I thought you didn’t want me, he says to Hannah.
How could you possibly have thought that? I gave myself to you. Utterly.
It wasn’t like that.
And it wasn’t.
But we made love! We lay on my bed and I let you do whatever you wanted! Was that nothing?
I thought it would be everything.
But it wasn’t.
I never asked to be put on some pedestal. The fact is – you started despising me as soon as I started to like you. You thought: her standards are too low, I can do better than this!
And perhaps he did.
Hannah
Pierre stands and goes over to the blinds and struggles with them for a while – until he works out how to draw them back along their runners.
A shallow grey light intrudes into the room.
He looks out of his depth, and very tired.
It is too late, however, for either of them to go back.
* * *
Hannah has been here, in this grey room, many times before. It is where people end up whenever they try to enter into a relationship with her. She knows her way around this place. She can explain all the sights. But by this point the boy she is with only ever wants to get out of there. She has become a prison cell – from which both she and the boy ought to escape.
But Hannah knows that there is no door, no lock, no key.
Only a cell with walls of grey mist – and the same worn pathway, establishing the same periphery.
* * *
We never want what we’ve got, she tells him. As soon as we see the drudgery of each other, we’re put off.
I suppose I wanted to – reflect.
On what?
* * *
She knows she made it impossible for him to phone her afterwards. As he walked away from her apartment, she would have become, in his imagination, the site of some violent act, the scene of a crime. He would have walked away from her feeling like a criminal – even if he didn’t exactly know what it was he’d done.
Did he rape her?
No.
Yet he would have been made to feel as if he had.
Did he force her to do anything that she didn’t want to do?
No – she goaded him to do every bit of it.
It was as if she was trying to punish herself through the experience – and was using him to do it.
Pierre
It all seemed so violent, he admits.
It did?
What was I supposed to think? I thought I had become repulsive to you.
He turns to her, feeling pity for himself, and a thread of redemptive anger.
* * *
Sex with her was exactly like this: an argument. An argument in which the only option left to him was to gratify his meanest and basest impulses. That was all she had permitted them.
* * *
But now when we talk about it, he continues, it’s like you want to turn it all around and make it my fault.
But – we found something together, didn’t we? We – reached something.
He didn’t.
I shared myself with you completely, she says, as I don’t think I’ve done for a very long time. I considered it a real accomplishment!
And afterwards you were sick in the toilet?
I – don’t understand that myself.
And told me to get out.
I asked, she shouts, I didn’t tell!
She sits at the edge of the couch, hunched like a crow.
He is one step away from her, but never have they been so far apart.
Maybe I needed some time alone, she says.
Right.
I only meant for you to go around the block. For a walk. But then you never came back. Or called to see if I’d be all right.
* * *
He sees her showering and getting dressed and making coffee and waiting for him on her couch. For how long did she sit there?
All day?
All night?
Or only for a minute?
* * *
Admit it, Pierre. You were disappointed. I wasn’t what you hoped I would be.
Which is true.
That is not true.
She laughs at him and says:
Do you think a woman doesn’t know every single thought that goes through a man’s head?
Hannah
Yet there are no men and there are no women, she thinks. Only ideas for ourselves – like bits of wreckage that we latch onto as we are pulled about, this way and that, by contradictory currents.
Pierre
Maybe I was disappointed, he says. Flat. Like I’d been used up. Playing a part I didn’t comprehend. It was never me you wanted. It was something else – an idea of someone else.
Didn’t I shout out your name? Remember how I sobbed in your arms!
I didn’t like that. What was there to cry about?
It was as if a whole lifetime of shame and misery and isolation was being lifted. I felt so liberated – so full of hope!
But all he had felt was trapped. Trapped in the old way, playing a part he had never chosen for himself.
I’m sorry, Hannah.
For what?
All the disappointment.
Well that’s far too vast a subject for you to comprehend!
Hannah
There is murder in his eyes, and blood in her mouth, but still they carry on.
Pierre
There’s no need to insult me, he says.
You call that an insult? she almost laughs again, her eyes glazed, her voice harsh as a man’s. That’s not an insult. That’s a little song in the park. You coward, you liar, you insinuating, spineless little boy – stealing biscuits from the biscuit tin and then hiding them away. Those – those are insults!
Why must you speak to me like this?
He means this as a warning. At any moment he might strangle her, if only to shut her up.
You follow me around, you go through my stuff. You sniff about like some dog – and then when you get at me at last and have satisfied yourself, you piss on me and slink off!
I’m not the one who pissed on you, remember! You’re confusing me with someone else!
You did – you did piss on me! You made love to me and then you left without a word. For what? Some other bit of tail to sniff?
Who are you, he roars at her, to talk to me about love?
The room trembles with their rage.
He brings his face right up to her, spitting his contempt.
