Get A Life (7 page)

Living in isolation, all along. Even when inside the woman.

Later, in the garden, away from the closeted emanation in that room, what is this all about but an obvious matter of the incompatibility between the advertising industry and environmental protection. Two clichés.
So what?
Can't even call it by its true term. Irreconcilability. Because the world, in distinction from the individual, has no absolutes, there's a mix that goes along prescriptively with the mixed economy. And what about the woman, Benni/Berenice. What a prick the woman's chosen man has been. Yes, revealed as nothing but the prick in his relation to her.

The innocence of the tree that was climbed, the perspective of being alive, from up there, the mind's sketch of the treehouse-gynaeceum of the sisters – everything accepted, the sin behind the pampas grass, capture of the freedom of butterflies, fall of the slingshot bird.

But it was in the Garden that expulsion came once there was Knowledge.

Divorce? Divorce after she's endured, on her side of the quarantine, did her job, earned the means of common needs, took care of the child calling
Daddy Paul
, smiled and joked anecdotally for normality across the divide between outdoor chairs. While this brings no counsel from the uncertain waverings of the jacaranda fronds, tongues in trees, there comes a prolonged ringing from the house. Goes ignored, until whoever it was hangs up. But the caller determinedly keeps trying. Such obstinacy must somehow be responded to. Still – as now – unsteady, upright from supine, the way to the house seems slowly gained. The ringing gives up; and starts once more, an encouragement.

– So you laz-zy, how's it? Chief,
haai
! We never hear from you! So much happening. I'm back onto the pebble-bed scene, now, it's dynamite, my man, I can tell you. But what are the doctors doing, keeping you locked away like this, do you feel okay? When're you coming back? Aren't you due for remittance of sentence by now… So… good, that's great. Sharp – sharp! Say, you hear the latest – the Institution of Nuclear Engineers says the new reactor at Koeberg gonna be 'walk away safe'. 'Walk away safe.' I thought you'd like to take that walk, Bra. But if the Minister gives Government go-ahead, we'll have him in court against this 'favourable environmental impact assessment evaluation' his boys have come up with. Man, I've got plenty to tell you, what's going on, we're getting more support groups joining protest every day. Big names. Amazing. I promise you. The man's gonna find the nuclear a hot seat… so when can I come to your place, I don't know where you are -

– Not a good idea for you, I want to see you, Bra, but we can't sit in the same room, we'd be in the garden like a couple of kids sent out of the way. And even then, who knows. Why should you risk anything at all, I'm my own experimental pebble-bed nuclear reactor. -

Laughter bursting into the receiver. – Sharp! Sharp! But nonsense,
non-sense
. What about the weekend. I'll be back in town. What's the address? I'll turn up in the afternoon and bring you some stuff to work over. We need you. -

When he arrives he has to be backed away from as he throws out his arms for the African shoulder-hug that's come out of the expression of freedom fought for together among black men and has done away with the inhibition of whites that God-fearing heterosexual males don't embrace. (Thapelo at seventeen was in a Mkhonto we Sizwe cadre, another kind of combat in the bush.)

How can you manage what you are, to others. Primrose, her statement to stay on in the risk of quarantine when the right thing was for the parents – and the leper himself – to insist that the faithful retainer be treated like anyone else outside the responsibility of progenitors, and be sent beyond harm. What is the threshold of risk to be decreed for different people – what about the paper plates touched by radiant saliva on spoons and forks, got rid of. Thrown away in the trash to lie on waste dumps picked over by kids from black squatter camps. What is 'rid of' in terms of any pollution, it's a life's work to inform us that it's not only what is cast into the sea that comes back to foul another shore, no matter whose it is.

