Angela Jooste

Pearl

A story about a girl who wanted to feel everything.            

short story                                                  

1

In a small town in the countryside of undulating hills and forests of pine trees there lived a girl who wanted to feel.

Everything.

She was a tiny mollusc creature when she was born, her skin opaque and translucent.

“What’s the word?” Pearl asked her mother, struggling to feel it on her tongue. 

“Opalescent,” her mother said. “Your skin was glowing.”

“Luminous,” Pearl said loving the way her mouth and cheeks shaped like a trumpet to say it.

Her mother laughed at Pearl’s face and how she revelled in the sound she made.

“You could almost fit in your father’s hand you were that small.”

Pearl tried to imagine her father holding a glistening newborn and could not. He had hands like oven mitts. All Pearl could see was her father in his suit, hand outstretched and instead of a baby he was holding an actual pearl, tiny and perfectly formed. She could see his hand closing around it, until it disappeared.

2

When Pearl was old enough to walk she discovered that she could feel the energy of things. As if standing up had brought the world to her attention. And with that came the desire to feel everything.

She saw the sun and felt its warmth, her eyes closing against the light so she could see the red beneath the lids of her eyes, the membranes of blood that were like a veil to the world outside.

Pearl tasted the water from the stream near her home and held the cold in her mouth; she was holding a piece of the air and the clouds and the sky on her tongue and it was seeping into her, small rivers forming a parallel system of arteries to the ones of blood.

She imagined that beneath her skin there was a river of the elements coursing through her.

After school, Pearl would run and then roll along the grassy slopes near her home and laugh with the feel of the earth and the falling, and then she’d stop to lie on her back, looking at the sky. She’d reach up with her arms as if she could touch the blue, clear light.

She looked until her eyes were wide and full of air.

Pearl was the sun and the moon, the energy that created the tides, the ocean. While she’d never been near the sea, the home of her namesake, she had seen pictures of expanses of water so vast that it looked as if the sky had been wrapped around the earth. One day she wanted to feel the sand that met the water, to walk across it and enter into the realm of the ocean.

She imagined it would be like walking into the sky.

3                                 

It was during art classes at school that Pearl made another discovery.

She loved to draw.

There was wonder and magic in being able to shape what she could see. However, what she drew was never what her teacher wanted her to draw, expecting a likeness of the object chosen.

“It’s how I feel,” Pearl said of her drawing of the sun. It seemed so obvious.

“But it’s not what you see. It’s not real,” said the teacher. “I want you to draw what you actually see.” And she emphasised the point, “What you see with your eyes.”

How could she say that what she felt was exactly what she saw? 

She tried to explain that the lines of yellow, the strands that formed an orb of coiling threads, was the actual sun that she could see. It was the energy and flares of light that she could sense. If she had only seen an image of the sun from outer space, she would have understood how close she came to revealing its core: the solar flares, the whips of heat and light that created a roiling mass of blazing energy.

Her words could not come close to explaining what she drew.

“It’s not realistic,” her teacher said.

Pearl’s teacher failed her, not understanding that she was asking Pearl to conform to her view of the world where making a copy was safer than the chaos of the imagination. If all the students did something different, how could she mark them? How could she compare them?

Pearl wept quietly in the woods near her home, not knowing how she could explain why she saw the way she did, not accepted for what she knew.

There was no one to tell her that what she felt or perceived—how she interpreted the world—was true for her.

Her mother who would have soothed the niggling doubts had passed away when she was nine. Her passing had left a space inside of Pearl that was like falling into a dark and endless hole. One day her mother simply fainted. Pearl was numb with the shock of it, not knowing what fainting meant and it was the housekeeper who called the doctor and helped to nurse her mother while Pearl sat nearby, unable to speak. As she watched her mother fade away the space began opening inside of her. She could feel its expanse, its emptiness, and that there was nothing she could hold on to. Pearl’s mother had been her anchor to a world she was just discovering. She was the warmth of arms before the yawning dark of sleep. She was milk and baked bread. She was freshly cut flowers and soil and mulch from the garden. She was the small sprigs of lavender placed under her pillow to help her sleep. She was the song of evening as she cooked and the song of stories at bedtime. She was fresh air from the open windows in the morning and small kisses that spoke of welcome, thank you, preciousness, but never goodbye. She was the ballooning warmth that shaped the heart in Pearl’s chest and spelt a word spoken soft and low and frequent in Pearl’s ear: love.  A simple word that contained breath and light, the feeling of being held and folded in the world of her mother’s arms.  

And then she was gone.

The housekeeper stayed while her father came and went for work, going from city to city for his very important job with the government as he’d always done. He handled foreign affairs. He went to far and exotic places and would leave and come back with small gifts that Pearl placed on a shelf in her room. There was a map on her wall and she would place a pin on the city where he was currently staying. It had been her mother’s suggestion, as if knowing his location would somehow bring that distant figure closer. One day she held the map to the window and the small pinpricks of light that filtered through showed a pattern of her father’s absences.

