Small Circle of Beings

by Galgut, Damon

  I did not wish to raise the subject of my mother now, and have discussed her in far greater depth than I in tended, but there is another thing that must be said, if only in passing. I have been told by the doctor who treated her that her madness is not entirely explicable. He suspects, however, that it is a hereditary thing. I think at once of my mother’s sister, my aunt, whom I did not know well, but who is, I believe, in an institution somewhere. And so confirm this doctor’s veiled warning, if only in my own mind: I too shall be mad. There will come a time in my life when, unbeknown to myself, my comprehension of events will begin to change in subtle ways. I will fail to grasp the true significance of words. People will threaten me, will plan my downfall behind my back. The thought of this is terrible to me: I cry. Stephen tries to comfort me, but there is nothing he can really say. If this will happen, it will happen despite my will.

  I have by now, of course, accepted the idea. At times it seems an interesting notion: to endure the shrinking of my brain until my world is an acre of lawn and two dirty rooms. Who will care for me then? Stephen, perhaps? Or David? It’s possible even that Moses will relent and take me under his wing. Perhaps I will reach a reconciliation with my mother, and we will sit and drink tea together, cackling to ourselves, while the lawn is being mowed outside. At other times the idea repulses me: I think of myself as she is now, and feel ill. I want to wash, I want to change my clothes. I want to be seen as a person with pride.

  To protect myself from this eventuality, I guard my thoughts. I constantly test what I believe, asking myself: can this be true?’ Is this so? In such a manner do I hope to put off what may be inevitable. But, for now, I am safe.

  So there are, in fact, the six of us: Stephen, David, my mother and I. Salome and Moses. Between us we see to the running of the house. We maintain relations. We keep things safe.

  This is the way it is.

  By the time Stephen gets home in the late afternoon, I have put David to bed. He’s been complaining that the pain has returned. The Disprin that I gave him has failed to work. He doesn’t feel hot to me, but there is no reason to disbelieve him. I sit by him in the bed and read to him. Later he falls asleep. When I hear the noise of the bakkie outside, I get up and go out.

  Stephen stands on the back lawn outside the garage.

  ‘David is ill,’ I tell him.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘I don’t think it’s serious. Don’t look now, but my mother is watching.’

  He does look. She is crouched at her window, staring out from beneath a lifted corner of the curtain. As our eyes meet hers, the curtain falls.

  I put my arm about him. Together we go inside.

  2

  A cry in the night. Perhaps I have been waiting for it: I am instantly awake and fumbling for my gown. I wrap myself in it, and stumble barefooted across the wooden boards to David’s room. He’s sitting up in bed, the sheets thrown aside.

  The pain, he says, is still there.

  I sit by him and murmur to him till he falls asleep. This takes a long time; he whimpers to himself, he bleats. I stroke his head with a rhythmical hand, back and forth. Eventually he subsides into the pillows. His head falls aside, distilling his dreams.

  In the morning he seems to be all right. The pain is gone. I help him dress for school (though he’s old enough to do this for himself). As he and Stephen drive off I stand at the window and watch them go. David looks up and I shrink back where he cannot see me.

  When I fetch David from school after lunch, he’s waiting for me on the curb, his chin on his knees. I haven’t been thinking about it, but as we drive back up the long dust road, I say to him: ‘How is the pain?’

  ‘Gone,’ he says. He seems preoccupied and I don’t question him further.

  It’s later, after he’s eaten, that he says, looking at me over the table: ‘Red came out.’

  ‘What?’ I say.

  He tells me. In the cloakroom at break, as he stood at the urinal, a stream of red came from his body. What frightened him more was the reaction of the other boys. The row of them along the trough, as they saw the bright flow pass by their feet, turned their heads one by one to look at David. He recalls with vague alarm the faces turned toward him, staring with open mouths.

  ‘They watched,’ he says.

  I feel a rush of pity for him, this little boy who contrived by means beyond his control to piss blood.

