Small Circle of Beings (11 page)

‘I do my best,’ I say. ‘I try to be all that a mother should be. What more? What more can I do?’

And then, peeved at his relentless crying, the clutch of his bony hands on my back: ‘I have sat by you,’ I shout, ‘to the edge of death! Is this how you repay me? Are you going
to that man who did nothing for you, nothing, that I was prepared to do? I slept next to you, I fed you, I talked to you! How dare you leave me now? How dare you?’

At last I pull free of him and stumble away. I stop after three steps and turn back, but he has already gone, running silently and whitely, perhaps for ever, over the grass.

But he does return. There is between us, after this time, a rigid politeness that makes no room for talk. We discuss, when we must, the facts of our lives. There is no further mention of leaving
or of Stephen, and I am glad.

‘No,’ he says.

‘David,’ I say. ‘You will water the garden.’

We stare at each other for a long time. Eventually he turns and, with trembling lip and eyes burning black as sockets in his head, begins to water the garden.

We fight constantly now, as if I expect more of him than is reasonably possible. But small matters are at the centre of our dispute: weeding the lawn, washing the dishes. I set David to work not
for my sake, but for his own: Cedric is a hard man and would approve of this. ‘Your boy,’ he tells me often enough, ‘is weak.’ To challenge this, to set the record straight,
I make David help in the running of the house, taking on jobs that were once the province of the servants, or his mother. But he cannot understand.

‘I’ve got other things to do,’ he says. ‘I’ve got homework to do.’

‘You will paint your room,’ I tell him coldly. ‘Do you understand?’

‘You’re so unfair,’ he cries, and goes. But, half an hour later, I pass by his door and catch a glimpse of him on bended knees, holding a paintbrush doused in white paint as in
blood. He wields it against the wall. I go in, I kiss him on his head.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I knew I could count on you.’

But he ignores my voice. He does not look at me, only continues to stab at the wall with his brush, the end of his tongue sticking out of his mouth, as Stephen used to do.

He looks a great deal like Stephen, my sullen boy who cannot accept my truce. In the years gone by, since his sickness ended, he has grown a great deal. A small moustache has appeared on his
upper lip. He sweats more now, and smells of it. Beneath his skin, his bones have lengthened and grown hard. His voice, when I hear it, is not the voice I used to hear: it’s a deep sound now,
carrying moods in it, and colour.

‘I want to go out camping,’ this deep voice says one day. ‘For the weekend.’

‘Oh, David,’ I protest. ‘Where? With whom?’

‘With friends from school. Just up in the mountains.’

‘Oh, David,’ I say. ‘It’s so dangerous there. I don’t think so.’

Now, though, he does not argue. He merely stares at me and leaves the room. He has come, I suppose, to expect and accept such refusal from me. For all the work that I would have him do, I still
think of him as weak and soft. His body has lain on too many beds, under too many sheets, to lie down on mountains now.

‘It’s for your own sake,’ I tell him later, as he sprawls in his darkened bedroom, staring at the ceiling. ‘Do you think I do this for me?’

But he only ignores me as he glares up into the dark.

I do not tell Cedric about the camping trip. He would see it as a good idea, the kind of thing that David should be doing. Instead I show him the other evidence of David’s strength: the
wall painted white, the garden free of weeds. He nods absently. ‘Good,’ he says. ‘Good work.’

But to David he says nothing. Though they sit beside each other at the table now, and their hands occasionally brush in passing, no word, no glance, is exchanged between them. There is only the
soft and monstrous sound of chewing.

There are times, of course, when they do talk to each other, but these are the times when Cedric, with measured, ruminative malevolence, will raise his eyes from his plate and say, his tone
pleasant and dangerous: ‘What did you do today, my boy?’

‘Nothing, really,’ David says, fingering his shirt.

‘Come on. You couldn’t have done nothing.’

And David, his voice and face containing tears, will relate to us all the way he spent his day: the homework he did, the books he read, the trees he climbed. Only when he is done will he bow
over his plate and begin to cry hotly into his food. My mother claps gently from her end of the table, an audience of one. I watch, pitying him and angry. And Cedric, his task of kindly cruelty
done, will give up his attentive pose and resume eating in silence. After just a few more minutes, he looks up again and says:

‘If you want to be a baby, David, go to your room.’

