Small Circle of Beings

by Galgut, Damon

  With this he lies back and puts off the lamp on his side of the bed. But I am awake for a long time afterward, staring up at a ceiling I can’t see in the dark. I don’t know what he means by asking me this. Does he believe, because I am his mother, that I should have an inkling of what is happening to David? And should I? Is this fair?

  Asking questions, I do fall asleep eventually.

  Thus do our lives begin to alter, subtly, imperceptibly, with the change in our midst. We are all of us, in some tiny way, affected.

  Except for Moses, who proceeds, oblivious and sulky, with his work. He mows the lawn by the light of the moon and appears not to give a second thought to the people inside the house, clustered like clams about the white bed in which the sick boy lies.

  3

  David has jaundice. The results of the tests come back and a jubilant Dr Bouch is on the phone, his round voice rolling like a series of little marbles into my ear. He comes out himself later, glowing with pride, as though he is personally responsible for this reverse in our fortunes. He gives David another going-over and confirms this diagnosis. The pain, he tells us, comes from his liver. He leaves him a small bottle of pills.

  I walk back out with him to his car. My mother comes with us, hobbling on her crooked feet and clutching Dr Bouch’s arm. Her poodle limps behind. She remembers Dr Bouch from the days when he treated her when she first lost her mind. He’s kind to her, he smiles.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ my mother says. She grimaces with delight.

  ‘Only a pleasure, Mrs Roper.’ He turns to me and takes my hand. His touch is dry and cool. ‘It’ll all be over soon,’ he says.

  This would seem to be true. For a while the jaundice runs its course; there comes into David’s complexion a strong yellow colour. He is sick, but not as sick as I’d imagined him to be. So it is with great relief that I observe the illness take effect. His tongue goes yellow. He sweats. His temperature is up and he tosses on the pillow. In a few days I am alarmed to see that the yellow has even coloured his eyes, so that they roll in his head like balls of ivory.

  I tend him closely through this time, sitting by him as much as possible.

  My absence means that I cannot keep as close an eye elsewhere as I would like. Small duties are neglected. Salome doesn’t wash the floor as thoroughly. There are streaks of grime on the window panes. I find traces of soap in the rinsed washing. The bushes in the garden that Moses should be pruning are ragged and badly cut.

  I notice these things at night, after David is asleep. Or they are pointed out to me by Stephen, who likes an ordered home. It is he who notices that the bushes aren’t properly pruned, one evening as we stroll together in the garden before supper.

  ‘You must keep a firm hand,’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll try.’

  It is difficult to do. Watching the servants takes a lot of time. The tasks that have been set for them are a meaningless affair as far as they’re concerned. This is not their home. The disciplines of care and cleanliness must be enforced by me. My mother, too, has to be watched, or she will misbehave. She is given to compulsive deeds that are unpleasant and costly. Once I caught her carrying armfuls of books out to a bonfire below the house. Several times she has phoned arbitrary numbers overseas and had long conversations with people on the other side.

  I speak to Salome and Moses, scolding them with strong words. They listen but do not respond, standing side by side in the dirt outside the back door. Salome shifts from foot to foot, biting at her lip. Moses, as always, has his eyes fixed on a point behind me and to the left.

  I long for this trying time to be over, for things to return to normal. There is a point, it seems, at which life is tedious but most acceptable. We have passed beyond it for a little while, but we will resume our dull course soon. We will be back where we began.

  But this is not to be. David gets worse, not better. Dr Bouch has been out twice in the last week to examine him and seems happy enough with his recovery. But, as the jaundice goes, it becomes clear to me that something else is taking hold. I watch him carefully.

  Now I am afraid. At first I tell myself not to worry. My mind is upset by tensions in the home, but my instinct insists. I look at David one day and see him, with a jarring shock, as a stranger might. How much he’s changed. How pale he is, how thin he’s getting.

  I phone Dr Bouch that night. He sounds peeved, but agrees to drive out. And this time he does not look so calm when he comes out of the room, his little black bag in hand. He walks back with Stephen and me into the lounge, where we all three stand for a long moment without speaking. For some reason the lamps have not been lit in here, and blue light from the moon comes stretching into the room. I am cold, terribly cold, though the air is dense with heat.

  Dr Bouch begins. He touches the frame of his spectacles from time to time with a nervous hand.

  ‘There is something,’ he says. ‘Something …’

  A silence falls.

  ‘A growth,’ he says. ‘In David’s throat.’

  We look at him. I fumble for Stephen’s hand and clench it in my fingers: a limp, a lifeless thing. I let it go.

  Dr Bouch continues to speak. He has never seen anything like it. He doesn’t know what it is, but he would like me to bring David to the hospital tomorrow. Just for tests. He’s sorry to alarm us, but it may, after all, be serious . . . We are to stay calm.

  We do. As we listen to this, standing side by side on the bare lounge floor, I am amazed at how calm we are. It’s only later, after he’s gone and we are left, Stephen and I, in the suddenly brooding house, that panic seizes me. I have a moment of pure grief, as though David is already gone. I sway.

