Get A Life (16 page)

Enquiries, to someone who dealt with these things, about the processes of adoption are routine in informing oneself how the child might better be offered to someone where she could grow up in the company of siblings, a father and mother. There was no point she would really remember when instead she had become the adoption applicant, informing herself. The process is not simple, even in the case of a child of unknown parentage, abandoned no-one knows by whom. But it was the time to inform her son and his family.

Should Paul's mother be invited to bring along the child when she came to his house; where Nickie was? Lyndsay, that awesome lawyer rationalist (Berenice's one of the impoverishers of their mother tongue who make the epithet as devoid of religious force as 'fuck' is devoid of force to shock), not only decides at her age and in her situation to adopt a small child but must have one who is infected with the Disease. Does anyone honestly know whether or not it can be transmitted ways other than sexually or by blood? If by blood, what happens when two children play together and there are scratches, blood exchanged. Nickie's a boy, quite rough, if still small. Benni/Berenice – everything must be taken into consideration – decides to put a hold on such visits, tactfully, until Paul is home. She knows Lyndsay well enough, in the shift the plight of Adrian has somehow brought about, to think Lyndsay will understand, not comment upon to Paul.

– The child's accepted at a nursery school. – Paul's like his mother, depends on evidence, whether it's a conservation back-of-beyond or their private lives in question.

– Not all nursery schools. Wasn't there even a case – a woman went to court when a kid was refused. The nursery school pointed out that very young children bite when they get in a temper. -

– The child's how old? -

– It's not sure, about three. I suppose they tell by the teeth and not all come out at the same rate. Nickie's were early. -

Benni was not particularly surprised, not confused as he was, he saw, when his mother came out with it just before he went to the drowned Okavango that now was the scene in unobliterated vision, present after-image in his awareness. He could not place, with Lyndsay, this action. She had never been particularly fond of children, it seemed, kept a kind of privacy even between herself and the four she bore (had it been Adrian who wanted a family, and now left them to her) and she didn't drool and coo over her grandchildren although she and Nickie were rather companionable, he loved this special friend.

Benni appeared rather to be amused by his discomfiture. The wilderness is an innocent environment whatever else he exposes there; he doesn't know what goes on in the real world. Doesn't know it's become quite trendy to adopt a black child, or an orphan from, say, Sarajevo or India. She could tell him it proves something. But in Lyndsay's instance, she can't hazard what.

She sees he won't oppose – whatever Lyndsay decides, he is convinced is all right. For Nicholas: he doesn't decide, for Nicholas. She should, she wants – fuck him if he doesn't put his child first, above all the orphans in the world – to turn on him angrily but she does not. In this life put together since the time he went home again, out of touch, there is still, underneath, something between him and the woman who is his mother that shuts out everyone. He's here in the bedroom but the lines are down.

Whatever it is she wanted to prove by adopting in old age, and on her own, a child who might die and whose physical possibilities of growing up with the birthright of a female, clitoris, labia, and vagina, must be damaged however clever the surgery was, his mother's choice isn't an easy one. This bright and beguiling little girl is self-willed in excess of her size and approximate age, manipulative, a show-off in the spotlight of demanded attention and the next half-hour gloweringly withdrawn. – Just plain naughty. – The foster-mother/grandmother laughs even when exasperated.

Who knows if the virus covertly hunts this child down as rogue cells may still be holed up somewhere along his bloodstream. His mother is an old hand at interpreting prognosis, monitoring it coming about either in its negative or positive proof, back in the quarantine, his. And as then, she somehow establishes, creates ordinariness in this other unwelcome metamorphosis of a family – Adrian missing, some other being added – out of uncertainty, the unresolved. Which surely you've learnt by example of ecological solutions, is a condition of existence? No? Is she compensating for lack loss of him, Adrian – is he coming back? Is she punishing Adrian by showing she makes bolder choices than his, going all the way to the exhibition (no less) of extreme moral choice, taking on some child not orphaned but even worse, abandoned, and still further from human to inhuman act, a victim raped, disease-infected, while in the state of total innocence. Is his mother showing off; as the showing-off, the rages, the defiance of the flirtatious round-eyed, soft-mouthed near-baby is a punishment of whoever conceived her, abandoned her, thrust and tore open her body, planted a virus there.

