Get A Life (15 page)

– Unlawful dismissal. We won. It's something of a test case with implication for others. Charlene Damons was an outstandingly good witness – the attorney who was supposed to prepare her said it was the other way about -

The two women laughed; this testimony must have been what led Lyndsay to take an interest in the woman. Obviously initiated some opportunity to talk to her; time has long passed when coffee shops were segregated and there was nowhere to go. Over the Sunday lunch Lyndsay encouraged voluble Charlene, who didn't need much urging while she composedly enjoyed her food and the usual wine the host's mother contributed, to tell about her work among people suffering HIV and AIDS, in particular workers employed in industry and chain stores.

– What happens to the babies? Many die? And if they survive, with treatment. They do get treatment? – Benni is wiping the traces of icecream from round Nickie's mouth.

– Many die. What can you do. They've been left in public toilets. Some in the street, the police find them and bring them in. -

– The mothers? -

– Nobody knows the mothers, who're the fathers. -

Lyndsay has been turned away, listening. – But when you see them, their faces. They look like someone. Not nobody. -

There's proof. Nickie, icecream-besmeared face, looking like – Paul, Benni, Lyndsay. Adrian. And progenitors farther back. As the elements that converge in the Okavango; as the natural forces of alchemy create the sand dunes secreting minerals from still earlier formations.

The new kind of family lunch passed uneventfully enough with the guest; Paul and Benni didn't encounter her again. Lyndsay was engaged in a new case, her next offering was not an individual but a letter, first of several, read out to the family as sometimes she brought along an email from Emma; a letter from Adrian telling something of whatever it was that he was living. A state awkward to categorise. Travels to the mountains, natal region of Zapata, more Rivera paintings seen, the weather. Archaeological excavations, of course. In one letter, he said he was thinking of writing something. The experience of seeing these unearthed accomplishments of the ancient past when you belong to an era where there are wars going on over who possesses weapons that could destroy all trace of it. (The letters were addressed like publicity leaflets headed 'The Occupier', 'Dear family' on the first page.) When Lyndsay came to these few sentences her distanced tone sounded to the others a sign that they were meant for her alone.

She probably wrote back – would she? – the same kind of letters with matters skimmed from the surface of what the family was living; whether there were words, residue of the exchanges of the personal, not the ancient, past, coming privately from her to him was her own affair, her son couldn't speculate any more than he could foresee any resolution the parents might come to for themselves.

The government's announced project for a Pondoland 'marine protected area' wasn't going to be any resolution for the sand dunes on that coast. It protected the waters alone. The Australian-based Mineral Commodities could still go ahead with their plan to mine twenty kilometres of the dunes. With Thapelo and Derek surrounded by a paper-territory of surveyors' maps and their own field notes, the team sat with representatives from Earthlife Africa and the Wildlife and Environmental Society following the trail of contradictory statements, a palimpsest over what was before them.

– The Minister's passing the buck. Just listen again. Environmental Affairs: 'The Minister remains opposed to the mining and instead supports ecotourism in the area. But ultimately the decision to mine on the Wild Coast rests with the Minister of Minerals and Energy.'
Ja-nee
. – Derek's jerks of the head mimic 'yes-no'.

– The Mineral Commodities outfit must have submitted for the Aussies the application to Minerals and Energy by now. Department's sitting on it. While that's going on and Mineral Commodities' spin doctors are lobbying, you can depend on that, we've got to keep pushing, man, pushing. They're going over the Pondoland Marine Park projects, they say, to 'assess' how it will affect their mining plans, but that's nonsense, shaya-shaya, their chief exec's already said the frontal dune and riverine systems had always been excluded from the mining areas – they're not – Thapelo hoists the flag of one of the surveyors' maps.

