Small Circle of Beings (7 page)

The bowl is removed, placed back on the trolley. I touch David’s head to make him look at me, to remind him I am here and on his side. But he doesn’t look up. Greyer than before,
blubbering slightly, he falls back over the pillows as if he has been punctured by that needle.

But there is another to come. This is the largest of them all: a syringe as thick as a wrist, a needle as long as a pencil. The nurses seize David. They put over his head a small white jacket
that has, at the back, a circular hole cut out of its centre. They roll him on his side so that he faces me. ‘Now curl up,’ says one of the nurses. ‘Come on. It’ll be over
in a second.’

‘The quicker you are, the quicker it’ll be done.’ Dr Tredoux flashes a glance at me: an appeal. But I do not flinch. I stare him down.

‘Come, David,’ the other nurse says.

Because David is howling like a wolf and rolling in the bed. He grabs at me again. Finally I cannot stand it anymore and I put out my hand. ‘David,’ I say, ‘you
must.’

He subsides, snivelling. There is a fleck of foam at the corner of his mouth. As if he is a dummy, the nurses roll him back onto his side with his knees up against his tummy. He is a foetal
shape, the outline of my womb.

We hold him down. The nurses and I, leaning with our weight, pin him in this position to the bed. (‘It is very dangerous,’ Professor Terry has said. ‘He must not move.’)
Dr Tredoux, aiming carefully, presses the needle against his spine where it stands out in a ridge in the circular hole in the jacket. Then, a knife into butter, he pushes it in. As it slides, David
screams: a sound, primeval, released. It hits me there too, at the base of my spine. They draw fluid out, sucking it carefully from the slender white stalk that holds up his body. Then they inject
fluid in. And all the time my son is screaming.

Then it is over. The nurses are putting away the needles and pans. They take the jacket. Dr Tredoux wipes his hands on the white lapels of his coat. ‘There,’ he says. ‘It
wasn’t so bad.’

I find myself saying: ‘Thank you.’

They go. For a long time afterwards, David doesn’t move. He continues to lie on his side with his knees drawn up, sobbing hoarsely as though with grief. I don’t know how to console
him, or if I want to. I run my hands over him, pressing gently at the spongy texture of his flesh. ‘David,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

‘I have to vomit again,’ he says.

They’ve left a bowl beside the bed. I hold it for him as he retches. He shudders, then falls back again, an arm across his face as he cries and cries and cries.

Every day this happens.

I go to see Professor Terry in his office. He receives me with a tired but patient air, as if he recognises me for what I am: a meddler, a busy-body.

‘Of course the treatment is necessary,’ he says. ‘You don’t think we do if for pleasure, do you?’

‘No. But I wonder if there isn’t some other way – ’

‘Everybody wonders that,’ he says. ‘We all wonder that every day. Research,’ he tells me, ‘is continuing.’

There is only one other thing I need to know. ‘How long must the treatment go on?’

‘If it is successful,’ he says, leaning forward, ‘he must keep coming back for ten years.’

‘Ten years?’ I repeat, lame in my chair as I stare at him.

‘I’m afraid so. To be on the safe side.’

The interview is over.

Ten years, I know already, is too long a time for either of us to endure. David is my son. He has been in me more deeply and more intimately than any lover I’ve had. We
undergo this attrition together.

It is at some time now, while we are living this way with so much distance and time between us, that betrayal begins. I have no thoughts, no profound understandings to offer.
Perhaps the sickness in our midst makes deception easier to practise. I prefer to think, however, that we begin to see each other honestly, and cannot bear what we see. At any rate, I have no
warning. I think back over the weekends that Stephen has spent with me here. I remember the phone calls he’s made, but find no clue to what is taking place.

The first I learn of it is when I receive a call one evening after returning from the hospital. I am greeted with a slow, strange breathing on the other side.

‘Hello?’ I say.

‘Do you know,’ a voice informs me (a woman’s voice, muffled and high), ‘that your husband is having an affair?’

‘What?’ I say, unsure whether I’ve heard correctly. But there is only a silence before the line goes dead.

I am suddenly weak. Shock falls over me like a blinding white dome in which I am moving, silent and bereft.

