Thapelo slaps his hands across his chest to strike and grab his biceps. – We have to live with it, Bra. Race sensitivity's out, my man, for this thing. Those big money boys know how to operate rings round us. For sure there's a link, a deal, between the toll highway and the mining, let the Mineral Commodities set-up and the government deny it, shout from now till tomorrow, you saw how the National Road Agency says the road will reduce transport costs, that's important for the products of the mine, getting the stuff to the smelter. -
– And finally to the stock exchanges of the world. -
– And the ten million dollar shareholders scattered by the highway. Who'll get the dividends. -
– The makhosi. -
Paul turned from the contest of words to decisions. – We're only a couple of months before the deadline for final objections to the mining project. Co-ordinate all the organisations and groups for action, jack up overseas support (Berenice's vocabulary comes in useful, an unfamiliar weapon). Get a life, man! – Let's make up and bring a high-profile party of save-the-earthers to come as observers of what's at stake – not the low-voltage ones we've had – some pop stars who'll compose songs for us, Come rap for the planet, prove they're good world citizens… it's cool now for the famous to take up causes -
– Right on, my brother! -
Maybe her advertising agency would know exactly how to manipulate this, now desperately become like any other publicity campaign.
Lyndsay had left a message among those waiting on his mobile phone. Responding to relevant others, he forgot about it. She called again – it's just to say she'd like to come round this evening, if he and Benni were going to be home, hadn't seen them for a week. Yes, eat with us. No, she'd come for coffee. You know we don't drink coffee after dinner, Ma, and neither do you. Laughter. For a drink then, fine.
His mother arrived after nine without acknowledgement of being later than expected and with the air of having pleasantly concluded some preoccupation. Benni, in the worldly sophistication of Berenice, even tolerantly wondered to herself whether Lyndsay hadn't found some man attracted to her, she still looks good despite her age; it can happen. Mother and son had a glass of wine, Benni for some reason puts her hand over the glass Paul has put beside her. Must be some new diet she's put herself on, well-promoted… There's Danish aquavit in the cupboard, which she favours, but the Scandinavian association is perhaps not tactful.
– I've been meaning to tell you for some weeks but there have been legal complications, still are… no point in waiting for that to be final. You remember, I brought a welfare worker, witness in one of my cases, along to lunch. Someone who'd taken me to see abandoned babies – children in a home. Well, I went back there on my own a few… a number of times. I felt, I don't know, there was a child, a small girl, she's about three the paediatrician says, one can't be exact with an abandoned child, she responded to my turning up – presence. She was brought in by the police seven months ago, that means she was about two years old, then. She'd been raped and she's HIV-positive. She had to be (Lyndsay, always professionally, unhesitatingly precise – hands up – at a loss how to define this for others)… reconstructed… surgery… weeks in the children's hospital. Apparently it was successful, far as they can tell with a female so young. Then she was handed back to the institution. They're happy – the people in charge at that place – if they think you're trustworthy, you want to give one of the inmates – kids – a treat, an outing. So I took her to the zoo, you must introduce Nickie to the baby seal that's just been born – she was ecstatic. I've decided she couldn't go on living in an institution, good though it is. There are very few adoptions of HIV-positive children. The home has released her already. She's with me. I'm adopting her. -
– What have you done. – He has stumbled into some place in Lyndsay's life closed against him. Can't see her there. -
I'm finding out. Quite an experience. – She raises eyebrows, serene. – You can imagine how delighted Primrose is. She's in charge while I'm in Chambers and court. -
His mother gives time for silence, for Paul and Benni/Berenice to accept what is done. Her son is with her in quarantine in the garden, they are statues, commemorating their habitation there. – How will Adrian. What about Adrian? -
She is alone with Paul, since the quarantine there will always be this facility, apart from the presence of others.
The words flung down before him.