  ‘Did it hurt?’ I say.

  ‘It burned,’ he says. ‘A little bit.’

  Something is wrong. I take David that same afternoon to see the doctor. Because I don’t know another, we consult the same doctor who treated my mother. It’s been a long time since I saw him last, but he hasn’t changed much.

  He’s a little man whose body is made up of circles. He has round cheeks, a bald head, and two perfectly round eyes behind round spectacles. His name is Doctor Bouch. He makes David undress and lie on the table. Then he proceeds to examine him, going over the surface of his body with the soft tips of his fingers and the cold steel ends of his instruments. As I stand by, watching, clutching my handbag to my stomach, I catch David’s eye and smile. He doesn’t smile back.

  When he has finished, Dr Bouch tells me that he can find nothing wrong. ‘It happens,’ he says, ‘from time to time.’ People pass blood in their water. The pain, he says, ‘could be anything’. But it’s likely to be minor. I am to call again if it comes back. Before we go, Dr Bouch smiles broadly and asks after my mother.

  There is nothing to be done. Life goes on. I accept with relief Dr Bouch’s pronouncement on the health of my son, and we return home. In the day to day living on the farm, there is much to be seen to. From the time that David and Stephen leave in the mornings, I am busy with tasks in and about the house. I don’t know that Stephen can understand the countless little labours that go into maintaining our existence in this place. Every day, with the help of Salome, there is washing and dusting to be done. Armed with cloths, brushes, mops and water, we apply ourselves to the surfaces about us. We scour them clean of the dirt that, grain by grain, invades us from outside. I have a large collection of silverware that I clean each day. I wipe and polish trays and beakers until my face shines back at me. I smile at my reflection.

  It’s not a remarkable face. When I was younger I used to wish for features that were interesting, if not beautiful. But there is something bland in my appearance, as though I have not lived deeply enough. My mouth is straight. My eyes are brown. My hair is also brown, brushed back straight from my forehead and tucked behind my ears. I don’t like to wear makeup; it hardly seems necessary up here, so far from anyone else. When I have to go into town to do shopping or pay bills, I usually do put a little colour into my face. I touch up my lips, redden my cheeks.

  These occasions please Stephen. On the evenings of these days he looks at me and says, ‘There now. Why can’t you look like that every day?’

  ‘For you?’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘For me. When I first met you, you used to wear makeup every day.’

  This is true. There was a time in my life when I took pride in things like this: I covered my face in powders and oils. I dabbed scent on my wrists and on the back of my neck. I wore long dresses and high-heeled shoes. I was conscious, you could say, of the way I appeared.

  But here, in my house in the hills, I seem somehow to have lost myself. I wear flat shoes. I wear old dresses and aprons. In my battle with the dust, I put on the armour of housewives. There are times when I am frightened of myself. I take off my clothes and stand before the mirror. I scrutinise my body, examining my sagging flesh. Gravity has had its effect. As I grow farther and farther from my birth, my body succumbs to the pull of the earth. It melts from my bones and begins to drip and ooze downward under my clothes.

  Can this be pleasant for Stephen, I wonder? Does he look at me sometimes and see, as I do, the dowdy little woman I have become? Am I unpleasant for him?

  When I worry
in this way, I make an effort for him. There are nights, yes, when I dress up in pretty clothes, when I paint my face the way he wants me to do. I put on stockings. I pin up my hair and am, if only for a few hours, the girl he met ten years ago. I am once again Miss Roper, the laughing schoolteacher who somehow seduced him. But there is something false about these evenings, no matter how much he claims to like them. It is as if I am only dressing up, as if I’m putting on a costume in which I no longer belong.

  There is, you see, something about the place in which we live that makes pretension impossible. Stephen spends his day in town, in the little office at school where he is headmaster. He cannot know, as I do, the rigours of a life removed. I am far from town. I see few people, other than those I have described. I live, as it were, with necessities. There is no need for makeup or special clothes. There is no one to impress.