Her father felt like cold rain, the songs of hymns sung at church, and the parade of teachers that made the children stand to attention and recite, read and write. He was the dark clouds passing over the sun, the majesty of thunder and the summer storms. He was the Clydesdale horses of their neighbour, still used to pull a cart loaded with produce or hay. He felt like the doctor who came once when Pearl was sick with a sore throat, when her chest began to wheeze and close. He was the dark grey stone of the house he had grown up in and where they now lived with the high-ceilinged rooms, the French doors and large marble fireplaces. He was the furniture in the two rooms kept for guests that she was told it was best not to sit on or touch, and the beautiful yet frightening grand piano that no one played. He was the names of the cities she learned to say and spell when she pinned his new location. He was the world outside, far away from the one where she felt safe and that felt like the word her mother spoke as love. 

Pearl was counting her own heartbeats the moment her mother’s stopped. She could not forget that. And the number: one hundred and eleven. The world stopped turning, the air became still in the room despite the window being open. The light dimmed as if night was settling in. Her mother’s eyes were closed and her chest no longer rose and fell. No small sounds came from her mouth. Nothing stirred around her. Even the dust motes hung, suspended in the air.

And Pearl’s heart kept beating.

Her father was home when her mother died and said nothing. When the housekeeper and her father’s sister, Aunt Rosa, gently helped Pearl to leave her mother’s side so that her father could be alone with her, she heard him. For the first time, she truly heard him. His cries sounded like one of the great pine trees being felled in the forest. A cracking and splitting of the world.

They placed her mother in darkness, not in light where she had always belonged. A dark box buried in a dark place, cold and dank in the earth. For months after, Pearl could not close her eyes to sleep, seeing too clearly that hole in the earth where her mother was laid to rest. A world of ash and dust. Of rot and damp. Pearl was frozen inside with the terror of it. She could not sleep. She could only close her eyes during the day, sensing the spectral glimmer of her mother that she sometimes felt but would never speak of.

For a long time after, all she drew were pages with smudged and blackened spaces.

But life went on.

            Her father left for work as he would normally do so, with his suit and coat, his briefcase and suitcase, a car from the government waiting to take him to the airport in the city. He bent to look into her eyes, a hand placed on her shoulder and without saying goodbye he kissed her; a dry and papery kiss on her cheek, and then he was gone. Pearl’s Aunt Rosa and her husband, Uncle Lucian, now lived in the house, as well as the kindly housekeeper who had nursed her mother when she was ill. But when her aunt had a baby, a little girl named Clara, Pearl could feel something that she had once experienced as a warm expanse inside her. And it was growing in the house, like a bubble of air. It was pressing against her, cocooning the baby and her aunt and uncle, while she was standing outside its skin that she could touch but never truly feel she was a part of.  

When she tried to draw the feeling, the pencil barely touched the surface of the paper as her tears fell, leaving a dented warp on the page, a small pool that no one else could see.

4

Pearl had one true friend.

Elodie Manon.

She was the second daughter, one of four children of the family who farmed the land next door to where Pearl lived.       

The first thing Pearl sensed when she met Elodie was the music in her name. Then the sound of her being. It was angelic. Elodie was born with fiery hair and eyes like the sky, but her nature was one of such peace and stillness that everyone in her family could not resist touching or holding her so that she was never long in her crib. And before she could walk she would sing. Soft sounds that needed no words and that came from music only she could hear. Some people in the village believed she could not be long for this world, that she was a winged one. Yet Elodie’s mother believed otherwise. Elodie looked like a little devil with hair on fire, so there must be a balance to that nature of hers, so her mother treated her with a pragmatism to balance others who would prefer to coddle.

Elodie spied Pearl rolling in the grass one day and simply climbed the fence that served as the boundary between their properties and joined her. From the beginning they played together with laughter and joy. Elodie had no conception of what Pearl’s father did, but she understood Pearl’s mother who welcomed her with a smile and gave them honey star biscuits and milk for their afternoon tea, and who would always say goodbye with a hug and a kiss on each cheek.

It was at Elodie’s home that Pearl first understood the feeling of belonging.

Elodie’s home was a lovely house with rooms full of sound and light and air. It was also a very busy home. Elodie’s mother was its cornerstone. There was always fresh bread and soups, pies both sweet and savoury, biscuits and cakes, homemade cheeses and chutneys, as well as preserves and honey that was harvested from the bees kept in their boxes that Elodie’s father tended to. Elodie’s mother showed the two girls how to retrieve the eggs from the hen house without disturbing the proud and fussy birds, how to milk the goats and the cows with a song that calmed them and sweetened their milk, and how to muck out the stable where the Clydesdales lived. She showed them how washing the sheets in lavender water brought the garden into the house and kept the sun in their beds, and how rosewater was not only best to wash their faces with but also to wash the floors of the house as well. Pearl savoured the simple tasks and pleasures that she was never asked to help with, but which she gladly did.