– What about Adrian. -
She went back to that babies' shelter, one Saturday when she had walked past a toy shop in a mall and been beckoned by a display of anthropomorphic bears, monkeys and leopards dressed in jeans. Nickie had pillow-mates like these; there was a jungle gym she'd noticed the unidentified children climbing when she accompanied her outstanding witness to their reality, but were there any toys like these, personal treasures. She bought a few, and went to drop them off in the rundown quarter of the city where the institution was. Those inmates old enough to walk or at least sit were having their supper at tables right for their size. A small girl she recognised from the first visit jumped up, overturning some mess in her plate, and came running, to the toys, not the woman; she took her time, gazed at the bear, the leopard, the monkey, and carefully chose the monkey. Others clamoured round.
Was it foolish to bring a few luxury toys where there were – how many had Charlene said – thirty or more babies and children, the number went up and down as some died and one or two, healthy ones, might be adopted. Would they quarrel over possession – the recognised girl had run off with her monkey. Well-meaning could be mistaken.
She returned a week later, not with gifts that might obviously cause trouble, maybe create a contentious privilege, difficult to imagine a child who doesn't have any, in the democracy necessary in such a place – to ask if she could take the claimant of the monkey to the zoo to see real ones. The girl had been in care for months, she was told, found without a name, not old enough to know if she did have one, the staff called her Klara. Getting to know the features that made the child whoever it was, she was (couldn't be expressed to oneself less clumsily) proposed the wonderful mystery of the personality, how it may be signalled in the set of the nose, the shifting line of lips in speech (this little creature talks a lot, an incoherent coherence of whatever African language she had shaped when she learnt to speak and the English she had learnt to obey from the whites among the Salvation Army people whose institution cared for her). Here was a small being creating herself. The distinguished-looking woman, maybe a politician or something, who came back after Charlene brought her, became well-known to the Army's female Major and was allowed to take lucky Klara away for weekends, then was listed a foster-parent, Klara officially in her care. A bed, a place vacant for another, born not in a manger but a public toilet. Better not ask what next for the small girl if the lady tired of her. Because Lyndsay, also, did not know what next. For herself; for the child; in the meantime she did not make her guest? charge? known to Paul and his family.
Her own motives were suspect to her. Then they were of no concern, she and this stranger with a vividly distinct self, stranger no more, had a life in common. A nursery school accepted her, dropped off there every morning by Lyndsay on the way to Chambers, and Primrose kept her fluent in a mother tongue in the afternoons. Lyndsay did mention to a colleague that she was taking care of someone's black child; it was not the sort of temporary situation without precedent in the individual social conscience of their legal practice – at least had not been during the apartheid years when clients defended on charges of treason sometimes had no choice but to leave a child abandoned. There was a good chance, said the paediatrician Lyndsay took the child to, that her HIV-positive status would correct itself shortly; the blood count was encouragingly mounting. This reprieve could happen only in children. So there was an interim decision; don't look further than that. She wrote one of the spaced letters she and Adrian exchanged, like the form letters to aunts etc. taught to phrase, at school, where she tol
d that Paul was in a helicopter monitoring the terrible floods in the Okavango, and related the progress of Nicholas swimming over-arm instead of dog-paddling, beginning to count up to twenty-five, recognise words in story-books. (Relating to herself; Klara, able already to string red and white beads alternately on a cord, has to be stopped from attempting to climb the jacaranda in the garden, insists on mastering the use of a fork at the age of about two-and-a-half or three.)
Enquiries, to someone who dealt with these things, about the processes of adoption are routine in informing oneself how the child might better be offered to someone where she could grow up in the company of siblings, a father and mother. There was no point she would really remember when instead she had become the adoption applicant, informing herself. The process is not simple, even in the case of a child of unknown parentage, abandoned no-one knows by whom. But it was the time to inform her son and his family.