This man is not that barely-literate woman; he's scientifically literate, awareness of the insidious power of radiation is in his daily field. Primrose does not believe in what she cannot see; he knows what is not to be seen as it exudes from one who is his Chernobyl, his own Koeberg experimental nuclear reactor. How was it these two had no fear; too easy to attribute this sentimentally, as a white man descended from a history posited on the tenet that blacks were worse, to evidence that both were blacks, and better. Willing to take risks, in contact with fellow humans. More likely, for this ex-Freedom Fighter colleague in scientific research as for the uneducated woman, he's been exposed and accustomed to many threats in childhood in the quarantine of segregation, before those of war.

Thapelo brought cold beer and a field briefcase tight with documents. Beer in the garden was the first drink after decreed abstinence. Worth taking the risk of reaction, in the company of a workmate. The sun drowned under the horizon of shrubs and the garden darkened, until a light appeared on the terrace and the mother's voice called affectionately, a familiar coaxing echo, Paul don't you think it's time you came in.

ii
/ States of Existence

She pulled a smiling, deprecating mouth at the concern and the reproach.

If someone had to get shot by an intruder it mustn't be one of her beloved men; only now come to know, through another kind of threat, the urgency of that love. Couldn't tell them. That was her reason to be out before the intruder, alone. A threat you could counter. But that much was clear in all that was confused in what had happened to them; Paul, Adrian, Lyndsay. To try and make sense of it there were devices of different approach; she must place herself among these less subjectively, as a woman called 'Lyndsay'. Set it out. The meteor of the inconceivable fell upon the son; he was the one who became invisibly alight. Paul. What happened to him was not to be presumptuously compared with what happened within his radius to the father, Adrian, and the mother, Lyndsay. In yourself as progenitor you have somewhere a stowed disaster kit, resourced both practically and psychologically to deal with a known list of existential crises in your children's lives: career failure, suicidal loss of confidence, doomed love affair, broken marriage, change of sexual orientation, drug addiction, debt. They've had the broken marriage syndrome with the daughter born too soon after the son, but it has proved to be a kick start for her rather than a trauma, she has a new country, a new language and a new man to fulfil her apparent needs. As a lawyer, in her early career the Lyndsay persona was familiar with the entire conventional list, but for years her career has been as a civil rights and constitutional lawyer. Adrian proved to be the one best in understanding of the way Emma could emerge from the tangle of the early marriage; lawyer Lyndsay could simply provide the practical means to end the contract. He suggested to their daughter that you can perhaps destroy out of pride and anger, too hastily, what may be essential for you. She had been so crazily in love with the man, whatever had happened to them since. Give yourself time to be sure whether the heady power of rejection – making a decision while you are drunk with it, it's potent – hasn't taken from you the one you really want, worth an acceptance of all the disillusion come about. So the girl who had married too young didn't take the quick and tidy divorce; unaccountably, in her mother's view (wasn't the childish marriage a casualty before the register was signed), she took half a year to test herself and did not regret it, confiding to her father that it had been a good thing: she would leave the marriage now in calm certainty it was not vital, within her or the man. The father didn't protest or pass judgment, apparently this was all right, for him, too? The process had been fulfilled, justifying whatever the outcome.

Hazards like these have recognisable courses of action, emotional readjustments, to follow, even if individuals responding don't always do so in the same way. What has happened – that formulation implies the past, what is here now is a present that has no existence in the range of experience provided for. Only the Japanese would understand, maybe; they have had to make 'ordinary' ('normal' is a word that can't be used on this subject) the presence of children born, generations after the light greater than a thousand suns, with a limb or some faculty of the brain missing.

Paul's confrontation with an unimaginable state of
self
. She sees it in his face, the awkwardness of his body as if he feels the body does not belong to him, when he speaks, his choice of words, of what there is that can be said among all that cannot. She is aware of the state as she makes his bed and as she stands at the chuntering machine unable to leave off watching his contaminated clothes somersaulting in water behind a round window, Primrose standing by. This is Primrose's domain, no matter how contemptibly role-confining that may sound. Lyndsay's presence in the backyard laundry cannot be
ordinary
.

