Becoming Strangers (23 page)

'Perhaps we should establish what actually happened first,' he said, chancing upon a pen.

He indicated the other chair and Annemieke took her place alongside her husband.

Thin-lipped, she began. She closed her eyes and took a breath. 'He walked me back to the room. I was feeling shaky...'

'Benjamin said the same thing,' Burns added.

'Who?'

'The barman.'

'I felt awful. Headache. And so Adam, he offered to walk me back, in case I fainted, you see.'

Jan was looking at his wife attentively, nodding gently still, as if hearing his child make her case to the headmaster, his will pushing the right story forwards.

'I undressed. I supposed he had gone, but you see, I was in such a bad way, I just wanted to get in the bed and be still. You know how it is, Jan. When I have those headaches.'

'Certainly.'

'I must have passed out. With the pain. And when I woke, I've no idea when it was because I didn't look at the clock, he was ... he was on top of me. He was...' Burns gave a wincing flat smile and mouthed an apology to Jan. 'He was inside me. I felt him there and so I told him, "No!" I know I said that. But he didn't stop until he was done. And then you came in, thank God. I am grateful to you, Mr Burns, because I thought he might start again, who knows what could have happened?' She used the tissues balled between her hands to wipe her eyes roughly.

Jan was silent. Annemieke turned to him and said, Are you going to sit there and say nothing?'

'What will you have me to say?' he asked, his accent thick as he spoke in the grammar of his own language.

'What would any man say?'

'I don't know.'

'No, I see that. And not for the first time I see that,' she said, her eyes bulging red with tears, her mouth
aghast. A great croak of a cry formed across her mouth as a bubble of saliva, stretched taut; it burst and sobs emerged from behind it.

'Mr Watts does not deny that they had sexual intercourse,' Burns said, cringing.

'I see,' said Jan. He went to take his wife's hand but she snatched it back.

'About pressing charges, Mr and Mrs De Groot...'

'My own husband will not support me,' Annemieke began, 'I am alone in this matter...'

'Annemieke, this is not the case. Do you want to press charges?'

'I want your support...'

'I do support you, I have always supported you, all your life...'

'And for you to believe me.'

Jan demurred, his head down, and made a small soft sound that was not a clear word.

'Yes,' she went on, the timbre of her voice inconsistent, 'yes, to believe me.'

Burns blushed again. Nobody ought to hear such conversations between a man and wife. There was their whole history before him, making a sad naked procession through his office. He saw in minute detail how their marriage had been, he saw in his mind's eye the imprint that two bodies lying apart left in bed sheets, saw a man's clothes left on the floor, saw a scar in a cupboard door where a screw had come out, a travel bag half-packed on the floor. He could imagine the great events that coupled themselves with details such as
these; the christening for which there'd been no cake on account of an unresolved argument about something else entirely, the first day of school of their first child that came and went with no film in the camera, he saw the car bypassing the shops on the wedding anniversary. He heard the drone of the TV that softened all of these blows. He had no idea where their connubial successes lay. Things come together as often as things fall apart, he supposed lamely, the sun must have shone, hands had been held, a joke would have struck both of them at the same time, the children must have said cute things, surely. His own ideas of success, so poignant and vivid to him, were single, individually achieved, though widely appreciated. They were like TV commercials for expensive cars. One day, he promised himself, he would be on an American freeway, his passport and a single bag on the passenger seat, with his foot on the gas of a performance car, he would stop as and when he liked.

'He wont say anything,' the wife declared to no avail. Jan's face was firm. There was no jury. There was Steve Burns. She looked at him suddenly with hatred that it should be him there, in front of them. 'He doesn't believe me.'

'Of course he believes you,' Burns spoke up suddenly, surprised that he should care. 'We'd best not rush in stupidly, that's all. Of course he believes you. We both do.'

Jan looked up at him too. 'We believe you,' Burns repeated.

'They say this is what happens; they say it is like this in all the magazines, but I would never have believed it. It is because I am a woman.' She recalled Jason's expression in the room. 'You consider me unclean. Dirty.'

