by Damon Galgut
We were talking about me sharing a room with Laurence. How we had got on to this topic I have no idea, but I found myself announcing suddenly that I had wanted Tehogo’s room.
His smile froze as he understood. Immediately I had to explain and justify: ‘But no problem now. I don’t want it any more.’
‘You want my room?’
‘No, no. I’m happy now. I talked to Dr Ngema about it once, but no problem any more. Really.’
Raymond said something to him and they both burst out laughing. Then Raymond said to me, ‘You want his room, you wait.’
‘No, no, I’m telling you, I don’t want it.’
‘One month, two month,’ Raymond said. ‘You wait.’
‘You don’t understand,’ I started saying, then I thought about it. ‘What’s happening in two months?’
‘He’s getting a new job,’ Raymond said.
‘Is he?’
‘New job,’ Tehogo said. ‘Good job.’
‘What job?’ I said. ‘You can tell me. I’ll keep it a secret.’
‘Good work, bad work,’ Raymond said. ‘It’s a good-bad job.’
Tehogo patted me reassuringly on the back. ‘Don’t worry. You stay here. You take my room. Then I come and cut off your head.’
They both laughed uproariously again. Then they spoke together across me and a more sober mood descended.
‘This is joking talk,’ Raymond said.
‘No job,’ Tehogo assured me. ‘Everything is joking talk.’
Before I could speak again Laurence ducked anxiously into view. ‘I’m worried about this music, Frank. Is the music okay?’
‘Don’t worry about the music’
But Tehogo overruled me. ‘The music is no good,’ he announced sternly. ‘I have better music. Wait. Two minutes. I’m coming now.’ He went out to get it. While he was gone Raymond kept leaning on me, talking into my ear. He was saying something about Laurence’s girlfriend that I couldn’t quite hear, but the tone was genial and insinuating; it sounded as if it might be funny, if I could catch it.
Then Tehogo was back with a handful of loose cassettes that he spilled over the floor. And the beat changed, becoming faster, more mindless and energetic, and somehow everybody was dancing. Everyone except Laurence. He sat on my bed and watched us with a puzzled, mournful expression. I called to him to join us, but he shook his head.
I was amazed at myself. I hadn’t danced, I think, since my wedding. But now I found myself weaving and bouncing opposite the most unlikely of partners, Tehogo. And I didn’t recognize in him the locked, earthbound body he slouched around in all day; he could really move. He was sinuous and supple, but strangest of all, he was happy. His grinning, sweating face seemed mad to me, till I recognized in it a mirror image of my own.
Something had happened to us that night; it was as if we’d fallen through a wall that normally bricked us in too tightly to move. The room opened and closed like a lurid flower around me. I wasn’t myself. The loose abandon that had come over me was something foreign and lush. I felt as if I was up on a height, from which I could look down on the usual contours of my life and see how narrow and constricted they were. But I would never go back. I knew that all of us would stay where we were, in this high place, in this benevolent state of friendship that had fallen like grace upon us.
And then everyone was leaving. The music was played out, the wine was finished, and Tehogo and Raymond wanted me to go with them to Mama Mthembu’s for more dancing and drinking. But I knew that I was done for the night. My head was already tender. I stood at the door, saying goodbye to everybody, as if I was the host and they were all my invited guests.
‘See you in the morning,’ I said to Tehogo. I enfolded him in an embrace, feeling his thin shoulder-blades moving under my hands.
‘Remember,’ Raymond said. ‘In two months you can have your own room.’
‘He is joking,’ Tehogo said. ‘It is not true.’
‘I don’t know what’s true any more,’ I said.
More laughter, rootless and excessive. Then the place was emptied out. In the weak light of the lamp I recognized my room again, full of rubbish and rubble. From the speakers came an endless soft crackle of static.
‘I’m just taking Zanele home,’ Laurence said. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
She was smiling self-consciously, tucking a strand of hair behind one ear. She didn’t look at me.
‘Come back in the morning.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t leave you with all this to clear up. That’s not fair.’
‘We can do it tomorrow.’
‘No, no. I’ll be back in a minute.’
When they were gone I contemplated the debris and skewed furniture while the buoyancy in me started to flatten out. I couldn’t believe that I’d danced and drunk like somebody half my age, but the youthfulness felt good, and from its gassy glow it was Laurence Waters who looked old and tired and jaded. Why wasn’t he spending the night with her?
He was back in fifteen minutes or so. Though he’d said he was coming back to clean up, he only looked at the disorder of the room and sank on to his bed. ‘Was that all right?’ he said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘The party. Was it okay? Did people enjoy it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Really? How did it compare with other parties?’
‘Laurence, in all the years I’ve been here, nobody’s ever had a party. Yours was the first.’
‘Really?’ he said again. A dim smile broke through the anxiety. ‘You were fantastic, Frank.’
‘That’s because I’m drunk.’
‘Are you?’
‘I’m so drunk, Laurence. Jesus Christ. It’s been years since I felt like this.’
‘Oh, good, good,’ he said vaguely. His face clouded again. ‘But why did Dr Ngema leave early?’
