Not to Mention

Vivian de Klerk

Description

‘Utterly compulsive. De Klerk delivers a slow drip of a story that is both beautiful and monstrous. I've never read anything like it.’ – Michele Magwood, literary critic

As her 21st birthday approaches, Katy Ferreira has not left her bedroom for close on two years. In fact, she has not left her bed – at 360 kilogrammes, she simply can’t.

Characterised by an indomitable spirit, Katy tries to make the best of a bad situation. She does the crossword in the Herald newspaper her mother brings home, consumes the food she craves – biscuits, pies, doughnuts, litres of fizzy drinks – and waits in hope for insulin and a solution to her plight. To pass the time she begins to compile her own crossword in one of the Croxley notebooks that have been unused since she dropped out of school. Within each cryptic clue is a message, an attempt to explain how it feels to be ‘the fat girl’, how taking comfort in sweet things as a grieving and lonely child escalated into a deadly relationship with food and a psychological and physical disease.

The process triggers splintered memories of dark family secrets and hints of culpability. As Katy finds her voice – quirky, macabre, devastatingly astute and viciously funny at times – the notebooks fill up.

Not to Mention is part diary, part memoir, part love-hate letter to the mother who fuelled her daughter’s addiction as steadily as the world ostracised her. The destructive power of shame and society’s harsh judgement of people who are ‘different’ is matched by the immense courage of a young woman who is determined to be heard.

Sujets

• General officer
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781770107076
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Praise for Not to Mention
‘ Not to Mention is a work of remarkable originality. It’s a treat for those who love words and word games; yet it offers so much more than that. Vivian de Klerk, in this skilfully wrought debut novel, tackles a difficult subject, rendering with delicacy and compassion, but without sentimentality, the plight of a character whose affliction makes her a social outcast.’ – DAVID MEDALIE , director of the Unit for Creative Writing, University of Pretoria
‘A page-turner in the truest sense: chilling and masterfully crafted.’ – REBECCA DAVIS , bestselling author
‘Outstanding in its attention to morbid physicality, this novel explores the tragic irrelevance of a sparkling linguistic intelligence measured against raw emotional, psychological and physical need. The book is beautifully written, blending the parochial charms of Port Alfred, a seaside backwater on South Africa’s Eastern Cape coast, with a harrowing tale of cruelty, suppressed resentment and entropic dissolution.’ – LAURENCE WRIGHT , literary critic
‘A cunningly crafted tale filled with cryptic clues as to the real reason why Katy has a toxic love affair with food; the sensuous language will leave you hungry for more. Vivian de Klerk ingeniously invites you to delve beneath Katy’s voluptuous folds into the depths of her psyche in this compelling debut, which will remain etched in your mind, much like the harrowing Herald headlines.’ – SUE NYATHI , bestselling author

For Billy



First published in 2020 by Picador Africa
an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa
Private Bag X19, Northlands
Johannesburg, 2116
www.panmacmillan.co.za
ISBN 978-1-77010-706-9
eBook ISBN 978-1-77010-707-6
© 2020 Vivian de Klerk
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This book is a work of fiction. It is based on a wide range of personal experiences and observations. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Editing by Alison Lowry
Proofreading by Sean Fraser
Design and typesetting by Triple M Design and Setting
Cover design by Hybrid Creative


FORE WORDS
3 October 1980
KATY’S CROSSWORDS I
4 October 1980 to 9 March 1981
KATY’S CROSSWORDS II
15 March to 7 August 1981
KATY’S CROSSWORDS III
13 August to 10 October 1981
KATY’S CROSSWORDS IV
18 October to 24 October 1981
AFTER WORDS
27 November 1981 to 20 February 1982
LAST WORDS
24 February 1983 to 2 January 1984
Acknowledgements


