‘It was disappointing,’ I told Greg that evening. ‘I wanted it to be moving.’
‘You can’t buy catharsis,’ he said, feeding Dylan spoonfuls of yogurt. ‘To think you can is perverse. The tour guide, the bus driver, the ex-prisoner, all of them, they spend every day there. They have an endless stream of people like you wanting to hear the stories, expecting to be moved, to be made to feel less or more responsible, depending on who you are and where you’re from.’ He catches a drip of yogurt before it rolls from Dylan’s chin to his shirt. ‘You complain about not being moved. Imagine what that must do to them. Maybe it was an off day. Maybe they spent all their energy moving people yesterday and didn’t have anything left to give but the automatic narrative. Maybe they spent all their energy on the lone American dignitary. Think what that means to the local people,’ he said, shaking his head. Dylan squirmed in his chair and reached for his cup of juice. ‘For them the island isn’t just a tourist site but a place of pilgrimage, and their one visit, maybe the only one they’ll ever make, was ruined by an American. Don’t get me started. For foreigners it’s just atrocity tourism. We can’t rebuild a society on atrocity tourism. I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t have told you to go. I feel guilty that you’re not as connected to this country as I am, and jealous, too, that you’ve been free of it for so long.’ Dylan drank his juice, ate another spoonful of yogurt, and his eyes began to droop. Greg lifted him out of the chair and handed him to Nonyameko, who took him off to bed. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said, ‘I’m thrilled you’ve finally come home. It’s just a shame you and Sarah are going to live in Jo’burg.’
We sat for a while in front of the fire, drinking a cheap bottle of pinotage that would cost four or five times as much in New York. Greg has been more or less single for as long as I’ve known him. There’s never been anyone else permanent in his life until Dylan. I know the boy is biologically his, but I don’t know the other details. The mother was either hired, or a friend I don’t know.
I think of our first meeting, at a depressing drinks event for new graduate students at NYU. Greg stood out in a pink sweater with his tattooed hands and black hair that had been dyed a shade of blue so dark the colour appeared only when the light hit it, making him look like an eccentric superhero. Discovering we had something more specific in common than mere foreignness, we spent the night talking in the corner and soon became close friends. A year later, he returned to Cape Town while I stayed in New York, finished my doctorate, married Sarah, and taught part-time at three different colleges, running up and down Manhattan until I was senseless with fatigue. When I was commissioned to write Clare’s biography I knew it was the opportunity I’d been looking for to do something different and, more importantly, an opportunity to try coming back home.
Absolution
They saw only one house, and it was so obviously perfect that Marie looked as though she had decided Clare would buy it even before they went inside. Clare was not as certain. The estate agent, a sunburned man with an overhanging stomach and a voice like curdled cream, met them at the entrance to the driveway, opened the gate with a remote control, and indicated they should follow him. The perimeter wall, half a metre thick, was topped with barbed wire wrought and painted to resemble ivy, with a staff of electrified wires above. It was self-effacing security for people embarrassed to think they needed it.
‘You’ve got all the security features here,’ the agent said, stepping from his car. ‘Cameras watch the exterior of the house, the entire perimeter wall, the gate, all the time. These guys are the best, primo. If they could smell the intruders they would, believe you me.’
They stood in the front garden, in a paved courtyard overlooking the steep terraces of the lawn falling down towards the street and the electric gate, now shut again, enclosing the three of them and their two shining cars. A group of gardeners, arms lax with fatigue, unloaded from a truck across the road, spilling out and trudging to the properties they were paid to tend, each announcing himself at a residential intercom, then waiting until the doors or gates opened, allowing access. It was the kind of neighbourhood in which Clare swore she would never live: a warren of celebrities, foreign dignitaries, and arms dealers. Perhaps it was fitting that she and Marie, scarcely less foreign in their way, possibly more dignified, should retreat to the company of such rabble.
‘So I should be paying for the privilege of being surveilled.’
‘Huh? Ja, well, they’ve got dogs, too, fully armed response with semi-automatic weapons and there are panic buttons in every room of the house, even the bathrooms and cupboards, in case of real emergency, but they’re disguised, so the attackers won’t know, and they’re not an eyesore, not red like some are.’
‘Then how should we be able to find them if we panicked?’
‘Ja, well, absolutely nothing to worry about. At least as long as we got rule of law. God knows how long that lasts, though, hey?’
The real emergency, he suggested, was that one might flee in stark terror to the interior of a cupboard and be trapped, quarry awaiting a hunter. But who would get past the wall in the first place? Inside, the house itself was, without question, splendid, and Clare could imagine being happy in it. With space enough for Marie to have a proper administrative area, Clare would be able to remove herself entirely from all external concerns, should she so wish. There was a vast garden, too, and no neighbours to the rear, save the slopes of the mountain and the occasional hikers who followed its trails — and they, it seemed certain, would never attempt to scale her deadly ivy. The trees were tall enough and the wall itself so high that there was no fear of being overlooked, even outside, swimming in the pool, except perhaps by the neighbour on one side. Still, she disliked the idea of paying for her own imprisonment, paying to be watched by a security firm likely as not to turn over its surveillance to a branch of the government, or perhaps even worse, to a corporation that would compile records detailing her daily habits, her food preferences, her alcohol intake, her sleeping and waking, and sell such data to other companies wanting to market their goods to her, goods made by the wives, daughters, and sisters of the petty intruders against whose incursions she would be employing the security firm to protect her. There could be no protection against the currents of history.
Marie was ecstatic. The windows were equipped with remote-controlled metal shutters manufactured by a company called Tribulation; these could be closed at night, entombing them in reinforced steel. There was a special ventilation system with a reserve generator. What would happen in the case of a fire or an electrical failure? Would they ever escape? The alarm could be set to exclude their bedrooms and bathrooms at night, while motion sensors in the rest of the house would respond to something as innocent as a cushion resettling itself on a couch or a spider crawling across the wall.
‘Once the alarm is set,’ the man said, ‘nothing must fall down, nothing must drop, nothing must stir, or you’ll have the guys down here in no time. Guaranteed response is five minutes max, but they’re just around the corner anyway, so it would be more like two for you. Not much can happen in two minutes. You can go to sleep at night feeling nice and secure.’
Clare wondered if the estate agent, blond and fat as he was, knew what could really happen in two minutes. Anything was possible within two minutes, but perhaps with a panic button the two minutes could be rendered inconsequential, the response always already responding, the dogs always slavering for battery-acid blood and orange disinfectant skin. She guessed that the estate agent, let her call him Hannes, had a wife and daughter, and that he had recently had cause to fear for them both on some horrible occasion — and fear, too, what intruders with a will and no conscience, no system of moral principles, might commit.