Small Circle of Beings (9 page)

At night, after Salome and Moses have left, retreating into the bush like sullen ghosts, I continue to work, down on hands and knees till my skin is raw. There are blisters on my palms, blood
between my fingers, when, late at night, I put out the last lamp and stagger to my bed.

We sleep in our respective rooms now, apart. David appears to have no bad dreams that live in this bedroom of his where, for so many weeks, he tried to die. I, on the other hand, am full of
memories about the room to which I must go at night. It is too empty now, too big. There was a chest-of-drawers in here, a table, that have been removed. In the cupboard in which the clothes are
kept there are many empty drawers. By these spaces, these absences, do I become aware of the larger absence in my life, and for this reason must go to my bed tired, so that I may fall asleep
without delay.

We are done with the house after a week has passed. But if Salome and Moses had thought that their labour was over, it is doubtless with sinking hearts that they watch me go out into the garden.
Here there is havoc. Plants grow wild, twining amongst each other like lovers. Weeds are sprouting in the middle of the beds. The edges of the grass, once neatly cropped and clipped, are ragged now
as hems in which the threads are torn. But worse than these is the sight of my rose-garden. The ordered rows of tied-up plants have given way to a chaos of scrubby bushes. There are no flowers to
be seen. There are only a few petals underfoot, trampled by buck, which have also left their droppings on the ground.

‘How dare you?’ I scream at Moses. ‘How dare you let this happen?’

But he only stares back with expressionless eyes. He cares nothing for me, this sour black man with his hands like steaks. I am nothing to him, a bothersome intrusion in his life that will,
eventually, go. The realization disturbs me. I maintain control.
All right
, I think.
I will fire you, then, when this is done.

But I don’t, of course, fire Moses. After two weeks of labour, the garden is restored. By now my anger is dispelled: the sight of the tame green acre about the house is enough to set me at
ease. Salome and Moses continue to work, coming in each morning and leaving together at night, as they used to do before the sickness began.

So are we all restored to what we were before. There is routine in our lives to keep us safe. My mother wanders about, watching me from round corners, behind walls. I have bought her a new dog
to replace the other that died. This is a frisky beast, also a poodle, that leaps and runs about her feet. I have tied a bell about its neck by which I can tell where it – and so my mother
– is hiding.

David, as I say, spends his days on the stoep. He does go for walks, but not very far. He is still too thin and weak to do much, though he gets better by the day. He has missed too much time at
school and must repeat his grade next year. But that is several months away, and there is time for healing. He eats well, smiles more. His hair is growing back. I have no doubt that, in a year or
two, all trace of the illness will be gone, except for that brown scar on his throat which he wears like a badge.

There has, of course, been trouble over David. I have received a letter from the hospital, signed by Professor Terry, telling me yet again how foolish I have been. The letter I crumpled up and
threw away. Not so easy to dismiss was the arrival of Stephen, who came the day after our return. He parked his bakkie behind the house in the usual place (old habits, they say, die hard) and came
up to the stoep. I greeted him there, my hair tied back, a wet cloth in hand.

‘Yes?’ I said, expecting trouble.

‘What do you think you are doing?’

‘I don’t,’ I said, ‘have to answer to you.’

‘Are you trying to kill the boy?’

‘Don’t speak that way in front of him,’ I cried, for David was sitting there, wrapped in a red robe like a judge.

For a long time we glared at each other, this thin long man on whom I had expended a decade of my life, and I. He quivered with rage. I daresay I looked as foolish as he did, with my dirty face,
my body wrapped in rags. We had never been further apart than we were then.

At last he left. He muttered as he did, something about taking further steps, but I doubt that he will. He knows too well the replies I could make, the accusations about how he was spending his
time while his son was ill.

Such thoughts preoccupy me now. In these familiar rooms, the places that I know, it is easier to visualise what happened while I was far away. This house has been the scene of my undoing. While
I sat with David in the hospital, or lay alone in the brown hotel room at night, other people occupied this area. Without my knowledge or consent they performed actions that unpicked the seams of
my life.
Where
, I wonder.
When
? I am beset by questions.