Pearl and Elodie watched Elodie’s father and how he worked the land. Some paddocks would lie fallow while others were sown with seeds for wheat or pasture for grazing. There were the cows for milking and the milk was sold to a local dairy manufacturer. The goats were Elodie’s mother’s pride and joy and her cheeses were sold at the local market and at the delicatessen in town, but often people would come to their door to enquire after her cheese and Elodie’s mother would always smile, their home her unofficial store. There were large vegetables patches and a fruit orchard that the two brothers and Elodie’s older sister were responsible for. But Pearl and Elodie were often tricked by the boys to do their share of the work and would promptly sneak away to get up to some mischief.

In the presence of Elodie’s family and their daily life, Pearl belonged. She was Elodie’s best friend and as they loved their child, Elodie’s family accepted Pearl as having a place among them.

5

Pearl began to draw in secret.

She tried to do as her teacher expected and the results were passable, but her drawings lacked any sense of how she truly perceived the world. Even Elodie, who understood how important drawing was to Pearl, could not make sense of what Pearl drew.

In privacy she could go outside and sit beneath a tree and draw the river of veins—of light—that stretched from deep within the earth, through the trunk and then splayed out into the leaves and into the air and space around it.

She saw the water in the stream as it flowed by, but also how it was fed from beneath the ground and moved into the air above as the energy from the sun met it with heat as it all became one.

She drew the petals of a flower as wings of a butterfly. The fragile membranes were as weightless as feathers and soft to touch so she drew the flower as a quivering, living being, with the sensitivity of an anemone deep in the sea, its wavering spidery follicles searching and reaching, its hands and eyes in the watery environs.

Pearl hid the drawings in a book.

Each drawing she placed within the leaves of a giant atlas that her father had given her. Another way to trace his leavings. 

Before she went to bed, she would open the pages and immediately she was transported: travelling to the sun and the moon, through the patterns of the stars, and then along the streams of light that ran through the living energy of things. She was swimming through the stream by the house, through the flowers in the glade by the stream, then she was burrowing deep into the earth and up through the roots that fed the trees. Pearl would become weightless and fly across oceans of space, leaping from branches and leaves through the air that felt like the small brushes of wings and feathers against her skin.

Only then did she truly feel alive. Only then did she feel she was connected to all that was around her.

She had a small hope, that one day she would find the person she could show them to who would appreciate her unique way of seeing. And this hope was nested with another, so small that she barely touched or listened to it. That perhaps, she would meet someone that could truly see her.

Deeper still there was something she dared to even name. A hope she could barely whisper and was too scared to speak openly, but that in the silence of the night it would prick her heart like an ember, small and fiery, wanting to spark and burn.

And this hope: that perhaps when someone could truly see her—the dreams and visions, the thoughts and stillness, the aching hurts and silent joys, the quiet bravery and quaking fear that set her trembling, the kindness and the pettiness of her, the laughing lightness and streaming tears, the sometimes overwhelming sadness and pulsing beauty that lay at her core, what some might call a heart—that when they could see the universe inside her, that maybe, just maybe, they could possibly love her too.

6

At night, Pearl would wait until the lights of the house were off and she would sit by her open window and look at the sky and the stars.

This was harder for her to draw and she kept looking, wondering how she could make an image of such darkness.

She had tried by blacking out a sheet of paper and erasing specks of white into the black. It frightened her, how big the sky was and how small she felt. How alone she was in that sea of dark that sometimes mirrored the space inside her, echoing with all she had lost.

But the light of the stars gleamed brightly, winking, piercing the dark. Lights from so far away she could barely sense them, but they were there.

7

“Can I see it?” he asked simply. “Can I see what you’re drawing?”

Pearl was sitting by the stream, not thinking much, basking in the warmth of the sun’s rays as they licked and played against her skin.

When she opened her eyes she saw a boy from school, a year above, but he lived close to her home. She recalled seeing him in the corridors, in the playing fields, amongst the nameless faces and the smells of chalk and wool, sweat and soap, shoe polish and dusty paper. Away from school the boy felt like freshly mown grass and hay singing in the summer heat before its cut and dried and bundled. He felt like wet earth warming in the sun and of her cat, Podge, stretching and rolling in a patch of warmth after springing a mouse and licking a bowl of cream. He felt like the newness of life, of gangly lambs and calves, all legs and jolts and head butts.

Pearl stretched out her hand and showed him. He held the piece of paper as a fragile thing so that it shook like a tender leaf. Then he looked at her and saw something she couldn’t see.

“It’s beautiful,” he said quietly.

“Please, keep it,” she said, her heart skipping strangely, her breath fluttering from her mouth.

