I Am the Swarm

PART ONE
SEVENTEEN DAYS BEFORE THE WASPS
I get my magic on a Saturday.
Three days after I turn fifteen.
Like it nearly forgot about me.
Like I almost got free.
My fifteenth birthday arrives quietly,
like someone
opening a window
in a house
down the street.
I keep watching for the magic.
Watch myself from the inside. Find nothing.
In the afternoon,
Ouma comes over for tea,
her Yorkie, Hildegarde,
tucked under her arm.
The magic is already hours late,
and no one is mentioning that it’s late,
not Ouma, who sits down
and immediately starts feeding a lemon cream
to Hildegarde, and not Mamma,
who is cutting chocolate cake,
sucking icing off her finger.
We sit in the cool dining room,
the three of us, and the fact that Mora isn’t there
makes the house feel like one big echo.
The table is too wide. The chairs are too far apart.
Then Mamma’s phone rings.
Mamma is twenty-­nine today,
wearing bright-­green heels
and dangly earrings. Thin as an actress.
She comes back. Still holding the knife.
“Sorry, baby, I have to go.” She doesn’t explain.
Doesn’t say, “Your sister needs me.”
If she said it. If she actually said the words.
I would be able to ask questions.
I would be able to say:
“Do you really think that I don’t need you?”
Ouma and I,
we listen to Mamma
gathering her things.
Walking around,
whispering
that she can’t find her keys.
Until the door slams.

When Mamma’s gone,
Ouma says,
“Has everything been
all right at home, Nell?”
Ouma’s English is formal,
slowly and carefully pronounced.
Her accent is like cream
floating on the surface of her words,
making all the consonants softer.
“Things have been okay.”
“She’s twenty-­eight now?”
“Twenty-­nine.”
I’ve been watching
Mamma change for so long
that I always know.

Ouma nods. “That’s better. That’s—­”
“She’s been sixteen a lot, though.”
“I suppose it’s understandable.”
I cut myself a piece of cake. “She forgot to make the tea.”
“Nell,” says Ouma.
“Your mamma.
She’s trying very hard.”

Mamma’s magic:
her age is always changing.
She’s never younger than fifteen, the age the magic found her.
And she’s never older than her actual age.
In between fifteen and forty-­two,
there is a staircase.
The steps
are all
different heights.
You can’t walk up or down
without tripping.

Ouma watches me
make two cups of tea,
but I can see
her mind is elsewhere.
I can see
she’s thinking about
Mora’s empty room.

Long after Ouma goes home,
I hear Mamma’s car singing up the road.
“How was she?” I ask
when she steps through the door.
“Nell, I can’t talk now.”
In the light of the entrance, she’s younger,
leaning against the doorframe as she kicks off her shoes.
She’s fifteen.
She has been
fifteen
too many times to count.
I will only ever turn fifteen once.

Go to my room. Sit at the piano.
But my fingers won’t move.
Even before I’ve started to play.
I’ve already given up.

I lie on my bed and I think about the magic.
About how it’s going to come. How I can’t stop it.
All the women in my family have some kind of magic.
It’s the kind that goes crooked through you,
growing at a slant, like trees bowing to the icy Atlantic wind
that shrieks over Cape Town.
Ouma says it’s always been this way. Her mother, her mother’s mother.
The magic is passed down the line, a cursed family heirloom that nobody wants.
I’ve never wanted it. But that has never mattered.
No matter what I want. I’m still going to get it.
I can’t say this to anyone, though.
I never talk to Dad
about magic,
and Ouma is gone now,
and Mamma is fifteen tonight,
doesn’t want to talk.

One daughter’s magic
is already too much to carry.