One night I cannot bear my bed. I take my pillow and my blanket and creep down the passage to David’s room. Blind with sleep, smelling of milk, he fumbles me into his embrace. I slip in
beside him and we lie, mother and son, on the narrow mattress. Warm and cramped, I fall asleep.

After this, I sleep here every night. David never mentions it to me, but I sense that he is waiting for me when I come. In the morning, when the first light appears, I roll out of bed and tiptoe
away.

I am an early riser. It has always been this way, long before I was married, even, to Stephen. Now, however, there is a meaning in it, as though I must be wakeful as much and as long as I can.
It is as though too much has happened while I slept. It is as though I have too little time.

But this is not the case. Now that Stephen is not here to look after, there is too much time, too much time altogether. I find myself looking for means of occupation. There is still a lot to be
done, and I continue to clean, to tend the garden. But there are still hours in the day when I am at a loss, when my hands are empty. I try to read, but I am bored, somehow, by words. I play card
games with David. I sit in the window and look down the valley.

Every few days I must go into town to shop. I meet people here whom I once knew, who greet me and talk. I dread these conversations for the things they never say. Questions are asked, always,
about David: how he is, how he’s feeling. He’s at home, I tell them, he’s feeling fine. But no mention is ever made of Stephen.

It is on one of these shopping expeditions, in the supermarket in town, that I catch sight of Gloria MacIvor. I recognise her at once, though she is not as I recalled: a fat woman, truly fat,
with straight red hair cut short. We look at each other down the length of an aisle before she drops her eyes and moves quickly away, pushing her trolley in alarm. I follow. I catch up with her as
she tries to make an escape up the next aisle. ‘Hello,’ I say. ‘How are you?’

She keeps on walking. She does not acknowledge my presence at all, but continues to scan the shelves of goods, searching, she would have it appear, for something.

‘How is Stephen?’ I say.

At this she stops. Her trolley drifts on a little way, bumps into a row of tins. A tin falls, clattering. ‘What do you want?’ she says.

‘To talk.’

‘Why? What about?’

‘I would have thought,’ I say, ‘that you and I have things to say to each other.’

‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’

Her voice is high, as though air escapes through a valve in her neck. She does wear the pearls I imagined: a loose, jiggling white chain at her throat. As she speaks, her face clenches up, then
releases. Perhaps she is wrinkling her nose at me. Perhaps I smell bad to her.

‘Please,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to make a scene. Just leave me alone. Please.’

‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ I say. ‘I only wanted to talk.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Goodbye.’

I watch as she retreats, leaving her shopping trolley behind. She wears high heels and they make a clicking noise, like an admonishing tongue.
So
, I think.
That is you
.

David spends each weekend with his father. It is at these times, while I am left alone in the house, with only my mother for company, that I feel grief most acutely. There is
nothing to keep me busy and I find myself pacing the floors and musing. When David returns, I question him.

‘What did you do?’ I ask.

‘Nothing really. We talked. We went to a movie.’

‘Did she go too?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does she ever talk about me? Does she ever ask you about your mother?’

‘No,’ he says blandly, avoiding my eyes.

If this is true, I resent it. I require her curiosity, as I am curious about her. From what David can tell me, I try to piece together a picture of their lives: Stephen and this woman. David
speaks of her, I hear, as Auntie Gloria; and in a strange way she does feel like my sister. She is someone, I feel, I knew well a long time ago.

I am a bitter woman, full of shadows. On the surface I appear to be calm, collected, in absolute control. I run my life decisively. In reality I am full of torment. I contain deeds that have
only to be committed. Forces arise in me that I cannot stave off. David comes home one Sunday night wearing a white T-shirt I haven’t seen before. A black rage billows up in me that takes me
reeling down the passage to the phone. Stephen answers, unsuspecting. Don’t, I shout, let your girlfriend buy clothes for my son. Don’t let him call her auntie anything, she is the
sister of no one in our family. ‘Do you understand?’ I cry. ‘Do you understand?’

Before he can reply, I put down the phone.

By these words, then, spoken in rage, do I come upon the pain in myself.

I phone back later that night and discover myself pleading with this man. ‘Please,’ I say. ‘Please come back to me.’

He is amazed. ‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘You have to understand . . .’

‘Please,’ I tell him, believing my words. ‘I will die if you don’t.’