  Stephen clears his throat. ‘Are you all right?’ he says.

  ‘Of course I’m not,’ I shout. ‘Of course I’m not all right!’

  I have never shouted at him before. I fall silent again and we stare at each other. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but my head is lurching with a strange and awful liquor.

  ‘There is,’ he says, ‘no need to scream.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I begin to say, but he has by now turned neatly on his heel and left me in the room.

  Holding myself, I go to the double doors that lead onto the back stoep. I push them open and stagger out onto the blue grass. Stars hang thick and fat, magnified in the clear air. Under their light I wander to the edge of the lawn and take the path that leads down below the house.

  It’s difficult to see in the sticky black, but I push my way through, tugging at branches, till I come to the cleared acre where the fruit trees are. They give off a strong smell in the steamy air, but I don’t want to sit. On I go, down, to where, at the bottom of the cultivated space, the stream is running. It’s only a sound to me in the dark: a constant and stony gurgling that seems to emerge from the ground. This is where all our water comes from, pumped up from this shallow channel in hidden pipes to the house above. I sit down. My feet find the water and push through it to mud, oily and black. Cold.

  The night is coiled about me like a snake. On the other side of the stream, invisible to my eyes, the jungle starts: a wall of vines and trunks that have been woven too tight to pass. Only sound comes through the leafy chinks: burbling noises, the pad of paws, the snuffling of breath. Animals are afoot. We have lost two dogs here, killed by wild pigs. Leopards come down from the mountains sometimes, but they are seldom seen. As I sit now, a wail comes drifting up from the gully. It sounds like a night bird of some kind. Whatever it may be, the noise startles me, plucking a string in me like a ragged nail. I jerk upright, my hair and skin aprickle with fear. It takes a long time before my heart is soft again.

  By then I am crying. I couldn’t say why. It’s not David exactly, but something connected to him. The idea of this growth in him appals me. I see it as an image: a living swelling thing that has bred in his body and that now feeds on him. I see it as a creature with a face. In the gloom, its tiny animal eyes regard me steadily. I
cry.

  In half an hour I feel better and retrace my steps back up to the house. The lamps have been lit now and Stephen is sitting in the lounge, reading a newspaper. He looks up as I come in.

  ‘Been far?’ he says.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Just down to the stream.’

  ‘Ah.’ He nods. After a moment he looks back down at his paper. I know that all is well, that things are better between us. We have, by silent consent, agreed through the ten years of our marriage never to raise our voices to each other. We do disagree on occasion, but only with quiet tones and rational argument. Though we haven’t, as I say, discussed it, Stephen would consider any display of emotion unnecessary. I have, till now, honoured his wishes. Tonight I have been silly. I have overstepped myself.

  But it’s all right now. I gather myself and walk on down the passage to David’s room, to tell him what is to happen tomorrow.

  I take him to the hospital. This is a small building at the edge of town and not, by city standards, what it claims to be. It’s more a clinic than anything else: a dirty white building with three frayed palm trees outside. A fat nurse takes down my name and address and shows me where to wait.

  Soon afterwards, we are shown into a consulting room very like Dr Bouch’s in town. Dr Bouch is here, together with two other doctors. Their names are Viljoen and Van Zyl. Once again, David must undress and lie down on the white table. The three men crowd about him, probing him like plump white bees at a flower. This time they are not concerned with the surface of his body. It’s his throat into which they are peering, aiming their tiny torches like guns. They mutter among themselves, speaking a language I cannot understand.

  Eventually they call me over, and I too am given a chance to look down the gullet of my son at what is living there. I peer down, afraid. It’s an innocuous thing, this growth; not at all what I imagined. Tiny and red and almost harmless, like a small sea creature trapped where it does not belong.

  Dr Bouch is talking to me. I tear my eyes away, reluctant, ‘. . . to be done,’ he is saying. ‘There are decisions to be made.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, unsure of what he means.

  ‘For now, he must be kept in bed. I’ll come up every day. I’ll write out some prescriptions for you. We must try various methods.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. I smile at him.

  ‘There isn’t necessarily any cause for alarm.’ This from Dr Viljoen, who is holding my wrist with a tender grip, as if he is taking my pulse.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good, then. Good.’

  And we are being ushered from the room, David still doing up the buttons of his shirt. The fat nurse smiles as we go out.

  I go to the chemist and obtain, with the prescription, assortments of pills in bottles. I regard these in the same way I do the other pills Dr Bouch had left us. I suppose it is mistrust. I suppose, yes, it is still as mild as that: mistrust for these coloured objects in their transparent containers that are meant to cure and heal.

  I discuss this with Stephen that night. He looks at me, surprised.

  ‘But of course he must take them,’ he says. ‘If that’s what Dr Bouch told you.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. How can he prescribe medicines when he doesn’t know what’s wrong?’

  ‘You’re being silly,’ he tells me. ‘He has a job to do. Let him do his job.’

  ‘I have a job too,’ I say. ‘I must take care of David. I must do the best I can for him.’

