October Read online

  Craig took only his books and office chair. Even his favorite Howard Hodgkin print from a recent exhibition is still on the wall above the mantelpiece. A clean break, with nothing to remind him of a life spent with her. Mercia swept in a single movement, and without looking, the girlish paraphernalia from the mantelpiece into the bin, wondering why he had not done that himself. Did he imagine that she would keep it intact? The desk she has left, in the same place, against the window, with the stain of overlapping circles on the right where Mercia, having slipped in quietly, would leave a mug of coffee. Often, as she withdrew her hand, Craig would take hold of her wrist, squeeze absently, before she tiptoed out.

  What Mercia ought to do is to turn it into another, cozier living room, have the chimney swept, shift the television into the study, console herself with a fine Ziegler rug. But who needs a second sitting room? Perhaps the apartment is too large for one person. There certainly is room for a child who could transform Craig’s study himself with gaudy, boyish things, who could scrub out the coffee stains, but she supposes a child should choose a room. Together they could go about the apartment, rearrange the entire place, marking out their separate spaces.

  Mercia tries to say it out loud, in several formulations: I will take Nicky. Nicky can come and live with me. I will look after Nicky. But this one stops her. How? How will she look after Nicky? The business of raising a child may be no more than commonsensical; still, she flinches at the thought. No, she concludes, it is too much to ask of her. They cannot expect her to make a sacrifice like that. It is one thing having a tolerable or even an enjoyable outing with a child, but quite another to have him for keeps. Of course, she would support the child financially, put him through school and university, but that is as far as she could go, besides, a child should be at home with his mother. That is what home is for. For children, who have no choice in the matter.

  That evening Sylvie announces that they will have to move to one of the government’s RDP houses. Jake has not been paying the mortgage and has ignored the bank’s warnings of repossession. Sylvie’s tone is bitter. Jake has no right to do this. The house is not just his to knock down as he pleases; the deposit from Pa, as she now refers to Meester, has also been given to her, Sylvie, security for her and the child, that is what Pa said in her very presence. The pittance they’ll get from the bank will slide straight down Jake’s throat. It’s a disgrace. Whatever will people think of them coming down in the world like this?

  There is a colony of RDP houses on the horizon stretching eastward from the town’s rubbish dump as far as the eye can see. Only the Gifberge rise beyond it. What amazes Mercia about RDP housing, or rather about the architects of these dwellings, is that in a country where land is plentiful, houses are virtually butted against each other with barely any space between the boundary fences. There is no question of a small patch where people could grow vegetables, a few mealies and pumpkins to keep the wolf from the door. How strange that the architects of these townships, living as they no doubt do in comfortable houses lost in large gardens, and well out of sight of their neighbors, should imagine that the poor want to huddle together in cramped conditions, that they do not want to grow vegetables, let alone flowers.

  Now you must know, Sylvie says, these houses are already falling apart. But what can you expect? The state of the country, with nothing working! The blacks now wanting to kill all the coloreds, even swarming into Kliprand, into the RDP houses. Who knows what will happen to them in such a place?

  Precisely, Mercia retorts, if you don’t know what will happen there, there’s no basis for racist assumptions. And people can’t swarm into their own country; they belong here. Namaqualand can also be their home, she hears herself saying.

  The girl laughs mockingly. Ooh, you Murrays have such bakgat ideas. Jake also says she should stop talking like a white person, but true-as-God she, Sylvie, knows of a woman who’s been raped even though the family’s keeping quiet, and there was a murder reported only a few months ago. Imagine, a murder in Kliprand!

  It is Mercia’s cold stare and exaggerated sigh that make her return to their housing plight. If only Jake would pay the bond, but she supposes now that he has given up, now that he has made himself ill, he can’t. Her voice creaks with self-pity.

  Mercia knows that she is required to come to the rescue, and that after all is not as tall an order as taking the child. There is the money from their father’s house, she says, she could do without her share. Jake can have it all to pay off his mortgage; he should have told her. There really is no need to live in RDP housing.

