– Not a good idea for you, I want to see you, Bra, but we can't sit in the same room, we'd be in the garden like a couple of kids sent out of the way. And even then, who knows. Why should you risk anything at all, I'm my own experimental pebble-bed nuclear reactor. -
Laughter bursting into the receiver. – Sharp! Sharp! But nonsense, non-sense. What about the weekend. I'll be back in town. What's the address? I'll turn up in the afternoon and bring you some stuff to work over. We need you. -
When he arrives he has to be backed away from as he throws out his arms for the African shoulder-hug that's come out of the expression of freedom fought for together among black men and has done away with the inhibition of whites that God-fearing heterosexual males don't embrace. (Thapelo at seventeen was in a Mkhonto we Sizwe cadre, another kind of combat in the bush.)
How can you manage what you are, to others. Primrose, her statement to stay on in the risk of quarantine when the right thing was for the parents – and the leper himself – to insist that the faithful retainer be treated like anyone else outside the responsibility of progenitors, and be sent beyond harm. What is the threshold of risk to be decreed for different people – what about the paper plates touched by radiant saliva on spoons and forks, got rid of. Thrown away in the trash to lie on waste dumps picked over by kids from black squatter camps. What is 'rid of' in terms of any pollution, it's a life's work to inform us that it's not only what is cast into the sea that comes back to foul another shore, no matter whose it is.
This man is not that barely-literate woman; he's scientifically literate, awareness of the insidious power of radiation is in his daily field. Primrose does not believe in what she cannot see; he knows what is not to be seen as it exudes from one who is his Chernobyl, his own Koeberg experimental nuclear reactor. How was it these two had no fear; too easy to attribute this sentimentally, as a white man descended from a history posited on the tenet that blacks were worse, to evidence that both were blacks, and better. Willing to take risks, in contact with fellow humans. More likely, for this ex-Freedom Fighter colleague in scientific research as for the uneducated woman, he's been exposed and accustomed to many threats in childhood in the quarantine of segregation, before those of war.
Thapelo brought cold beer and a field briefcase tight with documents. Beer in the garden was the first drink after decreed abstinence. Worth taking the risk of reaction, in the company of a workmate. The sun drowned under the horizon of shrubs and the garden darkened, until a light appeared on the terrace and the mother's voice called affectionately, a familiar coaxing echo, Paul don't you think it's time you came in.
ii / States of Existence
She pulled a smiling, deprecating mouth at the concern and the reproach.
If someone had to get shot by an intruder it mustn't be one of her beloved men; only now come to know, through another kind of threat, the urgency of that love. Couldn't tell them. That was her reason to be out before the intruder, alone. A threat you could counter. But that much was clear in all that was confused in what had happened to them; Paul, Adrian, Lyndsay. To try and make sense of it there were devices of different approach; she must place herself among these less subjectively, as a woman called 'Lyndsay'. Set it out. The meteor of the inconceivable fell upon the son; he was the one who became invisibly alight. Paul. What happened to him was not to be presumptuously compared with what happened within his radius to the father, Adrian, and the mother, Lyndsay. In yourself as progenitor you have somewhere a stowed disaster kit, resourced both practically and psychologically to deal with a known list of existential crises in your children's lives: career failure, suicidal loss of confidence, doomed love affair, broken marriage, change of sexual orientation, drug addiction, debt. They've had the broken marriage syndrome with the daughter born too soon after the son, but it has proved to be a kick start for her rather than a trauma, she has a new country, a new language and a new man to fulfil her apparent needs. As a lawyer, in her early career the Lyndsay persona was familiar with the entire conventional list, but for years her career has been as a civil rights and constitutional lawyer. Adrian proved to be the one best in understanding of the way Emma could emerge from the tangle of the early marriage; lawyer Lyndsay could simply provide the practical means to end the contract. He suggested to their daughter that you can perhaps destroy out of pride and anger, too hastily, what may be essential for you. She had been so crazily in love with the man, whatever had happened to them since. Give yourself time to be sure whether the heady power of rejection – making a decision while you are drunk with it, it's potent – hasn't taken from you the one you really want, worth an acceptance of all the disillusion come about. So the girl who had married too young didn't take the quick and tidy divorce; unaccountably, in her mother's view (wasn't the childish marriage a casualty before the register was signed), she took half a year to test herself and did not regret it, confiding to her father that it had been a good thing: she would leave the marriage now in calm certainty it was not vital, within her or the man. The father didn't protest or pass judgment, apparently this was all right, for him, too? The process had been fulfilled, justifying whatever the outcome.
Hazards like these have recognisable courses of action, emotional readjustments, to follow, even if individuals responding don't always do so in the same way. What has happened – that formulation implies the past, what is here now is a present that has no existence in the range of experience provided for. Only the Japanese would understand, maybe; they have had to make 'ordinary' ('normal' is a word that can't be used on this subject) the presence of children born, generations after the light greater than a thousand suns, with a limb or some faculty of the brain missing.
Paul's confrontation with an unimaginable state of self. She sees it in his face, the awkwardness of his body as if he feels the body does not belong to him, when he speaks, his choice of words, of what there is that can be said among all that cannot. She is aware of the state as she makes his bed and as she stands at the chuntering machine unable to leave off watching his contaminated clothes somersaulting in water behind a round window, Primrose standing by. This is Primrose's domain, no matter how contemptibly role-confining that may sound. Lyndsay's presence in the backyard laundry cannot be ordinary.
The endless hours he seems to spend in the garden. No book, no radio. Imagine, an attempt to leave the state behind in this prison-home. No-one could conjure that. It's more than a physical and mental state of an individual; it's a disembodiment from the historical one of his life, told from infancy, boyhood, to manhood of sexuality, intelligence and intellect. It's a state of existence outside the continuity of his life.
The evidence of such a phenomenon before her every morning when she puts her head round the door to greet him as she leaves for Chambers and the structure of the law ready to deal with the dislocations of human existence on the Statute Book, the return to find him in the darkening garden or lying in his cell – this stirs unwanted recognition that there are other states of alienated existence.
Now also become unimaginable.
Fifteen years ago she sat in this house one night and said, I have to tell you something. The affair is over.