None to Accompany Me (21 page)

FUNK DOGS HIPHOP ROCK ELECTRIC PETALS INSTANT KARMA

An intense discomfiture filled the room as if the temperature were rising. The girl was disposed of like a body. She
was
a body, in the solution that had been found; nothing else. The other aspects of the situation that had brought them together had been withdrawn—emotions, motives and responsibilities nobody knew how to deal with. Didymus gathered his wife and daughter; the girl walked out before him without glancing at anyone except—a moment—up at Oupa; Vera saw the movement of the head, from behind, and could not tell whether the look was in compact or defiance; but she saw no responding change in Oupa's face. Didymus gave a nod to Vera: —We'll call.— Oupa was imploring her with his eyes and his stranded stance not to leave with the Maqomas. In sudden distress Vera wanted to waylay them —Don't treat her as if she's a criminal, put your arms round her, hug her, she's your daughter— but the girl, walking alone before her parents, was gone down the corridor. Vera slowed to keep to the hesitant pace of Oupa accompanying her, urgent to speak. —I wasn't the first one she'd been with.—

—Oh what does that matter. Why tell me. It's not the point.— Vera was impatient with him for burdening her with the confusion of excuses, if they could be accepted as such, she had thought of already.

—Not to you. But it would matter to her parents. I didn't want to make more trouble for Mpho, if I'd told them.—

They walked a few steps. —So you love her. You think you were in love with her.—

—I don't know. How can I be in love, I've got a wife.— He closed away from the intrusion.

—You mean you don't think you have the right to.— She smiled. —That doesn't prevent it coming about, you know.—

—When I say I don't know … she's such a kid, the time
when I might have a girl-friend like that, I was inside, those young years. But also she's seen, she knows, so many things I never have—London and Europe and so on … sometimes she even laughs at me, the things I don't know about. In one way she's too young, and in another way she's ahead of me. So I don't suppose we could ever get it right.—

As she drove home she realized she had not once, while there in the flat, been aware that this was One-Twenty-One. Otto's One-Twenty-One. With that unawareness, everything that place had been to her and her lover slipped out of grasp; no retracing of walls and footsteps along a corridor would bring it back, once let go, overlaid, it was disappeared for ever. No part of her was occupied by it.

That flat was now the scene where she, whose daughter would never have a child, was appointed to arrange to abort the child of someone else's daughter. The procuress. On the day when the Maqomas were to come and talk to her about arrangements, Didymus, once again, stood alone at the door. —Sally doesn't want anything to do with this.— He revised what Sibongile had said: Just get rid of it.

—She's still angry with me?—

—She has the idea you ought to sack the man.—

—How could she possibly expect that! Even if I had the power to, which I don't.—

—Of course. It's just that she's in such a state. I can tell you. It's not easy. After all, Mpho is our only daughter, we'd given up hope of having a girl and then she came along … Sally brought her up on her own, you know I was away most of the time. And Mpho just shuts herself off, she won't speak to her mother, she won't even speak to me, though I don't reproach
her, I'm prepared to forget about the whole business once it's been dealt with.—

Didymus looked so different, so—battle-weary, in comparison with the man in great danger who had smiled and said,
Vera how mean of you;
so isolated, in contrast to the man who lived in the solitude of disguise. She had the instinct to offer some sort of exchange of unexpected situations, as people who feel attachment for one another do; something private out of her own life. —You know Didy, Annie has become a lesbian.—

He glanced away, clucked his tongue bewilderedly. After a moment, an African exclamation: —Yoh-yoh! What makes you think that?—

—I didn't have to think; she's told me. That woman with her you met at the party, she's the other half of the couple.—

—I don't know what to say—I'm sorry? Does it worry you? D'you mind?—

—I think I do, but not morally; from my own point of view, you know, because I'm a woman.—

—I've never thought much about it—among our people, about men of that kind, I mean. They're around. Of course, it'll be part of our constitution that there'll be no discrimination against any sex … but that doesn't cover about your own child becoming—d'you have any idea what made her?—

—At present just … I suppose we believe we're responsible for what we think has gone wrong with our children and in their judgment hasn't gone wrong at all.—

—Sally and me, with Mpho.—

—Maybe. The villain of that whole business said something to me about Mpho and him. He supposed they couldn't ‘ever get it right' (he meant even if he wasn't married with kids), they've both been displaced, their relative ages don't tally naturally with their actual experiences, there's a dislocation that couldn't be
corrected. He missed out her teenage stage, in jail; she has a worldly sophistication beyond her years, because of European exile.—

—And our generation created both circumstances … well, it could be. Man, I don't know. But they wouldn't apply to Annie?—

—No.—

He saw that this was the limit of her confidences, for the time being; his old Underground experience in being alert to moods when people reveal themselves remained sensitive to the dropping and raising of barriers.