The next evening, we visit Mora at the clinic,
even though Mamma is so young she could be Mora’s twin.
Dad never comes with us.
Somehow, every time we plan on going, he manages to have a phone call that can’t wait.
Meeting. Crisis. Unhappy client.
Tonight, he’s pacing up and down the pathway that leads to the garage,
his phone lighting the side of his face. Half shadow. Half ghost.
We brush past him, but he doesn’t notice.
Mamma stops on the path and watches him not seeing her.
She squeezes his arm softly to say goodbye, so she doesn’t interrupt his conversation.
She’s sixteen, and Dad is his unchanging forty-­four, and she looks small beside him,
and her eyes speak quietly about all the things she wants to ask for but can’t mention.
He raises his eyebrows. She raises her eyebrows back.
Then she walks to the car, and I follow her.
I never try to talk to Dad when he’s on the phone. I already know. He’s unreachable.

We sit in the visitors’ room,
waiting for Mora to appear.
Then she’s there,
in the narrow doorway,
her sleeves tugged down
over her hands,
her hair greasy at the roots.
“Mori,” Mamma says, patting the chair beside her,
but Mora leaves space between them.
I can see Mamma is trying not to look hurt,
but when she’s this young
everything shows up on her face
like light reflecting off still water.
“How’s it going?” Mamma asks,
reaching for Mora across the empty space, not touching her.
Mora shrugs. She shoves her sleeves up
and I see the scars that have Jackson Pollocked her forearms.
I know they go all the way up to her shoulders,
slipping across her collarbones. Some of the scars are thick as fingers,
shiny as fish scales. There are fresh scabs, too, reddish, rough as gravel.
“Why do you keep coming?” she barks.
And it takes me a second to realize she’s talking to me.
“Nell,” she says. “What are you doing here?”
“She’s your sister,” says Mamma.
“I don’t want her here,” says Mora.
“Mora—­”
“I don’t want her here.”
That’s when Mora starts to scream.
She leans forwards in her chair and screams in my face,
scratching at her scarred arms.
A line of blood
trickles down towards her right wrist,
and I can hear it.
It’s soft, but it’s still there:
the music trapped inside.
Right there, in the waiting room,
delicate harmonies waver,
humming like a hall of old fridges.
“I think we should go,” says Mamma.
Looks at me. Like I did something wrong.

Mora got her magic
the second she turned fifteen
because that’s what she’s like:
everything is drawn to her quicker.
She was fifteen.
I was almost fourteen.
The first time I heard it.
She was sitting in the dripping garden,
cross-­legged on the orange bricks,
the last of October’s rain darkening the grout,
deepening the color of the grass.
It was chilly. She shivered as she said,
“Nell. Listen to this.”
She cut into her clean white forearm with a razor blade,
a silver thing turning light into violence.
“Listen,” she said again.
There was music coming out of the cut.
Bright music. The reddest I had ever heard.
I put my ear close to the wound.
It crept into me. That red music. It sat, pooling, in my stomach.
I stood up. Backed away.
At arm’s length, I watched the blood spill out of her.
Red is a girl’s color. Red nail polish. Roses.
Lipstick and red every month. So I shouldn’t have been shocked to see it.
But it was a color and a sound together, like my sister’s body was a speaker.
There was the blood: sparkling out of the cut.
And there was the music. As she bled, it got louder.
“It’s in my blood.” She laughed like she couldn’t believe it.
“It’s in there. Nell. You can hear it, right?”
My mouth was too dry to speak but I nodded.
I could hear it. Then.
I still hear it now.

Mora made me swear not to tell Mamma.
I swore on the piano. I swore on the mountain
we could see from the edge of the garden,
shaped like an elephant, a dark cave for an eye.
I swore on the cherries picked from the trees,
their sour taste like poison. I swore on every flower.
I swore on the unchanging cold of the ocean,
wild foam licking at wet-­black rock.
I would do it. Of course I would do it. I did everything she told me then.
The weeks went on. Months.
Wet spring morphed into crackling summer.
Despite the heat, Mora covered the cuts with long sleeves.
Mamma and Dad hardly noticed.
More and more time in her room. Music rattling the closed door.
There was no wind anymore. Only hot, still air.
I didn’t say
a thing.
But after a while,
the secret
was heavy
as handfuls
of wet sand.
In the end.
I had to tell.




Mora has hated me
ever since.
When my magic arrives,
Mora isn’t there to see it.
It happens without her knowing.
It happens to me alone.