  Stephen, I suspect, would like to live in town where things are orderly and neat. He would like to attend bridge evenings, go to dinner parties with friends. He has spoken from time to time about moving back there. ‘One of the outlying suburbs,’ he says. But I can’t do it. This house belongs to the family, I tell him. My mother has lived here all her life, as hers did. We can’t give it up. Besides, I say, what would Mother do in town? Here she can wander all she likes without getting into trouble. It’s safer by far to live here.

  In reality, I love this place, with its wild views down the valley, the storms that come down from the hills. I have discovered something of myself in the solitude. Here I am not answerable to people or to custom. I can do as I please. I am my own woman.

  I must concede, then, that perhaps a division existed in our marriage long before the sickness began. Perhaps, in our battle of wills, our daily unspoken compromises, there was a fault for which I had to pay, whether or not David fell ill.

  But he does fall ill. It becomes clear that something larger and more frightening than I first supposed has entered into his body, and our lives. The pain, the little pain which was the first warning of our downfall, has not gone away. Instead it grows, day by day. The morning after Dr Bouch has made his proclamation, the ache is back. David cries. And it’s then, as I gaze at him where he stands in the centre of his room, holding in one hand his grey school shirt and in the other the place in his stomach that is sore, that a revelation comes to me: something has begun. There are secret, subtle nerves between us through which messages and signals are transmitted. As I stand in his bedroom, looking helplessly down at him, I experience a flash of hurt in my body that corresponds in some way with that in his. I go down on one knee and hug him. His arms go round me and he cries.

  Chains do exist. People are bound. Nine years ago I gave birth to this boy. Over the months – eight and a half of them – the weeks, the days, that I carried him, he became part of me in elemental cellular ways. I gave him up when the time was due, expelling him from the cave with strong round rings of muscle. But his presence remains. Sometimes at night, lying awake, I can will myself to recall the sensation of his weight, and I feel the kick of a foot, the shift of a limb, beneath my skin. He continues to live in me, not yet discharged. I am his haven and his prison. He will never leave alive, despite the evidence of this child, nine years of age, who is crying now in my arms. I rock him gently, murmuring in his ear. His nose is running and it gums wetly against my neck.

  ‘Shh now,’ I say. ‘I’ll make it all better.’

  But he goes on crying. Till then, a word from me would have been enough to comfort him. Now he’s learnt, perhaps, that I lie.

  He doesn’t go to school that day. I take him instead back to Dr Bouch’s rooms, where the little man lays him out on the table and examines him again. He’s not as light-hearted this time about his task. He sees in me, I think, a determination he hasn’t bargained for. He takes a urine sample. And blood: we watch, David and I, as the pale syringe sucks fluid from his arm.

  The results of the tests will be phoned through. But, other than that, Dr Bouch can ‘still find nothing wrong’. He looks at me over the top of his desk, contemplative. There is that in his glance which suggests he is sorry, truly sorry, he can find no sickness in my son.

  I take David home. I put him to bed. For the first few days he is calm. The pain seems to come to him at particular moments, or times of the day: late afternoons, mostly, and late at night. Then he cries. But otherwise a placid ritual evolves that has as its centre the child in the bed. I go in and out of the room on numerous little missions, bearing trays of tea, plates of snacks. I sit with him. I read to him often from books I buy in town. He’s always enjoyed reading; the sound of words excites him. At other times we talk, but on subjects that he chooses. In the morning and at noon, Salome takes proper meals to him, also on a tray. She clears them later. My mother, on her wanderings about the house, discovers his constant presence in the tiny room at the end of the passage. She too takes to visiting, and I often come in to find her sitting in my chair next to the bed. ‘Come in,’ she says. ‘Sammy and I were talking about weddings.’

  ‘My name is David,’ he says, and giggles.

