The Shades

The Shades

Ashraf Jamal

Brevitas
Howick

Copyright Ashraf Jamal 2002 First Published in 2002 by

Brevitas

Publishers

P.O. Box 836, Howick 3290, South Africa Tel./Fax 033-3303269 / 033-3863570 e-mail pnb@futurenet.co.za All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Woman in a two-piece 1984 294 x 257 photomontage Jane Alexander Authors photograph: Andrea Vinassa 1993 Cover design: Alistair Nixon Typography & lay-out: Dietloff van der Berg Cover artwork:

ISBN 1-874976-14-7

Contents
The shades Empty Ghost heart Apple green In a field Ape man Grown hands D.I.Y. Destinys child Love, Jeffrey Fishy suits Merman Red man in the red German genius Jammerplank Winged love Black bag The beggar-guest The dinner The house-sitter Milk blue Nuptial Junoon My way Karoo dress 1 8 14 22 30 38 46 52 60 70 78 86 94 100 108 116 124 132 140 148 158 164 172 182 190

For my mother Nellie Theron-Hammar

The Shades

 in Africa a human being is an entity, not in the first instance divided up into various sections such as the physical body, the soul and the spirit. When a Zulu is sick it is the whole that is sick, his physical as well as his spiritual being that which is affected. He watches TV. The image recedes. He is in outer space looking down at a billion pulsing white ants that shape the African continent. No lines divide earth and ocean. It is the multiplication of flickering lights that matter; an electrical companys vision of an African future. The vision is vain, he thinks. It is not light that swaddles the earth but night. Outside night falls. He thinks of the stealth of a hawk silently swooping, plucking day from the sky with its talons. Through the squared frames of the burglar guards he had recently installed to fit the cottage panes and not break the membrane of glass he watches night emerge. It is always there. Veiled. The hawk swoops, its talons glittering. The remote control is broken. He gets up to switch off the TV. Night sounds. In the bathroom his daughter sings ... two little bees in a garden. In the bedroom his wife is on the phone. They have been in Kwazulu-Natal for four months. They have lived in the house for two. The roof needs repairing. In the mean time he will remove the painting above the fireplace where the leak persists. His wife laughs. A good thing. She is in her first trimester. Nauseous. Lonely. Unhappy. Who can blame her? The wife goes where the husband goes. The adage depresses him. For now she laughs. Said the one little bee to the other little bee: Is your pom-pom bigger than mine? Night is on his mind; like ink it fills the cranium. He sups. In a fortnight he presents a paper on Zulu ritual and prophecy. He knows he must retire to his study. Now he looks through the window. The red earth of the driveway is turning black. No stars, only glittering talons, plucking, stitching, forming its patchwork of black. In the distance the lights at the entrance way flash on then
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off; controlled by a timer. An electric gate has also been installed for easy access; the better to control the traffic of the unnameable and violent. There are maleficents abroad. Beasts of prey. They come like fate, without reason, without pretext. This is South Africa where the night is red. Ribbons of blood like a kites frayed tail cutting through the black. Ink in the brain. Blood too. When a man dies before the grey hairs appear, still being full of vigour (esaqinile), then the people say: What is this thing in our midst? We know nothing. Suddenly we see umhlola (any strange, extraordinary, awe-inspiring thing or occurrence causing one to wonder) working among us. The people become very troubled about the death. Berglunds Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism is his key source. Like himself, the author is the son of missionaries. Bringers of light. Bearers of words. Converters. Perverters. Resentful, sick, glowing with hysterical fervour. Messengers from the ad agency in the sky. Pale, alien, fearful of night; clutching the holy book, its pages sodden with Africas liquid heat, rotting steadily; the words parasited, diseased; offering salvation, giving none. On / off. The lights at the entrance, sheathed in balls of plastic, feebly light the way. A defence, a lure. Total darkness is preferable. He wont convince his wife of this. Her laughter too is a form of light. The house is circumferenced with light. Light in the hallway. Light beside the bed. Light in her pale eyes, her pale hair. Where he stands the fuse has blown. Shell replace it soon enough. When shes troubled. When laughter ceases. There is talk of a wall. He baulks at the prospect, says nothing. The house by day is beautifully situated at the sloping foot of a hectare of land. There are trees all around. Too many trees, she says. They block the view. What she doesnt say is that they shield a threat. What he doesnt say is that the threat is constant. A woman is raped by a gang of teenagers. She lived a
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mile away. A man is shot in his garage on a Sunday afternoon. The priest from the local parish is hijacked in broad daylight while waiting for the traffic lights to change. Despair and faith; handmaidens in these troubled times. Reason prevails. How turn safety into an art form? Change the burglar guards for a cleaner view. Weld a filigree of thorns to the top of the electric gate. Run a viper vine of spikes about the fenced circumference of the property. And now an inner wall. Brick conceals, is easily scaled. Vibracrete is not an option. He has settled for welded mesh and razor wire attached to tar-poles interspersed at three meter intervals. The poles will echo the trees. The mesh is difficult to cut. He would prefer to think of night as a wall; a wall that enfolds, suffocates, inhibits. A cursory glance at the newspaper and he knows that the fear of night is dying. He weighs the lack of fear against the brazen increase in slaughter. With the death of fear comes the death of ritual. There is no poetry to the cries of a raped woman; to the cries of a dying man a few meters away from his children seated before the TV. These are not ritual deaths to secure ancestral regeneration. This is slaughter without meaning, without fear. Slaughter by the godless and the unregenerate. His daughter places her arms about his leg. Her damp hair touches the back of his hand. He realises then that he is trembling. Shaking. He lifts his daughter into his arms to ease his fear. The balm of innocence; an innocence he must protect and knows he cannot. She points to a tick-bite at the nape of her neck. Thank God there is no telltale rim of night about the scratched crater of skin. The wound flares red. There will be no fever. She reminds him that it is time for supper. And then a long scary story. She is four and savours this ghoulish bedtime communion. Was he the same? He doesnt think so. Does she sense his fear; her mothers? Does she believe that the telling will ward off evil? She enjoys the fact that she is always the heroine; bravest of the snaky girls, her favoured current personae. She has many. She moves through the labyrinth of drama with ease. She does not tolerate too much detail. Get to the story she insists, prodding him. In the story she will have a knife, a gun with
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bullets. She will topple Red-eyed blue, her favoured adversary. She will smash his head with a rock. She will wait for the grand moment when the village honours her bravery by erecting a statue to the snaky girls; she at the towering centre. How does she reconcile this dark vainglorious craving with two little bees in a garden? They move to the kitchen. Reluctantly she lets go of his embrace. He lets her grate the tomatoes, which satisfies her. The black-eyed beans are cooked. So is the rice. The bottom of the pot is burnt. He sets the beans aside to cool, decants hers before adding the chopped chilly, garlic, dhanya, gheera. The medley of smells console him. He remembers an account by one of Berglunds informants. The shades enter the head through the mouth of the dreamer. They visit the eyes so that he (the dreamer) sees them. Then they pass on to the ears so that they can be heard. That is why a man who has dreamt much has a taste in the mouth. It is because they have been passing in and out through the mouth. Beneath the taste of dhanya he recovers the taste of night. And what does it taste of? He swills the secreted fluid. Gall, he thinks. He asks his daughter to fetch the dictionary. Gall: A sore on the skin made by chafing. A mental soreness or vexation. A place rubbed bare. A growth produced by insects or fungus. These are the meanings upon which he alights. There are others. She wants to know what he is looking up. His eye falls. Gallant, he says. Brave, chivalrous. Like you. She smiles. Her radiance overwhelms him. Was his smile once so bright? His tongue twists in his mouth. Smells good. His wife appears. She too is radiant. As proof of her good will she kisses him on the ear, then scoops up a spoonful of black-eyed beans. Rice is burnt, he says. She doesnt care. For her, at least, it will be a good night. Janes decided to leave. Phils landed a job in Auckland, she says.
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The Antipodes. And after? The Antarctic? He winces. Jane and Phil are not the first to go. He dreads dinner invitations. They invariably revolve around appointments abroad. In bed, their daughter asleep, the conversation would resurface. A sore on the skin made by chafing. A place rubbed bare. She too thinks of leaving South Africa; Africa as a whole. But where can a forty-eight year old researcher in Zulu studies go? Into night, he thinks. Tonight in bed she will pick up the conversation. Not now. Now she lets the inference linger and turns to their daughter. Their embrace is as overwhelming as their twinned smiles. In his wife he sees no destruction of the soul, no withered hope. She is transported. Transfigured. She changes constantly, of course. Her unhappiness is as practical as her fear. She believes there is a solution for both. Now they eat. First a prayer. Their daughter places palm to palm. Thank you lord for the food, she says. Then adds: May we all be gallant. She giggles shyly. It is the first time she has uttered the word. She knows its meaning. His wife gazes in wonder, looks at him searchingly. Nothing is said. The plates are set aside for the housekeeper who comes in the morning. Her name is Goodness. She is at the heart of the family mantra: Thank Goodness for Goodness. His wife decides to tell the long scary story. He retires to the study. An attic room. He lights a cigarette. It is the only room in which he is permitted to smoke. The lap-top gapes; a skull grimace. He twists the mouse. His screen-saver appears. It reads: IN A PERFECT WORLD. The words are accompanied by an image of the New York skyline replete with its twin towers. Compliments of Phil, bound for the Antipodes. He struggles to lock his mind to the paper he will have to give in a fortnight, but his mind is unruly. It has been that way all evening. Glittering talons have swept away his mind. The light of reason is rubbed bare. A bruise survives, first red, then slowly, inexorably, darkest blue, then black. A flag for this nation. A flag for an unfree world. For today there is no escape, he thinks. No saving membrane. No protective wall. Eyes no longer look, eyes glare; wakeful, fearful. The body is a jagged carapace. But nothing will save us. The heart silts
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with night. He opens Berglunds book, reads the sentences he has annotated: The important role played by dreams in Zulu thought patterns cannot be overstressed. Without dreams true and uninterrupted living is not possible. There is cause for anxiety when people do not dream. These are fearful nights. I do not see anything. Perhaps there may be something (bad). A troubled mans words to his diviner. We have grown too wakeful, he thinks. Our dreams are not our own, but packaged nightmares visited upon the consumer. Like the electric fireflies that would wither Africas darkness we have tried to banish the darkness within. Have we succeeded? Yes. Our hearts and minds are flood-lit, without depth. Our fears lack complexity; they lack life. Our dreams are unregenerate; viral, celluloid. There is no true fear, hence no promise of life. And the Zulu people? What of the Zulu people? Will they return us to the goodness of night? Or are they too caught in the glare; petrified, confused, fatalistic? He reads: Today there are not many shades but a large majority of abathakathi. They are increasing in numbers because there is no watching any more. Not putting medicine into the grave. Nothing there is done. Nothing. So the shades are dying. They are being taken (lit. eaten up) by abathakathi. So what can we expect these days except bad things.... If we watched the graves the shades would be happy. They would feel secure. Then things would go well. They would soon appear in dreams, being happy that we were doing our work nicely. But today we are simply forgetting them very soon. Even their food. They appear, saying, Children of our fathers, we are hungry. But there is nothing done. They are dying of hunger.
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He blots out the twin towers, closes the grimacing skull. The laptop is black; the black of a dull, overcast night. Now there is true silence. His daughter must be asleep. Is his wife waiting for him? Is the plot of her conversation readied at the lips? He hopes not. He is tired. Rubbed bare. The taste in the mouth which hed sought now stays. He wants to dream. He wants the shades to teach him to see again; to listen, truly listen; to taste with love. He reads: They are in the head. When I dream, they are in the head, causing me to see the dream. I see my eyes being closed. I do not see things outside (me). I see the things inside (me or my head). That is where they cause dreams. They are inside.... That is true. They are everywhere. They are in the head, in the whole head.

Empty

The first thing she sees is outside of her. Crushed. Twisted. She reads the brand. F for FANTA. F for FUCKED. Like most words this ones easy to say, harder to deal with. She watches the dregs slide across tar, thicken around the bruised lid of her eye. She tries to move. Something in her wont. Cant. A car speeds past the shoulder where she lies. Heat and thunder. The roar dies. She doesnt think anyone can see her. People never did, why should they now? Black skin. Black dress. Black in the black night. Even the blood she sees on her splayed thigh is black. She tries to shift her eye away from the saccharine sting. Her head wont roll. The liquid slips under the lid, slides along her cheek into the mouth that wont close. Nothing in her will close. The taste is more acrid than sweet. She knows the taste. Shes spat it out a thousand times. She cant spit it out now. If her head wont move shell try another part of her body. Shell move in pieces. Slowly she rolls her knee, tries to slacken her leg. The pain is unbearable. She knows theres blood there; she saw it out of the corner of her eye when the car flooded past. But what she reacts to now is not the sight of blood, the knowledge of a cut; she reacts to something else, something that makes cuts. She knows its glass. Broken glass. She wants to cry but she cant. Her right eye, half filled with sweet stinging Fanta, churns. The other, rolled back, is red and white like the moon. Her mouth is raw, not a mouth at all but an acrid sperm-filled cavity; lips torn, teeth broken. She wont cry because she cant. Not even air fills her. She is empty. A place for empties. The twisted link surprises her. She realises she can think. Not a good thing. Never a good thing to think. Still she thinks. She thinks of the empty thats still inside her. Useless. Broken. She couldnt take it to the bottle store and get her money back. The quart she knows the size, they showed it to her is good for nothing now. Good for her, she thinks. She who is nothing now. They told her so, whispered the words into her ear as they shut her mouth and opened her legs. She couldnt hear her own cry of pain and alarm. The pain deafened her inside. The pain echoes now, but no one can hear her. How can they, when no air will fill her, no sigh slip the mooring of tongue. Does she have a tongue? The pain within
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is deafening, all encompassing. It has no single source. Blood everywhere. In the eye, the mouth, in the emptiness between her legs. Empty, she thinks again. Dont fill a woman but empty her. Tear the flesh, rape the voice. Leave nothing. Make nothing of nothing. It is the word they spoke repeatedly. Nothing. Indefinite. Without substance. A hole. The hands that shoved her legs apart, shut her mouth, tapped the bottle against her ear so she could hear the hollowness, seemed to belong to one man. Did it make it easier to believe so? She thinks not. She only knows that the hands were one and the same they may have belonged to different men but they were the same fingers and palms calloused, nails sharp as blades. Only the voice was soft; soft and hateful. You want money. I give you money. Wallet gaping; a stained and clotted tongue. She watched the hand withdraw a thick sheaf of ten rand notes, green and white as mould. Money. Isnt that what shes made for? A thing made for money. Ten rand notes shoved in a bottle shoved up her the medium is the message up her cunt. Its the only word she can find. Not one shed use, but like fucked its a word that comes easily now. Its a word that lives inside her; unsentimental, efficient, as sharp as glass. A message in a broken bottle. Up her. Inside her. Dividing her. Not her. But who is she? What is she? Whore. Jintoe. Poes. Shes heard the words a thousand times, spat like nails from the mouth of any grunting man. Words of hate to match their sex like knives. She, the target. Did she think it would come to this? She doesnt think so. Its not that shes stupid. Shes not. Its not that she doesnt know that whats happened to her has happened to others. Its not that. She knows the risk that comes when you stand on a street corner and bargain with hate. She just didnt bargain for this. This feeling that shes feeling now, because yes she is starting to feel. Shes moving beyond the evidence. Shes feeling because she thinks shes dying because she is. She is dying. Her cry is deafening. Mute. She is not sad. Shes not even afraid. She is not blind to her fate. She is not even confused or desperate. Knowledge fills her in a way that air will not. If she cannot move her head, it is because her throat is cut. If she
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cannot shift her back, it is because the spine has snapped. Her heart is a broken bridge. Her hands, gathered at the nape of her spine, are bound with razor wire. If her knee falls and her calf slackens, it is because she is resigned. Gravity claims her. Still, there is pain. At least there is pain. She feels. She thinks. She cannot tell sensation apart from mind. She thinks of her son Zwelethu; he is crying for her now. She thinks of her mother, Beauty, who has long ago forgotten to cry; her mother who walks through ash and shame, unbowed, loving still in the bloodless way of those who, like she, have accepted fate. She thinks of the shopkeeper who offered the love she renounced. She thinks that now she wont repay the money she owes him. She thinks of her brother grown hateful too. She thinks of her father, hateful always. It is he who first called her a hateful thing. He, then the others, who stole her away as she walked to school, whispering sweet nothings because she was nothing. She never liked what they did to her. Strange, then, that she likes what has been done to her now. Likes. A sweet word for an unsweet deed done to her. She who has done nothing. Is she redeemed because she is innocent? She thinks not. She is not innocent. Innocence was never hers to have and to hold. For her innocence was nothing more than a cheap plastic doll, as easily broken as she is broken now. As empty too. Empty at last. Why did she renounce love when it was offered to her once? Because she did not like the look of love when it finally appeared? Stick legged, pot-bellied, reeking of brylcreem. Ishmael, hed said. Call me Ishmael. He made it sound like he was James Bond. She didnt know knows not now that he was referring to a novel from another time; a time of obsession, a time when love was a form of madness and not a form of hate. Ishmael. With a sigh his name topples the broken heart within her. Nothing inside, nothing outside, hurts her anymore. The pain has gone. Where, she thinks, where does pain go? What happens to the pain of those, like her, who were never vengeful, never bitter? Will others hear her sigh of alarm? Does her son Zwelethu hear her now? Her mother? Ishmael? It is dark, too dark now. Only in dreams will they hear her. Do they hear her? Or have their hearts
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grown tired with worry; so tired that now they no longer worry, at least not for her. But then it was she who told them never to worry not for her. Shed made a bargain with hate, she said. She is aware of the risks. She believed shed arrived at the point when no words would come between them; a point when no acts as dark and stale as hers could ever defile the little that could survive hate. Why, then, does she now long for their worried hearts? Is it not too late? She thinks she sees the sky empty. She is wrong. Where there was blackness the ground reaches up brown against expanding blue. She senses this rather than sees it, the one eye blinded, the other swollen, pressing the world into a sliver. A bird settles in front of her, its beak taps the crushed and twisted can. She hears a human cry. A pair of thick ankles and squat feet with nails painted red appear before her, sheathed in pink slip-ons with the flimsiest of heels. In the blinding sliver of light, her face flush against the warming tar, she sees little else. She could never have imagined a stranger consoling vision such feet in such shoes! She is smiling difficult to picture but she is smiling. Pictures are hard to see, especially internal ones. She listens to the womans broken voice on the cell phone. Three distinct sets of hands and arms appear; one creased with age, another lithe, the third a veld fire of red hair. The fourth pair of hands, invisible to her, holds the head and neck in place. Slowly, ever so gently, she is being lifted. She trembles in their trembling hands. Tears from above sting her face, her cut breasts and legs. Pain returns, audible and comforting as a sigh.

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13

Ghost heart

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Through the rear-view mirror he watches the glitter of them caught in a dust cloud mother and child. The child, fist to cheek, thumb in mouth, scratches the speckled nail with her teeth. The childs look is the same as the mothers blank bemusement, concern, if it exists, is stifled. He has raised the child with the air of one who embraces the most delicate of experiments. Da, their first contractual exchange, knowing she was looking for a word that could hold him. Da ... barely a word. Spoken first under the almond tree. Now, as he watches the mother and child through the rear-view mirror, the image of them shuddering with the shuddering of the truck, the pale conviction that bound them falls away. She the mother has always known he would leave. Why else does she stand unmoving, bare feet on the burning ground, dress and doek aflutter in the dust-swept wind? He is not leaving on a business trip. His is not the bravura of a man whose job it is to bring home the bacon. What do you bring to a home where no one eats pig? Milk to make hot chocolate for the girl. Grapes for the mother who eats nothing else. He a part of the cleansing process. A toxic thing given up to the ether. Grape season in the valley. To the left and right of the pot-holed road the vine heaves. Soon the air will be piquant with the rot of abundance. With a fingernail he slits the green skin, pops the fruit into his mouth. Sweetness fills the shuttered cavity where no sweetness has spilt its juice for some time. A shuttered mouth for a shuttered house. A deceased estate for which there are no claimants among the living. No words have past his shuttered mouth. No words of love, no words at all. No parting brush of lips. No liquid from her lips or tongue. Hed placed his boots, duffle bag and tent at the front door. Hed chopped the wood for the Dover. Hed wanted to leave traces that said he wasnt really leaving; that he was still present; that loss was illusion. Was this for the girl? For the mother? Nothing was said. Why speak when action alone matters? Actions speak louder than words. But what do actions say? That he is not really leaving when he is? What is the good of actions when they are forked? No better than a snakes tongue.
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He the snake. Is that what she is thinking? Is that what her black eyes say? Her face a buttoned and folded shirt, bloodless, white. Her black hair pressed down by the blue doek; something to make with the scraps left over from the dress she wears. He thinks of women from another time, a time of veils; bare feet on the burning ground, but the heart encased, shut away; wanton hair pressed down, glittering black. Down ... the gravity of the word does not suit her. She is not down. She is bound ... by duty, conviction. What, then, convicts her now? He knows the answer. A single word. He will not say it, think it. Not yet. Instead he thinks of the Flash Magnifier she gave him; an object, like her, from another era. The shape and size of a torch, the object came with a list of applications: To check signatures and seals. To examine fibres and textiles. To inspect plugs and the like. To scrutinize the conditions of taps and drills abrased. The list explained what she wanted for him, wanted him to do. To see. To search. The gift a thing to prise darkness open at the shuttered mouth, open the throat, find the heart. Fanciful. He is being fanciful. The thought gnaws. He returns to the list of designated uses. Surely the object was given to him to stalk broken things and fix them? A practical thing for an unpractical man! It is he who is the tap from which no water leaks, its spout dry as bone, the ligament abrased. It is he who is the fraudulent seal and signature; he the false thing that must be uncovered. The injunctions are hers. Examine. Inspect. Scrutinize. This is what her black eyes say. This is the true edict expressed in a folded and buttoned face. Look to your heart. Search closely and tell me what you find there. Again the word surfaces. Again he sets it aside. She' d found the Flash Magnifier in a second hand store in Tulbagh. Shed bought it because he has trouble with his eyes. He uses it to read books, to show the girl things. An insects eye. A dogs paw. The heart of a flower. He knows now, as the truck heaves away, that it was given to him so he could look to his own heart.
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The Flash Magnifier lies now in the cubbyhole; in the cavity of the breast where the heart lies. Rolling there, glass pressed to the bloody thing inside that beats, he waits for the Flash Magnifier to settle; for the eye to settle in turn, then see. Truly see. The heart is not a mystery. It is a thing that beats. Telling, tolling, the heart quickens. What he sees there with his weakened eye is the little one, the one unrecorded; third in the trinity, blood of his blood, shielded from the dust, puckered lips to the mothers breast. Had he failed to think of her because he can not, must not? Is that why she the mother says nothing? Is her silence truly silence, or a rage grown hard within her? Hard like the eyes. The pressed lips. Betrayal He accepts the word; he can defer it no longer. The word blooms inside him, a grassland on fire. It is the hungry ghost inside the heart that returns the word to him, a gift unwanted and inescapable. It is the ghost in the heart that tells, tolls, its gut bloated, the mouth through which the ghost speaks a pinprick. It is all truth needs to speak. A pin. A prick. The ghost has spoken. Its single word devours him now. Betrayal. Another word for bad faith. Another word for guilt. No other word can explain what is happening. In the dictionary betrayal is followed by betrothal. He knows this because the hungry ghost has told him so. Dictionaries, like lists, are sweeter for their randomness than their seeming order. Not for him the promise of betrothal, the ghost tolls. He splits the skin with his nail, ingests the sweetness. Grape. Grapeshot. Another strange harnessing. To fix a fruit so sweet to a thing that wounds ... is this the meaning of dictionaries? Sweetness and pain? If he places his ear to the dictionary to his heart will he hear a resounding mocking laugh? Will he hear the ghost say: You do not know what you mean. Betrayal. Betrothal. Grape. Grapeshot. Words wedded, at odds. They recoil now under the glare of his weak eye. From the dictionaries cauldron the cauldron of his heart bubbling,
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boiling its brew of pilots thumb and foot Hecates brew he gleans the word that is his to have and to hold. Betrayal gift of his hearts ghost. The one word that explains what he is doing, what she is thinking. He still sees her standing on the sweltering road, frock agape, the little one latched to the fullness of her. Mother and child. His child. Seed of his betrayal. Shona. What of her, his little one? What of Shona? The question grinds as the truck heaves, bleached blue against the yellow shimmer of slate and stone; the rolling serried green of vine all around. A guinea fowl flees from wheel and fender, lifts, flutters, falls. A comical bird trounced by gravity. He thinks: Sadness too must have its comedy. Then the bird falls from his mind. Sloughed. The little one stays. Shona. Named for the grasslands of Angola. Named for the beauty of the name or a warmongers pain? Shona ... a hush, a hiss of grass, a bullet to the brain. Grapeshot. What was he thinking when he named his little one? Why didnt she stop him? Because he, like Adam, must name the world? Because she, drunk with morphine, must let the little one be snatched from her gut like a shard of shining steel? Shona ... love child, child of war, split at the core like all words, all deeds. He persists: No word, no deed exists which does not betray. What does he mean? What is he thinking? Is it he who thinks this now, or is it the ghost in his heart that whispers to him through its pinprick mouth? Does it matter who thinks this that he thinks? What matters is not the ghost inside of him, not he himself. Would that he could separate the two! What matters is the little one in whom he seeded his betrayal. It is she, his little one, who bears the mark. A letter stitched to the breast. A stain at the soul. The truck trundles through the village, heat-struck, still. There is no one he can gift with a passing wave. The flamboyance of the gesture he longs to make, surprises him: He who gifted nothing to no one, asked nothing of no one. The vision of the three on the dusty road persists. His trinity. His cross. He cannot imagine their backs turned on him the way he has turned his back to them. The truck moves slowly. He is not in haste. Like the truck he too heaves a weight; a weight heavy and ungainly, like the comical bird he passed. He locates his laughter there, in the
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bird. If the comic has a place it is outside of him. Is that the right word? Comic? Sadness too must have its comedy. But in him there is only sadness. A soft word for such a hard thing. Hard as stone. Hard as steel. He persists. It persists. War will not leave him; will not stay in the trenches of the past. War, his hungry ghost, rages now in the sun-struck sleepy streets of the village. How could he have thought he could pluck a name like a blade of grass and think the soil that fed it would not revenge the theft? A whim, he thinks now. A flight of fancy as ungainly, as forced, as the flight of the fowl. Flight of a wishful foolish heart. Shona ... not a true name not a good one. A mistake. A miscarriage. A word plucked from a confounded gut. One day one day when his little one has grown to the fullness of a woman she will strike her name from the record because it is alien was never hers. He is gladdened by this act of treachery; an act never his to fulfil, for his is an act harder, much harder to fulfil. He knows the consequences of what he is doing as he drives for the last time through the village. He knows the word that fills his ghost heart with ash. Betrayal not treachery. A deeper violation, which no Flash Magnifier can fathom. It is all too late, this act, this word. He knows the act is misdirected. He knows what he is doing is wrong. To who will he explain the deed? To the ghost with its pinprick mouth who tolls, devours, who never listens? He thinks not. He wonders whether the word, the act, can ever be explained. Again he thinks not. Not now, not ever. He is wrong. He has wronged. Should he stop the truck, make a U turn? They are still there he thinks. The child ... fist to cheek, thumb in mouth, one bare foot scratching the back of the other. The mother ... feet firmly planted on the hot ground, blue dress aflutter, pressed against thigh and knee ... the little one who sleeps in her ample arms. His eye is hurting because it sees too clearly. His eye, turned inward, is pressed to his heart where betrayal whispers, boils. In a flash he thinks his ghost heart thinks the word was always shielded, encrypted within another. Shona another word for betrayal. Does he mean that in naming his little one he made of her a trophy for his pain? Shona ... burning bush, broken land, birdless, seeded with death.
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He knows now that the leaving is good. Good for whom? Himself? He thinks not. For them? Again not. Then for whom? Who will gain from this betrayal? Time, he thinks. Time will gain. Human time. The girl who calls him Da will grow. The little one too. They will grow in a light undestroyed by him. Under the almond tree he spoke the one syllable that could bind him to the girl. No syllable binds him to the little one. No shade shields her from the sun. No past claims her. No future damns her. She is free. They are all free. Even the silent mother, her breast too full to bare. She too is free. The tree is gone. He has chopped it down. Now only grass will seed, light and lithe, a wink in the wind. Earths air. For the first time he smiles. He knows now that he no longer needs the rear-view mirror to explain his journey. He no longer needs to look to his heart. His ghost heart sleeps, enfolded upon itself. Its pinprick mouth is sealed, coins pressed to the lids. The tolling has ended. His eye no longer hurts. His heart, he thinks, is dead. But it is not. For now his ghost heart sleeps. Two bars all round, he says. He watches the petrol-pump attendant clean the windscreen. He studies the pink palm as it separates from the cloth. Coral. A coral palm with its own peculiar whorls, its own certainties. He smiles at the attendant who smiles not at him but at all the world. Where to? the attendant asks as he shifts to fill the tank. Karroo, he says. The Little Karroo. Then, unbidden, he finds himself saying: That is where you go when you are dying. That is where you go to begin again. The attendant scratches his head, doffs his cap. His eye watches the digits swell; watches distance grow. A click. The digits still. A zero grows to fullness. Then, with the fullness, the emptiness of the zero, the attendants smile transforms into something unforgiving. Though the attendant well knows of dying and living, it is not a thing he would venture to express not to a stranger.

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Apple green

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She enjoys shopping. It is not to stave depression. She is not depressed. At forty-two she is still beautiful. Still ... her word. She uses it now because it chastens her faith in what beauty means what it means to others what it means when she uses the word to describe herself. Still. The word modifies the glow she feels. Yes, she has the kind of skin that glows. Moon skin. Sea skin lit from within. In front of the full-length mirror in her full-length room she turns, looks, and looks again. The built-in cupboards gape, but nothing is in a mess. She puts on, takes off, replaces. Method in the shopping. Method in the arrangement of dresses on the rack. Method in the colours. Apple green and black. Fuchsia, then a wrap of spangled scarlet. No underwear. If she cant go naked, shell find an empresss clothes made of air. Her body is the thing she wears. She wears it like she wears her mind. Methodically. Her thoughts arranged. Her heart arranged. Love is a vista she sees clearly. The distance between her self and the self she sees in the mirror is mere illusion. She is inside the mirror. She is inside her body. Her heart is not something she wears on her sleeve. Her heart is something she weighs like the fall of a shoulder, the look in her eyes. Apple green. Sea green. Never innocent. Never guarded. Fearless green. Her body is a thing, but she moves in waves. Nothing presses upon her, shapes her, other than that which must shape her. It is air, she thinks, air that wills her. She does not breathe, she aerates. A human thing made of mystery. She looks to the mirror to see what she sees there. Light falls, limbs laced with shadow. She shifts, lets shadow dress her. More green than black. Vine of shade. Skin moon white in the filigreed dark. She looks, sees the vein. Seam of blue across the breast. She looks, finds the cut at the nape of the stomach. A deeper white, she thinks, if white were deep. Which it is. Which no one says. The white of the cut to the stomach, more membrane than line, glows in the encroaching dark. She thinks of sea creatures with limbs like lamps. Pellucid. Transparent. More star than sea creature. A thing of light in the fathomless deep where the sea knows no colour.

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She hears the bedroom door open. Through the tilted mirror she sees him. She knows his look, feels it now travelling along her back, falling, swaying, dropping down to her feet. She does not move. Neither does he. She watches him as he turns to look at her through the mirror. His eyes are hooded in the overhead hallway light. His head is a nest of grey thoughts. His jaw is slack. His mouth, she sees, is slack too. Something wanton invades his tiredness. Ruin, she thinks. Not a man but a ruin. Flesh as flaccid as the shirt. The hallway light gratifies her. It is dark outside. Will he switch on the bedroom light, adjust the dial to shift the mood? She doesnt think so. It would break the vigil he has already broken. The vine of shade is gone. The moon has fled. She is cut by a light that carves the bedroom floor. Knife light. She, the thing cut. She smiles, enjoys the theatrical cutting up of her. She runs an elongated finger along the seam that divides light from shadow. Amazonian, her single breast shimmers under cold light, the other devoured by shadow. There, where her breast should be, she imagines a slung bow. Across her back a brace of poison arrows. Along the seam that splits the night and day of her she watches her elongated hand. The nails gleam. Apple green. What is he thinking of while he looks at her? Or is he too tired to think? Men and their tiredness. Merchants in waste. Why wont he enter, kick off his shoes, fall groaning to the bed? Its what husbands do in front of naked wives. Fall. The better to look up, she thinks. Perspective is everything. Perspective is the nature of desire. Still he stands unmoving, his eyes hooded. The better to see? What? Her? Hes seen it all before. He has never liked it. Correction. He has never admitted that he likes what he sees. Unabashed. A quaint word. Quainter still when it fell from his mouth. Did he mean shameless when he used it? She thinks not. He would not want a wife who was a thing of shame. She searches now to find its true meaning. His meaning. She thinks of his mother because she thinks it is a womans word. A womans weapon wielded against her own sex. Does he truly know the meaning? Looking at him now, she thinks not. He, never given to pointed inference. Demurral a murmuring of the scruples that is
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what she thinks of when she thinks of him. What little truth he possesses he murmurs, lets slip, holds quivering in his ridiculous moustache. She grows impatient with his stare, strides towards him, switches on the bedroom light, and slams the door in his face. An unkind thing to do? She thinks not. It is he who is unkind. An unkind mirror. She has had enough of his looking. Always over her shoulder. Always from a distance. If her heart is clear, his is clouded. A heavy cloud. Hangdog. Dog cloud. If he hates her, say it. If he is unhappy, then say it. Why murmur words that are quaint, stale; words which wont fit? He calls her name. My God, is he still there?! Elna, he says. She hates the name. Elna, he says again, and makes her hate him all the more. She opens the door. What is it? She sees that he is crying. What is it? She notices that he hasnt moved. What is wrong with him? He lifts his thick hands to touch her. She pushes his arm away and strides down the hallway. Buttocks rolling. Breasts swaying. He watches her amazed. In the kitchen she lights a cigarette. She wears a housecoat in thick pink cotton with white polka dots. Cheap, she knows. She likes that. The cord is roughly tied. Her chest and stomach glow hard under fluorescent light. Cold feet on the fake marble floor. The nails of her elongated toes are pieces of mosaic. She wants to scream but she wont. Smoke rolls upward from her unmade mouth. She watches a moth the size of her fist. Waits. Stupid, stupid moth. The light crackles. The moth falls to her foot. She arches her foot, lets the moth slip to the floor. Anything velvet sickens her. The velvet of his hooded eyes. The velvet of his breath. His velvet voice. She thinks of sprung dogs at the back of a car. Mating dogs in a car made for mating. The seats and dash soft to the touch. Soft and sad and spineless. She could tell a story or two about sorrow and velvet. Men and their hangdog love. She lifts her leg, drops her foot into the sink, and twists the tap. He appears. She flicks the cigarette into the sink as she removes her foot. She leaves it up to him to turn off the tap,
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pluck the butt out and drop it in the bin. Another sign of his disapproval. She the harlot with a fag in her mouth. It is not her lungs that concern him, but the sight of her. Nothing must penetrate her, except him of course. The velvet man with his velvet eyes, his velvet heart. That velvet thing, limp and soft under his beige trousers. Does he feel her eyes there? His trousers are thick cotton. The shirt too. Over the blue shirt he wears a flak jacket. What is he thinking? That he is a man of war? A hunter? A reporter from the front-line? Stupid, stupid man. The serried pockets of the flak jacket are useless, empty. Some, she thinks, not even opened. What could he possibly find to put in all those pockets? Words of reproach, she thinks. Words scribbled on bits of paper the better to remember. Unabashed. The cord loosens. Her nipples are hard in the cold. The hairs of her cunt are flickering embers. Hot with anger. Cold with hate. And yes, she is wet inside. If you want to hunt, then hunt me! She waits. Her breasts heave. He brushes past her, opens the fridge. Opens a beer. Were running late, he murmurs. She wants to laugh. Cry. Wont. Cant. He exits the kitchen. Hell place the beer on the bathroom counter. Hell drink while he shaves. Twice a day is good enough for such a hairy man. Grow a velvet beard, she thinks. Hide that weak chin. Running late. What makes a man so stupid? A woman a fool? Cold comfort, she thinks. Its the house rule. Time to change. She thinks shes swerving right, but shes swerving left. Turning she sees the moth crushed underfoot. His foot, sheathed in a fake hunters boots. The wings have snapped. The larval centre is glutinous, grey. Crushed velvet. The night is cold. She doesnt care. She pulls the housecoat close to her puckered flesh. Feet softly run through wet grass. Where is she running? Nowhere. If someone stops to inquire where, shell say the corner store. In a housecoat? With nothing underneath? In this bloodthirsty land? In a pink housecoat with white polka dots? The vision floods her as she moves fearless through the suburban night. Theres no one to inquire because theres no one there. The boundary walls are fenced to the sky. Jacaranda trees glitter violet under lamplight.
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She knows because her neck is arched upward. Her limbs are loose; the housecoat blows up and out. Her skin is violet too. Madness, she thinks. This thing she is doing that only a woman will do. The car screeches to a halt in front of her. The passenger door gapes. She steps inside. He slams the door. Her vanity bag is in the cubbyhole. The dress and shoes hes chosen is on the back seat. He wont have had time to shave or change, or finish his beer. He doesnt care. Why should he? Hes the hunter. The man of action. The man whose job it is to pull his wife off the street. She switches on the light attached to the mirror in front of her. Green for her green eyes. Sheer red for her lips. A twist at the nape and her hair falls in a filigree of curls. Hes chosen the back-less black dress slit to the mole at her thigh. Hes chosen the sandals with its fretwork of leather that lashes the shin. Apple green gloves for the puckered elbows. On his thick finger he dangles a sliver of v. He drops the laced sliver between her thighs, grabs the housecoat from the floor and hurls it out of the window. The gesture excites her. Its the first real thing hes done all night. She turns to look at him. Her velvet man with his velvet glove. She the thing caught in its grip. Its a compromise she makes for moments like this. They arrive. The casino glitters. No need for a Master Card. Everythings free and they the rewarded. For what? He opens the door for her. No other man must do that. He leads her with his velvet leash across the red carpet. She notices the rolled hosepipe forgotten on the floor. A snake asleep. Apple green. There are security guards everywhere, chests thrust out like pouter birds, faces visored. Guns where the heart beats. He leads her through the gauntlet of cameras, his trophy, his thing of beauty. Its what he wants, what she will be. His wife for all to see. He wraps a chain of emerald about her neck, murmurs into her mollusc ear, then leaves. A bell tolls. So too the ranks of slot machines. The music of money: a hymn. The casino is called the Golden Horse. She sees one beneath an architrave, its front hooves raised and gleaming, its flanks rippling. A thing of glue and paper, she thinks. Its armature
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made of foam. Like everything else she sees the horse is Trojan, fake. And she when she sees herself is that what she sees? A thing disguised? But what of the war she carries inside her? What of the bow slung across her breast? Her brace of poison arrows? Illusion, she thinks now. She runs so she can be caught. She hurts so she can be loved. Apple green ... thing of sin, thing of innocence. Like the seam that binds the fake horse, the seam that binds her is false. Does she care? Not at all. If she chooses innocence it is because she wears it well. Better than most. Superlatively. The mirror tells her so. So do all the velvet eyes arraigned now upon her body. She ... more star than creature. Under toll and glare she glows with that deeper white of which she dreams. Deep ... deeper ... deepest. She sees him walk towards her. Blue and beige have gone. The boots of a hunter too. The flak jacket with its quaint stolen words, which will not hold her, lies waiting in the boot of the car. His tux is edged with velvet. He wears a velvet bow. Her eyes fall to the velvet sea horse that lolls in the reef between his legs. She wants nothing more than to take the sea horse in her mouth.

