Get A Life (3 page)

What do you do when you have no purpose, are allowed no purpose but something his mother has called 'recuperate'. As good a term as any other euphemism for – whatever. You can call up anything you want on the Internet, what about this? He could not really believe he was going to have to die, rogue cells were moving around right now within the territory of himself; dying is a remote business, has no reality when you are in your thirties, all that can happen is you're run over by a bus. Shot by a hijacker. His work is scientific, in collaboration with the greatest scientist of all, nature, who has the formula for everything, whether discovered or still a mystery to research by its self-styled highest creation; in that university library, naturally, he'd read up everything about the thyroid gland, that hidden nodule in your neck he could put a hand up to feel for, if it hadn't been removed. It is a vital factor in growth along with the pituitary, which is hidden behind your forehead, he wouldn't have come to adolescence, physical and mental maturity, without it. These sites should be marked like the sacred signals coloured on the brows of Hindus. So, demonstrably, the gland has an effect on emotions aside from its necessary physical manifestations if it decides to go erratic, an excess of thyroid gland production causes tachycardia, a rapid heartbeat. Some even aver a connection between excessive thyroid activity and creative ability in the arts – the imagination is accelerated, too. You take it that your type of intelligence is decided by the size and composition of your brain – that's it. But there are these other little pockets of substances whose alchemy influences, and interferes – even directly – in what you
are
. Many other abstruse details about the component now missing from his neck, a scar at the spot where it once secretly functioned and where the cells turned rogue in crazy proliferation. He's able to meet doctors almost on their own informed scientific ground, so to speak, and what he's wanted to know from early on when he was told the gland must be removed, is what his life would be without it. He was told not to worry, let's just beat the cancer. You'll take some routine medication. And that is? Oh something called Eltroxin, substitutes for the thyroid's function, very well.

Back in his allotted room he hears someone else's human bustle, with him out of the way the woman is running a vacuum cleaner somewhere. There is the stereo equipment set up by his father and the cassettes Benni didn't forget. Surely there is no purposelessness the music you love cannot deny by the act of your listening. There's the elephant study and other books you never have time enough to read. The laptop computer. Briefcase of papers to collate and write up from the St Lucia wetlands research with Thapelo and Derek. And the telephone. What will there be to say to the person at the other end.

What do you do when you have no obligation, no everyday expectation of yourself and others?

You get out of where you are. Leave the walls of gaping emptiness behind. His feet took the way used in childhood, through the deep windows in the livingroom, to the garden. A man was loosening a bed round shrubs, the tines of a heavy fork biting into firm ground with each heave, he paused halfway in a movement and raised a hand in the kind of greeting salute a black worker is expected to give a white man, he completed the rhythm of his half-movement and the fork sounded his effort and the earth's resistance to it. Someone with a purpose.

The big woman came round from the back of the house, the usual woollen cap askew on her head cockily ridiculing the prissy English 'Primrose'. – You all right? Everything okay? -

Across the width of the lawn, for her safety, he thanked her for breakfast, showing off his smattering of Zulu, the only African language he'd usefully acquired for work in rural areas, thought by whites to be some kind of African lingua franca. The attempt was almost a connection with his working, functioning life. She laughed. – My pleasure. My pleasure. – Along with 'Have a nice day', conditioned formulae everywhere in divided worlds to bring policies of reconciliation to an everyday level of polite convention. As an unbeliever unthinkingly will respond 'Bless you' to someone who sneezes. The new demotics have reached even this one, an old-fashioned black woman, no dreadlocks, no railway tracks woven with the hair on her head, no topknot of yellow-dyed false curls he's familiar with among the beautiful sister-executives in Berenice's advertising agency, or the elegant secretaries, high-breasted and nose in the air, in the government offices his work takes him to. The phone is ringing from the room he left, but when he gets there to lift the receiver the caller has hung up.

