October

by Zoe Wicomb

  If this home away from Kliprand and her family feels strange, it is only a question of time, a matter of half an hour at most, for the emptiness to be filled with what soon will be familiar routines. Like the gas boiler fired up, pumping hot water through old copper pipes, the warm tick-ticking of radiators slowly thawing into life, spreading invisible warmth. In this empty apartment Craig’s absence hovers like the heat molecules rushing up, out of reach, to cling to the high ceiling. Mercia will not wait for the warmth; she will not call Smithy just yet; instead, she’ll do her messages as the Scots say—a trip to the supermarket, which invariably means a conversation on the corner of Byres Road where she is so often detained by someone she knows. So many students who have passed through her hands. More of a village here than Kliprand. Does no one ever leave this city?

  Dr. Ants in Her Pants. That’s what Craig called her when he first flicked through her passport. Only five years old and already bursting with border-control stamps. Where have you not been? he asked, shaking his head.

  In those brand-new days there was something of admiration in his voice. Craig had after university spent two years in London, with a trip each to Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam.

  Look, he said defensively, I come from a country of folk who once upon a time rushed about colonizing the world, and so freeing those left behind of the horrible Christianity they took along to dump on others. Thereafter, folk needed only to move across the border, either to make good or to relish being in exile. Now, having recovered ourselves, we no longer have to do that, so I’ve come back to Glasgow and this is where I stay put. Healthy or what?

  Mercia laughed. In those brand-new days their differences were a source of fond banter. She said, Let’s be accurate: back to the West End of Glasgow. It’s because you can’t find your way in big cities, hopelessly lost in London, nose in the A–Z for the entire two years, no sense of direction; in fact, could you find your way to the south side of this city?

  Mercia has always had that fifth sense, even in strange cities, where, after a cursory consultation of a map, she was able to move swiftly through a crowd, confident about her whereabouts. Like a springbokkie, her father used to boast, lifting its nose to smell the direction of the wind, pounding a hoof into the earth, before, quick as a flash, having found its bearings, it leaps off straight as a die to its destination. That is still how Mercia sees herself, propelled effortlessly through the world, eager to see yet another place. Not pathological restlessness, as Craig later diagnosed. She was after all prepared to stay put in Glasgow. In the city’s West End with Craig by her side, she had no desire to move house, to try another city, or even another part of town.

  Precisely, he said. So you have the comfort of a home, but rushing about being a citizen of the world means that you don’t have to acknowledge it as home.

  This home needs time to make itself more comfortable. As Mercia searches for a warmer coat, ready to wander down to the supermarket, the telephone rings. It is Smithy, darling Smithy, whose voice is like honey, except, that voice is unusually clipped as she asks Mercia to come over for dinner that night. Smithy seems anxious to get off the phone, so that Mercia knows something is wrong, wheedles the news out of her. All right, Smithy says. I planned to tell you later, but here goes: Morag gave birth prematurely last week. The little girl’s been in an incubator for six days, but she’s out now. Tiny, but absolutely fine.

  Mercia is pleased to hear it in advance. Now, she says briskly, we need not talk about that tonight. But tears prickle, roll down her cheeks. The trick, she thinks, is to be organized. Instead of rushing out, she makes a careful shopping list of essentials that she could carry the short distance. She does not have the energy to drive.

  There is no one to detain her on Byres Road, which is a pity, because the next trick is to have a conversation, at least about the weather. Neither does Mercia meet anyone in the supermarket, but the lady at the till with the elaborate hairdo greets her with a long-time-no-see that allows her to say that she’s just back from Cape Town, that she’s only been away for two weeks. Lucky you, hen, the woman says, it’s all right for some, and she recites the week’s weather forecast, unseasonably cold for the end of October. Already full-blown winter while you were sunning yourself down under.