There is silence, only, on the line.

‘Please. Please.’

Knowing his reply, I put down the phone again. I bring my hand up to my mouth and bite into it hard, till blood breaks out.

I meet Cedric soon after this and we become lovers. He is a man unlike Stephen in every way; short, squat, with thick red hair. Indeed, redness is a colour that seems to
flicker in him. His skin is covered in reddish freckles. He has ginger hair on his forearms and back. Unlike Stephen, he has no moustache, but a sort of perpetual red stubble covers his chin. He
smells faintly of sawdust and sweat, and his voice bursts out of him richly, like oil.

‘Life is chaos,’ he says, and laughs.

Cedric is a sculptor who lives in a cottage just out of town. I have known him vaguely, on and off, for six years, but never well. With huge red hands, swollen with blood, he hacks out of stone
the shapes of animals and men. The garden of his cottage and the workshop behind are full of these strange convulsive figures. They have been excavated, I feel, not from the ground, but from some
deeper bedrock in himself that we shall never see. He is an odd man, Cedric, who has never known a woman before me. ‘You,’ he declares, ‘are the first.’ Then he releases
again that deep shuddering laughter, while I flush in pleasure and in fear.

He laughs a great deal, but finds very little funny. From the first he has moods that change without warning. He is given to fury a lot of the time. Indeed, it is with palpable anger that he
sets to work on his blocks of stone. I sit by silently on a little wooden bench and watch as he begins his assault. Holding in his hands a chisel and an iron mallet, he circles the grey column of
rock, frowning, sighing, blowing out his cheeks. Then, in a sudden gurgle of air, he darts in close like a swordsman and strikes a ringing blow. Chips fly. Sparks. And from now, without pause or
delay, he hammers and pulls at the dark, resolute hunk of rock, knocking off shards and chunks, tearing, I feel, at a dense outer wrapping that conceals some other form beneath. He reveals this,
bit by bit, as the hours and the stone go tumbling to the floor. Before my eyes an outline begins to emerge: the convoluted spiral of a horn.

Finally he falls back, sweating and gasping. We are looking at a goat, perched with bunched hooves on an outcrop of earth. Its dark eye regards me from a brute, mute face, animal as the brain it
hides.

‘For you,’ rumbles Cedric.

And laughs to himself.

How is it possible, I wonder, for me to love this man? But I do, I do. This is where I now spend my mornings. In the evenings he comes to the house and eats with us. ‘How you doing?’
he roars, and pushes playfully at David. Once David falls and hurts himself; he begins to cry. ‘Don’t be a baby,’ Cedric says, pulling him to his feet and dusting him off.
‘Nothing’s worth tears.’ But David continues to cry.

‘He’s a weak boy,’ Cedric tells me later. ‘You must be hard on him.’

‘Yes,’ I say, but think to myself that David has had too much, too much to bear.

‘The world,’ says Cedric, ‘is a hard place.’

He spends some nights with me. We sleep together then in the white double bed in which Stephen and I used to lie. On these nights I do not tiptoe down the passage and creep into bed with David.
We do not mention it to each other, this change in our habits, but we are awkward with one another on the mornings that follow.

It is strange to have a lover again after so much time has passed. It has been a long while, measured in nights, since hands have touched me. Cedric makes love as Stephen never did, crouched
above me on hands and knees, breathing hard. With Stephen there were rules to be observed, courtesies that should not be broken. Cedric cares nothing for these: we have made love together, more
than once, on the cold brick floor of his workshop, with the statues towering about us, and shavings of stone underneath. Though I was bruised afterwards in places on my back, these sore places in
my skin were precious to me.

My body (can it be?) has meaning again. As I wait for Cedric in the late afternoons, I undress and bathe myself. I stand before the mirror, confronting in the glass this silvery image of myself,
still sliding with soap. My breasts sag tiredly on my chest. There are lines etched into the flesh of my buttocks. But under these, where the body grows old, I see the sites of mystical processes I
have somehow learnt to forget. My womb echoes in me, a dark and hollow place. I feel the tides of blood humming under my skin, that each month break and flow. I am warm, wet, mysterious even to
myself: a carrier of things. There are seeds in me, events that could take place. I intrigue myself.