His name was Finn. A perfect name as it spoke of the sea and swimming and fish flashing through streams of water, reeds and rocks. He was the oldest of three, the only boy. His family were farmers like Elodie’s and he said that one day he would work the land like his father, and his father before him. Generations of men and women who had walked, ploughed, sown and harvested, who had tended the cows and sheep, had built, painted and mended the farmhouse and outbuildings, the stables and sheds. There was history and weight and love in his words. He was a rock and an ocean. Grounded and weightless.

Pearl felt as slight and transparent as a wisp of cloud next to his certainty. Yet when she listened to the earth of his voice, felt the hesitant touch of his hand as he plucked a leaf from her hair, and saw the keen light of his eyes, she felt for the first time since her mother died that she could be matter and flesh, real and alive, connected to someone other than herself.

8

Each time they met, Pearl would draw for Finn.

First, the stream and the rocks, the trees and the flowers. Then birds and deer, the cow that grazed contentedly in one of the fields of Finn’s farm, or a lamb newly born and that reminded her so much of him. And then after weeks of catching glimpses of his hands and skin, of his chin, or the sloping line of his nose and the flare of nostrils, the curving jut of his cheekbone, the length of lashes and the glitter of his eyes, she drew his face.

She had never drawn a face of someone she knew. It was a revelation. To capture in line and stroke, in shade and absence the slow curve of his mouth and his downcast eyes as he read to keep still so that she could study him.

When she gave the drawing to Finn his eyes had widened in surprise, then laughter akin to joy. Nothing she had ever drawn had touched someone to smile, to express such delight, and the warmth in her chest fanned the small ember that scorched and burned at times, glowing inside of her. She smiled at the sheer wonder of having given Finn a gift of himself as she saw him.

It was a day of firsts.

Finn hugged her then blushed at his impulsiveness. He pulled away only to keep holding her with hands that were shy yet firm. Feeling his touch, Pearl did what she had wanted to do from the first time she met him. She reached to touch his face, to trail with her fingers the details she had sketched and held tight each night in her mind before she closed her eyes to sleep.

And when he kissed her it felt like flying. 

9

“It’s time you expanded your horizons,” came the hammer blows of her father’s words. “There is a school in the city that I think you should attend.”

Words to numb and control.

Pearl’s father came home to his smiling daughter only to meet her equally smiling friend, Finn. For the first time he truly noticed his daughter. He had never seen her smile like this, except when his beloved wife had been alive. He was surprised, pleased and then shocked to see it. Because he could recognise too clearly what radiated from that smile. And its reflection was alive in the face of Finn.

They are too young, he thought, wanting to forget he was as young as they were, both in their teens, when he met his wife.

“They are too young,” he said too himself later in his study, his thoughts as heavy as stones. “What do they know of the world, of life?”

And with a phone call he made arrangements and a decision without any consultation with his daughter. He believed it was in her interests, that he knew better given his age and experience. Although he never stopped to think, to wonder, that in doing this, he did not know his daughter at all. That he did not understand what made her happy or sad, what made her shout for joy or cry. That he had never asked her what gave her a sense of who she was, that made her heart swell and made her feel like flying.

When Pearl was told she went to her room and held the atlas with her drawings in her arms, the pages now full to overflowing. Many she had given to Finn, but still, when they were apart, when her body still sung with having been near him, the simple living hymn of him, she would come back to herself with a lightness to her being, but also with a depth of all the feelings that came with knowing him.

She wanted to resist her father and found herself incapable of it. She did not have the words or the authority. She did not believe she had the strength.

How to explain to her father, with his important job and ceaseless movement, the absolute pleasure, the simple sense of being herself when she was with Finn? How to explain he could sit with her and not speak, that they could walk and never stop walking. How to explain the wonder in Finn’s eyes at what she created and how he would happily sit, watch and read while she did something that felt like breathing to her? How to put into words the bubble of air that swelled inside her when she saw him walk toward her, that first word of greeting, the slow smile where no words were needed? How to tell her father that she had found someone who was sure enough of himself to not need to leave; who didn’t feel the need to see the world, could see it everywhere around him?

She couldn’t.

She couldn’t express plainly that she had found something so precious, she dared not hope, had tried not to, but had longed for what was so basic to life and seemed as unobtainable as a star.

She couldn’t speak over the immense distance and unknowing between the girl she still was and the father who was so rarely present, but who spoke with the authority of the world she did not feel a part of and that she was meant to belong to.

Pearl could not speak of love to a man who had shut himself from feeling such a thing when the woman that he believed he loved more than he had ever hoped for, died.

She could not find words in the face of someone else’s loss and the walls he had built to protect himself from ever feeling again.

10

Finn could see the workings of Pearl’s father’s mind yet kept his thoughts to himself. He knew why Pearl’s father wanted her far away, to plant his seeds of doubt, rather than allow what is simple and true to exist.

Pearl’s father could not see his daughter. That’s what Finn believed. He could not see and accept the simple beauty of who she was. But Finn realised her father could no more see these things in himself, let alone in Pearl.