Should Paul's mother be invited to bring along the child when she came to his house; where Nickie was? Lyndsay, that awesome lawyer rationalist (Berenice's one of the impoverishers of their mother tongue who make the epithet as devoid of religious force as 'fuck' is devoid of force to shock), not only decides at her age and in her situation to adopt a small child but must have one who is infected with the Disease. Does anyone honestly know whether or not it can be transmitted ways other than sexually or by blood? If by blood, what happens when two children play together and there are scratches, blood exchanged. Nickie's a boy, quite rough, if still small. Benni/Berenice – everything must be taken into consideration – decides to put a hold on such visits, tactfully, until Paul is home. She knows Lyndsay well enough, in the shift the plight of Adrian has somehow brought about, to think Lyndsay will understand, not comment upon to Paul.
– The child's accepted at a nursery school. – Paul's like his mother, depends on evidence, whether it's a conservation back-of-beyond or their private lives in question.
– Not all nursery schools. Wasn't there even a case – a woman went to court when a kid was refused. The nursery school pointed out that very young children bite when they get in a temper. -
– The child's how old? -
– It's not sure, about three. I suppose they tell by the teeth and not all come out at the same rate. Nickie's were early. -
Benni was not particularly surprised, not confused as he was, he saw, when his mother came out with it just before he went to the drowned Okavango that now was the scene in unobliterated vision, present after-image in his awareness. He could not place, with Lyndsay, this action. She had never been particularly fond of children, it seemed, kept a kind of privacy even between herself and the four she bore (had it been Adrian who wanted a family, and now left them to her) and she didn't drool and coo over her grandchildren although she and Nickie were rather companionable, he loved this special friend.
Benni appeared rather to be amused by his discomfiture. The wilderness is an innocent environment whatever else he exposes there; he doesn't know what goes on in the real world. Doesn't know it's become quite trendy to adopt a black child, or an orphan from, say, Sarajevo or India. She could tell him it proves something. But in Lyndsay's instance, she can't hazard what.
She sees he won't oppose – whatever Lyndsay decides, he is convinced is all right. For Nicholas: he doesn't decide, for Nicholas. She should, she wants – fuck him if he doesn't put his child first, above all the orphans in the world – to turn on him angrily but she does not. In this life put together since the time he went home again, out of touch, there is still, underneath, something between him and the woman who is his mother that shuts out everyone. He's here in the bedroom but the lines are down.
Whatever it is she wanted to prove by adopting in old age, and on her own, a child who might die and whose physical possibilities of growing up with the birthright of a female, clitoris, labia, and vagina, must be damaged however clever the surgery was, his mother's choice isn't an easy one. This bright and beguiling little girl is self-willed in excess of her size and approximate age, manipulative, a show-off in the spotlight of demanded attention and the next half-hour gloweringly withdrawn. – Just plain naughty. – The foster-mother/grandmother laughs even when exasperated.
Who knows if the virus covertly hunts this child down as rogue cells may still be holed up somewhere along his bloodstream. His mother is an old hand at interpreting prognosis, monitoring it coming about either in its negative or positive proof, back in the quarantine, his. And as then, she somehow establishes, creates ordinariness in this other unwelcome metamorphosis of a family – Adrian missing, some other being added – out of uncertainty, the unresolved. Which surely you've learnt by example of ecological solutions, is a condition of existence? No? Is she compensating for lack loss of him, Adrian – is he coming back? Is she punishing Adrian by showing she makes bolder choices than his, going all the way to the exhibition (no less) of extreme moral choice, taking on some child not orphaned but even worse, abandoned, and still further from human to inhuman act, a victim raped, disease-infected, while in the state of total innocence. Is his mother showing off; as the showing-off, the rages, the defiance of the flirtatious round-eyed, soft-mouthed near-baby is a punishment of whoever conceived her, abandoned her, thrust and tore open her body, planted a virus there.
Lyndsay takes Nickie and Klara to the zoo. Klara demands, The sa-el, the sa-el, and Lyndsay corrects her. The two children raise a chant: The see-al, the see-al! Other visitors smile at the little scene, assuaging pleasantly their guilt of the past when the zoo was closed to blacks except on one day a week and black and white children did not chant together.
