Absolution (26 page)

With all best wishes for a happy holiday season and prosperous New Year,

Sam Leroux

*

I hold it together until we’re in bed, and then, finding the reassurance of Sarah next to me, the experiences of the last four months all burst from my face, running out of me, my heart seizing up, limbs twitching. I lose control, I rock, shake against her as she holds me, wait for her to put me back together again.

Absolution

Now that the terribly hot days had all but passed and the mist fell down more abundantly from the mountain, spreading its cloth of ephemeral whiteness through Clare’s garden, she gave Marie, who so rarely had a holiday, the week off for Easter.

‘I do not know how I shall cope on my own,’ Clare said, performing an exasperation she did not entirely feel. ‘I have almost forgotten how to cook.’

‘Shame, Clare. You’d think you were helpless. Listen, I’ve left meals in the freezer and all you have to do is take one out in the morning, let it defrost throughout the day, and just put it in the oven in the evening. I’ve written up some instructions for each one,’ Marie said, tying a scarf round her neck and handing Clare a printed sheet with cooking and household directions for each day of her absence. Marie was going to see a niece in Rustenburg and had plans to indulge in a little gambling, church going, and game viewing in the Pilanesberg Reserve. ‘I’m going to see a black rhino this time, finally. I’ve never seen a black rhino. And a
wildehond
. I can’t tell you how I long to see one of those. The countryside in that part of the world is unequalled in my mind. It is where I shall retire–’ she said, laughing, and then caught herself, a hand to the mouth in tentative regret. She was already past retirement age and for her to suggest the end of her working career was somehow also to imply the end of Clare’s life. For all that Clare knew they lacked common ground on the most basic and fundamental beliefs, Marie was a more efficient archivist and manager and all around helpmate than Clare had any hope of finding elsewhere. Mutual disagreement was part of their contract, and while she had no wish to hear Marie’s old-fashioned
opinions on the majority government or blacks in general or the rights of sexual minorities, Clare could not live without her; it was impossible to conceive of going forward without Marie.

With no one else to flick switches or close cupboards, open doors or answer the telephone on the rare occasions it rang, the few sounds that did occur of their own accord were magnified, reverberating as if in an echo chamber and imposing themselves upon Clare’s ears as a tangible rush of pressure. The crunch of the freezer contracting brought Clare to her feet, certain that someone must be in the kitchen, that perhaps Marie had changed her mind and would not abandon her after all, or that an intruder had somehow managed to stride across the dry grass, disable the alarm, force the locks, and was brazenly liberating Clare’s possessions in the next room. This was how it would happen, alone, the predators of the world sensing Clare’s vulnerability, the oldest member of the pack abandoned by the others and left for dead, for nature to work its efficient illusionism in which those who disappear are not merely offstage, slipped through a trapdoor, but are gone entirely, bodily.

After a day of starting even at the wind at the door, Clare spent twenty minutes closing all the curtains and blinds against the fast-falling night. Then, in a moment of irrational panic, she engaged the armoured external shutters that motored into place, sliding with the penitentiary ping of metal meeting metal. The special ventilation system came on automatically, blowing air of such bracing freshness, the moist feral smell of the mountain rushing in, that Clare felt almost liberated in her cell. She would put the alarm on later. She had never used the shutters before, insisting to Marie they would not succumb to the siege mentality. Unlike her neighbours’ houses, there was no threatening plaque with the face of an Alsatian on her perimeter wall, only the wall itself and its subtle fortifications, its shocking iron ivies and invisible motion-detector beams. The electrified wires bore no warning of
GEVAAR
or
INGOZI
, those conscientious betrayals alerting the criminal
to present danger. Those who would dare to intrude, Clare had decided, could risk pain or worse.