Finn could sense the slight chill like a skin of ice over a pool of water as winter approaches, as what is allowed to grow in the sun begins to wither and die. He saw in nature the retreat of outward vibrancy as energy is conserved and stored for the oncoming cold and the scarcity of nutrients. In Pearl’s halted words, the tight strain of her too pale skin from lack of sleep, her arms wrapped around her chest to hold herself as if she could slip away; in the smallest ways Finn could see her retreat.

He saw her clearly because Finn saw Pearl as the thing itself. The small gem stewed and nourished in a hard carapace, fed by the ocean and the very stuff that finds its mirror in blood. A microcosm of the world cradled in a shell that forms a pearl. A universe, a living gem like a seed, a grain of sand, a spark of life. Perfect for the very fact it exists.

He saw her essence with the clarity of expecting nothing. He had never known such a being could exist and that it was always within him to know her. She’d been growing inside of him before he’d seen her face. To be with her was to touch something pure and deep within him.

Finn would stand in one of the fields of the farm as the evening closed around him and draw big breaths, as if breathing in the land and all the life it sustained. The land was in him and he was sure it was where he should be. His blood was anchored to this place as if the veins that fed him were growing from the soil he stood on.

With the same kind of knowing, Finn didn’t doubt how Pearl felt about him. He didn’t doubt how he felt about her. But he could see the doubt that swirled around her fed by her father who had been making decisions for her entire life. Doubt as to what she should be, who she was. Her father had kept her at such distance, had sometimes pushed her away, sometimes kept her close, had believed he knew what was best for her. And the doubts planted grew like weeds, quick to grow in soil that was poorly nourished for too many years.

Finn could see, uncluttered in his plain acceptance, that the fruit and flower, the leaves, they eventually fade, wither and fall. But in that cycle of life, forever regenerating, the seed, the essence of things, remains.

11

It was not long before Pearl left the small village for the city.

Her father had been coming and leaving the village for years. The house in the countryside was his family home and when he was young, he had decided he wanted to see more of the world than that small village and went to a city and then to many more. But, he would always come back, to that house, that village, and he would call it home, as much for the memory of what it held as the reality of what was no longer there.

For Pearl leaving was like a veil falling across her eyes. She was seeing everything through a grey mist.

With her father’s decision, others followed. Her Aunt Rosa and Uncle Lucian and their little Clara left the house for a small cottage with a blue door and garden of lavender in the village. The housekeeper would now only come to maintain the house once a week.

All that resounded in Pearl’s head as she followed her father into one of the government cars, were the goodbyes she had said to all the people who had cared for her and the two people she loved most. Both Elodie and Finn refused to say goodbye. Elodie would only say, “I’ll see you soon.”

Elodie had cried freely while Pearl could feel the tears but they were falling inside her, into that strange void that had opened with her mother’s leaving, but that had somehow closed when she met Finn. There were promises of letters and hopeful visits, but Pearl was reluctant in feeling hope.

She was finding that the smallest words were sometimes the hardest to say.

And Finn. There were no promises, no words. They held each other until the very last moment when she had to leave.

When they let go and she could no longer feel the warmth of his arms, the beat of his heart, she thought she would simply vanish and fall into the hole that was opening and widening with every breath inside her.

If she said the words she felt, she imagined that the essence of it would vanish, so she held it tight behind her lips and hoped he had heard it as she said it over and over with every heartbeat.

But Finn didn’t need words. He held her face and kissed her so that the feeling came from deep within him for her to breathe it in and keep it in the only place that could understand it.

12

In the city her father lived in a townhouse between his travels and journeys back to the village of his youth. However, knowing his peripatetic schedule, he informed Pearl she would be staying at a boarding school.

When Pearl arrived her only sense of the place was of stone. Hard and unyielding, the building was monstrous in its grandness, set in grounds of playing fields and courtyards and cordoned off from the life of the city by high iron gates and fences. Once you arrived, you could only leave the premises with permission.

Her father accompanied her to the school in the government car to meet with the Principal. And again, Pearl could only think of stone, that the Principal was also hewn from the very stone of the building. It was she who led Pearl down the endless corridors, passing rooms that smelled cold and airless, and then out through a courtyard with bricked in trees to another building of endless corridors with rooms of beds in rows with wardrobes and desks.

“This is your new home,” the Principal announced. Pearl carried the weight of those words as a sentence of confinement. A prison of stone.

She would be living with two other girls it seemed in this neat room made up of white. It was a blank room and she blinked to make out the white wood furniture against the white walls, the simple beds, desks and chairs, the small wardrobes and bedside tables. The lampshades were white as were the curtains over the window near her bed. It could have been soft like a cloud, but Pearl found it icy and brittle. The absence of colour bleached all sensation to numbness. She sat on the bed and heard a bell and then the rumble like a herd of elephants coming along the endless corridors. It was the end of the day and there was a sense of pent up energy releasing, but Pearl could only wonder what freedom was to be had in a place such as this.