  Back in the apartment, where the heat now envelops her, Mercia treats herself to a long lavender bath. It will all fall into place—everything will be fine—everything in its place—a place where she is immune, where such news need not ruffle, she recites. She congratulates herself. So far she has done well, and besides, why wouldn’t it be fine? It would be foolish, unrealistic, to think of herself as mother to a baby girl. That was not what she’d ever wanted, that she must remember. But neither was it according to Craig what he had wanted. It is another Craig who has become a father. A new man who, unlike Jake, will be a good father, who no longer has any connection with her. Again she corrects herself: fatherhood has not changed anything in relation to her. Craig left when he left. Departed. And she, Mercia, need not think differently about him. Not since he has left the woman who does not want children.

  Mercia knows it is inconvenient; nevertheless, she arrives early at Smithy’s. She promises to keep out of the kitchen, where there is mayhem with the smoke alarm ringing. Instead, she will help with getting the children bathed and ready for bed. The children are disappointed that she did not see lions or elephants in Africa. Not even a monkey. No, but she has seen a tortoise, and for a bedtime story tells them Achebe’s fable about the leopard and the tortoise. Which they don’t think much of. Little Ross says that she is mistaken. Making marks in the sand, scribbling, is not the same as writing, no wonder leopard doesn’t understand what tortoise is up to. He, Ross, has been learning to write proper letters, capitals and lowercase. Unlike his sister, who cannot even write her own name.

  Over dinner Mercia gives Smithy and Ewan an edited version of her time in South Africa. She will have to go back at Christmas, she explains, to sort out Jake, who hopefully by then would have recovered, but she omits her father’s monstrous story and glosses over her expectations of adopting Nicky. Smithy says she is relieved that Mercia has not taken any rash decisions; she worried that Mercia might be bullied into foolish plans for Nicky. Would it not be better for the boy to be taken on by someone closer by so that he doesn’t lose touch with his mother? Some people, she says, are born to be aunties, which Mercia finds wounding. Born to be, rather than choose to be? But that is not worth pursuing.

  They offer no information about Craig’s baby, so that it is Mercia who dutifully asks after her. They haven’t seen her yet, so are unable to answer any questions, Ewan says, but they hope, when mother and child come out of hospital, to go round with a wee gift.

  Mercia has no idea where it comes from, does not have time to wonder whether it is the word gift that unleashes her words, but as if jolted by its entry, she straightens her back to speak. She hopes that Smithy will help, act as intermediary. She has decided to sell the flat and let Craig have his half of it.

  Ewan shakes his head. No need for that, he says emphatically. Why not take Craig’s word for it: he doesn’t want anything, doesn’t want you to be uprooted or inconvenienced in any way, which earns a sardonic smile from Mercia. Living as he does with Morag—that grand apartment in Kelvinside was left to her by her parents—he has no need of the place. Besides, as Craig says, it was your deposit that enabled the two of you to buy the flat. Half the monthly mortgage that Craig put into it was less than paying rent, which would have been the case if he hadn’t shacked up with you. He is the first to acknowledge that.

  But Mercia is adamant. She cannot resist a sarcastic hope that Craig’s modest tastes will allow him to live in such splendor, but no, jokes aside, she hopes not to have a distasteful conversation with Craig about money. She has thought about this carefully, she lies; she is determined to sell and it is only fair that he should have the proceeds, which after all are legally his. The apartment is registered in both
their names so it is not a gift, she stresses. The deposit is neither here nor there, but if he insists, she’ll subtract it from the profit. She trusts that Ewan and Smithy will deal with Craig on her behalf. When Craig left, she explains, giving up the flat made him feel better, less blameworthy about dumping her, but now that all that has settled, everything fallen into place, now that there is a baby, he will see that guilt or blame is inappropriate.

  Mercia castigates herself. She should not so thoughtlessly have accepted his settlement, but she imagines that with a new baby the money will come in handy. Now, she says, it is her turn to feel better, to draw a line under all that lively past. The apartment on Elgin Terrace is, like the many places they visited together, a place of the past, a place that no longer carries meaning for her. Phew, that’s all sorted in one mouthful hey, Mercia chuckles self-deprecatingly. Tomorrow, when I put the flat on the market, it will no longer be my home.

