– I can't believe it's as bad as that. As near. – The copywriter has stopped eating the vegetarian meal her colleague Berenice provided for her; but she can't take a clean breath, away from the smoke off the meat over fire.
Thapelo has been coaxed to his feet by the one who is just learning to use hers and is dancing African-style with her. – That's the problem, we can't get people to believe. That's why Eskom's big bosses have been allowed by the government to spend one billion on developing the pebble-bed technology. -
The photographer heaves up from his sprawl and presents himself to the three ordinary-looking fellow males who seem to speak as voices from the mouths of biblical prophets. – Look, I'd be interested in taking pictures of these sites, I mean, the place the thing's going to be. -
To lighten the mood Benni calls from where she's turning the chops. – I don't think the subject's saleable as a promotion to any of our clients, dear Lemeko! -
Perhaps nobody hears her above the sizzling.
– What else do you do out there? According to Berenice she doesn't see Paul for weeks. -
Derek refills his wineglass with an eyebrow-raise asking permission from anyone who happens to be looking, and says, as if it were a confession: – Well, here's something else. There's a strong coalition campaigning to stop a new national highway from being sliced through the Pondoland Coast, incredibly rich botanically. Ever been there? We work on background scientific research to make protest based on absolutely undeniable facts. Try for what's unchallengeable. That toll highway must never be; for the plant-life and the people-life – the Amadiba live there. -
The copywriter remembers reading something interesting recently about – what was it – a world heritage site called 'The Cradle of Mankind' – are the three doing anything concerned with that?
The host moves to do what he ought to be concentrating on, tending the trough of embers and taking over the turning of meat, but delays. – Thirteen dolomite limestone caves. Fossil remains of plants, animals, and hominids – they're early members of the human family. It's not our field. You can't do anything to save the dead. But you sh'd go and get a sense of these places, the nearest is quite close to us in Johannesburg. I'd like to take Benni and Nickie, you could come along. -
– I'm afraid of bats. – She was flirtatious on wine although she had no desire to attract men.
Australopithecus, distant relative: told of that in childhood by his father. Paranthropus, not ancestral to the living people gathered on this Saturday, but an evolutionary adaptation (remembered it like a litany) that lasted in Africa for a million years. And the Pleistocene period relating to the time between the ice age and the beginning of humans; Adrian 's passion, amateur palaeontologist, anthropologist, archaeologist. So knowledgeable, and the son who listened to him became equally dedicated but in another 'field'. Professionally, life-work, not a retirement hobby.
The gathering stayed on until early dark. The sunset was spectacular because of pollution in the air, according to Derek – everyone laughed at him for spoiling the effect, better be ignorant of some phenomena. – Anyway, you can't sell anything any more by using the good old riding-off-into-the-sunset image. Get a life! – Benni spoke up happily derisively for her colleagues. This venture went well. Nickie became quite wild, little king who had found companions. When the friends left, she and Paul cleaned up together. She watched him for signs of fatigue she thought, not because any doctor had suggested it, would question his recovery, his return. But he looked fine; in bed she smelled in his hair the homely smoke of the feast he'd duly tended.
Was it Berenice or Benni who proposed it.
The two personae were more and more mingled in the life they lived now. It was certainly after the several months following that Saturday, months during which there were the same kind of easy invitations in response to her trial one; she was asked by her Agency colleagues to bring along those nice bushmates of Paul, Thapelo and Derek whatsisname, with their kids, and Thapelo and his wife Thandike in return included the copywriter (who was this time accompanied by her woman), the photographer and his American girlfriend, to celebrate a birthday in Thapelo's family.
Let's have a baby.
Another child. She did not tell him it was even a career decision; she was prepared to lose some of her energy, her drive towards success after success, to give her body over to the disadvantages of distortion and accept the distracting, absorbing emotions of loving care for an infant.
– It's right for Nickie. An only child – that's lonely. -
God knows, he must have had enough experience of loneliness, those days weeks that have to be forgotten, made up for somehow (how was she to decide), to understand loneliness although there was no comparison in kind… childhood is another state.
He said nothing, met her eyes for slow moments; the hold twitched away and his head stirred in what could be a questioning or assent.
Anyway. – I'm not using – taking anything. – It was up to nature to decide.
Berenice had no doubt of her fecundity. Most of her sexual life had been focused on avoiding it. But months went by and there was no conception. Blood every twenty-eight days. Was she prematurely ageing – at thirty-two, ridiculous. She had announced to her close colleagues that they'd have to find a temporary executive-level replacement at her desk, her computer, her conference telephone, for some months soon, she and her man had decided to have a second child. Now she confided it didn't seem to be happening. She took their experienced advice. It's nothing a gynaecologist can't prescribe for. The tests for fertility showed normal ovulation. On the prescription of the gynaecologist she instructed Paul and herself in what she called 'acrobatics', and intense frequency of lovemaking during fertile periods indicated by a rise in temperature she was to measure in her vagina. Strangely – unexpectedly in a male who had recently survived terminality – this vigorous frequent call on his sexual potency did not seem to affect him. When she alerted him in the wilderness over the radio contact (mobiles do not work too remotely from any power source) that the fertile period was warm in her, he came home to serve, and then to return to his wilderness.
There was still no conception. She consulted the gynaecologist again.
You ovulate all right, that's established. Your husband should have a sperm count.
Paul is to make an appointment with his doctor.
When is it?
He has not made an appointment.
Shall I give a call?
No, I'll do it.
He doesn't. Berenice/Benni stops asking.
Cannot.
Cannot submit himself, this self, to more tests, more procedures invading, monitoring his body. It performs, the penis is eveready, at hand, when he wakes in the morning, it gives and takes excitement when called upon, so frequently, to enter and empty itself to her in spurts of pleasure. Without reason, without any means of knowing by all the tests a laboratory trusts, without knowing if there could be any such reason, he half-believes the roving cells perhaps have not given up, the radiance that pursued to kill them keeps a pilot light somewhere low within him. His sperm may carry this. What kind of child could come of it.
He cannot trust his body. It remains the stranger that was made of it.
After some months of the good enough quality of the ordinary life that is valued only when it has been destroyed and then in some effort put together again – she has been made deputy director of the advertising agency, he has completed his on-location report on the Okavango for his team to place before the Minister of Environmental Affairs and release to the press – she brings up the subject of the second child. Not reproachfully, almost with a kind of hesitant tenderness?