  But you don’t understand, Sylvie says. She smiles, evidently pleased with herself as she explains. Jake doesn’t want your father’s money. He wants to live in an RDP house; he wants all of us to live there; he wants to punish all three of us.

  Mercia stares at her coldly. She cannot speak with this woman, does not want to hear her analysis. She says, I see, and goes to her room, or rather Nicky’s room, which he has had to give up for her. In that room there are no books. The walls are bare except for a hideous picture on the wall connoting cutesiness—a small blond boy holding his peetie to aim an arc of pee into a flowery chamber pot. It is in an ornate plastic frame of white and gold. What does Nicky make of it? Could it be that he sees himself in the image?

  Mercia switches on her computer and stares dolefully at the screen. She wishes herself far away from this place called home. Never again will she complain about the pressures of academic life, the nightmare of trying to write. Being with family is far more stressful. She thinks of the parallel construction, being with child, and winces.

  Earlier this year, after Nicholas’s funeral, when she spoke about working on her laptop, Jake asked, Do you call it work, the stuff you do? And a laughing Sylvie interjected, You should come to the butchery on a Saturday morning to see real work.

  I’ll do that, Mercia said stiffly, I’m happy to find out about the different ways of working. Mine may not be the chopping up of carcasses, but it’s work all the same. Why, she wondered, has Jake taken to championing the working person? Is that what has driven him to marrying the girl?

  So are you trying to make a name for yourself? Jake asked.

  Ah, she mocked, I’ve been given a crap name so perhaps that is what I’m trying to do, blazon my name across the world so that its crappiness might efface itself. Then she said soberly, We try to think things through, think about texts and their language and interpret the world, nothing to do with making names for ourselves, and besides it’s such a small world, so many people working in my field—yes, working, she repeated—that it hardly signifies. Actually, nobody reads this stuff. Perhaps a handful of students, if you’re lucky.

  Jake threw his head back and laughed heartily, healthily for a man who seemed to be shivering, a man she thought who may well have returned to excessive drinking.

  Then why not rather write a book for real people about real people? he asked.

  You mean a book about people like you? It’s been done, she said curtly, done to death.

  Ag don’t be cross, Mercy man, he said, and handed her a large brandy.

  Why did she not question his drinking?

  Mercia could not be sure that it hadn’t been ushered in as long ago as the millennium itself—the screaming of women in extremis. Was it her new single condition that alerted her to it? Only days after Craig left, in a hotel in Paris, she lay awake, wondering when such requirements for women might have been established.

  Fortuitously, there was the conference to keep her occupied shortly after Craig’s announcement. Surely you’ll cancel, Smithy said, no one would expect you to honor that commitment. But Mercia was determined, glad that there was a paper to revise and travel to manage; she even looked forward to questions after her presentation, something she had always found terrifying. It will keep me on my toes, she said; it will make a change from crying.

  Determined also to focus on other, less familiar areas, Mercia agreed to chair ano
ther panel and so keep at bay Craig’s words that otherwise would mill about her head like midges. But who could have anticipated the sound of women screaming? As she arrived in the late afternoon and threw open the hotel window for air, the small courtyard trilled with a mewling that bounced promiscuously from wall to wall, echoed and amplified gleefully until the final shriek. At night, the sound came from the rooms on either side, the screaming of women. Mercia was not mistaken. Sound had, of course, always leaked from hotel rooms, but it surely had been muted, discreet, as people did not wish to be heard. But this, for her, was a new phenomenon where the female of the species announced her unbridled pleasure. How long had it been going on? It was not as if over the months, the years, she had noted an increase in volume; no, this seemed new, and ubiquitous, the world of couples and congress having taken over. And not having known about it, was that too a mark of her failing relationship?

