'I am tired.'
He chewed, showing long teeth.
He watches but does not judge. Always a faint haze of alcohol about him. Alcohol, that softens, preserves. Mollificans. That helps us to forgive. He drinks and makes allowances. His life all allowances. He, Mr V, to whom I speak. Speak and then write. Speak in order to write. While to the rising generation, who do not drink, I cannot speak, can only lecture. Their hands clean, their fingernails clean. The new puritans, holding to the rule, holding up the rule. Abhorring alcohol, that softens the rule, dissolves iron. Suspicious of all that is idle, yielding, roundabout. Suspicious of devious discourse, like this.
'And I am sick too,' I said. 'Sick and tired, tired and sick. I have a child inside that I cannot give birth to, Cannot because it will not be born. Because it cannot live outside me. So it is my prisoner or I am its prisoner. It beats on the gate but it cannot leave. That is what is going on all the time. The child inside is beating at the gate. My daughter is my first child. She is my life. This is the second one, the afterbirth, the unwanted. Would you like to watch television?'
'I thought you wanted to sleep.'
'No, I would rather not be alone now. The one inside isn't beating so hard, anyway. He has had his pill, he is getting drowsy. The dose is always two pills, you notice, one for me, one for him.'
We sat down side by side on the sofa. A ruddy-faced man was being interviewed. He owned a game farm, it appeared, and rented out lions and elephants to film companies.
'Tell us about some of the overseas personalities you have met,' said the interviewer.
'I'm going to make some tea,' I said, getting up.
'Is there anything else in the house?' said Vercueil.
'Sherry.'
When I returned with the sherry bottle he was standing at the bookshelf. I switched off the television. 'What are you looking at?' I asked.
He held up one of the heavy quartos.
'You will find that book interesting,' I said. 'The woman who wrote it travelled through Palestine and Syria disguised as a man. In the last century. One of those intrepid Englishwomen. But she didn't do the pictures. They were done by a professional illustrator.'
Together we paged through the book. By some trick of perspective the illustrator had given to moonlit encampments, desert crags, ruined temples an air of looming mystery. No one has done that for South Africa: made it into a land of mystery. Too late now. Fixed in the mind as a place of flat, hard light, without shadows, without depth.
'Read whatever you like,' I said. 'There are many more books upstairs. Do you like reading?'
Vercueil put down the book. 'I'll go to bed now, ' he said.
Again a flicker of embarrassment passed across me. Why? Because, to be candid, I do not like the way he smells. Because Vercueil in his underwear I prefer not to think of. The feet worst of alclass="underline" the horny, caked toenails.
'Can I ask you a question?' I said. 'Where did you live before? Why did you start wandering?'
'I was at sea,' said Vercueil. '1 told you that.'
'But one doesn't live at sea. One isn't born at sea. You haven't been at sea all your life. '
'I was on trawlers.'
'And?'
He shook his head.
'I am just asking,' I said. 'We like to know a little about the people near to us. It's quite natural.'
He gave that crooked smile of his in which one canine suddenly reveals itself, long and yellow. You are hiding something, I thought, but what? A tragic love? A prison sentence? And I broke into a smile myself.
So we stood smiling, the two of us, each with our private cause to smile.
'If you prefer,' I said, 'you can sleep on the sofa again.'
He looked dubious. 'The dog is used to sleeping with me.'
'You didn't have the dog with you last night.'
'He will carry on if I don't come.'
I heard no carrying; on by the dog last night. As long as he feeds it, does the dog really care where he sleeps? I suspect: he uses the fiction of the anxious dog as other men use the fiction of the anxious wife. On the other hand, perhaps it is because of the dog that I trust him. Dogs, that sniff out what is good, what eviclass="underline" patrollers of boundaries: sentries.
The dog has not warmed to me. Too much cat-smell. Cat-woman: Circe. And he, after roaming the seas in trawlers, making landfall here.
' As you please, ' I said, and let him out, pretending not to notice he still had the sherry-bottle.
A pity, I thought (my last thought before the pills took me away): we could set up house, the two of us, after a fashion, I upstairs, he downstairs, for this last little while. So that there will be someone at hand in the nights. For that is, after all, what one wants in the end: someone to be there, to call to in the dark. Mother, or whoever is prepared to stand in for mother.
Since I had declared to Florence I would do so, I visited Caledon Square and tried, to lay a charge against the two policemen. But laying a charge, it appears, is permitted only to 'parties directly affected.'
'Give us the particulars and we will investigate,' said the desk officer. 'What are the names of the two boys?' 'I can't give you their names without their permission.' He put down his pen. A young man, very neat and correct, one of the new breed of policeman. Whose training is rounded off with a stint in Cape Town to strengthen their self-control in the face of liberal-humanist posturing.
'I don't know whether you take any pride in that uniform, ' I said, 'but your colleagues on the street are disgracing it. They are also disgracing me. I am ashamed. Not for them: for myself. You won't let me lay a charge because you say I am not affected. But I am affected, very directly affected. Do you understand what I am saying?'
He did not reply, but stood stiffly erect, wary, ready for whatever might come next. The man behind him bent over his papers, pretending not to listen. But there was nothing to fear. I had no more to say, or at least not the presence of mind to think of more.
Vercueil sat in the car in Buitenkant Street. 'I made such a fool of myself,' I said, suddenly on the edge of tears again. ' "You make me feel ashamed," I told them. They are probably still laughing among themselves. Die ou kruppel dame met die kaffertjies. Yet how else can one feel? Perhaps I should simply accept that that is how one must live from now on: in a state of shame. Perhaps shame is nothing more than the name for the way I feel all the time. The name for the way in which people live who would prefer to be dead.'
Shame. Mortification. Death in life.
There was a long silence.
'Can I borrow ten rand?' said Vercueil. 'My disability comes through on Thursday. I'll pay you back then.'
III
In the small hours of last night there was a telephone call. A woman, breathless, with the breathlessness of fat people. 'I want to speak to Florence. '
'She is sleeping. Everyone is sleeping.'
'Yes, you can call her.'
It was raining, though not hard. I knocked at Florence 's door. At once it opened, as if she had been standing there wailing for the summons. From behind her came the sleepy groan of a child. 'Telephone,' I said.
Five minutes later she came up to my room. Without her glasses, bareheaded, in a long white nightdress, she seemed much younger.
'There is trouble,' she said.
'Is it Bheki?'
'Yes, I must go.'
'Where is he?'
'First I must go to Guguletu, then after that, I think, to Site C.'
'I have no idea where Site C is.'
She gave me a puzzled look.
'I mean, if you can show me the way I will take you by car,' I said.
'Yes,' she said, but still hesitated. 'But I cannot leave the children alone.'
'Then they must come along.'
'Yes,' she said. I could not remember ever seeing her so indecisive.