Absolution (18 page)

We arrive at the drab glass and metal building that houses the studio. A girl who always mispronounces my name greets us warmly at reception and escorts us upstairs. In the dream I sit down at a desk in the studio, and the production team smiles at me through the glass window of the control booth. They are waving … waving
fondly
I think, fondly because there
you
are, Laura, one of them. Not just one of them, but the boss, the head of the team, the one
calling the shots
. You lean towards your microphone and tell me just to let them know when I’m ready and they’ll begin recording. You show no sign of recognizing me as anyone other than the writer in your studio, the semi-celebrity who can walk down nearly any street in this country without being recognized, who is only noticed on the campuses of a few universities, and even there by a mere handful of students and professors. Abroad is a different matter. In the dream you appear unaware of – or wish to conceal – our kinship, and I sit there bewildered. Why should you be so pleasant but so distant? Is it a matter of not knowing? Are you not the daughter you appear to be, but her doppelgänger? Or are you ashamed of me, wishing for your colleagues not to know that you are the child of the monster who sits before them to read into a microphone, all the voices of her mind merging into a single furious shriek, for there is so much anger in the pages of this book (both the real and the dreamed, though they are different texts, telling different stories, equal in their rage) that in the dream (as well as in the real recording sessions this week) I have memories of previous sessions (dream memories of the real recording sessions, I presume) in which I have come to the point of shouting, screaming, breaking down in tears. My urbane New York editor will be unhappy with this. In his fey voice he asked for tension and suspense in my oral delivery, but
controlled, modulated, made safe for the ears and feelings of my auditory readers. In the dream I look down at the transcript of the book, open the cover, and find nothing but blank pages.
Go ahead
, you say to me, coaxing, smiling,
Go ahead, whenever you’re ready, just speak clearly into the microphone
. But there are no words on the page, I protest, holding up the transcript. There is nothing here to read, and I cannot remember it, I don’t remember the words, it doesn’t work like that, a memoir, even a fictionalized one, is a work of memory on the page; the individual words might lodge in my brain, but I cannot summon the text complete in my head. The text I have written does not reside within. You smile at me, looking patient, rather indulgent, and nod your head.
Take your time
, you say,
there’s no rush, we have the studio for the whole day, and you should just let us know when you’re ready to begin
. I page through the script, thinking perhaps I missed the text, that it will be there if I look again, but it remains obstinately blank. I cannot read from a blank book, I say. I cannot pretend there are words here when there aren’t, you must bring me the text that I used yesterday and the day before. I don’t have time for games, for these kinds of April Fool’s jokes. I am an old woman with feelings, and this is a serious business, the reading of one’s life. Suddenly you look cross, push back your chair, and stomp into the studio. You stand over me, pointing your finger, your face twitching as it used to when you were consumed with your own anger, but magnified a hundredfold, blocking out the rest of the room. Leaning over, you hiss at me,
You will read now, old woman, and you will read until you are done
. (Not
until you have finished
, but
until you are done
, dead, kaput.)
We don’t have all day
, you whisper between clenched teeth.
This is a very expensive studio to hire and you’re wasting our time and money
. On your body I catch the scent of wildness, of rage. I begin to tremble, and it is invariably at this point that I wake up, covered in sweat.

Waking from this dream and its multiple iterations over the course of the week, I have turned each time to your notebooks
or journals, I know not what to call them any more, because they are as much plans and appointments and random thoughts, all apparently giving nothing away that would be of use to anyone but me, the person in the position of the grieving parent, as they are a record of your life before you disappeared. (Am I not the grieving parent? I grieve and I was your parent, but I cannot fit my own position and my feelings with the image I have when the phrase
grieving parent
is pronounced: the sobbing woman with white hair, in a babushka, holding a broken body in her arms. I have not sobbed, there has never been a body to hold, the babushka my mind has borrowed from photos of disaster zones, wars, and battlegrounds. I could never be that woman I see, searching for her unburied dead.)