FORE WORDS
3 October 1980
Hello, mother. Today is a special day – the day I’ve begun to compile my very own crossword puzzle. I’m doing it with you in mind, and I hope you enjoy solving all the clues eventually, one by one. I find it’s an interesting way to get through the day – compiling a puzzle instead of solving one. It helps fill the empty hours, stuck inside here with nothing much to do except read through yesterday’s Herald news paper, which you’ve been bringing home from work every day for all these years. You must know how much I love doing the puzzles, so I thought I’d try to show you how to do them too, by providing clear explanations as I go. Then maybe we can do them together – it’s so much more fun that way. Like I used to do them with Mrs Davis in the library after school.
I plan to compile quite a lot of crosswords actually, and to use up all four of the solid hard-back Croxley A4 books I got from the school stationery room at the end of standard six. Red spines, each book with 60 enticingly blank pages. Brand-new books for standard seven, with neat blank blue-edged labels in the top right-hand corner of each black cover. One would have been for English, one for History, one for Maths and one for Afrikaans. But that was eight years ago, eight long years at home, invisible to the world outside, passing the time away until I can emerge again, like a butterfly from a chrysalis. So I’m calling them Katy’s Crosswords I, II, II and IV and this is the first one. I love using Roman numerals when I can, and I feel excited because I’m going to start inventing my crossword clues today, using a clean fresh page of this first hard-backed book, once I’ve finished writing this Foreword section (which sounds a bit grand, I know, but you’ve got to start somewhere).
I’m starting big, with a jumbo. It’s a specially big one with 70 clues altogether, being the extra-large pachyderm cruciverbalist that I am, and you can fill the answers in on the jumbo grid I’ve drawn up. It’s a bit of a mess, and there might be a bit of a problem area in the bottom left corner, but I’ll deal with that later. You probably won’t have the time to look up ‘cruciverbalist’, given how busy you are at work, so I’ll tell you: it’s someone who loves doing crosswords, and I’m going to be your very own personal elephantine compiler. I got that word from my Collins Concise Dictionary , my favourite bedtime companion – second only to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable . Anyway, I’ll have to see how it goes.
It’s not going to be easy, that’s for sure, and certainly not methodical, because now that I’ve written down the answer to the first clue in the grid, it forces me to find a word ending in an ‘a’ for 9 down and starting with an ‘i’ for 23 down. There’s a sort of inexorability involved – the first step you take forces you to take the next one, and then the next. And of course, while puzzles are always set out clearly in perfect black-and-white grids, I’m afraid mine is home-made and a bit imperfect, like me. The grid is hand-drawn and messy, and it isn’t a mirror image, so the words might seem a little forced now and again. I’ll do my best, but I can’t promise it’ll all fit in eventually. I’ll have to see how things go. I’m going to write down the date each time I write, a bit like a diary, just to keep track of time – at least that part will be systematic, ticking off the days as they pass, because I’m going to have to jump all over the show with my clues; they won’t come in an orderly fashion, like they do in real crosswords. They’ll be a bit haphazard and unplanned. I hope you don’t find that irritating. I hope I get the numbering right too, and that the letters all fit in, because my mind isn’t working as clearly as it used to at the moment, so I apologise in advance if there are any problems.
I’ve found that crosswords can be a wonderful occupational therapy if you’re bored, or stuck, like I’ve been, with only Collins, Brewer’s, Stedman’s Medical Dictionary and outdated copies of The Herald for company – and I’m really grateful to Mrs Davis for showing me how to do the puzzles. My life has been a boxed-in affair, restricted eventually to this little bedroom with its square parquet tiles, contained and confined by these four square walls, with just a limited view of the world through the nine-square windowpanes on the left. It helps that I’m a wordaholic. ‘You’re my little word sponge,’ Mrs Davis used to tease me – and I’m enjoying trying to capture some of the less obvious meanings of my life in these cryptic clues of mine. I hope you also enjoy unravelling and interpreting them in your way. Just for the first few clues I thought I’d give you the clue, the solution and then a brief explanation. You should be able to work them out for yourself after a while, and get the point as you go along. (I’m going to compile a list of all the solutions as I go, and put it right at the end of the fourth book, but let’s face it, it would be cheating to look them up. You and Sister Martha always disapproved of taking sneaky short cuts like that.)
And one more thing. I’m going to make this first one a personal crossword, so each of the solutions is going to have some connection to my life – a significance of one sort or another, just to make things more interesting. All of the clues are going to be cryptic, by the way, but I’m going to start with a fairly straightforward one to ease you in, as it were. I love that expression ‘as it were’ – nicely vague, in a manner of speaking. Crosswords are all about meanings, you see, and I like the cryptic approach, which hides the meaning so that it isn’t too obvious. Maybe even a bit perplexing, ambiguous, not as black and white as the grid makes things seem. Causing a bit of speculation for a while. But the nice thing about cryptic puzzles is that you can eventually be absolutely sure that you are right, and even then you can still double-check, and make sure all the letters correlate.


KATY’S CROSSWORDS I
4 October 1980
So now I’m going to start with your first clue:
3 down: A curious attire for a brief solo (7 letters)
The answer to this one is ‘arietta’. It’s an anagram of ‘a’ and ‘attire’ – the word ‘curious’ acts as an instruction to mix the letters up. An arietta is a brief solo, and I like to think of this first big crossword as my brief solo: a chance to speak up and maybe be heard. It’s never over till the fat lady sings, and that’s where the Croxley books are going to come into the picture. The fat lady was Brünnhilde in the Valkyrie, according to Brewer’s, and I love to picture her, looking rather buxom with her helmet and spear, singing ‘Götterdämmerung’ for twenty minutes at the end of Wagner’s opera. Well this is my song. It’s a nice clue