Small Circle of Beings (13 page)

‘Nighty-night,’ she says.

‘Mother,’ I say. ‘Don’t go.’

She looks at me a moment and smiles. Over her shoulders I can see the photographs on the wall of all my family gone past. There is a picture there of my father: Sammy, the elusive grinner with
his cruel and gentle mouth.

‘I’ll stay,’ says my mother. ‘But just for a bit.’

‘You mustn’t be afraid,’ she says, ‘of the dark.’

She turns off the lamp. Then she lies down beside me, a thin and parched white figure who is soft, at last, to my touch. We cling to each other. In this way we lie, twined like lovers or
enemies, inseparable in our embrace. We sleep.

‘No …’ he said.

Then he settled back into the pillows and was gone. Around him the crinkled sheets were like the white surface of a pond on which he was impossibly floating. I stared at him for a long time. He
stared back, but his eyes were clouding over, as though smoke had filled the inside of his head.

After a while I stood up. I went to the windows and closed the last little gap in the curtains. Then I pulled the bedclothes straight over him and gently eased his head on the pillow. With the
tips of my fingers I smoothed his eyes closed, as they do in films. I stood, looking down at him: a face as white and tight as bandages on his skull. On the coverlet, his right hand was stretched
out, frail and grey, amphibian with age. He wore, as he’d always done – day and night, for forty-six years – a gold ring on his middle finger. I touched this ring. It was a cold,
hard contact. I bent over and kissed him on the mouth. (I realised I’d never done this before. Even as a little boy on my way to bed, he’d always turned his head slightly so that I
kissed him on the tiny dent of flesh at the corner of his mouth.) His lips were cold and clean as the gills of a fish. I straightened and, with a last glance round at this room – so bare, so
neat – I turned and went out to my mother.

She sat in the wooden straight-backed chair in the lounge. She always sat here. It was angled towards the white-barred windows and the garden beyond. A pale sunlight came over this garden now,
so that the trees stood against it as hard as wire. I approached from behind. I could see at first only her head over the back of the chair, round and dark as a cannonball. (Her hair was actually
grey, I knew, but she dyed it black. She bound it up into a dense knot, which she fixed against the back of her head with three silver pins. The position of this knot had never varied from day to
day.) I could hear the relentless clicking of her needles before I came round the side of the chair and saw the white wool flickering in her hands.

She was always knitting – jerseys, scarves, socks. But since he’d been put to bed she’d been knitting something I couldn’t make out; it didn’t seem to be anything
useful at all. It poured off the edges of her long needles, metres and metres of white wool, row after row, that now lay collected about her feet in ripples. All day she sat in this chair and
knitted. I’d heard her at night too, long after I’d gone to bed.
Clickety-click. Clickety-click.

I sat in the armchair to the right. From here I could see her in perfect profile as she sat, staring out at the garden. She didn’t look down at her hands as they worked. She didn’t,
at first, turn her head to look at me. She only continued to sit in the straight wooden chair, stately and grim, weaving out like a white web from her bony hands the strange patterns that mounted
about her feet.

‘Mother,’ I said.

After perhaps a minute the needles stopped. She stared straight ahead silently, into the garden, for another moment. Then she did, eventually, turn her head and look at me. I glared back at her.
She turned her head to the front again. From her suddenly limp fingers I saw the knitting slide. The needles and their endless strands of wool tumbled from her grasp and fell to the carpet. They
made a soft noise as they landed, like a small, perfunctory sigh.

I never saw her knit again.

She didn’t cry, my mother – not then, not ever. The days that followed were difficult and sad. I’m not given to tears myself; I have always found them unnecessary. But I cried
from time to time over the week that followed his death. At unexpected moments, as I spooned sugar into my tea, or as I closed a certain door, there would flash into me a violent scarlet grief I
hadn’t experienced before. And I would cry: fierce tears that didn’t last long. I tried to remember my father. My earliest recollections were sparse and thin. They were of a tall skinny
man with black hair brushed back straight from his forehead. Below his left nostril was a mole, round and neat, with hairs growing from it. Later he would pluck these hairs. And the hairs that made
his eyebrows meet in the middle. I would come into the bathroom to brush my teeth before school, and he’d be standing in front of the mirror in his pyjama pants and vest, leaning toward the
glass in concentration as he tweezed from the bridge of his nose these small, offensive hairs. He dropped them carefully into the bin. My mother kept a neat bathroom and would have disapproved of
even tiny hairs on the floor. We both, he and I, understood this.