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In a field

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There are apostates and there are good sons. He is the good son. Bringer of light, celebrant of joy, emissary from an undepraved world. He bears these epithets with a smile; they do not affect him. There are things people say about you, which you can do nothing about. And in these dark times when words like love and hope and goodness matter so much he is not afraid to accept them. They are gifts. Sacraments in uncertain times. He is not a great believer. Celebration, like ritual, says more about the need than the deed. He knows the nature of need; knows the desperation that is the heart of need. He was once needy, once desperate too. A boy from Zululand signalled out for greater things by an astronomers eye. ... He remembers the letter he received from the South African Committee for Higher Education. Hed crossed a field of cane, opened the post box, opened the letter, sweeter than the field of cane. He, the chosen one plucked from the sky; a nameless star. Hed waited like all the others black as he, feet shifting in Bata shoes, eyes shifting too. A doctor hed say, when asked what he would be. Healing was his inclination as it still is now. Except the tools have changed and with it the science. He does not press a stethoscope to the chest, does not open his mouth and say AH. He peers now into the throats of souls. Tired of shifting, of being shiftless, hed opened an unlined Croxley pad, put pencil to paper. He drew a field of sugar cane, a knowing cloud above a little boys head, shafts of light, an earthing dark, and in the distance a dwelling made of clay and thatch. In the boys eyes he drew light; the light drawn like water from the empty page. His instinct knew then as it still knows now that light is not a thing but a things aura. He is ushered into a nondescript room, a table, two chairs, a beaker of water, two glasses, and behind the table a white man. Patrician he thought then, thinks now. A nobleman from ancient Rome seated behind a desk, before a sheaf of papers scored with the names and deeds of gifted children. The Roman peers at him through rheumy eyes. Strands of hair sluggishly flutter about his pink skull. He tells the Roman his dream of becoming a doctor.
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The Roman listens; he has heard this story before. The story of many a poor black boy. A story of healing. A story of riches. Because of me the dead will walk. Because of me all pain will cease. Children and their childrens books where faith finds myth. Where myth is another name for science. A doctor, the Roman said says now and peers through the beakers refracted glass where he sees the Croxley notepad clutched in the boys strong arms. A flick of an opened palm and the pad passes from boy to man. The Roman looks at the field of sugar cane, the clay dwelling, the cloud, the boy. He sees the light unstubbed by pencil. Light in the limber walk of the boy. Light in the suncraned stalks of cane. Light about the clay and thatch dwelling that is the reason why the boy walks, why the cloud holds its breath, why the field of cane bends, its genuflection a sacrament to the dwelling and the great promise it holds. For it is the dwelling which holds the letter which has taken him here. All this the boy explains while the Roman looks and looks and seals his fate. He will be an artist, the Roman says. The boy laughs. He is shocked and afraid. An artist? What is that? What is this thing the Roman wants me to be? Though he baulks he also listens. He is, after all, the good son. The distant nameless star that must be named. It is the Roman who will name him. The boy departs having accepted his great fate. His mother too waiting as he crosses the field to tell her accepts his great fate. Now, as he sits in his studio and reflects, the field, the mother, the Roman dead now, etched in memory he accepts the blessing of anothers vision. It was light, which passed between them mother and child, the Roman and the boy light that fills him now. He smiles. His smile is his spirits chalice. Like the sundrenched field of cane he glitters, bows. Now it is more than sweat than shines on the penumbra of his cheeks. It is the spirit within which smiles. He knows this spirit well. It is his companion in these dark uncertain times. He, the boy grown to a man. How must he honour such light now? Now in these dark uncertain times when light grows fictive and strange. Now in this time of false hope ... this time of fakery and treachery. A godless
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time, he thinks, this time in which he lives. A godless time brimful with gods. One no better than the other. How he longs for the Roman now. Would that he would guide him. He is seated in his studio, the interviewer and he. He is the subject of many interviews nowadays. He reflects upon the vision of the boy walking through the field. I walk through the same field now, he thinks. A field of hope and restlessness. These are the ciphers of that long ago vision. The studio will not be his for long. The signs of decampment are already there. Cardboard boxes, some gaping, others closed, are randomly arranged about the floor. What does she the interviewer think of these signs of restlessness. Do they comfort her the way they do him. A job well done, over now. Time to move on. Time to embrace the next plateau. It is the word which best describes who and what he is. His life unfolds in steady stages. There are no great peaks. No plummetings from grace. Ever upward, ever outward, the plateau reaches. The plateau never intimidates. Like a palm it lies open upon a plain. There nothing hides; no gesture is guarded. There humanity is at peace. The interviewer speaks: You are leaving the School of Art, moving on to greater things. And what are these greater things? Exhibitions abroad, travel. The prospect of travel delights and excites him, he says. He is slowly, surely, turning away from his inner thoughts, turning towards her, willing his minds embrace of her. A big man with a large head and shoulders to match, feet firmly planted on the ground, he is he knows the emblem of success. Healthy, wealthy, and wise. Light too, despite his weight; light in mind and heart. Where does it come from, this lightness? He asks the question in the beguiling way of those who cannot know the answer. Not even the question, he thinks, is his to ask. He asks it all the same. Its what words are for to ask questions. Questions, like faith, are sacramental acts. But his questions are not truly questions. He does not know the meaning of doubt, just as he does not know why clever people gather nails in their mouth. Pain is a form of mysticism to him. The pain of the unreasoning reasoning mind. The pain of those
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who think that in hurting themselves, in hurting others, they and the world will be all the better. Is this why he is favoured? Is it because he bares the stamp of innocence or as they say purity? Look at the colour in his works, they say. Look at the dignity he returns to the world. He longs for judicious insight and gets only craven worship. An apple keeps the doctor away. He, the artist, holds tragedy at bay. If he laughs now, eyes shining under bespectacled light, bass tones lifting from the gourd in his chest, it is because he is past explaining who and what he is. Not in words, never in words could he express the laughter that greets his soul when he wakes, when he blows out the lamp to sleep, sits now in his studio littered with light. The subject of the interview is not his pastel drawings but his photographs. It is these, more than any other aspect of his work, which have spirited the world. Strange, then, that in none of the photographs does one find laughter; in none does laughters twin echo its pain. Each is framed by stillness poised and rare. The subjects, framed by the rooms that shield them from uncertain night, stare directly at the camera. No, there are no accidents here, he says. If you look youll see why. The interviewer looks, she cannot see why. The beauty of the image like the glittering penumbra of his smile leaves her little room to see why. Beauty exists, the photographs say. There are no nails in beautys mouth. No shadow world distorts what beauty is, what it reveals. He has plucked the soul, laid it bare. And yes, the soul is beautiful. How does he do it? Again he asks uselessly. Asks because he knows it is what interviewers expect. Answers. And questions, which are secretly answers. But he holds no secret. The question and the answer are one. He glitters with a kind of knowing that forces the questioner to yield. The heart is a thing of worship. The soul too. The heart and soul bode no questions, yield no answers. Either you kneel, kiss the face of beauty which is the souls face, or you walk away, heel first, wary eyes wakeful, fearful, in case a bolt will strike, reduce faithlessness to cinder.
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But there is no vengeful bolt. He, like his work, is unrevenging. He will not sow doubt. He will not seduce with questions. His face, like his hand like the faces and hands of those he frames eschews mystery, offers up no story, and tabulates no hurt. Look and you will see. There! It is there! She looks, and looks again. The shutter clicks and still she cannot see. The dictaphone whirs, fills up, its record a record of laughter and glittering smiles and silence. Look! See! Even the notebook placed on her lap is blank. Her notebook, a thing of beauty! Immaculate! He peers over his silver rimmed spectacles, the better to grasp the blankness she too expresses. Impetuously he touches her hands folded one upon the other. The pencil a stem without a flower is a useless jutting thing. He draws the pencil as though he were performing acupuncture. Which he is. He knows he is. It is his photographs which are the needles. He too, the needle that records. How then, record the recorder? I am sorry, she says. He pats the back of her hand. She lets him. What she does not know, is that while he laughs and smiles and asks questions useless to her, he is studying her. He has been studying her for some time; from the moment he drew her from the threshold and placed her at the heart of his studio where she sits, the veins at the feet thickened by the shoes she wears. Court shoes, unforgiving in the oppressive heat. The skirt, impractical too, woollen with a Tartan pattern. Again, impetuously, he arranges her skirt so that now the knee is no longer bare. She wears a waistcoat over her blouse. About her neck a fine chain of gold. Christ sleeps between her breasts. Her hair is mouse brown; brown for a mouse. The strands that fall about her face are as thin as air. The hair is short, like a boys. The face is unmade, mottled, pink. The nose like the mouth is pointed. No acuity resides in either cavity. No instinct. No mind. Is it because she sleeps with Christ that she cannot think? cannot feel? What then of the band of gold on her wedding finger? Who is he, this man, this betrothed? He looks to the breast sheathed in shimmering pearl. He passes the stick of wood through the eyelet and binds her waist-coast. She lets him. He looks to her neck for the pressure of anothers lips. He looks
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to her lips, a pressed flower. He turns to the eyes. Still he finds no love. She smells of peppermint. Of this creature too he will make a thing of beauty. He rises, draws his chair silently back. Without turning he finds his camera, slips it from its casing. He knows the field of focus; it lies with Christ. Before she leaves he hands her a catalogue of his photographs. It is accompanied by an interview, which he hopes, she will read. It harbours a story she could use. The story of a boy walking through a field of cane. Its what journalists do, he thinks. Look for stories. Make stories. Use. And he? Does he use? Has he used her? What will she think when she opens the envelope he sends to her and sees the photograph of herself? Will she turn against Christ? Or will she waken the faith that sleeps upon her breast? He thinks the latter. She is given to repair. He imagines a flowering at the tip of her pencil. A rose, he thinks. A white rose. And what of her lips? What of the pressed flower? What of the eyes that peer and will not see? What of the feet that need not hurt? What of the knee exposed so vulnerably? Boy-woman. Christs child. He wants to save her, but she is not his to save. Renunciation and insight is his lonely gift. His gift to her. His gift to all those with which his soul is peopled. He opens a copy of the catalogue he has given her. He searches the words hed once spoken words about a boy in a field. Reading he searches for himself.

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Ape Man

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Shes in the back of the car holding on to the little boy. She can see the drop. Theres no protective wall. Slow down, she says. He doesnt listen. Ed in the front repeats the plea. The Datsun speeds down the winding pass. She cant wait for the steep drop to her left to disappear. She prays. Ed sits stiffly. Beneath her bare feet she feels the thud of stone and shale. If she peers she will see the blur of ground through the rusted hole in the floor. The Datsun hits level ground, swerves, and spins, abruptly stops. The little boy cries. Ed steps out, drops to the ground. In front of her the valley stretches out. Fynbos lights up red and gold with purple encroaching. Soon it will be dark. Great fists of rock break the vast plain. The silence is deafening. She strokes the boys yellow hair. In the drivers seat the man is frozen. A rock, she thinks. A stupid rock. She exits, holding on to the boy. Ed tries to lever the Datsun but it wont budge. DO SOMETHING!!! she screams at the man frozen in the drivers seat. The fender twists like a harelip. The bonnet is twisted too. The headlights are smashed, the electrics dully flicker. A boulder has ripped through the engines gut. The tire rod ends have snapped. Metal claws rock, making leverage useless. She punches digits into the cell phone. Paces. The little boy is becalmed by the silence, his eyes riveted to the flickering plain of red and gold. Night falls, softens the sudden shift from grinding speed to stillness. The little boy sleeps in his mothers arms. While Ed talks someone has to break the silence she glares at the driver. His eyes shift to the twisted fender. He knows he is wrong. She feels his pain, knows that it is not good enough. Its her car, not his. Its her life too. What of the boy? What of Ed? Is he mad? Is this his way of wiping them off the face of the earth? It was her idea, this weekend in the country. He didnt want to go. She pleaded. Is that all she does these days? Plead? And when he does not listen? What then? What is the good of pleading? She is sick and tired of his refusal to listen to her. Is this his answer then? She presses the redial button, connects, turns away from the Datsun, and walks into night. From behind the wheel the driver watches her move away from the headlights dull
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flicker. For the driver this shift from dusk to dark is neither soft nor fluent. He knows who shes talking to. Its the reason theyre here. Theirs is an open relationship. He said it, not her. Open? Like a wound, he thinks now. Like the engines gut. It is he who makes the wound. Ed opens a six-pack, hands a beer to the driver. She emerges out of the dip that leads to the plain. Hell be here soon, she says. She wont say his name. The driver would like her to. She knows that. The driver weighs her every word. He pays particular attention to the intonation she gives to mens names. Ed has passed the test. Ed is innocuous, a pot bellied blabbermouth. Froth. But the one she will not name? The one his little boy calls Tarzan? They watched the film together, he and the little boy. Theres mummys friend the boy said, pointing to the animated figure hurtling between mangrove and sky. A jutting chin. A gash for a mouth. Nose as sharp as an arrow. Blue eyes. Honey coloured hair that brushes the spine. He watched the figure leap from vine to vine, settle on a mossy stump, feet splayed, chest pounding, eyes glowering. Her Ape Man. What does the boy see when he says There! See dad! Has the boy seen the Ape Man in his mothers bed? Does he have a chest like that? he asks the boy. Are his legs so strong? Yes! He doesnt lift the loincloth and ask There, have you seen that thing? They live she and the driver in separate places; she in the city where she runs a dance studio, he in the country where he paints still lives, throws pots, makes candle holders and blikkitare, products for the tourist market. It is she who commutes, he whose duty it is to look after the boy. He is glad for the times the boy accompanies his mother. He can learn things. The problem is that she hides nothing, leaves little for him to learn. From the start she confesses to the Ape Man. Is it because she believes in the truth, or because she knows there will be no reprieve either way? Whether shes with the Ape Man or not makes little difference. She knows this all too well. Hell goad her all the same. Hell break her down; reduce her to prayer; reduce them all, if he can, to nothing. He is dangerous because he lacks fear. It has taken
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her this long to realise that his lack of fear is a kind of cowardice. He cannot live. He will not live. But why threaten Ed? Their little boy? Her, yes, hes hurt her before. Eds tampering under the Datsun. Something to do. Ed knows something is wrong between the woman and the driver. Hes heard both sides of the story. Neither side impresses him. He is not given to sorting out peoples lives. He is neither analyst nor surgeon. A friend then? Here he pauses. If friendship means that you are always in your own company then what kind of friends are these? Who are they, this woman, this man? Ghosts, he thinks. The hither side. Ed lives alone. He has his cats. Ghosts too. Ghosts without wounds. He knows that others think it strange the way he lives. They imagine he has a tragic past. Why else live alone? They think he is lonely. A hermit. He suffers the opinions of others. They do not move him. He feels their pity. He pities them in turn. There is nothing profligate about his decision to remain alone. He possesses no wounded past. He has no dislike of children or women. He attaches himself to other pursuits because he must attach himself to something. If he shelters now beneath the gaping engine it is because he knows that certain things cannot be fixed. He shifts the torch light, studies the snapped arteries of steel. E.M. Forster is wrong, he thinks. How connect when nothing connects? A man before a wheel he cannot control ... a mother at war with the man that binds her to the child. ... And what of the disconnection inside each of them? What of the loathing which masquerades as love? Ed is no philosopher. No analyst. No surgeon. He has no solutions to the questions he poses. If he is with them now it is because he too has thwarted death. Like her hed needed a weekend away. Unlike her he knows there is no escaping who and what you are. Better a hermit crab than this sexed rage. This wounding. Love is a black hole, he thinks now. We are sexed so we can find that black hole. And he, he who will not use his sex? The thought slips into night. Along the spine, the nape of his neck, Ed feels the tremor of the advancing vehicle. Ed remains under the Datsun. Lights emerge. The vehicle moves
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slowly. The driver has not quit the car. The driver watches her advance toward the light. Her bare legs. Her bare arm waving. He crushes the can. A Land Rover, sensible vehicle for a terrain such as this. The Ape Man appears. The Ape Man strokes the boys yellow hair, presses his hand to her shoulder. The driver hears Eds voice through the gaping engine. Ed is talking to the Ape Man who studies the buckled bonnet of the Datsun. Has the driver stayed in the car so the Ape Man can see exactly who is at fault? Does the driver mean to say: Look at me, look at the crazy fool? The driver has never seen the Ape Man before. Now under torchlight he sees what his little boy sees. The likeness is uncanny. The Ape Man glimmers in the torchlight. He sees the Ape Mans eyes. They do not glower. They are soft, as soft as the Ape Mans voice. He sees how the Ape Man reassures her. He sees the Ape Man take the boy from her arms and place him in the Land Rover. Back and forth she, Ed, and the Ape Man walk. They transfer the contents of the Datsun. Theres nothing the driver wants to do. Nothing he can do. She tells him to get out. Her voice is soft too, but not as soft as the Ape Mans. He senses the strain. Shell save her anger for later. She sits in front with the Ape Man. The boy rests his head on her lap. No one talks. They are rocks in the bed of a dark steam, Ed thinks. Ed holds his breath under nights stream. The encampment is remote. The Ape Man decompresses the tires, turns off the headlights, and slowly wends down a rocky gully. The Land Rover shifts its ungainly weight. Now the clouds have passed. Now the sky is littered with stars. Ed cranes his head, aghast. When the Land Rover gently manoeuvres over a boulder he steps out. In his hands he holds the torch he will not use. All about him the earth is silver. A fire burns, encircled with rocks. The Ape Man lays blankets about the fire. Kindling snaps. The fire glows. For the first time the driver and the Ape Man see each other clearly. The Ape Man stretches out his celluloid arm, rearranges the logs. Honey coloured hair bronze in the firelight. You live here alone? the driver asks. Mostly. Is the driver surprised that the Ape Man speaks? Would he have preferred a grunt? She sidles up to the
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driver, wraps her arms about his waist. He doesnt want that. He cant tell her to leave him be. She knows he cant. The Ape Man is there before them. Between them. The Ape Man knows the driver must have his mate. Has she told the Ape Man about their lives? Did she say he doesnt want her anymore? Is that how the Ape Man finds her? Lonely? Needy? Did he make a lonely and needy thing of her? And is that what shes now trying to hide? The loneliness she feels? The weekend is a time to relax is it not? A time to put your troubles aside. But when the trouble wont go away? When he is a thing made for trouble? Ed appears grinning, his teeth white in the firelight. In his hand he holds a dassies skull. He wraps the skull in newspaper and places it beside the sleeping boy. Water boils. Let me. Ed makes the coffee. The Ape Man rests on the blanket, knees bunched, arms folded. He wears a sarong and a necklace of shells. Probably has a didgeridoo, the driver thinks. Is this what the boy sees, this sarong, this necklace? Who the hell does the Ape Man think he is? Adam with his fig leaf? The Ape Man is oblivious to the drivers thoughts. She cranes her neck, looks at the driver. In the morning youll see how everything is changing here, she says. It is Eds presence that allows her to speak. Though she looks at the driver to gauge his heart she already knows it is a cold hard place. He is an unshifting weight against which she rests. Not even a dull flicker joins him to her. When the driver wakes the Ape Man is gone. The boy squats beside him, the dassie skull in his hands. She is gone too. The driver suppresses his troubled thoughts, rises like a man with a clean conscience. The show is pitiful, but no one is there to pity him. With the boy he walks. He finds her and Ed lounging under an oak tree beside a freshly dug pool. There are man-made alterations like this everywhere. Olive trees where nothing else will grow. Walls of stone and mud for a house made to vanish in its surrounds, the site snugly enfolded by a rocky outcrop. The boy runs ahead of him, his chest thrust out, small fists slapping, face stern. The dassie skull is tied with string around the boys neck. He knows who the boy pretends to be. The boy does not know the pain his innocence causes. The boy alters when he sees
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his mother. He holds the skull before him, says look, look. She stares at the skull and smiles. Look Ed, the boy repeats. Ed sweeps the boy into the pool. Together they holler, grunt, ululate. She smiles at the driver. Her fearless fool. He cannot wither her smile no matter how hard he tries. Her smile is irresistible. In the night she has changed. He persists. What has changed her? Where has she stored her anger? She takes him by the hand and leads him into a secret grove. How does she know this place? She would not care for his questions were he to express them. She cares for nothing now. There, on the bed of grass she lies waiting. For the first time the driver notices that she too is wearing a sarong. He watches her, a pale blue thing in the grass. He knows it is not an act of forgiveness, this act of hers. It is not a pact of peace. Then what is it? What does she want from him? She smiles and smiles. Is she on some drug? Is this what happens in the land of the Ape Man? Come, she moans, her hands outstretched, beckoning. Come. Nearby Ed and the boy ululate. Still she smiles. Still he will not yield. There is something grievous in him that wants her yet will not have her. She smiles undaunted. She has her hand between her legs. In the secret grove she writhes while he watches her. Her smile becomes a grimace, her eyes closed to the burning light that shines upon her. He is caught in the shade of the grove. Is this how she lures her Ape Man? Come ... come mate with me. He yields to the cry inside of him. STOP!!! The ululation dies. Shaking, the driver wrenches her from the ground. The sarong falls blue on the green. He presses her to him while she weeps. She knows this place of tears, knows it well. She knows it the way she knows this face he gives to love. A rough thing. A jagged stupid rock. She feels his trembling arms. Is it death he feels so tenderly now? When he looks at her writhing in pleasure is it her near extinction that breaks the strain? Neither has spoken of the crash. Is he still there, behind the wheel he cannot control? Is that why he trembles now? When he cries is it she he wants to stop? Or is it something inside of him whose end he wills? And when he does stop, what then? What truth will emerge? Who will save him from himself? Not she the Ape Mans whore.
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Come, she softly says. Come. She picks up the sarong, wraps it about her waist. What of the naked breasts? She will not bend to his censure. She takes his hand and leads him out of the grove.

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Grown hands

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1973 in the Cape Flats. The boy is eleven, the grandmother has forgotten her age. She is a tree in a place of weeds. Like a tree in a childrens book she walks, talks and holds his hand. Like a tree, four years from now, she will be struck down. Something in the brain, like lightning, will extinguish her. Then she will no longer walk, no longer talk while she holds his hand. When that moment comes, a moment akin to dusk, she will hold the day like a fading memory. He will see her then, on the hospital bed, her eyes empty, unseeing; her mouth open too, her tongue pressed down with a silence she does not have the energy to shift. He will speak to her, whisper loving words, words she well knows, the vocabulary of their love. Then, from her unmoving face, tears will fall. He will place his hands there where the tears fall. Her tears will be the last of her that he will hold. There, on his hand, the tears will stay. There where they still stay now. He puts his hand to his mouth. He can still taste her tears. Though she be dust, her grave like any other, still she stays with him. Is it his heart that has claimed her? Where, he thinks now, where does love stay? His heart is full, but it is not she alone who fills his heart. Others have claimed a nesting place there. It is in his hands, it is there where his love for her alone stays. Unremarkable hands, but they are his. With these hands held before him he touched her hair, fine as a spiders silvered web. With these hands he lovingly tugged the creamy wattles about her neck. With these hands grown large he held hers. 1973 in the Cape Flats. On weekends hed stay with her. A time he cherished more than any other. Theyd sleep together in the foldout bed in the living room. She lived on the second floor. With these hands, smaller then, he drew her up the stairs after the long walk back from church. Everyday shed go to church. He regretted the moments on other days when others would guide her to and from the God she worshipped. Shed sense his longing and walk the five miles to his school to collect him. Then theyd walk back to her flat, his school-bag pressed to his back, grey shorts flapping about his bony knees, she in a grey cardigan and a smock of faded cotton. Adventurers, the two of them, youth and age in a desert overgrown with weeds. Hed recount his day. Mr. Martin who thought he was stupid because he couldnt subdivide. Hed show her the drawings
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hed made. Her flat was a gallery filled with his art. In between, against the pea-green walls, Jesus appeared on a cross, at a table, on a hill, in a field. At night, together on the foldout bed, his head upon her breast, hed look to Jesus, her saviour and his friend. Jesus was a great walker, shed say. With each step he stitched the world together. Hed bury his head deeper still, his thin arms around her waist. Stitching, he thinks now, ear to her heart, his body pressed tight against her. Did he think, then, that one day she would die? No. He would make Jesus his friend, the better to hold her who was his only God. Blasphemy? He looks to his hands to see if he can find blasphemy there and cannot. If her faith is greater than his, if she placed her faith in a greater God than he ever would, does that mean he is damned? He refuses to believe this because he has known great love. Jesus is his friend and she, his grandmother, is his God. She weeps still in his hands. It is she who is the undivided divinity within him. He could not, still cannot, divide. Stitched, he thinks again. It is because of her that he is whole. Her great love has made it so. He sleeps in her arms still. When he wakes she is there with her hair a skein of silver, her drooping breasts and eyes, the softness of her wrinkled cheek, her many tongues ... Basotho, Xhosa, Zulu, Afrikaans, English. In the darkness shed sing the song of the sacred horse, the song of the sacred field, ancestral songs from a time before this time in the Cape Flats, which then, was the only time he knew. Stitched, he thinks again. In the morning hed bathe her because hed begged to and shed come to understand his beggary as a kind of love. Hed fill the basin in the kitchen with warm water. Hed select one of three faded frocks. Her vestments. Her stockings bound with elastic about the shin. Her single pair of shoes. Once dressed, hed brush the skein of silver, the hairs a tethered cloud in the brush in his hands. No matter how gently hed stroke the cloud would grow. Did he think then, as he thinks now, that this cloud of silver plucked from her head was not a moulting but a sign that one day she would be dead? Never. She lives still in the hands that touched her. Hands grown too large for the wrists. Unremarkable hands. Again he places them to his lips.

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A prayer made of tears. If he worships her now, it is because he worshipped her then. She his religion. She his God. For breakfast bread and porridge. For lunch and supper a bowl of samp. At night after prayers at the foot of Christ shed let him put on the record player. For her hed play Jim Reeves. Then, the sacrament of prayer and song complete, hed dance for her. He loved to dance. Loves to still. Burning love, I feel my temperature rising. Twisting his hips, jutting his thick lips, thrusting his pelvis to Elvis and Tom Jones, then crooning with Engelbert Humperdink. He loved the name. It reminded him of a prince in a fairy tale. He, a crooning prince too. Her prince. No one elses. Never. Never. Never. He thinks of Cordelia dead in her fathers arms. He thinks of his grandmother alive in his tear-stained hands. He thinks, now, of all those other lovers who would never wipe away the tears. Is that why he is still alone? Because, in truth, he is not alone? How explain this love in this grown-up world? Who will understand him? Some, those who dared to steal his heart, have tried. It is madness they say, this little boys love for his grandmother. Would she have approved? Does she accept this love he holds for her in his tear-stained hands? Would she not have wanted him to live on? He does, he says. He lives. But what of a wife? What of children? How, he asks, when he is the child and she his wife? Madness, they, the brave ones, say. Madness, but he, now, is past caring. They, the brave ones, can leave if they must. He has Jesus for a friend. He has his grandmother for a wife, a God. Sometimes he walks along the paths they walked. Nothing is the same. The desert of weeds has become another kind of desert; a desert of lost souls. The flat where she lived still stands. Alison Court. Strange word, court, for such a bleak monstrosity. A block of flats. Would that they, the diviners of that monstrosity, could block the lives of the poor who live inside, but nothing in her could ever be blocked. Child of Jesus, servant of God in a thin and faded frock. Hair of silver. Heart of gold. Her many tongued whisper endearing to all. Sentiment? Is that what spurs him now? This
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love that no one will understand? This love he holds in an overgrown hand. Sometimes, on the weekends he spent with her, the little kitchen would be filled. Large bosomed Xhosa women perched on formica chairs with stilts of steel. Irish nuns thin as sticks smelling of almond. The ruddy-faced priest, from Ireland too, seated beside the bed when she grew too tired to walk to church. A murmuring and clicking of sacrament and rosary and tongues. And he at her side, his hand in hers. Watching the Xhosa women, their faces aglow; watching the Irish nuns with their sheen an inner sheen, he knew why it was she he loved. They loved her too. Did they know her love for Jim Reeves? Did they hear the ancestral voices lodged in each and every bead of her rosary? A clicking of tongues. He hears it still, this clicking, this stitching. Each bead bears a soul. Each soul is legion. In her, time stood still. A tree in a wasteland of weeds. Struck down. Laid waste. A scattering of tears and beads. Tears and beads beads of tears he holds them now in his hands. There was no pain in her life. No pain in her end. And he? He too knows no pain. He is the boy in which she gloried, his lips thrust out, his pelvis jutting too, as he danced about the pea-green living room. Her little Elvis dancing to the devils music. Dancing for her. She forgave him then, as she forgives him now. To her he was never blasphemous. If she does not come to him in dreams, it is not because she has renounced him. She does not say I am not your God. She knows the burden of Christ in Africa. Christ is not a thing of Rome. He is not a thing of books and pictures. No graven image will hold him. That is why she forgives his love for her. That is why she accepts his faith. Like all great faith, his is child-like. It is the faith of a child with grown hands. Hold me there if you must, she says. I am not afraid of your hands. Touch me where you will. The wattles if you must. My empty breasts where still you find fullness. What you want of me is not godless, I know. Neither you nor I are afraid. These are the words that come to him, not in dreams, but in this waking life, which is the only life he knows. Soon, he thinks, he will be with her. One day soon. With his grown hands he will hold her in his arms. There in the silvered cloud, hell bind her to his
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breast. She is waiting for him, but not too soon. Why hurry the inevitable? Dance, she says, dance to your devils music. Make of your heart a thoroughfare. Though no one will hold you, though many would dare, know at least that I have understood you. Remember too, that my love was not an act of theft. I simply loved you in the only way I could. You too. So much in need of love. Does it truly matter, the shape a lovers love takes? Surely not when the love is good? Her words fill him now. Her words? Or are they his words? He has never been able to divide. Mr. Martin the maths teacher said so then. When Mr. Martin punched him in the stomach he knew that he was right. He could never separate one thing from another; a young boy from his grandmother. Now he lies in an empty bed. His heart is no longer a thoroughfare. His heart is closed, enfolded upon one thing. Beside his bed is her single pair of shoes. In the drawers of his cupboard lie the three faded dresses. In his pocket rests the wooden box that holds a silver cloud. About his neck hangs the rosary of murmurs and clicks. Her vestments too are his to hold. These are mere things, he knows, the remnants of a sloughed life. She does not live there in these things. She does not live in the velvet picture of the last supper that hangs on his wall. She does not walk with Jesus through fields of blue. She is not in the sepia portrait framed in silver beside his bed. She is in his hands that can no longer hold her. There, in his hands, empty, without purpose. He knows the word obsession, has heard it spoken of him. But this is not what he is. He is not obsessed. He is in love. Does he love any less than another because the object of his love is gone? He opens the wooden box shaped like a heart. He draws a strand of hair, lays it on his cheek. Uncontrollably he starts to weep. He places his hands to his face to stop the tears. They will not stop. With the back of his hands grown too large for the wrists he wipes away the tears. Still they will not stop. Tears fall to the quivering full mouth. It is then, as the tears seep inwards, back into his body, that he begins to taste her.

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D.I.Y.

