Absolution (27 page)

After an hour of turning first left and then right she had nearly fallen asleep when there was a sudden interruption in the light, as if from a momentary power outage – or worse, from the movement of someone passing between her and the door. She lay as still as she could, listening for a noise, remembering she had forgotten to engage the alarm. There was no sound apart from the hum of the ventilation system and the soughing flow of air, but Clare was certain she had registered a change in the light through her closed eyelids. She supposed it might have been a power outage –
load shedding
was the supplier’s euphemism, as if provision of a basic service were a burden to be borne – but it had not felt like that, and the transition from the public utilities to her own generator should have been seamless. No, there were people in her house, friends or family of her dead brother-in-law, one of his six brothers and sisters or countless cousins, men and women as old as Clare herself, come to remind her once again of the knowledge they possessed about her. The removal and return of the wig was not enough; now they were intent on tormenting her in new and more terrible ways. As with the invasion at the old house on Canigou Avenue, her heart took over, beating in terror and outrage that anyone should dare to enter.

The light was interrupted again, and then remained so, half of what it should have been. Someone was standing in the doorway to Clare’s room. If this is going to be the end of me, let it come, she thought, and opened her eyes.

Clare

I cannot bear it any more, my vision, conjured out of horrible imagination, of you trussed like a lean pig, waiting for your fate in that titanium cage, clicking for your sanity. I try again what I have tried before. I offer you the cup, a song of my own invention, and wish for you to cohere again, my wandering daughter. In the garden I make a fire of dried leaves from the neighbour’s eucalyptus tree and a pile of twigs cut last winter from the branches of the stinkwood. It crackles and smokes and turns itself over into a gentle blaze. I pour honey and milk on the flames, a glass of wine, and water that has run down from the mountain. In the absence of barley, I sprinkle white cornmeal over the fire, grinding the grain between my palms. I do it correctly this time. I pray to you Laura, plead with you to come forth, promise to sacrifice a black sheep in your honour. I prick my finger to summon you, extract a drop of my blood to body you forth. I did not do it properly before: the bloodshed was only in my mind. I drone and squeak. I dance with steps of my own devising, an unbalanced dervish, hair in the wind, a blue crane, a crone. I keen as I should have keened before. The ibises watch me and cry out in chorus.

I wait until the fire burns itself out, knock the coals apart, heap them with ash, see the windows of my neighbour’s house go black as, bored by my theatrics, he finally puts himself to bed. I told Marie I did not wish to be disturbed, but no doubt my neighbour has been watching as neighbour-men do, passing judgement in his way. He will tell the other neighbours, the grandees of the Constantia Club, that Clare Wald practises witchcraft. They will read the new book to see if there are any hints to the nature of my devilry. I predict a spike in local sales. I no longer care if I am seen
and thought mad – or worse, sane and an agent of evil.

In the darkness with the moon spitting off the mountain, I sit before my pile of ash, running my fingers through the grey feather-petals. Silence, and breeze that stirs the cinders, but you have not come. Myth is only myth. Perhaps you are too long dead. Perhaps the recipe or incantation had a flaw.

I go inside, locking the doors behind me, engaging the alarm that makes Marie and me feel secure until morning. With the disappointment at your failure to appear, there is also comfort. If you do not rise, there is still a chance you are not dead. But if not dead, then where are you, Laura? Where have you taken yourself? It does not seem possible that you would wander the world without contacting one of us – and if not your father or me, then at least your brother. You cannot still be in captivity; that is only a discomforting fantasy. No, you can only be dead, and I am no believer in the supernatural. It was foolish to pretend I was.

I shower and roll myself into bed, crack my back straight, turn on my side, and bury my head half in the pillow. In sleep I drift through dreams of you, always dreams of you abandoning me, and if not abandoning, then caged, your body exposed, waiting to be consumed by sharks, the bones picked by palm-nut vultures when the tide goes out, bones sinking into the estuary silt, waiting for the next age to discover you, this country’s own bog woman, victim of the gladiatorial ring with victims of your own.