They discussed, as if the itinerary for a journey or the agenda for a meeting, the doctor Vera had managed to persuade —playing on his left-wing sympathies and lack of open activity in liberation politics—to salve his conscience, do his bit by removing an embryo from the daughter of an eminent couple who had suffered for the cause much disruption in their lives. A date and place were set.

Vera walked with Didymus, once again, to his car, this time there openly outside the gate. She hesitated at the window after he was seated. —Ben refuses to believe it—about Annie. He pretends not to know.—

 

The radio alarm clock Mpho had not been able to resist, duty-free, as she left London airport, woke her with its Japanese version of Greensleeves at the hour she had set. She lay with her fists at her mouth, feeling on them the soft double stream of breath from her nostrils. To awake in the very early morning when everyone else is unconscious is to be alone in the world.

She got up and went to the window, carefully pulled the curtain. All was blurred with mist and, set back on a hill, only the glass façade of a towering building glistened out of it, mirror to the still hidden sun. She took off the Mickey Mouse T-shirt she slept in, her breasts dragged up and bouncing back; threw the shirt on the bed and then picked it up again, rolled it and put it in her duffle bag. Naked, she packed some other clothes and a goggle-eyed toy cat. She went to the window to see one more time the radiant face witnessing her. As she pulled in her stomach muscles to zip up her jeans a sense of fear and wonder and disbelief at what was there, inside, held her dead still. A
lump of panic was suppressed with a swallow of saliva. She put herself together as she always was: frilled elasticized band circling her dreadlocks like an open blue rose on the crown of her head, another T-shirt with some other legend or logo on it, bright socks rolled round the ankles, black sneakers, the crook'd wires of one of her collection of earrings hooked through the soft brown tips of her ear-lobes. Mpho. That's Mpho. The mirror on her dressing-table caught her as the sun did the face of the building; there she is, nothing's changed. In her trembling sullen unhappiness, something overturned: she felt gaily released for a moment; nothing had ever happened, she had just got off the plane from London to meet the admiring glances of this country called home.

Nobody heard, nobody saw her close the front door behind her. In this white part of the suburban city only joggers were about, hamsters working their daily treadmill. She took an empty bus to a city terminal where blacks arrive from the townships to go to work. Street children lay in doorways as drifts of cartons, paper and banana skins lay in gutters. Women were setting out rows of boiled mealies, the venders of watches, sunglasses, vaseline, baseball caps, baby clothes, were unpacking their stock. A shebeen on a packing-case displayed litre bottles of beer and half-jacks of brandy, and before this altar a man still crazed from the drinking of the night danced round her to
mbaqanga
music coming from the stall-holder's cassette player. The freshness of the morning brought the smell of urine as dew intensifies the scent of grass. She passed through it all with an untouchable insolent authority beauty creates, going against the stream of workers, agile among the combis cornering, stopping and starting racing-circuit-style, smiling in response to remarks made to her
in the language no one who made them would believe she didn't understand.

There is dread at the sight of an empty bed.

Gone.

Gone, it says.

Where?

The contractions of fear; people kill themselves if they have been made to feel ashamed of their lives. From that comes the extreme of fear: what should have been done to avert the sight of the bed, there, empty. What has been done to bring it about. Sibongile knows—he doesn't have to say it, doesn't have to conceal—Didymus thinks she has been too harsh and judgmental towards the girl.

An appallingly reasonable conviction strikes her; of course. —She's gone to that man.—

He bunched his mouth. —Unlikely. He'd be scared. I think he's a weak character. Never mind his record as a comrade. I don't think he'd take her in, now.—

Sibongile rummaged again for some clue—no note, of course, if the idea is to punish your parents you certainly don't leave a note. Didymus followed her into the room, a place mute and accusatory. The odour of Mpho was there, the mingle of perfume and deodorants and skin-warmed clothing, sweaty sneakers, the mint-flavoured gum she liked. She could have run away to people they didn't know she knew, people picked up at those places young people frequent, Kippies, discos. Now something really terrible could be happening to her, rape, drugs.

