The walls in what was meant to be a white man's house aren't like those in the house outside Benoni through which we couldn't help hearing the neighbours' quarrels and sexual groans. I don't know what went on — how he managed, without me, when they were alone in their bedroom. Their bedroom with the bed-head that extended at right angles like elbows, on either side of the bed, into two small cabinets, each with a lamp for which she had made a shade, on her side the alarm clock and lemon hand-cream pot, on his an overspill of newspapers, torch, aspirins in an ashtray Baby made him when she was small, book he was currently reading. I can only imagine. Invent from what I knew of her, what I knew of what he'd become. What did he think of to say to her while he was untying the shoelaces he'd tied when he got out of bed with that woman. Perhaps when you've been married a long time it's a shared burrow you scuttle along, every feature of it, for one, known by the other, every comment on the way anticipated by the other. The bedrooms, the nights, are like that. But he came and went by secret passages; he had things to say that he never could say. He must have had to watch every word.
And not only words. Once when I got into the back seat of the car I saw something strange on the floor. Everything; anything, alerted me to danger. My mother was getting into the front seat beside him; I waited until we'd driven off and they were deciding whether or not it was necessary to go to the bank before filling up with petrol, and I was able to pick up the object without them noticing. It was the dried head of a sunflower. Just the hard disc from which the seeds had fallen. Exactly like a round honeycomb. I don't know how it could have got there. Why. I only knew he would not be able to explain it to my mother; he did not need to explain anything to me, since the cinema, when he'd told me what to see and made clear what I was not to have seen.
My mother seemed to me as she always had been. Only, because of what I was in with, with him, and so afraid of — for her — there seemed to be some kind of space around her that kept us off — him and me — and that I held my breath for fear of entering. I didn't want to be in the room alone with her, either. But if I kept out of her way she would know there was something wrong, thinking in her innocence this would be something concerning me. And if I tried to be with her, to cover up that he wasn't — that might set her thinking, and I didn't want her to think, I didn't want my mother to think about him in any other but her gentle, trusting way, changed from the old times on the Reef simply by the special respect and privacy she taught us, by her example, he had earned by the pilgrimage through prison.
It's only since Baby cut her wrists that I've known my mother knew about him all the time. Well, not at the beginning (and even I don't know when exactly that was, whether the cinema was early on), but for a long time. She surely couldn't have known when, some weeks after my father was released, she and the wives of two other men who had been in prison with him decided to give a little New Year party for them and their supporters. When she and my father made up their list of people to invite she suggested Hannah Plowman and he wrote the name without comment, as if that were just another guest. It surely would not have been like my mother to have included that woman out of some sort of guile, a test of my father's reaction, of whether the woman herself would have the nerve to come to our house, now?
What a thought to have about my mother. But when you are lying, in your presence at the table, in every expression on your face, in everything you customarily do, going in and out to school, fooling quite naturally over the telephone with friends, you can't imagine anything that isn't devious, anymore.
The whole world is lying, fornicating and lying.
I was at that party. Baby and I were there, first helping with the preparation of food and rearranging the furniture. Baby, carrying a gift of snacks, went with him to our neighbours to tell them there'd be music until late that night; from the day we moved in, my mother had established good if distant relations with these whites. They didn't know about prison, about his political activities — one look at my mother and their Afrikaner fears that our skin meant dirty habits and noise they'd tolerate only from their own colour, were groundless. Everybody drank a lot — not my father, and my mother doesn't drink at all — and Baby was over-made-up and amazed all those people with her wild dancing. She was good, but showing off to the men. I danced a few times, after a beer, but I could feel myself getting angry every time some tannie said I was growing up handsome as my father, and I could see him, his face painted with the sweat of his hospitality, shining pride. I don't remember whether he danced with that woman. I can hardly picture her there at all. The moment when she arrived I was passing with a bottle of wine; it was the first time I'd seen her since the cinema and I'd thought about that face so much I could scarcely recognize it — this pink, scrubbed face, blonde hair springing back into shape like the coat of a wet dog, she must've washed it just before leaving for the party. She was smiling comradely at others' greetings, not at me. A moment when suddenly I didn't believe it: she had materialized, and his woman, that I had — like him, I know — always in my mind, vanished. My mother was signalling to me across the room at the group who were waiting for wine. There was a pretty comb in my mother's tight and shiny crown of hair, she was neat and beautiful, with the special care she took to dress for parties; she so enjoyed feeding people.
Baby cut her wrists when she spent a Saturday night with a friend. She didn't even do it at home, where she had her own room. You think of details like that — crazy — when you don't have any explanation for what has happened. She didn't die. A mess in somebody else's bathroom and some stitches on the inner side of her wrists where you can see the freeways and bypasses of veins just under the skin. Baby is light-skinned, like my mother, not like my father and me. When she was in bed, repaired and sedated by Dr Jasood, for whom my mother worked, my mother came and sat down in the kitchen where I was reading the newspaper because I did not know what I should be doing; he, my father, had taken his briefcase that morning and said he had to be away that weekend. He had looked heavy-limbed, as if he had to make himself go; she must have believed there was some grave political crisis taking him away. She sat on the edge of her chair and looked at me as if she had known me her whole life, not just the span of mine which had begun in her body. As if I were her son and not her son. She said Dr Jasood had just told her it was evident to him that Baby took drugs, that her great liveliness was deep unhappiness. He had been at that party.
She said to me: —What can we do for her?—
The slight emphasis on 'we' gave away, all at once, that my mother knew about my father. That she knew — without knowing how — I knew. She discounted him — couldn't count on him, couldn't call on Sonny, now, wherever he was, even if he were to be hidden from her only round the corner, he was too far away. I understood. What could we do for my sister: a family that ours had become? And at the same moment it came to both of us: what Baby's 'deep unhappiness' that the doctor diagnosed was about.
So Baby knew, too. It was just that she managed differently what she knew. The hip, hyped style she flaunted on street corners (out of sight of my mother; I saw her), the flip and vulgar way she — brought up in the sound of my mother's quiet voice and the poetry of my father's Shakespeare — talked; the emotional outbursts over trifles, that my mother put down to the strain of having had my father in detention and on trial during the time when her menstrual cycle was being established; her manner of distancing herself from the childhood she and I had in common — all these were her attempts to manage.