The Shouting in the Dark by Elleke Boehmer Page A

books.
    Frith Fouché, whose mother is a librarian, tells the story at school.
    â€˜Poor lady,’ Frith says the librarians whisper amongst themselves. ‘To have Himself around all day to deal with. No wonder Mrs is a bit wound up.’
    Ella wishes she could make common cause with the librarians and disappear up a ladder. Because if her father’s loud at large in the world, how much louder isn’t he boxed inside the four walls of their house?
    One morning the father’s new friend Major Tom Watt gives him a frosty reception in the queue at the butcher’s. That evening he stands behind his chair at the dinner table glowering, his white-knuckle hands arched on the table’s edge, his breath dark-yellow with cigarette smoke and bile.
    â€˜Couldn’t get him to talk to me about a thing,’ he frowns at the leathery chop the mother lifts onto his plate. ‘No matter how I tried. This man who has enjoyed my hospitality, my Old Brown. I asked what he made of our Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster as a successor to state architect Verwoerd. Was he sufficiently firm? A worthy custodian of our dream of a white republic? He kept looking away. Finally, at the till, he asked me to “tone it down”. Be more measured, he said. Measured! Was the burden of history too heavy for him? I asked. He scooped his change into his pocket and made off. These English, I tell you, they may be the pillars of this society, but when they decide to dodge an issue, they’re weasels like the rest of them, slippery as hell.’
    He bends down to his plate, discerns for the first time a fine charred line running along the length of his pork-chop.
    â€˜What’s this? Burnt again!’ he drops heavily into his chair. ‘When will you women ever get it right? Irene? So little I ask. Fresh chops purchased this very morning at the butcher’s, and now look!’
    He stabs at the chop with his knife and it skids off his plate onto the table, trailing grease. The mother picks up her napkin, leaves the room. ‘ Moeder ,’ she whimpers to herself as she goes, ‘ Mijn Ella . Mijn moeder .’
    â€˜ Idioot ,’ the father bellows at her back. ‘What earthly use do you people have? You give me nothing, you two, only take. Just like the rest of them, those Dutch, succubi all of you, sucking the lifeblood from my veins.’
    Ella quietly puts down her knife and fork, yet still catches his attention. ‘You keep quiet, you dumb staring idioot no better than your mother,’ he roars, white spittle gathering in the corners of his mouth. ‘It beats me utterly. That you women can’t get right even the few things you’re good for. Like homemaking maybe. Like maybe giving a man an embrace.’
    In the reflection in the dining room window Ella sees herself seated between her parents’ places, the father’s on the left, the mother’s on the right. The window has no curtains because her father likes to follow the last of the sun sinking behind the rolling western hills of his view. From her seat she can read the titles of the books in the bookcase behind her mother’s empty place. A Town Called Alice in a battered cream cover to the left of a blue Plain English Grammar and beside that the green The Cruel Sea . One title in particular always catches her eye – the biography of a famous soprano Oma once gave her mother. The title is printed on the bottle-green binding in silver. Am I Too Loud?
    You are too loud, Ella wants to tell her father, her mother; we are too loud. Except no one could hear her for the noise he is making, and the blood pounding in her head.
    Not long after, the skipping rope Ella leaves coiled at the foot of her bed inside the covers disappears as silently as did the pills, but nothing is said. Undeterred, she finds another way of binding herself in bed. She hoards clothes she has outgrown, that corset her tight, wears them