  Sammy is the name of my father, who died when I was ten years old. There is a photograph of him on the wall above the fireplace, amongst the many others of our family gone past. When I look at this particular photograph I see a man with swollen dark eyes and balding head. His mouth was cruel, but his smile seemed kind enough. I remember little of him, too little. I need to know more, but there is nowhere to find out. Only from my mother who sometimes, in her convoluted ramblings, lets slip a truthful word.

  ‘This is David,’ she says now, and grins at me with her turtle’s mouth.

  I don’t like to sit with David and my mother. There is between them, I’m afraid to say, a coded communication which I’m not party to. They get on well. They speak of things I do not understand. ‘The roses,’ my mother says, ‘are full of worms.’ She prods at David under the blankets with a long jointless finger, and they laugh merrily together, showing their teeth.

  I don’t laugh. I’m jealous of them, I have to concede, though why I couldn’t say. I suppose I resent the fact that David is so easy with her, that they like each other so much. My mother was never this good to me as a child, not when she was sane.

  I talk to David about it. ‘Does she bother you,’ I ask, ‘with all her mad stories?’

  ‘She isn’t mad,’ he says. ‘She’s clever.’

  He holds my arm as he says this and speaks so completely earnestly that I become angry.

  ‘Of course she’s mad,’ I cry. ‘She’s as mad as a hatter.’

  At this he begins to snivel. After a moment I pat his head. I’m ashamed of myself and the ancient anger I’m venting on him. He doesn’t know better and if she’s a good companion to him, why should I complain? So, after this occasion, I try not to mind so much when I find her drowsing in that chair like a woman long dead.

  Stephen, however, will not go in while she’s there. She always leaves a room when he enters it, casting backward glances and muttering. He finds her reaction uncomfortable, being an upright man with a sense of order. He stands by this.

  ‘Decency,’ he once told me, ‘is a sense of order.’

  With decency, then, Stephen runs his life. He is concerned for David, but not as concerned as I. He does not believe in fate or things inescapable. Life, he would maintain, is a mathematical affair. Emotions are algebra. There are sums by which one lives and by which, eventually, one dies. There is a logic to this comprehension: he was, after all, a maths teacher for most of his working life, until he became headmaster of the high-school in town. He was a maths teacher when I met him, ten years ago: a thin, tall man with short black hair and a huge black moustache through which he breathed. His eyes, then as now, were lidless and huge. They saw everything there was to see.

  He does not get on with David. He loves him, I hasten to say – but this is perhaps the problem. Stephen doesn’t know what to do with his love. He whittles it down to dry and brittle
words. He refrains from touching David, but keeps his distance and speaks of silly things. David senses this. He finds it difficult to respond, to demonstrate his need for a father he can hug, or talk to, or build kites with. So between them is a rigid trade of thoughts, but never touch.

  (Which leads me to a thought: Stephen, who has become so comfortable with me, who talks with me and touches me with ease, does he love me still? I have no way of knowing.)

  Now, when he comes home from school in the late afternoon, Stephen goes into David’s room. He stands awkwardly next to the bed, pulling at his hands as if to rid them of their skin.

  ‘How do you feel today?’ he asks. ‘Are you better than yesterday?’

  Or:

  ‘I had a terrible time today. So many bad boys in the office. You’re not going to be a bad boy, are you, when you grow up?’

  To which David smiles and says no.

  Stephen doesn’t stay in there long. He comes out after fifteen minutes or so and goes to change. He takes off the tight blue suits he wears daily to school and which give him an implacable air, like a man in command. He dresses in casual clothes: shorts and sandals, T-shirts or vests. But he cannot shake off a tense quality, as perceptible as starch.

  He says to me one night as we are undressing for bed, ‘What do you think is the matter?’

  ‘The matter?’

  ‘With David,’ he says, looking down as he takes off his socks.

  ‘He’s ill,’ I say.

  There is a pause.

  ‘Of course he’s ill,’ Stephen says shortly. ‘I asked what you thought the matter was. But never mind.’