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The problem with flats like hers is that theres only one exit. Shell need a parachute to jump from the tenth floor. She ties a rope to the balcony grid. The rope is long enough to reach the balcony beneath her. She changes the lock to the door. She dyes her hair. The landlines unregistered; its made no difference. Shes asked Telkom to disconnect the taped-message system, but not before she records the smothered voices of hate. Shell need the evidence. She thinks shell live to use it. All this happens later. The investigation begins out of love, devolves into loathing. Somewhere in between she becomes another victim. She knows who the murderers are. They are police men; three of them. She knows their names; shes spoken to them in person. A mistake. She couldnt have known it then. Shed gone to the police station to express her doubts. Christopher didnt drink, shed said. He didnt do drugs. Theres no way hed throw himself out of a building. He loved life. He was the lead dancer for the Civic Ballet. The Nutcracker was about to open. They smirked. Some kind of life, they said. A reference to Christophers sexuality, his profession? They are seated in the interrogation room. One man rests his back against the wall, the second sits across from her on a plastic chair. The third circles. The two standing are young and lean. Hyenas. The third who sits across from her is older, fat. He watches her through pig eyes. Hes called the general. Its the name the hyenas use, though hes a sergeant. Does that make him the leader? At what point does he draw the hyenas into his scheme? She studies the generals crotch. A little thing, she thinks, smothered with fat. She thinks of the masturbator she recently photographed for a project on mens pleasure. Its not the masturbator she sees now but the general, stripped, leering, his hand holding the scrotum like a packet of sweeties. She knows he has pictures of her too. She can see through his pig eyes. She decides to leave. Theres nothing more she wants to say. She plays a concerned and doubtful friend. But she knows its too late. She has sparked their suspicion. One hyena stands directly behind her. The general watches him, smirks. She looks at the other one against the wall who says nothing. He has a tattoo on his forearm of the vierkleur. He has cold eyes, gravel grey. Who is responsible for the rape? All of
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them? Who drags Christopher to the balcony, kisses his lips, then tips him over the edge? Black dye stains her pillow, her place of black thoughts. Is it instinct that saves her; the fact that shes found nothing to link the murder to the hyenas and the pig? Do they enjoy the fact that she suspects them and can do nothing about it? Is this too a part of mens pleasure; that they can kill and get away with it? Away from what, she wonders now. Is it not, rather, the proximate pleasure of threat and danger that wills them? Do they draw sticks? Do they rotate the sum of their slaughter? And what are they to each other, the hyenas and the pig? Do they group under cover of night attired in jeans and T-shirts? There has been a spate of murders in the gay community. Christopher is the fourth. This is why she is suspicious. He is a number to them. To number four they say, smugly clinking their beers over a braai on a Sunday afternoon, the children splashing in the porta-pool, the mothers gathered under the shade of a Baobab tree. Once the toast is done, the sacrament complete, theyll move on to more important things. D.I.Y. Other than the messages on the phone, shes received no further threat. She in turn has found nothing that can seal their fate. She leaves the boy heaving below her, his head against the pillow dyed with her black thoughts. He wouldnt be much good if the hyenas and the pig came by. A boy, barely a man. Shes told the boy nothing of the murder. Can he see it in her eyes? What does he see, looking at her? Or is he too drained and frightened to see anything? She doesnt feel pity, only disgust. Shes given him what he wants then some. She smirks as she leaves the bedroom, walks to the kitchen. She'll prepare a breakfast for one, open the newspaper. The boy can fend for himself. If he cant, hell have to learn. It is in a situation like this one the boys come and go that she stumbles upon the news of Christophers death. Its not what she expects to find. Shes looking for information she can use, control. Shes an artist. The newspaper is a freak show she takes dead seriously. Still, shes not expecting such intimacy. Now, weeks later, Christopher haunts her. He is her black thought. She hears his shrill laugh. She sees him leap through air, a faun, a
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leopard, loves arrow. When he falls from the fourth floor of his flat in Hillbrow does he think of loves arrow? Does he twist the hate, his plummeting body? Does he find a dancers moment of grace? The thought is too beautiful to bear. The thought defeats her. Defeats the truth. She begs Christopher to leave her. She cries his name in the night while the boy with his doe eyes looks on, strokes her black hair. He has his uses, the boy. And Christopher? What is Christopher to her? Her conscience the little she has her rage with which she is filled to the brim. Christopher ... her Griqua boy with his skin of gold; his muscles rippling, a shifting dune; his ancient eyes that see for miles. Why couldnt he use those ancient eyes when they were most needed? Why couldnt he see the hyenas and the pig for what they were? What blinded him? Loneliness? Longing? Shed talk about her boys, he about his rough men. Over bagels, coffee, and cigarettes theyd laugh. She hears his laughter clearly now, rippling, shrill. Deep within the peels of laughter she hears a shriek. Bagel and lox, percolated coffee, Camels, scissors. She opens the paper, starts with the sports section. Crumbs fall. Butter smears the muscular thigh of a footballer. She thinks of Christopher, her boy of air; suppresses the thought. She thinks instead of men and their balls. The thought is easier to deal with, though between the images of Christopher in flight and the dread-locked footballer the pig appears cradling his scrotum, offering it up to her. She wills the image to go. Surprisingly the image recedes. She returns to the sports section. The size of the ball its hardness, shape shifts. The ball stays, a thing hurled, kicked, cradled. Yes, the word returns, the pig too, cradling his scrotum. She cannot disinter one thought from another. Christopher. The pig. The ball. Enmeshed, she finds no reprieve. Still, she persists. The balls the thing between that separates men and brings them closer. Men need something between then war, another name for sport so they can fuck each other over all the more. Was Christopher the ball? Did they knock him back and forth? Toy with him? Or did they give up the play, cut to the core? Not a thing of sport, not the intermediary in a gentlemans game, but an object to be annihilated. And she? Is she the next
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object to be annihilated? Again she shifts, forces the image of fear to recede. Again, surprisingly, it does. Snip, snip. She sips coffee, skips the appointments pages. Wholl want her anyway? The entertainment section leaves her cold. Shes utterly disinterested in whos who and whats hot. She likes her information hard and cold. She likes it in the present tense. A hard place to live, the present. Shes not blind to the fact that everything becomes history. She knows the present is a flashback. But she knows something else. When a nine month old girl is raped ... when a boy disappears on the way to the shop and ends up on a crazed butchers chopping floor ... when an HIV positive mother of three is left to rot ... when a medical intern becomes a murderer sent from God ... when a man blows his family apart ... when money destined for a frail care centre gets redirected ... when a government lies through its freshly flossed teeth ... when ... the list is endless, its all over her walls ... when shit like this happens, and it happens every second of every day, you know that the present is not just a flashback. Christopher. ... She braces herself, holds the scissors at the ready. She snaps the scissors open then shut. The scissors teeth are jagged. Sharks teeth. She likes the serrated borders the scissors make. Shes not one for clean lines. Theres nothing clean about error, and it is error that compels her; error she exhibits. Her walls are papered with jagged edged stories. Stories in the bedroom. Stories in the toilet. Stories on every conceivable surface in the flat she rents. Laminated stories in the shower, on the kitchen table too. She eats, sleeps, shits, fucks, in a state of shock. The shark-toothed information is the electrode that shocks her. Her walls are wastelands, her kitchen table a war zone, her bedroom is papered with the faces of missing children, her shower is Psychos shower. After a forgettable fuck she knows what to forget and what to remember the boy tells her she should download the information, its all on the net. However, the brain of a computer does not impress her. Archives too, usually underground, in the bowels of a building, leave her cold. Shes not a mole or a necrophiliac, she says, her teeth to his breast. He winces. She
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straddles his waist, rocks, her eyes riveted to the faces of children on the wall, some missing, others believed dead. He thinks shes sick. She thinks hes scared. Shed rather be sick than scared. She presses his skull in her hands, her eyes riveted to the stain of black dye which frames him. He cries. She moans. She rises from the bed, stands over him, lights a cigarette. With her sharp toenail she jabs him where he hurts most. Jesus; fuck! He looks at her with doe eyes. She quits the bedroom. Men and their balls. Got to go, the boy says. He stands on the threshold that divides the kitchen and the hallway. Ciao, she says. The sharks teeth glisten in her hand. Still the boy stands before her, a tattoo of a chain about his bared waist. Pretty, pretty boy. He might have been a forgettable fuck, but hes still fresh. Forgetting, like memory, takes work. Shes working on it. Working on Christopher. Working on the pig. Working on the boy. Should she see him again? Snip, snip, the stories fall to the floor about her feet. They are the one deformed thing about her. The toes press to a single point. Lethal. The outer edges of her feet are calloused. The arch is deep. The feet of a woman who likes her heels long and sharp. Men think they are impractical, women know they are weapons. Lures too. Lures that turn into weapons. Shes as jagged as the information. Jagged black hair. Jagged feet. Jagged bones in the face, ribs, hips, that break the lean smooth body. Jagged knees. Jagged ankles. This is not what men see. Like the pig, like the hyena with gravel eyes, they see the splayed lips. They see the firm breasts thrust up, out. The full firm thighs splayed for their delectation. They think the winking dark between her legs is firm and soft. They dont see the jagged teeth. Once they know this, like the coifed boy with his shredded cock, theyll call her a man-eater, a man-hater. Theyll need reasons to explain their fear, reasons for why they hate women so much. Shell make bastards of the lot of them, because shes the flashback and the future, the present they hate so much. Still the boy stays. She ignores him. He stares and stares. Does he see something that no one else has? Is that why he stays when he says hes got to go? What does he want from her? Hasnt she hurt him enough? Does he want to stay in her bed of black thoughts?
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Theres no getting around power. Its what you do with power that counts. And what is she doing with it, with power? Shes using it to shock shock herself, shock others. She believes people should be disturbed. Shes looked up the word to find out if it means exactly what she intends. It does. She shuts the OED becalmed. Break the rest. Agitate. Worry. Move from a settled position, disarrange. She thinks of the boy with his doe eyes, his shredded cock. She thinks of his recommendation that she down load the information. He even offers to help her. Hes got a thing for computers. Ill download you, you fucker. Snip, snip, he falls to the cutting floor. Jesus, fuck! Men and their obscenity mixed with faith! Men and their ideas! Download. Order. Shut up. No wonder nothing gets done in this world. Everything has to be processed, negotiated. But when the world is non-negotiable? When horror strikes the core of each and every order? When monstrousness appears which no one can name? What then? What of men and their order? Men who hide behind the law? Snip, snip. It is fear that is the seat of order. It is because of fear that men order. Premature ejaculators, they are in fact procrastinators. The ball they place between them is another kind of delay. This is what men have done for centuries. For all their talk of progress they have delayed the inevitable, never confronted it. Women know this. Theyve known it all the while. Then why have women done nothing? Snip, snip. She is not disappointed or ashamed of her sex, she is disgusted. Make victims of women to hide your fear. Victims of children. Victims of gays and lesbians. Victims of the frail and aged. Victims of the dispossessed. Turn living into a kind of victim-hood. And you with your shredded cock? What of you? You with your laws. You with your hypocrisy. You with your shuffling of papers and your endless delays. Are you not a victim too? Should I even dignify you with such pain? I dont think so. She turns to look at the boy. She knows he wants to stay. Its not men she hates. Its her kind. Her species. Where others see evolution, she sees the reverse. She sees terrors soul smothered in information. If she reads the news, its because she hates it. She hates what is happening. What is happening to her. She feels powerless to
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stop the scourge. She dreams of genocide the way other women dream of marriage. She dreams of a kingdom where children are forever safe. In her dreams beneficent hands lift her. One by one the jagged teeth are plied from her body. She becomes a thing without lines, as soft and smooth as an egg. This divine form leaves her when she wakes. Then acidity fills her. Knowledge too. Her Griqua boy of air. The hyenas. The pig with his pigs eyes. The coifed boy with his tattooed waist who waits and waits. The present, unthinkable, impossible to grasp, holds her in its grip. She is powerless to resist; knows she cannot. Must not. She is a thing aggrieved. A weapon that must be removed from the lintel and put to use. Caught like everyone else in this these brutal times, she knows that the nature of divinity is war. The paradox flays her. Still she finds no exemption. Information is merely the clue, a surface thing. Her job is to read between the lines and unlock the nature of what disturbs her so. Frantz Fanon understood this. Who? Exactly. People forget. But she remembers. She makes it her business to remember. Its not enough to amass the clippings. Its not enough to shove the horror down peoples throats over supper. The information has to shift. Art is the way to show how history fucks over the future. Art is the preventive fire. She turns. The boy is gone. She hears the front door open. She waits. The door eventually shuts. Snip, snip. She journeys back into her skull. Rage deafens her. She doesnt hear his return, doesnt see him when he lays the black wig on the paper in front of her. Theyve cut it to the exact length. With an artists flare theyve made the cut jagged too. Is it the hyena with the gravel eyes who possesses the artists touch? The boy says nothing. Theres nothing he can say. He doesnt know her. He wants to know her. She sweeps the wig from the table. In her shaking hand she holds the scissors. He takes them from her hand, rests them on the table. He bends down and enfolds her. The boy who will not go away.

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Destinys Child

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He is bent over the toilet bowl at Diabolos counting shooters. Three Springboks, five Tequila Golds, two Blowjobs, three Apple Sours. Hes got no idea about the Black Labels. His jaw is slack, puke sticks to his braces. The toilet door opens. Its Gene. House music rips through the door. Hed prefer Santana, especially Europa. Jackie likes Santana, Angie doesnt, then again Angies got no taste, never had. Angies a slapper ho, a skanky bitch. Hes always hated that about her. Angie and her knee-length Spandex skirts, her ankle chains, her spiky hair all stuck up with butterfly clips, the bra strap showing on purpose. No ways you can reason with a bitch like that. Angie listens to Lenny Kravitz, for fuck sakes. Hey bru. Gene again. Fuck Gene. You okay in there? Like no Gene, Im just - uh puking my guts out. He lets rip. His puke is Technicolor, it sprays all over the floor and walls, all over his strops. He spins the toilet roll, wipes the slime off his face, his hands, then the strops. When he exits Chris is standing next to Gene. Bastard never says a word. Girls like that. Chris is the cool sensitive type; hes dressed in black except for the Kurt Cobain T-shirt. Chriss got hair like Kurts, spooky and purple. You cant see Chriss eyes. What the fuck does Chris see? Genes wearing Diesel and Cats. Genes the one with the bucks. Gene fucks Jackie. He turns to the mirror, readies himself for the wake-up call. He looks like shit. Always does. Hes wearing Teesav shorts, a T-shirt covered with puke. Pity about the strops, theyre new. Hes got the summer version with the velcro straps. He picks the puke out of his braces, gargles. Gene hands him a Tequila. He grins, knocks it back. ALL RIGHT! Gene says. LETS PARTY!!! Like uh what the fuck have we been doing at Diabolos for the past hour Gene? Genes an idiot. A bona-fide state of the art moron. But, hey, Genes got money pouring out of his arsehole. The bastards even got a Mercedes sport. Lucky bastard. Chriss got a Beetle. He drives a fucked up Beaumont. Good thing he knows how to fix cars. He knows how to fix things. Like Angie. Fuckin bitch. Thinking about her makes him smile. Hes learnt something from the hospitality trade. Smile, smile, smile. Couldnt find work as a chef so hes selling computers for Genes dad.
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Believe it or not, Genes dad likes him. Genes dad believes hes got a future. The fuckin dick also had braces when he was twenty. Genes dad says it like it means something. Emotional cripple. Hes so fuckin rich he feels sorry all the time. Genes dad even gives him a bonus like uh its going to go a long way. Like hes going to save it or something. Hes going nowhere. Why wont anyone figure that out? Gene doesnt have to worry. Genes made. Chris doesnt give a fuck anyways. Hell wear black till the day he fuckin dies. Tiffany? Tiffanys too busy swinging those little hips making sure every oke sees that belly ring of hers. Tiffany drinks Cherry Sours with Smirnoff because its oh so pretty and pink. Tiffanys religion is Guess Designer Wear and Soviet shoes. She listens to Destinys Child for chrissakes! Chris doesnt care. Why should he? Hes never had an easier lay. Jackies different. Jackies special. Whats she doing with Gene anyways? Tiffany wants to go into tourism. Jackies thinking of taking a year off. She wants to go to Nepal. Gene looks at her like shes a freak or something. Genes nervous. Gene should be. Theres no ways an idiot like him could hold onto Jackie. She listens to Dylan, Hendrix, Santana. And Gene? Gene doesnt know what the fuck he likes. Moron. Hes grinning like crazy now coz he knows hes left Angie out of the equation. What would Angie have wanted? Lenny fuckin Kravitz. When she fucks him she even cries Lenny! Lenny! like hes deaf or something, like hes nothing. The problem is Angie. Shes in the boot of the car. The problem is that Angie never saw things the way he did. He had like plans, like they could travel maybe. Maybe landing a job as a chef in London or someplace. What about computers, she says, like hello cant you fuckin figure out that I love cooking?! Angie was never sensitive. Not like Jackie. He could tell Jackie anything and shed understand. Maybe he should say something now. She and Tiffany are wondering where Angie is. Thing is he knows Jackie wouldnt appreciate what hes done to Angie. Shed be disappointed. He wouldnt like that. He hates hurting Jackies feelings. The thing about Angie is she likes it here. She likes the darkies. Shes an Ingrid Jonker junkie for chrissakes. Who in their
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right minds reads Ingrid Jonker in 2001? Clearly Angie fuckin does. Twisted bitch. Angie actually fuckin cares. She like believes she can do something in this shit hole of a country. Social work. Thats her game. Shes thinking about becoming maybe a psychologist or something. She wants to help people. Oh yeah? What about me, bitch. You got any solutions to my problems? She doesnt, like hes nothing or something. What does she think he feels when shes going, Lenny, Lenny? Insensitive bitch. So yeah, he had to do something about it. He told her to cancel herself out like Ingrid Jonker did. She said he was crazy, things are different. They definitely fuckin are. The darkies have taken control and what the fuck have they done? Fuck all. Things take time, Angie says. Like uh Im just going to hang around like, wait for the fuckin mess to clear. She calls him a racist like it means something. Sensitive insensitive bitch. Jaws thats his name. Mostly people call him Jaws because of the braces. Right now its Fergus. Fergus, you okay? Gene again. Some fuckin friend. Yeah, he says. The girls are waiting. No fuckin kidding. Fact is, he hates Gene, and not just because Genes with Jackie. Hes thinking that maybe he should wipe Gene out as well. Two in fuckin one. He smiles and smiles and smiles. Jaws is back, he says. Gene slaps him on the back. He slaps Gene back so hard Genes specs go flying. Gene looks at him all confused. Thats what hed do. Hed remove Genes specs so he could see fuck all. The rest would be easy, a fuck-load easier than Angie. He decides not to think about Angie right now. Angie had problems. She doesnt anymore. Right then and there he laughs like crazy. Believe it or not, people think hes a wit. Genes dad for instance. He likes that. Now he just laughs and everyone thinks hes having a good time. Which he is. He buys beers all round. Jackie has a Bacardi Breezer, Tiffany has another of those stupid pink drinks. Whats it with girls and pink? Tiffanys eighteen for fuck sakes! Most likely likes Chriss pink dick too. Who can blame her? The fuckin things huge. Maybe thats why Chris says fuck all. He talks with that hose between his legs. He cant figure how Chris gets it into her. Tiffanys small. He should fuckin know. He
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knows her snatch like he knows the back of his mole-ridden hand. Here he laughs some more. He pictures Tiffany hyperventilating so she can cope. Chris driving his huge dick inside her. Oh Chris, Chris, Tiffany moans, her face all sweaty and sobby. To Angie, he says out of the blue. Jackie and Tiffany want to know where Angie is. Out back, he says, and laughs. They laugh too. They think hes drunk. They think he doesnt know what hes saying. Braces and all, hes got a way about him. He commands respect. Pity Angie didnt figure that out. Then again she did. TO THE BITCHES OF WICKEN HIGH!!! Tiffany quaffs her pink drink, Jackie sips her Bacardi Breezer. Not one for toasts is Jackie. He wonders what the fuck shes doing at Diabolos. But shes there, in front of him, watching him. Does she think he knows where Angie is? Hed like to tell her, he really would. He knows theres no ways shed understand. He tries to make her laugh instead. The trick works. She smiles. Thats better. The last thing he wants is Jackie suspicious. Shes a clever thing is Jackie. She might drink Bacardi Breezers but shes not like a Ricky Martin fan or anything. Tiffany is. Tiffany actually believes theres a Latin spirit in every fuckin bottle! Go Tiffany Go! Tiffanys made for tourism. Stupid bitch. He thinks Chris shouldnt be so sensitive about his huge dick. He should fuck Tiffany till she fuckin bleeds. He would, if he could. Different strokes for different folks. Lets see if Chris can figure out Angies out back. He lays down some clues, talks about Rivers Edge. Theyve watched the movie like a thousand times. Shes out back, he repeats. Where, says Tiffany. Shes sleeping, he says. Theyre so pissed the clues dont work. Either that or they cant imagine that maybe just maybe the bitch is dead. LONG LIVE THE BITCH!!! he yells. Hes starting to feel like a stuck record. Chris says nothing. Beer Chris? Chris says yeah. They drink some more. Chris likes beer. Stupid thing for a clever bastard. He tells Chris he likes Tiffany. Fact is he doesnt. He likes Jackie. He even likes Angie out back. Hes fucked them all; theyve fucked each other. So he doesnt know why Tiffany looks so searchingly at Chris when all he wants is a dance. Maybe because Chris has got this thing he
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and Gene dont have. Chris is soooh cool. Nothing fazes Chris. Girls like that. Girls dont like guys with plans. Theyre scared theyll turn out like their mothers. When he tells Angie that maybe they should get out, she says like where? Like its a fuckin riddle. Out of here, he says. Out of this fuckin hole. PMB. KZN. South Africa. When he says that, she gets all perverse. She wants to fuck when hes trying to be serious. Bad idea. He grabs her close so she can see how serious he is. Angie just giggles, which really pisses him off. He hates giggling. Two sides of life he cant stand: giggling and seriousness. Hes on the one side he cant stand, Angies on the other. Hello! You listening to me, or what?! Shes got her hand on his zipper. Shes dragging his pants down. Angie! You listening to me, or what? Sure Im listening, she says, but all she wants is what he doesnt want to give. Hes not in the mood for this shit. Angie, he says. He actually fuckin loves her! Angie. She wont listen. Theyre in the back room kids corner he hates that, some arsehole definition of a place. Fuckin parents. He keeps his voice down all the same. Angie, he keeps saying. She wont let up. What is it with girls wanting to suck dicks? Is this like some kind of training? Most of the time hes not averse. He just doesnt like it when hes trying to communicate and all the bitch wants to do is suck his nuts off. Chris would understand. Chris understands everything. Maybe he should say something. Nah! He doesnt think anyone would care to know about Angie out back. More beers. He dances with Tiffany. Smashing Pumpkins. A long awaited break from fuckin house. He likes the way Tiffanys tits jiggle. The way she laughs. Not like Angie. Theres always been something disgusting about the way Angie laughs. Angie cant just giggle like most girls. Shes got to laugh like its sexy or something. What did she expect coming on like that, unzipping him and laughing and giggling and all? In fuckin kids corner no less. What does she think her parents are? Deaf? Crazy bitch. Tiffany looks at him all searching like. You okay? Yeah. Sure. He grins. Selling computers you learn a lot about grinning. Its what guys do. Girls giggle. Guys grin. Unless youre Angie then you giggle and laugh and grin. Crazy bitch. You okay?
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Tiffany keeps saying. Is that like a come on? He squeezes her. Tiffany gets all woozy, tosses her head back and gives him a sleepy look. Dont you look at me like that, Tiffany? Dont you fuckin look at me like that. He grins, leads her off the dance floor. Hes got his hand right there between her arse and her cunt. He feels her. She turns around and giggles, looks at him like shes so, so cross. He slaps Chris on the back and tells him what a hot bitch Tiffany is. Chris grins. Hes stoned out of his bracket. The bastard cant see a fuckin thing! Got to go, he says. Angies out back. Everyone laughs, including Chris. Hes been at the club for hours, whats Angie doing outside? Pushing daisies, he says, and everyone laughs some more. Some fuckin friends. Hes feeling queasy all over again. Nothing to do but drink and puke. He runs his hand over his mouth, says check you. He cant leave without a slap and a tickle. Tiffany and Jackie look all shocked, like they were virgins for chrissakes. He decides he likes Jackie a whole lot more than he thinks. Jackie giggles, but not like Tiffany, not like Angie. Jackies sensitive. Jackie would understand if he told her he was sick of being here. Shed say, yeah. London sounds good. Shed maybe even plan his future. He can see that in Jackie. Jackies got a future. Tiffany? Whos that? Angie? Got to go, he says again. Hes got a hard on. Hes thinking about Jackie. Angies calling, he says. The bastards laugh. See yah! Hes out the club. Its been fuckin raining. Perfect. He climbs into his clapped out Beaumont and heads for the country. In PMB the countrys a stones throw. Hes packed the spade. He ripped the plastic off the dogs shelter. The folks will want to know. Hell blame the gardener. Bastards been pissing him off anyways. Always so sweet and smiley to his mum. Has he got no idea shes sensitive? Whats it with darkie gardeners and sensitive women? He doesnt like this thing with gardeners and women. Lady Chatterleys fuckin lover. From Diabolos he takes the Sweetwaters road. Uphill. The Beaumonts doing fine. Hes thinking somewhere in the Underberg. Nothing but cows for miles around. He slaps on the tape. Santana. Hey Angie! Angie what you think? Angie says
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nothing. He figures Angie should have loved Santana. Sexy music. Music for sex. Angie! he screams. Angie says nothing. Hes got a six pack on the floor. He swigs. Santanas guitar goes crazy. The hard on wont go away. He keeps thinking of Jackie. Shell understand. Shell know he had to get away. Jackie wouldnt have just pulled his zipper down the way Angie did. Jackie wouldve understood dignity. Just the way Jackie carries herself. She doesnt toss her head all over the place. She doesnt wear body glitter and butterfly clips. She doesnt waste her money on getting her hair all high-lited like Britney fuckin Spears. She doesnt make you zone in on her tits. Jackies discrete. Genes a lucky bastard. You hear that Angie? Genes a fuckin lucky bastard. Its not like shes Miss Perfect or anything. Its just that Jackie knows things. Jackies sensitive. She doesnt wear her T-shirts oh so tight. Shes not into power beads and shit. Jackie ... Jackie. He takes the Underberg turn off. He hates highways anyway. Highways and clubs, same diff. A lot of noise and traffic and lights. The Beaumont rumbles. Hes looking for a field. Not too close. A sign comes up. The signs all flaky looking. He peers down the lane. Probably emigrated. He chances it. Hes right. Theres no one. Just the empty house, the field, him and Angie. No fuckin dogs. If he ever leaves this shit-hole of a country the one thing he wont regret is the dogs. Useless fuckers. One big hullabaloo signifying fuck all. The amount of money his mum spends on the dogs is a sin. But thats beside the point. The point is finding a quiet place for Angie who didnt want to go away. Well Angie, were here. Your dream house. What do you think, Angie? Nice and quiet, off the beaten track. He parks the Beaumont. He wishes he was driving something more neutral. A Golf maybe. The fat bitch wouldnt have fitted in a Golf. He opens the boot, grabs the spade. He weaves across the field and starts digging. The ground is sodden. He thinks he is lucky. He is. The ground yields without any complaint. The last thing he needs is to waste any more energy than he has already done. Graduation, for fucks sakes. Another excuse for a party. He has to admit he enjoyed himself at Diabolos. Mostly he enjoyed Jackie. He doesnt think Genes good for her. She looks unhappy.
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Maybe she regrets not being with him anymore. Angie is mostly Jackies friend not Tiffanys. He thinks shed like Angie out of the way. Well count your lucky stars Jackie! He leans on the spade, looks up. Enough stars, but not too much. He figures the hole is deep enough. Jackie, Jackie, Jackie, he says as he walks back to the Beaumont. He grabs Angie and throws her over his shoulder. The bitch is too fuckin fat for her own good. Shes tried everything. He knows that. She had the audacity to complain to him about her weight. Girls dont do that! They dont try to fill guys in on their problems. But thats what Angie did. Any excuse. Jackie would never have done that. Live and learn. He carries Angie across the field. He thinks Chris would understand. Gene too. Jackie too. He thinks if anyone would know what hes going through its Jackie. Tiffany? Let sleeping bitches lie. All in all the process progresses smoothly. Angie doesnt complain when her head hits the ground, even though she looks all shocked. Shes looked like that all the time hes been at Diabolos. She looked like that at kids corner. It didnt make a difference. He wipes her out with a spade and dirt, then he takes the squares of grass hes levered and tucks them back so they fit nicely. Greener pastures. When hes done he pats the grass like hes putting a baby to sleep. He realises he has three beers left in the Beaumont. He decides to head back to Diabolos.

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Love, Jeffrey

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During the night the alarm goes off. At midnight, then three, this happens. She knows, the clock ticks beside the bed. Under the jerseys piled in the top cupboard theres a baseball bat. Why not a gun? Because theyll turn it against you, he said. Which means he knows the danger. Which means hell leave her all the same. He doesnt say this of course. How can he? Money needs to be made. Which means shell get back to her job in mortgages and loans soon enough too soon. Which means hell accept the contract in Mali which he has. But what is the use of money when you live like this? Never sleeping. A ghost, day and night. A vampire with nothing to sup except your own thin blood, with no coffin to shut out the glare. A bat the pictures persist a bat, eyes large and shining like glass. Eyes caught between punishing wakefulness, thieving sleep. Not the eyes of a woman freshly weaned from the surgeons knife. No. It is not tiredness alone that rings her eyes. Something else lives there, something that no surgeons knife could remove. Ghost eyes. Ghoulish eyes. The eyes of Nosferatus bride. She hears nothing. No creaking underfoot. No clattering of glass. Her bats ears, like her eyes, are sonar. Should she switch off the alarm? Call armed response? Theyll call soon enough. Soon? When they call, will it be enough? What she knows too well is that she cant call him the husband. What good is he in Mali? She had to search for the country on the map, her finger haphazardly straying from name to name. Chad Somalia. She spanned forefinger and thumb to grasp the distance between. The equator separates them. They are hemispheres apart. What is the good of Mali now? The alarm squeals its acute pain. It is a sound that shatters her in a place deeper than the desolate hemisphere of her head. The sound cuts the eyes, rips open the ears, lodges itself in a place where fear is not an act of mind but a gnashing in the gut. She haemorrhages. That is what she thinks is happening inside of her. Her body buckles, the pain inside is worse than the pain she already knows. No blood appears on her fingers when she removes them from her gut, ripped open, stitched up, slapped shut with tape. No, what she feels, is not that kind of pain. It is
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not the pain of her muscles sliced open then left to heal. No. Another pain, deeper, stranger, has gripped the hurt inside she battles to contain. Inside she is cold. Ice cold. Or is it a heat she feels inside? She cant tell the difference between what is cold, what is hot. She remembers her science teacher explaining the principle of such guile. Confused. That is what she is. Confused in the head. Confused in the place somewhere there, beneath the abdomen, where she stabs her fists. Back and forth she rocks. She drives her fists so hard she feels bone against bone. Cold inside. A cold heat. The adrenalin that rips her ripped body leaves her strangely cold. She presses the tips of her fingers to places that surround the taped cut at the abdomen. A cut like a leer, she thinks. Vulgar. Gratuitous. They cut her open because the baby wouldnt turn. They cut her open because the holidays were coming up. Gratuitous, she thinks again. The slaughter of her timetabled so the surgeon could go on a fishing trip. Was she a mere simulation exercise? The child plucked from her like a trout? Whatever he, the surgeon, might have thought, she is not a rivers mouth. No. There, inside of her, she finds a cave for bats. Chiroptera. Now she cannot sense their membranous wings. Like the kidneys, the pancreas, the bats hang frozen. The blood too. Nothing moves inside of her. Everything inside glitters, the organs bruised with cold. This is how she registers fear. Adrenalin doesnt whip her innards; it freezes them. Her gut is a chilly abattoir. The red loop back to the cold heart is cold too. She pictures a hoolahoop, bruised, black with cold. Nothing spins inside, except the wracked head. There, in the head, the bats beat their membranous wings. A troop? A school? An army? What does one call the night creatures that populate her? She howls, but no one can hear her, no one, that is, who can save her. She screams his name while he sleeps his deep sleep under a mosquito net in a mining encampment in Mali. JEFFREY!!! What is the use of that name now? The alarm stops with a suddenness that surprises her. For no reason, with no variation in its shrill squeal, it stops. Dead.
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Silence fills her. The bats in the gut stir. Still she rocks, stabs bone against bone. Ice thaws. Inside through the blackness red appears. The hoop snakes, spins. Back and forth. Back and forth. Like a crazed devotee she rocks, her feet cold on the dark red floor. The paint is still fresh. The smell reminds her of a hospitals stench. Two weeks ago, before the gutting, shed ripped the carpets out of the bedroom and hallway. Shed always hated them. More dirt than colour. More slush than snow. Rotten too with damp. A breeding place like her freshly gutted stomach. In the underfelt she saw the maggots shed sensed. The maggots writhed, split, regrouped like filings. Shed burnt the carpets and the underfelt in the centre of the lawn. She didnt have the strength to shift the carpets any further. In time the grass will grow, cover the scorched leer. Once the carpets were thrown out and burnt shed stripped the glue from the floor, applied bonding liquid to fix the red stoep paint. The cheapest option. Clean too. A surface clean enough for Josey to crawl on. Clean enough for her to fall to her knees and rock. She rocks on the red floor. In the cot beside her Josey whimpers. Deafened by her own pain shed failed to hear the babys whimperings. Now the hoop twists out of her, forms a figure eight that links her to Josey. The hoop glistens, cherry red like the red floor. She lifts Josey into her arms. She feels her taped gut tear. She does not care. JEFFREY WHY THE FUCK ARENT YOU HERE?!!! A scream that only she can hear. The telephone rings. She knows who it is. Whats the point of paying for safety when theres none? She picks up the phone. Itll take another ten minutes before they arrive. She presses the tape back, places her hand over the sealed cut. Josey wouldnt turn. She was overdue and wouldnt turn, they said. Overdue for whom? For her? Josey? Or the surgeon and his fishing trip? Breach of peace. Breach of promise. Who can blame Josey? Who would gladly enter this world? She places Josey to her breast. She paces. The baseball bat is on the bed. The bedroom door is locked. The French doors too. Instead of
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ripping out the carpets she should have simply lifted them, taken an angle grinder and cut a hole through the cement, dug a hiding place large enough for her and Josey. The thought comes too late. She paces across the red floor. Outside she hears the dogs bark. What is she doing in this house all alone? What is the good of fences and alarms? Lay land mines at night. Blow the fuckers to pieces. Stick their heads on the spikes of the palisade fence. With Josey pressed to her breast she starts to hate. She hates the hunger that makes thieves and murderers fearless and her afraid. She hates all the useless beauty that surrounds her. The rose garden. The pool. The jacaranda tree and the wooden bench where she sits with Josey during the day. The house in which shes trapped. Most of all she hates Jeffrey. She hates his perspective that wont admit her pain. Not here for her, not here for Josey. Because he couldnt find work he took it as his right to leave her. Eight months pregnant with Josey. She must have been mad to agree. Out of her mind. Josey ... Josey ... is that why you turned?... Theres nothing for surveyors here, he said. But whats the use of surveying anything if you cannot measure the threat youve abandoned? Take cognisance of the broken boundaries here Jeffrey. Dig graves that you and I can fill each night. Its not a surveyor I need but a gravedigger. Make this place a graveyard for the fuckers who threaten Josey and me. She lays the baby in the cot. She presses her hands to her opened stomach. Still the dogs bark. She parts the curtains, peers outside. Sees nothing. What good is night when the threat is black? She searches for a glint of red, a predators eyes. She searches for the flashing gleam of a knife. The Kaddx panel records no invasion. The zone leds are intact, their liquid eyes red in the darkened cupboard. The external doors are covered. The movement detectors show no sign of a threat. Still, she will not unlock the bedroom door. Why believe the panels blinking lights? What would she do? A woman freshly weaned from the surgeons knife, with a baseball bat in her hands. She stares at the rod of wood and steel. Jeffreys. Baseball in South Africa? Absurd this thing on her bed. Better if there were blood at its swollen head. Black blood. Black skin too. Curlicues of coarse black hair.
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Better still if there was a black mans head there beside the bat, on the brightly knitted quilt on her bed. Shed feel better then. Shed place the head beside her on the pillow. Shed kiss its bloated aubergine lips, the coal lids of its eyes. Shed sing ditties too, then fall asleep. She lights a cigarette, checks to see if the cell phone is on. Maybe the bastard will call her. But he wouldnt, not on her cell, certainly not from Mali. He doesnt even call on the landline because hes saving money for them. He sends her e-mails instead. Its cheaper. He writes to her at work when she still worked. Now V in mortgages and loans prints the letters and brings them to the house. Jeffrey would like that; the fact that V reads the letters, the fact that everyone at work would say what a good husband he is. The bastard has even taken to a parallel correspondence with V! All well and good this smug daylight traffic through e-mail. But at night, when shes alone, what then? What now? Now he sleeps his deep sleep under a mosquito net, leaving her wide-awake, bats quivering their membranous wings inside her head. She reads the printouts V brings her. She reads them to Josey too. Who else is there to listen? V? The bitch would have stolen Jeffrey from her if she could. But then Jeffrey is the church going kind. He likes his faith like his heart out in the open. Faithfulness for Jeffrey is just another Noddy badge. Like his work he takes faith seriously. ... Love, Jeffrey. The printouts explain in exquisitely boring detail the routine that governs his life. His letters are letters of debit and credit in which their lives amount to a romance of money. How much he has earned, how much saved. He balances the imbalance of their lives with plans for the future. What they will do. How they will live. She strains to fill the stilted words; form pictures where hed given none. A bad writer. A bad husband. A bad father. Does Josey know this? She picks up the phone, dials Mali, puts the phone down. Hed hate her now. Hed hate the expense. She looks at the pillow, longs to sleep beside a dead mans head.
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She hears the car, the crackling of the two-way radio. She knows the sound of the car. A standard Toyota Conquest. The alarm is her shepherd boy that cries Wolf! Through the curtains she sees the guard, his torchlight flashing. The guard appears at the French door. She opens it. He is a small man in a grey uniform. Another man surveys the outer reaches of the grounds. The small man enters. His voice is soft. About the belt strapped to his waist he carries a canister of tear gas and a 9mm pistol. She wants to take the 9mm in her hands, run the cold steel along her skin, especially there where the cut leers. The guard talks. She is calmed by the softness of his voice. Night soft. He checks the zone leds on the Kaddx panel. She follows him from room to room. The movement detectors are fine. There is nothing broken into. She says shes sorry dragging him out like this. She does not mean to cry wolf. Its his job, he says. Something she, like many others, pays him to do. Arent you scared? Sure, he says. But shes not sure. He doesnt seem afraid. But then, hes a guard after all. He guards himself well. In the kitchen she makes coffee. Its all she drinks. He declines. She begs. She needs him here, in the house with her. The other guard is still patrolling the grounds. She watches the torchlight cut open the night. Theyre among the trees, she says. Theyll wait for you to go then theyll come back. Ill go and see, he says. Dont. Her hands are on his slight shoulders. She feels the blade of bone there. He places his hand on hers and draws it away. He knows what she wants. He is her wolf-man. She places the black coffee in front of him. He sips. She studies his lips. Thin. A sore flares between the lips and chin, the crater of skin encrusted, yellow. The cheekbones are as sharp as the shoulder blades. His eyes are night eyes. They see her clearly. Stay, she says. It will be day soon. The walkie-talkie crackles. He speaks. Someones broken in, he says. Gerts outside. Well be a while. He smiles his thin smile, slips the walkie-talkie back in his grey pocket. He decides to sip the black coffee. His teeth, like his eyes, are yellow. Wolf yellow. His hair is a parted sheet, dead black under fluorescent light. She likes what she sees. The stained teeth. The yellow sore beneath the sliver of mouth. The neck with its
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Adams apple, a blade too underneath the yellow of his long thin neck. She puts her hand to the blade between his legs. She thinks of the baseball bat. The blade is hard; the tip is sharp, rounded. A wolfs snout. He switches off the kitchen light, lifts her cotton nightdress. In the dark carved by torchlight he fucks her. She draws him deeper. The canister of tear-gas strapped to the waist hurts her where the tape spreads. She moans. Unhappy with the position he lays her on the cold tiled floor. He is swift. Gert will be back soon. She presses the blades of bone at the hips, drives him deeper still. He is silent as the night. With his sharp thin hands he stifles her moans, but not before she cries Jeffrey ... Jeffrey.