They stood about in her absence.

—Why do you think she's done this?—

—Scared. She's scared of what's going to happen to her. The operation.—

—For heaven's sake. It's hardly an operation. I've told her, she'll be asleep, she won't feel anything. I even told her
I've
had it, so I know.—

A change in his face. —Why d'you do that.—

But Sibongile—Sally—belonged to the generation and the experience that saw emancipation in burdening their half-adult children with the intimate life of their parents. —Why not? So she wouldn't be scared.—

—But if you put yourself in the same boat—why should she feel there's anything wrong with her adventure with the man, why that whole business in the flat, her having to hide her face from us … you get pregnant, you have an abortion, doesn't matter, it's nothing to worry about.—

—Oh you make me mad. Isn't what's happened enough without you … d'you think she shouldn't be allowed to know what our life was like sometimes in exile, how hard up we were, couldn't even keep the boys with us, how could we have another child those days in East Germany! You always want to protect her from everything, and then look what she brings on herself … As if what I
had
to go through has anything to do with her playing around with someone else's man and getting herself pregnant!—

He spread and then dropped his hands: not prepared to argue. —I'm going to his flat to see if he knows where she is.—

Sibongile was due to take part in a press conference—it would be that very morning the child chose to run away, God knows where. She was dressed for public exposure. In her distraction and anxiety she had put on as a general does his uniform her tailored skirt and jacket, her accoutrements of small gold
ear-rings (nothing showy), her carved wooden bracelets—as royalty is expected to wear garments and jewellery designed and made in their own country, a walking billboard for home products, she always saw to it that she included on her person some example of African craft. It's understood—and she exacted this from her co-workers—that personal obligations must be subordinate to the cause, always had been in exile and clandestinity and were no less now, round conference and negotiation tables. Public exposure may be an armour within which trembling flesh is hidden. Photo opportunities (that's what the press asks for) are the victim's obligation to wear a persona separated by duty from self.

It simply was not possible, for Sibongile; not possible, if she was what she had taken responsibility to be in the Movement, for her to telephone and leave a message that her chair would be vacant—because? Because a foolish child had got herself into a mess and punished her mother by leaving a deserted bed. When she was ill and alone, in London, with a baby to care for, could she expect to call her husband back from wherever they might have sent him, another country, another continent?

She stood there, looking at Didymus, unable to leave. All the partings and reappearances, the arrivals and departures, the climates and languages, the queueing for rubber-stamped entry and exit were present between them, as a wind gathers up a spiral of papers in dust.

He released her. —Go on. I'll call. I'll leave a message for someone to slip to you.—

The lift did not move; he stabbed at each button in turn. A beer can rolled into one corner had dribbled its dregs and caked dirt on the floor. He climbed stairs and walked corridors
to number One-Twenty-One, passing napkins, T-shirts and underpants hung to dry over the burglar bars of kitchen windows, doors with their sections of stippled glass replaced by cardboard, bags of trash in doorways, a bicycle frame without wheels he had to step round: our people moving into the shell of middle-class life without the means or habits that give it any advantage. So they inhabit it and destroy the very thing they believe they wanted. It becomes the ghetto we think we've escaped. Only it costs much, much more. The white landlord cuts the water supply because ten people in a two-roomed flat, multiplied by ten storeys, strain the sewage system beyond the capacity it was installed for; the rent falls into arrears and the electricity supply is disconnected. This building with its mirrored foyer and panelled lifts hasn't got there yet but it's on the way, it's on the way. Isn't this what our ‘education for democracy' is all about, after you've learnt to make your cross on a bit of paper, after you've learnt not to allow yourself to be bribed or intimidated to vote for someone you don't trust to govern your life: it's about not occupying the past, not moving into it, but remaking our habitation, our country, to let us live within the needs of space and decency our country can afford. And that's what the whites have to learn, too. Luxury's a debt they can't pay. A good thing he wasn't called upon to make speeches any more; something more easily recognizable as rousing than this would be required.