Linda is concerned. She follows after me, tugging at my arm. ‘What?’ she cries. ‘Was it the hospital? Is it David?’ When I continue to ignore her, she can no longer
resist. ‘Has it happened?’ she says.

‘No,’ I say. ‘It isn’t that.’

The next day, sick and sleepless, I pack my bag. I tell Linda that I must go home. ‘To settle some matters,’ I say. She twitters consent, but I can tell by the way
she looks at me from her frightened grey eyes that she knows something is wrong.

Before I leave, I go to the hospital to tell David I shall be away for a day. He accepts the news without concern, but when Dr Tredoux, on his daily rounds, inserts the second needle into his
arm, he releases a thin high wail I’ve never heard from him before. We cling to each other with tiny mammal hands, the sick boy (my child) and I. The sound of his cry is in tune with
something in me, so that for a moment we sing out together: high, lonely, and in pain.

I get back home in the late afternoon, with the shadows of the trees stretched long and pale across the grass. It is strange to see the house again after being away for so
long. There is no sign of anybody. A pelt of dust is on the floor. ‘Salome!’ I call. ‘Moses!’ But there is no reply.

I sit down to wait in the lounge, in the large armchair at the window. The gas-lamps are unlit, and the shadows deepen about me as the evening comes on. There is no sound from inside the house,
except for the occasional squeak or fart of rafters. Outside, the air buzzes gently with birds and insects.

Eventually, I hear the noise of Stephen’s bakkie from far down the road, long before it comes into view, trundling across the grass and out of sight again around the corner. Before, when
all was well, I used to go out to greet him when he came home. But not tonight. He must see my car when he parks his, but he doesn’t hurry. In fact it is a long time before I hear the tread
of his footsteps on the lawn and he appears on the stoep, walking slow and stiff, trailing on the air like smoke.

It’s twilight now. A blue darkness has welled up from the ground, drifting like fine spray into the air. He comes to a stop in the doorway, leaning disjointedly against it as he would
never have done in time gone by. We look at each other, silent, across the shadow-scarred boards of the floor. And I see, yes, that he too has had a vigil to keep up, alone in the house with its
walls of stone, filling up with darkness as with water.

‘Hello, Stephen.’

‘Hello,’ he says, and at last tears loose from the jamb, comes staggering across the floor towards me. He sits in the chair beside me, his knee bumping against mine. He pulls it
away.

Through the five interminable hours of travel, I have thought of a great many things to ask or say. Bitter accusations filled my head. But now I find there is nothing to discuss. Perhaps we are
finally tired, he and I, after the tedious months gone by. Perhaps we have realised that words are for the young and eager.

When we do, eventually, talk, it is about matters of no consequence.

‘The drive . . . ?’ he says, staring ahead of him, out of the window.

‘Was fine,’ I say.

‘Not too hot?’

‘Earlier. Earlier it was quite hot. But not later.’

‘Ah,’ he says, musing. Then: ‘David is …?’

‘Fine,’ I say. ‘He looks fine.’

‘Ah. I’m pleased to hear that. I am.’

We look down now at our feet, those interesting objects on the floor. It has become my turn to speak.

‘Who . . . ?’ I begin, but my voice goes out in the darkness like a match.

He clears his throat. ‘Gloria,’ he says. ‘MacIvor. From the school.’

I remember the woman. She is the secretary and has an office next to Stephen’s. Though I’ve seen her no more than a dozen times, she comes vaguely to me now: a plump, floury shape,
sticky red hair pinned up behind. A necklace of fake pearls, running across her throat like a zip. Her eyelids are blue.

‘Gloria . . .’ I murmur and, for no reason, laugh.

Stephen is hurt. ‘What’s funny?’

‘Nothing,’ I say, and we sit quietly together again.

We have not been this close since our courtship began. Indeed, it is as if we are younger by eleven years and he is visiting me at home, with my mother in the kitchen next door, making supper. I
am tempted to stretch out a hand and touch him on the knee.

Instead I stand up. ‘What now?’ I say, crossing to the window as casually as if we’re discussing the housework. The moon is up, and for a moment I entertain the absurd
recognition that it’s the same moon that appears each day, a lifeless white eye watching our lives.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘What now?’

I shrug but I don’t turn round. I’d imagined it would be worse than this, somehow. I’d imagined that ten years would make an awful racket and thunder when they finally tore
apart. But it’s not the case at all. They fall from us gently, those years, slipping off our shoulders like sin and melting into the dark.

