Dead Before Dying

But there was another possibility that he’d discovered, another potential reason why Mat Joubert was looking forward to his second visit to his personal head doctor. And that was the doctor herself.

She paged in the file in front of her. It bothered him. Couldn't she remember what he had told her the previous time? Had the blood he’d spilled on her carpet washed out so easily? She looked up at him. He saw the tiredness around her eyes and had a sudden insight: he was the eighth or the tenth or the twelfth patient of the day who sat opposite the slender woman spewing out the bitterness of their lives.

“You said very little about your mother during the first session.” Her head was still bent over the file. He heard her voice and it sounded like a musical instrument. He put his hand into his coat pocket, took out the Benson & Hedges, lifted the packet’s lid, saw the cigarettes in their neat rows. His big fingers always found it difficult to extract the first cigarette from a new packet. He pinched the filter between thumb and forefinger and pulled. The cigarette slid out, Joubert changed his grip on it and put it into his mouth, then realized she was waiting for him to speak.

“My mother . . .”

Why had he looked forward to this visit? He put his hand into his pocket, brought out the lighter, let the flame shoot up, sucked in the smoke. He noticed that his hand was shaking slightly. He put the lighter back into his pocket. He looked at her.

“How do you remember her?”

“I . . .” He thought about it.

“As a child, I mean.”

As a child? How did one remember anything as a child? Episodes, fleeting incidents that made such an impression that you recognized their shape and content even when they lay under a thick layer of dust on the shelves of your memory.

“My mother was pretty.”

He was six or seven when he realized it for the first time. It was on Voortrekker Road, that main artery of his youth. The church’s building fund or missionary money was at low ebb again and the sisters of the community had organized a pancake stall on the sidewalk— every Saturday morning. He’d begged his mother to take him along, the promise of soft pancakes with unmelted cinnamon sugar crunching under his teeth a prospect that inspired him to make a complete pest of himself. She gave in in the end, simply to keep him quiet. There were four or five other women at the sidewalk stall early in the morning. The street was still quiet, with the sun rising at the eastern point of Voortrekker Road, as if the road determined its orbit. He sat away from them, his back against a shopfront, his arms resting on his drawn-up knees, his head on his arms. He was sleepy, already sorry that he had come, his expectations of pancakes disappearing in the face of the women’s businesslike attitude. He’d closed his eyes and heard his mother’s voice. It was different, not the way it usually sounded. This made him look up at her. There she stood behind the table, busy unpacking and arranging, her hands skillful and sure while her face reflected the gold of the early morning sunlight. She was speaking. The other women were listening. And laughing. His mother, the woman reduced to quiet self-effacement by the abusive shouting of her husband, was amusing the women. That morning he’d caught a glimpse of someone he would never really get to know.

“I think they’d forgotten about me,” he said to Hanna Nortier. “And my mother was imitating someone. I don’t know who it was— another woman probably. There on the sidewalk, just after seven in the morning. She walked a little way up the pavement, turned, and became someone else— her walk, her bearing, the way she turned her head and neck, her hands and arms. ‘Who am I?’ she asked. The other women laughed so much they couldn't speak. ‘I’m going to wet myself,’ one said. I remember that because I was shocked. Between the gales of laughter they shouted the name of the woman, the one my mother was imitating. And then they clapped. My mother bowed with a smile on her face and the sun shone and then I saw my mother was beautiful with her smooth skin and her red cheeks and her shining eyes.”

He was silent. The cigarette had burned down to almost nothing.

“I only remembered it when we buried her.”

She wrote in the file. Joubert stubbed the butt in the ashtray and wiped a hand across his upper lip. He smelled the tobacco and smoke on his fingers, an unpleasant smell.

“Maybe I was disappointed in her. Later. Because she never confronted my father. That she hadn't left him because of his tyranny and abusiveness and drinking. She was so . . . passive. No. It was more than passive. She . . . On Friday evenings when my father was in the bar she never spoke about it. She never said: ‘Go and fetch your father from the bar for supper.’ She used to say: ‘Go and look for your father.’ As if he might have been somewhere else. And when I came back and said that he didn't want to eat, it seemed as if she didn't hear me. As if she had an inexhaustible capacity to deny reality, to create her own.”

“How much of that did you inherit?” Her tone of voice was sharper, almost accusatory. He realized that it was the first psychological introspection she had expected of him.

Joubert tried to consider it. But she released him, her voice gentle again. “Was it easy for you to take out girls? Later?”

Somewhere in his head a soft alarm sounded. Where was this leading? His mother. His girls?

“No.”

He was reluctant to face that memory, the awkwardness, the gnawing uncertainties of puberty, the period he came to terms with with such difficulty. He saw Hanna Nortier’s frailness. How could she understand? “I was large, Doctor— even at school.” Not simply tall. Big. He knew he wasn'’t as at ease with his body as other boys— the fly halves, the wings, the sprinters. Others pranced like high-bred racehorses; he, with heavy, dull movements, fought his war against gravity. He was convinced that it disqualified him from associating with girls. Eight years after matriculation he met a school friend who asked him whether he’d known that she was in love with him at school. He couldn't believe it.

“I never had a girlfriend. The one who went with me to the matric farewell . . . my mother and her mother fixed it. Like an arranged marriage.”

“Did it bother you? That you didn't have a girlfriend?”

He thought about it.

“I read.”

She waited.

“Books create their own reality, Doctor. In books there are no clumsy heroes. And there are always happy endings. Even when the hero makes mistakes, in the end he always gets the heroine. I thought that all I had to do was to be patient. And until then the books were enough.”

“Your first girl?”

Alarm bells rang. The process had been exposed. His mother, his girls, the way to Lara Joubert. And dear God, he didn't want to talk about Lara.

“Lara,” he said softly and looked at the hands in his lap, the thick fingers that twitched and struggled with one another. There were others, before Lara. The secret loves of his teenage years that made his heart beat and his palms sweat. A phys ed teacher, a new girl from another school, the dark, somber Greek girl with the strong scent in the café on the corner of Rhodes and Voortrekker.