Lyndsay takes Nickie and Klara to the zoo. Klara demands, The sa-el, the sa-el, and Lyndsay corrects her. The two children raise a chant:
The see-al, the see-al!
Other visitors smile at the little scene, assuaging pleasantly their guilt of the past when the zoo was closed to blacks except on one day a week and black and white children did not chant together.

Does his mother feel Adrian 's eyes on her from somewhere in the fjord – wherever whatever – the stratosphere that is his absence? Does he see these occasions of hers as defiance?

Or isn't she thinking of Adrian at all, at the zoo with her grandchild and her child. Not when she and Klara come to the son's house at weekends – it's nice for Nickie to have a playmate who is naturally part of the family. Adrian has left Mexico. But not to come home. When they're at table together, the Paul-and-Benni table that has become the family one now that Lyndsay doesn't set it at the old family home, there is a dismissal of awareness that there is an empty chair. Apparently it's a ruling that the father's, the individual Adrian 's choice be respected. Human rights exclude mawkish sentimentality as useless while disguising that it is painful is a better reason. He is in Norway with his sometime guide. They live in Stavanger, one of the northern ventures he and Lyndsay never made. Hilde has a sister there; I'm occupying a flat in the old family house, I have a view of the port. He writes in the first person singular, not 'we'. Of course it must be that Lyndsay writes back at intervals that match those of his letters; has she told him, does she write about Klara; she will have told him that the Judicial Commission has appointed her to the Bench. She is about to become a judge. A son has to stop himself from blurting, He'd be so proud of you – the licence of high emotions that allowed him to tell her, He always loved you so much, was over. Adrian is in Stavanger, taken retirement and presumably writing his thoughts on seeing – what was it – the dug-up accomplishments of ancient times while living in an era of weapons that could destroy itself without trace.

Nickie and Klara get on well together in the contesting manner of small children, she a tough match for the elder and male. And when he retaliates by tugging at a vulnerable attribute she has and he hasn't, her dreadlocks (Primrose insists on plaiting them to adorn a fashionable little black girl), she squeals piteously for help as the playmate who when pinned down on the grass had yelled that a gogga was biting him. Nothing further has been said between Paul and Benni about the girl's HIV 'status', in fact that established euphemism placed at a remove the remote possibility – unproven? – that the contact of scratched knees could transmit infection. Only when tussles between the two tumbling and cavorting children become too intense, the no-escape moment when a boxer is forced against the ropes, both Paul and Benni rush, colliding to part them. Lyndsay keeps the girl's fingernails very short: whether for hygiene or a precaution to which she would not admit credibility.

All right, the zoo. City children learn of their existence – co-existence – with animals other than cats and dogs. When Nicholas is older, take him along on working assignments; it'll be some years, the conditions are not for small kids, but a youngster of eleven or twelve, that'll be the time. Children see something of the wider concept of the environment on television – does Benni really put the boy in front of nature programmes, as supposed, instead of the monster-hero sagas he takes as his spacemen toys come to life. That's not seeing, smelling the living creature in flesh and fur; at least a zoo provides that. But childhood doesn't provide only in a garden, signals to what is going to be decisive in adulthood. There's the extraordinary dark memory like those in nightmares, but not dispelled by morning, and time: the eagle, in that same zoo which is now his mother's treat for the next generation, hunched on claws within the stone walls and close roof of a cage. Something frightening in prescience of what would only be understood, known, shared years later: despair. The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

Benni lifts and drops her shoulders, which stirs her breasts; kill-joy, not everyone can have the freedom of the wilderness and anyway he retreats into silence, some other place, when (again) she offers one of the clients' game parks, no cages there, foreigners fly thousands of miles to find marvellous. She has again suggested a stay, his mother and Klara included, this time, at one of the weekend breaks away from the city, Agency-featured, these beautiful half-wildernesses. All he says absently is that the children are too young to spend hours being driven around in a four-by-four. You need Japanese stamina for that. And so makes Benni laugh. Thank – what are their gods? – for the Japanese, they're the staples of our tourist industry!