  And where will you find a new home? Are you going back to live in Cape Town after all? Smithy asks.

  Mercia says that it’s unlikely, that she doesn’t know. She hasn’t thought that far. It hardly matters, she laughs. You know what a tortoise I am.

  Actually, Smithy says, I don’t. You’ve lived here in the West End for twenty-four years. And what, by the way, have you done with your shell?

  Mercia looks bewildered. Really? Twenty-four years? As if she did not know. Well, I’ll have a look at the estate agents’ tomorrow, at what’s on offer here, or perhaps on the south side, but the sale will take some time. I’d like something smaller, more manageable. Rent if necessary. Give myself time to see what crops up.

  Something crops up the very next day in her e-mail. A message from Tim, her head of department, urging her to sign up for the university’s personal development advisers’ training session entitled “Facilitating Interactions.” Every department is now required to have a PD adviser, and after her sabbatical she would be the ideal person, writes Tim without a trace of irony. Mercia howls with laughter. What kind of people dream up such hog-wash? The training session may well be hilarious, but Tim cannot seriously believe that she’d come back with a party bag of self-help tips for her colleagues. She could make them up without going: to facilitate interaction, behave like a decent human being and do not throw eggs at your interlocutor.

  Mercia presses the reply button and writes, Fuck off, Tim. But stops herself from sending it. Instead, she reaches for the “save” option, and wishes that like female protagonists in novels she accidentally pressed “send,” with the entire department copied in. If only she could pack in the job, go somewhere where she does not know the language, somewhere where there is no possibility of interaction, where she can’t read the script—China or Japan. And again, the very next day, something crops up in her e-mail. An advertisement for a professorship at the University of Macau. Christ, you’d swear she’s skipped into a fairy tale. Just as well she’s given up on the memoir. Who would believe that it’s for real? But anticipating a third visitation, she receives no further e-mail surprises. Unless the old-fashioned letter in Craig’s hand counts as something that crops up. Mercia tosses it into the bin, unread, then spends too much time prowling around the bin, begging herself not to succumb. She retrieves the letter, holds it to the light, ascertains that it is a single folded sheet of A4 paper, before savagely snipping at it with a pair of scissors. It is not enough. She would not put it past her, in the early hours, to reassemble the pieces. So once again she retrieves most of the scraps and with newspaper sets them alight in the grate. For a few seconds a homely fire flares in the hearth.

  Mercia has been shortlisted for an interview. Which doesn’t mean that she knows what she wants, she assures Smithy, but she may very well go, remove herself from the flat where in the small hours she hears Craig pacing up and down, burping a baby.

  Oh well, a job offer could come in handy as leverage for promotion at our hallowed place of learning, says Smithy. But Mercia is adamant. That would not be her reason for going all that way to an interview.

  No, of course not, Smithy says. That’s not the way of a citizen of the world. Mercia starts. Have they, Smithy and Craig and who knows who else, been making fun of her? She must not be paranoid; she cannot afford to lose her friendship with Smithy, so she laughs it off.

  Together they lark about, poring over a map. Neither of them has a clear idea where Macao is. Or Macau. Have these people not made up their minds as to what to call their place? Smithy asks. But that appeals to Mercia. Shows a healthy attitude to their place, their home as either this or that. Is it a country? A city? They Google the place, and one of the entries lists Camões.

  Yes, that is the association Mercia remembers, Macau as a place where Camões sojourned. If she is not mistaken, The Lusiads, or part of it, was written there. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, she says, if Macau were the place where old Adamastor was born. He, the monster of the coarse gravelly voice, who finds himself hugging a hillside, cheek to cheek with a boulder, instead of the beloved who mocks him from the waves. As for Adamastor’s grave, proprietorial warnings to explorers that so exercise South Africans, she doesn’t care. Nothing to do with her and her kind.

  Aye right, hen, dinnae worry about your monster, mocks Smithy. I know plenty of real men hugging a hillside after the honeymoon. Nothing to do with unrequited love either, just the old story of being blinded by sex rather than thinking about a flesh-and-blood woman, another human being.

