of gold, as a young man, in search of work.
Ficksen waded in, from the shallow end. That’s what Ficksen did.
When the family was called by the neighbours on Saturday evening, they bundled themselves into their car, bid hasty goodbyes to their grandparents, and drove the two-hour route on the busy weekend road, home. What’s the matter, mommy? What’s the matter? I don’t know, I don’t know – it’s Ficksen. Ficksen? What could be with Ficksen?
Ficksen had been found late on Saturday afternoon by his friend from down the street, who’d come to see if he wanted to join him for supper. Ficksen was dead at the bottom of the swimming pool.
An image, indelible, of his ebony body in the blue, blue water. She carries it with her. And with it she carries a deep puzzlement, that no explanation from her parents, or from the world around her, ever made clear. Because he must have been puzzled too. Puzzled to discover that he wasn’t laughing with glee, while he swallowed water and splashed so as not to keep sinking. Puzzled to discover that the motion of the man with his arms – the churning motion - was not so easy, after all. Puzzled to discover how treacherous the glinting water was, not beautiful at all. Not cool and cooling but murderously hot, as his heart beat furiously in his chest until it burst.
Dawn Promislow was born and raised in South Africa. She has lived in Toronto since 1987, where she works in magazine journalism and where she has been completing the writing of a collection of short stories.
March 12, 2009
That Tune Clutches my Heart shortlisted for The Ethel Wilson
Fiction Prize
January 22, 2009
Robert Bringhurst wins American Printing history Association Award
February 10, 2009
New From Gaspereau Press