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Fishy Suits

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Auntie Stella is pacing up and down past the hibiscus tree. Her arms are crossed. She keeps fluffing her hair back. Her high heels go click click on the crazy paving. Uncle Vinny is on the stoep soaking up the sun. His eyes are all squint. His teeth too. When the boy opens the creaking gate, Auntie Stella tells him to be quiet. Auntie Stellas face is shrivelled and cross looking. The boy doesnt understand why he has to be quiet when Auntie Gracie is making so much noise. He can hear her from the street moaning and groaning and shouting, Johnny, Johnny. Auntie Gracie is Uncle Johnnys sister. Uncle Vinny, who is married to Auntie Stella, is Uncle Johnnys brother. Hello Uncle Vinny, the boy says. Uncle Vinny looks and looks at the boy. He sees nothing. The boy thinks that the way Uncle Vinny looks at him he could be a blind person. The way the head and shoulders keep flopping the boy knows Uncle Vinny has been drinking. Come Auntie Theresa says. Auntie Theresa is the boys cousin. He calls her Auntie because at eighteen she is already married. Uncle Johnny is forty-two. Auntie Theresa fetches the boy from school because Uncle Johnny tells her to before he dies. He is the only child in the house. In front of the hallway mirror the boy spits into his palm, rubs the spit into his black hair. He opens his mouth, breathes into his palm, sniffs. Stinky, but not as stinky as Uncle Vinny. He pops a peppermint, straightens his school tie. He wears a shortsleeved white shirt, grey shorts. He pulls up his socks that reach his bony knees. He rubs the toe of his school shoe against the sock. Beside the hallway mirror Auntie Gracie carries on. Her whole body cries. She holds a laced handkerchief in her fat hands. When she blows her nose her fat body shakes all over. The flaps at the elbows wobble. The boy stifles a smile. Between wails Auntie Gracie heaves, draws air into her massive breast so she can weep all the more. Her hair, brushed flat about her head, is sheathed in an old brown stocking. Bits of curly hair poke out of the ladders. The toe of the stocking on top of her head wobbles too. Auntie Gracies slippers are as old as the stocking. Shes cut holes to ease the pressure on her bunions. The boy thinks Auntie Gracie should put her feet in warm lemon water. He cant tell her that now, shell only cry the more.
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Next to Auntie Gracie is Uncle Harold. He wears a double-breasted suit, which is too big for him. Uncle Harold is so thin he could fit into one half of the suit. Everyone in the family call Uncle Harold and Auntie Gracie Laurel and Hardy. Like Laurel and Hardy they are funny too. They like to sing and dance. Uncle Harold is a ballroom champion and Auntie Gracied amaze you. Its the ballroom shoes that hurt her feet so. Uncle Harold rests his bony hand on Auntie Gracies bare shoulder. There, there, Uncle Harold says. In his other hand he holds a Gunston Plain. He draws, smoke billows through his nose. The boy has learnt to do that. He doesnt like it one bit. He thinks its bad for Uncle Harold. If Auntie Gracie is the fattest person in the world then Uncle Harold is the thinnest. The boy has seen Uncle Harold with no clothes on. A sorry sight. Sticks and bones. But now Uncle Harold looks like the man about town in his blue double breasted suit, his hair and moustache bryllcreemed, the hairs in his ears clipped. Hes wearing cuff links too. While the boy arranges his hair Uncle Harold polishes his cufflinks. Now you be a man, Uncle Harold says, standing up straight, pushing out his bony chest, twisting his moustache, the Gunston plain smoking in his long brown fingers. The boy adjusts his spectacles, thrusts out his chest, and enters the room. There, there, Uncle Harold says. Auntie Gracie cries and cries. The boy knows that Auntie Gracie loves her brother so. The boy loves Uncle Johnny too. When his cousin Auntie Theresa comes to fetch him from school he knows something is wrong. Auntie Theresas eyes are all red, her nose is sniffly. When she sees him she squeezes him so hard hes scared hes going to fart. Now, Ive got something very sorry to tell you, she says. The boy waits. She doesnt tell him whats so sorry. She asks him what he did at school. He tells her because he knows she wants him to talk, say anything, just talk. He likes to talk, but he doesnt want to talk now. He wants to know why Auntie Theresa is so sorry. It makes him sad seeing her all sniffly and blubbery. She hasnt even combed her beautiful hair. Together they drive to Uncle Johnny and Auntie Theresas house. Auntie Theresa taps the back of his

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hand, then squeezes it too hard. He doesnt complain. He thinks that people must hurt each other so when they feel sorry. Auntie Theresa cries, but she doesnt cry like Auntie Gracie. Auntie Theresa makes sniffling noises. The tears just fall and fall. She doesnt have a handkerchief to wipe her wet bosoms. The boy thinks that she probably doesnt even know that shes wet down there. Auntie Theresa wears a pink dress that shows off her bosoms. She works in a shoe shop and she has lots of shoes. Now shes wearing green ones. Shes got the smallest feet and the biggest bosoms. This always makes the boy laugh because she looks so funny and so pretty. She has shiny black hair that falls down to her bum. Like Auntie Gracie she also wraps her hair in a stocking. Afterwards she sits under a hair dryer like a big bean with a hole in the bottom. Sometimes when shes in a hurry she lays her hair on the ironing board, covers it with a damp cloth, and strokes the iron backwards and forwards. She says her hair is too wavy. He says thats nonsense. Uncle Johnnys hair is wavy not hers. Uncle Johnnys hair is short and curly and stinks of fish. Uncle Johnnys suit too. Everything about Uncle Johnny is fishy because he owns a fish and chips shop in Athlone. The shop is called Johnny Rhodas Fisheries. When Auntie Theresa feels sorry like she is now, he knows something is fishy. He smiles, plays with the words sorry, fishy. He twists the words like he twists the marbles in his pocket. Now you mustnt be scared Auntie Theresa says. Everyone tells him what he must be, what he mustnt be. Auntie Theresa, Auntie Stella, Uncle Harold. Uncle Vinny says nothing because he is like a blind man. Auntie Gracie too. She cries and cries and cant see anything. They worry him so. Now Auntie Theresa is smoking a cigarette. She smokes Benson and Hedges Special Mild with the filters. She used to smoke Virginia Slims but she stopped because Auntie Stella would keep stealing them. The boy likes the way Auntie Theresa smokes. She doesnt blow it through her nose like Uncle Harold. She blows it in tiny bits out of the side of her mouth. Sometimes she brushes her hair back with the cigarette in her hands. She manages not to burn her hair. Which must be hard, especially the way she is right now, so worried, her eyes all
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red. Just when the boy thinks this Auntie Theresa takes the sunglasses from the dashboard and slips them over her red eyes. She looks just like a lady in the films. Its funny when you think about it. Auntie Theresa and Uncle Johnny. He met her in the shoe shop in Mowbray. Auntie Theresa says he used to visit her every week. He bought a lot of shoes. Sometimes hed bring flowers, sometimes perfume. One day he brought a whole basket of crayfish. The crayfish were alive too. Uncle Johnny had gone fishing on Uncle Alberts trawler. Auntie Theresa was so scared when she saw the crayfish snapping their pincers, she tripped on a footstool and fell hard on her bum. Uncle Johnny helped her up. That was when he asked Auntie Theresa to marry him. She was so scared she said yes. It didnt matter to her that Uncle Johnny was so much older. It didnt matter that he didnt move around so quickly. He has a tummy as big as Auntie Gracies. He doesnt dance as good as Auntie Gracie because hes got flat feet. Hes also got a problem with his heart. You can get it fixed, the boy told him. He even showed Uncle Johnny the picture of the doctor in the newspaper with a mask on his face. Its called a heart transplant, Uncle Johnny said. Besides, if you havent noticed the doctors just died. I can read, the boy said. He was cross with Uncle Johnny being a smart Alec. The dead doctor was the first, but there were other doctors who could help Uncle Johnny and his heart. Now they are on the corner of Newton and Havelock Roads where Uncle Johnny and Auntie Theresa live. The boy can already hear all the noise inside, especially Auntie Gracie. She always makes a big noise, but he has never heard her crying like that. Suddenly Auntie Theresa starts crying too and messes her sunglasses up. The boy takes the sunglasses off her face and wipes them with the tail of his shirt. Uncle Johnny loves you so, you know that dont you. I know, the boy says. He doesnt like the way Auntie Theresa looks at him so sad and then tells him how Uncle Johnny loves him so. Also she keeps tapping the back of his hand. Shes never done that before. Come to think of it, nothing that is happening has happened before. Auntie Theresa is
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always smiley. He knows because shes got a gold tooth in her mouth and she likes people to see it. But not now. He hasnt seen the tooth once. He also doesnt like the way her hair is all wild. She usually likes to wear it up like a big swirly cone. Or she puts clips in the sides. Always something. But not today. He doesnt want to say it, but he thinks Auntie Theresas hair is a mess. Fishy. Everything is fishy, and its not just because Uncle Johnnys house stinks of fish. He means everything is fishy because everything is funny. Auntie Stella going click click up and down the crazy paving. Uncle Vinny who can hardly sit up straight. Uncle Harold all dressed up the way he is, telling him to be a man. Its not that Uncle Harold doesnt like to dress up, but not first thing in the morning when hes only done two periods at school. At that time in the morning Uncle Harold is still in his vest and underpants rubbing Auntie Gracie all over with liniment oil. As for Auntie Gracie crying like she is. Crying and crying. Even he is starting to get worried. When he looks in the hallway mirror and puts spit on his hair he can see he looks cross. Maybe thats why Uncle Harold sticks his chest out so and smiles. Maybe Uncle Harold can see he is cross. He can feel Auntie Theresas tiny hand. He follows her. Auntie Theresas dress is not just pink like he thought. Its got orange dots all over. Silly that he didnt see that in the car. Maybe because she was so worried and all he could think about was how worried she looked. But he did see the green shoes, which means he wasnt looking properly. Now he starts to concentrate. Auntie Theresa has closed the bedroom door softly. There are lots of people in the room. Maybe Auntie Gracie had to go because she was making such a racket. Everybody is looking very smart but like Auntie Theresas their faces are all messed up. Auntie Philedas make-up has made streaky marks. Big Uncle Albert is shaking all over; his bald head is so sweaty it looks like even his head is crying. Auntie Mildred has a black lace thing over her eyes, you can just see her mouth twitching and her skinny neck quivering. Shes got that stupid sausage dog in her hands and shes hugging it. He only knows Auntie Mildred is crying because the tears roll all over the sausage dog.
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Auntie Theresa keeps holding his hand. He wishes shed let go. Shes hurting him so. Again, just when he thinks something, she acts like she knows what hes thought. She lets go of his hand and walks towards the bed. The boy follows. She falls to the side of the bed so suddenly the boy thinks shes tripped. She also makes a loud noise. And that is when he sees his Uncle Johnny. Uncle Johnnys eyes are open. His mouth is open too. Uncle Johnnys hand is on his chest. His fingers are not relaxed. It looks like he is pulling something, which he is. He is grabbing his vest. Uncle Johnny also wears shorts. The boy has never seen Uncle Johnny in shorts. Not even on the beach. Uncle Johnny always wears his black suit or his grey suit. His suits are always shiny with fish oil. He once told Uncle Johnny that he reminded him of a seal. Uncle Johnny laughed and said he was a seal. And then Uncle Johnny did something really silly. He jumped into the water in his suit and said See! Im a seal! Auntie Theresa was very cross. She doesnt like Uncle Johnny doing silly things. She always worries about Uncle Johnnys heart. The only times Auntie Theresa ever worries is when she worries about Uncle Johnny. She told him that she loved Uncle Johnny so much. How much, he asked. Like this? He opened his arms a little bit. Like this? He opened his arms wider. Like this? He opened his arms as wide as he could. Like this, Auntie Theresa said, and she flung out her arms and spun round and round in circles till she was dizzy. He tried to hold her up but she was so dizzy she kept falling to the ground and laughing. But now everything is different. When Auntie Theresa falls to the ground she doesnt laugh, she cries. And she cries so hard she makes him scared. Not the way Auntie Gracie cries making such a racket, but crying like she is pulling all the worry inside of her. Its not fair, Auntie Theresa crying like that. If she drags all the worry inside then where will it go? Wont it make her sick? Isnt Auntie Gracie right, crying like shes crying, making everything spill out? Breathing in deeply, then letting all the worry out. The boy walks up to Auntie Theresa and says there, there. He pokes his chest out too and looks straight at Uncle Johnny.
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Hes not scared. Hes not really worried. When he sees Uncle Johnny without his pants on, with his skinny legs all white and his toenails grey, he doesnt feel cross. He knows if Uncle Johnny had the time he would put his fishy suit on. Looking closely at the opened mouth, the stiff hand grabbing the vest, he can see why everybody looks so sad. Uncle Johnny looks in pain. But you know, if people could just stop crying just for a bit theyll see that Uncle Johnny is grinning, yes, uncle Johnny is laughing. So what is all the fuss about? The boy doesnt say anything. He just keeps thinking his sweet thoughts. He thinks about Uncle Johnny taking him to the airport to watch the aeroplanes and eat hamburgers. He thinks about Uncle Johnny and Auntie Theresa lying to the headmaster and saying there is a family emergency then taking him to the beach. He thinks about Uncle Johnny and he going on Uncle Alberts trawler Auntie Theresa was too scared. Uncle Alberts trawler is called Vasco da Gama. He thinks of helping a bit in Uncle Johnnys fish and chips shop. He thinks about Uncle Johnnys fishy hair and flat fishy feet. Mostly when he thinks about Uncle Johnny he sees him laughing the way he is laughing now. He thinks now of the day on the trawler, Uncle Johnny holding him tight, Uncle Alberts trawler rolling, the sea green and scary. He hugs his uncle now. He wraps his little arms around his uncles stomach. He whispers into his uncles ear and tells him he doesnt know why everyone is so worried. He even thinks he hears his uncle laugh, but hes not too sure. Uncle Johnny hasnt made a single move. He kisses his uncle on the cheek, presses the eyes and mouth closed and kisses him on the lips. When he pulls away he sees that Uncle Johnny is not laughing now, but smiling. He hears his uncle say he can keep the fishy suits.

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Merman

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Her heart races as the plane plunges. Over her sons shoulder she peers through the window. Below her the Cape peninsula veers towards the point where the Indian and Atlantic oceans meet. She puts the phial to her lips, drinks the last of the whisky. She has been drinking all night. Now in the expanding dawn she trembles. See, she says, pointing to Table Mountain. Her son studies the table as the plane dips. Today, just for her, the table is draped with its cloth of cloud. She longs for pictures like this, pictures she remembers from so long ago. Her son is sixteen. His brother and sister are twenty and twenty-two. She measures her exile according to the last. Twenty-two. She was eighteen then. Uncommonly beautiful for a common girl. As the plane slowly prepares to land, she holds the pocket mirror before her. She is beautiful still, her hair scraped back to accentuate the sheer structure of her face. She powders the rings beneath her eyes, softens the creases about the neck, between the breasts. While her friends in Frankfurt hem the slackness of their faces and bodies with a violence that amazes her, she can still rely on a dab of powder. She purses her lips, grits her teeth. She has had every tooth replaced. They glitter between the full red folds of her mouth. Nothing has withered her; neither drink, nor age, nor loss. It has taken her twenty-two years to return. Friedrich never will. He still smarts, all these years later, when he thinks of the secret police reclining in his lounge when he returns to his flat in Claremont. They have been watching him, they say. They know what he is up to. He is an engineer for Safmarine. Theyll turn a blind eye if he agrees to their wishes. She can stay with him, pretend to be his maid. No harm will come to either of them if he does one little thing. They look at him knowingly. Smirk. He can still see their disgust. A white man and a coloured woman. Dont you like our girls, they say. An engineer. They know how much he earns. What is he doing with a girl from Hanover Park when with his looks, his money, he can win the heart of any girl on the beaches of Seapoint? She knows the moment well. Over the years, in the bar in the basement of their home in Frankfurt, he has replayed the scene. She waits for the moment he refuses to spy for BOSS.
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It is his moment of greatest integrity. He will not report on Russian manoeuvres along the Atlantic and Indian oceans. He knows hell have to get them out of the country. He doesnt think that the police know they were married in Swaziland, that she is three months pregnant. While they recline in the Gomma Gomma lounge suite, he stands, waits, plots. He is a big man. They cannot imagine the gentleness of his heart. That same night they leave. Her aunt sends her news clippings. The photos must have been taken by the police. Intimate moments on Sandy Bay, in Kirstenbosch Gardens, in his flat in Claremont where they thought they were alone. Strange to think that love could spawn such venomous interest. Friedrich has the clippings framed. They hang behind the bar in the basement of their home. Twenty-two years later they are still a talking point. She knows why he displays them so. They are an affront to his parents who have never approved of her, an affront to his colleagues who laugh anxiously while they drink his Schnapps and beer. They commend him on capturing her. She doesnt care for the display. Still, she says nothing. She plays the girl from darkest Africa who, twenty-two years later, still speaks German poorly. Does he care that these pictures pain her so? Never. They are there to show off their love, he says. She detests the phrase. When she hurls the pictures to the floor, smashes the glass, he gets down on to his hands and knees and delicately removes the clippings. When they next appear on the wall behind the bar the glass that sheaths them is shatterproof. No, he says, he will never return. She leaves him with his fond memories of courage, of love and youth. His hair has thinned, his body is a vat. He works too hard, neglects himself. Like her he drinks too much, unlike her it shows. If he has aged badly, his heart is unchanged, as strong as ever. It is she who thinks of loss, she who imagines another life. But what? What could possibly replace the fact that she is a kept woman? She has done nothing to undo the fact. The housekeeper takes care of the cooking and cleaning. The older children have quit the house. They have flats in Frankfurt. They work for their father who now designs aeroplane wings. In the early days, when they struggle to
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make ends meet, she moonlights as a cleaner. He abhors the ignominy; she doesnt care. Shed have continued as a cleaner if hed let her. She does not have his pride, his standards. She reminds him that that was what she did when he first saw her. He doesnt care to think of that. Only the glory of their love matters. In a drunken moment he describes them as refugees of the heart. And the Turks here in Germany? Are they not refugees of the heart? He glowers, downs his Schnapps. He does not care for the Turks. She is not one of them. She is not a guest-worker. Then what? What is she? My wife, he cries, his eyes burning with love. My wife, he softly repeats. My jewel. My heart. He holds her tightly. Too tightly. Were she to die, he would fill her with straw and keep her beside him always. A gentle man. Mad about her. Go, if you must! But remember to come back. I look forward to hearing of this new South Africa. She has repeatedly told him that things have changed. You think that Mandela and his magic wand will change the hatred? You truly think that? If you do you are a fool. You think Germany has changed? Fifty years later and I tell you nothing has changed. A leopard cannot change its spots. She listens, downs a whisky. Look at my father, he says. Just look. Has he changed? Look at my own generation. Look how they look at you. And what of you, she asks. You and your shame and pride. You will not have Nurjahan in our house because she is a Turk. No! It is because she is a cleaner! And are so clean that you need no one to wipe up your mess? Go! he repeats too loudly. Go and see. He hands her two tickets for her and their son. The boy wants to go too. She looks at her son, buckled up beside her. He has Friedrichs blue eyes, her dark hair and skin. He smiles at her as the plane hits the runway. She holds his hand tightly in hers. Her family is there to meet her; all but one, the one she longs for most, her brother, her twin. No one knows of his whereabouts. On the phone to her cousin she hears the telling phrase: He does not know who he is. He has a child, a woman he left long ago. Without saying it the cousin infers that he left his wife for a man. She can sense the cousins disgust. Now she, the cousin, is all smiles. Her son has his cheeks pinched. Her family
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marvels at the boys blue eyes. She remembers Friedrichs words: Nothing has changed. He is right. In this instance at least. They, her family, are gratified by the fact she has married a German. They ask after Friedrich. They dont inquire after her. Still so beautiful, they say. They marvel at the smoothness of her neck, the clarity of her eyes, her teeth. They are startled by the condition of her teeth. She tells them shes had the lot replaced. Her uncle shows her the gums where nothing protrudes. A family of vampires. It is her son who quietly points out the fact. She doesnt ask after her brother Lenny. She has an address in Camps Bay. She will go there immediately. The family is surprised that she hires a car; surprised she will not go with them. They are keen to show her how they have moved up in the world. They dont live in Hanover Park anymore. They live in Fairways near to white people. Tonight, she says. She conceals her urgency well, thanks them for welcoming her. But it is the brother she wants to see, the twin she has not seen for twenty-two years. In the rented Golf she and her son pass a wasteland of shacks. They move through the Cape Flats, past the power station that divides Athlone from Pinelands. The boy cranes his head, his fingers to his nose to stop the stench. Salt and Pepper cans, she says. The Golf races past Rondebosch. I used to clean houses here. The son does not feel the fathers shame. On De Waal drive they pass wildebeest and buck, a field of lilies. The mountain rears overhead. The boy marvels as the buck gambol across the field. To his right the land slopes to the sea. The Golf races down past the city centre onto the strip that stretches along the beach. Look Ma! The boy points to a tanker. He knows his father was an engineer for a shipping company. He dreams of ships too. He'd like to be a cook on a ship. Sail from sea to sea. He tells her this; he doesnt tell his father. They enter Camps Bay. Lenny opens the door. It is he her son most resembles. He wears a string vest, boxer shorts. The upper body is stronger than the lower. There are tattoos along his arms, his legs, his neck, the sides of his face. A reformatory boy, a stint in Pollsmoor prison too. He smiles, a gold tooth glitters. He doesnt embrace her. Neither does he embrace her son. He simply opens
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the door, retreats. The house opens onto the sea. The boy says nothing. He holds her hand. She knows he is afraid. He has never seen such ugliness mixed with beauty. The boy stares and stares. Lenny peels off the vest, reveals a dragon, a necklace of roses and thorns, a numbered code, a merman. Lennys body is a map on which nothing makes sense. The stories he tells the boy are hidden stories. The emblem is the trigger. The numbered code signals his clan in prison. The merman, she guesses, is a token of love given, shared, taken? Has she flown all this way to have her son exposed to this? Does he, the son, understand? At sixteen what could he possibly know? Enough. She leads the boy to the beach. I will be with Lenny for a bit, she says. Swim. The water should be warm. The boy strips. Lenny watches him. Does he see himself? Beautiful, preyed upon, destroyed? She wishes shed left her son behind. Hell be fine, Lenny says. For the first time he embraces her. She feels his tears against her cheek. She cannot cry. Something inside is tightening. She needs a drink. He pours one for her. The glass is crystal. In his hand the glass seems a stolen thing. But then, is it not he who has been stolen? The question posed within, surfaces without pity. Does he cry because of her? Himself? She knows he has waited for the boy to go before the tears. He seems remarkably healthy and strong. At fifty he has the body of a young man. He must do something to ensure the tattoos keep their form. He swims, he says. Jogs too. He has to keep his spirits up. He tells her nothing of the medication he must take. Nothing of the man in the room next door who silently wastes away. If she is a kept woman, he is a kept man. Come, he says. I want you to meet the story of my life. The phrase is as intimate as a riddle. He opens the door, steps inside. There, before them, lies the man. Lenny bends down beside him, strokes his brow, holds his hand. The mans eyes open. They are blue, as blue as a deep sea. The man smiles at her. He knows who she is; his loves mirror. Each studies the other while Lenny looks on. She came all the way from Germany to see me, Lenny says. She holds the mans hand, light as a feather. He closes his eyes, she gently draws her hand away. Ma! She rises, leaves Lenny kneeling beside the
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man. Her son is wet and famished. He beams. In his hands he holds sea shells. He places a shell to his ear, then hers. She is glad that he is happy. She prepares her son a light lunch, salad, cheese, and bread. He scoffs, downs a glass of orange juice, races back to the beach. Lenny appears. It is for the lover he cries, not for her, not for himself. She sees that he too is radiant. Jurgen found me on the street, he says. Ten years ago. It doesnt escape her that he is German too. German men and their love! He will not go home to Bielefeld, Lenny says. He wants to be here with me. I am his protector. What would the men from BOSS have said of this? She decides that this is where she too will stay. She calls her cousin. Her cousin is not pleased. How can you allow yourself, your son, to stay in a place like that? She knows what her cousin means. She puts down the phone. Now, more than ever, she longs for Mandelas magic wand. She unpacks the suitcases, arranges her sons bed. The house is large. Sea air fills the rooms. Through the kitchen window she watches her son scale the waves on a boogie board. Lenny is in the water with him. The merman. The kept man who has become the keeper. The role suits him. It is a role which he was made for. She has never known such softness in him; has never seen such softness in a man before. Friedrich, with all his gentleness, his protestations of love, was never this soft, this pure. When she flies back to Germany this is what she will say; that in South Africa she discovered love. Is that all? Friedrich will ask. It is everything, she will say.

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Red man in the red

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5 am. He stands at an intersection. Danger tape red and white flanks the trench in the centre of the road. The village is being rewired. To his side broken slabs of tar, disgorged earth. Amber light encircles him, a lone figure in the rural night. Through mist the taxi advances. Ten minutes to the train station. A wait of thirty minutes on the station platform. Two hours before he reaches Cape Town. Punitive. In the taxi, on the platform, no one speaks. Five days a week the same vigil. Men in workers blue. Women office workers, domestic servants swaddled in drab colours. He too. Drabness is his deterrent in these threatening times. It is also his fate. He wears drabness with the air of a flagellant. Not a pious renouncer of Mammon but one who is Mammons debtor. These days he is a familiar face at Cash Converters. It is his place of conversion. No longer does he shamefully bear his wares. He has converted his need into a kind of courage. Shame and pride is a thing of the recent past. This change in him fascinates. A regular contributor to the Classifieds he has sold many a prized bauble to the bargain hunter. The Rolex. The Catamaran. The CD player. He well knows the lament of Ur: My possessions fly away from me. Like locusts they are on the wing, flying. Does he lament? She does. He doesnt. He tells her the dead time hes experiencing is temporary. He knows it isnt. The will is gone. The hunger too. He cant tell her this. Shed freak, which she does anyway. In the mean time, while he searches for a solution, the boys school fees have to be paid. The mortgage, since he wont sell the house. He encourages her extravagance the better to savour the punitive world he courts. Is this punishment his salvation? Of course not. He is neither punished nor saved. What he experiences is not a transfiguration. If he thinks now of returning to carpentry it is not because it is the ennobled vocation of the poor. It is a thing to do with hands. A skill long neglected which in the rural locale where he lives is much prized. He should quit his mouth then. Telesales professionals do not need fancy equipment. They have only one tool, their voice. A strange tool indeed, stranger still now that he waits on the platform where no one speaks. Here, in the dark of night, he is one of the voiceless. From silent mouths plumes of cold emerge, a language from the
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deep. Under the enclosure of a derelict brick building they singly wait. Inside the building the stench of urine and shit. Before his feet the frosted shards of a broken wine bottle. In the third class carriage silence prevails. A man in blue falls back to sleep. In his large brown hands he holds his luncheon wrapped in paper. Those who stay awake possess the eyes of sleepwalkers, their ghost eyes mirrored in the carriage window. The train rocks. The figures and their mirrored ghosts rock too. The first whiffs of the approaching tannery. The smell is a smell like death itself, impossible to define. It is a smell he carries by proxy. The man in blue, who sleeps, works there. Others too. How do they carry the smell? Where, in them, does the smell reside? Is it a smell at all? Or is this death with which they work something other? A mirrored ghost. A skin shed, regrown. An ether. For him a passing transaction which each day grows permanent. From them who traffic in slaughter a stench forged in the body that is its chalice. Cells have memory. Cells are the sacramental place of memory. What then must we make of the cells of flayed skins? What of their memories? The memories of cattle. Do they make the bodies of the living their kingdom? He has never been inside the tannery. Is it just a place of skins? At what point do the skins cede the flesh? The smell suggests more carcass than skin. Is it there in the tannery that the separation of flesh and bone and skin begins? He imagines boiling cauldrons as vast as swimming pools. Salted hides in serried racks. Dyes which, like memory, inhabit the bodies of the living. He sees the sleeping black man bruised with crimson. The stain like the stench will never go away. It is his ghost, this stain, this stench. At night when he lies in bed with his wife, it is this stain, this stench that binds them. Her man of oxide. Her ox man. Does she bathe him in oils? Does she douse the water with lavender and rosemary? Is their marriage bed a scented place too? Man of rosemary and lavender. Man of hides. The man disembarks. Some office workers and domestics too. Hell see them again on the way back from work. The train moves. Light breaks. Another ninety minutes before he reaches his destination. Chatter grows with the expanding light. The
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closer his place of work the more rested the occupants. He, meanwhile, remains a dead thing in a dead time. He thinks of his wife readying the boys for school. Hes sold the BM, shes kept the Defender, because there is no way she will admit to a car pool. Besides, how will she visit her friends, the hairdresser? She is a woman who sets high store by appearances. Its why he married her, why he wonders why he is with her now. How speak of carpentry to her? Shed only laugh in the acid way she mistakes for power. Needless to say no condiment of lavender and rosemary awaits him. Her recommendation: Sort your shit out. Which he does, which he has, but not in the way shed envisaged. She finds nothing chastening in a punitive life. No doubt shes looking for a way to ditch him, which she will soon enough. She enjoys a winner with a gift for the gab; hes stopped being one. The stench she savours is the stench of money. If he cant find it, she will. Shes got a play-list of wealthy divorcees. Shell donate her cunt to them till kingdom come. No doubt shes fucking Bram Malan on the side. He doesnt care. Hes past caring. Shes stopped arranging his hair, sorting out his clothes. She prefers not to be seen in public with him. What for? He has the look of a defeated man. A man with precious little capacity these days to make money. Worse, a man without the ability to fake it. Counterfeit, he thinks. Thats what she values. A counterfeit marriage. Counterfeit money, counterfeit but usable. It is money, or the ability to fake that you have it, which is his households religion. The boys have a taste for money too. How, then, remove the smell of money? Worse, how remove a smell he cannot gratify? Money eludes him, has done so for some time. He is in a dead time. It happens, this death. He is not the first on the sales floor who now habitually fails to close. The bank is no longer an option. He has little left to sell. He is in the red. A man of oxide too. The view through the carriage window no longer gratifies. The mountains and fields are gone, his vision foreshortened by building upon building. He thinks of the graph of a thriving heartbeat. Industria. Inside of him a flat-line. He opens a stapled collection of A4 paper. BASIC TELESALES. He reads the index,
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knows the logic that drives each heading: Why do people buy? Why do people buy from you? Basic Sales Formulae. The Sales Call. Introduction. Probing. Matching. Confirming. Closing. The headings no longer console him. They are flayed, detached; skins he no longer wears, words he cannot unstitch. At what point did the instinct for selling desert him? When did he pose that fatal question that turned ease into doubt? Was it a question, or was it a smell, some thing stealthy, ineffable, that stole him from himself? A parasite. A toxic thing that glazes the tongue. Hes seen it at work on the sales floor, this dead thing that turns work into a dead time. Rashid, high on coke, who passed the point of no return. Lionel who one day disappeared. Lionels wife appearing for the first time wanting clues to his whereabouts. Jason who blew his brains out on the sales floor. Never easy this thing he does, especially now with the rand crashing, businesses disinvesting, advertising space in a paper universe daily growing redundant. He repeats the mantra: Probe. Match. Confirm. Close. But he never reaches the close. Day in day out he remains a failure. It is not that he doesnt try. He does. Perhaps he tries too hard. Is it his voice that gives him away? Or is it what the voice will not give that gives him away? He has grown suspicious of himself. He is the intersection of a ripped open road. Something inside him cancels him. He is the X. The O. He flips the letters. OX. Oxide. Red man in the red. Something has shut him up, erased him. He feels the unease of someone who hasnt even begun. Closure mocks him. If you cant close then blow your brains out. Wipe the slate, disappear. Why do people buy from you? A pointless question. People dont. He reads the explanation anyway. Hes read it before. Hell read it again: Make the most of every phone call. Come across positively, professionally, as interestingly as possible. Smile. Vary the pitch. Speak clearly and at an easy to follow pace. Stress words that you want them to remember. Pause effectively. The sales floor is a theatre. He, like the others, are actors. Miscast, he thinks now. Cast against type. Perhaps not an actor at all. Then again, is he any more real than they? Any less? He cant locate the error. He only knows that something is wrong. The more he knows this the more he hates
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himself. The more he hates himself the more he hates the wife in bed who waits for the cash to flow. Nothing flows. Each day the circuitry fails him. If he cannot act, he wont close. And if he acts, succeeds, then what? Hell be back where he started, at the top of his game. If he wants to play, that is. Play-act. Should he play the fool the better to mask his rage? Should he accept this play within a play? He is asked to be persuasively unreal. Better than the real thing. Superstitious, suspicious, he thinks he has sold his soul. Did he have one to sell? Who is he kidding? Theres more soul in the tannery than in each and every cell of his scheming body. He is on the train because hes sold the BM. Hes in a third class carriage because he thinks its good for him. A Johnny-come-lately at the pearly gates? All about him the chattering grows. As the train enters the city centre sleep eviscerates. Dullness gives way to grins and smiles. Teeth gleam. Mouths are laminated calling cards. In the streets vendors parry their bric-a-brac. A packet of cigarettes, a hot-dog, the Business Day. In a shop window he glances at himself. He smiles. Hamlet will have to take a back seat for the next six hours. Or is it not the reverse? Is Hamlet not the clue to success? Dissemble to get to the truth? Let everyone think youre crazy then cut to the core? The problem of course is that Hamlet dies. Not an option. Unless of course it is the tongue that is the sword; a tongue that must turn against him. Walking towards the foreshore, ships like cutouts in the near distance, he begins to breathe deeply. Hes thrown the dog in the bin because the taste disturbs him. He feels he has been eating himself, which he has. Like the dog, he is a processed thing, sheathed, disguised, counterfeit. The whiff of the tannery tells him so. Forget the tannery, he thinks now. Shut down the senses. Put the brain on hold. Light a cigarette. Open the Business Day. Junk Hamlet with the dog.