The endless hours he seems to spend in the garden. No book, no radio. Imagine, an attempt to leave the state behind in this prison-home. No-one could conjure that. It's more than a physical and mental state of an individual; it's a disembodiment from the historical one of his life, told from infancy, boyhood, to manhood of sexuality, intelligence and intellect. It's a state of existence outside the continuity of his life.

The evidence of such a phenomenon before her every morning when she puts her head round the door to greet him as she leaves for Chambers and the structure of the law ready to deal with the dislocations of human existence on the Statute Book, the return to find him in the darkening garden or lying in his cell – this stirs unwanted recognition that there are other states of alienated existence.

Now also become unimaginable.

Fifteen years ago she sat in this house one night and said, I have to tell you something. The affair is over.

This same familiar room where their son sits with them in the relation of childhood, these nights, listening to music.

This room was where Adrian was told that his wife Lyndsay's four-year love affair with another man had ended. He was looking at her as he was to all those years later when she told him his son had a cancer of the thyroid gland; blue eyes black with intensity.

I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving.

She met the man at a conference through the advancement in her career he, Adrian, had made, in practicality, possible. For him love (one came at last to understand) is commitment to the fulfilment of the loved one. In their early life together he had taken on many responsibilities in the education of the children and distractions of domestic bothers, freeing her to continue her studies and pursue the right contacts to be admitted to the Bar, realise her ambition to become a civil rights lawyer. When she was briefed for a case that passionately interested her, her mood brought home was quickly matched by his; they would celebrate with her exposition of the issue for the layman he was, over their meal, late in bed. Sometimes she would say in reaction to his questions – a reflection on another's life – you could have been a very good lawyer, but he had wanted something else, also not realised, wanted to be an archaeologist. Go digging, as he dismissed the seriousness of the vocation become an avocation, subject of leisure reading and occasional viewings of the site of an archaeological find opened to the public. Not many become a Leakey or a Tobias. When they had to go for marriage, children and years might pass before, if ever, going digging could provide bread for a family, instead of studying for that profession he took, meantime, a junior position with prospects in a business firm, and indeed, with his wide intelligence that could not apply itself at less than its best, even to what did not really interest him, moved on to a successful middle-level niche in an international firm.

She became prominent enough in cases of civil rights to have worked with the great in the profession, Bizos and Chaskalson, in these final years of the old regime when daring legal opposition to it caught the attention of world support, while the powers of the world dilly-dallied whether or not to back, by sanctions against the regime, the liberation movement and its military action. She was invited here and there abroad to conferences on civil rights and constitutional law – this last in particular an aspect in which she was qualifying herself for the future: the country would have a new constitution, new laws to be upheld when the old regime was defeated.

It was at a conference in her home country, home city, in which she was a member of the Bar Association's organising committee, that she met the man for the second time. He was a European in the sense that she was not; from Europe, fairly distinguished on the international legal conference circuit. Hospitable on home ground, she followed the protocol by which her local colleagues shared out the obligation to entertain the visitors. She invited this one, with whom at least she had previous acquaintance, to a dinner at this house. Adrian as host. The man was not the most outstanding personality round this table where one of the settings is now with paper plates, and it is not memorable whether he and the husband of the colleague, with whom he was conferring professionally for a second time, exchanged more than casual dinner-table remarks. In the usual enjoyable assessment of guests after they had gone – fascinating, boring, or about whom there was nothing much to say – no recall of mention of him. But that might be repressed memory.

Perhaps as a return for the hospitality in place of delivery of flowers, next day the man suggested they skip lunch-break refreshments provided at the conference centre and get something interesting to eat elsewhere. He was more amusing tête-à-tête than at a dinner table. Maybe he had been bored. A few days later they went for a drink she agreed was needed after a long conference session. The half-hour in a bar was a continued session of legal complexities discussed – he seemed to have a special respect for her knowledge of the law's constraints in this country of which he had no experience. When the conference closed and farewells were made he said his to her, last of all. So it was that moment among the crowd; suddenly there: they had to see one another again.