Every Saturday, I speak to your father on the phone. We ask each other, Have you heard from her? We’ve been asking this for two decades. I tell him about the dreams I have been having of you, their vividness, my belief that they signal your continuation, and your rage — rage directed at me specifically. It is something we both feel. We are both responsible. Your father is convinced he failed to support you adequately in your beliefs — beliefs that, at the very least, we both shared, even if we drew the line at some of your activities. You talk to us, relentless, haranguing, banging around in our brains, beseeching. We cannot put you to rest.
*
You and Sam sat apart on one side of the fire, with the lion and jackal, Lionel and Timothy, on the other. There should have been obvious questions from each party for the other — questions you would have asked them, questions they must have had for you. Why were two young students — for that is what they said they were, at least that is how you describe them in your notebooks — camping alone in the mountains? Why was a lone woman with a small child driving a truck through a hazardous, untarred mountain pass after dark? The two parties looked at each other across the campfire. Did you trust them intuitively, as the boy trusted you? Your notebook is silent about this. You had locked the cab of the truck, the keys were safe in your pocket, so there was no worry about the men stealing the vehicle, though perhaps you allowed yourself to imagine the worst in order to be prepared, to see yourself being forced to the ground, the keys stripped from your body, the way you would fight, how you would claw at their faces, call on Sam to attack them, to bite at their legs as the dog had bitten at yours. But these men had innocent, children’s faces. You brought out your Safari Dates, and the men offered to share their dinner. Sam nibbled a hot piece of bread and drank water, but had no appetite for anything more substantial. He laid his head against your side and you put an arm around him.
‘Lionel and I were wondering if we could ask you for a ride, if you’ve got room in the truck?’ Timothy said. ‘I know it’s presumptuous, and we’re strangers, and two men, and you’re a woman, but, at the risk of being inappropriate, I can assure you that you’d have nothing to fear from us. Nothing to fear, I mean, in the way that women so often have cause to fear men.’
‘Are you priests?’
‘No, not priests,’ Timothy laughed. ‘Though even if we were, would that really reassure you?’ This made him laugh even harder.
‘No,’ you agreed, trying to make yourself look relaxed and unafraid. ‘Where are you going?’
‘The Nuweveld. Outside Beaufort West.’
‘I’m going that way. Sam’s aunt lives in Beaufort West.’
‘Your sister?’
‘No.’ Through the fire and smoke you thought you saw Timothy raise a sceptical eyebrow. ‘What’s in the Nuweveld?’
‘We’re going to a clinic. It’s nearer Beaufort West than anywhere else. There’s nowhere particularly near to our clinic.’ Timothy held his hands over the blaze and Lionel muttered to him in a voice so low you could not make out his words. ‘You haven’t told us your name,’ he said.
‘Lamia.’
Lionel coughed and laughed. ‘Ah-ha, the night-monster.’ A cagy smile slashed through his face as he ran his hands down his hair, pulling it away from his body.
‘A sea monster, too. A shark. An owl. And a beetle,’ you said. With brazen brows and lips that smile. ‘My mother’s sense of humour.’
This was your invention, sowing confusion, as if to say you were and were not Lamia. You laughed to show you took it lightly. You were not your name, or not entirely your name, and the name was more than it suggested.
The two men looked at each other as if uncertain of you; Sam, filling the silence, moaned in his sleep, his arm twitching violently against your leg. You stroked his head, smiling to reassure the two men. They helped you put Sam to bed in their tent, tucking him into a sleeping bag, head on a pillow. How long, you wondered, since the child had slept as a child should, head cushioned, covered in blankets? How many nights had he slept in a moving truck, upright, or slumped against the door, the dog standing sentry over him?
You and the men returned to the fire and sat together drinking Old Brown Sherry out of tin cups. With antiseptic and cotton wool Timothy treated the wound on your leg, which had swollen up red and black. ‘A stray,’ you explained, ‘at a picnic stop. It was trying to get our food. I didn’t see it.’
‘You’ll have to see a doctor about it. It might have been rabid.’
‘I’ve known rabid dogs. This one was not. It was just mean.’ You asked them about themselves. They explained that it was the long vacation, the time when they could be away from university, doing good works, gaining experience, whatever boys who leave the city do when they’re away. And then Lionel turned the conversation.
‘Terrible things going on.’
‘Yes, terrible things,’ you agreed.
‘A dangerous time.’
‘A very dangerous time,’ you said. They did not know how dangerous.
‘Particularly for people like us. Young people.’
‘Yes, particularly.’
‘A very bad time.’
‘Indeed. The worst.’
To get this far, they had hitchhiked from Cape Town to George where they collected medical donations, and then from George to Oudtshoorn, before going on foot from Oudtshoorn into the pass. They had their tent, their sleeping bags, medical supplies for an emergency and enough food for a week of travel, which was the longest they reckoned it might take them to reach the clinic on foot if they couldn’t pick up another ride.
‘The clinic is funded by Lionel’s parents and their rich friends,’ said Timothy, smiling.
‘Which makes it sound like he’s from the gutter.’ Lionel elbowed his friend. ‘His mother is the head doctor at the clinic. What do you do?’
‘I used to be a reporter,’ you said, half-truthful. ‘I worked for the Cape Record.’
‘That must have been interesting.’
‘Yes, interesting.’ Too careful to say more, you watched the men hold their breath, as if doubting whether you were all on the same side. Were the sides so clear? you wondered.
‘And now you drive a truck?’ Lionel asked.
‘Now I drive a truck.’ You did not speak like a truck driver and Timothy again looked sceptical.
‘And your boy?’
‘As you say, it’s the long vacation. He comes with me when he’s not in school.’
It was late and you all began to yawn and stretch as the silences lasted longer. After half an hour you left the two men, saying goodnight as family would, with a familiar kiss on the cheek. In the tent, you folded your body into a corner, lying on the ground next to Sam, but unable to sleep yourself, a curse that returned always at the worst times, when sleep was what you needed most. As a child, you remember, you would pray to be able to remove your eyes, to dream as others dream, as if the eyes alone were responsible for waking or sleeping.
You watched Sam breathing, his thin lips parted, crooked teeth catching the light from the fire that filtered through the green material of the tent. The light carried the thick odour of wood smoke and returned you to earlier fires on the beaches of childhood holidays, to the farm for funerals and weddings, numberless ceremonies of the everyday and the extraordinary, fires built of acrid-smelling brush and lemon wood, fires built of pines that popped and fizzed with sap, fires built with coals and lighter fluid over which slabs of beef and fish were grilled, dripping juices that spat and sizzled. Below the crackling and hissing of the campfire that night, you could hear the men whispering.