‘Yes,’ he replied (I am sorry but I cannot tell a lie).
‘Why?’ I said.
He shrugged.
‘Why?’ I said again.
‘Because,’ he said.
‘Well, bugger you,’ I said, and turned my back on him and locked myself in the bathroom, where I did not cry — the thought of crying did not so much as cross my mind — but on the contrary, choking with vengefulness, squeezed a full tube of toothpaste and a full tube of hair-mousse into the handbasin, flooded the mess with hot water, stirred it with a hairbrush, and flushed it down the sink.
That was the background. After that episode, after his confession did not win him the approval he was expecting, he turned to lying. ‘Do you still see Yvette?’ I asked after another of his trips.
‘I have to see Yvette, I have no choice, we work together,’ he replied.
‘But do you still see her in that way?’
‘What you call that way is over,’ he said. ‘It only happened once.’
‘Once or twice,’ I said.
‘Once,’ he repeated, cementing the lie.
‘In fact, it was just one of those things,’ I offered.
‘Exactly. Just one of those things.’ And therewith words ceased between Mark and me, words and everything else, for the night.
Each time Mark lied he would make sure he looked me straight in the eye. Levelling with Julia: that must be how he thought of it. It was from this level look of his that I could tell — infallibly — that he was lying. You won’t believe how bad Mark was at lying — how bad men are in general. What a pity I had nothing to lie about, I thought. I could have shown Mark a thing or two, technique-wise.
Chronologically speaking, Mark was older than me, but that was not how I saw it. The way I saw it, I was the oldest in our family, followed by Mark, who was about thirteen, followed by our daughter Christina, who would be two at her next birthday. In respect of maturity my husband was therefore closer to the child than he was to me.
As for Mister Prod, Mister Nudge, the man shovelling sand from the back of the truck — to return to him — I had no idea how old he was. For all I knew, he might be another thirteen-year-old. Or he might actually, mirabile dictu, be a grown-up. I was going to have to wait and see.
‘I was out by a factor of six,’ he was saying (or maybe it was sixteen, I was only half listening). ‘Instead of one ton of sand, six (or sixteen) tons of sand. Instead of one and a half tons of gravel, ten tons of gravel. I must have been out of my mind.’
‘Out of your mind,’ I said, playing for time while I caught up.
‘To make a mistake like that.’
‘I make mistakes with numbers all the time. I get the decimal point in the wrong place.’
‘Yes, but a factor of six isn’t like misplacing the decimal point. Not unless you are a Sumerian. Anyway, the answer to your question is, it is going to take for ever.’
What question, I asked myself? And what is this it that is going to take for ever?
‘I have to go now,’ I said. ‘I have a child waiting for her lunch.’
‘You have children?’
‘Yes, I have a child. Why shouldn’t I? I am a grown woman with a husband and a child whom I have to feed. Why are you surprised? Why else should I need to spend so much time in Pick n Pay?’
‘For the music?’ he offered.
‘And you? Don’t you have a family?’
‘I have a father who lives with me. Or with whom I live. But no family in the conventional sense. My family has flown.’
‘No wife? No children?’
‘No wife, no children. I am back to being a son.’
They have always interested me, these exchanges between human beings when the words have nothing to do with the traffic of thoughts through the mind. As he and I were speaking, for instance, my memory threw up the visual image of the really quite repulsive stranger, with thick black hair sprouting from his earholes and over the top button of his shirt, who at the most recent barbecue had ever so casually placed a hand on my bottom as I stood dishing up salad for myself: not to stroke me or pinch me, just to cup my buttock in his big hand. If that image was filling my mind, what might be filling the mind of this other, less hirsute man? And how fortunate that most people, even people who are no good at straight-out lying, are at least competent enough at concealment not to reveal what is going on inside them, not by the slightest tremor of the voice or dilation of the pupil!
‘Well, goodbye,’ I said.
‘Goodbye,’ he said.
I went home, paid the house-help, gave Chrissie her lunch, and put her down for her nap. Then I baked two sheets of chocolate cookies. While the cookies were still warm I drove back to the house on Tokai Road. It was a beautiful, wind-still day. Your man (remember, I did not know his name at that point) was in the yard doing something with timber and a hammer and nails. He was stripped to the waist; his shoulders were red where the sun had caught them.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘You should wear a shirt, the sun isn’t good for you. Here, I’ve brought some cookies for you and your father. They are better than the stuff you get at Pick n Pay.’
Looking suspicious, in fact looking quite irritated, he put aside his tools and took the parcel. ‘I can’t invite you in, too much of a mess,’ he said. I was clearly not welcome.
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I can’t stay anyway, I have to get back to my child. I was just making a neighbourly gesture. Would you and your father like to come over for a meal one evening? A neighbourly meal?’
He gave a smile, the first smile I had had from him. Not an attractive smile, too tight-lipped. He was self-conscious about his teeth, which were in bad shape. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘but I’ll have to check with my father first. He isn’t one for late nights.’
‘Tell him it won’t be a late night,’ I said. ‘You can eat and go, I won’t be offended. It will just be the three of us. My husband is away.’
You must be getting worried, Mr Vincent. What have I let myself in for? you must be asking yourself. How can this woman pretend to have total recall of mundane conversations dating back three or four decades? And when is she going to get to the point? So let me be candid. I am making up the words, the dialogue, as I go along. Which I presume is permitted, since we are talking about a writer. What I am telling you may not be true to the letter, but it is true to the spirit, be assured of that. Can I proceed?
[Silence.]
I scribbled my phone number on the box of cookies. ‘And let me tell you my name too,’ I said, ‘in case you were wondering. My name is Julia.’
‘Julia. How sweetly flows the liquefaction of her clothes.’
‘Really,’ I said. Liquefaction. What did he mean?
He arrived as promised the next evening, but without his father. ‘My father is not feeling well,’ he said. ‘He has taken an aspirin and gone to bed.’
We ate at the kitchen table, the two of us, with Chrissie on my lap. ‘Say hello to the uncle,’ I said to Chrissie. But Chrissie would have nothing to do with the strange man. A child knows when something is up. Feels it in the air.
In fact Christina never took to John, then or later. As a young child she was fair and blue-eyed, like her father and quite unlike me. I’ll show you a picture. Sometimes I used to feel that, because she did not take after me in looks, she would never take to me. Strange. I was the one who did all the caring and caring-for in the household, yet compared with Mark I was the intruder, the dark one, the odd one out.
The uncle. That was what I called John in front of her. Afterwards I regretted it. Something sordid in passing off a lover as one of the family.