The Shouting in the Dark by Elleke Boehmer

rib-cage rhythmically rises and falls, saliva glistens in a corner of his open lips. The father pays him no heed. He slumps lower, then suddenly jolts. A cry rips from his mouth, a torn, hollow sound of shock and abandonment.
    â€˜ God, O Godverdomme ,’ he cries – the same cry, Ella thinks, as on the nights when he believes he’s alone on the verandah. ‘Can you credit it, Ko? How fucked we’ve been, gesodomierterd by the lot of them, the bosses, the Admiralty. We gave everything, everything, and in exchange— ’
    Ella steps back and closes the gap in the curtains. She doesn’t want to hear more. What the father’s invisible listener waiting out there in the darkness makes of these cries, she doesn’t want to think.
    She lies down in bed, puts her pillow over her head. Enough, it’s been enough. She hears Ko stagger upright and a few minutes later the click shut of the guest room door. Out in the darkness there still are noises, hoarse and ragged. She presses the pillow harder to her ears. As many times as Ella has heard the noises, it still is terrible, the wordless snarling, spitting and gasping, the father no longer the English-speaking deck-officer at the centre of the action, no longer the level-headed artillery man managing the guns when Crommelin’s taken ill. She sees him instead, a poor frantic fellow, stumbling about on deck in the thick of enemy fire, his X-installation abandoned, squeezing his head in his hands.

Sleep
    â€˜Sleep, schat , sleep,’ the mother begs, standing beside Ella’s bed. She wrings her hands and sighs, ‘You lay your head on the pillow, Ella, you go to sleep. You will go to sleep. Without sleep a young person will go insane.’
    But sleep in up-country Braemar, Ella already knows, though it’s often commanded, is easier said than done.
    Her Mam and Dad, each after their own fashion, believe in sleep. Her father believes in short sleep, intense and economical, two hours for the price of one. He says that less sleep is required with increasing age. He cuts down his sleep at the start of the night by following the stars that shine through the crack in the curtains, as he used to do on board his plucky Netherlands destroyer the Tjerk Hiddes .
    â€˜What about robbers, Dad?’ Ella asks, ‘People who might come in the night?’
    â€˜There are worse things that come to you in the night than robbers, meid ,’ he says, casting a look at the mother through his black-rimmed glasses. ‘Besides which, this great country South Africa looks after its own. Robbers and other miscreants are put where they belong.’
    The mother craves sleep but cannot easily find it, same as her daughter. Sins of the fathers and the mothers. In bed at night, she says, her thoughts will not drift off, a great heaviness presses on her heart. Sometimes she doesn’t have the breath even to stretch out for the Catherine Cooksons on her bedside table.
    â€˜I was awake last night for hours,’ the mother tells her husband and daughter at breakfast, cradling her forehead in woven-together fingers. ‘I had to get up and walk about. The birds were already singing. This lack of sleep will boil my brain, I know. It will end up breaking my skull in two.’
    Like an eggshell, Ella thinks, a head cracked by sleeplessness. She knows what her mother means. The thin Braemar air here on the high Zululand escarpment doesn’t weigh her head down on the pillow either. With the father’s night-time talking added in, sleep is tough to find. As soon as he starts his noises, she must get up, check on things, catch what he will say, the stories of the Silindoeng , the Oranje Nassau , the Tromp . She must make sure he eventually comes inside, especially on nights when he is raging, see that he gets to bed.
    Lately, though, her wakeful mother has discovered what she’s up to. Ella hears her in the passage just outside her door,