The defrosted meal for the first day of Marie’s absence was a tuna quiche typical of her culinary skills, which had been honed in the middle part of the last century when tinned vegetables and commercially preserved meats had their vogue. Since moving to the house Clare had taken to eating in front of the television, fatigued by the formality of laying a table every night, the two of them sitting and trying to make polite conversation about days that were so alike as to be indistinguishable one from the other. Now they had adopted a new pattern. Putting out a small dish of pretzels or potato chips for Clare, shredded kudu biltong for herself, and two glasses of wine poured from a box, Marie would ask at six each evening whether Clare wanted
table or trays
. Although making a performance of considering her mood, Clare would nonetheless now always settle on
trays
. Then they would sit in the lounge, eating from the freestanding wooden trays and watching Marie’s favourite soap operas. Outraged at the latest high jinks and proof of social chaos the soap stories seemed to offer, Marie would comment on the lives of the characters as if they were real people. ‘It’s this teenage pregnancy story again,’ she would say, shaking her head and clicking her tongue against her palate. ‘Remember earlier this year Teresa was pregnant from Frikkie.’ Or ‘It’s this whole discrimination story again, as if we haven’t had enough of that already.’
Story
for
problem
or
palaver –
it was a way that Clare’s sister and the Pretorius in-laws once had of speaking. After a couple hours of such entertainment Clare would excuse herself, going to bed with a book, which she would read on and off throughout the night between short periods of sleep.

Without Marie, Clare went through the evening routine on her own as well as she could, although she became distracted by the news and overcooked the quiche, having to peel a layer of
burned custard from the top. She forced herself to make a salad, eating without much appetite in front of the television. It was half in her mind to watch something other than the two soap operas that she and Marie usually followed, but the theme tune of the first came on and she was surprised to find that she wanted to know what was happening with Teresa and Frikkie and Zinzi and Thapelo. At some point she fell asleep with the tray rolled to one side and woke after nine with an American action movie banging across the screen. The dishes would have to wait until morning. She piled them in the sink, knowing that Marie would be disgusted.

‘Dirty dishes attract vermin,’ Marie would have said. ‘And I don’t just mean mice and roaches, but
snakes
, I’m telling you. I heard that Mrs Van der Westhuizen had snakes last month because she’d been leaving the dishes out for her girl to do the next morning.’

Mice and roaches, snakes and other creatures, they were welcome tonight if they wished, provided they could penetrate the shutters that transformed the carapace of the house into a patchwork of steel and stone.

Clare was too tired to read, but kept the book she was trying to finish next to her on the bed. At some point in the night she would be wide awake and need to make the hours pass. Initially she had blamed the house for her insomnia, convinced there was something wrong with its chemistry. She’d had it tested by half a dozen environmental experts and no problems were detected. Then she had been certain it was the orientation of the structure, or some shortcoming in the way she and Marie had arranged the furniture. Though not believing in such things, she had consulted a woman from Mowbray who claimed to be a feng shui master. She made small adjustments to the placement of chairs and sofas, turned Clare’s bed to face the window, hung two mirrors, and pronounced the space well balanced for a house of its kind. This still did not solve the problem. Then Clare had paid a German
interior designer from Constantia to repaint all the rooms in soothing neutral colours with non-toxic paint, but this made no difference either.

‘Maybe it’s a problem with you and not with the house,’ Marie had said. ‘I have no trouble sleeping myself, unless I forget to drink enough water during the day and then I get the most
terrible
cramps in the middle of the night.’

Clare snorted and rolled her eyes.

‘I’m only suggesting that maybe you should see someone about it. They say that insomnia may be, what did they say–?’

‘You’ve been playing doctor online again. Practising medicine without a licence.’

‘–
indicative
. They say that insomnia may be
indicative
of a more serious problem.’ There again was the click of the tongue, one hand on the waist, one pointing in accusation. ‘You should get it checked out, I’m telling you.’

More to satisfy Marie than out of any hope of a cure, Clare had subjected herself to blood work, heart monitors, and brain scans. All established there was nothing physically wrong with her – she was remarkably healthy for a woman of her age. Her doctor suggested psychoanalysis, but this was something she could not face. She spoke with her cousin Dorothy, who had suffered insomnia in the past, and she suggested Clare consult a traditional healer, a sangoma.