Immeasurable tide of weariness has come back. He is lying on the bed again when later the call is loud beside him. It is Benni. – I tried you earlier -

– I was in the garden. -

– Oh good. -

Lyndsay and Adrian cancelled their cruise to the Arctic Wondrous Northern Lights
aurora borealis
and fortunately it's apparent neither Paul nor Berenice remembered it was planned, so there were no protestations necessary to convince anyone that this was of no account. The trip had been Adrian 's idea because he sensed that his Lyn was in two minds about what that ominous state, retirement, would mean, supposing she joined him in it, and the fact of choosing to go somewhere, now, some remote travel they'd never thought of, would show that ventures could be part of the new state. This journey, from the extreme of the Southern Hemisphere to the extreme of the Northern, would convey that without need of words between them. Just as she must know he loved her, still even desired her, as he did when they first began to live together.

The parents tried to avoid going out in the evenings without making it too obvious that they were staying at home because of him. When there was a concert with a programme Adrian particularly wanted to hear – his pleasure in Penderecki, Cage, and Philip Glass came from an eclectic depth of understanding she envied as beyond her – he went, she stayed at home with Paul. And in a way that was a treat, when last had mother and son the chance to spend an evening alone together. The small boy, the adolescent one mustn't intrude upon too closely, emotions must turn away from the one woman to other women, the young man with whom there had been adult friendship and understanding of one another – these had become the man with a wife and child. Now alone they spoke mostly of his work and how he felt about it – privately, essential to his being – as probably she thought he did only with his woman, his wife. His almost angry dedication, there were so many forces, political, economic, against it, had essential dependent connections with her work in the law that they had never really discussed before. The question of how, which rivers and seas should be exploited is decided ultimately by laws promulgated by governments. Paul and Thapelo and Derek might prove that this form of exploitation in a particular environment may be managed with benefit to human, animal, organic growth and the atmosphere; that form, in another environment will sicken the human population with effluent, starve animal species of their food habitat, take more from the sea than it can replace. But the 'findings' of ecological research by government-approved project entrepreneurs are produced as some sort of justification in going ahead with their projects. Never mind the independent researchers (the Pauls and Thapelos and Dereks) who prove otherwise; their findings can be given token attention, oh yes, the enterprise projects doctored up a bit as a concession – and the disastrous proceeds. So environmentalists have need of consultation with lawyers who know what loopholes, under the law, used by project entrepreneurs, must be anticipated and exposed while independent research is in progress.

Consultations like this one under quarantine. He's not allowed alcohol and when she forgets, in the mingle of their voices become familiar again, and says, let's have a glass of wine, she quickly corrects: no, I'll put the kettle on, what about camomile tea. He's smiling and lightly moving his head, you have your red wine, and she tips her head to match his movement, smiling refusal.

Her son is so exhausted by what they have both entered in intimacy that he has to go to bed before his father has returned from the concert.

There are other emanations than those she had been exposed to in a tête-à-tête. There are individuals for whom music moves on with its oxygen like the circulation of blood in the body and the brain, after it has been heard. Adrian came back in this serenely heightened state. It does not result from the kind of music you can hum, that she knew before he introduced her to something that opened her perceptions. People give one another things that can't be gift-wrapped. But she had not experienced the music with him tonight, not even at the level she could have expected with Penderecki and Cage. He read a little while beside her, one of the autobiographies unburdening the ugliness of the political past which they handed to one another to applaud or argue about.

They had already said what there was to exchange about the evening at home. – How'd it go, was he all right. – - It was good, I think he forgot… – - Not easy to talk, I know. – - No, we talked. About his work just as if he's in the middle of it. -

It was not the time to ruin the possibility of sleep by speaking of what this brought to mind, was never out of mind: would he ever take up that work again.

She lay with her eyes closed, somewhere trying to pace her breathing along with that beside her as she would keep up with his longer stride on walks. He put aside the book, turned off the light. It was their long custom to dismiss the day for each other by saying goodnight in the dark. The kiss put a seal to it or led to lovemaking. He'd had some prostate trouble but didn't need Viagra. The kiss tonight was a seal.