  Already Macau sounds cozily familiar. Adamastor—let’s say he was actually born in Macau, Mercia muses, a seed sprung in the mind of the one-eyed Camões, the poet in exile. I can just see him grumpily brooding in his grotto, an alien on a Chinese peninsula without a guidebook to facilitate interaction, one who transforms his monster into Table Mountain, towering over the Cape Peninsula. It would be like a homecoming for me. Of course it didn’t occur to the poet that the Khoe who lived there had a different story for their own sea mountain, Hoerikwaggo as they had already named it.

  No kidding, Smithy says, Professor, the job is yours. Adamastor must be recast right there in the place of his birth.

  Yes, no kidding, and who knows what forebears of mine might hail from Macau, famous for its slave trade, Mercia jests. Who knows what happened to the children born to Camões’s Chinese concubines?

  And so she talks herself into it. She ought to stay put and deal with selling the flat; besides, she doesn’t really dislike her job, but Macau does seem awfully tempting. Even providential, given that she has already decided to leave the West End.

  But a flat, darling, says Smithy, is not the same as a city, or a country.

  Mercia has spent a sleepless night, was up at dawn, and now before the interview has plenty of time to wander about the campus on Taipa with its assortment of buildings perched on a hill, modernist structures at various levels that, thanks to ingenious gardening, appear to grow out of the rock formations. She is grateful for her infallible sense of direction, since the place is a challenge, with floors numbered differently in buildings connected by walkways. These she explores, fascinated by the flora of Macau, which is everywhere on display. Gardens tumble out of rock faces, are exquisitely laid out on roofs, transform embankments, provide ornamental edging to the facades of stonework, are tucked between buildings, turning awkward spaces into lush displays. And so many of the flowers are those of the Cape: bougainvillea, hibiscus, poinsettia, oleander. Perhaps even jacaranda, which, like the frangipani she does recognize, is not in flower.

  She finds on the northern side a bench on the fifth floor, or is it the second? from which to look out at the spectacular view of hazy sunlight on the water, the long bridge connecting Taipa island to Macau, and the hills flanking the city’s glitzy casinos, from which light bounces. Mercia does not know what to think of living in a place like this. She ought to consider the possibility of a question about why she wants to come to Macau. She could not very well say that “Facilitating Interactions” has driven her there. And who
’s to say that Health and Safety and Personal Development Advice are not in any case already hiking their way over to China? Instead, will she say something limp about the weather, the heat, the flowers of the Cape? By virtue of being interviewed, there is a chance of being offered the job, so what in the world would she do if it were offered to her? She has no idea, but no doubt she’ll soon find out.

  Mercia’s head spins. She has twenty more minutes. She rises distractedly, wanders down a flight of stairs, and catches a glimpse of morning glory tumbling over rocks. And so late in the year too, although the weather at the beginning of November is deliciously hot, hardly autumnal. A flash of blue trumpets lures her along a corridor that promises a hidden garden, until she realizes that she has lost her bearings, has lost the garden. If only she could get out into the open, out of this building, she would be able to find her way. And indeed, just before panic sets in, Mercia sees in the dark low-ceilinged corridor ahead natural light pouring in from a structure on her left. It is a turtle pond, situated both indoors and out, its far wall an ornamental stone structure of various levels, supporting another roof garden.

  On that far bank of the pond in the morning sun the creatures are huddled together, haphazardly piled up on top of each other, as if there were not enough space, as if they have been hurriedly driven out of the water. Some are settled on a large concrete fish. Rising out of the water are two ghostly concrete structures, resembling mountains in old Chinese paintings, and on these are placed, in various crags, little figurines. As she squints to see what they represent, several turtles splash noisily into the water, as if they have just woken up. Mercia watches the ancient-looking creatures lumber in and out of the pond. She checks her watch. There is time, and although she is not sure of her whereabouts, the campus is small, and the garden on the right means that she’ll get out, find her way once again.