David, soft and edible and pale as the baby he is, must go.

I follow later, to where the light is inevitably off, the curtains, as usual, drawn. I sit on the edge of the bed. I dare to touch him with my hand. ‘David,’ I plead. ‘Why do
you cry? It would be all right if only you didn’t cry.’

Now, as then, he sobs.

‘He loves you,’ I go on. ‘If you’d just let him, he’d be such a good father to you –’

‘I have a father,’ David says. ‘I don’t need another one.’

We sit, while I stroke him with my hand. It’s dark in here. Outside, the moon throws down its light about the house, like silver hoops onto a peg.

‘Do you think,’ I say at last, my voice too soft for me, ‘do you think I married Cedric because Stephen went away?’

‘You didn’t marry him,’ says David. ‘Did you?’

The question answered, it’s too difficult somehow to stroke his back. I let my hand fall and we sit, side by side on the edge of the bed, while the night booms about us in the throats of
frogs. After a very long time I get to my feet. Touching at my hair as if it is coming loose, I leave his room.

To bring them closer, I suggest to Cedric that David should call him Father – ‘so that you’re not a stranger to him.’

Cedric discusses this with David the following evening. Though the door is closed and, after some time, I hear raised voices and the sound of beating, David hereafter refers to this man as
Father. ‘Here is your supper, Father,’ he says.

Or: ‘Here is your coffee, Father.’

‘Thank you, David,’ says Cedric, and smiles.

But David, he does not smile. He gazes back with slightly unfocused eyes, as though thinking about some thing else of great moment, and turns to leave.

‘Where are you going?’ Cedric will call from his low, deep chair before the television set.

‘To bed, Father.’

‘Before you go, come and give your Father a kiss. A bedtime kiss.’

I watch from the crack in the door as David must cross on slipper-swollen feet to the chair, must bend and kiss Cedric on the mouth. ‘There,’ says Cedric, and pats him on the bum.
‘You know I’m as good to you as I can be.’

‘Yes,’ says David.

‘Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight,’ says David. ‘Father.’

Stephen calls me again, angry on the phone. What is this, he wants to know, about David calling Cedric his father? He is no such thing. ‘You’re not even married to him,’ he
says.

‘Not yet,’ I reply coldly, and hold the telephone like a club.

There is a pause. Softer than before, he says: ‘Are you going to? Marry him, I mean?’

‘I’m free to do exactly as I please,’ I say, and put down the phone.

I sit for a long while, hands pressed into my eyes, and weep. But, for all the suffering this would bring to Stephen, I cannot have Cedric as my husband. I think of the long march up the aisle,
wrapped about in white. I begin to feel faint.

There is a great deal of silence, now, in the stony house we live in. I speak more to Moses and Salome than to the people who share my roof. My mother, though she seems happy
enough in her new room, has taken to wandering far afield each day. She sets out in the mornings, a weird and lonely figure, fading into the bush. In the evening, at sunset, she returns, her wild
hair full of burrs, scratches on her hands. I fear that one day she will not come back at all, but I say nothing. I pluck the thorns from her skin and wash her tiny wounds. She does not speak to
me. David, as usual, keeps much to himself. And Cedric, fiery, short Cedric who has redeemed me from my solitary state, has lapsed into silence too. He grunts a great deal, though, and scratches
his head with thick, gingery fingers. He has brought with him from his cottage a large television set; it stands in the lounge, in front of our now unused fireplace. At night, after supper, it is
here that he goes: slouched down in an armchair, eyes fixed unblinkingly on the aquatic movement of the screen. Occasionally, he farts.

I never join him there. I hate the television, and instead I go to my room. So it is at the dinner table in the evenings that we are closest to what I most desire: that small circle of beings,
the family. Even my mother is present at these gatherings, hunched over the table like a harmless old predator, spearing at her peas. She munches with an open mouth, surveying us as she does from
veiny, yellow eyes.

David hates peas. ‘Can I leave these?’ he says. ‘I’ve had half.’

‘All right,’ I say, and smile at him.

Cedric looks up, fixing on David, down the table, his hard crimson stare. ‘David,’ he says. ‘Come here.’

David stands at the head of the table next to Cedric, holding his plate in his hands. It trembles slightly. We, my mother and I, have become quite still as we watch what must, in the end, be a
scene.