You lie there like I’m raping you, all the time shaking, biting your lips, as if you’re waiting for it to be finished – sobbing, trying not to be sick!
Stop it!
And then at the end you shout, Come all over me, come on my breasts, come all over my mouth! And you cry out, like a little girl, all the time using this stupid child’s voice —
Please, stop —
You make me into the little boy, stealing the biscuits from the biscuit tin, but the child – that is you!
She looks like she might cry again, but he no longer cares, all he wants to do is hurt.
You make me the rubbish, the rapist, the criminal, the savage —
You are a savage, to speak to me like this!
But you – you are nothing. Nothing! Without me, you don’t even exist!
Hannah
She climbs over the couch to get away from him, but still he’s after her.
Who taught you to speak to a woman like this?
Pierre
Oh – be polite, be polite! What’s that about? You think I must be treated like an animal, insulted and spat at and kicked, and still I must have manners at the end of it? What do you expect? You people are all the same!
What people is that?
White people!
You’re the racist, not me!
Didn’t you know? Black people can’t be racists. We’re the victims, remember. We’re the objects of racism.
And will continue to be the objects as
long as you get off on being the victims.
Hannah
You think we aren’t all fucked up? she continues. You think we can’t all find reasons to be fucked up?
Still he is walking after her – but she has the couch between them now and could make it to the door.
Tell me, he says, advancing still. What did he do to you?
Who?
You know exactly what I’m talking about!
He is blocking the door, but she is nearer the balcony. She could jump out. She might sprain an ankle or break a leg – perhaps her femurs will be buried deep inside her guts – but at least she would be safer that way.
Get out!
Did you have sex? Did he fuck you? Did he come all over your face?
Get out of my house!
He must have – how else can you explain yourself?
Stop!
Your brother is the rapist, but you make me into him – so you can keep him innocent.
What are you talking about?
But me, I’m from somewhere else. It’s easier to make me the animal and him the good one. You want to fuck your brother, but that’s too dark, so instead you choose to fuck me. You’re like your mother! When you finish with us, what must we do? We must get out, we must get back to our houses!
My brother is dead!
What?
He’s dead!
How dead?
He killed himself.
I don’t believe you.
He cut his wrists.
What?
With a silver spoon!
Now you’re playing your games with me.
Am I? Maybe I’m starting to express myself. Isn’t that what you wanted? To see me for what I am? Well, I’m a liar and a thief! All right? A murderer and a bitch! Are you satisfied?
No, I’m not satisfied. With you, I will never be satisfied. It is better if I go out and never come back. I do not even know why I come!
Came! You came!
Pierre
She has come right up to him now, triumphant, no longer afraid of her pain – or her sickness, or whatever it is that drives her. She has that same look in her eyes that she had when he was having sex with her.
You know what? she says, beginning to unbutton her dress. The thing you hate is not that you didn’t enjoy it, it’s that you did. You enjoyed pretending to rape me. You were as liberated by being an animal as I was. That’s why you ran away. You were afraid of what you’d become.
Of what you wanted me to become.
Yes – it was me. I showed you who you are.
Her arms are around him now, pulling him back into the great disease of her.
Well, it should be ‘it was I’, he says, extracting himself, not ‘me’. You were the subject. I was the object.
Hannah
He pushes her hard onto the couch, his hand on her throat.
He starts to strangle her.
Pierre
But he doesn’t kill her.
He decides against it.
I think I’ve got as much out of these lessons as I need, he says, standing.
She is looking up at him, heaving like a slut.
He digs into his pocket and takes out a few notes.
What’s the expression? he says.
The money is dry in his hand as dead leaves.
For services rendered?
He throws some money in her direction and walks out.
Hannah
She can feel the leather couch against her cheek.
A door slams.
The room goes quiet.
Pierre!
ACT FIVE
DEGREES OF UNCERTAINTY
Between Europe and Africa
I
Hannah
Flight
We are a silver arrow aimed
for incidental stars
swaying and dipping on emptiness
in homage to Icarus.
Down below us in houses
our loved ones wait
testing out our absence
like a rehearsal for death.
I do not belong up here.
I belong down there.
I am writing in the dark.
II
Hannah
The flight over Africa seems to last forever.
* * *
Around dawn, she pushes up the plastic blind and peers through the porthole, the airplane letting off a distant roar, the long wing blinking.
Far below, she can make out the faintly smoking land. Ancient circles of earth and rock, a meandering track leading nowhere, a rare glint of water.
When she is in the classroom at Language Works, or speaking to Pierre, or writing in one of her notebooks – that is, when she can approach the world through words – everything comes alive for her. Simple phrases can acquire multiple meanings, silences can dance with irony, time can be measured out in words, sentences, paragraphs, and thoughts can accumulate in a full stop. But as soon as she returns to what is loosely referred to as ‘reality’, nothing else feels quite so interesting. Her words drop from the sky like dying stars and the great cosmic dance around her is silenced.
