Get A Life (12 page)

This was not a conference, it was a case of important moral significance to the government of their country!
He
was in the preparatory phase of his retirement, didn't he realise he was free at last. Freed to follow, for once, his avocation, in a country where there were archaeological sites you wouldn't find among the Makapan Caves and the dig where Mrs later identified as Mr Ples lay for millennia. The Norwegian they'd found compatible enough could take him to archaeological sites while he stayed on for a couple of weeks.

But you?

I'm a big girl… You wouldn't be seeing much of me anyway, the case's going to be heard in Bloemfontein.

They made love the night before she left. She said as they turned to sleep, under brief emotion difficult to control – heaven knows why, because the statement was in line with their plans for retirement – This probably will be my last big case, it'll drag on to the end, end of the year. As if as she spoke, a decision was made. The Mexican venture was only the first of those they were going to take, free together.

Benni knew from her Berenice experience in the public relations of advertising that black men in business generally left their wives at home when they came to cocktail parties and even dinners, the empty place beside them in the seating arrangements at official functions being cleared of cutlery, glasses, by a waiter, and in a private house dealt with by a shift-up closer of those seated. A black entrepreneur might bring a beautiful girlfriend along, on the side, made known only by her first name, barely introduced on the general understanding she wasn't really there.

There was Paul's return to the bush with his team of black as well as white mates – and you held your breath or didn't think about it: he seemed absolutely restored to strength enough to go out and live rough. The other factor was the relationship with their child. (Her friends remarking, what a good father, lucky you.) It was so normal, familial – after all that had happened – he had never confessed the deprivation, those times they sat apart, facing one another in the quarantine garden, the grown man's childhood, the past. Wouldn't it be part of what she ought to do to restore life in him, bring children and wives of his Thapelos, not just the ecological bushmates alone, home to the house, as a natural expression of what ordinary life is now that the colour you are doesn't compose it. So not just restore him; there's the unexamined sense that life can never be as it was. Something the new man may need to bring a new kind of relationship into the old one (left in the garden) that served – the attraction of opposites. Saturday braai on the terrace seems the occasion to invite Derek and Thapelo with emphasis that this includes wives and children. The mix of a few friends from the Agency includes a black photographer with his Afro-American girlfriend and a lesbian copywriter (white) who is surprised by the arrival of the dishy husband's bushmates, Thapelo and Derek.

– I wouldn't have thought as they prefer living away miles from anywhere their idea of pleasure would be to come back to all these swarming kids. -

Her Agency mate Berenice laughed at her over the salad they were making.

– You'll never understand what it means to be straight, my innocent darling. Get a life! -

Derek has four children and Thapelo three on their legs and a baby in a padded carry-cot decked with dangling toys. Derek's wife manages to look like the sexually challenging teenager she must have been, with nipples poking at a T-shirt but the set of years is in the angle of the cigarette in her mouth. Thapelo's is a beauty, a schoolteacher who could be one of the models in Berenice's campaigns to promote luxury cars or cosmetics. The tossing blond hair of Derek's woman, placing her as a sister rather than mother to her twelve-year-old daughter casting about her blond veil in the same way, is completed in contemporary fashionableness by the braided and beaded heads of Thapelo's woman and six-year-old daughter. The bushmates, including Paul – Berenice has no false modesty, existence is too ruthless for that – apparently go for showy species outside as well as inside the wilderness.

The children, for whom pizzas have been provided, race about in rivalry, covet one another's toys, invent games, hug lovingly, tussle savagely and have to be parted. The private schools they go to, these days, have black and white pupils and all the complexions and features characteristic of in-between colours; there is nothing unexpected for them in this gathering.

Who would have thought of the intellectually effervescent Thapelo – cool – as a family man. Here he is with the young climbing all over him. He shares, mouth by mouth turnabout, his piled plate with his younger daughter, steadies her on legs that have only recently begun to take her weight. Nicholas goes, as if in the superiority of his age making a claim to match, to hang on Paul's shoulder he can reach where his father is hunkered on the grass.

