— Oh I know you're quite happy to take bribes — him letting you go off and live away from home. Leaving Ma. Leaving me with them.—
— If you're so pure why did you take it, then! — The motorbike again.
— Leave me alone. You don't live here. Coming to kiss him all over and bringing your bloody dresses for her to sew like a servant.—
— Listen, man. The trouble with you, you don't grow up. Oh a big hulk with hair on your chin, but a case of — of arrested development. Voluntary.—
Now I couldn't help laughing at my sister, how could I give her the satisfaction of taking her seriously. — My, where did you pick that up? Got some new boyfriend studying psychology? Or would it be medicine? Is that the sort of stuff you rap among your disco pals? My, my.—
— You have no friends, that's your problem. Hang around the house glowering. Obsessed. — She paused, threatening, eyes staring insolently wide at me, to say with what. — There's more than a family.—
— Yes, smoking pot and sleeping around and bumming off anybody. I don't believe you even work, half the time. We don't know what you're doing.—
Her aggression dropped like a weapon laid down. — That's right.—
I wondered what was the matter with her. She sat breaking the crusts she had left; my mother always had made her eat her crusts. The thought came startlingly, reasonably to me: —You're not pregnant, are you, Baby?—
She laughed in the affected way she has adopted since she was about fourteen, throwing her hair and head back for men-including even me. — Of course what else could you imagine could happen to me! Oh little Will! — And I laughed, too, in relief; for my mother.
But when my mother came in fresh from whatever the discussion had been with my father before he departed on one of his important missions (there are so many funerals, so many 'cleansings of the graves' among blacks, he had a good chance of getting away with this Sunday's alibi) I didn't look at her, so that she might not see my disgust. She knows — we know — that if I withdraw she is without support — it's not that I can guide my mother, I'm too young and ignorant for that, but that my attention is a bit like an ordinary old pocket torch that I hold, walking backwards before her as she manages to keep to her way in its light. That Sunday morning I couldn't do it. I know what's in the carryall. When she's out of the house — and he's nearly always out of the house — I look in their things. It's a strong compulsion; has to be strong because one of the rules of respect he taught Baby and me was never to open drawers or read letters belonging to others. (As a result, we used to tell on each other when we filched each other's toys or books, giving occasion for another contradictory lesson in ethics, eh-one doesn't betray. The only thing he left me to find out for myself was his own contradictions.)
She keeps the carryall in the cabinet on her side of their bed — poor thing, must have it right there beside her so that she can lay her hands on it at once if he's taken in the middle of the night. On the shelf at the top are the creams with which she takes care of her skin — for him. I used to smell the scent on her hands if she came into our room-Baby's and mine, the Benoni house — when one of us had a nightmare. In the carryall she keeps toothpaste and a new toothbrush still in its plastic film, towel and soap, clean underpants, socks, pyjamas, a pullover. The list is a code of her fears that he might be taken away next time as he was the first, without the means to keep himself clean — the means of self-respect so important to him — and warm: the pullover is her means of love, whether that's important to him or not. And she gives the carryall to him to take along with that briefcase! How could I look at her.
I could feel her dismay at my rejection, hear her timidly determined efforts to put together, for her daughter and son and herself, a leisurely Sunday lingering at breakfast, pouring herself tea, murmuring whether anyone would like another slice of bread toasted. But Baby was staring at her, I saw Baby take breath to begin to speak, twice, flicking her long eyelashes, before she actually did. And as she did, I quickly looked to my mother, at least I was with my mother when Baby spoke. — Ma, I want to tell you. I don't want to give you a fright again.—
Aila found the carryall in the boot of the car when she wanted to load a bag of potatoes she had bought. She unpacked the new toothbrush, the toothpaste, the towel, soap and clothing and put them where they would be in daily use: the toilet articles in the family bathroom cupboard, her husband's clothes in the wardrobe acquired on hire purchase in Benoni — on the first Saturday of each month it had been part of the family outing to make the regular payment from the schoolteacher's salary.
He watched what Aila was doing, going back and forth, emptying the carryall.
— It's surprising she told you when I wasn't there.—
Aila couldn't get a full drawer to take the thickness of the pullover. She was refolding it slowly and carefully.
— After I'd gone out, I mean.—
Aila pressed the pullover into the drawer and shut it.
— Didn't you know. — A statement. She looked at him unchallengingly.
— If I'd known, wouldn't I have told you!—
What a thing to have let slip his lips — as if he told her anything, now. — How could I have known? What do you mean? You don't think I had something to do with it! Do you? Is that it?—
Aila stood in the middle of their bedroom. It was ridiculous — Aila, so quiet and dignified and harmless — but he felt he couldn't get past her, if he tried to walk away she would step in front of him. — It's the kind of thing I thought you'd know about.—
— Well I wouldn't. The less each group knows of the activities of the others, the better. But you're perfectly aware of that — you are. Particularly in the matter of recruitment to proceed outside. The people I work with don't deal with that. There are others. She must have been with them — perhaps all these months, and we didn't know it. She's been well schooled, that's clear. Didn't want to involve you — us— Paused, yearningly; but there was nothing to be shared with Aila, standing there. — Clever little girl, after all.—
— Perhaps you can still see her. We won't know when she's going.—
— You want me to persuade her.—
Aila was slowly moving her head, dipped to one side, not in denial but in doubt at his success.
He had an urge to take the risk of talking to Aila, really talking to her, he felt everything pressing up against his diaphragm: speak, speak. — I don't know what to feel about it, the whole thing.—
— It's not what you have to feel about it, it's how you feel.—
— I suppose I can't believe it. Baby. So I don't feel. She's been out of the house, I miss her because of that, I've missed her all the time, it's not the same. without her. And now she won't be here, for another reason. — But everything he was saying seemed to be something else; he stopped with a loss of breath like a groan. He felt himself in great danger; one move from Aila, Aila—
She picked up the empty carryall and pressed it flat under her right arm. She waited; but was it only her politeness, that had never been neglected, even in the days of their intimacy? Aila, Aila. A terrible temptation to tear off her clothes, burst into tears, enter her, destroy himself as surely as his Baby could have done when she cut her wrists. — You're not too upset, Aila? What I could do. I could try to arrange that she doesn't have to get into anything too risky. But you seem to be taking it pretty well.?—
She looked at him with great sorrow in her face. He had never seen that face before, although he knew he had deserved it. And now there was the pain that he could not be sure it was for him.