‘No,’ I reply. ‘I didn’t get enough.’
I have no notes with me now. I’ve invested so much in this film and I know I only have a few hours more.
‘How did you hide what you did?’
My question homes in on him and I wait to see if he will answer. There’s a short pause and then he answers with a bluntness to match my own.
‘You hide in the open. It’s the best way to go unnoticed.’
‘Could other people have known, do you think? Even if they weren’t told?’
He leans forward, both elbows on the table. Today he’s not playing the same game as before. Today he’s telling the truth, his truth, maybe just to get it over with. Maybe, I think, nothing really goes away until we get to its essence.
‘Of course they could have known. If they’d wanted to.’
‘Why do you think they didn’t?’
‘People are self-obsessed. They don’t see what they don’t want to. Parents don’t know their own children. If they did, they’d see when the changes come. If they did, the kids would trust them enough to tell straight away. Most often though, there’s no real relationship there. And the longer it goes on, the less chance the kid will rat. The more the kid becomes tangled up in it, the safer it is for someone like me.’
‘Did you … love … any of your victims?’
‘Yes.’
Straight, uncompromising. There’s a sound in my throat but it stays below my voice box, never emerges fully formed into the air. I swallow it down. ‘So your cousin – I forget how old she was?’
‘Eight. My cousin. She was eight.’
‘Did you think you loved her?’
‘I did love her.’
‘Why didn’t she tell anyone?’
‘Because she loved me too.’
‘You believe that?’
‘Maybe not at first, but yes, I believe that. She did love me, but I killed her too. Inside. I killed her inside. I knew it was wrong, you know. Love can kill your soul when it’s wrong. She was too young, yes. I know that.’
‘If you were let out, do you think that you’d offend again?’
‘Probably. That’s what people don’t understand. Time in prison doesn’t take the urge away. It’s like a drug, a need. It’s a part of who I am.’
‘What would it take for you not to offend again, on the outside?’
‘Not to be around any children.’
‘Were you abused?’
‘I told you, my mother loved me.’ He leers, takes a sip of the water in front of him. I notice that his knuckles are tattooed with numbers.
‘Were you abused?’
‘No. I told you, no.’
‘How old were you when you first had sex?’
His eyes shift, to the guard, to Zakes, back to me. I wonder if he’ll even answer.
‘Nine.’
‘You were nine?’
‘I told you.’
‘Who was it? Was it a man or a woman?’
‘It was a girl in our neighbourhood. She used to babysit me. She was seventeen or eighteen, I think. She used to play with me, a lot of rough and tumble. Then one day she just moved in on me and that’s when it happened. After that it happened every time my mother went out.’
‘Have you ever told anyone this?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think it changed who you were?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think—’
‘But also—’ he interrupts me.
‘Yes?’
‘It changed who I might have been and how my life turned out.’
‘How?’
‘I think it taught me that sex was a tool, that every time I needed to feel bigger, or better, I could just go and get it.’
‘Did you feel violated?’
‘Yes. And no. I started to feel like a participant, after a time.’
‘Did you ever tell anyone?’
‘No.’
‘And then you started doing the same to others, other kids, even.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you then change who they might have been?’
‘Probably. Definitely. Yes.’
‘Shit,’ Zakes says afterwards. ‘You gave him a grilling. You feel you got what you wanted?’
‘Pretty much.’ I lean against the window, close my eyes briefly. The camera and all the footage is safely locked in the boot. Zakes is driving. I don’t feel well enough to be at the wheel.
‘I thought it went pretty well,’ Zakes says. ‘You firing away with those questions and him rising right up to the occasion. It was like he suddenly respected you enough to answer honestly, now that you’d come back.’
‘Do you think he was right about what he said? That parents don’t really know their children?’
‘Pretty much. People are so inside their own heads. They’re not paying attention to who their children are. Or how their children are. I suppose you really don’t want to believe stuff like that could ever happen to your child either.’
‘Do you think, if you’re a parent, that you’re then equally responsible, if your child is being abused and you never know it, or acknowledge it? Is it then as much your fault as the abuser’s?’
Zakes looks at me now, properly, despite the road ahead. ‘You okay, Catherine? Everything all right at home?’
I don’t answer, and he looks back to the road. ‘Sure,’ he continues. ‘All very well to judge as an outsider, but I’d concur. If you’re a parent and your child is continually abused without your knowledge, you’re culpable. In the sense that you haven’t created the kind of relationship where your child trusts you enough to disclose.’ He clears his throat. ‘Is that what you’re thinking, Catherine? About your parents and your sister?’
‘Maybe,’ I say slowly. ‘Except—’ Suddenly my stomach lurches. ‘Please, stop the car!’
Zakes veers onto the shoulder and the car stalls before he can cut the engine. I am sick, retching over and over on the roadside, until my body can take it no more. I hold myself upright with one hand resting on the bonnet. Zakes stands discreetly at a distance until the heaving ceases and I can manage to steady myself again. Then he hands me a handkerchief, and waits politely as I wipe my mouth.