  Two weeks later, as she escaped from the emptiness of the apartment to Berlin, her expectations of screaming women were soundly met. Mercia imagined that the international magazines, the Dutch, German, French and British Elle or Cosmopolitan, or whatever they were called, had been pounding out advice for the twenty-first-century woman: the no-holds-barred shrieks of fulfillment to replace the old angst-ridden Munchian woman, she of the silent scream. Was management doling out prize-winning badges at the breakfast tables? Smithy, who had been prevented from coming along by her younger child’s whooping cough, laughed at her account. Och, you’re a prude, she said, let people be.

  Hotels then were for a while at least to be avoided. They were not places in which to learn to be alone, in which to stop crying.

  Craig had found someone else, he said, after the throat clearing and required preamble of his respect and devotion to her, Mercia, and he lowered his eyes to scrape together with the edge of his hand bread crumbs on the breakfast table.

  Found someone else! Why was that thought to be ameliorative? What prompted the search? she asked. How long had he been looking? Her questions were met with silence. Craig herded the crumbs together into a neat pile. It had not been easy for him; he had suffered beyond measure, but he had come to a final decision: he would leave, and do so that very day. There was nothing to discuss, nothing to be gained from painfully raking over their relationship.

  In the study Craig’s books were already all packed up in boxes. Mercia, awash with tears, swallowed repeatedly to find her voice. She said, Yes, okay, of course, she understood, but then could not stop the bile from entering her words. Someone younger, more attractive, someone less preoccupied with her work, with a job that allows for leisure time; indeed—yes, she said that word, indeed—someone with an eager womb? She did not know where that had come from. Craig started, looked up in alarm. Not a young, glamorous, size-ten blonde by any chance? Mercia continued. She hoped that that would be received as self-parody. In the last couple of years she had gathered a few inches around the waist. As had Craig.

  Craig shook his head sadly, with disbelief, as if he had expected better of her. As if she had not expected better of herself! Only days later she could have added: and someone who screams. Smithy reported that the woman was not so young after all, looked about forty. But that was no guarantee against screaming. Was it not these days incumbent upon the aging woman to perform youth regardless? Besides, forty was young. A decade or so at that stage made all the difference.

  If only Mercia had not referred to the woman’s hair, for according to Smithy, who had walked into them at the Film Theatre, she was in fact blond or blond-streaked like the majority of women in Glasgow nowadays were. Oh, it made Mercia sick, her own delicate tiptoeing around markers of race, required to prevent others from thinking her sensitive about color. She had no such difficulty, thought that if there were a problem, it belonged to her beholder. No doubt a matter of multiple mirrors. Craig would have been the one person to know that she was comfortable in her skin. But that Craig has vanished, has left behind only the question of whether she had invented him.

  •••

  Mercia lies awake in her brother’s house. On the far wall, in a chaste single bed, under easi-care sheets, she listens to Sylvie’s screaming. It is less embarrassing than puzzling. The girl is hardly a reader of Elle, but then the style columns in the age of globalization probably in no time at all filter such matters through to villages via Sarie. Sturdy Sylvie, not yet plump, with her strong legs and high Namaqua behind, is still youthful. How much longer must she suffer the attentions of a drunk, dysfunctional husband? There will be no escape for a girl of her kind, Mercia muses. She should try to muster sympathy for Sylvie. She does not wonder why she thinks of Sylvie as a girl.

  Mercia has much to be thankful for. She knows that she will come to terms with being alone, which is not to say that she does not miss the Craig she knew, that she is not still engulfed by sadness. But she has tried to make the most of post-Craig life by immersing herself in work. How Craig would have laughed at that. Not possible, he would have said, for her to be more immersed in work. Did he resent that? Let others call it complacent, but nowadays she counts her blessings, names them one by one: a research grant and sabbatical; conferences at which to present papers; an invitation to Yale; the monograph on postcolonial memory to finish; and almost certainly a professorship the following year. The book will surely bring further invitations from prestigious institutions abroad, travel to new cities, new countries—even if it does mean hotel rooms in which postmodern women scream.

