The House Gun (10 page)

Claudia is not looking at him as she speaks. Her head is turned away. If it were to control tears it would break the tension which is both hostile and exciting, his heart gushes like a geyser at his breast, against her. She does not offer tears; she asserts the severance of not seeing him. What has happened has brought into the order of the townhouse what it wasn't built to contain; she's right, there—their life together was not equipped to sustain itself so far, to this edge. People have ambition that their sons should go further ; theirs has made of this a horror.

She said once, What did I do to him that you didn't do? He wanted to say now in his controlled voice that he could use with the force of a shout, And what is it I
didn't
do for him that you didn't do? Why me?
Because I'm the man.
That sudden resort to
the female tactic. Putting on the sheep's clothing of weakness when it suits you. I'm the man and so I'm responsible, I buy shares whose profits you spend, money that kills, I made him a murderer, a dead chicken and a man with a bullet through the head, it's all on the road to hell.

Hostility had sucked all communication into its vacuum. If he'd opened his mouth, God knows what would have come out.

So Harald is able to believe his son did it and that he must be punished. No confession (already made), repentance in exchange for forgiveness possible. So much for the compassion of Harald's God and of his Only Son who was conceived not of penetration and sperm (because that's human and dirty) but who took on himself all human sin to cleanse all others who sin. So much for the religious faith that the father had lived by in moral superiority, going off to pray and confess (what?) every week, and every Sunday taking the small boy with him to give him the guidance for his life, the brotherly love and compassion decreed from on high while the mother turned over in bed and went back to sleep. She carried about within her the wretched apostasy of the father as she had carried the foetus he had implanted when she was nineteen.

T
he great eye of the sun bleared under a cataract of cloud: the diffused glare confused the planes of the face so that for a few moments Harald and Claudia were not sure which black face this was. They were in the parking ground among police vans, he locked the car with the touch on the electronic device, out of habit, they were turned to the fortress. There was recognition acknowledging them, in the face; they and the man approached each other across the space between arrival and the entrance doors that always seemed so long to cover. Khulu. What was it again: Dladla. From the property where the cottage was. From the house, the sofa. He was leaving after a visit to Duncan. Duncan was back in a cell from the madhouse. They were going to Duncan. A strange suffusion of warmth accompanied their coincidence. Harald had not seen the man since waiting in the house stared at by that other eye, the computer, Claudia probably had not seen him at all since some invitation to the house given by their son in a time before what happened. She found no purpose, nothing to be learnt in going to be confronted by the place, it could only be like being forced to look at a grave where after a post-mortem duly performed
a man had been stowed out of mind. The victim disappears, the perpetrator remains. It could only rouse revulsion at what the room had witnessed, and she couldn't risk this revulsion against the one who said he had performed the act.

Nkululeko ‘Khulu' Dladla. He, too, brought to the prison what was missing, Duncan
himself,
somewhere existing outside. Any grim redolence of the house he had about him was evaporated in the glare on prison gravel; they felt some sort of gratitude. They had no-one else; only Hamilton.

A curved tooth of some captured feline set in gold tangled with an ornate Ethiopian cross on the broad breast in the opening of a shirt left unbuttoned. A gleam of cuff-links and a red-stone ring —these elaborations along with the other, anti-materialist convention of frayed jeans and sneakers—he was normality, a variety of contemporary ordinariness made surprising, simple freedom appearing in the sterility of this space before blind walls, like a daisy pushing up through stones.

—No, man, he's okay. I think so. I really do. I would have come before but, like, I didn't know how he'd feel. To see me, and so on. He's all right.—

This was one of the two friends who had found their friend with his sandal hanging from the thong on his foot, killed by a bullet from a gun that belonged casually to all who used the house, shared brotherly as the cigarette packs lying about and the drinks in the kitchen. He was one of two friends who ran to the cottage to tell their other friend something terrible had happened.

And suddenly, as they stood so close together in shelter before the prison he'd left and they were about to enter, his face very near them struggled with a changing tension of muscles and his eyes, appalled by what was overcoming him, grew large, brimming. He drew tears through his nose with the unashamed snort of a child.

Claudia put a hand on his arm.