Jan looked at her. 'No, Annemieke.'

'Yes, I am filthy, used goods, all used up. An old woman who has been violated, I am worthless in your scheme of things. I can no longer make children. I am empty and dry and now I am dirty too...'

'No,' both men protested.

'If you knew, if you knew how I'd suffered, what I've been through,' she was shaking the cumbersome words out through the narrow opening of her mouth, she was making no distinction between the men at whom she shook them, 'every month, killing our babies.'

Burns wanted a drink, he felt for the drawer handle of his desk.

'What are you talking about?' Jan asked her, his hands on the desk in front of him.

'The IUD,' she said, 'the coil. I have read in my magazine that it works by making an abortion. I never knew this. Now I understand why every month I felt like killing myself. This thing, they don't tell you how it works. It stops the fertilized egg from embedding itself. Terminations, deaths every month, that is how it works! This is why I have been so unhappy, all the time. So unhappy. My own body was killing. All that life going down the toilet, it goes against a woman's nature, it destroys her, it's an abomination...'

She was becoming unhinged, Burns surmised. He quickly took out the bottle and unscrewed the top.

'A nip,' he said, 'she needs a nip.' He went to fetch three paper cups from the water cooler.

'Annemieke, you exaggerate,' Jan said, looking up at Burns.

'We are Catholics, we were born so,' she said, tears spilling off her chin.

'Stop, you are hysterical, you are not well.' Jan held the paper cup to her lip and she took a sip noisily.

'All around me is death and now this,' she said. 'I tell you this, Jan, the greatest sadness of all is that you don't believe me, you deny me, after a lifetime together. We might as well never have been, we have nothing to show for it all.'

'Of course I want to believe you, but what if it is not as you think it is?' He drank his own measure and felt the heat abrasive in his chest. 'What am I to do? We must have some standard of behaviour; or rather I must have,' he concluded.

Burns threw his own double measure to the back of his throat and swallowed.

'Look, let's not get carried away right now, we don't have to say one thing or another,' he said. 'I shall speak to Adam, get his side of things, I'm bound to do that, you know. We'll take it from there. Wherever you want to take it, I mean. Sleep on it, why don't you? We should all sleep on it.'

He ushered them out with soothing noises, offered to send a meal up to their room, closed the door.

He sat back behind his desk and looked at the three empty paper cups, then he poured himself another dose. He thought how the cups looked like hospital cups, the kind one used for the water one took with pills. The husband was dying. It was bad. He reached for the phone and dialed England. He waited to hear his mother enumerate the phone number he had known since he was a child.

J
AN HAD A LITTLE
V
ALIUM
in his medicine kit. He suggested she take it and that they both sleep. She thanked him formally. She went to take it in the bathroom. It was an eccentricity of hers that she could not bear to be watched taking medicine. If she vomited, she vomited alone and woe betide anyone who tried to comfort her, she would turn on him or either of the boys like a wild animal. Similarly her female functions, he had assumed, had taken place sensibly. She never spoke of them; he saw no ephemera, no wrappings, no debris.

Hysteria, he reflected, sitting in the chair by the balcony, for he would not lie on the bed, derived its meaning from the Greek for womb,' it was an affliction therefore of the womb-man. He closed his eyes, he was exhausted. She had suggested that her menses had culminated in slaughter for the majority of her fruitful life. He thought of the coil. He had never seen one, but he imagined it to be spring-like. He thought of the helterskelter on the pier at Blankenberge, saw thousands of little toddlers, fat-legged, arms holding on to the sides, falling into the sea. To one woman it might be nothing, to another it might be everything. We live in the dark; perhaps we do die into the light, he thought.

'Jan.' His wife was lying fully clothed on the bed, holding a small face towel in her hands, crying quietly. 'Do you believe me?'

'Believe,' he repeated, opening one eye. 'Is that really what you need from me?'

She shook her head and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. She lay on her side and stared fixedly beyond him at the French windows. 'There has to be something to show for the years,' she said. He gave her a murmur as his reply. It meant simply that he'd heard her.