“The new girl,” muttered a petite and pretty girl with bright green cat’s eyes and long dark hair tied with dark green bows.

“Pity,” muttered the other girl who followed close behind whose eyes were brilliant blue, her hair the colour of wheat.

Pearl stood to greet them and was met with hard stares and then nods, but that was all.

“Dinner at six thirty, then study,” said Cat Eyes helpfully. Pearl nodded, whispering “thank you” and the two girls exited quickly, not having said their names, after discarding books and bags. Pearl unpacked what little she had brought. The atlas with her drawings she placed at the bottom of her wardrobe.

That first night she turned her back to the girls—they’d finally offered their names, Sasha and Kate—who both whispered chatter before Pearl heard the snuffle of snores and sighs of sleep. She counted the beats of her heart and could see the moon through the half-closed curtain. The harder she focused on the steady thump the easier to stop the widening dark inside her.

13

Pearl had an overwhelming sense of inertia amongst the stone buildings of the school and a strong urge to escape.

Each day followed a routine that gave her no comfort in its consistency. She would rise early to avoid the rush for the communal bathroom, its dull blue tiles and stainless steel sinks tinged her skin with grey as she looked at herself in the mirror. Without the sun and the air of her home, her once rich nutmeg hair was becoming a limp brown, and her eyes that flickered green and brown with flecks of gold seemed to fade to the colour of pale amber. The sun in her skin that gave it a toasty hue was now pasty dough. Pearl was fading, each day becoming less visible.

All meals were in a communal hall of worn, wooden benches and long tables with imposing engraved boards lining the walls with the names of prefects and former pupils in gold. The tall gothic windows let in coloured light through the stained glass and Pearl would focus on this while she ate her meals, having found a place at a table where other students as odd and misfit as her would gravitate. To sit with these girls was to become an outcast in the hierarchy of cliques that had formed long before Pearl had arrived. She was on speaking terms with a handful of girls, but none had come close to becoming a friend.

Classes were long and took up most of the day. The school founders believed unstructured time led to trouble, so time was measured by a clock and bells and by the end of the day when dinner was served early, Pearl was heavy with the weight of books and learning and of more study to do before sleep.

Her only moments of lightness were letters received from Elodie or Finn and the brief visits from her Aunt Rosa with Uncle Lucian and little Clara. Elodie wrote of her days, days that were so familiar to Pearl that she didn’t need Elodie’s words to shape them. But from Finn, there were few words but in the envelope she would first feel then see a small piece of home made tangible. An acorn from an oak tree, a husk of wheat, seeds to be planted, the black rich soil from his land, a feather, a leaf and her favourite, a piece of the softest pink tissue paper cut in the shape of a heart. No words were written on this one and they weren’t needed. She kept that piece of paper in the pocket of her shirt, and she had replied simply with a cut out heart shaded a deep, deep red. She did not speak of her loneliness, did not want them to worry, but her silence, the gaps in the well chosen words was a whisper sounding on the wind from the draughty hollow inside her. 

Finn would open her letters by the stream where they first met and with every one he was reminded of the day he saw her leave. It had been like the turning of the leaves as they began to fall in autumn. The subtle change of colour to herald brilliant reds and golds from green. And in that moment there was the signal of the fall and knowing the earth was preparing to return to itself, to rest and lay the ground for what might survive and be born anew. A signal of an end with the smallest hope of what might return in spring.

Her leaving was a piercing ache, the earth shuddering beneath his feet, a realignment of the most vital parts within him and he wondered if he could ever feel as complete or centred again. 

Words could not encapsulate that kind of feeling.

            Their longing was held in the silence, in the small tokens wrapped in pieces of paper and in the smallest hope that such tenuous contact could bring.

14

A day came when Pearl began to cough, and then she couldn’t breathe without the rasping wheeze of her chest. One morning she simply could not get up and Cat Eyes who revelled in drama, found the dormitory teacher who took Pearl to the infirmary. The doctor decided she needed a chest x-ray. At the city hospital they made her blow into tubes as hard as she could and they measured her breath as if her life depended on it. She had been breathing the air and the fumes of the city, of the damp walls of the school and the specialists at the hospital believed she was allergic to it. They sent her back to the school with pumps and sprays, but she knew it was more than pollution and damp. At the slightest sense of being hemmed in, of feeling cut off, of being alone, she’d feel her chest wheeze, her breath rasping as she sunk into the vanquishing sensation of her self disappearing.

When she was ill with lack of breath the days became formless with no sense of time.

Pearl would be sent to the infirmary to lie on one of the row of beds. She’d count the moments by the rise and fall of her chest, a sense of moving through time by the clearing of the wheeze from her breath.