As he fell asleep he woke startlingly and heard her heaving with sobs. For a confused moment it was as if he found she was being attacked, desperate intruders know how to defuse suburban burglar alarms. His hand struck the wall, found the light switch. There was no-one. Her brutally self-distorted face cringed at the glare. He turned it off and he and the dark took her in his arms. Her body was hot, thick and strange against him.

– Why did it have to be like this for him, so we could talk.
Talk
. Why not before? What were we doing. Waited for this. What happened to us. What's the matter with me so it couldn't be these years that've been going by so satisfied with what was supposed to be loving. -

– Lyn – my darling – you're doing everything. Everything possible. Good God, you come home and make his bed, clean his room, wash his clothes – his nurse, servant – taken on more risk than anyone, than I do – all right, I helped him bath when he was still so weak – but how many professional women would get down to what you're doing. -

Her body began to shake as sobs made her choke and cough.

– Taking care of the man as you did when he was a baby. What more could there be. Listen to me, listen -

He stroked her hair, her shoulder, at last she scrubbed her face with the sheet and it came to him as a signal they would have to meet, kiss. While they entered each other by the silenced mouths he began to hold and fondle her breasts and a desperate desire rose in both of them. They made love, as Paul and his woman had buried their fear when the judgment came by telephone, and they were not aware of their son without this resort, this brief haven from fearful solitude. Just down the passage, where he had come home.

It turned out to be real that the inconceivable can become routine. At least so far as contact is decreed. Relationships. Their new nature, frequency, and limits. So if he does not get up to eat breakfast with them in the morning – sometimes too early a reminder that when he does join them his plate is paper and the utensils he uses must be put aside separately by Lyndsay or Adrian before they leave for the day – they make it their habit to open his door for an affectionate word of goodbye he knows is actually to see unobtrusively what state he's woken in. He supposes he must keep out of the kitchen as much as he can, although it's necessary, during the day when Primrose is not there, to go in for water or a snack from the refrigerator. While he eats his breakfast or lunch he may call out in a little exchange with Primrose attendant there beyond the door, asking what she's cooking up that smells so great, and receiving through the hearty gabble and thudding pop music of one of the African language radio stations she plays as she works, her dramatic report of the latest holdup she just heard about in a news flash. – These devils! Who were their mothers? God will punish them. – And with an effortless change of subject to the news of the progress of Tembisa in school sport – she wants to find something to tell that will interest a young man. Then she and the radio are gone.

Berenice calls as soon as she gets to her advertising agency every morning. Or from her mobile if she's on her way to a working breakfast where she's to outline a campaign to an important client.
Berenice
. He visualises her by that name, as represented her to him when they first met and like most people tentatively attracted to one another used calls to pursue the attraction between meetings.

This call is supposed to be a substitute for the natural exchange of daily preoccupations and happenings they've had since living together, that's the premise both must keep up. She has to fill the silences by relating what's in progress in her working life in diverting detail as if giving a report to an interested party – another, an intimate kind of client; he has nothing much at all to say.

Yesterday I listened to the whole
Fidelio
.

This morning?

Maybe the garden.

Well, nice place to read, looks like a lovely clear day. Enjoy!

Some mornings she has as a hang-up conclusion, awkwardly irrelevant, I love you.

Benni
, by contrast, comes often and regularly in the afternoons. This is Benni, all right. In her unconventional, gypsy form of business dress and scarves she carries off so well and that he likes to watch her arming herself with when she gets up from their bed to begin a day. He watches her now as they stand in that No-Man's-Land, the safety of the garden, and unbidden, inappropriate, nerves coming alive from some anaesthesia, he has the surging yearning to touch her. Cross the few feet of space between them, where they stand, or where on the chairs from the terrace he's put out they sit, apart, facing each other; feel her under his hand. She has rung at the gate on the intercom, he has pressed the remote control, she has driven up the drive and he has been there, not far, not near, as she gets out of the car, and they stop – each held back. A greeting across the void, laughing, had they forgotten the sheer pleasure in seeing one another? But it has no natural conclusion in touch. This gap she hastens to fill with the things she has brought, more books, clothes, letters – once flowers, but that, both saw, was a mistake, as if he were a sick friend in hospital. Who can say what his existential category really is?