A heat of frustration rises with it. Paul waves a hand up across the table as if clearing this emanation. – Lobbying – that's only part of the strategy. Bribery is going to serve them even better. The option they've given to a black empowerment company that represents the very community, the traditional leaders we counted on, the people
we've
been lobbying to protest misuse of their land, threat to their subsistence. A fifteen percent stake in the mining deal, ten million dollars. Ten million! How does that divide up among – how many people? It doesn't; going to be shares on the stock exchange. Doesn't matter. It's a sum that fills the sky. – His rolling glance tilts inadvertently at Thapelo, who shouldn't be singled out; wanting the empowerment of money is a characteristic of whites as well, at least human temptation isn't discriminatory. The difference is whites have held that power exclusively, so long. – How does that look for protest against the toll road that's going to break up their habitat, the mining that's set to destroy the dunes there? So? We don't want rural blacks to have a share in the growth of economic power? It's not for them? They're out of the mix in our mixed economy? What're we going to say to that. -

Thapelo slaps his hands across his chest to strike and grab his biceps. – We have to live with it, Bra. Race sensitivity's out, my man, for this thing. Those big money boys know how to operate rings round us. For sure there's a link, a deal, between the toll highway and the mining, let the Mineral Commodities set-up and the government deny it, shout from now till tomorrow, you saw how the National Road Agency says the road will reduce transport costs, that's important for the products of the mine, getting the stuff to the smelter. -

– And finally to the stock exchanges of the world. -

– And the ten million dollar shareholders scattered by the highway. Who'll get the dividends. -

– The makhosi. -

Paul turned from the contest of words to decisions. – We're only a couple of months before the deadline for final objections to the mining project. Co-ordinate all the organisations and groups for action, jack up overseas support (Berenice's vocabulary comes in useful, an unfamiliar weapon). Get a life, man! – Let's make up and bring a high-profile party of save-the-earthers to come as observers of what's at stake – not the low-voltage ones we've had – some pop stars who'll compose songs for us,
Come rap for the planet
, prove they're good world citizens… it's cool now for the famous to take up causes -

– Right on, my brother! -

Maybe her advertising agency would know exactly how to manipulate this, now desperately become like any other publicity campaign.

Lyndsay had left a message among those waiting on his mobile phone. Responding to relevant others, he forgot about it. She called again – it's just to say she'd like to come round this evening, if he and Benni were going to be home, hadn't seen them for a week. Yes, eat with us. No, she'd come for coffee. You know we don't drink coffee after dinner, Ma, and neither do you. Laughter. For a drink then, fine.

His mother arrived after nine without acknowledgement of being later than expected and with the air of having pleasantly concluded some preoccupation. Benni, in the worldly sophistication of Berenice, even tolerantly wondered to herself whether Lyndsay hadn't found some man attracted to her, she still looks good despite her age; it can happen. Mother and son had a glass of wine, Benni for some reason puts her hand over the glass Paul has put beside her. Must be some new diet she's put herself on, well-promoted… There's Danish aquavit in the cupboard, which she favours, but the Scandinavian association is perhaps not tactful.

– I've been meaning to tell you for some weeks but there have been legal complications, still are… no point in waiting for that to be final. You remember, I brought a welfare worker, witness in one of my cases, along to lunch. Someone who'd taken me to see abandoned babies – children in a home. Well, I went back there on my own a few… a number of times. I felt, I don't know, there was a child, a small girl, she's about three the paediatrician says, one can't be exact with an abandoned child, she responded to my turning up – presence. She was brought in by the police seven months ago, that means she was about two years old, then. She'd been raped and she's HIV-positive. She had to be (Lyndsay, always professionally, unhesitatingly precise – hands up – at a loss how to define this for others)… reconstructed… surgery… weeks in the children's hospital. Apparently it was successful, far as they can tell with a female so young. Then she was handed back to the institution. They're happy – the people in charge at that place – if they think you're trustworthy, you want to give one of the inmates – kids – a treat, an outing. So I took her to the zoo, you must introduce Nickie to the baby seal that's just been born – she was ecstatic. I've decided she couldn't go on living in an institution, good though it is. There are very few adoptions of HIV-positive children. The home has released her already. She's with me. I'm adopting her. -

– What have you done. – He has stumbled into some place in Lyndsay's life closed against him. Can't see her there. -

I'm finding out. Quite an experience. – She raises eyebrows, serene. – You can imagine how delighted Primrose is. She's in charge while I'm in Chambers and court. -

His mother gives time for silence, for Paul and Benni/Berenice to accept what is done. Her son is with her in quarantine in the garden, they are statues, commemorating their habitation there. – How will Adrian. What about Adrian? -

She is alone with Paul, since the quarantine there will always be this facility, apart from the presence of others.