Thirty-Seven
The Sunday morning sun falls on the house like a veil of light, warming us all and creating again our golden heaven, the family that we are. In the kitchen the telephone rings as the kettle boils. I flick the switch and Auster hands me the phone, his eyes wide. He takes Hayley outside. They leave through the back door, and I stand there alone.
‘Hello?’
I watch them through the window. They find a giant snail that has eaten the basil plants, a huge shell atop a body of slime. Hayley bends at her waist to examine the creature, her hands resting on her knees.
‘Your father took a turn for the worse last night,’ the nurse says. ‘He’s had a series of strokes. It’s not looking good.’
Outside, beyond the clear glass of the window, my husband bends too and gives all of his attention to that snail. My daughter is beside him, pulling leaves off the bush and tempting the slow and slimy creature with the green delicacies.
‘Is he comfortable?’ I am solidifying into stone. My body is heavy, as though my own death is lying just around the corner. I am so tired.
‘I’d suggest you come and see him sooner rather than later.’
‘He’s lost his language?’
‘I’m afraid so. Only time and God have any answers now.’
Time and God. Time does nothing but stretch forward forever, impartial and persistent. Time stands at a distance from us; it does nothing the way we think it should. And who knows where God is through all of this.
‘I’ll be there in a moment,’ I say.
I will go, and I will go alone.
I put the phone down and I’m standing at the window and watching my small family when Auster turns around and catches my face framed by the wood of the window’s edge. He rai
ses his eyebrows in question and I nod and he says something softly to Hayley. She rises, wipes her hands together in an attempt to clean them and together they come inside.
‘What’s wrong with Grandpa?’
I take a towel from the drawer and drag it over the counters that are already polished. ‘He’s not well,’ I say. I cannot look at her.
‘You going over there?’ Auster asks. He knows I’ll want to go alone.
‘Can I come?’ Hayley says.
I shake my head, but it’s a movement so small I wonder if she’s even seen it.
‘You and I can go to the park today,’ Auster tells her. ‘Bring some nuts and we’ll catch a squirrel.’
There’s a shadow on the kitchen wall and it moves like a silent presence observing, reserving comment. The shadow moves and I wonder where it is going before I realise that it is me, that I’m observing my own shadow. To the table, where my keys and wallet lie. To the door, beyond which life moves on, relentlessly. Hayley starts to cry and I see Auster pull her angular frame towards him. He enfolds her and kisses the top of her head, holds her in check as she struggles to understand.
I take the wallet and put it in my pocket. I take the keys and close my fingers into a fist around them, around the cold metal; I feel the separateness of each. I go to the door and through it and away from the house that is bright and sunlit and smells like home.
The car is parked over the gutter beside the lamppost outside. I turn the key in the ignition and start the engine and, without looking behind me, I travel with my shadow down the road. I am crying and I am calling her name, but I am calling into empty sunlight and the morning air. She was my sister and I was supposed to grow old with her, to face my father’s death with her by my side. We were both cheated out of what was ours – it wasn’t meant to be like this. When Samuel goes, I will finally be alone.
When I get there I walk inside, knowing that it is over. They move towards me from all sides and a strange and alien silence enfolds me and the colours are all eerily muted like an old movie playing itself over and over in my mind. I see their lips move without hearing the words; all is silent but for the strange light sound of my feet on the thin carpet, carrying me towards the body of the man who has held all of my life. Samuel is there, and he is not. His hands, useless now, his black hair that should belong to the body of a much younger man, the set of his mouth and the deep creases on his brow.
I know that face. I know that face. Somebody has closed his eyes. Somebody has closed his eyes and his sight can fall no more on me, the one who is left behind. Somebody has come and taken his sight away and Samuel cannot see me now. But I can see him. I can see my whole world before me, in him. I can see his nose, his creviced cheeks, ravaged by sea air and by the dark holes where he smoked and dreamed and gambled for our lives. Those cheeks, the chin that I held when he carried me on his shoulders, the stubble that someone else will shave now, one last time. The throat that swallowed pride and anger and allowed what should have mattered most to remain unspoken. The rest of him is covered, unmoving and unmoved. Here lies Samuel, the last of my kind.
When I am through, when I have signed the papers and had strange hands placed on my shoulders and words mouthed at me above the cacophony of my life, I stumble from that place. Hands grip my shirt to hold me still, but I ease away from their kindness. I imagine eyes watching me as I reverse the car and wait for the giant gate to move and open on its slow motor.
The world shimmers. The late morning light is stark and white and colours are sharp against my eyes. The sea glistens where I park in front of it. I leave the car and roll up the cuffs of my long trousers and I walk across the sand to stand at the edge of the water and the waves embrace my feet. For my sins and denial they wash me clean. For a moment my tears roll and suddenly beneath them there is a movement in my chest that is a kind of laughter, a bubbling up against my sadness. A gull swoops down with extended wings and almost touches my hair with the tips. There are people who believe that after death the souls of the good enter into birds, and I wonder if my father has come to visit me here on our beach. Others wheel in and fill the sky with their wings and I name one for my mother, and another for my sister. I will the feathered creatures to stay with me, but in a moment they are gone, back to the flock far beyond me, above the abyss of liquid blue that I can never fully enter or ever contain.