  But how do the poor manage? Must Sylvie put up forever with the attentions of a husband who seems to not like her anymore, if ever he did, and who in his few waking hours shouts abuse at her? What a relief for her if Jake were to find someone else. But there is no knowing what Sylvie’s screaming announces. Mercia shudders at the possibility of the girl being grateful for Jake’s drunken attention. She would like to take her firmly by the shoulders and say loud and clear: it’s over; save yourself, go away and leave him to his drink. But where would she go? Where do people like Sylvie go? Is it in order to leave that she has to give up the child?

  Mercia’s Afrikaans is rusty; her ability to make small talk rudimentary; and small talk would surely have to precede such big talk. It is of course not only a matter of language. Everything in her dealings with Sylvie is uncomfortable, creaking with embarrassment. A problem of class, Craig had proffered after her last visit, without the benefit of having met the woman, but what did he, a Brit, who had visited the country only once, know about the complexities of rural colored life?

  It is midnight. Mercia props herself up in the sagging bed and kicks off the hideous nylon cover. Since her arrival in Kliprand she has been plagued by menopausal hot flashes. But there are drugs, she consoles herself, and there will be freedom from the monthly discomfort. She fans herself with a newspaper. Burying her head to weep into the easi-care pillowcase is not an option; instead, she must press on. Mercia reaches for her laptop. Too agitated to carry on where she has left off, she could at least revise the last chapter.

  When Mercia arrived in her hired car that afternoon, Jake was in bed. Sylvie brought the message that he was unable to rise, that he would see Mercia the next day. Mercia said, Nonsense, she had come all that way, and with a brief knock on his door, barged in to his bedside.

  Jake made as if to sit up, but fell back against the pillow. Mercia all but choked with nausea at the stale air, but so shocked was she by his sunken eyes, his skin a sickly yellow-brown with lack of sunlight, that she laid a hand on his head, pressed his bare shoulder. What had happened to him? There had been no mention of illness.

  Jake, you didn’t say you were ill! she exclaimed in alarm.

  He laughed weakly, pulling up the covers. Yissus, Mercy, so you got here. Welcome to Rainbowland. Then he pulled the sheet over his head, and turning his back, muttered, Yissus, my head. I can’t. Got to lie down, I’ll catch you later. And tell that bitch to keep out.

  Appalled by his language, she backed out of
the room without a word.

  So what’s the matter with him, Mercia asked Sylvie, what does the doctor say? Why didn’t you say anything about his illness when I called?

  Sylvie looked at her intently, as if to ascertain what she knew, so that Mercia panicked. Is it AIDS? Is that why you won’t say?

  The girl laughed. That’s what they think overseas isn’t it, that everyone’s got AIDS in South Africa. No, with Jake it’s just the drink. Nothing wrong with him.

  Mercia squirmed with embarrassment. She would have to leave further questions until later.

  Having prepared dinner, Sylvie refused to rouse Jake. He’ll just swear at me. Effing and blinding, that’s all he has to say. He doesn’t eat, that’s why he can’t get better.

  They ate in awkward silence the festive food that Sylvie heaped onto their plates: a mound of braised mutton, yellow rice with raisins, potatoes and sweet pumpkin. Tomorrow, Sylvie said, I’ll make sousboontjies. Jake is now very fond of the beans. Perhaps that will bring back his appetite.

  The child, who sat in an armchair with his food on his lap, piped up, I also like sousboontjies. I don’t eat pumpkin.

  Wouldn’t you like to come and sit with us at the table? Mercia said, but his mother replied that he wasn’t one for sitting up, that slouching was his thing, and as for pumpkin, there was no way of getting him to eat it. See how stubborn Nicky is, he’s his father’s child all right, no question of that, and she shook first tomato sauce, then chutney over her meat.

  Mercia stared at the child, who looked so like his father and his grandmother Nettie. Did Jake have nothing to do with the raising of his child? And how was Mercia to eat all that over-salted, sweetened stodge? Would she have to eat such heavy dinners every day? What would she do in this strange house? How was she to speak to the girl? What could she possibly say? She said, Ah, I remember Mrs. Ball’s chutney, that’s what we used to have, and I still miss it.