He was not fond of words. He didn’t speak much and, if he did at all, it was usually to offer advice. ‘If I were you,’ he’d say, ‘I would put my shirt away.’
Or: ‘I suggest, old man, that you make up your bed.’

My mother approved of shirts put away, of beds made up. She would sweep through the house in her colossal skirts, inspecting the rooms. She made a rushing noise as she moved, like a purging
fire.

‘Clean up there,’ she’d cry in a voice that could only be described as spotless. ‘Wash the dishes, James.’

My name is James. I can’t help that. It’s a name, I believe, that my mother gave to me. Her father’s name was James. She felt obliged to signify due loyalty by naming me after
him. Family loyalty is something by which my mother has always placed a lot of store.

Her name is Lydia. My father’s name was Ivor. She was born in Cape Town and lived there for the first eighteen years of her life. He was born in Pretoria, but met her in Cape Town when he
attended university. He studied business science. He was a businessman all his life, up till four years before his death, when he retired. I knew little of his work. He had an office in town. He
would go to work after I had already left for school. His departure in the mornings was an event I could only imagine. I knew his return, however. At five every afternoon he would arrive on the
bus. I could see him from my bedroom window, walking with tentative steps up the drive, his briefcase under his left arm. He had three suits, blue, brown and beige. He wore different suits on
different days; my mother laid them out on the bed in the mornings. She took them out in a certain sequence, following a private pattern I could never decipher. Perhaps it was the blue suit on
Monday, the brown on Tuesday, the beige on Wednesday. Then the sequence would begin again, so that Monday was beige again. Perhaps this was the way it was. I don’t know.

I would go to the kitchen when he arrived. I would always go on some pretext, such as to make tea. I would be there as he came through the door. I would look up as he stepped inside, as if
surprised. ‘Hello, Father,’ I’d say.

‘Hello, James,’ he’d say, and smile. I seem to recall – though I could be mistaken here – that he had a moustache at this time. If so, it has been gone for many
years. But I seem to recall a moustache, through which his front tooth, capped in gold, glinted at me.

‘How was work?’ I said.

‘Work was fine. Was fine.’ He stood, unsure of himself, as if arriving at a stranger’s house for the very first time. ‘What did you do today?’

‘I did nothing …’

‘You must have done something, James.’

‘I did nothing, Father.’

This was true, I think. I did in fact do nothing in the long afternoons when school was finished. I did not have friends. I was not a popular boy. Looking at old photographs of myself, I see a
bloodless, anaemic child looking back at me through square glasses. I had a thin neck in which my adam’s apple stood out like a knuckle. My hair (the shame of it!) was wet down with grease
and combed across the top of my head in an arc. My mother did this to me. I’m sure of it: she would stand me in the bathroom and drag the comb across my scalp like a weapon. She bathed me
every night long after I was too old for it, scrubbing my face with the rough edge of a flannel. ‘Stand,’ she would say. ‘Let me soap your legs.’

I hated my mother. I accepted this fact by slow degrees as I grew up, till it resided in me, tiny and dark, a germ that lay too deep for her hands. I hated her with a calm, an easy, and
sometimes a pleasant hate. There was no passion in it. She would not have approved of that.

‘James,’ she said. ‘I would appreciate it if you could help with … with things. It would be too difficult for me.’

‘Of course, Mother,’ I said. ‘Of course I shall help.’

