Tell Me, Darling Read online

  “Speak for yourself,” said Tarryn. “My horizon was looking bleak, so I’ve been searching further afield.”

  ‘Can you believe it, guys,” said Denver. “My sister has met a guy online. Seriously. She doesn’t even know if the guy exists.”

  “He does exist!” objected Tarryn. “He just happens to exist in a different hemisphere, time zone and continent.”

  “That sounds very unwise, Tarryn,” said Linda. “He might not be who he says he is. There’s a name for that, isn’t there?”

  “Catfishing,” said Derek. “He might be seventy years old or locked up in jail or something.”

  “And even if he is who he says he is,” continued Linda, “then you have yourself a long-distance relationship, which is never a good idea.”

  “We did it for a while,” said Kerry, who was sitting next to Jared, her arm through his. “When Jared lived in Joburg. It was horrible, though. I’m so glad he found a job and moved here.”

  “Me too,” said Jared. “There’s WhatsApp and Skyping and all that these days but it’s still no way to do it.”

  “I agree,” said Linda. “When Derek and I came back from overseas and he went back to Pretoria before he found a job here – that was not a good time for us.”

  “Yeah,” said Derek, with a grin. “She couldn’t handle not knowing where I was twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Exactly,” said Linda. “He could have been going anywhere, with anyone, and I wouldn’t have known! It was very unpleasant.”

  Everyone laughed at the look on Linda’s face.

  “There are just hardly any nice single guys around here,” said Tarryn. “In church circles, I mean. And time is ticking, people – I decided I had to be more proactive. Maybe my soul mate lives in California and not Cape Town.”

  “Long distance Cape Town to Joburg is one thing, Tarryn, long distance to the USA is nuts,” said Denver. “My philosophy is this: finding someone you love and who loves you back is such an amazing miracle that it’s as likely to happen here as anywhere else. If God wants me to be married, then the opportunity will come up. I just have to trust him, and so should you, sis.”

  “I know, Denver, but a girl only has so much patience. When the guys you know just don’t click and nothing happens in years – I’m not just going to sit around forever. Even if it means I might end up moving to California. I mean, look around us – here we are with a married couple, an engaged couple, Jared and Kerry who are dating, Sadie and Joe in the weird friend stage, and then you and me! This is my social life!”

  Sadie’s heart nearly beat out of her chest. Had Joe heard that? She risked a look at him and he was looking at her, but he had a big smile on his face. “Are you my weird friend?” he said.

  Everyone laughed. “I can be weird,” she said. “I used to have blue hair, you know.” She was so relieved. Tarryn’s comment had just turned into a joke.

  “What do you think, Joe?” asked Denver. “Ever had a long-distance relationship?”

  “Nope,” said Joe. “I agree it’s not ideal. I think that when Christians start a romantic relationship, they should have a good idea of how it could move towards marriage, towards a life they can live together. Getting involved with someone who lives half a world away would make that very difficult. And I agree with you, Denver. About the miracle part.”

  Sadie wanted to cry. Oh Joe, she thought. Maybe the miracle has happened already. I wish I knew what you were thinking.

  She decided to speak up. “I think,” she said carefully, “that if you meet someone who you think might be that miracle for you, then you should do what it takes to make it happen, Tarryn.” She didn’t look at Joe. “Whatever it might take, within reason of course. Lost opportunities can be a tragedy. There might never be another chance. I think you’re brave.”

  “Yeah!” said Rudzani, giving Sadie a high five from where she sat on her other side. “I had to be brave, you know. Sibs nearly left to go back to Umtata without me. He thought there was no way I liked him back even though I had literally thrown myself at him, and he gave up before he had even spoken to me. Remember that, Babes?”

  Sibs laughed. “I was so dumb, my baby. I still thank God that you decided to come to my house the day before I was going to leave on the bus, to shout at me and tell me I was an idiot.”