But a man must not be patronized or humiliated by the hiatus of another man's silence: Harald himself had been blinded in this
way, once, driving back from the prison at the beginning of awaiting trial.—I'm sure he was glad to see you. It was good of you to come. Thank you.—

Duncan's manner stopped their mouths against any concern about how the ordeal under scrutiny among the schizophrenics and demented had passed. And he did not acknowledge to them that there had been a visitor before them. He had ready a list of things he wanted attended to and time was on his heels, they must know as well as he did, by now, how soon the warders would shift from one heavy foot to another: back to the cell. There was a distanced practicality in his delivery. As if the probing of doctors had shaken him out of some stunned condition, in there, that place where the human mind in all the frightening distortions of its complexity is exposed. They were to get in touch with Julian Verster (they would know how to do that? If not at home, then at the firm, the architects' office) and get him to remove what was still on his, Duncan's, drawing board. Plans. The work he was in the middle of. —I can do it here. They can't stop me. Motsamai's arranged it. And tell Julian to bring everything I need, everything, down to the last pen. Motsamai's arranged for a table.—

Harald noted dictated payments that had to be made: overdue. Time must have been destroyed with everything else in Duncan's life, and now the sense of what had passed, stopped dead at the moment of the act, had to be reckoned with. Insurance for the car. And it ought to be put up on blocks. To protect the tyres. The battery disconnected. Unless she would like to use it—for a moment the son was aware of her, remembered as if it were to be taken seriously his mother's jaunty enjoyment when she once tried out driving the second-hand Italian sports car; a vehicle for the transport of a young man's past life.

—The policy should be in a drawer. The bedroom. A file with other things.—

Harald has no need to make a note of this, he has been there before, looking into what was not for his eyes.

There were letters for posting. These were allowed by the prison
authorities to be handed over, awaiting trial there are still some personal rights left, and Harald put the envelopes under the flap of his jacket pocket without looking at them. His son watched the letters stowed, as if à ship were disappearing over his horizon; no horizon within prison walls. And he knows these two will look to see to whom he's writing letters, once they're away from this place. And they'll want to know, desperately want to know what's inside, what someone like him has to say to these names they recognize or don't recognize. (Everyone wants to know what's inside him, everyone.) They'll want to know because what he's thinking is what he'll write and what he's thinking in the cell is what he is, the mystery he is for them, my poor mother and father.

They promised a twelve-year-old boy that whatever he did, anything, whatever he was, anything, they would always be there for him. And here they are, sitting facing him in the prison visitors' room.

Plan.

The plan their son is going ahead to draw in a prison cell—office block, hotel, hospital—what is it—predicates something that will come about. Ahead. Belief. Steel and cement and glass, in this form; yet an assumption of a future.

M
essengers.

The Senior Counsel's secretary faxed the message and Harald Lindgard's secretary brought the missive to his desk. She entered softly in consideration and laid it before him just as she would a letter for signature but of course she knew what such messages concerned. Mr Motsamai had set aside ‘the afternoon hours' for them, three-thirty onwards. As usual, the attendant at chambers' underground garage would reserve space for their car if Mr Lindgard's secretary called to give the registration number. Whatever portent messengers bear they have no responsibility, cannot help; all she could do was call the attendant with the necessary information which, of course, she memorized as part of her job.

Harald picked up Claudia at the surgery. Although the message had come at short notice—he heard her receptionist, Mrs February's question, what should she do about patients' appointments, when would the doctor expect to be back, answered with a gesture of dismissal. From Claudia, this time: to hell with them. But he saw it detachedly as the deterioration of her personality, since without the ethics of her doctoring she had no support.

What did they talk about in the car? Neither would remember. Maybe they hadn't spoken at all, each preferring it that way. They were already seated in the room when Motsamai—Hamilton—came in with the animation of a long lunch, like an actor backstage after leaving an appreciative audience.

—Got caught up!—

Dumped a raincoat, flung hands apart, a smile that seemed to belong with the last pleasantries and witticisms exchanged at a restaurant door. Wine in him maybe.

It was as if he had forgotten whatever it was he had called them together for. He calmed while ignoring them, flitting through papers that had arrived on his desk in his absence. And then became really aware of their presence; turned from where he stood and shook Harald's hand, clasped it doubly, covering the fist, and presented himself before Claudia.—Tea. You'll have some tea. Or you'd like a fruit juice?—

The tray had been brought and the obligatory ritual was followed in preparation for—what? ‘The afternoon hours'. A considerable weight of his time to be given to whatever it must be he had to say to them.