Words become as commonplace as ashtrays.
Sentences no better than bits of string.
This is what it will be like at the end of time, she thinks, staring down at the apparently vacant land. The last people gone for good, and nothing left but stone and earth – and a trickle of disappearing light.
* * *
As the dawn grows beneath her, picking out greater detail in the landscape – a scattering of trees, more evidence of roads and homesteads – she remembers going to a farm near the Cradle of Humankind with Oliver and a friend of his. There were underground caves that could be reached by a rope ladder that was suspended from a sinkhole in the limestone. They had torches and their friend led them into a small chamber leading off one of the corridors, where they crouched inside and lit a joint. Hannah soon started to have a panic attack and wanted to get out, but the two boys just laughed at her.
What are you afraid of? said their friend. Down here it’s only us.
Maybe that’s what she’s afraid of, Oliver laughed.
When the two boys started to kiss, Hannah tried to find her way back through the darkness to the ladder, but her torch was weak and she quickly became disorientated. She could still hear the laughter of the boys, but she didn’t want them to mock her again and so she didn’t ask for help.
* * *
Often at night, when she is half asleep, she finds herself back in those caves, travelling from cave to cave, interminably. In each cave, she encounters something new. Her father might be in one doing experiments on animals – on rats and rabbits in glass cages – and in another there might be couches, where she and a biology teacher sit and have a detailed conversation about her disappointing exam results. Once there was a room that she had to swim through. One was a room in which she could fly. One room was full of grain and she had to wade through it – but she soon discovered that there were dead babies amongst the grain, and she had to stand on them in order to get out. And so the different rooms continued – sometimes until dawn.
On one occasion, Hannah thought she had finally reached the rope ladder – and she climbed upwards, towards the light, feeling increasingly elated. But the world above it only revealed itself to be another room, with another exit point that eluded her.
III
Hannah
Her mother is standing at Arrivals with misapplied lipstick and one of her better shirts. When Olly died, it seemed her neck went with him. Her head became squat and feathery, like a baby pigeon. It hunkered right down between her shoulders, adjusting to a new era of disappointment.
Hannah remembers the days when her mother still had a neck – her long giraffe neck, as she called it. As a small girl, Hannah would occasionally perch on her mother’s shoulders as they walked through the long grass on her grandfather’s farm – Hannah’s feet hoisted high because she was afr
aid of ticks.
Hello, Mom.
Her mother appears to be speechless. When her voice does come, it’s higher than usual and tremulous.
Hello, darling, did you sleep well on the plane?
While they test out the usual questions on each other and her mother struggles to find the parking ticket, and then the car, Hannah feels her way into a former self – that girl who walked in the slipstream of her mother and her brother and had little to say for herself.
* * *
The city presents them with familiar billboards and warehouses and the haphazard row of dangerous buildings along the horizon. Her mother’s car is tentative amongst the traffic, as if no longer confident about its capacity to keep up. Minibus taxis and trucks rattle past them, but her mother maintains her lane and rarely allows herself to be thrown from it.
Hannah wonders what she looks like in her mother’s eyes these days – and whether the daughter she was expecting has arrived at all. Arrival is something that has constantly eluded Hannah, but has her arrival also eluded others? What is the point of being here if we never reach each other – and exist in some sort of indeterminate limbo between two continents, like her airplane, swaying and dipping through the silent flashing clouds over the Congo last night?
She suspects her mother would like to hear about the beauty and romance of Paris, which to her must seem like a dream world, a kind of heaven compared with contemporary Johannesburg. Hannah tells her what she can, providing the narrative her mother would like to hear and doing her best to make it sound convincing. She describes Language Works and its seventeenth-century cobbled courtyard, and she tells her mother about all her interesting students – the Italian who runs the art gallery, the two film students from Serbia, the teams of dashing doctors. She finds, however, that she can’t enter into the dark continent of Pierre – whose last words still ring through her like some childhood terror.
* * *
The house stands exactly as she left it, with creepers engulfing the front wall, the driveway smelling of wet mud and moss, and the trees around it – including the bare pin oak Oliver planted during their first year at university – asserting themselves over the house, which looks cowed and easily dismissible.
From one look at the house, you can see that an old person lives there, and that there are no children or grandchildren coming to visit. Where the rest of the city bristles with electric fences and gates, Hannah’s mother still has to get out and fiddle with the lock while cars race up and down the hill. One glance at Hannah’s mother would tell any prospective criminal that she’s defenceless but probably not worth the effort: the pickings being limited to an outmoded television, a cheap phone and the battle-worn Toyota Corolla that was bought second-hand after Oliver wrecked its predecessor.
The White Room Page 14