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German Genius

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She died of nothing but the rage to live. These are the words she finds when she opens the envelope that contains the obituary hed written for her. The words are Swifts. It was she whod uttered them years ago. Twenty-two precisely. She remembers the day, the hour, the moment. She sees him before her. His thick blond hair with its widows peak. The eyebrows arched. The eyes cool, burning at their core. The tanned body languorous. The tapered hands moving effortlessly. The voice hard ... soft too. She feels the jolt inside. She cannot find another word to describe the sensation she calls love. She feels it as a kind of pain. Before this jolt shed felt then feels now shed never known love. Men yes, but not love. Was it his love she felt, or her own? Did he choose her because shed chosen him? She watches him sign his name to a slip, the pen white gold in his beautiful hands. Twenty-two years later he still had the pen. Unlike her, he never lost things. With the same fountain pen he will scratch Swifts words and slip them into an envelope. When she discovers the envelope after his death there is no clue to the contents. The envelope is sealed. Blank. It is in the third drawer of an ordered desk. He has left no stone unturned. The estate is closed. The houses in Port Shepstone and Johannesburg go to the children. She keeps the flat in Margate. She lives on the interest of the Trust. In perpetuity the wills says. But what good is the interest in a declining currency? She is sixty-four. He leaves her no lump sum, no nest-egg. Live! he says. Rage! The draft of the will she finds is scratched with the same white gold pen. Everything she owns, everything that is hers, she owes to the bank. She measures her profit margin against his interest. She measures these against her declining health. The equation leaves her little room. What good is a flat by the sea when she cannot retire? What good is a suppurating knee when she must keep moving and the cartilage wont heal? The funeral follows pell-mell after the operation. She locates her grief there in the chafing knee which, after years of neglect, will no longer endure the burden she has inflicted still inflicts upon herself. She has no choice but to
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move on, keep moving. Rage! Live! The words keep recurring as she moves now between the city and the sea. She no longer lives in the house in which theyd both lived. She lives in the flat he chose for her. An efficient space like the anonymous motel rooms between cities to which she has grown accustomed. Not a home but a resting place, a place to rest her knee, her heart. A place to still a mind that will not still. She is on the outskirts of the city. The traffic thins. Now the bloodline to the sea her child eases. Still Swifts words return, snag her. Would he have remembered the words sealed in an envelope long ago? Would he have thought finally as he opened the drawer to his desk? Had he long ago recorded the name and telephone number of the stone cutter, the engraver? Always one to look ahead. Premeditated in everything he did. In bed too. She feels his tapered fingers with their perfectly clipped nails. The movement of his hands clipped too. Hard ... soft. What was it in her that wanted this? He arranged her as he arranged everything else. She knew what he wanted. She adjusted herself accordingly. The hair a certain length. Make-up, but not too much. This colour, not that. She, a thing, subject to his will. She feels the jolt she calls love. Is it something she engenders or something he provokes? Driving towards the sea she struggles to remember her answer to Swifts words. Absurd to think you can construct a lovers obituary in advance. What were they thinking of, she and he? Was death a remote thing to toy with? She remembers the evening beside the fire. A Sunday with little to do. Theyd play a game they called Sophies Choice. The game referred to a novel shed read. Theyd seen the film together. In the film the actress Meryl Streep must choose which of her two children she will save, which leave to die. When she reads the book, sees the film with him, she cannot conceive of the choice as a sacrifice. Was the one child more important or worthy? Never. The choice is never Sophies. It is never an act of surrender. She Sophie would give her life, but it is not hers to give, not hers the Commandant wants. No, not a sacrifice. Then what? What is Sophies choice? A madness, she thinks now. That is what the
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Commandant wants for her; a pain which no death will ever take away. Not sacrifice, then, but psychic murder. A murder of the soul. Save one child: endure a living death. She is crying. She cannot will not imagine herself there, on the station platform, her boy and her girl beside her. Yet, much as she wills the censor, Sophies pain floods her. She sees herself as Sophie. She sees Dieter as the Commandant. Symmetry wills her there. She the Polish Jew, Dieter the German genius. His words German genius. Throughout his life he used those words. They were meant to set his race apart. Had he ever made an apology for his race and what they had done to others? Never. Not once has he apologised for anything. It was always she, she with her acts of contrition. He was a boy in 1945. A boy from Hamburg. She a Jewish girl from Springs. What did they know of psychic murder? Everything, she thinks now. The place and time is different, yet slaughter prevails. The figures may differ, the means of death too, but death tolled then, in 1945, in 1981 when they first met. Death tolls now in 2001. They are in Johannesburg for a routine check-up. The doctors words. Words designed to mask the fact that it is death that is routine. He can barely breathe. Barely stand. All the beauty is gone. His tapered hands are talons of bone. His thick blond hair with its widows peak is ashen, thin too. The voice with its modulated hardness, softness, quavers; a stones rattle in a tin. Exhausted, incontinent, she leads him to the public toilet. There, before the gendered door, he leaves her. There, behind a door that is not hers to enter, he dies. She cannot forget the place. The ignominy. The shame. She wants to believe that the place where he dies is arbitrary, which at some level it is. What are the odds against his dying in a public toilet in the city? After all, he lived by the sea in a house he never left. Why not there, by the sea? Why in a public toilet? Is she searching for clues where there are none? Is she incapable of accepting that death knows no right place? And why now does she return to the cruel game they played on an aimless Sunday afternoon? Is it because cruelty slept between them? What then of the words sheathed inside a blank envelope? She died of nothing but the rage to live. Did he mean what she meant
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when she spoke these words all those years ago? Did he intend them to consecrate her zest, her passion, her will? Or rather, were they not encrypted? Designed to conceal a Commandants cruel wit? Is that why the memory of a book, a film, a cruel game, slips between love and its shadow? What does the obituary truly say of her? She cuts apart the words. Nothing. Death. Rage. Life. What do they truly mean, these words? What did she mean? He? A mere quotation, she thinks now. Borrowed wisdom applicable to anyone. Does this make the words any less worthy? Less important? Are these the words shed have wanted inscribed in stone, cut into steel? What do they make urns of these days? Does it matter? She thinks it does. Death must be consecrated, made worthy, important. No stone is like any other. No metal either. Then what of borrowed words? What of Swift? He is nothing to her. A dead scribbler from another century. A bitchy one too. Would Dieter have known of Swifts bile? Would he have seen through the quotation, located the rage within the rage? Is he Dieter Swift come back to haunt her? Mock her? Everything within her militates against the claim of love. She does not love him, she thinks now. He did not love her. For twenty-two years they play a cruel game. She the Jew from Springs, he the German from Hamburg, playing Sophies Choice on a Sunday afternoon. Given the choice who would you sleep with? Who murder? Who save? The mornings he devoted to the cross-word. She sees him in blue pyjamas, a ghost of a man, a gin and tonic at his side. She thinks of what the cross-word might mean other than the fact that it maroons him, isolates him from her, shuts him away in a speculative journey that contains a single answer. Deduction. Induction. Is this all the obituary means to him? A grid. A solution to a problem. Is this too what her death would have meant, had she died before he did? Would he have sighed and said: Nothing, she meant nothing to me. Her rage too was nothing to me. Her life? Well, we hardly saw each other. I saw more of the maid than I saw of her. Come to think of it, the maid was more useful too. A necessity. And she? A hindrance. Yes, a
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needy noisy hindrance. Good for a lark. A roll in the hay. As easily brushed off. His will, like the cross-word, is a system of solutions. He is Pontius Pilate. His hands are clean. Monies and property is divided amongst his children. He leaves little for her, nothing for her children. At sixty-four she has a schoolgirls annuity. Live! he cries in the public toilet. Rage! She sheaths his hate with love. If she remembers the cruel game which spanned twenty-two years, she also remembers the jolt she felt in a restaurant in Springs. She feels it now. A spasm that grips the heart. She feels his hand there where others have driven nails. She feels him draw the nails one by one. She hears the nails fall to the floor. With each nail he draws she lives a little more. He does not close the wounds. He leaves that up to her. He sustains her belief in him. He knows that because she has not known love, she cannot know his nature. This she learns in time. But he knows that when she learns the nature of his love it will be too late. She will stay, which she does. They will play their games together. She will care for him, which she does. She will love him in spite of everything because he sustains her when no other man will. He never hit her like Harry did. He never denied her things. If his cruelty has a name it is moderation. He moderated her. Moderated her rage, her will. A wild animal, he called her. And he? Was he the tamer? Was that his fantasy? Was she his caged animal from Africa? Did she care what he made of her? This German with his German genius. Was he her Commandant with his cool blue eyes and his moderation? She learnt to stem her fancy. She exchanged her taste for his. Because her body was never her own she saw no danger in giving herself up. He drew the nails one by one. He lay raw meat in the cage, left the door ajar. Other than this he left no other lure. No bully, he is no seducer either. German genius. Is this why, now, she thinks of Sophies Choice? Is it because he knew she had no other choice? What, then, of the children? Her children, not his. He left them nothing because they were nothing to him. And she, did she make nothing of her children too? She remembers watching the film with him. They
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are lying in bed. The moment comes for which the word sacrifice will not do. It is a moment which has no name. Is that why, in that moment, she claws the walls, tears the wallpaper? She cannot watch the moment when Sophie makes her choice. She blinds herself with tears. She twists in bed, reaches not to Dieter but the wall. Like Sophie she abandoned one child. Like Sophie she knows that the child she abandoned is the girl. Dieter says nothing. The film rolls on to its tragic conclusion. As a German what did he see? What did he make of the pain of a Polish Jew? What does he know of a mothers pain? Nothing. She is no mother to him. A woman then? But then so is the maid. A lover then? But then what did he know of a womans passion? A wife then? But then she was not there each day to care for him. A week-ender. She knows now that he learnt long ago not to need her. Fitting, then, that he should not die in her arms. Fitting that he leave her next to nothing. She who was nothing to him. Better to die in a public toilet. There he is rid of her. These thoughts flood her as she races to the child she renounced. Dieter is dead and buried. That part she gave to him is dead and buried too. Her thoughts are not made of grief. She does not grieve for him. She does not grieve for herself. She knows the choice she has made. She knows the choice is mistaken. Then why cry over spilt milk? If he were here he would only moderate her further; train her never to spill, never to waste emotion. If there is some truth now in Swifts words, then it is that she has grown accustomed to nothing. She is tempered. If she lives now, it is not with rage, it is with hope. Mistakes have been made. Shell make them again. If he with his German genius sought solutions, then she, if she seeks anything, seeks love. Immoderate love. A mothers love for her abandoned child. This is where she races now, years later. Unlike Sophie she does not give her child up to death. No Commandant takes the child in hand and leads her to the incinerator. Her child lives. The child is a woman now. A mother too. It is the child that calls her, the child that says, mother I am here for you. Mother come to me. It is the child who stills her rage, the child who knows she is not nothing.
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Jammerplank

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At forty-six he does not drive. The reason he gives, is nervousness. He is highly strung, he says. Easily agitated. The words are alien, the figments of feminine character in a Henry James novel. Still, they serve their purpose. The explanation shifts depending on whom he talks to. Im a passenger and I ride and I ride, he murmurs to the ferryman who may have heard of Iggy Pop. I belong to the age of the horse and carriage he says to another. But nervousness is the most common account. Preparing a seminar on V.S. Naipauls The Enigma of Arrival he finds the word repeated, combined with rawness, strangeness. The rawest strangers nerves. The combination is not alien to him. It is, however, a combination too intimate to be divulged to a ferryman. Rather a character in a James novel with her smelling salts; rather the passenger, never controlling, attentive to danger. He lives on a forested knoll fifteen kilometres away from the campus. The isolation suits him. He lives alone, has done so for years. The children are with their mother in Yellowknife, an outpost in Northern Canada. The arrangement is amicable. Both he and his ex-wife prefer distance, isolation. She is the medic for the Inuit reservation. He visits the children once a year, arranges a conference lecture to cover the cost. The childrens cards and letters the correspondence is frequent concern moose and reindeer, sleighing and ice-skating, Indian summers and Northern Lights. The children take after their mother. Physical children. They do not have his rawness, his strangeness. It is the Christmas holidays. Cards depicting snow and reindeer perch on the bookshelf. He sends the children a card too. An image of Zulu women with bared breasts weaving baskets. The ferryman whom he usually accompanies to campus is in Greece. He discovers a recent arrivant in the Nederlands Department who lives in the same village as he. The discovery occurs at the meat counter at the local Spar. The man, Hans van Holom, is eager to chat. Plastic carrier bags in hand they exit the Spar. His bicycle is outside. It is then Van Holom discovers he does not drive. Arrangements are made. He has found his ferryman for the holidays. Van Holom invites him for a drink. He declines. He reserves conversation for the occasions when he
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must speak when a passenger, in a seminar room. Van Holom is not aware of the silence for which he is well known. Van Holom is a talker. He does not care for talkers. He does, however, recognise Van Holoms usefulness. Numbers are exchanged. Van Holom has classes on Dutch culture to prepare, e-mails to see to. He does not reveal the nature of his own research. Van Holom inquires, of course. He can see that Van Holom is a lonely man. Sixty? Sixty-five? A retired schoolteacher lucky to have found sessional work at the university. They meet three days later. He waits on the side of the road. He settles in the passenger seat of the Toyota. The ashtray is brimful with butts. He unwinds the window. Van Holom peers. I take it thats your house? He nods, follows Van Holoms gaze. The house is hidden in a dip, shrouded with trees. A hideaway, Van Holom says, chuckles. The teeth are yellow, interspersed with slivers of gold. Sandals, canvas shorts, a short-sleeved shirt opened to the breast, a gold chain in a thicket of yellow-white hair. He is relieved that the arrangement is temporary. Because distance must be filled, words exchanged, Van Holom talks. He listens. He must. It is his duty, a form of payment. Hed rather pay in cash but Van Holom resists. A pity. Van Holom is clearly needy, but it is not his money Van Holom needs. As the Toyota trundles down the knoll towards the city he discovers that Van Holom once taught Afrikaans and Dutch at a private school in Grahamstown. The information filters, stirs a memory. Did you know a man called Donker? Van Holom looks at him surprised. Yes, he says. He died of asthma. A fine young man. Played the guitar, called it his jammerplank. Always felt sorry for himself. Never involved himself in extra-mural affairs. An odd ball. Van Holom stops. Is he now being regarded as an odd ball too? How do you know Donker? He does not care to explain the source of the memory. He sees that Van Holom does not care for his preferred silence. Still, he is captive. On the way back from campus Van Holom remembers Donkers first name. Edvard, he says, as in Munch. A fine man, he repeats, though nothing he has disclosed suggests that he ever regarded Edvard Donker as a fine man.
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At the entrance to his house Van Holom idles. He wishes to be invited in, senses he will not be. Ill see you Wednesday, then. Yes, he says. Thank you. Van Holom interprets his gratitude as an insult. He turns his back, descends the slope to his house, his satchel weighted with books. All morning he has been unable to shirk thoughts of the young teacher of Dutch who died of asthma. Edvard Donker moves to South Africa in the sixties for reasons of ill health. The condition is chronic; the dryness of Africa stalls the inevitable. Wherever he is he cannot breathe. He leaves behind a wife and a three-year old daughter. Does he sing his woe? Is that why he Edvard Donker calls his guitar his jammerplank? Why does he now think of Edvard Donker, a man dead for thirty years whom he has never met? Because there, in the man, the name, lies another memory, one so deep, so tender, that its resurgence startles him. It is a chance moment in a conversation exchanged out of duty that she, the daughter, Myrrh Donker, returns to him. He hasnt seen her for twelve years. Through the grapevine he knows she is married. She was his prize student once. Named for a resin, a perfume, the name, singular, compelling, compels him now. He unlocks the door to his cottage. In the dining room he sets down the weighty satchel, pours a glass of wine. Unable to relax, nervous, raw, he gazes through the window. Did you know a man called Donker? Van Holom swerves, looks at him. He sees the surprise in Van Holoms eyes; a surprise deftly veiled. Dead, Van Holom says. And yet, nothing dies. Until that point in the conversation he has not stopped to think who Van Holom might be. He is the ferryman, a man he barely knows. A colleague of sorts. During the next three trips Van Holom returns to Donker. He will remember the songs he sang, the village in Holland from whence he came, the clothes he wore; an artists clothes, shabby corduroys, loafers. Details will join them as they ferry back and forth between village and campus. How do you know of Edvard, Van Holom repeats. He knows he must provide an answer. He does not mention the daughter but the wife. He talks of the man she married when Donker died; a leading figure in the Liberal Party. He was once a card-carrying member, he
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says. He senses Van Holoms relief. Van Holom believes he is finally talking. Mention of the wife provides Van Holom with another portal. He remarks on her beauty, he remembers her name. Virginia. A North American vine, Parthenocissus quinquefolia, cultivated for ornament. Van Holom thinks he impresses. Malcolmia maritima, with white or pink flowers. Inevitably, he swerves to the pure state the name harbours. She was never a virgin, Van Holom says. Smirks. Anything but. Drove Edvard crazy. What do you expect when you marry beauty? Van Holom looks at him knowingly. Was Virginia the ornament Edvard could not hold? Did she wantonly mock the innocence of her name? This is what Van Holom suggests. They lived in a closed community, Van Holom says. We all knew each others business. Then why why did no one discover Myrrhs business? And why has Van Holom not once mentioned the daughter? Is he being too sensitive? What does he think he is after? Why does he persist? Then he realises it is not he who persists but Van Holom. Not a single occasion goes by without some detail surfacing. Does Van Holom know what he is thinking? Is that why he returns to the dead man with his jammerplank? A curious phrase fraught with apology and despair. There is nothing of the kind in Van Holoms tone. Why should there be? He is a man content with the fact that at sixty-five he is still able to work. He has his health, his wife who works for a hospice, his children scattered in England, New Zealand, Canada too. Van Holom has his looks. He is proud of his broad chest, his strong legs and arms, the thickness of his white hair, the symmetry of his face. Now and then he notices Van Holom lovingly gaze into the rearview mirror. When, en route to campus, they stop to drop a document his wife types for an economist, Van Holom returns to the car and says: I have never seen an uglier man. The judgement irks him. It is gratuitous and cruel. Is this Van Holoms way of setting himself apart? That night, in bed, he sets aside the book he fails to read. He switches off the bedside lamp, draws the covers. Sleep will not claim him. It is of Myrrh Jameson nee Donker of whom he thinks. They are in his study for a tutorial. She is a frequent
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visitor, a diligent student. She will graduate as one of the top five in the humanities. But now it is not her scholastic prowess that returns but the story she discloses. He has always encouraged his students to speak on any matter that concerns them. The trials of interpretation exceed books. He is not a voyeur. Rather, he believes that a students abilities must be measured against their ability to hold life in their hands. He discusses their poetry, their relationships with lovers, their families, their political inclinations, morality, ethics. If he is a detached man, he is not cold. If he does not speak it is because it is his duty to listen. In the case of Myrrh Donker the problems are not as easily dispatched. She does not struggle with her class work; she has no problems with her mother who dotes on her. As for lovers, she has none. She lives alone, works hard, uses the tutorial to broach a problem with a given text. He sees, however, that with each visit she is increasingly troubled. He cannot explain the moment she shifts the focus, sheds light upon her pained mind and heart. Now, eleven years later, he recalls the moment when she breaks down. He holds her in his arms and rocks her gently. She does not care for psychiatrists. It is he, she says, only he to whom she must speak. She describes the father she barely knew. He had a beautiful voice, she says. She describes her glamorous mother. He lets her speak. He senses that she does not know how to say what she must. Her mother was always away, she says. She liked to go out at night. She hated being cooped up in a small town, she was made for greater things. She hated the school where my father worked, the pettiness, the privilege and the sloth. She worked in the townships. She considered my father a racist because he didnt care for the lot of the black poor. I think he was just too attuned to his own desolation, his sickness. He was a blues man. A suffering creature too. What did he care for change when his own life was daily wrung from him? Some days he was too tired to move. He saved his energy for his teaching. He could do no more. I was left alone, you see. Mum was too busy trying to change the world, dad was too sick to care. It was just my books and me. That was where I made my nest. In books.
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He waits, watches her. Her hair is lank, her clothes unkempt, her shoes scuffed. Her dark eyes hold him in their grip. She will not let him go. Stay with me, she says. Listen. She describes a tall blond man in sandals, a gold chain about his neck, an opened shirt, a smell of cigarette smoke. The man is her fathers friend. They work together at the same school. He tells her she is a pretty girl. He calls her Pretty Pretty. First he inquires after the books she loves and longs to read. He reads to her. Her father is too sick, too tired. Her mother is away. Thats how it all starts. He sits beside her, his thigh against her leg. Here she stops. Leaves the study. He does not restrain her. In time, he thinks, the story will run its course. When he next teaches the seminar they are working on the Metaphysical Poets she is not there. He inquires after her, discovers she is in a hospital. He visits her, holds her hand. The nurse informs him that she is starving herself to death. Before he leaves the mother arrives. Dr Crewe? Yes, he says. My daughter has told me much of you. Could I have a moment of your time? They move to the hospital canteen. She, Virginia Williams nee Donker, is as beautiful as the daughter has described her. A swoon of red hair. Green eyes. Skin of milk. It must be the father Myrrh resembles. Seated over tea in a styro-foam cup the mother looks at him. Thank you for taking the time to come to the hospital. I suppose she has told you? The question hovers. He says nothing. He does not know what to say. I suppose you know she was abused as a child? To put it simply, she was raped. Repeatedly. I dont wish to mince words. There is no time. Now, more than ever, it is you she needs, not me. I do my best, but my best is not good enough. A tear falls from the mothers eye. She reaches out her jewelled hand, touches his. Promise me youll care for her. Ill do what I must, he says. She loves you, the mother says. She speaks of no one else but you. Myrrh recovers. Classes progress. She graduates with distinction. He receives a professorship in Natal. When, years later he inquires after Myrrh he discovers that she is married, that she has a daughter. He does not telephone her. He thinks she would prefer silence. Now, years later still, now that he thinks he
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knows the man who destroyed her, he thinks he will call her. He will say nothing of the man; he will not mention the name. He will say that he is flying down to Cape Town, that perhaps they should meet. He switches on the lamp He rises from the bed, from sleep that will not claim him, walks to the telephone. William Jameson, he says. The number is listed; he punches a digit for a direct connection. It is late, too late to be calling. A man is on the other side. William Jameson? Yes. My name is Charles Crewe. Yes, she talked about you. He stiffens. Something in the voice alarms him. The voice on the other side senses his fear. It will not do, Dr Crewe. Youve called too late. If you must know, she took her own life. William Jameson consoles the daughter who cries in his arms. There, there. He gently puts down the receiver.

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Winged love

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She is thinking of love. Thinking is the operative word. About her desk are reams of notes. Slivers of torn paper jut out of books. Novels. Books about novels. Love, then, expressed in fiction. Does fiction make love any less real? Of course not. The books shes read under the rubric of the post-colonial novel should there be a hyphen? is less about love, more about lovelessness. Why love then? Why the need to find some refuge in love? She reads the opening epigraph to her essay: The colonial or provincial neurosis is always to look for approval to some distant centre, and even the protest against this dependent condition is still controlled by that which it reacts against: no agent is a free agent. But whatever creates a new centre of consciousness is truly liberating, and this is what love does: it endears places to us, surrounds them with an air of glory, creates a centre from which we can look outwards, in Donnes phrase makes one little roome, an everywhere. She has read this passage a thousand times. She has honoured its author. Ned Thomas. Whoever you are, wherever you are, I am with you Ned. The sentiment is sweet; as sweet as Neds words. Words fashioned for women like her, she thinks. Women of sentiment. Did he know this when he penned these words? Did he think, looking outward, swerving inward and finding Donnes phrase, that he would also find her heart? She, an Indian girl from South Africa. Girl? Woman then. At what point does the shift occur? Is she a woman because shes a mother of two? Is she a woman because she is matronly now? No. A girl, she thinks. A girl in the body of a woman. What then is this body? Swollen about the waist true. Tired when it scales two flights of stairs in the library. Her voice is also a thing claimed by age. What of her voice? Feverish, she thinks. Delirious. Is this fever, this delirium, a mark of passion? Sometimes she thinks that she talks herself to death; that her passion is a kind of death. Thinking of exhaustion exhausts her all the more. She realises that its not Ned that claims her. She returns to the opening epigraph and searches for the shift. No agent is a free agent.
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Then how, Ned, how do you arrive in the very next breath at liberating love? Is liberating love unfree love? Is that the only love? Is that what you are telling me? You tell me, a girl yes a girl, an Indian girl you tell me not to seek approval elsewhere. You tell me that it is neurotic to do so. Why must an Indian girl from South Africa waste her life by dreaming of refuge in anothers centre? But what is love if not the searching for anothers centre? Wrong Ned. You are wrong. If not wrong, then you confuse me with your sweet words. The centre is everywhere, is that what you say? Is that why Donne means so much to you? I agree with you Ned. Truly I do. But what is this heart of love snug in its little roome? A refuge, is it not? But where does one find refuge if the whole world is unhoused? Again Ned falls behind. His is a good but tired heart. Hers, though tired, is stronger. She doesnt believe Ned now. For her there is no little roome that is everywhere. Everywhere everywhere she sees vacant lots; hearts grown numb with longing. She sees gaping doors, hearts for let. For her no saving centre. No true refuge. Then why why does she think of love? Does she think because there is nothing more to do but think? Is she the monk who devotes her whole life to emptiness? Is love her nostrum? Her pet affection? A thing trivial? A womans parlour devotion? She has called her friend Lesego a poet of some renown. Love, she said, is the only refuge. At the other end of the line, in another city, he laughed at her. Laughed? No, scorned. She the woman scorned. Hours later she still feels the sting of Lesegos scorn. The pages in front of her, crisscrossed with the evidence shes amassed, evidence at odds with prevailing opinion, now scorns her too. Dear Ned, sweet Ned, would that I could follow you into your little roome. But she knows she cant. Her heart too is a vacant lot. Her mind bare too. No. If not bare, then a jar filled with copper coins. Yes, that is what her heart and mind is. A jar filled with copper. Unfavourable currency. How many coins will she have to amass to sway the evidence in her favour? Who will buy what she has to give? Who will say yes when even she is now doubtful? Lesego. Ned. Two sides of the same copper coin. Scorn is cheap. So is fancy. Yes, Ned, that is what you are to me now. A
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thing of fancy. A fancy man with fancy words. ... this is what love does: it endears places to us, surrounds them with an air of glory.... Ridiculous! Does a law exist which could damn such profligate hope? Is Lesego that law? A law of scorn? Must one choose between the two? Can one choose? Or is the very act of choice an act of defeat? She realises now that she must not choose. Her heart, she remembers, is a heart for let. An open heart. Patient too. A heart that does not care if it falls to rack and ruin. A heart that will not accept any old would-be occupant. Chancers. They are both chancers. Ned and Lesego. Romance and vitriol. While the one gently strokes the other burns. But both are lost. Lost men in a lost world. Copper tinkers with their copper hearts, their bric-a-brac, their wickerwork. And she? Is she the fool for love? At what point does her dream veer away from Neds? A what point does she gape and gape, become a heart that will not fill with scorn? Between and beyond, she thinks. She knows a black mans scorn and a white mans hope. She, the Indian girl between. But also a girl outside this rage and hope of men. She, the hand-medown, the thing between: a vacant lot, a heart for rent. Indian girl. African girl. She weighs that part which is blood, that part which is earth. She knows that neither holds her. Neither blood lineage nor hallowed nation is the keeper of her heart. Certainly not the man who pricks her finger with a pin and says: There! See! We are of the same blood you and I! Certainly not the man who shoves her face into the earth and says: Taste. Fill your gut with this land, it is yours, mine, this red and bitter land! A traitor, she thinks. That is what she is. Why? Because she will not yield to reverie or pain? Because she knows that love is not a tinkers coin? Go to hell Ned! Donne too! And Lesego? Lesego has already made his hell. She realises now that she has been crying for some time. The pages on her desk are stained with her tears. Her heart is brimful. She lets tears fall. Between and beyond that is what she is. A woman between men who wanted nothing of her but that thing between her legs tight as a fist, brimful with tears. Ned with his sweet words. Lesego and his scorn. What is it they wanted

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from her if not that thing between? Seducers both. Appalling! Gratuitous! False! She draws her hands between her legs. Her skirt and underwear is sodden. Her thighs shudder. Her whole body shudders. Her mind too; a mind as exhausted as her heart, as betrayed, confounded, lost. Where then is this beyond of which she dreams? Is it a fancy too? If her heart is empty, her mind undone, then where where will this dream of a love beyond find refuge? Make of your heart a dovecote, she thinks. Make of your mind a dovecote too. Lay seeds upon the dovecotes floor. First baste the seeds with tears and urine and something sticky too. Spread the seeds about you. Keep still. Winged love will come. Winged love will settle in your heart. Winged love will beat its wings in the rafters of your mind. Winged love will come. She rises from the sodden chair. Unravels the toilet roll on the desk, wipes her eyes, blows her nose, cleans the clenched place between her legs. A gaping heart. A bolted body. A mind too tired to think. Goodbye Ned, she sighs. Smiles. Something in her has yielded is yielding something that makes her smile. That clenched place between her, which is her, is softening. In her seeded heart she feels a wing beat. Her mind, while it is no clearer, is stilled. She no longer questions, no longer hungers. She is the girl in the dovecote with legs bunched, arms gently folded, her hennaed hands a seeded cup on a seeded floor. Her black hair, rich with coconut oil, fans the floor with its sticky dew. Her eyes with their dark rings of kohl and tiredness are closed. She will not open them. Must not. Winged love is not a thing for eyes. Winged love is not a thing for ears. No sweet whisperings. No scornful glare. Winged love falls, its falling a wing-beat of air. She drops the toilet paper into the wastebasket. She shuts the study window. This little roome, she thinks, is not everywhere. Winged love is never generous. It is not lovers love but love of oneself, for oneself. Love given where most will not give. In a dovecote. Dovecote love. It is time to clean up then cook. The children will be hungry soon. Themba too. Shell have to wait till the children are asleep before she returns to her desk. If she can. She is glad for
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the reprieve. She well knows the wrath of discipline and punishment, brute claimants which she and no other invited into her mind. They will goad her, harass and harangue her soon enough. Work, they will say. Find then amass the evidence. But not now. Now she lets her heart and mind rest. Drained, at peace, she walks through the flat. The children are seated in front of the TV. Rapt. An animated figure of blue and green recedes, its highpitched voice accompanies a waving hand Bye Bye! Bye Bye! Bye Bye! The children both girls echo the blue-green mans farewell. She too wishes to add her echo. Goodbye Ned. Goodbye Lesego. The blue-green man is swallowed up. A childrens plaything. A mothers demon. Vanquished. She gathers up a clean set of clothes. Matronly, she thinks. She repacks the loose dress, a cassock to hide her thickening waist. Why revenge her body and call it discretion? She will have to do something about the way she dresses. Girl? Woman? She must learn to favour the former not because she fears age she does not but because winged love tells her so. She opens the cupboard drawer and removes a green silk sari, a golden bodice. She has not worn them since her wedding day. Why? Because marriage is a business which eschews such splendour? Ridiculous. For too many years she has been ridiculous. Why didnt anyone tell her so? Why didnt Themba? Is it not the job of husbands to draw out the splendour in their wives? Why didnt he say something? Did he say something? Was it she who preferred not to listen? She, the girl with her books. She who sought splendour in the pages of a book. Ridiculous. Once her soiled body is washed, this is what she will wear. A sari of green and gold. Shell place a tikka between her brows, crimson in the parting of her hair where the skull shows. Shell wear a bodice of gold that shows off the folds of flesh at the waist. Flesh unrevenged. Shell gather up the folds of green silk light as a wing-beat. The children will be surprised. Themba too. Shell astonish them all because she too is astonished. Where darkness and despair could not find winged love, this fancy that is more than fancy will. Winged love. Self love. Love of oneself. Love of ones inherited creed. Love of Themba. A black man, an
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Indian girl. They her family could not even dignify him with a creed. Only a colour, he. And she? She who is as black as he? They her family could not see that nothing separated them. Is it this that horrified them? That she, as black as he, could find no reason for separation? A black man. A black woman. Zulu. Hindu. Gathering up the green silk and gold, she embraces the inherited creed that disinherited her. For whom is this gathering? Not for them, but for her, for Themba and their children. In a basin of water the shower is broken she sloughs the days grief. She draws her hair of jet from the water. The coconut oil she runs through her hair is seeded. The place between her legs is seeded too. She has given up the ghost Neds ghost, Lesegos ghost. She prepares herself for her self, for Themba and the children. She knows they have longed for this moment. They are tired of her troubles. They have longed for her love. She who, till now, could find no love outside of duty and compassion. She loved them no less. She just could not find the love that meant so much more. Matron love. Mother love. Love of ones husband. Not true love, she thinks now. Not seeded love. Dovecote love. What is wrong with mum? shed hear the children say, holding Themba ever tighter. She is working, hed say, not knowing what to say, how to return her to their troubled hearts. On what, she thinks now. On what has she been working? The seeded centre that is now in her? The wing-beat that brushes her dark feet with their hennaed soles? About her full breasts she buttons the golden bodice. About her full waist she wraps green silk. Once, twice. Again and again green silk enfolds. She the chrysalis. She gathers up the remaining flute of silk and drapes it across her shoulder. On her feet, no longer tired, she places slippers of gold leaf. She hears the key click, the front door open. Dad! she hears the girls cry. Amidst the hubbub she hears them say that mums working. Working? Yes, she is working. Working on love.