But in that blue there are creatures at play. They are here again. Two giant bodies roll and raise their flippers to the sun. Gleaming and black and content forever. I stand and watch the sea giants for an hour or more. People gather on the beach behind me, but with my face to the water, I am still alone. I plant my feet in the sand and the water swells to my calves and then away. It’s me and the whales and the sea at my feet.
And then I see it, small and lost in the gleaming bliss, protected by the gentle, black rolling adult bodies, loved and held forever in this perfect peace. A white calf, too pale and gawky for its own kind, it will struggle and play until it grows up and grows into itself one day. It spouts, a tiny cascade of droplets and steam and water. One of the huge beasts nudges gently up against it and then they are both lost from sight. They will remain here, these whales, for the next few months, until that small calf grows stronger and able to fend for itself. They will find their safety here in our bay for the duration of the spring, the same safety that I once believed would always last.
‘I know,’ I whisper to the calf, my words reaching it on the wind. ‘I know what it is to be born incomplete, to have to find your own way in the water until you learn to swim alone.’
They will stay for some time and I will come here every day to watch the baby’s faltering attempts to gain strength, and it will grow and lose its ungainliness. I give it a name so that we will always recognise each other. The smooth round head, the skin too pale and the almost comic clownishness with which this baby tries to navigate the new and watery world make me laugh through my tears. It reminds me of what I was, of the years when this water was the whole world and the only world to me. I give it my own name so that we will know each other when I come again. I call it aloud and into the wind and the creature catches it and carries it all the way down to the depths of the sea as it dives to discover itself. I hear my father’s voice as I call out. Sea Monkey. One day it will have a face that is more than the gawkish cuteness from a comic book. ‘What we are has always been real,’ I whisper to the calf. I know it now.
When the whales move out of sight and on to the next cove, I walk the beach to the end where the bend of the concrete road rises above me. I touch the wall and will my father to race me back to the house. Instead he kicks off his shoes with a grin on his face and looks down upon me. ‘Want to be a dolphin?’ he laughs, and the world springs bright.
The timeless sky gleams white above. I don’t look back, but I know my sister is behind me. I run with all my life towards the bluest water and enter the sea fully clothed. Already I feel the touch of Samuel’s hand and I know that there will come a day when he will catch me again. I stand in the ocean and look up into a bright and cloudless sky. The sun is strong and into the blue the moon has risen also.
- end -
Devin’s Voice
The first draft of Sister Moon emerged with the voices of both sisters, Devin and Catherine, competing equally for the floor. Eventually, though, I had to give one of them up to allow the other’s voice to become the dominant narrative. Like Samuel and Marshall both, I too chose Catherine over Devin. Guilt and ambition are more nuanced, more complex and more interesting than victimhood. And so Catherine’s side of the story won me over, and in the later drafts of the manuscript I left Devin’s narrative voice behind. What follows are short excerpts of her side of the story that helped me begin the process of writing, but never made it into the book.
1.
Here above the clouds is white and cool. There’s a softness in invisibility; a Zen-like knowing that eternity has taken hold. I want to return to the place where
I was but I cannot do it with no feet to stand upon the solid earth and the record of it all beneath me. This is where it began and where it has ended and who knows who ever shall hear these words. I return again to places, my hair held back by the sun and my weightlessness floating on a mattress of air. Why do I return? What possible attraction could the cold solidity of the world hold for me now? I have not broken those patterns of old even through death’s release, or perhaps I am still who I have always been and there is no changing that. But now when I dream, I feel a clearer vision than those that struggled for a hold on me when I was living – I am older and, if not wiser, I have marked the path at least. Stage by stage the footsteps are set and they fall upon the lives of children I see every day and they fall upon the path of the people in the street and they fall upon the fabric of the quilts beneath which the world sleeps at night when it reaches up to pull the moon down, to shield them from the night. But still I desire a deeper imprint of the footsteps from another source, still I desire a further purity and control, to rid myself of earthly cravings and indulgence and to learn to breathe what is pure and natural. To strengthen my spirit to deal with the strain of watching life with the stamp of eternity upon it. Time in the world is the briefest respite from this, the bigger picture. It is the habits that hold us back. The habits that go on and on, and bind us to ourselves.
2.
I wanted to be in another time when there was still gut and heart and soul in the world. I wanted to bleed like the best of them, to howl at the moon with the smoky sounds of jazz and blues and gravelled voices that sang of a thousand miles of pain, to the heart of life and hard living and back again. I wanted to fear the thunder, to smell the gin-stained breath of life in my nose. I wanted to know that being could be full again, full and dark with the eye of the white moon looking down on me as the waves washed whatever peace there was inside of me away.
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