Every Saturday, I speak to your father on the phone. We ask each other,
Have you heard from her?
We’ve been asking this for two decades. I tell him about the dreams I have been having of you, their vividness, my belief that they signal your continuation, and your rage – rage directed at me specifically. It is something we both feel. We are both responsible. Your father is convinced he failed to support you adequately in your beliefs – beliefs that, at the very least, we both shared, even if we drew the line at some of your activities. You talk to us, relentless, haranguing, banging around in our brains, beseeching. We cannot put you to rest.

*

You and Sam sat apart on one side of the fire, with the lion and jackal, Lionel and Timothy, on the other. There should have been obvious questions from each party for the other – questions you would have asked them, questions they must have had for you. Why were two young students – for that is what they said they were, at least that is how you describe them in your notebooks – camping alone in the mountains? Why was a lone woman with a small child driving a truck through a hazardous, untarred mountain pass after dark? The two parties looked at each other
across the campfire. Did you trust them intuitively, as the boy trusted you? Your notebook is silent about this. You had locked the cab of the truck, the keys were safe in your pocket, so there was no worry about the men stealing the vehicle, though perhaps you allowed yourself to imagine the worst in order to be prepared, to see yourself being forced to the ground, the keys stripped from your body, the way you would fight, how you would claw at their faces, call on Sam to attack them, to bite at their legs as the dog had bitten at yours. But these men had innocent, children’s faces. You brought out your Safari Dates, and the men offered to share their dinner. Sam nibbled a hot piece of bread and drank water, but had no appetite for anything more substantial. He laid his head against your side and you put an arm around him.

‘Lionel and I were wondering if we could ask you for a ride, if you’ve got room in the truck?’ Timothy said. ‘I know it’s presumptuous, and we’re strangers, and two men, and you’re a woman, but, at the risk of being inappropriate, I can assure you that you’d have nothing to fear from us. Nothing to fear, I mean, in the way that women so often have cause to fear men.’

‘Are you priests?’

‘No, not priests,’ Timothy laughed. ‘Though even if we were, would that really reassure you?’ This made him laugh even harder.

‘No,’ you agreed, trying to make yourself look relaxed and unafraid. ‘Where are you going?’

‘The Nuweveld. Outside Beaufort West.’

‘I’m going that way. Sam’s aunt lives in Beaufort West.’

‘Your sister?’

‘No.’ Through the fire and smoke you thought you saw Timothy raise a sceptical eyebrow. ‘What’s in the Nuweveld?’

‘We’re going to a clinic. It’s nearer Beaufort West than anywhere else. There’s nowhere particularly near to our clinic.’ Timothy held his hands over the blaze and Lionel muttered to him in a voice so low you could not make out his words. ‘You haven’t told us your name,’ he said.

‘Lamia.’

Lionel coughed and laughed. ‘Ah-ha, the night-monster.’ A cagy smile slashed through his face as he ran his hands down his hair, pulling it away from his body.

‘A sea monster, too. A shark. An owl. And a beetle,’ you said.
With brazen brows and lips that smile
. ‘My mother’s sense of humour.’

This was your invention, sowing confusion, as if to say you were and were not Lamia. You laughed to show you took it lightly. You were not your name, or not entirely your name, and the name was more than it suggested.

The two men looked at each other as if uncertain of you; Sam, filling the silence, moaned in his sleep, his arm twitching violently against your leg. You stroked his head, smiling to reassure the two men. They helped you put Sam to bed in their tent, tucking him into a sleeping bag, head on a pillow. How long, you wondered, since the child had slept as a child should, head cushioned, covered in blankets? How many nights had he slept in a moving truck, upright, or slumped against the door, the dog standing sentry over him?

You and the men returned to the fire and sat together drinking Old Brown Sherry out of tin cups. With antiseptic and cotton wool Timothy treated the wound on your leg, which had swollen up red and black. ‘A stray,’ you explained, ‘at a picnic stop. It was trying to get our food. I didn’t see it.’

‘You’ll have to see a doctor about it. It might have been rabid.’

‘I’ve known rabid dogs. This one was not. It was just mean.’ You asked them about themselves. They explained that it was the long vacation, the time when they could be away from university, doing good works, gaining experience, whatever boys who leave the city do when they’re away. And then Lionel turned the conversation.