The words flung down before him.

– What about Adrian. -

She went back to that babies' shelter, one Saturday when she had walked past a toy shop in a mall and been beckoned by a display of anthropomorphic bears, monkeys and leopards dressed in jeans. Nickie had pillow-mates like these; there was a jungle gym she'd noticed the unidentified children climbing when she accompanied her outstanding witness to their reality, but were there any toys like these, personal treasures. She bought a few, and went to drop them off in the rundown quarter of the city where the institution was. Those inmates old enough to walk or at least sit were having their supper at tables right for their size. A small girl she recognised from the first visit jumped up, overturning some mess in her plate, and came running, to the toys, not the woman; she took her time, gazed at the bear, the leopard, the monkey, and carefully chose the monkey. Others clamoured round.

Was it foolish to bring a few luxury toys where there were – how many had Charlene said – thirty or more babies and children, the number went up and down as some died and one or two, healthy ones, might be adopted. Would they quarrel over possession – the recognised girl had run off with her monkey. Well-meaning could be mistaken.

She returned a week later, not with gifts that might obviously cause trouble, maybe create a contentious privilege, difficult to imagine a child who doesn't have any, in the democracy necessary in such a place – to ask if she could take the claimant of the monkey to the zoo to see real ones. The girl had been in care for months, she was told, found without a name, not old enough to know if she did have one, the staff called her Klara. Getting to know the features that made the child whoever it was, she was (couldn't be expressed to oneself less clumsily) proposed the wonderful mystery of the personality, how it may be signalled in the set of the nose, the shifting line of lips in speech (this little creature talks a lot, an incoherent coherence of whatever African language she had shaped when she learnt to speak and the English she had learnt to obey from the whites among the Salvation Army people whose institution cared for her). Here was a small being creating herself. The distinguished-looking woman, maybe a politician or something, who came back after Charlene brought her, became well-known to the Army's female Major and was allowed to take lucky Klara away for weekends, then was listed a foster-parent, Klara officially in her care. A bed, a place vacant for another, born not in a manger but a public toilet. Better not ask what next for the small girl if the lady tired of her. Because Lyndsay, also, did not know what next. For herself; for the child; in the meantime she did not make her guest? charge? known to Paul and his family.

Her own motives were suspect to her. Then they were of no concern, she and this stranger with a vividly distinct self, stranger no more, had a life in common. A nursery school accepted her, dropped off there every morning by Lyndsay on the way to Chambers, and Primrose kept her fluent in a mother tongue in the afternoons. Lyndsay did mention to a colleague that she was taking care of someone's black child; it was not the sort of temporary situation without precedent in the individual social conscience of their legal practice – at least had not been during the apartheid years when clients defended on charges of treason sometimes had no choice but to leave a child abandoned. There was a good chance, said the paediatrician Lyndsay took the child to, that her HIV-positive status would correct itself shortly; the blood count was encouragingly mounting. This reprieve could happen only in children. So there was an interim decision; don't look further than that. She wrote one of the spaced letters she and Adrian exchanged, like the form letters to aunts etc. taught to phrase, at school, where she told that Paul was in a helicopter monitoring the terrible floods in the Okavango, and related the progress of Nicholas swimming over-arm instead of dog-paddling, beginning to count up to twenty-five, recognise words in story-books. (Relating to herself; Klara, able already to string red and white beads alternately on a cord, has to be stopped from attempting to climb the jacaranda in the garden, insists on mastering the use of a fork at the age of about two-and-a-half or three.)