Does his mother feel Adrian 's eyes on her from somewhere in the fjord – wherever whatever – the stratosphere that is his absence? Does he see these occasions of hers as defiance?
Or isn't she thinking of Adrian at all, at the zoo with her grandchild and her child. Not when she and Klara come to the son's house at weekends – it's nice for Nickie to have a playmate who is naturally part of the family. Adrian has left Mexico. But not to come home. When they're at table together, the Paul-and-Benni table that has become the family one now that Lyndsay doesn't set it at the old family home, there is a dismissal of awareness that there is an empty chair. Apparently it's a ruling that the father's, the individual Adrian 's choice be respected. Human rights exclude mawkish sentimentality as useless while disguising that it is painful is a better reason. He is in Norway with his sometime guide. They live in Stavanger, one of the northern ventures he and Lyndsay never made. Hilde has a sister there; I'm occupying a flat in the old family house, I have a view of the port. He writes in the first person singular, not 'we'. Of course it must be that Lyndsay writes back at intervals that match those of his letters; has she told him, does she write about Klara; she will have told him that the Judicial Commission has appointed her to the Bench. She is about to become a judge. A son has to stop himself from blurting, He'd be so proud of you – the licence of high emotions that allowed him to tell her, He always loved you so much, was over. Adrian is in Stavanger, taken retirement and presumably writing his thoughts on seeing – what was it – the dug-up accomplishments of ancient times while living in an era of weapons that could destroy itself without trace.
Nickie and Klara get on well together in the contesting manner of small children, she a tough match for the elder and male. And when he retaliates by tugging at a vulnerable attribute she has and he hasn't, her dreadlocks (Primrose insists on plaiting them to adorn a fashionable little black girl), she squeals piteously for help as the playmate who when pinned down on the grass had yelled that a gogga was biting him. Nothing further has been said between Paul and Benni about the girl's HIV 'status', in fact that established euphemism placed at a remove the remote possibility – unproven? – that the contact of scratched knees could transmit infection. Only when tussles between the two tumbling and cavorting children become too intense, the no-escape moment when a boxer is forced against the ropes, both Paul and Ben
ni rush, colliding to part them. Lyndsay keeps the girl's fingernails very short: whether for hygiene or a precaution to which she would not admit credibility.
All right, the zoo. City children learn of their existence – co-existence – with animals other than cats and dogs. When Nicholas is older, take him along on working assignments; it'll be some years, the conditions are not for small kids, but a youngster of eleven or twelve, that'll be the time. Children see something of the wider concept of the environment on television – does Benni really put the boy in front of nature programmes, as supposed, instead of the monster-hero sagas he takes as his spacemen toys come to life. That's not seeing, smelling the living creature in flesh and fur; at least a zoo provides that. But childhood doesn't provide only in a garden, signals to what is going to be decisive in adulthood. There's the extraordinary dark memory like those in nightmares, but not dispelled by morning, and time: the eagle, in that same zoo which is now his mother's treat for the next generation, hunched on claws within the stone walls and close roof of a cage. Something frightening in prescience of what would only be understood, known, shared years later: despair. The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.
Benni lifts and drops her shoulders, which stirs her breasts; kill-joy, not everyone can have the freedom of the wilderness and anyway he retreats into silence, some other place, when (again) she offers one of the clients' game parks, no cages there, foreigners fly thousands of miles to find marvellous. She has again suggested a stay, his mother and Klara included, this time, at one of the weekend breaks away from the city, Agency-featured, these beautiful half-wildernesses. All he says absently is that the children are too young to spend hours being driven around in a four-by-four. You need Japanese stamina for that. And so makes Benni laugh. Thank – what are their gods? – for the Japanese, they're the staples of our tourist industry!
Get A Life Page 12