‘Terrible things going on.’

‘Yes, terrible things,’ you agreed.

‘A dangerous time.’

‘A very dangerous time,’ you said. They did not know how dangerous.

‘Particularly for people like us. Young people.’

‘Yes, particularly.’

‘A very bad time.’

‘Indeed. The worst.’

To get this far, they had hitchhiked from Cape Town to George where they collected medical donations, and then from George to Oudtshoorn, before going on foot from Oudtshoorn into the pass. They had their tent, their sleeping bags, medical supplies for an emergency and enough food for a week of travel, which was the longest they reckoned it might take them to reach the clinic on foot if they couldn’t pick up another ride.

‘The clinic is funded by Lionel’s parents and their rich friends,’ said Timothy, smiling.

‘Which makes it sound like he’s from the gutter.’ Lionel elbowed his friend. ‘His mother is the head doctor at the clinic. What do you do?’

‘I used to be a reporter,’ you said, half-truthful. ‘I worked for the
Cape Record
.’

‘That must have been interesting.’

‘Yes, interesting.’ Too careful to say more, you watched the men hold their breath, as if doubting whether you were all on the same side. Were the sides so clear? you wondered.

‘And now you drive a truck?’ Lionel asked.

‘Now I drive a truck.’ You did not speak like a truck driver and Timothy again looked sceptical.

‘And your boy?’

‘As you say, it’s the long vacation. He comes with me when he’s not in school.’

It was late and you all began to yawn and stretch as the silences lasted longer. After half an hour you left the two men, saying goodnight as family would, with a familiar kiss on the cheek. In the tent, you folded your body into a corner, lying on the ground
next to Sam, but unable to sleep yourself, a curse that returned always at the worst times, when sleep was what you needed most. As a child, you remember, you would pray to be able to remove your eyes, to dream as others dream, as if the eyes alone were responsible for waking or sleeping.

You watched Sam breathing, his thin lips parted, crooked teeth catching the light from the fire that filtered through the green material of the tent. The light carried the thick odour of wood smoke and returned you to earlier fires on the beaches of childhood holidays, to the farm for funerals and weddings, numberless ceremonies of the everyday and the extraordinary, fires built of acrid-smelling brush and lemon wood, fires built of pines that popped and fizzed with sap, fires built with coals and lighter fluid over which slabs of beef and fish were grilled, dripping juices that spat and sizzled. Below the crackling and hissing of the campfire that night, you could hear the men whispering.

Before dawn you rose and crept to the truck, slipping past them, arms pillowing their heads in sleep. Using one of Bernard’s shirts stashed in a bag under the seat and water carried in a plastic bottle from the showers at the edge of the campsite, you scrubbed the worst of the blood from inside the truck’s cab, until what remained was only a brown stain that bled into the lighter brown vinyl upholstery. If they asked, you would tell them that Sam got nosebleeds, since children often do, and then you remembered that Sam
had
actually had a nosebleed. The deception would itself be a kind of truth.

You washed in the shower, bracing under the cold water, and changed into shorts and your last clean shirt. Outside, it was light enough to see yourself in one of the truck’s mirrors. There were purplish bags under your eyes and you had recently chipped one of your front teeth. It was not a face you liked, too much of me in the jaw and complexion, too slack in the cheeks.

Stealing back to the camp, you found Sam sitting outside the tent, staring up into the trees. Since arriving at the campsite the
night before, he had become affectless, less human, less present. ‘Did you sleep well?’

‘Can we phone my aunt? I want to go home now,’ a long high whine like a dog.

‘There’s no phone here. Come. Let me help you.’ You put Sam’s clothes, dirty with blood and vomit, into the campsite dumpster, and then dressed him in the last clean shirt and shorts in his small bag. At least you could count on delivering him to his aunt and being rid of the responsibility.

When the men woke, they brewed camp coffee and you drank in silence while Sam sipped from a tin of condensed milk. The usual formalities of travel, discussing a route, speculating about time and distance, detours, the boastful talk of men, these were all superfluous. There was only one logical way from there to Beaufort West, one road through the mountains.