‘I don’t think parties are her thing.’
He nodded distractedly and made a show of collecting some paper cups together. I watched him for a while, then I said: ‘What’s this outreach project she was talking about?’
‘Oh, that.’
‘Well, what is it?’
‘You should know, Frank. You’re the first person I told about it.’
‘Your travelling clinic.’
He nodded. ‘But I must thank you. It was your idea that I try Maria’s village first. It was a great suggestion.’
‘You’ve been to Maria’s village?’
‘A few times. It’s ideal. So the plan is to hold a trial clinic there in a week or so. See how it goes. And if it’s successful...’ He laughed. ‘No more symbols, Frank. You were right.’
‘Why has nobody said a word about it?’
‘Dr Ngema’s going to tell everybody at the staff meeting on Monday. Let’s not talk about it now, Frank. I’m not in the mood.’
So we let the subject drop and soon afterwards we fell asleep. It bothered me that this project had taken shape at Maria’s village without anybody telling me, but it was part of the weird harmony of the evening that it also didn’t matter. The past was complex and fractured, but it was past. Tomorrow was another day.
I woke in the morning with a terrible headache suspended between my temples. We had left the lamp on and its wan glow mixed with daylight to reveal the mess in the room. Crisps trodden into the floor, broken plastic cups holding the dregs of wine.
When I got up I saw that somebody had knocked the wooden fish that Laurence had given me off the table; it lay broken on the floor. I threw the pieces into the bin and peered through my pain at Laurence sprawled face-down, his mouth open, a string of saliva on his lip. The day already had a used and ugly look to me.
A hot shower and an aspirin didn’t help. Laurence was still asleep when I went out. I wasn’t sure yet where I was going, but I just wanted to get away.
As I emerged into the corridor, Tehogo was locking his door. He seemed in as much pain as me. I knew I ought to smile at him, but the smile just wasn’t
in me this morning.
He said to me, ‘My tapes.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve got my tapes. In your room.’
It took a moment for my blurred brain to understand. Then his rudeness irritated me. ‘Laurence is still sleeping,’ I said shortly. ‘You can get them later.’
He grunted and in an instant it was there with us again: all the dourness and sourness and mistrust. The past, recharged and renewed. Nothing was different after all.
I carried this with me all day. The headache didn’t lift and my mind felt crazed through with thin lines of unease. I was thinking, not very coherently, about Laurence and his girlfriend and the party. I knew I had undertaken to spend some time with Zanele tonight, but the reason wasn’t clear to me any more. I was resentful at being entangled in Laurence’s personal affairs and it felt to me that if I stayed away, on my own, for long enough, my obligation would fade.
But it didn’t fade. When I went back in the late afternoon he was busy cleaning up the room. The first thing he said was, ‘Oh, thank God. I thought you’d run out on me.’
‘Laurence, listen. Let me do your duty for you. Then you can —’
‘No, no, forget it. I told you, it’s a commitment.’
I lay and watched him, toiling on his hands and knees, a wet cloth in his hand. There were stains on the floor that would never come out.
9
I arrived late and she was waiting downstairs for me, wearing another of those West African suits. She had a touch of makeup on and I saw that she’d taken some trouble to look good. But I was in the same clothes I’d worn all day, with two days’ growth of beard and a dull pain behind my eyes.
We had to eat at Mama’s place; there was nowhere else in town. So I led her through. The bar was full. From the haircuts and attitude I recognized the full contingent of soldiers, a group mixed in race and age. But there were also more of the other regulars than usual, the scattering of clerks and farmers and workers that were the motley population of the town. There was a table open in the courtyard, by chance the very same one I’d sat at with Laurence the first day, in the corner under the bougainvillaea. Mama came over to serve us and I ordered whisky.
‘Is that a good idea?’ Zanele said.
‘Hair of the dog. I couldn’t get by without anaesthetic. And there’s nowhere else to find it in this whole godforsaken place.’
She smiled. ‘It is kind of a strange spot. Not what I was expecting, I guess.’
‘What were you expecting?’
‘Well, Laurence didn’t say... in his letters... I had a different idea.’
I don’t know what her different idea was. But I could see that the place made her uneasy: she kept looking around distractedly. I didn’t want to be here myself, but I made an effort to shed my burden of bad grace. It wasn’t so unpleasant sitting opposite a pretty face, whisky in hand.
Things mellowed once I’d had a bit to drink. We talked about this and that – her background, how she’d landed up out here. She came from middle America somewhere, the daughter and granddaughter of black Americans. There was nothing African about her, really – not even her name. Zanele was a name she took on when she came out to the Sudan. Her real name, it turned out, was Linda.
‘Linda’s a nice name,’ I said.
But she shook her head. She wanted to leave it all behind, that middle-class childhood of half-privilege and displaced values. She thought she was African now, but she had the manner and confidence of another continent completely.