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Black Bag

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When he clears his office he puts the videotapes in a black bag. The letters on the bag read CDG, a clothing company. Hed bought her a dress at the CDG branch in Antwerp when hed stopped to see his mother and sisters en route back from a conference in Arles. Two years later he still has the bag. Shes cut the dress, destroyed everything hes given her, which of course means that everything must be replaced. Which it cant be. Nothing can be replaced. Certainly not the moment when he sees the dress and knows it is hers. Green silk for her black skin. La Negresse Verte. She jeers at his love for her. You European men, she says, always collecting. Nothing stops her from perceiving herself as a collectable. A curio. He has grown tired of her jeering. She does not believe in his love. Why should she, when the moment he elects to marry her is the moment he stops the relay of black women who visit his bed. Always his bed, not theirs. What does he know of their beds, their lives? This is the question she asks of him. What do you know of me, where I come from, who I am? The question does not stop the marriage. The reception occurs at the Hohenort in Constantia. The wedding photos too have been destroyed. She holds nothing sacred. A barbarian, he says one night, the boys asleep, the two of them screaming at each other over the badminton net. He continues packing. She, he knows, is affecting his work. The book on Nerval has stalled indefinitely. He used to be able to work at home, but she has taken to invading his study. She does not read French. What is the good of books that no one can read? If she understands nothing, no one else will. An implacable and brutal logic. A barbarians logic. He does not admit then, as he does now, that the goad harbours a degree of truth. The monographs he writes are by no means bestsellers. Her word, her measure in the value of words. Not that she reads she doesnt. She knows nothing of books. She doesnt even read the newspaper. When she pages through a magazine, it is the pictures that draw her. What women wear. She does not care for the agony column. She does not bother with features on couple therapy, adoption, venereal disease. She pauses when she finds information on beauty products that pertain to her skin colour, the texture of her hair. She slips the dresses off the images of white women. The flesh of a white women is a rack that divides her from what she wants.
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He thought then that is was he she wanted. He knows now that he wanted to think this. Had he too grown tired of the pliability of the women who visited his bed? Did he think that in her hed found his equal? The word is absurd. As absurd as the sentiment he affixes to it. He thinks of the two of them screaming on either side of the badminton net. The neighbours complained the next morning. Who could blame them? The indignity of it all still galls him. No peace at home, precious little at work. At least the term is coming to a close, his headship of the department too. Not a particularly good administrator, he thinks. If he were to believe her, he is not good at anything at all. Her claim does not convince him. And yet her jeering and scorn has taken its toll. He thinks he has had enough. He knows of course that such a state is impossible. One never has enough. But now the notion consoles him. It lends congruence to this process he undertakes, this closing shop. While arranging his books and packing them into boxes he alights on a posthumous collection, Chatwins Photographs and Notebooks, a rare volume in English in a library devoted to French literature. He is interested in Chatwins travels through Africa, the link with Rimbaud. He opens the section devoted to Chatwins travels in Mauritania, lingers. They are black here Mica black Obsidian black And their mouths are stone hard When you pay for their mouths Stone hard and pink at the edges. But the African back Expanse of volcanic dunes Black and rippling And the rump And the walk Both sexes are irresistible. He does not share Chatwins taste for boys. But this is immaterial. He lingers on the words, obsidian, mica. He knows the stone hard mouths. They are mouths he has paid for. Her mouth. Can he blame her resentment now? He knows he cannot. When he first sees her in a dry126

cleaning shop he is smitten. He discovers her name, where she lives, that she is a single mother. One day he suggests taking her and the boy to the Boswell Wilkie Circus. Neutral ground. They go early. Six am. He is an insomniac. The decision has little to do with the fact that he does not sleep. He wants the boy to see the tent erected, the performers as ordinary folk, the animals being fed. It is the same, she will discover, with everything he approaches. Always at dawn when the moments hidden from view reveal human toil, the rigours concealed in art. This, she has learnt all too well, is how he approaches the hearts and minds of the artists he has made his province. Nerval, Mallarm, Proust. This, he thought then, is how he would approach her. He drives from his house in Rhondebosch to the flat in Lavender Hill she shares with her mother, two sisters, her son. She too has sisters. Driving towards her he discovers no lavender, no hill, but a flattened expanse of dune and scrub. Sea air has corroded the window frames, eaten through the untreated concrete blocks. A labour camp, he thinks, no worse than the tenement blocks on the outskirts of Paris. A breeding ground for resentment. La Haine. He wills the scent of lavender, it will not come. He imagines her in a taxi heading for work in Wynberg, a white enclave. He thinks of her, incorrectly, as a victim of history. In time he will learn that she is no ones victim. Her ignorance redeems her. Her mockery too. But then, on that morning driving to the circus in Green Point, she is quiet, pliant. The boy sleeps. He is ten years old. She, how old was she when he was born? Barely sixteen he imagines. The boy is pale. A white mans boy. She reveals nothing of the father. This occurs later. Then, in the Volvo, the roof opened, he glances, imagines her as the mother of their child. He does not think, then, of divorce. He does not imagine her stripping him of everything, even his pension. Then he sees only her beauty, her mouth with its pink edges. Mica, obsidian. He shuts the book in the cardboard box. A fool, he thinks. He. Chatwin. Fools both. To think that he and she could become equals. What was he thinking of? How could he have invited her into his life? What does she know of Mallarm and Nerval? Nothing, clearly. Ten years later nothing at all. Then again, what does she truly know of his life? Everything, he realises now. He looks at the black bag, the contents as thick as three volumes of an encyclopaedia. Twelve
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videotapes. She found them hidden behind his books in his study at home. She had the key made when hed said hed had enough of her barging in, disturbing him. Shed thrown the videotapes in the bin. Hed rescued them. Theyd screamed at each other across the badminton net. Shed had enough of his perversity. Her word. A word he dwells upon now. Perversity. Perversion. Pervert. Is this what he is? Perverse? She cannot imagine a man with a serial affection for black women. Its degrading, she says. Beneath me. It is not he she thinks of but herself. What is she? Who is she? A white mans whore? The words sail through night. The neighbours listen. Do they smirk? Do they say fool, stupid fool? And why does he care for what they think? The girls get younger and younger, she says. The men stay the same. Always a white man, a black woman. Never a black man, a black woman. A black man, a white woman. Shes watched each and every video. Is that what you do when you do it to me? Is that what I am? He feels her pain acutely, he cannot absolve himself. Why, she asks, why not a white woman? He can find no answer. What is wrong with you? Here he dwells. Confronted with her pain, he believes there must be something wrong. How explain the obsession? Her word. It is true that white women do not move him. Why? She is not alone in asking the question. There is his mother, his sisters in Antwerp. When he takes her there with the two boys they have had a son the mother, the sisters, look and look. Unlike her first son the second is dark, as dark as her. His sons hair, like hers, is intemperate; it will not yield to a white mans comb. This is what the mother and the sisters see. They look at her, at him. They want to know why he has brought them here to the cobbled streets of Antwerp. She, he knows, wonders too. They are married, it does not matter. She is the white mans whore, the white mans concubine. He doesnt prepare her for his mothers and his sisters disgust. He leaves her stranded, naked. She, he knows, sees through their mocking affection. She screams to be back home. She wants nothing of his life. A mistake, he well knows, dragging the family to Antwerp. Why mix obsession with marriage, why procreate? He is outcast. At forty-nine this is not what he would have wished. A bad administrator. She placed the divorce papers on the laptop in his study. He knows hell give her what she wants. He does not care enough to withhold anything. Silence is better. The secretary
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appears at the door. Flaxen. Old. She has never given him the respect that is his due. Does she know of the black bag? Is the secrecy of his longing all too evident? She too regards him as a bad administrator, of this he is certain. Does she wonder what he is doing in Africa? Does she use the word he hates so much? Decadent. A state of moral and cultural deterioration. He replaces the a with an e. Decedent. A deceased person. Is that what she sees? Someone dead? The secretary hands him three supplementary exam papers. Hell evaluate them tonight. He knows the grades before he has even marked them. He knows the examinees. He feels their judgement too. Out of touch, hes heard them say. Insensitive. They think he is homosexual because he does not care for them. Women and their instinct! Women and their overweening regard for themselves! They do not care for his disregard. Especially when they are pretty, which they are, which even he has acknowledged. What kind of a French man is he? Why wont he soften the procedure of learning? Why is he such a stickler? They forget he is Belgian, not French. They know nothing of his love for mica, obsidian. The flaxen haired secretary does. She has made it her business to know things. He persists: Has she opened the black bag? Has she read the titles of the films? Did she instinctively know what the contents were? Better Recherche du temps perdu, Fleurs du mal! He slips the exam papers in his briefcase. He tells the secretary hell be home for the remainder of the week. He does not tell her that some day soon it will not be his home. His only concern is his son. There, at least, eternal love has lodged. The boys French is coming along well. He has a zest for the world the mother renounces. He imagines the son with him in Reunion. He has a job offer, if he wants it. He has tried each and every university in France. No one will have him. The fact that he has published with Gallimard means little, next to nothing. Do they know he has abandoned Europe? Is he the second son in truth if not in fact divested of all claim to rightful ownership, compelled to seek his fortune in the colonies? What fortune, then, has he found? A profession he has grown to detest. A wife who will not have him. A son, young as he is, who dreams of the cole Suprieure. At least, he thinks, at least something of him will survive if shell allow it. Much as he wills this dream he doubts its fruition. Here, at least, he
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must make his stand. He has evaluated the rights a husband and a father have. Absurd though this country is, it has acknowledged that right, a fathers right. The boy has an EU passport. The mother too. But what good is the European Union when no university will have him? If not him, then the boy. Surely she will allow the boy his freedom? He is not certain. Nothing about her is certain. Aggressive, yes. Resentful, yes. But certain? What can she know of certainty? Her family votes for the National Party. And she? Does she vote? He doubts this. While she is made of history she does not invest her faith there. The ANC are fools, she says. They understand nothing. And she? What does she understand? Enough to know that she doesnt have to work for a dry cleaning company. Enough to know she can take him to the cleaners! He thinks hell take the job in Reunion. The prospect of island life appeals to him. The irony of the name Reunion does not escape him. He knows he is done with the mainland. Done with Europe. Done with Africa. The boy will come with him. It will be his one proviso. Will he succeed? Here, for the first time, he prays. He is not a man given to prayer. He is a man of little faith. He believes he has known love. It is mica, obsidian. He knows hell love his son always. But what of the other boy? Has he not learnt to love him too? And what of the mother, the one who will not have him? What of her? Is he such a thing of scorn? Inadmissible. Admissible no longer. Surely no mere black bag could divide them? Then what? Has he been asleep all these years? Ten. A decade. Decadent. Decedent. He has always been drawn to the resonances of words. A book is a teacup. Words are leaves. When he looks at the book of his life, what does he see? The question stalls, will not go away, will not be answered. She recommends a therapist before she gives up the ghost. He surprises himself by taking up the suggestion. He thinks she is surprised too. She says nothing. She does not want him to regale her with confession. She is not his altar. Better the white mans whore than his black Madonna. He respects her decision to cede all love, all faith in her. It is not in her that the answer lies. She knows this. How, he does not know. But she does. Her stone mouth tells him so. How could he think he could vault the contract between them? How could he have ever believed he could soften her mouth? Reunion ... the word will not go away. Not only
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ironic, he thinks now, but obscene. Her deeds, her words, possess no irony. They are not obscene. Is this why he will not fight her? But what of the boy? What will he do to keep the boy? He realises now that there is nothing he will do. In the art of war he is a novice. And she? He can find no word to match her skill. So much for equals. He shuts the door to the office. The number on the door will remain the same, the nameplate will change. A good thing too. During his headship he has displayed little skill in generating a student body. In South Africa French is not the language of trade. Better if he were a specialist in Chinese! He well knows Frances investment in South African culture, in cultural exchange. But culture, as she well knows, means little if not nothing. And exchange? What exchange could possibly exist when distrust and faithlessness divide the world? Trade, thats what counts. He knows this well. He has been a devoted consumer. Did he care for the hard mouths? No. Was it his own gratification alone that mattered? Again no. Then what, what has he been doing here? He passes the secretary. A chain dangles from her over-large spectacles. She, he thinks, is asking the same question. What is he doing here? It does not escape him that this was also Chatwins question. He hands her the keys to the office. Someone else will move the boxes. In his hand he holds the briefcase, the black bag he presses to his chest. He does not care that the CDG bag is reinforced, the seal zip-locked. He knows the treachery of plastic. The secretary gazes at the bag he holds to his chest. Her suspicion, he realises, is mixed with concern. She actually cares! In turn he smiles broadly. He wishes her well over the Christmas season. He even asks after her heart. She happily informs him of her travails. He makes a mental note to ask questions of this nature in the future. Questions that gratify, that bind. Union. Reunion. Clutching the black bag to his chest he thinks of an island. A piece of land surrounded by water. A detached and isolated thing.

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The beggar-guest

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She is a research psychologist. It is the phrase she uses during dinner conversations. The phrase implies, she hopes, that she does field work; that she is in the field. She pictures herself there, in a field; a handkerchief tied to her head, seated on a foldout campstool, note pad in hand, Tabard on her legs and shoulders. Intrepid, she thinks. The illusion satisfies her, but only briefly. Why not home work? After all, it is there, in homes not in the fields, where the stories unfold. She uses a dictaphone. The notepad she uses for those compelling moments which, she believes, are the clues to the rest of the story. The conversation, more a pointed series of questions and answers, is invariably arduous to unravel. The children, young girls and boys, are not gifted speakers. Then again, neither is she. She has never been one to beat her breast. Over dinner she is usually the silent one. The mistake of others is that they believe that her silence implies she is a good listener. She is not. She believes she has no gift. At no point does she dress up this lack as a kind of modesty. A drudge, she thinks, though those about the table who claim to be her friends protest. She supposes that they have a vested interest in making her more interesting than she is. She resolves, then, never to reveal what she thinks herself to be. The resolve is destined to fail her. No one cares for silence that means nothing. A research psychologist then. A field worker. She must satisfy. All the more so about a dinner table where illusion is more piquant than either wine or food. A writer is there at the table, a recent arrivant on the campus. Bombastic, she thinks. However she cares enough for what he says. To value him she must disinter the words, fold them one by one, neaten the sense, remove them from the foul cavity that no wine will clean away. It is he who forces her to account for herself. Does he too disinter the words? Does he inwardly ask what a research psychologist might be? Does he dwell upon the unfortunate phrase fieldwork and say to himself: A white woman in a field, what is she doing there? Who could possibly tell her the truth? Before a woman like her pale, fish-eyed who could possibly reveal anything of value? The writers eyes are glazed, the mandible chugs. Food and wine disappear in equal measure. She cannot disavow his
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relish. His gluttony chastens her. While the others about the table demurely peck, he reveals the hunger that gnaws in all of them. Is it his words that ruin the general appetite? Is it because when he speaks he plunges the heart, draws the hearts conscience up so that it lodges there in the mouth? She watches her guests dab their lips with napkins. They are readying themselves. They expect each and every one of them that they will be forced to answer for themselves. It is because of the writer that they peck. Food intercedes. Food stops the hearts expression. It is the taste of conscience that lodges in each and every mouth. The writer has provoked unease. That is why she values his words. It is to her he turns. She is waiting. He is speaking of Disgrace, a book she well knows and does not care for. The author of the book is his passion. She cannot understand why. When told one day in the corridor of the Social Sciences Building that the author of Disgrace, has been short-listed for the Nobel Prize she does not say that were he to receive the coveted award it would mean that the very earth on which we stand has been condemned. Now the writer at the table who has received no award, no short-listing either talks of disgrace. We are all disgraced, he says. Each and every one of us, he insists. He is given to declamation, hyperbole. He leaves it up to the rest to disinter, neaten, edit. It is a job, she imagines, which he believes to be the province of gifted men and every woman. She marvels at his complacency. She watches her guests as they pat their mouths. En route to work in another city he insists that it does not in fact matter where the incident takes place he drives past a man exercising himself upon the body of a woman. She is struck by the relish with which he yields the telling phrase exercising himself upon. She does not know that the phrase belongs to the author so highly prized by the Nobel committee. Returning to Cape Town on a Monday morning, cars hurtling through fraught space, I looked to the Black River on my right, then, shifting to the left, my gaze mounting upward along a raised embankment of uncut green, I saw a man clothed from the waist up, his arse hollowed at the sides, taut, the legs sinuous, the
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trousers like a discarded sweet-wrapper about his legs. He was copulating; with whom was unclear. The man may have been exercising his strength upon a ghost, so insubstantial the figure seemed. Cars hurtled past, no one stopped. Did no one see what I saw? My fellow occupant certainly did not. I thought sex; she thought rape. Since then Ive thought of how many cars passed before the man ejaculated. The man ... bald, white, powerful, brazen. What I couldnt imagine was the woman, a ghost, fully clothed, prone, but for a flailing hand, brown. S.A. Wildlife. I know the statistics. I read the paper. Rape is a fact I can imagine, simulate, arraign within my interactive cortex. Otherwise, the brutal integrity of rape escapes me. There was a deliberateness to the bald man; a thoroughness. Shocking though it may sound there was in that one-sided act an impressiveness, a fearlessness, a wild rigor. Is there a difference to watching human beings copulate than, say, dogs? To me, at that moment, there was none. The flannel ghost was not exempt. She had too little shape to muster concern. And he? He was monstrous, fearless, driven, a figure from a Genet novel, in chains, yet free. As for her? there was no reprieve. And so it is in South Africa today. I struggle to be outraged, but my heart fails me; my mouth, aghast, merely sighs. He proceeds to draw a link between this occurrence which, she is sure, he has reprised before to similar effect, with the novel Disgrace. It is a work intimately aware of the unnatural order of life in South Africa, he says. The novel does not dignify nor apologize for the existence of the ugly. Disgrace simply is. It is our inheritance, our character, the state of our minds, the sum of our actions. Pleasurable. Revolting. Banal. Here the writer stops. Throughout he has gazed at her, no one else. Nothing in the conversation has led to the writers monologue. She suspects he never follows, always leads. A pity. While she acknowledges his ability to hold an audience she believes he would benefit greatly if his ear were not so general, his mouth too. His claims are too large, the illustration does not suffice. Because no one has anything to add, she neither, he
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casually proceeds. Would that he would listen. Would that he would stop. He shovels food, drinks. The book deals with rape, the transfer of power, anarchy, the coupling of youth and age, death, the question of whether or not we own our selves, our bodies. It pivots on a charge of sexual harassment and, later, a gang rape. Sex is the seam, an act unlovely, loveless. Of the blurred moment between fucking and rape we read: Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core, as though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away." His memory appears unimpaired. He well knows the power of quotation. No one eats or drinks. It is the writer they consume. Do they imagine themselves in the salon of a nineteenth century novel? Is he the beggar-guest, she the host? And they, the others, who are they? Children, she thinks. The dinner is proving a success. It is he who makes it so; he with his bile so eloquently wrapped. They will have something to talk about. No doubt she will increase in their estimation. What do they care that she utterly disagrees? What do they care that she sees hope where he, the writer, sees none? Are they such children, without guile, so easily won over by fluency that they cannot see that fluency will not do? Fluency has no place here. No words will contain this earth. No drunken sot. No glutton. She sees that now their appetites have grown large too. They no longer peck and dab their mouths. He has restored a zest, an urgency, to the proceedings. The roast lamb is picked clean. When they are done with eating and drinking there is nothing left, nothing to do but nod before their effusive appreciation of the spread. One thing is certain, this is the first time she does not have to freeze the leftovers. There is nothing for the dog. The marrow is sucked dry. Not a single sprout is left in the salad bowl. The bareness of the table horrifies her though she feigns satisfaction. Better dissembled gratitude than such
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effusive pleasure. Better a stunted repartee about nothing than this twittering of birds, this laughter louder than she has ever heard. Obscene. All of this, obscene. Somewhere, in the midst of her disgust, she finds a lingering sympathy for the author of Disgrace. The cigarettes run out. Those who smoke pat their breast pockets, riffle through their overcoats. The writer lights a buttend. Those who smoke do the same and laugh. A plastic sachet containing dagga appears. This too is consumed. The guests, children all, quit the table. In groups they leave the room. The writer remains before her. His dull eyes see everything. He is thin. What does he do with the food he devours? What is he doing here, before her? A mistake, she knows, inviting him. A misplaced sympathy on her part. She searches for the reason she invited him. She realises it is he who invited himself. A chance remark in the common room. He overhears, draws himself into the fold. She mistakes his inclusion of himself as a sign of vulnerability. There is nothing vulnerable about him at all, though he knows all too well how to manufacture the affect of vulnerability. He is a Namibian, taut, jaundiced. Born in the desert he has regaled many about a dinner table in Oxford, Paris, Accra. He is a visiting lecturer in the School of Psychology. If she deems him a writer it is because this is what matters most to him. He publishes the occasional story, he has a novel in the pipeline. He has little patience for drudges such as her. Why, then, does he stay? Why wont he join the party by the pool? Does he wonder why she remains? Does he imagine her as a kind of prey, something else to devour now that the table is bare? She cannot decipher his eyes. A lions eyes. Gold. There is nothing attractive about him. Nothing attractive about her either. Does this qualify them as mates? Is she one of an unfortunate couple with her bulbous eyes, her heavy hips, her breasts heavy too? He thanks her for the dinner and heads for the pool. There, at least, he will have an audience. When he leaves a seraph, an exclamation mark she is appeased. She realises that more than the words she has disinterred, she values the simplicity of these final moments because, yes, they are final. She does not care for inference. She does not care for dull all-seeing eyes. She
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wants no man in her bed, no man in her heart. What then does she want? Peace, she thinks. But when there is none? What then? What does she want? She certainly wants this dinner over and done with. But what of the ricochet? What of the phone calls that will surely follow? Who is he? How do you know him? What is he doing here? Provincial questions; questions which, no doubt, will grow into gossip. She is single after all. She is the subject the victim of kindness. If she can disinter him from his words, then why not the rest? Is she not done with him, with the lot of them? She concludes that she is. She will have no more dinner parties. She will remove herself from the clutches of children. She wonders, for the last time, why she even allowed herself this disgrace. Some time passes before she finally shuts the door. She adjusts the latch, draws the curtains. She moves from room to room securing each and every cavity. She has no desire to feed the dog. In her study, which opens onto her bedroom, she triggers the alarm. Alone at last. Shut off, shut up, she returns to her desk. She has drunk little. Her mind is clear. A glass of apple juice in hand, she switches on the desk lamp. She is annotating a series of interviews with young boys and girls. She refuses to think of them as teenagers. She does not believe in this awkward and damning middle sphere. After the dinner she wonders if there is such as thing as an adult. Children, she utters, we are all children. She a drudge amongst children. She reads the handwritten gloss to an interview with an eighteen-year-old girl from Emzamweni. She is not pleased with the notes neatly inscribed in the margins. Barrier: experience. Barrier: trust. Solution: keep quiet. The notes refer to an isolation she feels. She has enough detachment to know that her isolation is not the girls. What then are the barriers she separates with a colon then counterpoints with experience, trust, silence? What would he, the writer, think? She pictures his dull knowing eyes; eyes, she thinks now, that know too little. Could he feel the plight of a girl from Emzamweni? Does she? What she knows the little that she knows is that no dinner table talk of Disgrace would ever move her. How speak of disgrace to someone who knows all too well
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the meaning? She sees the girl before her. The knees scuffed and bruised. The hands gently folded on a skirt of plaid. Behind her before her? a dead mother, dead father, dead stepmother too. In her arms a three year old stepsister soon to be dead too. What would he, the writer, make of this? How would he explain the ignominy the girl feels? Outcast. A girl made of death because they, the ones who judge, make her so. In every transcribed interview she reads there is this silence. No one talks of the death that stalks them. Enfolds them. Death, she sees now, is a girl with arms enfolded on a skirt of plaid. She is not dying, the girl. For now she is exempt. It is the little one in her arms, the one the girl cannot save, that wounds. What would he, the writer, make of this? Is this our inheritance, this our character? Better to have screamed and said enough! Enough of your generalization! Better to have torn the food from his mouth, broken each and every wine bottle and said: Enough of your pleasure! Enough of your writers callous fluency! And you, the children who listen and gorge, what of you? What do you know of disgrace? What do you care? And she? What does she make of the barriers that separate lives from hope? How does she vault the chasm that draws all into silence? What is the good of fieldwork? What is the good of listening when the disgraced die by the second; die because no one will heed, no one break the silence? No one, not even the writer, breaks the silence. No eloquence will fill the emptiness of a girls hands. Without reprieve she sees the baby that no one but the girl will care for. And she with all her rooms, her dog, her salary, what will she do? Perhaps she needs the writers eloquence. Perhaps she needs his complacency. What is left? Before her desk, where the glass of apple juice topples, she weeps. She has grown tired with confusion. Grown tired with hope. She wishes she were never born. She cannot change the world. She can only listen. And what good is listening? For years she has believed that listening was enough. She has seated herself before the wounded, recorded their stories. And then? What then? Does she need a writers skill to make something of their words? If she were capable of doing so which she is not what then? What is the good of words?
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The Dinner

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When asked if there is anything he does not eat he says, pork. Difficult to add that he does drink, that, in fact, he drinks rather a lot. But no inquiries are made about his drinking habits. Pork, then, will do to set him apart. Hed eat it if he had to. He has before. He has never liked the sweetness of the taste, the pallor of the flesh. He knows the revulsion strikes deeper, that it strikes a place that knows no reason. What is this place? It is not faith. It is faiths wound. Faiths conscience. The wound and conscience of a faith he no longer holds. Still, the wound is there, conscience too, readied for moments such as this when decisions must be made that set him apart. Now, the dinner looming, a dinner he attends because she wants him to meet the members of her family Bill, Davey, Helena he knows well enough that it is not pork alone that sets him apart but the faith which conditions the taboo Islam. Not a favoured faith these days, certainly not with those whose names are Bill, Davey, Helena. Will he explain to them that this religion, this birthright, is not a right at all? A wound, a conscience, yes, but a right, no. She comes from a devout Catholic family. The words devotion, Catholicism have never struck him as a congenial pair. They are the words she uses. If so devout, if so catholic, then why is she so anxious? Is devotion not a thing purposive and clear? Is Catholicism not all embracing? Clearly not in the case of her family. Why, then, is she so eager to introduce him yet so anxious? He cant alter the word. Its what she feels. It is what her family has made of her. Anxious. Skittish. So much for Catholicism! Searching her anxious eyes he finds little that is all embracing and universal. She, or rather her family, is a factional sect. And he? He is the man who does not eat pork. The infidel. Crazed devotee of Islam. Worse, a devotee of the flesh. The black ram who nightly tups their sweet white ewe. Not the words theyd use of course. They do not read. She has told him as much. She has told him enough to warrant that he gracefully decline. Yet, still she insists that he come. If Othello is beyond their ken then Guess Whos Coming To Dinner will do to define who and what he is in her parents house. She humours him. Still, she is anxious. Is
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she ever not anxious? Eventually she concedes that no Stanley Kramers film is not something they will have seen. This is South Africa after all. She lets the phrase drop in the dark of the moving car. Her words are not intended for the scrutiny he inflicts upon them. But then, when are words ever given to scrutiny? It is not in their nature. Chameleon, words dissimulate. Would that they could say one thing. But they dont and never will. Bill ... Davey ... Helena ... pork ... after all. ... The film would of course have been banned. A black sophisticate at a white dinner party? Absurd. That the black sophisticate happens to fuck the daughter of the host and hostess? No! It must not be! It cannot! This is South Africa after all. In 2001? Her simple remark in the dark is a warning. It tells him that nothing has changed in her household. He laughs. He pictures Desdemonas father, Brabantio, in a pickle and a fit. Change like any other word is a changeling, a thing substituted for another by stealth. The new South Africa: An elfchild left by fairies. If he amuses himself thus, it is because he too is anxious. What concerns him is less the matter of colour though colour matters, is matter. What matters to him is the matter of age. He is twenty years her senior. Father time. He winces. She touches his thigh in the dark. Is he with her because of moments such as this? This knowing. He cant think of another word. She knows him: That is what he knows. At what point did this knowledge become apparent? Is it a product of her vulnerability? A matter of youth. A matter of upbringing. Because yes she has been brought up. Schooled. Versed. To be what? Everything shes not and cannot reject. The paradox is sweet. Sweet as pork. Is that why she is drawn to him? Because he knows the sweetness of paradox? Or is she drawn to him because he does not eat pork? Because he reads T.S. Eliot and Shakespeare and knows the names of film directors? Flippant. He is being flippant. And flippancy, he knows, can be menacing. He does not wish to hurt her feelings. Or rather, it is feeling this feeling in the darkened moving car that he does not wish to hurt. He brushes her hand. She grips his thigh.
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Bill the father. Helena the mother. Seasoned practitioners in the art of announcing themselves. Bill, just Bill, the father says in a tone that is anything but jocular and familiar. The mothers single Helena is meted with a naked hand the better to weigh his grasp with naked eyes the better to fix, search, fix again. If the father conceals, and poorly so, the mother will not. Her hand and eye is a sensor. Is this why she is anxious? Is it the mothers hand, the mothers eye, that binds her? He watches the woman twenty years his junior as she reaches up to embrace her father then turns and, without touching, says, Mother. Would that the scene was a farce, a scene in a novel from another age, but it is not. There is nothing all embracing here. Nothing Catholic. He presses his hand gently to his lovers back. He watches the mothers imperceptible flinch, the fathers yellow grin. Is Davey here, the lover asks. Davey ... Bill. ... He has entered a world where men have pet names and women are called Helena and Saskia. Yes, this is what she is called, his lover. Saskia. Softer than Helena. More erotic than Desdemona. He whispers her name. It is a name made to be whispered. Does Helena know this? Is that why she looks at him the way she does? Knowing too, like the daughter. But a different kind of knowing. Narrow like the eyes. Firm like the hand. Ignorant too. A knowing convicted by its own conviction. A knowing for which pork will have its uses. Not this, but that. No room for contradiction. The ticker tape stops. He pauses for fear that he too will trip over his own convictions. Breathe, he says. Its what he says when, seated in front of his desk, he disinters word from word. Yes, disinters. Standing in the sumptuous hallway, breathing deeply, he remembers his first real words to her, his lover. Saskia. Words are not separate, hed said. Words are inside each other. Thats what it means to mean. Thats what meaning does and is. Meaning is word inside word a kind of fucking, so to speak. A cheap thing to have said, he thinks now, watching her move ahead of him through the hallway into the dining room. Cheap, yes, and true. He wanted to be inside of her. But with her great sense of knowing she also knew that he wanted her to be inside of him.
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He enters the dining hall. Bill and Helena face each other across the oak table. The table is empty. Is this a dinner or a conference? Id like you to meet my brother Davey. They are arm in arm. She is radiant while he Davey grimaces. Is that the word? A grimace? What is the trigger inside Davey that moves the mouth? It is not detachment. It is not disaffection. No. There is longing there inside of him, inside of Davey, but it is longing killed, shot down, longing that has fallen from a great height. Shahid, he says. He offers his name as a deflection. He is probing. He is doing what editors do. This is not the time and place. He is not here to probe. Or is he? Is that what dinners such as this should be? A probe? He thinks of the verb, the noun. He thinks of the mothers meted hand, the electrode in her eye. His thinks of the fathers jocularity, which is a kind of pain. He watches the two of them seated at either end of the empty oak table. He thinks of the emptiness of the table. Unsettling, the whole business is unsettling. Would the presence of food make a difference? Or is food too a probe? A thing to detect a defect in the bodys workings? To hunt down the infidels soul. Ridiculous. He is being ridiculous. Looking at Saskia he knows just how ridiculous he is. He watches her and her brother seated at the bay window. A curved wall of glass encases them. Outside the night is full. Stars glitter through glass. She is animated. Davey attentive. Their hands are joined. The way light falls there in the glassed circumference soft light - the way light glows all around them, heartens him. It is the first moment in this cold great house, which he takes to heart. This, he thinks, this is what it means to be Catholic. It is for her brother, he realises now, for Davey that she has brought him here. But, then, surely they could have met elsewhere? Why Bishops Court, this suburb of grandeur and pomp made for bishoprics? Davey lives in Sea Point, she has told him as much. The two of them she lives with him, in his house live in Green Point. A single artery joins them. Points flickering along the same stretch of sea. Why Bill? Why Helena? Why, then, this fuss? Though, staring at the empty oak table, parenthetically framed by silent host and hostess, the event hardly seems a fuss.
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A pretext then? To what? There seems no received convention, no coherence to this unfolding night. A liveried manservant appears bearing a tray of drinks. It is absurd, but these are the only words he can find to describe the apparition that appears before him. He plucks a glass of whisky at the stem. A woman in matching livery appears bearing food. Steadily the oak table fills with probe upon probe. Bill and Helena have remained in profile. Bill grows steadily florid, while Helena maintains the selfsame temperature. Absurd as the scenario appears to him, he finds himself gladdened. He has not been asked to present a potted summary of his life, a thing he has done a thousand times before, a thing he does supremely well. Tonight he is not asked to deliver an unvarnished tale. Tonight he is the man who does not eat pork. He is the man who owns the house in Green Point where their daughter lives. He is the older man. The dark man. The ram who tups their white ewe. They wanted his presence, nothing more. To see what he was? What, then, have they seen? Not his heart. Certainly not his mind. His body then. Is it his body that matters to them? The dignity of the chest? The quality and thickness of the hair? His teeth? His jaw line? Whether he is pigeon-toed or not? He surprises himself with the thoughts he is willing to indulge. Bill the hapless assistant. Helena the geneticist. And he? He the thing who fills their daughters bed. The thing that makes their daughter glow. He finishes the whisky, plucks another at the stem. If the parents will not satisfy him as he, clearly, does not satisfy them, then it is to the daughter he must go. He walks to the bay window where sister and brother are seated. They turn towards him. In deference? Children before a grown man? Or is it he thinks correctly because she loves him that they turn in deference? It is because she has told her brother how much she loves him that he now, in turn, shows his deference. And has she told the brother his feelings what he feels for her? He doubts this. It is not in her nature to speak on behalf of others, not even the man whose bed she shares. He loves that in her. Her singleness of purpose. Her love that is singly hers even though

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she knows this is only possible because she belongs to another. Words inside words, a kind of fucking. She withdraws from the bay window leaving Davey to fend for himself. Davey smiles his strange smile, a smile that is more a shuddering. Again he thinks of longing shot from the sky. Icarus. A plunging arrow. A man in flames. A pale man. A pale flame. Yellow. White. He thinks of a burning man but what he sees is only the shudder. It is inside, this fire he sees. The surface, the man he sees, is a painting by Joshua Reynolds. Rouged cheeks. Cupid lips. Skin pale as milk. Bill before the fake jocularity and wine. Bills body too, broad in the shoulders, tapered at the hips. Long legs. A military figure. A swimmer. No. A trapeze artist.... This is where he pauses, breathes, stops the ticker tape. It is the word trapeze that gives him the clue to what he sees, which no one else can see. Not Saskia with all her knowing. Not Bill who must grin and grin because he is too afraid to smirk. Not Helena with her electrode eye, her meted hand. Are they blind because they must be? Are they so inured to this figure from a Reynolds painting that theyve stopped looking, failed to see that the painting is on fire? What is the matter with this family? What is really the matter with Davey? Is he mad for thinking what he thinks? What is it in the boy that provokes such thoughts? Is it because he is a stranger given to disinterring meanings that he sees what he sees? Is it because people, like things, like words, harbour properties, secrets, essences, which are his to decipher? No. What he regards as insight as the meanings inside of people, things, words does not come from objectively assessing the world around him. Davey is not an object subject to his perception. No. What he thinks now comes from listening to the tremors of his mind. A word ... then another ... trapeze. What he thinks of when the word first comes to him is an event in a book. The setting for the event is a circus. The audience gapes. A trapeze artist walks the tightrope. There is no saving net. A devil appears behind the trapeze artist, taps him on the shoulder and grins. The trapeze artist turns to find that the devil has gone. The devil has leapt over his shoulder and is now
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in front of him. The trapeze artist turns, sees the devil. Startled he plummets. The audience flees. Only one man in the audience remains in place. The trapeze artist crashes at his side. The man remains unmoved as the trapeze artist dies. The man speaks: I have loved you for the dangers you have passed and I will bury you with my own hands. These are the words he remembers. A paraphrase. These are the words that come to mind while seated in the bay window. Davey has told him nothing. What he knows is that Davey is dying. How he knows what he knows is a mystery. There is no telltale lesion. No clouding of the eyes. Daveys heart is strong, a warriors heart. The heart flickers now. Yellow. White. Does Davey know that he is dying? And if he did would it make a difference? Would the mouth work any differently? Is it a sense of loss, helplessness, some kind of resignation that explains the distance Davey constructs? Is that the right word? Construct? But what of distance that is not the distance between points? What of distance itself? Seated in the bay window, Davey at his side, he trembles. Hed told the boy his name. Did he tell him that his name means witness? He smiles. Davey returns his smile without reproach. Dinner is announced.