‘Peas are good for you, David,’ says Cedric. ‘You must eat your peas.’

‘I don’t like peas,’ says David. His voice is very like his plate: a flat, a shiny thing, that trembles on the air.

I watch as Cedric takes his fork. He sticks it into the peas on David’s plate and lifts it. There is a pause before David’s mouth, as it always does, accepts. He chews.

Cedric feeds to him the plate of peas. Then he reaches for the dish and fills the plate again with the evil green pellets. Again, he takes the fork. David, not moving, not blinking, eats them
all. He cries as he stands, but quietly, as if at something he remembers that has nothing to do with us.

Later, as we lie in bed, I say to Cedric, ‘That was not necessary.’

Moonlight falls between us on the bed, cold and hard.

‘You are too close,’ he says. ‘The two of you. It’s not natural for you to be so close.’

‘We’re not,’ I protest. ‘Since you have come, we hardly know each other.’

I hear myself. There are things I realize then, as I lie on the freezing sheets.

‘Oh, I love you,’ says Cedric. ‘I love you so much.’

I don’t doubt he does. His fury and his turmoil are his gift to me: the only gift this man can make.

I wander then, for days, with the white concussive understanding of what I have done. Unbeknown to myself, while I was unsuspecting, I have allowed into our lives a terrible force I am not
capable of stopping. I stand on the back stoep and look out over the garden, at the new flowerbeds, the statues I do not recognise. I turn and face into the house, in which the rooms, the
furniture, have been changed. From far away, drifting to me like smoke, I hear the sound of Cedric in the bathroom. Water splashes and runs as he scrubs, scrubs, to cleanse himself of things too
deep for soap.

My mother is beside me on the stoep, leaning on her knobbled wooden walking stick. She giggles to herself, a thin, sawing noise. ‘Everything goes,’ she says. ‘Everything
goes.’

‘Yes,’ I say, hugging myself. ‘But what must I do?’

‘Ask Sammy,’ she says, and laughs again.

‘Tell me,’ I cry shrilly, ‘tell me what to do.’

But she only shakes her head. She shuffles away down the stoep, a frail grey outline in the dusk. She is followed, a little way behind, by the separate translucence of her dog.

Thus it is on an evening like any other, when we have eaten supper and the gas-lamps have all been lit, staving off with their simple yellow light the burden of darkness from outside, that I
tell Cedric he must go. We sit in the lounge, he and I, with the television on, but I am in front of the screen. I speak calmly, with the calm of desperation after too many beatings, too many
pains, too much sickness altogether.

He listens. I don’t remember exactly what it is I say, but they are only words: I love you. I do. But I, we, cannot live this way. It is better to be alone than to have to be this way.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

When I am done, he continues to look at me. The glow of the gas-lamp is in his eyes. He has, it appears, lost interest in me. After a long wait, I leave him there. And it’s now, after
I’ve left the room, that he gets to his feet. I hear glass break. Wood cracks. I am back in the room and watching as he begins to destroy what he can see. My mother has left her walking stick
on the chair. Armed with this, Cedric is spinning about the room, a man electrified, lashing out in every direction with his length of wood. I see vases break. Tables overturn. He kicks at a
bookcase that slowly, uprooted, topples and spills. ‘Aahh,’ he cries. ‘Bitch. Bitch.’ The stick comes down.

Strangely, it is in this final act of destruction that I am safest. I stand by, immune, and gaze as he lays waste to what I own. In the end he comes to a halt: head bowed, choking, he tries to
breathe. Foam is on his lips. And all about him, spreading, it seems, in ripples from their source, concentric rings of glass and metal and wood move soundlessly outwards.

Later, of course, he comes to me where I lie in bed, wrapped in my nightgown, turned to the wall. He sits on the mattress behind me, a dull and heavy weight. He is crying,
loudly so that I can hear. (I too have been crying, but quietly, to myself.) He puts a hand on my back. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

I do not move.

‘Please,’ he says. ‘I will be better than I’ve been. I promise I’ll try. I promise …’

I say nothing. Riven from inside, but still, I lie and breathe.

After he has left, I get out of bed. On bare feet I go down the darkened passage to David’s room and open the door. The light is off here too, and I peer into the black. But David,
sprawled on his side in sleep, fills the whole mattress; there is no place for me. Aching and somehow ashamed, I close the door again.