The three men who live another life in the wilderness cannot be together in any company without evoking it in references, discussion, argument between them, out of which every now and then they turn a passionate (rhetorical) question or a challenge of fact that ought to be known to the others around who surely don't know and maybe don't want to. But the company has been chosen expressly by Berenice-as-Benni to bring them – something – together, and her selection works well because the listening copywriter looks alternately sceptical, then attentively in agreement, and the photographer and the American break in or over the voices of the bushmates.

– What doesn't get published except in scientific-speak Mrs Jones or Mr Tshabalala don't understand, aren't meant to, is that those radioactive isotopes could fall into wrong hands, make black bombs radioactive-

The American has a voice insistent as a doorbell. – What the hell – oh
hell
, sure – is a 'black bomb'? I'm one of those dumb folk who don't hear you right. -

Her boyfriend must assert he's not with her there, he's a professional photographer in the advertising industry, he gets around, and he's a South African. – They're talking about Koeberg, the nuclear thing in the Cape. -

– No – these're some facts of the risks of a pebble-bed reactor that's high up on the planning board. -

– Well, you could say hugely adjunct to existing dangers of Koeberg, Derek. – Paul, animated on the familiar ground of grim reference, is addressing himself, with a droll distortion of his mouth, aside to the uninitiated.

– Look at these kids. Our kids. All our kids. D'you know about the danger, what babies could breathe in from the day they're born. Never mind all the security that's going to be installed. – Thapelo adds for the understanding of his mates alone –
You can walk away from it
. Shaya-shaya! -

The photographer throws up open palms. – All of us here are supposed to believe this. -

– So how far along is this pebble reactor thing, I mean is it in the works now? -

Doesn't the woman – Benni's told Paul the photographer's girlfriend is in banking – read the newspapers while she's visiting a country. Well we all follow only what we think affects us personally, soccer results or maybe with her it's the New York Stock Exchange and interest rates; now, it's better not to go further than the date of the next blood tests. He tells her what's at least been published for everyone to learn. – Eskom, that's the government's Electricity Supply Commission, got a licence from the National Nuclear Regulator before the end of last year. Although the Environmental Affairs Minister was challenged in court by Earthlife Africa and other groups, even the Cape Chamber of Commerce – businessmen who've usually got other things on their calculators than extinction by nuclear leaks… -

– I can't believe it's as bad as that. As near. – The copywriter has stopped eating the vegetarian meal her colleague Berenice provided for her; but she can't take a clean breath, away from the smoke off the meat over fire.

Thapelo has been coaxed to his feet by the one who is just learning to use hers and is dancing African-style with her. – That's the problem, we can't get people to believe. That's why Eskom's big bosses have been allowed by the government to spend one billion on developing the pebble-bed technology. -

The photographer heaves up from his sprawl and presents himself to the three ordinary-looking fellow males who seem to speak as voices from the mouths of biblical prophets. – Look, I'd be interested in taking pictures of these sites, I mean, the place the thing's going to be. -

To lighten the mood Benni calls from where she's turning the chops. – I don't think the subject's saleable as a promotion to any of our clients, dear Lemeko! -

Perhaps nobody hears her above the sizzling.

– What else do you do out there? According to Berenice she doesn't see Paul for weeks. -

Derek refills his wineglass with an eyebrow-raise asking permission from anyone who happens to be looking, and says, as if it were a confession: – Well, here's something else. There's a strong coalition campaigning to stop a new national highway from being sliced through the Pondoland Coast, incredibly rich botanically. Ever been there? We work on background scientific research to make protest based on absolutely undeniable facts. Try for what's unchallengeable. That toll highway must never be; for the plant-life and the people-life – the Amadiba live there. -

The copywriter remembers reading something interesting recently about – what was it – a world heritage site called 'The Cradle of Mankind' – are the three doing anything concerned with that?