My scream pulls me out of sleep and I sit erect in bed, blankets swirling around me, because I felt your breath and the coldness of your hand, and now, out of sleep, you come screaming back at me on black rag wings burned with blood, chanting a haunting cry into my eyes. You worm yourself between my toes and infect my bowels, a tapeworm foetus angry for rebirth.

I wake up screaming, and Marie comes to my door. She is the keeper of my secrets. I could never let her go. ‘Nothing is wrong,’ I say, ‘only a bad dream.’

But it was no dream, and you have not come alone.

As quickly as you arrive you disappear into the shadows, leaving only Nora, who flies on currents of white noise, the sound of wind coming down the mountain or the air of this house being stirred by its hidden rotors.

She arrives with the murmur of two cushions compressing, air being forced out by her weight, the ripping sound of two pieces of fabric rubbing warp against weft. She sits on the chair nearest my bedroom door. I know immediately it is Nora, and her presence is so real that my brain, lesioned by trauma, tells my hand to reach for the panic button until I hear Nora’s voice in my head, warning me that she will be long gone by the time the security guards have arrived and I will be made to look like a mad old woman, asked if I have been sleeping well, if I have spoken to my doctor about the things I think I’ve seen, if I am taking all my medication. I take no medication.

‘Then perhaps you should,’ she says.

Nora’s voice, the sing-song amusement of young womanhood, consumes me in an acid bath. I know it as well as the voice of my parents and your own lost voice, Laura. I can summon you all to ring in my mind, you and your brother, your father, my dead and my living. I can speak all of you aloud in my own feminine way. And now I learn I can summon you all too well. I want to send you back. I have made a mistake! This is all the proof I need. I accept you are dead, now leave the living in peace.

My sister, the Nora I have unwittingly conjured, has a sense of humour that she lacked in life. She sits with me for hours through this night, passing comment on my works, all the books she never had the chance to read, speculating on their meaning. She has turned herself into an eternal reader, benefitting from the underworld’s great lending library. Rightly, she finds herself in each of my books, appearing in one form or another, sometimes young, more often old, male and female, human or lesser animal. Once I cast her as a hurricane, a storm of such unpredictable ferocity that it defeated the meteorologists and destroyed an
unprepared swath of American shoreline. Another time she was a drought of long duration, teasing the suffering heroine with storm clouds that never broke into rain. She is an admirably flexible talent, bending to suit my purpose.

She wears the yellow taffeta cocktail dress in which I last saw her, its skirt arranged coquettishly around her knees, spine erect, lips pursed into her customary pout. Her skin remains firm where mine is now loose, her eyes bright and clear where mine have lately begun to dim, to cloud, wandering independent of my will. The only change I see in her now is the presence of a round, dark cavity. It is a perfect circle on the left side of her face: a hole into which one might insert a finger. Around it a reddish-black fire rages in quiet stillness across the surface of her pale skin. It is the hole for which I must bear responsibility, the fatal orifice and eternal flame burning from beneath a marble slab. In the last moment of her life it opened to consume three-quarters of her face.

‘I have only been speaking about myself. But how are
you
, dear sister?’ she finally says after hours of explicating my texts. ‘By the by that last book was a
triumph
if I may say so, but what a lot of obscenities. Mother and Father were not at all sure what to make of the language.’ After another quarter hour of such annoying small talk – not quite my idea of a proper haunting – she falls silent and approaches me, her movements halting as if her bones were centuries older than my own, and leans over, placing her hand against my heart. I feel pressure as through the cold numbness of anaesthesia, and then that pressure penetrates my skin and wraps itself around the beating organ, slowing the heart to a less panicked time. I wish I could say that her trick does not frighten me, but in fact it does. My hands tremble; I mewl like a kitten and ask her to stop.

I try to consider the situation with my usual logic. It occurs to me that I might actually be asleep, and that I am experiencing a new kind of dream giving vent to the guilt I have carried for
so long. The problem with this logic is that my customary stress dreams are always of an entirely different order and have no physical effects.

