Unlike some of his peers, men of the old dispensation who still argued with the illogic of apartheid, the logic of illogical privilege, Mark seemed to have an instinctive understanding of the tone of the court, the casual formality of its discourse, the critical interrogation and titanic frustrations and teasing good humour of its justices. He commanded the space and performed convincingly even if the justices did not find in favour of his clients. It was a noble thing to champion, the right to privacy, but Clare wondered if her lawyer son did not perhaps take it too far, if the supple intellect that could always see a more pliant interpretation of the law did not also risk perverting it. There were limits to privacy, and always had been and always must be. A state of unlimited privacy would inevitably be a state of chaos — a state that could not for long remain a state.
This, however, like his health and a great many other things between them, was something that Clare and Mark did not discuss. When she asked about his work, he turned either silent or defensive. She hoped that he could talk about the law with his father, who had been his model in so many things. For the sake of both men, she hoped that they enjoyed that kind of intimacy, though as the years passed she believed this was not so, that Mark’s best and closest interlocutor was his own mind. And in this, perhaps, he was more like his mother.
Clare
As the day progresses and I try to ignore Nosipho’s enthusiastic vacuuming, Adam’s mowing and hedge-trimming, and Marie’s clip-clopping back and forth from her study to mine, I become incapacitated by a migraine. It starts at the base of the skull, and then grinds across the right side of my head like tectonic plates sliding against each other in a crescent arcing from my forehead to occipital bone. Then comes the nausea and visual distortions, the twin kidney shapes I always see, forms that pixelate the world within their borders. The first time it happened I thought I was going blind. I have learned that the only way to make it stop is to close my eyes and hope it may pass in an hour or two. So I put myself back to bed, but the headache is relentless, and the pain spreads, running along my clavicle and radiating demonic wings across the planes of my shoulder blades. After an hour of turning first left and then right, lying on my stomach and then back, pillows over and under my head, I finally fall asleep to one of the most troubling of my recurring dreams, one which takes various forms but always involves a similar scenario.
At some point in the recent past, so the narrative usually goes, I have made a commitment to look after the dogs belonging to a young couple that lived down the road from my childhood home. In most versions of this dream, on the afternoon the owners are due back from their holiday, I remember at the last minute that for several days I have failed to attend to the animals, leaving them without food and without access to the garden. Visions of frantic dogs, paws smeared with their own shit, the house rendered uninhabitable from the mess, overcome me. Knowing that, at worst, one or both of the animals might be dead, I race to the house, arriving just as the couple does; there is no hope of rectifying the situation before they can discover it. In the variation of the dream I have today, however, I remember the neglected dogs only after the couple’s return, making my irresponsibility all the worse. I become aware that the couple has not phoned me to retrieve their spare keys, but, being overcome with shame, I cannot bring myself to contact them. The threat of some kind of legal sanction against me lurks at the edge of the dream’s contents: I will be marked in the courts, and thus in the public record, as an abuser and neglecter of animals, someone so irresponsible I cannot even be trusted to look after myself and should therefore be locked away where I can do no harm to anyone.
Each time I have dreamed this particular dream it involves the same couple. They either have two dogs, or one dog, or a cat and a dog. I always fail to do what I have promised, resulting not only in acute embarrassment, but also potentially in the deaths of those entirely innocent other lives, the companion animals who relied upon me for their most basic needs. What always troubles me more than anything on waking is that I can think of no reason for feeling I ever disappointed this particular couple. They had no pets, but as an adolescent during the school holidays I was sometimes paid to look after their young daughter. I know that I always took good care of the girl, reading stories until it was her bedtime, tucking her in, consoling her when she cried for her mother (always her mother and never her father), waiting up for the parents to return from their dinner party, then being walked home by Rodney, the husband, who looked like a more dissolute Cary Grant. He would always press the money into my hands as we reached my gate, his palms sweaty and the notes limp with perspiration. At the time, I would not have minded if Rodney had drawn me aside, against a tree, and kissed me. Although nothing of the sort ever happened, this feeling runs like under-stitching through the fabric of the dreams, invisible but holding firm the lining that keeps everything else tidy, the seams obscured, the construction masked under a shimmer of subconscious satin. Looking back on my desire for Rodney I suspect that if he had actually kissed me, pushing my body up against the bark of a stinkwood, insinuating his tongue into my mouth, I would have been horrified.
I know, too late, that this series of dreams has nothing to do with Rodney, or his wife, or their daughter, whom I looked after so well, and about whom I have no reason to suffer a guilty conscience. These dreams have everything to do with you, Laura, the wild beast daughter I neglected, failed to feed and water, failed to hold myself account to in the way that you needed. I should not have waited for you to ask for help. I should have known what you needed, anticipated your requirements, and foreseen what you would feel compelled to do. I should have known you could not be domesticated or broken. If I had tried to stop you, would you have let me?
‘No,’ you say, coming into my bed tonight, unfurling yourself around me, enclosing my limbs in yours. ‘You could not have stopped me.’
‘But if I had been different, if I had known another way to be, if I could have given with both hands instead of always, always holding something back, then surely you might have let me help you!’
‘There is no undoing the past, old woman. You must accept what you are.’
‘What am I?’ I implore, as you rise and retreat. ‘Tell me what I am!’
‘A monster,’ you say, your voice unravelling sadness. ‘A monster like me.’
*
Since I don’t know what else to do, I return to what I was reading the other day. I realize, for the first time, that all ten of your notebooks are nothing more than school exercise books — the very same kind that I used to compose the first half-dozen of my novels, convinced that if the authorities ever raided the old house on Canigou Avenue the police would assume they were nothing but the work of children and posed no threat. I intentionally made my handwriting juvenile, even sloppy in places. But your handwriting, Laura, is always precise and, though unusual, unmistakably adult. One would look at your script and say it was the hand of a writer, unlike mine.
After first meeting Ilse at the newspaper you saw her again a few days later and, trying to sound as though you’d been struck by some spontaneous inspiration, invited her to join you for lunch. She suggested a small hostel on Church Street.