I helped. While she sat in the wooden straight-backed chair in the lounge, I went through his possessions and packed them into boxes. There was little enough to do. In the bedroom there was a
small white cupboard and a chest-of-drawers in which all his clothes were kept. (His were separate from hers, at opposite ends of the room.) I had the privilege of touching the garments I could
recall him wearing from my days at school. My fingers came into contact with those suits, blue, brown and beige, that he dressed in to go to work. Although different in colour, they had the same
fabric: a smooth felt, worn thin at the elbows. I folded them up and packed them into boxes. I folded everything up and put it all away: shoes, shirts, ties, belts. And the more intimate garments
that I could only imagine till then – his socks, his underwear. From all the clothes came a faint scent of mothballs and powder. I pressed my nose into the cloth, squeezing it to make it
yield up some other odour, some whiff or trace that might give me a hint of a history, an event, a happening in a life gone past. But there was nothing at all.

Mothballs and powder.

I put the boxes into the garage.

‘James,’ she said. ‘If you could help with … with the other room. I would be so grateful.’

‘Of course, Mother,’ I said. ‘I shall be glad to help.’

The other room was the study to which he retired at night after supper. I suppose he worked there, though I cannot guess at what. As a child I’d been in there only seldom, and then only on
brief errands for my mother. ‘Tell your father he is wanted on the telephone …’ I recalled it from then as a cavernous chamber, carpeted in fur and walled in with books.

Now it was a small and modest space with nothing impressive about it. The carpet was thin and pale. There were only three bookcases and the volumes in them were covered in a brown skin of dust.
(Nevertheless I looked them over and decided on them for myself.) His desk stood before the window. Light came in from the neat winter garden outside. The walls were covered in faded wallpaper and
there were some prints hanging at eye level.

I went through the drawers in the desk. Their contents I also packed into boxes and consigned to the garage. If I’d hoped for a clue here to the heart or mind of the man who fathered me, I
was again disappointed. The desk was almost empty, and what there was in it was completely anonymous. Writing pads, pens, staplers, rulers. My hopes lifted when I came upon a tattered brown file in
the bottom lefthand drawer, but it contained only some tax forms from years ago. There was not even a signature to be had.

At supper that night, as I faced my mother down the length of the table, I murmured as gently as I could: ‘Is there any more to be done?’

She didn’t look up from her soup, but continued to stare into the bowl as her hand conveyed the liquid to her mouth in neat sips. She paused for long enough to say, ‘No, James. That
is all.’

And, two sips later, ‘Thank you.’

‘It was a pleasure to help,’ I said. ‘Mother.’

‘I thought,’ she wheezed, ‘that you could have the books in the study. You may have the room,’ she said, ‘when you come to live here.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Would you like some more soup, James? It’s minestrone and very good for you.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘but I won’t.’

‘All right then,’ she said.

I went back to the study after supper, duster in hand. Sunk into a kind of white and featureless despair, I began to go through the books in the bookcases, wiping them clean, opening them up and
riffling through their pages. He’d always loved reading, though she hadn’t approved and had insisted after a while that he take books out of the library instead of buying them.
‘The expense, Ivor. We cannot afford …’ I also loved reading, and the bedroom of my tiny flat in town was packed with shelves and shelves of books: thrillers, biographies,
literature and trash. I tried to imagine now how those books would look in here, in this room: arranged in rows against the one bare wall. I tried to imagine myself behind the desk, my back to the
garden, as I sat and listened to the soft slurping noise of my mother’s footsteps in the passage outside. It was too much to conceive of.

I’d known, I suppose, that this would be the nature of my dry and tedious fate: to return to this sombre house in which I had been born and spent my first twenty years of life, to become
the father I had never begun to recognise or comprehend. I’d known this, I suppose, since he had first taken to his bed on his long, stuttering decline into death. But now that she had made
her pact with me, her pagan contract across the shining surface of the table and the steaming bowls of soup, I felt my frightened soul go into revolt. I wanted to scream and cry. I wanted to bang
my head against the walls and tear at the drab, fading wallpaper, in which the dim outline of a pattern could still vaguely be seen.

I didn’t, of course. I continued to stand, cloth in hand, and wipe stupidly at the covers of the books as I took them one by one from the shelves. In the small oval mirror to the right of
the desk I caught a brief glimpse of myself and saw with horror that I was still bloodless and anaemic, that I still looked out at the world through thick glasses. I hadn’t even rescued
myself from this, the earliest prison I could recall.