  Rudzani snuggled up to him and squeezed his hand. “Then you grabbed me and kissed me and said, ‘I’ll never go anywhere without you if you don’t want me to, my baby,’ and that was it. It was worth it.”

  They all laughed, and Sadie thought her blush must be obvious even in the firelight. Are you listening, Joe? she wanted to shout. Is that what you want me to do? Declare my love and shout at you just as you’re about to go back to the other side of the world? But she didn’t dare to look at him.

  The topic changed after that, thankfully. They washed up the dishes and packed everything neatly away under Linda’s beady eye, then sat around the campfire. After a while, Rudzani and Sibs went to their tent, and Jared and Kerry went for a walk around the moonlit campsite. So did Derek and Linda. Tarryn put on her pyjamas and went into the tent she was sharing with Kerry to read her book, and Denver lay down on the picnic mat again.

  “Come and look at the stars, guys,” he said to Sadie and Joe. They both got up and joined him, lying on their backs on the mat to look up at the stars. Sadie lay in the middle, Joe on one side and Denver on the other.

  “Wow,” said Joe. “I have never seen so many stars in my life before. This is amazing!”

  “It’s because we are so far away from a town or a city,” said Sadie. “Can you see the Milky Way?”

  Joe was incredulous. They showed him the Southern Cross and the few other stars they knew.

  “We might see a shooting star if we look long enough,” said Denver. The three of them just lay there, watching. It was so unbelievably quiet. There was no traffic noise at all – only a voice every now and then, or a tent zip, or the faint background trickle of the stream. Sadie’s arm was gently pressed against Joe’s; they were so close she could hear the breaths he took.

  “Ah, this is nice,” said Denver. “Even if I am single and I don’t even have a weird friend – this is nice. God is still good. Looking at the stars always puts things in perspective. Who knows where we will be a year from now, even a week from now? But it’s cool here right now, lying with my friends under the African sky.”

  “God is good,” said Joe quietly. “He made every one of those stars and he made us. He’s in control.”

  “Amen,” said Sadie, quietly. Denver was right – this was nice, and God was still good. Even if Joe just wanted to be weird friends.

  The rest of the camping trip was one of the best fun friend times Sadie had ever had. Her memories of it later were also romantic, even though Joe still said nothing about their relationship and the weird friendship, as Tarryn had put it, continued. They went on another long hike the next day, and swam in a waterfall pool, miles from anywhere, that was like something straight out of her imagination. She and Joe swam out to the far side of the pool together and stayed there for ages while the others hung out on the other side. They reminisced a little about Camp Bellevue, and talked about work, and Joe told Sadie how he had become a Christian when he was seventeen, when his English teacher had risked getting into trouble and had sat and read the Bible with him in his classroom during lunch times.

  “Wow,” said Sadie, after Joe told her that. She had to talk quite loudly over the sound of the falls. “What made him do that? How did it come up?”

  “It was a poem,” said Joe. “We were studying it in class – a sonnet called ‘Death Be Not Proud’ by John Donne. It was about facing death and not being afraid. The last line is, ‘Death, thou shalt die!’ I had been thinking a lot about my dad and wondering if I would also die young, and it really got to me. My teacher said Donne was so confident because of his faith, and I was curious and asked what he meant. That’s how I first met Jesus, in Mr Shaw’s
English classroom while the other kids were outside eating their lunch.”

  “That’s amazing, Joe,” said Sadie. “Do you remember the poem?”

  “I do,” he said.

  “Well come on then – say it for me!”

  “I don’t know – maybe I don’t remember it all.”

  “Try, Joe. I want to hear.”

  “All right.” Joe took a deep breath. “Death, be not proud,” he said, holding out his arm as if he was performing. He paused, looked sideways at Sadie and laughed. “Am I really doing this?”

  “Go on,” she said. “That was a good start!”

  He continued: “Though some have called thee

  Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

  For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

  Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.”