Still, there was something about her mission I admired. She was actually out here, slogging in the Sudanese desert, roughing it in the Drakensberg mountains. She told me about her life in Lesotho, and none of it made me envious. I was on to my third whisky, feeling good now, and I ordered another along with my food. It was easy to listen, while she talked about a library, a creche, a literacy training programme, even a village bank – all of this started and run by the people of an impoverished community in the high mountains. With the help of overseas funding, which she’d helped to raise. It sounded Utopian – and of course it was: none of this had really come to pass yet, it was all in the pipeline. Meanwhile she and six other foreign volunteers were sleeping on mattresses on the floor, while the days passed in grubby work that ranged from inoculating cattle to digging irrigation ditches.
‘And you? What are you doing there?’
‘I’m a teacher. The only one in the village. I teach children of all different ages – six to sixteen.’
‘What do you teach them?’
‘Different subjects. Math, English. Some history.’
‘Can’t be too effective.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, I mean. Different ages all together. Different levels. All those subjects.’
‘It’s not like the schools you probably went to,’ she said, a bit stiffly. ‘But it does have some effect. These are very poor people. Anything is better than nothing.’
‘Is it?’
‘Well, of course. Don’t you think so?’
‘It seems to me,’ I said, ‘that past a certain point, anything is exactly the same as nothing.’
She was watching me warily. ‘Have you ever done it?’
‘What? Gone to do volunteer work with a poor community somewhere? No. Maybe I don’t believe in it. Or maybe this place is it.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘This place isn’t it. What you’re doing here isn’t community work. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
She and Laurence were the same kind of person: blindly and naïvely believing in their own power to change things. It was simple, this belief, and the simplicity was strong and foolish. I could see how they might have been drawn to each other, up at the camp in Sudan – Laurence the young healer, earnest and passionate, she the lost seeker with her new name. And how South Africa, down at the bottom end of the continent, with its glorious future just beginning, might have seemed like a backdrop to their belief.
But that was only part of it, of course. Because I could also see how mismatched they were. Behind the brave aspirations, what did these two really have in common? Their relationship was just another idea – dry and sensible, like everything they did. And they had started to realize it too. Which is why she and I were sitting at this table now, while Laurence was a kilometre away, doing a shift of duty he didn’t need to do.
Talk turned inevitably to Laurence. She said, ‘I wanted to thank you for looking after him. He’s mentioned you in every single letter. It’s helped him a lot to have you here.’
‘I haven’t helped him.’
‘Well, he thinks you have. Maybe you don’t know this, but Laurence doesn’t have friends. You’re the first friend he’s ever made. It’s important to him.’
‘Why doesn’t Laurence have friends?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s too preoccupied. He is a touch wrapped up in himself. Of course, you know his background.’
‘Some of it. Not too much. I know about his parents being killed.’
‘His parents?’ She stared at me. ‘That’s not right.’
‘Weren’t his mother and father killed in an accident?’
She shook her head and looked at the table. ‘That’s an old story,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why he told you that. I thought he’d got over it.’
‘So what’s the truth?’
‘His parents aren’t dead. He’s an illegitimate child. His father wasn’t ever around. His mother raised him on her own. But she told him that story about his parents dying, and how she’d taken over —’
‘That she was his sister.’
‘Right. That story.’
I felt somehow betrayed. ‘He told me a long saga about looking for their graves one day...’
‘Well, that part is true. He did go looking for them. That was when his sister – his mother – came out with it and told him the truth. It was a big thing for him. But it’s all history now. I don’t know why he lied to you.’
‘As dark secrets go,’ I said, ‘that’s pretty disappointing. It’s not the Middle Ages any more.’
She looked troubled; it gave her face an added depth. It was on the tip of my tongue to say something reckless, but at that moment Mama arrived with our food. I transferred my attention reluctantly. ‘Full house tonight,’ I said.
‘Everybody’s here,’ Mama said. She couldn’t seem to stop smiling, all her good fortune radiating from the gap between her front teeth. Her plump arms, as she set down our plates, gave off a jangling of bracelets that was like the sound of cash in a drawer.
‘All the soldiers have arrived?’
‘Even the boss. Colonel Moller. He came yesterday.’
‘Who?’ I said.
It was like a hot light growing in my head.
‘Colonel Moller. Ooh, such a nice man. That’s him there inside, by the bar. You want more ice with that drink?’
‘No, thanks.’ I’d started to sweat. It was too much, surely; too much of a coincidence. But I had to see for myself. I went to the bathroom to wash my hands. The figure that Mama had indicated was at the far end of the bar and it was only on the way back that I could stare into his face for two long seconds. Yes, it was him; not much different, despite the ten intervening years. He was a little slacker and older; he’d gained one rank and was in charge of a mixed group of soldiers – black and white together, some of them the enemy he’d been trying to kill. His life must feel very different to him, sent up here on this unlikely posting, but to me he was the same, unchanged. The narrow, fanatical features, the lean body generating a disproportionate power. He stared back at me with dead eyes, then looked away. He didn’t know who I was.
I found that I was trembling. Zanele looked curiously at me as I settled myself again. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Oh, nothing. I’m all right.’
But I wasn’t all right. My mind was knotted up with what it had seen. I sat and picked at my food, but I wasn’t in the room any more. I was following the brown back of a corporal through the dark, towards a lighted cell... and then stumbling away again, alone.