The host moves to do what he ought to be concentrating on, tending the trough of embers and taking over the turning of meat, but delays. – Thirteen dolomite limestone caves. Fossil remains of plants, animals, and hominids – they're early members of the human family. It's not our field. You can't do anything to save the dead. But you sh'd go and get a sense of these places, the nearest is quite close to us in Johannesburg. I'd like to take Benni and Nickie, you could come along. -

– I'm afraid of bats. – She was flirtatious on wine although she had no desire to attract men.

Australopithecus
, distant relative: told of that in childhood by his father.
Paranthropus
, not ancestral to the living people gathered on this Saturday, but an evolutionary adaptation (remembered it like a litany) that lasted in Africa for a million years. And the Pleistocene period relating to the time between the ice age and the beginning of humans; Adrian 's passion, amateur palaeontologist, anthropologist, archaeologist. So knowledgeable, and the son who listened to him became equally dedicated but in another 'field'. Professionally, life-work, not a retirement hobby.

The gathering stayed on until early dark. The sunset was spectacular because of pollution in the air, according to Derek – everyone laughed at him for spoiling the effect, better be ignorant of some phenomena. – Anyway, you can't sell anything any more by using the good old riding-off-into-the-sunset image. Get a life! – Benni spoke up happily derisively for her colleagues. This venture went well. Nickie became quite wild, little king who had found companions. When the friends left, she and Paul cleaned up together. She watched him for signs of fatigue she thought, not because any doctor had suggested it, would question his recovery, his return. But he looked fine; in bed she smelled in his hair the homely smoke of the feast he'd duly tended.

Was it Berenice or Benni who proposed it.

The two personae were more and more mingled in the life they lived now. It was certainly after the several months following that Saturday, months during which there were the same kind of easy invitations in response to her trial one; she was asked by her Agency colleagues to bring along those nice bushmates of Paul, Thapelo and Derek whatsisname, with their kids, and Thapelo and his wife Thandike in return included the copywriter (who was this time accompanied by her woman), the photographer and his American girlfriend, to celebrate a birthday in Thapelo's family.

Let's have a baby.

Another child. She did not tell him it was even a career decision; she was prepared to lose some of her energy, her drive towards success after success, to give her body over to the disadvantages of distortion and accept the distracting, absorbing emotions of loving care for an infant.

– It's right for Nickie. An only child – that's lonely. -

God knows, he must have had enough experience of loneliness, those days weeks that have to be forgotten, made up for somehow (how was she to decide), to understand loneliness although there was no comparison in kind… childhood is another state.

He said nothing, met her eyes for slow moments; the hold twitched away and his head stirred in what could be a questioning or assent.

Anyway. – I'm not using – taking anything. – It was up to nature to decide.

Berenice had no doubt of her fecundity. Most of her sexual life had been focused on avoiding it. But months went by and there was no conception. Blood every twenty-eight days. Was she prematurely ageing – at thirty-two, ridiculous. She had announced to her close colleagues that they'd have to find a temporary executive-level replacement at her desk, her computer, her conference telephone, for some months soon, she and her man had decided to have a second child. Now she confided it didn't seem to be happening. She took their experienced advice. It's nothing a gynaecologist can't prescribe for. The tests for fertility showed normal ovulation. On the prescription of the gynaecologist she instructed Paul and herself in what she called 'acrobatics', and intense frequency of lovemaking during fertile periods indicated by a rise in temperature she was to measure in her vagina. Strangely – unexpectedly in a male who had recently survived terminality – this vigorous frequent call on his sexual potency did not seem to affect him. When she alerted him in the wilderness over the radio contact (mobiles do not work too remotely from any power source) that the fertile period was warm in her, he came home to serve, and then to return to his wilderness.

There was still no conception. She consulted the gynaecologist again.