  He stopped. Sadie had goose bumps. She felt for a moment as if she was in another world – sitting on a rock beside a waterfall, the mountains massive and rugged around her, listening to her favourite person in the world recite poetry in his beautiful, perfect English accent. “Is that it?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “It’s a sonnet. Fourteen lines. I was just feeling embarrassed. And the water is so loud, I have to shout.”

  “Please finish it,” she said. “Don’t be embarrassed. I’m loving it, really.”

  “Okay,” he said. He spoke the rest of the poem, looking out over the pool. When he got to the last two lines, he looked back at her. “One short sleep past, we wake eternally. And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

  Sadie wiped her eyes. “That was amazing, Joe,” she said. “You said it beautifully. And you remembered it all.”

  “Thanks,” he said, looking very self-conscious. “It’s a wonderful poem. I’ve never forgotten that it led me to faith.”

  “John Donne would be glad,” said Sadie.

  “I agree,” he said. “Should we go back and be sociable?”

  “All right,” said Sadie, happy to go back but a little sad that the moment was over.

  That evening there was another braai and another campfire, and this time Denver got out his guitar and got them all singing. Linda thought they should play some games, and even though no one was very enthusiastic, they humoured her and played charades. It ended up being the funniest, craziest game of charades Sadie had ever played, and by the end of it, Joe was laughing so much he was crying. He gave her one of his brief hugs good night as they all went off to bed, and she climbed into her sleeping bag feeling that it might just possibly have been the best day ever.

  “Joe saves his hugs for you, girl,” said Linda, as she sat on her mattress putting on her night cream, which was a little awkward to do with her headlamp on. “Have you noticed? He doesn’t hug anyone else.”

  “That’s fine with me,” sighed Sadie, so tired that she could hardly keep her eyes open.

  “He is really taking his time,” said Linda. “Does it bother you?”

  “Only when I doubt and start wondering if he has any feelings for me at all,” said Sadie, her eyes still closed. “If I knew for sure then I would have no problem at all with the slowness.”

  “If he doesn’t then he’s behaving badly,” said Linda. “I can get Derek to have a word with him if you like.”

  “No!” Sadie’s eyes flew open and she sat up. “Don’t you dare do that. Promise me you won’t.”

  “All right, don’t have a cow,” said Linda, putting the lid back on her jar of cream and zipping up her toiletry bag. “We’ll let Joe do this in his own way, even if he is being painfully slow about it. The tortoise won the race in the end, I suppose.”

  The tortoise won the race, thought Sadie, smiling as she closed her eyes again. Slow could be frustrating sometimes, but it didn’t necessarily have to be a problem.

  Chapter 39

  Sadie came back from the camping trip on a high. It was hard to go back to work and back to the reality of paperwork, nervous mothers, crying babies and night shifts. Also, her 85-year-old grandmother, who had been frail and senile for years, was in hospital with pneumonia, and Sadie tried to spend some time with her and help her mother at home. There was one week where she didn’t make it to church or Bible Study, and she didn’t see Joe at all although they texted each other every day. Then Granny suddenly started fading fast, and a busy night shift in the maternity ward was followed by a vigil at her bedside. She died that night, by which time Sadie had been at the hospital in the same clothes for over 24 hours. She went home with her equally exhausted parents and slept all the next day. When she woke up in the evening, she found that Joe had come by and left a note for her.

  Dear Sadie, it said.

  I am so sorry about your Gran. You and your family are in my prayers. Even when someone is old and has lived a long life, death is still “mighty and dreadful” to us on this side of eternity. I am sorry never to have met her. I am thinking of you.

  Love, Joe

  Sadie wiped away the tears from her eyes as she read the note. He could have just sent a message or phoned, but he had sent a note, on nice paper in an envelope, and Sadie appreciated it so much. She put it away in a box she kept for memories, with the other note he had given her at the end of camp. He knows just what to say, she thought. He knows. And that word at the end – love! In her sadness it was so comforting. “Love, Joe.” It soothed her heartache and felt like a ray of hope in her fog of tears and tiredness.