She was made to sit or lie, the quiet of the place and the few people around her compounded an increasing sense of loneliness. The girl who wanted to feel everything now could barely move, her senses crying for a simple touch, trapped by the body that had once liberated her perception of life.

With each attack of anxiousness at the tenuousness of her place in the world, she found herself curling in like a snail within its shell.

Pearl dreamed that she was trapped within her lungs. That what was inside her was actually external, a hard shell encasing her, suffocating in its resistance.

She would lie in the bed in the infirmary that felt like a prison, and with that very thought, she began to escape.

Each day she would find ways to reach beyond her tired and weakened body. She would imagine threads unravelling from her fingers, forming shapes and patterns as she slowly moved to get up and walk around the sterile ward. She imagined holding feathers the length of her arms that she could wave to fly or simply touch one of the other patients. Through eyes heavy with sleep, she saw pools of light and the blurred lines of energy that had once zipped and flowed with life.

Slowly, with each minute, hour and day, she moved her body and mind to imagine herself away from that place.

At night she dreamed of the water from the stream near her home, the grass of the slope by the house where she would roll down. She dreamed of fields of wheat and sunflowers, of light filtered through green and shady leaves, of the sun warming her skin and bringing her back to life. She would dream of the music in Elodie, her singing and her laughter, and she would dream of Finn, the feel of him.

The feeling of home.

15

It was later in the school year that she met someone that gave her hope.

A young man who had come from a village, not unlike her own, had one day ventured to the city and found his place in the world of art school. He had loved to paint and had never imagined in the tiny village that there were places such as this that could give free reign to be an artist. He also discovered that he had another talent: to teach. And while he was grounded and wise enough to know he would be no great artist, he was still able to be in touch with what gave him purpose and wanted to nurture that gift in others.

There was something about the young man who came to teach art at Pearl’s school that made her think of Finn. In many ways, they were worlds apart, but there was a light in his eyes and a genuine smile that reminded her of home. And when the young teacher asked them to interpret, not simply draw the small display of apples, having shown them paintings by Cezanne and Van Gogh, Pearl’s heart fluttered like the wings of a small bird trapped, wanting to escape its cage.

One day, Pearl asked the teacher if she could show him her drawings. What he saw in each drawing was the very vitality and energy of creation itself. He also recognised something else. Pearl could not be taught. He could give her lessons in different techniques, on different mediums, but the essence of what she was could not be taught. Pearl was an artist. The kind of artist that he could only desire to be but no amount of training could mimic. She had the soul of a poet, in the way she could see and get to the heart of things and somehow communicate through images not in words. The teacher could see all this and was at a loss. He could suggest she follow a similar path to the one he had taken, but to what end he wondered. Unless she wanted to teach.

He also saw something else. In that school, in that place, Pearl was like a flower growing through the cracks of stone. She was struggling. The drawings she had done while at school didn’t come close to what she had brought with her. What had inspired her was not here.

So, the teacher whose various qualities included great empathy, spoke plainly. “You have a gift, Pearl. An exceptional gift. And such gifts cannot be taught although they can be nurtured. Like a flower or plant, they need to be planted in good soil and watered and mulched and allowed to have access to light and air. Do you understand?” He could see that she did, because he was talking a language that made sense to her.

“It is quite simple. A flower needs care and attention. It needs love to grow. Love is energy, Pearl. All living things, people and plants and animals, they can all sense it, because it is straightforward and real and wants the best for you. If you want to follow what you obviously love to do, I think you need to find the people and the place that can give you this. Think of it as a foundation.”

They were plain words and yet they touched the wound that was so deep and still raw that the tears Pearl had not been able to shed when leaving her home now came. The teacher’s words reminded her of what she had lost and yet had not had the strength or knowing to fight for.

The teacher only had some dry but smelly paint rags at hand, but they did the job of mopping her tears and the smell made her laugh in hiccups.

Pearl found she had voice enough to speak. “I never wanted to leave to come here,” she said. The truth was often very simple.

The teacher nodded. “It is not for every one. The trick is knowing what is right for you.”

“How do you know for sure?” she asked in a whisper, the words of her father still clouding her with doubts.

The teacher thought for a moment. “How did you feel when you made your drawings?” There was a glimmer of a smile that lit Pearl’s tearstained face.

“How did you feel when you drew this face?” He pointed to the one drawing of Finn’s face that she had brought with her and that had been too painful a reminder to look at all these months. Now she was smiling broadly a slight easing of the pressure in her chest.

The teacher smiled too. “Sometimes that’s all you have to know, Pearl. Trust how you feel, especially if it makes you feel alive, happy. Hold on to that, even when you might also feel weighted, sad and unable to see the beauty. They go hand in hand.”

Pearl nodded, knowing some of what he said and not sure about it all in its entirety, for she was still young and the teacher knew these were things to be experienced, not just to be taught and filed away in the mind.

“Thank you,” she said, not knowing any other way to express how grateful she was at his kindness.