—You've seen your son this week, yes? I have the impression he's standing up well.—

—Whatever that means.—

She may not know, but he, Harald, impatient, does: why pretend !—He's determined to finish the plan he was working on, you've arranged that, I gather. I don't know what the firm will feel about it.—

—Oh he's still on the payroll. Man! I should damn well hope so! They'd look fine if they struck him off before he faces a charge that hasn't been heard. I would not be prepared to let that pass, you can be sure.—

—If the man himself does not wait to be judged guilty.—

—Oh come now, Harald, I've told you again and again. That's not the principle. The facts still must be examined by the court, verified. You must bear in mind there are cases where an accused
may be taking the rap for someone else—a matter of big money, or even, certainly where a capital offence may be involved, a matter of love, something where one party will do anything to protect the other.—

—You don't think there's any possibility here, do you.—

Claudia is not asking, she is drily pre-empting any baseless encouragement in herself.

—I do not. No. I'm reiterating from another aspect what we know our case rests on—circumstances. Circumstances that will be revealed in court. As I've already discussed with you. As I've been studying in the psychiatrist's report. As I've been following up in the talks I've had with people I've called in this past week. Verster. David Baker and so on. People from the house and those who frequented the house. What must and what should not be expected from cross examination. If I think it necessary to call this one or that as witnesses.—

—There is only the man, the gardener. If you can say witness is what he says he saw and didn't find.—

Harald contracted his calves against his chair to control irritation with Claudia. The lawyer was working up to whatever it was he was going to tell them, it was signalled in the way he leant back and then brought his body forward over the expanse of desk that held him at professional remove from them, his people in trouble; an intimacy with which, while inspiring their confidence must always leave him with a clear head above theirs. He could have summed it up for them: the definition of a best available Senior Counsel is one who thinks for those who do not know what to think.

—I've had them all in this room, one by one. With the exception of Baker, Jespersen's lover, they don't seem to feel anything particularly violent against Duncan, which surprised me, I must admit. Even if they thought they were concealing from me —I have my ways of seeing through the faces people put up. After all, one of them is dead, you could expect them to reject absolutely—never want to look at Duncan again. Ah-hêh …—

—One of them's been to visit Duncan. We bumped into him outside.—

Motsamai tilted his head at Claudia in confirmation; must have sent him there.

—Ah-hêh. It was necessary for someone to go to him. From the house, the two men who are left of the little set that lived on the property. Kind of family. Whatever in the house might have happened.—

—He never mentioned Dladla who'd just been with him.—

—I suppose it was a bit of a shock. But also something to give him courage, you know what I mean. Later. When he could bring himself to think about it, in there. There's so much time, so many hours when you're inside … Well. Dladla was with me last week and again yesterday. We've talked. Long talks. He's told me what Duncan hasn't, and what I didn't get out of the girl. Miss Natalie James didn't tell me the particulars of her relationship with Duncan. Dladla says she tried to kill herself after the affair of the birth. I don't know exactly what she did, pills, walked out into the sea, it was in Durban, he says, but Duncan found her and took her to hospital. He brought her back to life. Literally. She owes her life to Duncan; or she blames him. Depends which way it was, for her. Given my impressions of her, she could punish him for it. That could have been what the display of intercourse on the sofa was about. Oh yes. With a woman like her. A proven unstable character. I've said before—I suspect she wanted him to discover her. And now it turns out there's another reason why she would choose this particular way to get at him.—

The discourse is slowing down. All three were on some reckless vehicle together and it was braking as it approached a dangerous blind rise over which there would have to be a new surge.

—Well. Dladla, yesterday. Yes. We were talking. In English and also, yesterday, in our language, when there are difficult things to say it's better to use the words that are closest.—

Motsamai struck the flat of his palm at his chest.

—He told me many things. I thought I had it all straight from
my sessions with Duncan—but this man told me. He told me something else. I don't think you know. You would have said, you'd know I'd need to know, that's so.—

He is looking at the two of them with the patronizing compassion of an adult who suspects a child of maybe not being entirely open to him. His head is lowered but the gloss of his eyes under fold-raised forehead glistens at them.