There is a place where the eagle he has not forgotten, its species, is free. That's a nearby outing for the children, the family, owed by this father who too often is absent; in his wilderness.

The Black Eagle,
Aquila
verreauxii
, has been breeding at this cliff above a waterfall since 1940. These highly territorial birds, with a weight of approximately five kilogrammes and a wingspan of up to 2.3 metres are one of Africa 's largest and most majestic eagles. The Black Eagle pair in the Roodekrans territory can be seen all year round. They spend their days hunting, soaring, displaying, or perching on their favourite roosting spots, where they rest and preen. They live on the Rock Hyrax, hares, and guinea fowl. The breeding cycle commences in March/April, when one of the two nesting sites will be used in a specific breeding year. Sticks are placed to form a nest cup that will be completed with leafy twigs. This creates a soft lining in the cup prior to egg laying which normally occurs in May. The male performs spectacular courtship displays during the refurbishment. The pair mate for life and take a new mate only if one should die.

Paul read out from a leaflet picked up at the entrance to the park space, half botanical garden for indigenous African species, half wildlife protection habitat. The two small children neither listen nor understand, the information is for himself, Lyndsay and Benni, Nicholas and Klara are simply excited at the beginning of any excursion. Do they know what an eagle is? You're going to see a ve-ery big bird. Lyndsay attempted to make the excitement specific but the focus of the two for whom the world of nature is new was wide and low, there were gaudy butterflies to chase and Nickie spied a caterpillar articulated like the coaches of a toy train. Paul carefully lifted it from a leaf, opened the boy's hand and placed it gently in the palm, to protests from Berenice. But he addressed Benni, the boy's mother. He mustn't be taught to be afraid of everything that isn't human or domesticated. And if it happened to be a scorpion? That's part of the knowledge: learning to recognise what's harmful and what's not.

Life-skills – that's the term she would understand. And he doesn't expect – or want – anyone to understand that what he's been able to say simply, without his kind of jargon is – simply – the principle of what he does, it's called ecology.

Lyndsay turns out to know more about the strange sculptural plants than he. It used to be said of such growths that they're like something from the moon, but now it's known there is no growth on the moon, there's no comparison with nothingness. She is able to name substitutes for leaves like buttocks; an elephantine lump of grey as a desert species from Namibia which stores water in its bulk for nourishment during the long dry years. In the period when Namibian independence was being negotiated she had been there as part of a legal team and Sam Nujoma himself had arranged for her to be taken into the desert – not that Paul or his wife would know or is likely to remember who the first president of the country's sovereignty was.

From every experience, professional or otherwise, there's always some aspect detached from the whole. The negotiating process subsumed by the history-that-is-memory; the identity of some weird growth is there, available, named.

While the family outing straggles along the paths to the waterfall you can hear but not see: in the susurration,
I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving
.

(The children chasing about each other or the butterflies butt against adult thighs as if these were tree trunks.)

That's all that comes out of that state of existence, and why not; so definitive as it was at the time. And it did not happen, the leaving. Mate for life. The affair is over. Case closed; it has not been reopened for long years. And now quite differently – no, come on, admit it – the same, has been reopened. I am sixty-five I never imagined this could happen it's happened to Hilde and me. The child chosen as black, defiled, infected, nameless – something else that has happened. One of the states of existence. Paul is taking up each child in turn to be swung round him as he walks; the son has come out of quarantine and seems to be in possession of a new state.