  He came to the funeral a few days later, sitting behind her and her family with her other friends and colleagues who had been able to come to the service. Afterwards, there was a tea at her parents’ house, and they all came and sat with her, the ones who had met Granny sharing their memories of her.

  “She hated my blue hair,” said Sadie, sitting on the couch with Linda’s arm around her. “And she thought my nose stud was from the devil himself.”

  They all laughed a little. “I agreed with her,” said Linda. “The hair was unnatural.”

  “It suited you,” said Joe. “It fit who you were then.”

  “That’s not what you said at the time,” said Sadie. “You said it made me look …”

  “Like a schoolgirl,” he finished. He smiled, as if the memory was amusing.

  “I recall that Granny said it made you look like an exotic dancer,” said Linda. “She wasn’t one to mince her words, was she?”

  “Nope,” said Sadie. “Until a while ago she had a sharp tongue and a sharp mind.”

  “She was the only one who never trusted that horrible boyfriend of yours,” said Rudzani, who had taken the day off work to come to the funeral.

  “Oh yes,” said Linda. “I remember that. He didn’t fool Granny for a minute.”

  Sadie fought back the tears again. They were right – Granny had told her from the start that she could do better than Paul. She had called him “smarmy”. It was a pity she had never met Joe. Sadie knew she would have liked him.

  Later that evening her parents gave her the news – Granny had left Sadie her flat, and a large sum of money. Sadie was shocked. “But Mom – surely she left it to you? I don’t understand.”

  “She was adamant,” said Elise. “She left me the rest of the money, and to be honest I am amazed at how much it was. The flat is yours, Sadie, and it’s worth a lot being so close to the University. You’re a property owner now, love. We’ll go over there next week to sort it out and pack it up, and you can decide what to do about it.”

  Sadie couldn’t believe it. The Mercy Ship – it was her first thought. If she owned a property like that, she could rent it out and use the income to go back on the Africa Mercy. But then – there was Joe. If she left to go on the ship, would he be here when she got back? Was it going to come to this – a choice between following her dream and waiting around for Joe to make up his mind? It was too overwhelming to think about.

  The next day was Sunday, and Sadie skipped church in the morning but was glad to accept Joe’s offer to p
ick her up for the evening service. As usual they sat together during the service, although by now Joe knew almost everyone she did. Afterwards, Joe went to the hall to get a cup of tea, while Sadie stayed in the church talking to Rudzani for a while. When she had finished talking to her friend, she made her way out, hoping there was still some tea left. As she walked into the hall, she could see Joe across the room, standing talking to Jared and someone else whom she couldn’t see properly, someone with sandy hair and a denim jacket that reminded her of something, although she couldn’t think what. She got her tea, wondering if she should join Joe or chat to someone else. As she cast her eye over the people in the hall, the guy talking to Joe and Jared turned his face to the side and she almost dropped her cup.

  She would know that profile anywhere. The endearing boyish face, with the strong brow that could turn his expression black in a second – it was Paul.

  Her reaction surprised her in its intensity. He hadn’t seen her yet; he had just turned his face to listen to something Jared was saying. It had been three years but still – just seeing him took her back all that time to when she had begun to believe that she was as bad as he had said. Her hand shook, and she held the cup in both hands to steady herself. What was he doing here? She felt angry, so angry that he had found this place that was part of her life without him, angry that he was here tonight of all nights, when she was so sore and sad about Granny. She considered leaving before he could see her, but she had come with Joe.

  Rudzani appeared at her side. “What’s wrong, Sadie?” she asked. “You look as if you just saw a ghost.”

  “I did, Rudz,” she said. “Look who’s talking to Joe and Jared.”

  Rudzani peered through the groups of people milling around the tables. Then she saw. “Oh my gosh, Sadie. Is that who I think it is?”

  “Yes.” Sadie took a sip of her tea, trying to calm her nerves. “What do I do? I don’t want to talk to him. Do you think he knows I’m here?”