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The House-sitter

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Click, click. The needles snag, unlock. About her feet bundles of wool. The latest is a Single. Two days work, fifteen hours at a stretch. Keeps her busy. The client pays her more than she asks. Rare. At seventy rand she knows the Single is a bargain. She could do with more. Pricing is everything. Still, money is coming in, thanks to the lady who gives her an extra forty for the Single. Money is scarce the clients remind her, as if she doesnt know. She and her father live on the war and old age pension. He thinks its a bonus, she knows it isnt. She brings in money from the knitting and the housesitting. Across the room she looks at her father. Shes glad hes with her now. The nurses at the old age home had had enough of his complaints; hed had enough of them. Begrudging, he says. The lot of them. Black and begrudging. They either know it all or dont give a damn. And did the fact that he was a paying customer make a difference? Not a blooming jot! Make no mistake. Hes proud of the war pension, proud of his investment; proud of the fact he lost his legs. She doesnt understand such pride, never understood the war. Married for two weeks thirty years ago was enough. She is done with war, with men and their pride. Even with his legs cut off he does the driving. He had the Morris converted in 1952. He calls it his Formula 1. She laughs because he expects her to. He claims it was his idea, shifting the clutch, breaks and accelerator to the hand controls. She must admit he is gifted with his hands. Even before he lost his legs he knew how to fix things. She looks at his hands now. Click, click. His hands are thick paws, the wrists thick too. He never tires of showing her the musculature of his upper arms, his chest. He never neglects talk of the legs. He is not ashamed. He regrets nothing in his life. His voice booms. At eighty-two he is a commanding figure. Now it is she he commands. His wishes are precise, never repeated. Not like the nurses at the home, he says. A waste of time and energy, the lot of them. Not like her. Not like the nurse who cared for him in the hospital in Helwan outside Cairo in 44. Jamila. The nurses name is the one thing he repeats. Other than her mother, Jamila is the only woman he has loved. She never includes herself within this pantheon. She was
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never made for a mans passion. A laat lammetjie he calls her. Belated. Simple minded. Plain. He never tells her that her mother never wanted her. He has the grace not to rub salt into that wound. Theyve driven across the length and breadth of South Africa without a hitch. When theres a problem with the Morris he fixes it. People commend him on his dexterity, his fierce independence. People marvel at his joy. Violently happy, he says and laughs. He was always made for extremes. Click, click. The words recur. Violence. Happiness. She understands neither state. She cannot imagine the obscenity of their twinning. She pictures her father, a soldier from the colonies, clear eyed, gleeful, rifle in hand, sprinting across a blood soaked field. This is not the picture he shows her. In the small black and white pictures with their serrated edges he sits in a mess surrounded by officers, straddles a motorcycle, hurls a rugby ball, poses in front of a Spitfire. Always laughing, always smiling. She has never reconciled the laughter and the smiles with the ashen stumps of his legs. Crimped like a leather sofa. She pictures leather buttons in the centre of each stump. If she mentioned this picture to him hed be disgusted, not for himself but for her. Women, hed say, women and their sick homespun images. He doesnt approve of what women think, not because he regards women as silly but because he finds their minds disturbing. Click, click. They go where the houses are. Youd be surprised how many people need a good house sitter. Shes got references as long as her arm, shes booked for the next nine months. Three in succession in the Cape, two in Johannesburg, then an extended stint on the Bluff. She gets free e-mail through Absa. People contact her. The power of word-of-mouth consoles her all the more. Her father has an account through the Associated Banks of South Africa. Thats what he calls it. He likes to call a spade a spade. The ANC is the African National Congress. The DA is the Democratic Alliance. He has lots to say about politics. She pretends to listen, nods at the right time. Other than the monies she brings in through the knitting and the housesitting R50 a day theres her fathers Marriott Asset Management Fund
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through the Associated Banks of South Africa. Always one to look ahead her father took the payout from the hydraulics company where hed worked for thirty years and invested it offshore. The interest rate is higher. He gets a monthly income for retired investors R800 which she keeps in savings just in case. She has power of attorney. She values the gesture, her fathers trust in her. She wishes the gesture was an act of love. Instead he reminds her what a sensible and reliable girl she is. Now and then he reviews the savings. He values her frugality. Under the circumstances she is the right person for the job. He is happy that the money isnt being wasted in a home filled with begrudging nurses and miserable peers. He is not impressed by the neediness and self-pity of the men and women especially men of his own age. Grouches, he says. Grouches with their aches and pains and squandered hopes. Waste, he says. Waste and neglect. He sits across from her in front of the TV. The Central News Network blares. Hes a trifle deaf. Another war injury. Shes knitted special covers for his stumps. She makes sure he wears them. He is also wearing the new woollen cap and muffler. Shes tucked it in just so. The fire blazes. Nice and toasty. When hes done with the paper, done with the Central News Network, hell read Edward Stewarts Privileged Lives, move on to Mortal Grace by the same author. She doesnt approve. She doesnt comment. What does she care for privileged deviants and their sins and their money, for judges who rape, Monsignors who murder? Why should he care when they are so toasty, she and he? Shed prefer it if he read the bible. He could read it to her while she knits. But no, he has taken to Edward Stewart and his sinfulness. When he isnt looking she pages through the latest tome. To say she is shocked is an understatement. Sheer filth. She has no other word for it. Her father doesnt care for her shock. She hasnt lived, he says. How could she possibly know what goes on in the world? Hes seen enough to know, he says. He even has the gall one day to ask her if she is a lesbian. How could he say such things to his own daughter? How could he? Its not surprising they didnt want him anymore at the old age home, rude and sinful the way he is.
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When they pass a pretty girl on the street he asks her if they should take her home. Better to keep him indoors as much as possible. She doesnt dare think what he would do with that thing between his legs at his age. Its she who cleans him up every morning and evening. She who dresses him. She should know. She finds it strange to think that with that thing he brought her into the world. Click, click. Soon shell prepare the dog food. The owners of the house in Parktown have seven dogs. They, the owners, have certainly not stinted when it comes to feeding their dogs. The dogs eat better than she and her father. Shes taken to siphoning some of the dog food, mixing it in with theirs. She watches her father nibble the remainders of a late lunch, the plate on the wheelchair between his stumps. Hes not complaining. He never does when it comes to the food she makes. Onion livers, rice, and something else. She eats little. Like a sparrow, he says. He doesnt say it kindly. She doesnt mind. As long as they have a roof over their heads, food, a fire, his paper and his filthy books, her wool, theyll be just fine. For five years now theyve been together. Thanks to the Morris theyve been able to move further afield. Theyve lived in houses as great as palaces. Houses with bidets and jacuzzis and swimming pools and surveillance cameras in every room. She deals with the dogs and the cats and the cleaning. He works out the alarm systems, the electrics. Hes good with machinery. Always was. They make a good team. The homeowners are happy. They study her reference letters closely. Shes sure they contact the owners of houses shes cared for. Shes not anxious. She knows she does her job well. They enjoy moving around. They get to see the country, how the privileged live. They feel privileged too. Better this than being stuck in an old age home. Better this than her living in a flat, worrying about water bills and phone bills and all sorts. She doesnt worry about what will happen when she gets old. As long as she can she will care for her father. It doesnt trouble her that her father doesnt worry about her. Why should he? He has worries of his own. Shes glad that his worries arent serious. He usually worries about things that neither she nor he can do
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anything about like the plight of Aids orphans, or battered women, or why the government is doing nothing to help. Which is good. She doesnt mean it is good that there are so many problems; she means it is good that these problems dont affect them personally. Her father says she is selfish because she doesnt worry. He doesnt know that she has enough on her plate just finding a place for them to stay, money to live. She doesnt want to drain the small resource they have stored in the Associated Banks of South Africa. In the event of her fathers death the war pension dries up. Still, theres the Marriott Asset Management Fund. The financial advisor at the Scottsville branch in Pietermaritzburg is a sweetie. Her name in Prelini Naidoo. A dainty Indian girl who understands that she is doing whats best. She has made two Singles and a Double for Prelini. She didnt charge her. She believes in word of mouth. Her father calls it a domino effect. She likes the phrase. She sees the dominos fall one after the other. People call her on her cell. Shes made three blankets for Absa, two for mortgages and loans, one for a lady in finance. They were not as sweet and as understanding as Prelini Naidoo and the lady who gave her an extra forty rand, but she doesnt complain. She makes sure theres money in the bank, a little extra too. She is fifty-one. Her father calls her a sparrow but she thinks of herself as a box. Shes square shaped. Large shoulders, thick waist. Her legs, thankfully, dont give her too much trouble, though she should have her varicose veins seen to. They are starting to show something awful, even under her thick brown stockings. Theyve always been thin, her legs. She regrets the shoes she used to wear. Her toes are bunched over each other. Her father calls them wishing toes. She knows he doesnt mean this kindly. He has never been particularly kind to her. Prelini Naidoo is kind. The lady who gave her the extra forty is kind. She marvels at such kindness. It is a balm. She understands why people are mostly unkind. Kindness is not an easy thing, not these days when everyone struggles. Her father says she is a fool to expect kindness. He tells her not to chatter so. When she visits a client he waits in the Morris. He doesnt care for other peoples
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sympathy. He smokes his Texan Plains while she chatters. The clients enjoy the uniqueness of what she has made. They may not value the Single or the Double enough to give her more money, but they do understand the time involved. They, the clients, usually have no time. Surprisingly they find time for her. If she doesnt care for people, she does care enough to let them know about the work it takes to complete a Single. She knows they find her odd. She supposes she is with her skinny legs, her thick upper body, her glasses that make her eyes pop. No matter. The world is made of all sorts. At least she knows she is not any old sales person. She represents generations of women who go click, click. She appreciates the fact that what she makes, ends up on their beds. Sometimes she is invited to the bedrooms. She values the invitation, burns the moment into her mind. She often replays the image of a certain bedroom. She does not care to think of the client and their partner under the sheets. It is her father who provokes her with such thoughts. He talks heatedly of men and women in compromising positions then shifts to loneliness and pain. Why, she wonders, why entertain such thoughts? He says such things to upset her. They upset her no longer. She is done with the insecurity he thinks he still provokes in her. She doesnt worry about her figure, her chattery voice that her father finds so squeaky, her bunched up toes. She goes for her early morning walks about the grounds of the house in Parktown. She takes a dip in the pool in her long satin shift. She cares for the dogs, her father. She knits. Once installed in a house she never leaves. If they run out of anything her father has to get it. He is more than able. He pops the wheelchair in the back seat. Only once did he cause a fuss. Hed gone out to get milk and bread, stopped over at a bar. When he drove back hed forgotten the chair on the street. Shed had to leave the house the one in Ramsgate and spend the day looking for the chair. Ive got drugs smuggled in the piping, her father joked. She wasnt impressed. Eventually theyd gone to the hospital. While hed waited in the Morris she scanned the bank of wheelchairs, found his, the name, Jamila, cut into the underside where his fingertips would rest. After that shed made sure there was enough booze at
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home. Now and again he needs his whisky. She does not blame him. Poor thing. She has never been a drinker. Temperate, he says. A temperate sparrow. If it helps him to think this way why not? She has never cared for drink. She associates it with pride and warfare and men. She regards herself as a homebody. It is the one word her father uses that she does not mind. A box in a box he says, laughing. She humours him. She is not given to riposte. She is neither a wit nor a conversationalist. At best she is a chatterer. Someone who chatters about a single thing: Singles, Doubles. Otherwise she regards herself as a professional, an expression he mocks. A professional? he asks. A bywoner he says. A poor white who looks after the houses of rich whites. Blacks too, these days. So what? Someone must take care of things. She does it well. Barring that one occasion when, because of his drunkenness, she was forced to quit her post, this is what she has done. It is more than a living, it is a responsibility, one she takes seriously. Would that he would understand. She thinks that he doesnt finally care for her responsibility. Then what; what does he care for? For her? Not at all. Then what? With all his talk of Aids orphans and the government he cares for nothing. Would that he would regret the loss of his legs! Would that he had said that the war was wrong! But he doesnt complain. He never complains when he should. If he possesses bitterness it is towards her. It is there, in her, he locates his bitterness. His chatterbox. His girl that no man will ever want. Time to cook the dog food. She sets the knitting aside, rises from the chair. She wishes he wouldnt smoke so much. The owners of the house know he does. They dont mind. She wishes they did. But once theyve checked her references they care no longer for the father who puffs in his wheelchair. His presence, she thinks, gives her duty an air of nobility. Because of him they discover nobility in pity. Shed functioned well enough while he was in the old age home. But now, now business is thriving. What is it about war that fascinates people? While he assesses procedure, wheels from room to room, he talks about the war, his wounds. They discover that he was a dispatch rider for the South African
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Core of Signals, that he was stationed in Sienna and Florence, in Helwan outside Cairo. He doesnt spare them the moment the motorcycle hits the landmine. Here he grows nonchalant, his beady eyes watchful. He is amused by peoples squeamishness. There are no real men anymore, he says. To illustrate the point he talks of the young black thugs who rape, who attack the aged at Automatic Transmission Machines. He doesnt tell the homeowners he entertains that he considers them gutless too. Old men and their wisdom. Old men and their charm. Are they both fools? Benign fools? Is that what they, the rich, pay for? A spinster and her unknown soldier? If there is a gun in the house her father will know what to do with it. What is another death? You must always be on your guard, he says. He fixes the homeowners with his thousand yard stare. They see he is afraid of nothing. This heartens them; they who are always afraid. As for her? She comes highly recommended. A match made in heaven, or that place where security has a purpose. Her father calls for a whisky. She dilutes it, then hands it to him. Back in the kitchen she prepares the dog food. After the feeding shell run her fathers bath, prepare supper. Hell sleep early. So much for being always on your guard! It is she who will stay up through the night, knitting, listening. If danger strikes she will do everything she can to protect the house, her father. But no danger strikes. The dogs are silent. The TV no longer blares. The only sound she hears is the click, click when the needles snag, unlock.

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157

Milk blue

For Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1957-1996

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The bed, unmade, made for two, is milk white. A seam of dark runs beneath the puffed pillows. The pillows overlap. He thinks of tongues; Rosss tongue. There are hollows at the centre of the pillows. The hollow to the right is deep, the hollow to the left shallow. There, once in the shallow cusp, lay Rosss head, a thing of air in his hand, as light to the touch as the head of a newborn child. The whole of him of Ross becomes a thing of air, asleep by day, awake at night, eyes wide, unseeing, sensitive to light. The linen curtains, the colour of larkspur, are always drawn. Light filters through the linen sieve, softens, shades. Milk blue. His eyes shift away from the uneven line of dark beneath the pillows that no light will wither. He studies the milk white folds tongued with blue. He has never lingered upon this mingling of white and blue before. Then it was Ross, always Ross, the man-child, that held his heart, his eye. But now, now that Ross is gone, now, before him, he sees milk, spilt, blue. He will not say that he sees nothing; that there is nothing before him except an empty bed. Ross. He unfolds the name, listens as it slips, rolls. Ross. A lovers sigh. A blown kiss. He stands at the threshold to their bedroom. Do the sheets stir when he softly utters the name? The windows are shut; he will not circulate the air. What he wants is this stillness, this unchanging vista of milk and blue. What, then, is the stirring he sees? A trick of light on a crumpled sheet? Is it the bed that speaks to him now? Out of milk and blue he wills meaning. If not meaning then comfort. Something. Anything. Never nothing. He is tired. He will not rest. The bed wills him. He cannot shift from the threshold. If he crosses, enters, he knows that he will do so alone. Ross is no longer there, waiting. Beside the bed the porcelain basin and sponge. He will not empty the water; cannot. He will not puff the pillows, straighten the sheets. He will allow no one into the room, not even himself. For three and a half months this is what he has studied. He opens the door at a definite time; the time he first returns from the hospital and realises that he cannot re-enter the bedroom. Each day, at 11:20 am he opens the door, lingers. The thin thread of dark beneath the pillows strangely consoles him.
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The light, shifting, seeds the milk with its blue. He grows accustomed to the vigil, expects the blue will come and go. The sky is not his to command. Sometimes the sheets are bathed in lemon tinctured with blue; sometimes the blue is tinctured with grey. He does not care for blue-grey. The sheets harden then, become a coruscated place of slate. Then the pillows with their crimped hollows are boulders. He never switches on the electric light. He never ventures beyond the threshold. Everything inside the bedroom is unreachable. His clothes, his reading glasses, the unfinished newspaper, the glass of water, the row of plastic bottles with their safety caps. It is he who opened the bottles, he who administered the dosage. He has his own round of medication. Sometimes he has supped believing he does so for both of them, but the waste he holds at bay has claimed Ross. He has renewed the medication he takes, renewed the clothes, shoes. He no longer cares to read. What occurs in the world is outside his interest. Friends inquire after his welfare. He shuts them out. The Gallery calls. They await his offering for a group exhibition. He has made nothing, thought of nothing. Nothing exists outside the bedroom. Yet he must eat, pay for the medication. If he has given up on life, it does not follow that he means to die. Rather, he stands on a threshold between Rosss world and his own. He cannot separate the two. His dutiful opening of the door at 11:20 am makes him think of clocks; two clocks, synchronized to the very second. When the gallery calls again he has the answer. He presents two battery-operated circular clocks, side by side like the pillows on the bed. He subtitles the piece Perfect Lovers. When he reads the catalogue summary he is momentarily gratified. Someone has understood his longing. What do the two clocks convey besides the time of day? Their sideby-side position assumes the power of gesture; they touch. Their synchronization envisions their relationship, the unison of love. Their identical forms indicate alike lovers; they are homosexuals. What the summary cannot say, cannot know, is the extent to which he now exists outside of the perfected sphere of love. Death, a crooked black thread, has come between he and Ross,
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has joined then separated them. If the circular clocks stand side by side they will never encircle each other, form a space like an upended eye where the one lives inside the other. The circles are sheer, separate. Their twinning says as much of mockery as it does of longing. If the concept is resolved, easily interpreted, it also invites an ideal, which, now, is no longer admissible. Like the bed which he cannot make his own, the ticking clocks with all their seeming harmony sound a death knell. On the opening night of the exhibition he goes because it is his duty; because he is sick of desolation he discovers that the second hands are fractionally out of synch. He says nothing. Desolation grips him. For that fraction of a second he is flung outward, away. Synchrony becomes bitter, remorselessly false. The disjunct second hands are his and Rosss hands, separate, divided by time. He leaves the gallery gutted. Has no one seen the glitch that separates the second hands, mocks his dream of perfected love? If they do, do they care? And if they do care, then why? What does his sentiment matter? In this day and age when fear like a false hand, a crooked shadow splits loves soul, who can truly say that perfection counts? Is the love of a man for another man truly a love founded on likeness? Of course not. No two men are the same. Ross was never his mirror. Their hearts were never one. The false hand is true. That night, for the first time in three and a half months, he enters the bedroom. In his hand he holds a candle. Streetlight filters through the linen sieve, forms pools of red and gold. He sets the candle beside the bed, kneels. With elbows pressed to the edge of the bed, hands clasped, eyes shut, he prays. If oneness is truly possible it is oneness with God. He murmurs, red and gold pressed to the lids of his eyes. It is to himself he speaks. He imagines Ross before him with eyes unseeing, ears deadened, Rosss breath involuntary, a matter of the will, a will that is not Rosss but lifes ghost heaving through the supine body. It is forgiveness for which he asks; forgiveness for the false hand that rings true; forgiveness for the fact that he could not stop time, save Ross; forgiveness for the desolation he feels. He knows that tomorrow he will sleep there in the empty bed. He
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knows that Ross will expect this of him. But first he will pray. To whom? What? A God he has never cared for? Whom he thinks has never cared for his kind? What is this plague, this thin crooked line, that makes a mockery of harmony? Why will no one heed and say: look! It is not your fault; it is the fault of the false hand! Why does he feel such despair when love dies, as love will? Surely Ross is content now? Surely there exists a place more comforting than this place where he kneels? If he is a supplicant it is because he knows now that prayer, like light, needs a filter. Love is the filter. Love gives, takes away. Love is a gift, a reproach, an empty bed. At 11:10 the next morning he readies the tripod and camera, waits. At 11:20 he takes the shot. The light is blue upon a bed of milk. Now, months later, now that he has recorded the scene a scene he thinks of as a testimony to illness, death, love, loss now he knows he will live there. He knows he will sleep alone. Will Ross visit him? Will Ross say, you are not alone, I am with you? Is it Rosss words he will hear, Rosss voice, or his own? Is Ross inside of him? Beside him? Is Ross the thing of air that beats within? Beside the bed there is a photograph. The photograph is taken in a canoe. He is the photographer, the absent one for whom Ross grins, his face flushed. In his powerful hands Ross grips the paddles. The chest is thrust out, the arms thrust down. The water all about is the deepest blue; the sky is the colour of larkspur. He places the photograph in a drawer. He does not care for Ross grin, his flushed cheeks, the power in those arms and chest that once enfolded him with a delicacy that never ceased to surprise him. Now it is the lightness of the head of a newborn he cherishes, the neck he gently shifts, the body nothing more than skin and bone. He too will one day become a thing as fine. He too will one day pass through the eye of a needle. Then, when the day comes, when the false hand will sound its truth, he will be ready, waiting. Who will carry him from the bed where he lies? Will Ross return? Will Ross be there to sweep him in his arms? Will they pass together through milk and blue? Will Ross be his guide; the one who stills his fear; the one
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who finally plucks the thin dark thread as faithless as a strangers hair in their bed? For that is what he imagines death to be; a lure in a moment of weakness, a devil-may-care figuration of lust, as thin, as easily shed as a strand of hair; a trace slight, devastating. In the early days when Ross never knew commitment, it was this thin dark thread, caught in the folds of their bed that would turn love to hate. Then hed scream, plead. Why, why am I not enough? Ross, spread out across the bed, would look and look, say nothing. What proof could Ross have wanted? At what point would Ross say, now, now I am wholly yours. When he knew that he was dying? When in the clubs and bathhouses he frequented he finally saw his own ghost? When, walking on the lakes shore, they saw the carp, its eye glaucous, dull, its body pecked through to the bone, a star made of birds feet traced on the shore. It was he whod pointed out the scene. He, camera in hand, whod taken the photograph, struck by the beauty of the pattern made by birds feet. Then it wasnt the beauty of the sand scroll that moved Ross. It was the dead carp gutted to the bone. Was it then, on the lakes shore, that Ross finally turned to him and opened his heart? Love, he knows, can never come too late. Ross neednt have tried to make up for his neglect. It was enough that, in the end, nothing would separate them but the thin dark strand, a strand that now slowly weaves its way towards him. Before him, on the table, lies the photograph of their bed. He has met with the director of the gallery, made arrangements with a billboard company. Soon the bed of milk and blue will appear in locations throughout the city. The frames of the billboards will be painted the colour of larkspur. If, before, hed wanted no one to see what he saw, feel the tenderness of his loss, now it is this tenderness, this loss, he wants to gift to the world. He wants to part the curtain, say no to darkness.

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Nuptial

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Feather ... rock ... flower ... thorn. ... I am a feather, the man says. Blown about, detached, unanchored. His words disturb the group. They want to make him feel that he belongs. I am a rock the woman says. Part of the earth. You can rely on me because I am solid. I am a flower another woman says. She holds a Cosmos in her hand. I dont want to be cut and put in a vase. I want to be free. ... The three whove spoken are part of a group seminar she runs. Theyve been asked to find something in nature which best expresses who they are. She knows the experiment has its limit. A man stumbles upon a feather, says yes, this is me. She doesnt question the links the members of the group make. She knows that if things and words appear as one; words are also decoys. Filters. The group belong to the administrative branch of a parastatal. Theyve gathered together for two days to align their values and energy, discover a common outcome. These are her words, her brief. The project is headed by a Ghanaian. The members of the group, all South African, range in race, gender, ethnicity and faith. They are men and women who are employed because of their intelligence not the capacity of their hands. She well knows the problem which arises when the mind is separated from the hand. When she talks of values the values are as much corporate as personal. She does not believe in separating thought from action, the private from the public. If a woman says to her that the men in her firm do not heed her because she is black, because she is female, she does not say, yes, I understand. She knows this truth is only partly so. She waits for the moment when the filter falls, when seeing meets understanding, when colour and gender reveal themselves for what they are: filters, things of straw, bogeymen. How find a common goal in a room where men and women who do not know each other are seated about a table? What joins them other than the fact that they work for the same parastatal in distinct yet connected locales? For two days they are brought together, ferried in the same bus from various points. The seminar is held in a conference centre in the Northern Province. The centre is adjoined to a motel located on the
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outskirts of a mining town known for its platinum. All about there is bushveld, a place of thorn and cactus, feather and rock. Cosmos. If the conference were held on a beach what then would they bring? How would they explain themselves? Does it matter that the man who describes himself as a feather detached, unanchored is Indian? That the woman who claims she is a rock is Shangaan? That the woman who will not be cut, placed in a jar, is of Scots extraction; the man who claims he is a thorn is Afrikaans, a boereseun from the platteland with a rugby injury that will never go away? If race and gender is a filter it is also something indominatable, a barrier. How does one find a common outcome amongst men and women who bind themselves to traces as wanton as a feather, a rock, a flower, a thorn? She knows the outcome she wants. She knows it cannot be forced. The little she achieves in two days must be everything. She knows this is impossible, all the more when democracy is a phantom, when people cling to the little that divides them. She knows of a Zambian woman in the same parastatal who cannot break an impregnable and venomous xenophobia. The woman says that the cleaning lady will not heed her requests because she is not from here. But where is here? Who belongs here? She knows that the problem reaches further back than the system loosely called Apartheid. In a corporate culture with its pretensions to transnationalism it is the tribalism forged through empire that persists. A man is thrown off a train, a woman has her shack in Honeydew destroyed because they the man, the woman are Zimbabwean. Mekwerekwere. A dirty word to describe what is regarded as dirty. In this phantom democracy there remains a reason to hate, a reason to destroy and murder. If she seeks now, in a mere two days, to align values and energy, to work towards a common outcome, she knows that the victory, if victory there will be, will be piecemeal. At no point during the proceedings does she disclose her faith, at no point does she protest and say: Look! Find the undivided divinity within! She is no preacher. She is not here to declare that which is right, that which is wrong. The absolute is a matter of faith, not a
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matter one brings to the table in a conference room in which the air conditioning is faulty, where men and women sit guarded. She asks the group to share two things about themselves, the one personal, the other work related. The boereseun from the platteland confesses the rugby injury. She can see the courage it takes for him to express this personal pain. Men of his ilk, from his clan, do not reveal such weakness. When, later that day, the group perform an outdoor activity the pain is too great, he cannot jump. Jump! the others say. Deaf to his confession willfully dispassionate? they force him back into his shell. From that point he says nothing, gives nothing. Is she responsible? She doesnt think so. Still, she knows the risk involved when posing a question. Questions are doors that open, doors that shut. If the question succeeds the door will always be open. But questions nothing more than words that hover, gasp are duplicitous too. What does it mean to expect two things? Why not three? Why not a hundred? Why two? Does this make confession any simpler? She traffics in a culture of solutions, seeks a common outcome, yet she knows that questions, when posed, are not necessarily solved. If a door opens it is because it will lead to another, then another still. She cannot say this to the parastatal that employs her, though she thinks, if she did, they would understand her meaning. Any corporation knows that between a question and an answer lies the goal. The goal is the thing between, a thing ineffable, unbranded, a ghost of a possibility. If corporations call her, which they do, again and again, it is because what she does is twofold: She masks, she conjures. She knows that the survival of a corporation is a riddle. Between desire and fulfillment lies the unnameable. She calls this unnameable - hope. A word like any other, and yet, for her, hope is more than a mere word. Hope is a threshold. Hope is the place where openness and closure enfolds one about the other. Hope is a nuptial. It is there, in the threshold a place that is also space that value meets energy, where the corporate and the private is one. This threshold where the nuptial occurs is not a rational place, it is not a place where confessions are parried across a boardroom table. If she lingers now over her notes at four in the
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morning in her motel room it is because what she looks for is the glimmer of this moment; a moment greater than a posed question, a posed answer; a moment greater than unyielding silence. She looks for the ineffable moment when each will part from the other and, without a word, know what they must do for themselves, for each other. In the clouded smoke ridden atmosphere she sees the group entangled. Acrobats they move through the threshold of a great room. Each is distinct, each is joined to the other. This, she believes, is the meaning of company. And she, where is she in the midst of this subtle choreography? Is she there among them? Is she the apex, the support on the ground? Or is she the choreographer, the one set apart, the one who asks the questions, sets the exercises? She knows she is neither a part of the delicate lattice of moving limbs, nor the one who choreographs. Then where is she? Who is she? Is she the ghost, the ineffable thing? She knows she is the trainer, the team builder. This after all is her job description. She is paid to till silence, engender hope. And when she does not succeed? When nothing comes of her hope, what then? Does she pack her backs and say: Better luck next time? No. She does not believe in luck. When confronted with the illiterate workers of another company she draws pictures. Again it is the alignment of values and energy that is her focus. Before a sea of black faces the group is large, the languages multiple, words will not do she draws a battery. Her intention is to demonstrate that when a battery is incorrectly inserted energy does not flow. Having drawn a rectangle with nodes at either end she waits. There is no response. The picture does not make sense. Beneath the drawing of the battery she writes: EVERREADY. Now the drawing makes sense. If the sea of black faces cannot read the image they can read what the letters are intended to mean. Battery, a man finally says. Relieved she continues. What does a battery do? she asks. The man rises, thrusts out his arms, buckles his pelvis, thrusts back the fists. PULL THE MUSIC, the man booms. She has retold this story these fifteen years. She has made it her mantra. What she does, she says, is pull the music.
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In the group there is a man with pale hair and green eyes. He is thin, too thin. She thinks of him as beautiful, intellectual, sensitive. When dressed in a tracksuit or casuals he is still distinct from the rest. Effete. While the others move in scuffed takkies his shoes are neat. His words are as measured, as careful as his attire. A presentable man. She is drawn to him. She thinks he is drawn her too. Across the boardroom table he watches her. His eyes are piercing yet soft. He sees what she wants. He understands the goal. He knows that more than anything it is humanity she wills, hope she cherishes. When he, in turn, is asked to proffer two confessions, one work related, the other personal, he tells her that he is highly irritated when expected to work with someone when the project does not require collaboration. He expresses his irritation calmly. There is nothing irascible about him. Does he say this because he knows that she too would find this burden irritating? She waits for the second disclosure. He talks of his mother. She is sick, he says. She is dying. There is nothing he can do to stop the inevitable. Again his voice is gentle. She marvels at the softness with which he gifts the inevitable. Is this his answer to rage? Does he rage against the forced collaboration that is so much a part of current corporate culture? Does he rage against the dying of his mothers light? His tapered fingers are folded. The flesh is thin, translucent. He is a thing of light. A groomed ghost. When each is asked to participate in the outdoor activity; a game that is much more than a game, in which a member is expected to resist that which resists within, he cedes without fear. He falls blind into the arms of another, forms a human chain, allows himself to trust. The ease with which he yields binds the group. They too are no longer afraid. Now, because of him, they forget gravity, forget the intimacy of a strangers touch. Because of him they become one. She ponders over this gift he has made of himself; he who is irritated when forced to work with others, he who is troubled by his mothers death. Is this a personal confession or is it a decoy? At the end of the second days proceedings, their last, he invites her to his room. During the proceedings she has discovered that he is a scrabble champion. She enjoys the game
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though, unlike he, she does not play to win but to weave a tapestry of words. As a consequence the game is swiftly over. On the table he has a bottle of chilled red wine. Here too the air conditioning is faulty. Each is bathed in a film of sweat. It becomes her, he says. She is a cat on a hot tin roof. She knows the reference. She knows the animal magnetism that is the core of Tennessee Williams plays. But, he demurs, it is not Elizabeth Taylor she reminds him of but Sophia Loren. The business between them is done. He knows this. That is why, now, in his room, he speaks so intimately. What then of the answers he gave? Were they intimate too? Now, she doubts this. She doubts the mother for whom he purportedly grieves. She even doubts the grace with which he gives himself in the game of trust. For all his care, his grooming, he is barbed. If he now speaks of a cat on a hot tin roof it is not because he is a would-be Paul Newman softening her resistance with his words, but because he is Tennessee Williams, the abject playwright who scribbles on the margins of passion. The wine is swiftly polished off. Everything in his room is completed with swiftness. There is no ease inside of him, no langourousness on this steamy night in which the air thickens with heat. He places an ice cube to her brow, she lets him. If he is brazen now, she certainly will not be coy. Shell leave such drama to Tennessee Williams. Eventually, the third bottle of chilled wine finished, she declares it is late. It is three in the morning. She has an early flight to Johannesburg. I will not see you again, he says. She believes him. In her line of work she is constantly moving. She carries ghosts. Arent you tired, she asks. Always, he says. But sleep? Why sleep? She knows now why he is always so well groomed. His whole life is a ministration, an act of wakefulness. Each instant must be parsed, weighed, clung to. It is then that he tells her why. You know of course that I am dying. No question mark completes the sentence. Of course she knows. She must. If she does not it means that she does not understand who he is, what he is. And if she did not then these two days will have been a waste. At this point she could voice her suspicions concerning his dying mother. She does not. She could acknowledge the effete
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quality of his presence. The grooming, the classical music, the otherworldy nature of him. She does not. She could point out the overly swift manner in which he completes things, the efficiency that defines his every act. She does not. This last confession of a dying man she accepts. It is for this moment he has waited. A jaundiced priest would not have sufficed. But a beauty, someone as glamourous as Sophia Loren, now there is a heart worthy of his final arrow. He knows she will bear the strain. She sees him soften once the words are released. The boardroom discussions, the game of trust, the game of scrabble, the wine, are merely the pretext for this final nuptial. Tonight, she thinks, he will sleep well. Fitfully.

