Agaat Read Online Free Page B

obstacle. It will be the best-managed death in history, you’ll see, her eyes said. Her mouth was a thin line.
    The carpet was taken out, the wardrobes with my coats and dresses, the chests of drawers with my jerseys and blouses.
    I was the one who started it. I planted the idea of the great clearing-out in her head.
    Only the bookshelf from Jakkie’s room she carried in here to hold the extra reading matter. She selected all the books in it. And the television she brought in from the living room and took away again later because the contents would upset me, I ask you.
    Perhaps she was the one who was upset.
    There are already too many things happening in this room, she said, without our having to make space for People of the South and The Bold and the Beautiful .
    Now she wheels it in only when she thinks I want to watch a video. But I no longer want to see Agaat’s selections. Ben Hur , Mary Poppins , My Fair Lady , A Day in the Death of Joe Egg .
    The radio was permitted to stay. For the idle hours, she said. Morning service. Praise the Lord. Listener’s Choice. Moto perpetuo . In these sacred halls. Almost time for Christmas carols. They’ve been starting earlier every year. Then Agaat will walk through the house again singing high and low with her descants and her second voices.
    You like your music, don’t you, Ounooi.
    She switches the radio on and off. She selects the station. She selects the tune. Sometimes she pushes a tape into the slot. Not always what I want to hear. Red Indian croakings from Jakkie if she wants to irritate me.
    That she left the three-panel dressing table, that’s a miracle. It hunkers there like a museum piece, its dark wood conspicuous against all the other stark objects in white and chrome. I can see myself in the
central panel, the one that was put in later and reflects bluer than the others. She turned the dressing table exactly in that position for me.
    So that you can keep yourself company when I’m not here, she said.
    The drawers are empty now. But that wasn’t my doing. I didn’t have the heart to clear them. The trace of Chanel No. 5 and lipsticks which hovered in them, must have evaporated a long time ago. Sometimes I miss perfume. Would she have given it all to the servants?
    It’s the last time, Agaat said, on the morning of my birthday, go ahead and enjoy it. A woman has to look her best on her birthday, not so?
    She marked the date on the calendar. 11 March 1996. Seventy years old.
    Then she made me up for the guests. I could see them blanch when they came in here.
    She never liked making me up. She had to do that from quite early on, when only my hands were paralysed, when we still went into town together.
    But I know by now, birthdays always bring out the nastiness in her.
    Then I looked like a blue-headed lizard, white spot between the eyes, the one I’m always given right there when she makes me up, to warn me against spying, to remind me of what I shouldn’t have seen that time with my head against the whitewashed window sill of the outside room. Mascara. Blazing Bat on my drooling mouth. My neckbrace doused with six kinds of perfume and the powder-puff creating clouds around my head. And drowned the sense in odours. Just about choked in powder that day. So then she had an excuse. So then she tipped out the drawers of the dressing table into black plastic bags.
    Claims she was acting on advice from Leroux, but she’s always been one step ahead of him.
    There must be nothing to irritate the nose, he’s supposed to have said to her.
    We’ve thought of that already, she said. No dogs, no plants, no dusty shoes or dirty things ever enter this room. And from now on no face powder, no perfume, no under-arm sprays that can make her sneeze or snort.
    She had to stop herself. It was one of those days.
    So now she’ll just have to shine and stink, was on the tip of her tongue. But Mum and calamine it was to be.
    Keep a