‘Well,’ I say. ‘The house. Us.’

He also stands and moves beside me. He puts his arm about me. It rests on my shoulders as a heavy weight. Once again there is a silence; and it seems now that the day has passed like this, in
gusts of time in which there is no sound.

‘Oh, Stephen,’ I say. ‘How could . . .’

I don’t finish. I don’t have the energy. This is the closest I’ve come to bursting into tears. If I do, I know, I’ll fall into his arms and tear at his face with my
nails. There’ll be no stopping me.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘You haven’t been here. The house is so empty, you can see. I don’t know.’

‘Ohh . . .’

‘We can’t seem to agree anymore. On anything. There’s a . . . a disagreement between us.’

I am listening.

‘I need somebody,’ he says. ‘I can’t live alone.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I say, and it’s true. I have always assumed, I suppose, that Stephen could manage quite well without me. I have regarded myself as an intrusion in
his life, though perhaps a necessary one.

I take a breath. ‘Stephen,’ I say. ‘Listen to me. This will be over soon.’ Echoing his words said over and over, too often, to me. ‘And things will be normal again.
We’ll all come back to our senses. We haven’t been ourselves, Stephen, this last while.’

He says nothing. My voice tapers off, becomes a whisper.

‘Stephen.’

The moon is inching up the sky. It casts a light into the room in which we stand. I think of her, this Gloria MacIvor, with her pasty skin and her hair dyed red.

Then I stand on tiptoe and kiss Stephen on the cheek, a contact as dry and light as a pressed flower. He doesn’t flinch. I go out the door and across the stoep to the grass. My car is
round the corner. As I walk towards it, my mother is there, waving her torch like a demented firefly. ‘Here,’ she hisses. ‘Here, here!’

‘Mother,’ I say. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Be careful,’ she tells me. She draws me close, holding my arm. In the shadow of the house we huddle like assassins.

‘Him,’ she says, pointing back to where Stephen stands, unmoving. ‘He’s trying to poison you.’

I kiss her too, and go to my car. I start up and drive back round the house, headlights jogging on the bumpy lawn. When I come to the gate I have to get out to open it. I leave it open behind me
and set out again on the long drive back to the city.

It seems our parting is to be a gentle affair. After this we do not speak on the phone every night. Stephen does call from time to time, but only to ask after David. Linda, I
think, guesses what has happened, but doesn’t let on. She fusses over me more than ever, plying me with cups of tea and asking if the business at home went well. Yes, I tell her, it all went
fine. I leave it at that. But I know even then that I can no longer remain here.

That Friday, shortly before Stephen is due to arrive, I take the plunge. I decide to tell Linda the whole story; there seems no sense in lying. She listens, enthralled, touching at her face now
and then with those bloodless nails. When I am done, she begins to cry: a single majestic tear trickles dramatically down her cheek. ‘You poor dear,’ she says, over and over, her high
thin voice scratching like an old record. ‘You can’t go. You mustn’t go. It’s he who must go, the bastard . . . bastard . . .’

Her voice sighs out. It’s odd to hear Stephen described that way: a bastard. The name strikes no chords in me. I remove Linda’s hand from my arm, I give her a tissue. My bags are
packed; time is short; my mind is made up. I thank them both.

I book in that night at a cheap hotel in town. This, the latest in the series of strange rooms to shelter me, is more depressing than any I have seen. It’s a dark cell, overshadowed by a
glass-topped wall too close outside. There is a single bed with a brown cover. The carpet is brown. The curtains are brown.

I want to cry, but can’t. Tears have become more difficult for me of late, requiring too much effort. But a crack has opened in me somewhere as I sit listlessly on the bed and stare,
unseeing, at the smoky square of the television set and the figures moving on it. The crack inside me widens. It’s the first night I’ve spent alone, utterly alone, in my life. There are
people who spend fifty years in this way. How do they keep on? How do they survive?

In the morning I phone Stephen at Linda’s flat and we agree to meet for coffee nearby. It’s been only a week since I saw him last, but I study him as someone long lost. He’s
getting old; there are lines in his skin. At his temples and in his moustache I discover small silver hairs are growing.