Was he always so tentative? How did he behave as a child? Is your account of him accurate, or itself a performance for my benefit? What would you make of him now, Laura? In your notebook, he is always cowering and flinching, clinging and trembling. I see some of that now, but also a more sinister quality. He is like a beast that feigns vulnerability to put its prey at ease.
*
A cloud of toxic smoke was moving along the coast, following the weather patterns. You could already see its black mass approaching behind you on the western horizon. Bernard stopped for fuel at a station that had its own generator; everywhere else along the coast was in blackout, as he had predicted. Sam was asleep in the cab, Tiger standing guard over him, panting his sticky breath. You knew that it would have been easiest just to leave them, but you pretended to phone me, you mimed a conversation, laughing in a way that you have never laughed with me. I told you that I couldn’t wait to see you, in a way that I had never told you. You had a story ready, you were going to tell them that plans had changed, that I was about to leave for our beach house — a house that does not exist — and that I was getting a little forgetful these days, had been confused about plans. But when you returned to the truck Sam was awake and staring at you, his body crossed into a tight knot against the vinyl upholstery. He asked if you were coming with them and before you could remember your invented story you said yes, because he looked afraid.
You bought a newspaper, peaches, another packet of Safari Dates, and bottles of water, which you put into your red rucksack on top of your clothes, folded neatly over your notebooks, hidden at the bottom.
The interior of the cab was ripe with human sweat and dog breath, vinyl and petrol, the rotten egg of the child’s skin. As Bernard drove, Sam sat looking blankly ahead at the road. Every few minutes the child turned his head to stare at you. His mouth pouted, grime at the corners, sometimes opening to show his small teeth. There were globs of sediment in his tear ducts. No one had taught him to care for himself, even to scratch the sleep from his eyes. You smiled at him as if to say, ‘Yes? Ask me anything you like, tell me something, what is wrong, why are you afraid?’, but Sam only stared at you, his mouth hard and impassive, eyes yawning vacant in his skull. It was not a normal child’s expression.
Near dawn, Sam’s nose began to bleed and you helped him with a tissue, pressing until the blood stopped. You wiped his face, and he turned away from you to bury it in the seat. You were accustomed to the smell of blood, but it was overpowering in the heat of the enclosed cab, the hot-iron stench. You opened your window, but Bernard told you to close it. ‘Gravel sometimes flies in. Rather I’ll put on the fan. We’ll stop soon. Always getting bloody noses. You’d think he was a girl. What a girl, Sam, what a little girl you are, hey?’
After another hour of driving Bernard stopped at a picnic ground. He parked the truck in the shade of a grove of eucalyptus trees clustered next to the road, their sharp-edged leaves rattling. It could have been anywhere along any road in the Cape. There was nothing to mark it as unique — the same stand of trees, the same concrete bench and picnic tables, at this one, perhaps, also a standpipe for water. There were no toilets, not even a barbecue pit or emergency phone.
‘I’m going to sleep,’ Bernard said. ‘You can stay and wait, or you can leave. Suit yourself. Don’t mind your company, but don’t want to keep you if your mother’s expecting you.’
‘What about the boy?’
‘Sam’s fine.’
You walked around the picnic ground, looking for somewhere to sit out the day, while Bernard stretched along the length of the seat. Tiger was between his legs, the dog’s tail slapping the man’s gut. Sam slipped out of the cab after you and sat at the base of a tree, fiddling the earth with a stick, boring into the dust between his feet, red canvas shoes, withdrawing the stick, boring again, deeper, withdrawing, a chimpanzee using a stick to harvest ants from a hole. His dark hair was red with a layer of dust and his skin was peeling from sunburn.
You knew it would have been wiser to keep moving, but the child kept staring at you, opening his mouth as if to speak, then turning again to the stick and the earth, grinding and digging into the soil, up and down, one hole after another.
Cars were passing. If you wanted to play your part properly you would have continued your journey. Instead, you ate a peach and read the newspaper, which told you nothing you did not already know, nothing the authorities did not want everyone to know. Terrorists would be blamed. At that moment the police were raiding several properties and two remote farms suspected of operating as training camps. Did you imagine the knock on my own door that morning, the men, the memories that knock conjured of an earlier knock, many years ago, on the morning after a similarly horrific night? You dismissed the consequences for the rest of your family — you had to in order to survive. I understand that, at least.
And me? What of me? What should I have said when the men asked, when they shouted? What did I know? I tell myself that I knew nothing that could have changed anything at that point. Earlier, though — if they had come the day before, or the day before that, demanding I confess what I knew of my daughter’s plans and her associates, I can no longer say what I might have given away. And why, I ask myself now, every day that passes, did I not take the chance myself? To save you, to save others, I might have betrayed you. Would a defeat on that day have changed the course of anything, the balance of lives lost against lives saved?
There was no news for you, who knew all that mattered on that day. You clawed in the sand trying to make up your mind — cruel, an ostrich in the wilderness.
1989
The boy understood that his Uncle Bernard had been a soldier once and still called himself a warrior. This was a reason for doing and not doing all kinds of things. A warrior did not listen to music except when going into battle and a warrior trained his body to live on less, to eat only once a day, twice at most. A warrior knew the psychology of his enemy. A warrior had to rely on nature for survival and so a warrior had to be — what was it he said? — intimately acquainted with the bitch.
This meant that when they went on these drives there was no music.
Are we going into battle? Bernard barked, when the boy asked if he could turn on the radio.
No, the boy said, even though he didn’t know if this was the answer Bernard wanted to hear.
Then no music, hey? No battle, no music. You got to keep your mind focussed. Music and food, these things distract a person, man.
Was my father a warrior?
Bernard laughed and rolled down the window and spat into the wind.
The boy remembered car trips with his parents to see his Aunt Ellen in Beaufort West, and once to visit friends in Kenton-on-Sea. The radio was always on, all the time, even if his parents complained that the music was terrible. It was something to drown out the sound of the road and the hot wind that came in through the windows if it was a dry month, or the rain on the roof that hammered them deaf if it was wet. Music made time pass, sped up the hours that seemed so much longer driving fast in a car. The boy would fall asleep to music, especially if it was the old-fashioned music his parents liked, and wake after dark when they arrived on the street where his aunt lived, and felt himself being carried inside by his mother or father and tucked between sheets stretched tight over the cushions of the sofa in his aunt’s lounge, a sofa that smelled like one of his parents’ parties if it were held in a sweet shop or bakery.