After a while her breathing slowed and she shuddered and closed her eyes. Soon, he heard the soft snores of sedation and he was relieved to be alone again. He was very tired. He had lots to think about—Adam and Dorothy, Laurie and Annemieke, George and Bill, Burns too—but he was exhausted.

He went with heavy steps towards the bed and lay down beside her on the far side. He took off each shoe with the toes of the other foot and brought his knees up behind hers. He put out a tentative hand, splayed and wide, over her lower belly and touched her.

'Mijn vrouw...'

She stirred a little and licked her lips, then, feeling him close by, she felt down for his hand and put her own on top of his.

N
EITHER
J
ASON NOR
M
ISSY COULD SLEEP
, despite a bottle of wine shared and a brandy each too. Jason lay on their bed reading various business magazines he'd bought at reception. Missy was in the bathroom, she had been in there for some time and in trying not to listen he found his attention diverted from what he was reading. He heard one or two little coughs and then the flush of the toilet. She came out smelling of her perfume and wearing a neat thin-strapped short nightdress. Her hair was wet and brushed smooth, it looked like caramel sauce, dripping on to her vanilla skin.

'I can't help but think it could have been you,' he said to her, looking up from his magazine. His features were reflective, reasonable, his mind had come straight from an appraisal of the last quarter's domestic performance. He was considering dumping some retail stock.

'Don't,' she said, with a shudder, as she went to the cupboard with her day's clothes, folding them once more.

'That guy needs some time in an American jail, if you ask me.'

'Yes.'

'It makes me think of what Jerry was saying on the yacht. You never know, you can never be secure.'

'It scares me,' she said, sitting beside him, leaning in to him and putting a hand on his stomach. Automatically, he breathed in, then relaxed. He had been overweight as a young man; he was committed to the gym and to a high protein diet. 'Who can you trust?' she asked.

Whether she wanted an answer or not, he felt bound to give one. They had been married for three years; she looked up to him. He found her esteem very stimulating.

'It's complicated,' he said, putting aside his reading material. 'You see, we need to put serious money behind the drive to seek out miscreants and put them away.' (He liked to say 'we' when he talked about his country, just as he liked the financial planning program he had on his computer to be linked to his hand-held.) 'Offenders are dealt with pretty persuasively, I would say. More so than in other countries. We have more people in prisons per capita than in any other country, I think, except maybe Russia. But we shouldn't overburden our resources. Taxes, you see, honey. We are in a difficult position, stuck between the freedom of the economy and the need to secure our society. Of course individual liberty is the highest value.' He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror now that he was sitting up and saw the firmness of his chin, the lean shape of his face—he was convinced and convincing. 'Yet some people do not deserve to share in it and we have to isolate them. It's a paradox, hon. Our freedom depends on the removal of others' freedom.'

Missy closed her eyes momentarily and sighed. 'I understand that,' she said as if the burden of it all fell on
their very shoulders, 'but freedom is just stuff, isn't it? No wonder we all get so depressed.'

'What do you mean?' he said, rising to get himself a drink and some nuts from the minibar. He saw the chocolate bars in there and considered that one, shared, wouldn't hurt. He poured an Irish cream and took out a Snickers bar.

'Well, I was thinking today, about that woman's husband. He's dying. When he's gone, he's gone. Right? I guess she'll think of this vacation. I mean, his legacy, or any of ours, it's so
nothing,
isn't it? She can give his things, jewellery, watches, clothes I guess, to the children if they have any, but when he's gone he's gone. You know what kids are like. I lost my mother's wedding ring. The only bits of him left will be in their memories, hers and the family. And they're not real. People get confused. So why do we make such a big deal of individual economic opportunity when it doesn't last...'

She petered out.

'So that we can be free, Missy! To choose the way we live our lives.'

She frowned, she looked sick as though she had a bad stomach.

'I don't know what that means exactly,' she said.

'You'd know if you hadn't got it! That's the problem. You're glad you don't live in China, am I right?'