“My pleasure,” he said simply. It was moments such as these that gave him that sense of rightness that he was doing what mattered to him. And being generous as well as wise, he only wished the same for Pearl.

16

One day, a day not unlike the day Pearl arrived to the city, she left.

She had very little to pack, her greatest possession were her drawings. With this and a bag of clothes and enough money for a train ticket, she waited for the weekend when she knew she could walk out the gates along with the stream of students and waiting families. And she would leave without anyone’s permission.

Pearl had said nothing to her father. She had not spoken to the Principal. She had simply decided that if she was to do this one brave act, to free herself, she would have to do it alone. She was determined no one would tell her that she could not make a choice that was critical to her life.

And it was so simple to do, even as it choked her of breath at walking away from what she believed was expected of her. She put one foot in front of the other, walking outside the gates of the school and along the streets following the signs, sometimes asking for directions to the train station. She bought a ticket and at the correct time she boarded the train, finding a seat near an elderly couple where she felt safe. She also knew with certainty she would not be going back to the house of her father. Pearl would go to her Aunt Rosa and Uncle Lucian and their little Clara. Her aunt had always said there was a room just for her if she ever needed a place to stay. What her aunt had never openly said was she felt Pearl’s loneliness, her lack of family, the absence of her mother. She had not approved of her brother’s decision to sever his child from a life she knew, from people who cared for her. She was so unlike her brother valuing the simpler things in life. Rosa had a husband who loved her, they both worked as teachers, and they lived in a cottage in the village. Her brother saw the lack of what he called ambition and worldliness while she could only see what gave her life meaning. While she could never replace Pearl’s mother, Rosa knew she could offer her a family and a place to grow.

In Pearl, Rosa could see something of herself. A girl who needed to live by her heart, to stay close to what sang real and true to the very core of her being.

So, when Pearl arrived at the village late that evening, she walked to her aunt’s home and knocked on the blue painted door of the cottage surrounded by lavender. They were not expecting her but when Rosa saw her she did what Pearl’s mother had done every day she came home from school, she wrapped her arms around her, hugged her and kissed both of her cheeks. She pulled her into the warmth of the house and set a place at the table. And that night, lying in sheets smelling of the sun and lavender, Pearl slept deeply, her breathing light and clear.   

17

As brave and simple as her coming home, the consequences of that act were handled discretely. Pearl’s aunt informed her father and the school that Pearl was now staying with her family and attending the local school. What was said between her father and Aunt Rosa, Pearl was never told, but she was amazed how from one small act of another would follow and then another. Pearl felt no fear of her father now that she was away from the city and the boarding school, away from the authority and the unfamiliar rules. When she walked out the blue door the next day to wander the streets of the village she felt each footstep reverberated with small roots from the soles of her feet digging into the earth, keeping her firmly on the ground. She smelled the lavender in Rosa’s garden from the open window when she woke, heard the giggles of little Clara, and the small talk shared at breakfast. She was welcomed with smiles and was only briefly questioned about what she intended to do. She was part of their family. It was the beginning of something new.

As she continued through the village toward the house she had lived her whole life but which she passed to go to the stream that ran alongside it, she was surprised at how easily she had walked from one life into another. What her father said or did at that moment couldn’t touch her. What she had not been able to see and feel when she was young was obvious to her now, there were people who truly cared and loved her, would help her when she needed it. And for the first time in nearly a year she could begin to say the words, the small words that spoke of her feelings.

Pearl came to the stream, not knowing what she would find or what she would do. She took of her shoes and placed her feet in the chill of the flowing water, the hard pebbles pressing beneath her soles. She smiled at the touch of reeds and flowing fish. Tilting her face to the sun, the warmth seeped into her skin and bones. Her eyes opened to the white warmth and she raised her arms to grab at the light and let them fall as the air moved in and out of her like the rush of water beneath her.

It was here that Finn found her. Word in the village had travelled quickly that Pearl had come home. The baker had seen her walking with her bag from the station the night before, and as people came early in the morning for their bread and pastries, news of her arrival passed from lips to ears to phone calls so that the news found its way to Finn’s mother. She quietly touched her boy’s shoulder and whispered low: Pearl’s come home. But not the home she had left. This alone had brought a smile and a small whoop of joy from Finn that his mother couldn’t help but laugh with him as he stood to run outside, making his way to the one place that still held memories of her.

And when he saw her wading in the stream, basking in the morning sun, his heart was as big as that shining orb, so full of fire and light and the feeling he had never spoken.

“Pearl,” he said, only wanting to say her name out loud after the months of silence and the heaviness inside him.

Pearl couldn’t stop the tears at the sight of his beloved face. She simply reached out her arms and then he was there, standing boots and all in the water with her as they held each other, with hearts as big as the world.

When they kissed, the words that spoke of their connection was now beating a rhythm between them, and whispered soft on their breath.

It was everything Pearl wanted to feel.

© Angela Jooste 2015