So the scientist talks like a tsotsi when he pleases. That's how Paul teases him; in appreciation. Paul sums up in colloquialism common to black and white alike: no bullshit in Thapelo.
He comes both to keep his colleague informed and to consult with him; doesn't matter whether he's actually been delegated to do this by their employer organisation or it's something delegated by himself. The question of his continued exposure to Paul's Chernobyl – the nature of relations with officialdom in the work they do makes him dismissive of the controlling edicts of authority as hidden agenda. Paul's condition doesn't come up between them in their talk, interruptions of one another, laughter, lowered voices, shouts of emphasis, this garden resounds, echoes with the animation of its past. It's the quarters, now, where two men are absorbed in the work that informs their understanding of the world and their place as agents within it, from the perspective that everyone, like it or not, admit it or not, acts upon the world in some way. Spray a weedkiller on this lawn and the Hoopoe delicately thrusting the tailor's needle of its beak, after insects in the grass, imbibes poison. That's the philosophy of conservation from which Paul is approaching the great issues in a draft petition of an environmentalist coalition to the State President he's writing between discussions in the garden.
The pebble-bed nuclear experiment may be the apocalyptic one, nuclear experiment you can walk away from; there are also planned or proceeding slower means of development taking the form of destruction.
– So now it's the Australians in on the act. Haai! Pondoland, it's recognised all over the world, the centre of endemism, the great botanical treasure, n'swebu, man! The government wants to put a national toll highway through it, tear it up, and now they're going to let an Aussie company in to mine the dunes, destroy the coastline too. This Transworld Company says it's identified reserves there, sixteen million tons of heavy minerals and eight million tons of ilmenite. One of the biggest mineral sand deposits in the world. Yesus! This what we mean by attracting foreign investment? Mining on the beaches, same time the Minister of Tourism says the Germans, the Japanese and what-what flying in are big in our economic future -
Primrose has appeared with a tray of paper cups and the fruit juice prescribed for the one she cares for at some sort of distance decreed for her by her employers. She doesn't know where to put the burden and Thapelo interrupts himself, sweeps up the papers from the table, laughing and chaffing with her in what he's recognised, in an earlier encounter with her here in the garden, is her language among his four or five.
– The aspect for us to hammer -
Thapelo waves his cup across his colleague's half-sentence. – The road and the mining are linked – like that, nê? – He bangs the flimsy cup, overflowing, down upon the table, clasps one fist in the other.
Invigorated by the piece of theatre, his colleague tries again. – The aspect for us to go for is the broadest effect of danger the toll highway carries, pleas for beauty destroyed in these issues are regarded as going soft, just sentimental objection to progress -
– Chief, lalela, hear me, I think you're wrong there. You know that after mining tourism's our best income source. Who's coming to look at a mine, and a highway like they've got all over where they come from. -
– I'm talking about the Amadiba, my brother, they're living on the Wild Coast, five communities, not so? Go for them. From the plan you've shown me, the route of the highway plunges right through people's houses and fields, straight over their mealies. Staple food. What about the Amadiba Tribal Trust? Need to make them shout. Loudly. All stops out. Rally the traditional leaders; the government has to hear them; you know it's policy, government's having to recognise right now all kinds of questions on land distribution rights. -
– Derek's due down there next week. -
– And the National Road Agency? Any new statement from them? The figures they give for employment their grand highway will create – short-term, do they admit that. -
– The government must vuka! Open their eyes. See what's getting by in the name of development. All over the country. What about the cost of demissioning the pebble-bed plant? If it does light up that huge grid claimed, it can only last about forty years… -
The Hadedas landing from the house roof squawked derision. Their familiar companion took up quietly: – And the disposal of the nuclear waste. Where? -
Thapelo had brought photographs and surveyors' charts he had forgotten last time he came by. They bent over them, now and then, Thapelo constantly trespassing the distance at which his mate held him off, his forefinger returning to the toll highway, stabbing at a feature, the array spread among makeshift refreshment, coffee half-downed, the way they took it in the forest, in the bush, the desert. Thapelo had in a pocket – where was it, now – a pencil-length of root, shrunken and withered dead digit of a mangrove tree from the wetland they'd not long ago researched together, and the half-shell, patterned blue on cream like a fragment of Chinese porcelain, of a bird that would soon be extinct. Thapelo had the habit of absently gathering such small signs as he walked. When he was there, the garden was an enclave, paused at together, a wilderness.
Thapelo had left.
The eggshell and root, there on the table.
How many more days go by in the garden.
There are markers other than time on the way back from this state of existence. Not all are reassuring. Not without confusion. Yes, the doctors had given the cancer all clear. Only: after some months – How many months? – A shrug; somewhere between three and six, we'll do a scan. That's all. A precautionary follow-up. Most unlikely, but it can be that another radioactive treatment is indicated in some cases.
But now, so far as radioactivity is concerned? He is no longer radiant. All clear.
He hears otherwise, from his body.
His decision is to remain a week or so in a kind of halfway – between the leper refuge and the return, harmless to the human fold. How could Benni question this protection of her and the child; how could Adrian and Lyndsay be seen to think his presence become a burden? And he was still weak. Wobbly due to lack of muscle tone, the inactivity of weariness, the spell cast in the pursuit of rabid cells on the loose in his body. He had to get to know that body again; the doctors were aware of this consequence, of course, and it was arranged that a masseur would come to revive his depleted flesh before he quit the old family home once again in his life-cycle. A man arrived, about his own age, the thirties, neither young nor near the barrier of the forties. The man chattered amiably as he worked, first with the body laid out on its back, his strong hands cool at contact, warm as he went over the chest, triceps, biceps, diaphragm area, moved down to the thighs and calves. Body belly-down. Massage of the feet, that was the beginning; the significance of biblical washings of the feet, a sacred tending to the most distant part of physical awareness, least emotive. Unless the shoes pinch or a thorn pricks, barefoot, who notices what's carrying you. Sometimes in bed the foot of one nuzzles for a moment the foot of the other but that happenstance has little to do with caresses of the body. 'He kisses their feet' – a derogatory reference to sycophancy. The deft and firm manipulation of the feet brings to notice, like the existence of someone who had gone ignored, the expressive mobilities in the curve of arch and keyboard of toes; so this is what took over, came into play – what one danced. What was prehensile when a boy climbed the jacaranda. Up calves and thighs, the hands brought back the good tensions of effort, sensation of running through thick underbrush, taut balancing over stones. Then the hard-smooth palms and fingers came up the outer sides of the buttocks, down and up over to the spine, and along either side of that stem and back again, down. The man was leaning over, when his hands reached the muscular contour of the upper back and shoulders – that male attribute, secondary only to the frontal display between the legs – his breath just touched on the bare nape of the neck. Massage is hard work, deep breaths are audible, their touch is a soft breeze.