They knew nothing. Nothing. That was it, that was so! It was an accusation, not from the lawyer, but from each to the other, Harald, Claudia, another killing, a common life speared through, flung down: you, a father who knew nothing about your son, let him share a gun like a six-pack of beers; you, a mother who knew nothing about your son, let him fire it.

But Hamilton, their Hamilton Motsamai, had no part in this fierce flash of animus between them, although, diagnostician-priest-confessor that he was, he might have sensed it, brought from the Other Side his particular kind of mother-tongue prescience.

—Khulu knows something else.—He is racing the three of them down the steep descent now, can't stop. Don't speak: —Natalie was not the only lover on the sofa. Khulu says Duncan and Carl Jespersen were lovers at one time. Jespersen broke up the affair, not Duncan. Khulu says Duncan took it badly. He didn't move away, out of the cottage, although the other one—Jespersen had stayed there with him—went back to live in the house. But he was hurt, Khulu says he saw it. Depressed. Even if he wanted to show he wasn't any less free than the others—‘for us, people can change partners, no big deal, still friends' that's how the fellow puts it—Duncan somehow underneath didn't have the same facility, the same attitude. And then it so happened that he went to the coast and found the girl to save. Saved himself. Khulu suggests. He doesn't know if Duncan had met her before, he thinks he might have, somewhere, when she was still with the other man, the father of the child she had. So he came back in love with a woman and brought her into the set-up. Nobody minded, no prejudices, he was free to do as he liked, and everything's fine, Miss
Natalie James fits in very well. There is the heterosexual couple in the garden cottage and the gay trio in the house. David Baker and Carl Jespersen are lovers, Jespersen's fling with Duncan is a thing of the past, for Duncan just as these episodes are for the others. And then, and then … Jespersen is the one who makes love to the woman. Duncan's woman. A wife, I call it, living there like any ordinary couple in that cottage. Oh we're told there were other little adventures she had. But this is Carl Jespersen. First he rejects the man and then he makes love to the man's own woman. He's there to be found on top of her—I'm sorry Claudia—right there on the sofa in the room where they're all such good friends!—

Motsamai is hearing applause, excitement moves his shoulders under the padding of his jacket which keeps them so elegantly squared. In an earlier generation, on what the law decreed as his Side, he would have had no recourse for this spirit but the pulpit. He had commanded them completely so that they could not have interrupted him; now he expects something outspoken from them. But all there is in this chamber, a familiar of the many emotions of people in trouble, is his rhetoric; and his clients' estrangement, neither wishing to admit any reaction to the other.

At last, it was Harald who spoke. Words are stones dropped one by one.

—Does it make any difference whose lover he shot.—

In their absolute attention that magnified every detail of his demeanour, both saw Motsamai's muscles relax beneath the jacket and the encirclement of his shirt collar and tie-knot.

—Ah, I'm glad you take it like that. Harald, Claudia. (He summoned and commanded each, formally.) That's how it should be. I'm impressed. That's what we need if I am to proceed in my client's interest, effectively, no nonsense. I have difficult decisions ahead. Because it does make a difference! It could make a crucial difference! This factor. The prosecutor—he'll have no purpose in calling any of the friends: as witness to what? The State's case rests on the confession. That's sufficient. It's the Defence's decision
whether or not to put Dladla on the witness stand. Dladla's not going to be questioned about this aspect unless the Defence decides to bring it up. What matters is my and my colleagues' decision. That's the way to look at what you've just heard. That's all that matters. You are wise; believe me. Oh you are wise.—

Harald stood up as if someone had beckoned, so that Claudia turned towards the door.
Which way, which way
. She rose. Motsamai—Hamilton—came gently over to guide them.

—Don't discuss this with anyone.—

Claudia lifted a strand of hair off her forehead and looped it behind her ear, looking at him.—If you call Dladla to the witness box what is the effect on the judge going to be. How are you to know his attitude to this sort of complication.—

—Oh just like you two and myself, anyone is aware of the kind of set-up there apparently was in that house. Men with men. Nothing special about that, nothing to be ashamed of, condemned, these days—the new Constitution recognizes their right of preference. That is so. That's the law.—