Before dawn you rose and crept to the truck, slipping past them, arms pillowing their heads in sleep. Using one of Bernard’s shirts stashed in a bag under the seat and water carried in a plastic bottle from the showers at the edge of the campsite, you scrubbed the worst of the blood from inside the truck’s cab, until what remained was only a brown stain that bled into the lighter brown vinyl upholstery. If they asked, you would tell them that Sam got nosebleeds, since children often do, and then you remembered that Sam had actually had a nosebleed. The deception would itself be a kind of truth.
You washed in the shower, bracing under the cold water, and changed into shorts and your last clean shirt. Outside, it was light enough to see yourself in one of the truck’s mirrors. There were purplish bags under your eyes and you had recently chipped one of your front teeth. It was not a face you liked, too much of me in the jaw and complexion, too slack in the cheeks.
Stealing back to the camp, you found Sam sitting outside the tent, staring up into the trees. Since arriving at the campsite the night before, he had become affectless, less human, less present. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Can we phone my aunt? I want to go home now,’ a long high whine like a dog.
‘There’s no phone here. Come. Let me help you.’ You put Sam’s clothes, dirty with blood and vomit, into the campsite dumpster, and then dressed him in the last clean shirt and shorts in his small bag. At least you could count on delivering him to his aunt and being rid of the responsibility.
When the men woke, they brewed camp coffee and you drank in silence while Sam sipped from a tin of condensed milk. The usual formalities of travel, discussing a route, speculating about time and distance, detours, the boastful talk of men, these were all superfluous. There was only one logical way from there to Beaufort West, one road through the mountains.
After you finished your coffee, you helped the men collapse and pack the tent and bedrolls, everything compact and well maintained. You thought of your apartment and its scarce effects, now abandoned, already ransacked. You knew your files were being read, a search undertaken, looking for stray telephone numbers, addresses, names, illicit books in brown paper wrappers, the few items you had dared accord sentimental value being knocked over, broken. Even these things, apart from the books, would not have been obviously valuable to anyone but you, and perhaps me. A blue glass carafe you used as a vase. A woven raffia textile with a geometric pattern. Two plants. A photograph of your father as a boy. An assortment of small shells collected on various beaches. The apartment came furnished, the chairs and tables were not yours. Even as a child you distrusted ownership. It was inevitable that the authorities would summon me to collect what remained of your possessions after they completed their task. It was inevitable, too, that they would find nothing to help them in their investigations. Banned books, yes, but no phone numbers, no names, no addresses, no dates paired with locations. The landlady clucked over the unscrubbed oven, the dusty skirting boards, the cobwebs on the chandelier, the missing marquetry plaque in three kinds of wood in the design of a fish, the plastic bowl of potpourri, the rubber plant in a glazed pink pot — those things on the inventory you had hated and wilfully discarded. I forfeited the deposit, too busy and careless of money to clean the apartment myself. We lived ten minutes from each other and for so many years I never knew your address. I would have come every day if I’d known. Perhaps that is why you never told me.
‘Are you ready to go? Lamia?’ You did not respond. Sie war in sich. You were deep inside yourself. ‘Lamia? We’re ready, if you and Sam are ready.’
‘Yes. We should be going.’
The sun was already high as you pulled away from the campsite and into the full glare of the treeless mountains, volcanic red rocks flowing in undulating vertical waves. The remainder of the pass road was less harrowing than what you had negotiated the night before — fewer hairpin turns, less dramatic precipices. Now it was only a matter of not riding the clutch or the brakes. You feared how much a night’s sleep might have cost you.
Sam turned his attention to the two men, fixing them with the same uncompromising stare that had so moved and unsettled you. It was a relief not to be the focus of his attention. Sam did not just look, he studied, as if adults were an invasive species, alien to his experience of the world, creatures from fantasy. The men tried to bring him out of himself. Timothy had a length of rope and showed him how to tie different knots.
‘You can’t untie this one, can you?’ he said, smiling and gently elbowing the boy.
‘If I had a knife I could cut it,’ Sam said, grim and determined.
‘Ah, but there is a way, man. You don’t need a knife to cut this knot.’
‘A knife would be easier.’
‘But that isn’t the point, Sam. Try with your hands.’
You could not explain to them why Sam was so removed, so joyless. You scarcely understood it yourself, but wanted to shake him again, to say, Be happy! I have freed you! You are free! I killed to free you!
Prince Albert spilled out from the mountains, a white and green pool bright against the hard brown interior. You stopped on the edge of town to refuel the truck and buy more food and water. Timothy and Lionel bought sandwiches for themselves, and paid for half the fuel. Sam brightened after eating a peach, smearing juice and flesh over his face and shirt. The men doted on him, wiping his face as if he belonged to them. He withstood their attention like a dog that has learned not to snap when fussed for fear of being beaten.
Driving through the grubby northern outskirts of town, inhabited by filthy children and curs that stopped traffic on the road to fight over a piece of carrion, you passed a police car. Your chest tightened and as you slowed down the cruiser pulled into the road behind the truck. It followed you for half a second before turning around, lights flashing and siren shrieking, to race after a car travelling in the opposite direction.
‘This is the real Wild West out here,’ you said.
The Wild West: cowboys and Indians, farmers and natives, lawmen and outlaws. Lawmen gone wrong in our case, at the time, and outlaws on the side of justice. To be outside the law, to place oneself beyond the rules because the rules are wrong, that’s what you had done. Apart from our books, hidden in their camouflaged cavities, and our circle of associates, my associates in particular, hidden in their own ways, your father and I were always so law-abiding. Where did you learn to be more than just a paper rebel? Not from me. I was no model for action. Even my work, my papery protest, it could hardly be called daring.
The rest of that day you passed few cars. A truck had overturned, scattering lengths of metal along the roadside. The driver stood next to the wreck, looking bewildered. He waved to you but you shook your head — an apology and a dismissal. Along the highway people trudged with loads on their backs, bundles of firewood balanced on their heads, children tied in sheaths of cotton cloth against erect adult bodies. A group of boys had found a trolley from a supermarket and were taking turns pushing each other in it, pretending they were motorized. They waved when you passed, throwing dust in their faces. Agave and yucca broke the monotony of the flatland, sending up flowering spikes and curving their forms into succulent arcs. On the horizon a bustard broke into a run.
Sam fell asleep and Timothy read a book. Lionel sometimes read over Timothy’s shoulder, and when he grew bored he stared at the road being endlessly consumed by the maw of the truck, or watched you driving, your face hard and scarred as the road itself.
I look at the last photographs I have of you, the last trace, together with your notebooks and the final letter. You are somewhere on a hill, perhaps in the Nuweveld, with long white acacia thorns behind you, and the skimmed-off surface of the Karoo in the distance, hazily exposed, Sam standing beside you. This photograph of you and the boy demonstrates your possession and affection for him — your hands are on his shoulders, he squints, you look at him with a caring smile. In another you look into the camera, hold him out in front of you, his hair brushed away from his face, your hair blowing away from yours, so there can be no mistaking the two identities. These were meant for me. They were evidence, the case you were presenting. Not of maternity, but of responsibility. This child has been mine to look after, your face says. And now he is yours.