‘They know what they’re doing. It’s not just witch doctor’s bones and that kind of nonsense. They use herbs. It might help,’ she had said. ‘It couldn’t hurt, I don’t think, if you get a reputable one.’

‘Where is one meant to find what you call a “reputable” traditional healer?’

‘Look in the phonebook – or ask your gardener. They always know.’

Clare worried that Adam might misconstrue such a request and could not bring herself to do it. More to the point, the
kwaksalwers
of ‘western’ medicine were one thing, diviners and interpreters of the spirit world, mediums for the souls of ancestors, quite another.

Certain the problem would eventually go away, she stopped fighting the insomnia and made an accommodation with it, coming to know it as a shadow self that, like an infant, commanded attention and amusement and sustenance. It would not be cajoled into silence until some number of pages had been read, notes taken, thoughts rearranged into a tentative grid of stillness and order, each tucked tidily in its compartment, maintaining the peace for an hour or two until the insomnia grew bored or restless and demanded the game start all over again, thoughts spinning themselves in circles of frenetic repetition. It was a way of being, if an unsatisfactory one.

When her husband had first left her and she was forced to sleep alone after all those years spent with a warm body beside her, Clare had been astonished at how cold the bed was with only her bones to fill it. He left in winter and for the first few nights she had continued to sleep on her customary side, nearest the door, stuffing pillows along what had been William’s side to block the draught created by her own body. After a week of being crowded by these soft objects that remained lifeless and motionless, never adjusting themselves to her nocturnal movements, she realized the most sensible thing was to sleep in the middle of the mattress, flexing her body to its limits. This helped with the warmth, but ultimately she blamed that earlier bout of insomnia on William’s absence. They were still cordial with each other, although he had left her for another woman, someone only a year younger than she. It seemed to suggest that her husband’s straying attention had nothing to do with Clare’s face or ageing body, but instead that he had grown tired of her personality. A month after his departure, she had phoned him to complain.

‘I cannot sleep without you,’ she snapped.

‘Take a lover,’ he said, in a way that sounded half-mocking. ‘Or get a blow-up doll.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, William. I can’t get used to the extra space. You’ve left a gap.’

‘Then downsize. Buy yourself a luxurious single bed, a canopy. Make yourself over into a dowager princess.’ He could be like this, teasing in a way he claimed was affectionate.

There was a silence between them on the line. On his end, only the other side of the city, around the mountain on the Atlantic coast, she could hear seagulls braying.

‘Did I do something wrong?’ she asked. ‘Was there something else I should have done?’

He sighed and she could hear him adjusting the receiver against his face, the microphone amplifying the sound of the plastic surface making contact with his stubble.

‘No, my dear, there’s nothing else you could have done or should have done. Don’t torment yourself by thinking that you failed to do anything. You can blame me with good reason and tell everyone that’s the case. The acrimony can come raining down on my head. I’ve been selfish and I’m not proud of it, but there it is. The truth is, I’m happy now. I imagine I would have been happy in a different way if I’d gone on living with you, if I’d never met – sorry, I know you don’t want to hear about her.’

‘What is her name?’

There was another pause and a hesitation and then he said, as if the name itself were a sigh or exhalation of breath, ‘Aisyah.’

In a flash Clare had understood. William’s leaving really did have nothing to do with her. There had been many mistresses in the past, she knew, including a number of his students. She had suspected on one or two occasions that the relationships had resulted in serious complications and entanglements and unforeseen responsibilities. But with this new woman it was all about the possibility of a wholly different kind of life, a new way of living in a country alive to new promise.

That she might not wake in profound darkness, alone in her new house that would always feel too large, too self-directing and sentient, able to reorganize its own architecture into something completely unexpected – a museum or morgue, for instance – the moment its inhabitants lapsed in their vigilance, Clare left the light on in the passage and put herself to bed.