It comes when I’m sitting at the piano,
trying to figure out a new song.
Fiddling, fingers fidgeting, semitoning up and down,
letting myself be the knot that music is made of,
and it comes, the phrase I’m looking for—­
out of my mouth and the ends of my fingers at the same time.
It’s like a wave pushing through me, like I am the wave, bending.
Right there, on the piano’s keys, yellow ladybugs appear.
I count them over and over, five ladybugs, each tiny as a pinkie’s nail,
and if I wasn’t fifteen and I wasn’t expecting it,
wasn’t expecting the magic, I’d think I was dreaming.
But I am fifteen and I am a Strand girl and I know it’s the magic,
my magic. I blink at them. Their purring wings.
My heart: a pocket of light. But then they lift into the air, float, fall across the floor like wind-­carried seeds,
and somewhere inside me a door has closed.
And I hope for that bright feeling to come back. But it doesn’t.

I walk through the house, looking for Mamma,
cupping one of the ladybugs in my hand.
I want to tell her that my magic has come.
I don’t have words for it yet,
but I can show her.
I can show her the ladybug.
I can try to explain.
I find her upstairs, in the en suite bathroom,
staring at her face in the mirror, a hand on her cheek.
“Mamma—­”
“I look exactly like her. All week, it’s been like this.”
She turns to face me. I close my hand over the dead ladybug.
Mamma is sixteen again today. She looks so much like Mora.
“It’s my fault she’s in that place.”
“It’s not your fault, Mamma.”
“Not my fault? Whose fault is it, then?”
“It’s the magic’s fault,” I tell her, trying to sound like I believe it.
Mamma’s mouth
is a bruise
of purple lipstick.
“Exactly,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“Who do you think she got it from? Dad?”
Her laugh stings like wind on the beach.

It takes a while for the ladybugs to come back.
When they come back. They are not ladybugs.

This is how it happens.
Mamma’s trying to make it up to me:
missing my birthday,
not even asking about the magic.
She hates the beach
but she loves Kirstenbosch—­
manicured green
mossing up the side of Table Mountain,
beds of strelitzias,
gangs of spiked aloe,
proteas as big as ostrich eggs.
So we go there,
where the summer is most summery.
Green and hot, ocean wind called off,
turned back to the Antarctic,
leaving us stranded and sweating.
We’re walking up a winding path.
The trees reach for each other over our heads.
I’m trying to tell Mamma about a book I’ve been reading.
It’s a small thing like that. Just trying to tell her about a book.
“Half of it is narrated by a cat.
And the main character, he’s—­”
I stop talking.
She isn’t looking at me.
I can see she’s not listening.
She’s staring at the shallow stream dancing past us,
light sparkling on ruddy water.
She’s a little older than Mora today. Seventeen and she
hasn’t stopped frowning. That’s why
I’m telling her about the book. To distract her,
make her feel better. But it isn’t working.
She tugs at her eyelashes with pinched fingertips.
This is the moment that gets the magic out of me.
A cloud of gray moths appears in the air,
quick as a light flicked on. They hover around me like smoke.
Small gray moths.
Fountaining at my shoulders.
Dusting the words I could have said off my lips.
Light gray. Pale as rain. Pale as pills and plastic.
Mamma lets go of her eyelashes, turns her head.
Her frown softens a little. Eyes widen.
I recognize the moths. Not from a textbook or anything. From inside.
When I see them, I know they are made of me.
They have carried something out of me.
A hopelessness as heavy as wet earth.
Everything turns to a slow-­thick churn,
bones and stomach and skin.
I stare at the moths. Trying to breathe.
Mamma puts her arms around me.
Squeezes me hard against her ribs.
“I knew your magic would be beautiful,” she whispers,
not noticing that I am a hole, opening wider and wider.
Pushes her face against mine. “Soft and gentle and so beautiful.
Look at them, Nell. Just look at them.”
I am mortar that won’t ever harden.
I am a dark and hungry grave.
But I lean in. Lean towards her. Let her kiss my hair.