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Junoon

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When he enters the room Junoon is watching a Premier League match between Liverpool and Ipswich Town. She is a striker for the school team. When she watches a game it is the defenders she studies. Obstacles fascinate her more than goals. In the Indian community in which they live, in which he the father holds a respected place, Junoons vision and passion is unusual. She will not be bartered. She is neither object nor goal. When he settles beside her she kisses his cheek, shifts back to the TV screen. It is then, in the instant she shifts, that the camera pans across the stands and fixes for an instant on Andreas Schappach. No one in the crowd of 65000 will know the name. He does. He knows the name all too well. He knows each and every contour of the face he sees; he knows the body cropped at the chest. In an instant the vision vanishes. It is as though the face he sees was never there. Emile Heskey scores. Junoon screams. Popcorn tumbles about her pounding thighs. Sharmila enters wanting to know what all the fuss is about. She presses her hands to his shoulders, kisses him on the brow. Junoon gyrates in front of the screen, her hands in the air. Sharmila doesnt care for her daughters pleasure. She doesnt care for the closely cropped hair, the jeans that hang loosely about the hips. She is not averse to the exposure of the belly. Shed prefer to see her daughter draped in a sari. Sharmila withdraws her hand from his grip. His hand falls. Does he expect Andreas to reappear? Impossible. In the instant when his eyes are focussed, in that instant alone he sees him. Grey hair, hooked nose, pouches beneath the eyes, the mouth drooping. But it is no one else, of that he is certain. Sharmila asks if he is all right. She knows him well enough after fourty-five years of marriage to know that something is amiss. What could he possibly say? How could she understand? Is that not why he married her; because she would never understand? He is back for lunch. He moves between four surgeries in Elsies River, Heideveld, Mitchells Plain and Athlone. He has a comfortable home on Shaanti Crescent in Gatesville, a timeshare in Hermanus. Junoon is the only child who is still at home. Rafiq lives in Ireland where he works as a music promoter. Murza is an Imam based in Port Elizabeth. Over zealous, he thinks. Murza
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supports the Taliban. Zubaida is a news reporter. She and Murza are at loggerheads. They always were. Junoon, his pride and joy, sees a career in football management. Her latest icon is Ria Ledwaba of Ria Stars. Each, in their way, is successful. Rafiq too, despite his drinking and drug problem, despite the fact that he, who is closest to Rafiq in nature, has never admitted this. Now, seated before the TV screen, the game over, he finds himself incapable of shaking the vision of his boyhood love. Sharmila announces lunch. Mutton curry, rotis, tea. Sharmila discusses their trip to Mecca. Every second year they visit Mecca after which they go to Monte Carlo or the south of France. Sharmila, a stickler for tradition, also loves to gamble. He encourages her weakness; it redeems him. Shes an excellent tactician. She rarely loses. With the proceeds they fly to Mumbaai, rent a car through Avis and drive to Janjira Marud, his ancestral home. The success of his practice means he employs graduates from the UCT Medical School, interns from Groote Schuur Hospital. These days he is the overseer. Now and again he dispenses. He no longer wields a scalpel. He is, he knows, no longer a doctor but an administrator. Junoon pipes in. She wants to go to Japan and Korea for the World Cup. Hell let her. He denies her nothing. Besides, Zubaida has been tipped as the E TV reporter for the games. Sharmila recommends that Junoon eat fish. They serve dog meat there. He has little appetite. Sharmila reminds him to take his heart tablets. He complies. While he drinks his tea made with cloves and warm milk Junoon studies him. She, he knows, sees him more clearly than Sharmila. Do you have to go to the surgery dad? He looks at his daughter as though for the first time. He sees her with her eyes closed. She lies on the weighing table. Her feet kick, her hands move, her eyes open. She smiles. He is the first living being she sees. Junoon he whispers. Junoon for passion, Junoon for ecstasy. An Urdu word culled by the Sufi mystics Rumi. Dad? She lays her hand upon his. They know he is not well. He hasnt been for some time. Years of struggle to reach this point where he sits hunched before his wife of fourty-five years, his daughter. Sharmila resumes the discussion. She thinks they
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should forget about Mecca and the South of France. He should be home in India under a Jackfruit tree. They, the mother and daughter, talk of the family farm, of ladyfingers and mangoes and sugar cane. They have always thought that she and he should retire in Janjira Marud. Now he does not know anymore what he should do. Certainty deserts him. His heart, sickly, draws him elsewhere. He is not in the East, not in the South of France; he is in Yorkshire under an oak tree. There, in the forest that surrounds the school, he enfolds Andreas in his arms. There, under the oak tree, they kiss. Amidst the scent of cloves he feels the impress of the boys lips on his. He knows now that no love compares to that moment under the oak tree. Sharmila and Junoon look at him. He smiles, places the glass of tea on the table. He decides that they will go their separate ways. Sharmila will go to Janjira Marud. Junoon will go with Zubaida to Korea. And he? He will find Andreas. Im thinking of visiting Rafiq in Dublin, he says. Sharmila is aghast, heartened. Father and son have not spoken in years. She believes it is Rafiq who now troubles his heart. Neither mother nor daughter questions the decision. They are glad that he has weaned himself from years of labour. They want nothing more than for him to rest, enjoy his autumn years. He rises from the table having eaten nothing. They resume their meal. In his bedroom he slips off his shoes, rests. He and Sharmila sleep in separate rooms, she is done with his snoring. He picks up the phone and cancels all his appointments for the rest of the week. He arranges a debriefing with his junior colleagues. He knows that he will cede control, remain the principle shareholder in a thriving business. He is done with sickness. He will wrest the plaque that reads Jalaal Ahmed M.D. from the surgery walls. Youth must have its day. Age too. Barring the troubles of his heart he is in relatively fine fettle. Cricket and squash have given way to golf. His spiritual life too is intact. Mosque on Fridays, daily prayer. The French doors of his bedroom face Mecca. His prayer mat he keeps in a custom-made sheath of skin. Every morning, rain or shine, he opens the French doors, unrolls the mat. His faith is the centre of his life. He has
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not tried to steer the family, not entirely. Conflicts are inevitable in families, but other than his deep disagreement with Murza who will not see the Taliban as a breakaway sect that has misappropriated Islam; other than the rift between he and Rafiq of which, now, he prefers not to think, his life has been ordered, its destiny fulfilled. Then why, now, does he think of a boy under an oak tree? He is sixty-eight. He was seventeen then. Still the impress of a kiss scented with cloves will not go away. Is this how love works? Is this how love grips the heart? If he had not seen Andreas face for an instant in a football stand would he have remembered the moment under the oak tree, all the moments which now begin to flood him? They are in a boys school in Yorkshire. They play first team cricket together. Squash too. They dont know how to express what they feel for each other. They believe it is wrong, but wrong soon turns to right. Morality is a thing of the mind; it will never possess the heart. Is that why his sickness now lodges there, in the heart? He reminds himself that he is a doctor. The reminder shames him further. What of the soul? What of the spirit? Is that why Rumi has claimed that part of him which no science, no system of morals, could ever possess? Rumi begins as a scholar of Islam. A scholar, he reminds himself, not an intellective who believes that Allah can be accessed through the mind. From Persia Rumi moves to Konya in Turkey where he teaches at the mosque. It is there, in a marketplace in Konya, that he meets the dervish, Shams of Tabriz. At the time Shams is sixty, Rumi thirtyseven. The difference in their worldviews, their understanding of how the spirit moves, is palpable. If Rumi is guarded, a scholar, Shams is the dervish, the one who begs to give you his life. Confronted affronted Rumi asks the question: Who is greater? Mohammed the Prophet or Allah? Rumi thinks he knows the answer: It is Allah. Shams counters: Neither Allah nor the Prophet but you. At this point the legend goes Rumi falls from his donkey and is knocked unconscious. The moral? The dervish has bypassed both the scholar and the intellective by claiming the heart as the purest expression of the Prophet Mohammed and Allah. It is said that Rumi invites the dervish to
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the mosque. It is said that they become lovers in body and spirit. Dissension occurs amongst Rumis students. They do not approve of the hold the dervish has on Islams greatest scholar. Neither the scholars nor the intellectives believe that Allah can be known through the heart. The lovers are intemperate, they say. Impatient. Allah will not yield to such craven longing. Allah does not care for passion, for dance. It is said that they the students are responsible for the murder of Shams of Tabriz. Now it is he, centuries later, a man of science, a man with a faulty heart, who remembers the Sufi poets despair which follows the death of his lover. About a pillar Rumi whirls and whirls and cries. It is thought that he has grown mad with grief. Then, when his students stop to listen, they hear that his cry is the cry of the heart, the cry of love. These are the words, centuries later, which he reads, rereads. Words wrapped in vellum that he keeps with him always. Words of passion and ecstasy. Junoon. He dials information. He is threaded to international inquiries. Id like the number for Andreas Schappach, he says. Slowly he repeats the syllables. His heart races. The name is listed. He secures an address in Brighton. He books a flight on SAA for the following morning. He will land at Gatwick Airport, take the train to Brighton. The debriefing with his junior colleagues will have to wait. Everything will have to wait. Indefinitely, if it must. Will he say anything to Sharmila? Why when she will never understand? But then, to her credit, she has always surprised him. Despite the fact that it was never he who chose her, the fact that they were brought together through the machinations of others, they grew to love each other. It was not her beauty that claimed his heart but her fairness, her equanimity, a balance she possesses still, a balance which he now threatens. In his heart of hearts, the heart of a lover, he knows she will understand. He believes she will forgive him; he who has always been incapable of forgiving. Rafiq leaves, he realises now, because it is he who will not forgive the boy. He knows all too well that it is not the drinking, the drugs, that he does not forgive, but the boys love for his own sex. Is it this failure to forgive, this failure to understand that love is not a thing that can be arranged, worked on, improved, which
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has taken its toll? In daring to control passion has he sickened his own heart? Has he heeded to a thankless and faithless conscience? Yes, he has. He knows all too well how wrong he has been. It is not that he regrets abandoning his youthful love. It is not that he believes his marriage a failure. On all counts he has succeeded. Now he thinks that he has succeeded all too well. He has a telephone number, an address in Brighton. Other than these slivers he has nothing. He reminds himself that he is sixty-eight, eight years older than Shams of Tabriz. Is this decision a flurry of sentiment? He wills his mind to think so. His mind concurs, humours him, but his heart says no. No! He imagines himself before a door of a Georgian house. He thinks of Andreas as a retired news reporter. He remembers, twelve years before, lying in his bed. It is three in the morning. Unable to sleep he listens to the British World Service. That is when, for the first time in years, he listens to Andreas voice. The voice is older than the one he remembers when a boy. Then theyd whisper. Every act was a whisper. In a school such as theirs the walls had ears, the forest too. It is the same voice he hears on the radio, fluent in German and English. Andreas is speaking from Berlin. He is reporting on the collapse of the Wall. He remembers the excitement in Andreas voice as he speaks of German unification. Years later, the wall down, there is no unification. Europe has consolidated itself into a would-be super power. But unification? He sees nothing of the sort anywhere. Democracy has revealed itself for what it always was: An illusion, a mask to hide a selfserving interest, global neglect and exploitation. Is that why Murza rallies for support for the Taliban? Is he not, once again, wrong? Murza ... always a gentle boy, always a devotee of the Quran. Why should he now be so startled by the boys burning gaze and militant stance? Murza mocks his western ways, mocks his faith in the faithless. You and your British World Service, Murza says. And he? How does he reconcile Islam and the West? With hope, he thinks. An old mans foolish hope. What could he possibly expect from Andreas whom hed once scorned, whose love he tore down believing it to be mere tinsel, a thing of fancy? He sees Andreas before him. He
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sees Andreas weeping as he tears up the letters of love. When Andreas says they could adopt children he scorns all the more. But now it is not these acts of betrayal that stay but the visions of the two of them in each others arms, holding hands beside the canal, hungering for the others sex. For two years this was the only world they cared for. It was he who grew anxious, he who panicked, he who nearly killed the boy who loved him so. The school matron diagnoses Andreas collapse as a nervous breakdown. Always first in class Andreas completes his exams in the sanatorium and barely passes while he, in turn, excels. He moves to Edinburgh and medical school, Andreas moves to Sheffield where he majors in Politics and History. Hed thought he was rid of him, but Andreas would hitchhike, beg to sleep in his bed. In the end he believed that Africa would separate them. He married, opened a practice, fathered. Then, years later, he hears the voice on the British World Service. Today he sees the man who, he knows now, he has always loved. The vision he sees is of an old man. If truth be told, they are both beyond their autumn years. Now, more than anything, he wants to return to those arms he scorned. Sometimes love, he thinks now, takes years to find its rightful place. Scorn is not hate. Scorn is fear. Now he knows that he is no longer fearful. Now he no longer cares. His father is not there to condemn him. His wife, he believes again and again, will understand. His children? Murza, surely, will hate him all the more. Zubaida, a woman of the world, a reporter too, will not demur. Rafiq will hold him in his allknowing arms. And Junoon? What of Junoon, his pride and joy? She, he thinks, will never understand. But then, his heart shot through with hope and longing, he says: Never say never. It is a phrase he has always abhorred. Not given to clich he finds now that nothing else will do. If Andreas had once begged to give his life, would he beg still? Does the heart of the dervish ever die? Does the heart, like the body, grow old? Does the heart say: Enough of the dance of passion! Enough of this impetuous childish longing to find Allah in the living world! Wait until you are dead! Only then will I come to you! Much as the mind would claim him, restore him to his senses, it is the lovers heart, Rumis
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heart that wins his soul. The moment occurs not in a marketplace in Konya but in a room before a television screen at the southernmost point of Africa. It is then, tired in body and soul, seated beside his prized daughter, that he sees the man who would have given him his life. Stretched out on his bed, the prospect of his return trenchant, unknown to the family he holds dear, he thinks of his dervish. He is before the door of a Georgian house in Brighton. He wears a muffler. In the one hand he holds his prayer mat sheathed in skin, in the other a suitcase that contains little. It is his heart that is full. The door opens. Before him stands Andreas. Tall, hunched too. Andreas wipes his hands with a cloth, then reaches out. He enters a hallway. The smell of a Yorkshire pudding. Andreas closes the door behind him and shuts out the world forever ... forever. It is a dream, he knows, fanciful, perhaps belated, but then Allah knows that on this earth love is never never too late.

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My Way

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Dusk. She is en route to Jagersfontein. Shes never been there. A first time for everything. She thinks of hunters and watering holes. Jackals and blood. Blood is on her mind, between her legs. Blood engorges the sanitary pad. Her last. She feels the blood seep past the pads wings. Absurd word. What were the advertisers thinking of? She shifts, feels the thin cotton of her dress stick to the vinyl seat. Theres nothing she can do to stop the remorseless flow. Soon night will shut out the sight of her. The painter drives her to the hospital. She hardly knows him. She knows he is well known. He paints landscapes like the one they drive through. His influence is Constable. He wields paint with a knife. He fixes his eye on dereliction and splendour, on moments like this when the sun is as engorged as she, as bloody too. The rooms of his house in Bethulie are covered with his paintings. If she were content the paintings would sadden her. It is the painters sweet sadness the consumer desires. Fantasies of gone worlds. At best elegaic, at worst prurient, sentimental. Paintings for the Volk. But she is not one of them. She is a thing apart. For the first time she is forced to leave her daughter with Sarie, the painters wife. She will forget she has done this. She will forget the whole mess. Now, throughout the fifty kilometre journey from Bethulie to Jagersfontein, the painter talks. He senses her distress, believes that if he says something, anything, his words will matter. They dont. She veers her eyes from the dust road, struggles to wean herself from this moment, the grinding gears, the painters words, the thud when the bakkie hits a pothole. He is speeding. She hates speed, all the more now. An empty beer bottle rolls about the painters feet. He opens another. He drinks too much, slurs his words. She doesnt actually care. If he were to crash the bakkie, if she were to die, the bloody mess of her would cancel the despair she carries between her legs. On the outskirts of Jagersfontein they pass a township. The houses are crude boxed dwellings from a childs drawing. A square. A slanted roof. No chimney. No scroll of smoke. No pathway leading to the door. No bed of flowers. Arid. Cruel too. Her sister, a town planner responsible for housing in Khayelitsha,
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tells her that this is what they want. They, the dispossessed. They who have nothing. Is this truly what they want, this box from a childrens book? They, her sister tells her, are shamed by houses made of mud and straw. Better electricity. Better water pumped into a faucet. But when electricity and water do not flow? When the breeze blocks are riddled with damp, the concrete poorly mixed and cracks form and the house disintegrates like a poorly made cake? En route from Cape Town to Bethulie this is what she sees. Row upon row of boxes which no coat of paint will bind. More shame than pride, this pitiful serialisation of a Western ideal. What good are these cramped damp ridden boxes that shut out life, that shame? She is alert. She must be. Her mind drags her from the mutiny raging between her legs. She thinks of Lorcas Yerma, a role she has played. A role she thinks she was made for. Better to be barren than this mutiny. She is sick of blood, sick of this wasted hope. It is not the first time she loses a child. The desolation she feels is greater now. Then he, the lover, was there. Now she is alone in a wasteland in the middle of the Orange Free State. She is heartened that the blight of boxed houses are behind her. They enter the town. The hospital must be close. She imagines a gabled structure in the heart of a white enclave. She is wrong. They pass through the towns centre. It is then she sees the nondescript prefabricated structure. Boxed too, the sides distended, the roof flush. She is right when she loses the last shreds of hope. Blood pours. The painter stops talking. She does not have the money for a hospital in Bloemfontein. She has nothing. Inside of her there is nothing too. It is he, the lover, who has lured her here. He is sick of her need. She is sick of him. She quits the city believing it is best for her, best for their child. Now, before the Jagersfontein hospital she knows that the best is not good enough. It is her hatred of him, the lover, that keeps her going. She enters what she thinks of as an abbatoir. The painter returns to Bethulie. His job is done. Is his conscience clear? She doesnt think so. Duty has nothing to do with love. She is unloved. That is what she thinks. Better that hed stayed the night, held her hand. A familiar unfamiliar hand. She
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thinks of him scrubbing the blood off the vinyl car seat; the seat no different to a canvas painted anew, reworked. Traces will remain. They always do. She is laid on a stretcher, wheeled along the corridor to the ward. Where is her sister now, her mother? Where is he, her lover? Will Sarie have telephoned? She told her not to; not until this mess was over and done with. Along the hallway she sees balloons everywhere. The balloons are white against a white ceiling. Faces, more leering than smiling, have been scrawled with a black marker. She passes a woman in a green theatre gown and slippers. The gown is loose. The woman wears a T-shirt on which a heart is painted. Inside the heart are two rabbits. Above the heart she reads: I LIKE YOU WHEN YOU ARE NICE. She realises it is surgical gloves the woman fills with air. The woman twists the fingers of the bloated gloves into bows. She leaves one finger for a nose. The marker is jammed in her plaited hair. The woman leers as she passes. It is the same face she sees on the balloons. Stretched out on the bed she thinks again of Yerma. Your grief, she says, is nothing to mine. The doctor appears. He is dressed in a safari suit. He has a comb tucked in the ribbed sock that reaches to the knee. His English is appalling. He is Senegalese. What is he doing here? Why does he wear a Safari suit? Is this some sick joke; a costume party where you appear as your shadow? She can see that he dislikes the fact he has been called away from his dinner. She imagines a pigs head on the table, a prickly pear protruding from its mouth. She watches him insert the drip. He tells her that her hb is low. She knows enough. Shes gone through this before. The doctor plunges then withdraws the needle, leaving the plastic cannula inside her. The cannula is attached to the giving set, a vacolitre. She is relieved that he doesnt drug her. The last thing she needs is to have her mind stolen too. He quits her, returns to his pig, his teeth and thighs beaming. At some point she is convinced that the drip is infiltrated. Inside of her the drip miscarries. She grows faint. She calls the Sister. No one hears her. The Sister is fat, complacent. She sees
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her when she is wheeled down the corridor. Now through the gaping door, along the corridor, she hears the Sisters laughter. The Sister is on the phone. The words are strange. Everything is strange. They, the Sister and the woman on the other side of the telephone it is a woman, she is sure of that are probably talking about vittles, clothes, renegade husbands. The laughter soars across the hallway, drowns her faint pleas. What of the woman with the T-shirt that reads I LIKE YOU WHEN YOU ARE NICE? No one hears her. There is no one else in the ward. She reads the names above the row of beds in front of her. Ngubane. Nachali. Ndlovu. Are these the names of ghosts? For the first time her mind mutinies. No one will hear her. Better, then, to drown. Struggling to resurface she thinks of her daughter. Her daughters laughter melts with the laughter of the nurse. Help me! she cries. But no one will. She is alone in a hospital where nothing works. She swoons. It is then, in the instant she falls within herself, that Stefan appears. Till that moment she has not thought of him. Stefan is dead. He is a thing of ash at the base of a rose tree. A ghost too. What is he doing here in Jagersfontein? He appears before her dressed in vestments of orange. The black ringlets of his hair glow. He breaks the spell. Before her he smiles, chuckles, edges her on. Dont die, he says. I know what death is and it is not very kind. Im miserable, she says. So what, youve been miserable before. She smirks. He is her confidante. He is the one who insists that the lover truly loves her. He is the one who now tells her to shift her fat arse, to stop feeling sorry for herself, move. HAMBA! She plucks the drip from her arm, levers her body over the edge of the bed. Falls. Ouch! Stefan says and laughs. She grimaces, glowers. She doesnt find his humour supportable. Come on now, move your arse! Bitchy. He was always bitchy. All the same, she creeps on hands and knees. He goads her. He was always good at that. He has the audacity to whistle. She recognizes the tune. Frank Sinatra. She hates Frank Sinatra. She hates Stefan. He is unmoved. Beside her he walks, his vestments of orange float. Above his head the white balloons leer. The
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bastard doesnt even bother to lift her up. All the while Stefan whistles. The song is My Way. Is she supposed to laugh? She doesnt know how long it takes her to crawl to the reception desk. The Sisters laughter booms. The Sister reclines in a plastic chair, her fat arm about her fat breasts, her fat ankles on the formica desk. If she looked back, which she doesnt, shed see the red spoor across the filthy floor. She has enough presence of mind to register the dirt. Or is it Stefan who tells her so? Is it Stefan who describes the fat black bitch on the phone? He intersperses the whistling with bitchy remarks. He even has the audacity to yell at her. He has in the past, why shouldnt he now? If his vestments of orange are beatific, he is not. He is full of complaints and cruel observations. He tells her she looks ridiculous on her hands and knees, her rump thrust up and out, her green smock tied at the back like an infants bib. He tells her that her hair is a mess. He recommends that she come to him for a decent bob. He thinks she needs a dye job too. The last thing she hears is his infernal whistle. When she recovers she is back on the hospital bed. The drip has been correctly inserted. Her smock is gone. There is no blood anywhere. She wears the flannel gown shed packed. About her are a group of women dressed in purple. They sing. It is the singing that wakes her. The singers stamp their feet, writhe. Their heads, wrapped in purple too, are thrust upward. Their breasts heave. Their voices soar. She understands nothing they sing except a single recurring word. Jesus ... Jesus ... Jesus. Is she dead? Has she lost her mind? Who are these women? Where is Stefan? She sees no glimmer of orange amidst the purple. What she does see, is the painter. With him is Sarie, their children Yuri and Helga, her daughter. On the way back to Bethulie she sits in the back seat, her daughter in her arms. The boxed houses fall away. Now the scene is empty, a plain of gold studded with grey-green shrubs, a koppie. No one says anything. Rain falls as they enter Bethulie. She tastes the earth inside the rain. The taste is sweet. In the house filled with paintings made of dusk she shuts her bedroom door, folds her daughter in her arms. She thinks of Stefan. She
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thinks she should have her hair done. Through the crack in the doorway she hears Tom Waits. He sings a cover of a Frank Sinatra song. Gently she rocks. The daughter, who is three years old, knows nothing. Through the day and night she sleeps. When she wakes, oblivious to the hour, she hears her daughters laughter. She rises, peers through the window. The children chase each other through the adjacent graveyard. The tombstones are broken, entangled with weeds. Yuri wears a cowboy hat, guns slung on both hips. The girls wear war-paint and feathers in their long hair. The girls holler, chase Yuri. He clambers up a tree, shoots. Helga falls to the ground, moans, dies, leaps up, growls. Her daughter watches in awe as life and death flip back and forth. She draws back the curtains, slips back into bed, weeps. Later Sarie enters. Behind her stands the lover. She wishes it were Stefan, but Stefan is dead. The lover settles on the bed beside her, strokes her hair. He doesnt think she needs to see the hairdresser. He doesnt see the world so clearly. She hates the touch of his hand, prays he will not touch her there where she hurts most. He doesnt. His movements are awkward. He cannot love her, goad her. He does not know her. She doubts he ever will. In his hand he holds a bunch of flowers. The scent is sweet. Too sweet. He lays the flowers on the bedside table, lies down beside her. He pulls her head onto his chest. Now she no longer weeps. Her eyes are clear, cold as stone. She is a thing of stone beside his racing heart. There, her ear to his chest, she listens. He too is frozen. Only the heart races. The thudding is deafening. She turns her back to him. He does not stop her. Outside the children holler, live, die, live again.

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Karroo Dress (Envoi)

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The carpenter installs the shelves in his study. The payment was made some time ago. Now, finally, he hears the drill. Denied access to his workplace, he lies outside in the plastic pool. He imagines he is relaxed. His legs and arms are spread. The rim of the pool forms a circle, kissing the outposts of toe and fingertip. He is reminded of da Vincis drawing. Under a burning sun, in a watery place, he is the one cross-sected. The segments of his body, however, are not perfect. The shoulders tilt, the spine twists, the legs are weak. The heart? The mind? There too he finds no symmetry. He emerges from the shallow water, hears his daughter screech with laughter. She is watching The Ugly Ducklings Magical Christmas. His wife bakes a cake. The sound of the drill is oppressive but necessary. He sinks back under the water. Muted, the sound persists. Does sound twist underwater like things do? He now equates the shriek of the drill with a sound inside of him more deformed than the casement of withered muscle, flaccid flesh and creaking bone. At forty-two he is, to put it mildly, in an abject state. Would that he was da Vincis splendid figure with a heart and mind splendid too! But no. It is the shriek within that best describes him. An abject shrieking thing. He has fantasies of enrolling in the local gym. Shame and sloth prohibit him. He has not been able to translate the discipline of writing to his body. In truth he depends upon the shriek. He is fearful of what will become of him were he to give up the sound within that pains him so. Mythridization: the incremental internalization of poison. Each day, when he sits before his desk, it is the poison within which he tills. Questions, he thinks, are a kind of poison. This country in which he lives is the source; a source he cannot, will not, shirk. Better remedies than questions! But here he knows he has no gift for remedies, no means to chasten his pained mind, his pained heart. If the gym is a dream, then beatitude is too. Soon, he hopes, soon the gnashing and groaning within will cease. It must. He wants it to. The poison has taken its toll. He is drained. Across the dinner table he will gaze upon his wife with dead eyes. If sorrow is his to have and to hold then it is she, becalmed, who glows. He does not envy her peace of mind, it is
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hers not his. Besides, he is not given to envy. If anything it is dread and longing that courses through him. He is a thing who dreads, who longs. The fretted network that links the mind and heart now searches for another word. Not longing but yearning. Dread and yearning. When he enters the kitchen which smells of cinnamon, she tells him that her brother will arrive tonight. His immediate thought is a selfish one. Visitors mean he will not write. Instead he inquires after her brother and his family. Their trip from the Cape to Natal has stalled. They have been forced to stay overnight in Beaufort West. Problems with the car. He can see her anticipation. Her elation. In four days time she gives birth. The date is set. He still needs to take the photographic record of her belly. He still needs to repaint the crib. She waits. She never forces, implores. It is he who does the forcing. He who implores. Or rather, it is the dread, the yearning, that wills him on. The carpenter appears. She hands him a slice of cinnamon cake and tea. At last the job is done. At last he can shut himself away. About him, in the room where he works, there is grit and dust, papers everywhere. Tomorrow he will start filing, shelving. Always tomorrow. Now, he believes, he will reach the end of the project. Another word, like work, which serves a purpose. The words serve to screen the dread and yearning; the ills he daily tills. In conversation he is compelled to speak, he cannot wholly shut himself away he claims to be an optimist. Hope is more conducive than grief. Yet, were he to mourn a death he would, he knows, be confronted by the caring ministrations of others. Who truly cares for a grief borne of writing? Is this why, when pressed, he says that he is reaching towards light? If she is the place where beatitude cradles, then he is the dispenser of platitudes! Better words that mean nothing to him than the dread that comes from knowing that words will always fail him. Just when he thinks he has grasped the inclination of his soul he is surprised. Intention is a fallacy. He well knows this. The act of writing always disproves intention. If writing is anything it is this dread, this yearning. Each day in the wrecked room he calls a study more the place of an evacuee he discovers what it is he must write. He
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believes that the words the stories have a shape, a reason that is not his to presume. If he believes this it is because over and beyond will, beyond the habit forming activity called discipline, there is a glimmer yes, a glimmer call it faith, call it hope, call it yearning. He turns to the dictionary. He has done so repeatedly throughout the project. Now it is the word yearning he searches for. To have a strong emotional longing. To be filled with compassion or tenderness. He weighs the words. He believes he has weighed each and every word which comprises this book. Is this humanly possible? If weighing is a measuring, then what is he measuring? The heart? Is this what he believes he weighs? His own heart? What then of compassion? What of tenderness and longing? To whom does the heart that beats within belong? We are stars, he thinks. Glimmering lights. We shed our glare, our shade stars too possess a shade. Is the sky a place of yearning? Is that why we reach outwards, upwards? Is that why we seal words made of a global tongue and hurl them outward, upward, believing we will be understood? Then again, is it truly understanding we seek? Is that why we are compassionate? Tender? He doubts this. He doubts it passionately. The sky the worlds beyond our atmosphere will not be presumed upon. We are smaller and greater than this claim; this rage to understand, to be understood. What then should we ask when we send missives into a world beyond our ken? Nothing. No thing. Having parsed the word, still still he knows that no claim can explain his reach. Longing, then. Yearning, then. These are the words that toll. These are the words which he believes he has repeated in every story. They may not appear. They may not be the words the reader alights upon and says yes!, now I understand! Understanding the precious little value it has will have no place here. Nothing will bind the heart, ease the shrieking mind. Why dip like a hawk, sup from ones own skull? If he does which he does he hopes, if nothing else, that the process compels. If he has nothing to offer, no remedy, no answer, what then of compulsion? If now he sups from his own skull, does this mean that there is nothing left, nothing but his gnashing temperament, the poisoned chalice of his skull? What of the
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imagination? What of the world beyond, outside? Has compulsion stolen him away from all that truly matters? Is it regret he feels now? Has he wasted time, and is it time that now wastes him? The allusion lingers. He is Richard II. The place where he toils, the room of which he has made a skull, is Pomfret Castle. Decrowned, imprisoned it is he who locks the door, throws away the key he has made of himself a thing barely human. The association is a conceit, a fancy, which pains him all the same. Then what of the Karroo dress? He he knows is not alone in asking this question. What of the Karroo dress, the reader asks? What does the dress, the Karroo, have to do with this last ghoulish supper? Everything, he insists. The reader, he knows, is impatient of farewells. How long does one wave? At what point does the waving become a kind of drowning? Here he bids farewell to the hawk. He dispenses with the prologue, the farewell, closes the skull. Here he slips into the story. The story begins when the brother arrives. A flurry of embraces. The daughter is drawn from sleep she goes to bed early in anticipation of the arrival of uncle and aunt, her cousins. They arrive at two in the morning. The flurry of handshakes and embraces is mixed with tiredness. He is deeply disgruntled. The skull from which he has supped is hollow and shallow. The dread and yearning has grown hollow and shallow too. He is empty; an empty thing. Toil, futile now, has made a ghost of him. He knows all too well the waste. The dread and yearning no longer shrieks its pain, now it mocks him. Bereft he does not sleep but paces the boards of his study. Inside of him there is no growing thing. When he places his hand to his engorged and poisoned stomach he feels no kick, no rotation, no shifting downward of a living creature willing its own engagement. If he were to make a scan of his stomach he would find a bloated vacant lot. Biafran. He knows to the bitten core that he has shirked a certain duty, one which in time he believes he will reclaim. A duty to his daughter who now and then scuttles across the floor and says dad, dont be grumpy. It is the word she associates with him. It is a word that saddens him. Incredibly, he is able to lift her to his lap without pausing. Tap tap tap, he writes. She sleeps. He is grateful though
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he knows he has missed a key moment in her life. In time, he says, in time I will return to you. Now others call me, figures drawn from my heart. In time. In time. But now, tonight, nothing calls. The poison is no longer a font but a dreg that withers. When he is able to speak to his wife he will repeat the words: in time, in time. She will understand. This does not mean that she approves. She finds little justice when she reads the stories. She does not need his sadness. She cannot discover the glimmer. When he pauses to perceive the world through her eyes he understands fully. Her whole life revolves around life; she is lifes cradle. What does she care for the shades? What does the daughter care? We live against ourselves. He, at least, lives this way. There is no justice in what he does; this daily creeping up the stairs towards his study. The word evacuee returns. Why claim such darkness when light is all around? What vanity steals him from the child who needs him, the wife who cares only that the crib is painted, the infants nappies and clothing readied? It is not that he neglects her needs. He does not. It is just that he is walking a thin line between the future that beckons and the past that beckons too. When he is done, he says, he will write a childrens story. It will be a story about a young man with flowers in his hair. With his gardeners wages the young man buys his mother from Ixopo a colour TV. She, the mother, can no longer walk. She believes she will know the world through the TV. Neither she nor the son know the TV is magical. A genie emerges from the screen, kisses her dead legs. Wings sprout from the swollen ankles. For his employers son the young man makes a wire go-cart. Every day the young man shines. His smiles so brightly he blinds the sun. At two am the brother, his wife and two children arrive. They are hungry. He makes a meal. Fish cakes and chips. Once the meal is eaten the children retire. His daughter is tired too. She will receive her presents when the day breaks. It is clear that they have stopped over for his wifes sake. They wish her well. They communicate their hearts. The presents unfurl. His daughter receives the bulk. A swimming costume. A plastic painting shift.
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Drawing materials. Bangles. A dress. The wife receives baby clothes, a bottle of Buchu, green, medicinal, the herb an underwater reef. And he? They the brother and the wife insist upon the difficulty of finding anything to fit him. Anxiously he unwraps the box. Presents unnerve him. A gift is a contract, an unwritten law. He splits open the cartons lip, removes a candle holder in the shape of a lighthouse. As best he can he expresses his appreciation. The shred of mind that lingers within knows that the brother sees him as the light; as the one who protects, the one who must save. It is an imposition that falls heavily upon his shoulders. The lighthouse manifests his guilt, his neglect. In time, in time. But when there is no time? When he has wasted time? When he bitterly yields when willed to the dinner table, when called upon to read a bedtime story, when he turns the hours when it is his duty to oversee the daughter into a kind of tyranny? What then of the light? What then of the glimmer? What good is this numbing tiredness he feels? Good for nothing. This project , this process. It is then that the dress appears before him. Look, she says, smiling. In her upturned palms she holds the dress. For Mira Jaan, she says. They know they will have a girl. She is named for light, for the soul. When he sees the dress everything inside of him burns with awe. The numbness he feels, the dread and disgust, reduces to ash. The dress is made of hessian, lined and edged with thick checkered cotton. There are flowers, hills, shrubs of red and orange and blue and green and pink and yellow. The dress is alive. Every stitch is alive. In white, at the rim, is the dressmakers name: A. Jooste. The date: 2001. The bulbous, sculptural beauty of the little dress overwhelms him. It is a vivid desert succulent. He is aghast. He knows then that there, in the dress, lies the end of this dark journey. It is towards this dress, this beauty, that he has yearned. Inside the skull the poisonous sediment clears. A wind blows. Earth banks. Roots. The brother informs him that while the dress is made by Ms. Jooste it is conceived by Outa Lapies. For those who have never heard of this eighty-eight year old man, Outa Lapies belongs to the karretjies people. He is a journey man, a nomad, an
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artist. In this country where art means nothing he, Outa Lapies, is a visionary, a man of the cloth, a child of God, a flower. He has heard of Outa Lapies. He has read the articles on this supposed eccentric who carries his cart back and forth across the Swartberg Pass. An insert in Home and Garden. Style. House and Leisure. Outa Lapies is a marvel of endurance and love for whom few truly care, the brother says. Why not a book about Outa Lapies? Why must he, an optimist, drink from the skull of night? In time, he thinks, he will learn his error, if he hasnt already. He knows that then it will not be too late. Now, now, he is gratified. He holds the dress to his breast. He breathes in Karroo dust. He knows it is not only the childrens book he must answer for, a book about a young man with flowers in his hair and a smile that eclipses the sun. He knows that it is to the daughter and the wife who wait to whom he must return; to the unborn child within.

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Also

available from Publishers P.O. Box 836, Howick 3290, South Africa Tel./Fax 033-3303269 / 033-3863570 e-mail pnb@futurenet.co.za

Brevitas

New Fiction Series

R70.00 ISBN 1-874976-38-4 Ashraf Jamal's first work of fiction; Love Themes for the Wilderness published by Kwela books was considered to be one of the first true post-liberatory novels to come out of South Africa. Instead of tapping into the huge concerns of a country still struggling to come to terms with itself, he tapped into the microcosm of the bohemian neighbourhood of Observatory, Cape Town. Written in an everyday style and concerned with the relatively ordinary concerns of the characters love, loss, creativity community, family there is transcendence. This is where Jamals gift as a writer lies to offer a vision beyond the ordinary, to embolden a society to recreate, or reimagine itself. In A Million Years Ago in the Nineties the focus moves to a group of characters, in Johannesburg. This group of characters are less everyday; they inhabit more profoundly the world of ideas. Here the polemics of art-making are played out, the essence of a true art sought. Here more obviously creativity and the intellect are seen as deliverance and a reason to be. Once more the reader will identify with these characters who do not typify the average South African. And so Jamal takes us further into the possibilities of lives lived true to themselves, freed from restrictive boundaries of politics and nationalism.

1. Ashraf Jamal A million years ago in the nineties

3. Guy Willoughby Archangels ISBN 1-874976-33-3 R95.00 A gay, or perhaps a post-gay love story? A smart satire on sex and social mores in contemporary, cut-and-thrust South Africa? A racy travelogue around Cape Town's clubland? A primer for fun, feasting and fermentation in the age of the pardy? A diner's delight, a drinker's consolation, a media dude's manual, a drug-user's morality
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tale? A comedy of bad manners, a burlesque of bad taste, a hedonist's paean, a bergie's confessional, a politico's pastoral? Guy Willoughby's rich, teeming, fabulously recondite but recognisable first novel is all of these, and more...

A distinctive quite baroque writing style, very funny, wonderfully erotic. I firmly believe that it will find a large audience Ashraf Jamal. Graeme Feltham One hundred naked beers

R65.00 ISBN1-874976-34-1 This is a sex crazed anti-fiction that plucks in the middle of fucked-up-ness. Set in the Karoo, Naked Beers tells the story of Fig, an urban dropout on a drug-induced quest for the sublime. Hardhitting, in-your-face, yet vividly poetic, this novella captures the voice of South Africa with a uniqueness and freshness that will leave the cruising reader gasping. In an intellectual and cultural climate which has moralized itself into oblivion, Graeme Felthams Naked Beers is a brash and brave attempt to tell it like it is warts and all.
4.

5. Izak de Vries Rites of the Ox ISBN1-874976-38-X R70.00

This is a translated collection of the best of his short stories. It continues an intensive tradition of self-inquiry within Afrikaans literature. De Vries' stories take no prisoners in their quest to unmask a psychically repressive and oppressive society. Each story locates a poison then slowly, movingly, draws it out. Given De Vries' relative youth, and given the putative shift to democracy, which may have lured the author to a more glibly optimistic vision, De Vries, instead, has chosen to go against the grain. In doing so he reminds us that the past is not another country; that the psychosis born of oppression remains in our midst. This awareness, however, does not make De Vries a fatalist. On the contrary, it all the better returns us to the complexity of the present historical moment. Caught between a melancholic toll and the clarion call of hope, De Vries opts for neither, choosing, instead, to restore an immanence of feeling and understanding which is well matched by the suggestiveness of the short story form; a suggestiveness which allows De Vries at every turn to keep nihilism at bay and optimism in check, and to transcend the borders of reality.

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