Some weeks ago I dreamed that I was visiting a busy European city, half Paris, half London, walking from one side of the metropolis to the other, at once escaping some ill-defined threat and running towards an appointment whose exact nature I could not discern, but which I knew I could not afford to miss. At the intersection of two wide boulevards I was compelled by a local guide, a short woman with a brown pageboy and wire-rimmed spectacles who spoke with a stammer, to take a detour into a subterranean museum, the entrance to which was red and mouth-like, the walls scarlet and stairs black – altogether a quite unimaginative rendering of hell – from whence clouds of steam billowed. I was wearing a wool coat that I had recently bought in my waking life, and which I decided to leave at the entrance, knowing it would be too hot to wear inside. I assumed I would only be a few moments and that no harm could come to it. Once I had made my way down into the museum (which had exhibits that made little sense – dioramas of civic worthies who had been recast by history as traitors and rogues, a tableau of slum clearances, a collection of the skulls of murder victims housed in reliquary boxes), the air cooled by several degrees and I began to shiver. At the same time that I felt need of my coat once again, I realized that in order to continue my journey I would have to progress to the very end of the museum, on the other side of the river that bisected the city. Only forward movement was allowed. It was impossible to turn around and retrieve my coat, and in realizing this I felt the tour guide had tricked me into abandoning the very thing I would need most on my visit. It was forbidden to go back to the entrance and every time I attempted to do so I found that the museum itself had closed off its passages behind me, walls and gates and barriers rolling themselves into place. The coat was lost – I had no idea on which street the entrance to the museum
had been, meaning that I would, in all likelihood, never retrieve it. This sudden loss filled me with a dread disproportionate to the real value of the thing – coats and clothes are not, moreover, items that much trouble me in waking life. A garment has utility and may be replaced when worn out or, indeed, lost. I have never endowed my own clothing with sentimental attachment.

Last night I dreamed that I had agreed to reprise a role I’d played as a girl in a school production of a holiday-themed play, filling in for an ill performer as the adolescent love interest of the main character. But as the night of the performance approached, I realized I had failed to study the script and knew none of the character’s lines. Nor could I remember the blocking, which, it occurred to me, would have changed anyway since it was a new interpretation of the story. More significantly, at the last minute I agreed to take the unsympathetic lead role, which I had never studied. The character had the most lines and was on stage for nearly every minute of the play. As I was panicking about learning the script, which I could not even locate, an old lover phoned to ask if he should come to the performance and I insisted, yes, he
must
come, and he
must
bring his mother (a common woman with a weakness for Victorian sentimentality, she had been a pub landlady in London’s East End) because she would love it – a haunting production, it was done with the utmost professionalism, with extraordinary sets and wonderful performers, a genuine evocation of nineteenth-century Christmas festivity. When I hung up I felt sick, knowing there was nothing remotely professional about my failure to prepare my lines.

I know what such dreams mean. The loss of the coat, being tricked into abandoning something I will need in the future that protects and comforts, I can only assume is about the fear of dispossession, of becoming dispossessed. I would not believe in such things if the dream and its variations were not so persistent in my unconscious life. The dream of ill-preparedness is more obvious, and comes most often when I am worried about an
impending public appearance. I know why this dream has returned. I have agreed to something I should never have, the appearances at the Winelands Literary Festival in five months’ time that will put me before my public, such as it is, and the series of lectures in Johannesburg that are the price Mark has extracted from me for hijacking his identity in the new book. It is a kind of exposure I can barely stomach.

But Nora’s presence, and your own brief coming, Laura, does not have the quality of a dream. If it is not an actual haunting, then it is some kind of hallucination or delusion, a projection of my own disturbed mind. And if that is what it is, like the insomnia I have been suffering off and on for the last several years (perhaps it is even an effect of the insomnia, the hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation), then I can see no point in resisting it.