  We drop the subject then, but there is a tension between us that hasn’t been there before. I sit with David for a while. Then I go to bed.

  4

  David is dying. I know this fact long before it is confirmed for me on a certain morning by Dr Bouch. On this morning, after examining David, Dr Bouch takes me to the corner of the lounge to which we always withdraw and says:

  ‘He must go to hospital.’

  I look at him.

  ‘I mean,’ he says, ‘a proper hospital. We haven’t the facilities here to deal with this case. There is nothing more I can do for him.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I am saying,’ he tells me, looking me in the eye, ‘I am saying that you must take him to the city.’

  The city. The words strike in me like a heavy iron clapper, sending out echoes in images of tall dirty buildings, streets as deep as rivers, cars, windows, noise. I lived in the city when I was training to be a teacher. I cannot bear the thought of it.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘I’m afraid he must. I don’t know if you understand. He has to go.’

  ‘No,’ I say again, though my voice is trembling.

  Dr Bouch stares at me. A kind of silent antagonism has developed between us, over the mornings and mornings that he has been here and been able to tell me nothing. He peers into every crevice of David’s body, but cannot discover what is wrong. The most he’s been able to find out, to my horror and fright, is that the growth in his throat is getting bigger every day. He reminds me of this now.

  ‘It’s doubling in size,’ he says, ‘every twenty-four hours.’

  I look steadily back at him, though my heart beats at my chest like a fist.

  ‘I am warning you,’ he says, opening his hands to me.

  Again I shake my head. A silence falls. Then he bends to his bag and prepares to leave. He mutters angrily as he does: ‘All right. The choice is yours. I’ll come back tomorrow. But I told you . . .’

  He told me. But I do not tell Stephen when he comes home that night; nor any night after. My silence in this matter is not an easy one. I am ridden with guilt afterwards. I know full well that in the city there are better and brighter men than these, men who may be able to discover what it is that is devouring David from inside. It is fear that prevents me from agreeing, that bends my lips into their resilient shape.

  I am selfish. I am small. My life has devolved to numberless small routines that keep me safe. I trust my existence in this place, with its small population of inhabitants. I recoil at the thought of the city, of giving up, even for a time, the secure arrangement of home and husband and servants that rings me round.

  But David is dying. I spend most of every day with him now in his room. He no longer laughs or talks very much. I read to him, but he listens with listless boredom, staring with glassy eyes into the distance. He lies very still. Too still sometimes: I have stopped rigid with shock at least twice when coming into the room and seeing him like that. When he does move, it is with stiff slowness, as if his joints are hardening. He cries often: small whimpering sobs that jerk from his mouth.

  I watch, amazed. How swiftly it happens. I count the days since this began, since that first afternoon he came to me, and think how, in this measured space of time, the complex perfect knots that bind up his body are undoing themselves, one after the other. There is a seam in him that is unravelling, somewhere in the deep dark places under the sheets that cover him. I can’t reach there with hand or prayer.

  I watch him go. Each day, each hour perhaps, the rot keeps on, advancing by slow degrees until the moment it will consume him. I no longer cry over him. Impossibly, I have become used to this. I have accepted into the ordinary patterns of my hours this most extraordinary thing. As have we all: Salome and Moses, no longer under my will, work where and when they please. I notice only, on my journeys to the kitchen or outside, that all is not as it was. The grass is too long. The fat summer petals are strewn under the trees. Inside, the floors grow dull. Dust collects in corners and against skirting boards.

  There are moments when I react with outrage and fury. At these times I lose control: I fly out in search of these two, my hair wild. ‘Salome!’ I call. ‘Moses!’ If they reply, I round them up and lecture them, berating them in high, shrill tones, telling them how they are letting me down. But they are immune, it seems, to my rages: they merely stand, unblinking, while I expend my breath.

  Finally I give up this ritual. It has no effect and wastes my time. Besides,
there seems no point, when there are no guests or friends to entertain. Even Stephen makes no mention of it anymore, though I know that it bothers him.

  Stephen has become quieter as the days go by. He was never a talkative man, but now, even in our most intimate moments alone, he hardly speaks. He avoids my eyes. At night, after the servants and doctors are gone, a dreadful silence falls on the house, through which he and I move like anguished ghosts. Only the solemn monotonous ticking of the clock spreads in concentric rings from its place in the lounge, paring away our lives.

  There are times, yes, when we speak. But, strangely, we talk little of David. It’s everyday matters, trivial concerns, that are the subject of our discussion. ‘We must fill the gas-lamps,’ he might say. ‘They’re about to run out.’

  Or: ‘I saw a shirt today I like. I think I might buy it.’

  If David is seldom mentioned, it’s because we cannot agree. We, who in ten years of marriage have never had cause for real dispute, find ourselves in opposition over something we do not understand. We have argued over him: over the pills he takes, over what is the matter and how to deal with it. In these arguments it is I who become passionate, I who scream and point. Once I banged my head with force against the wall. Stephen merely studies me with icy reserve, observing me as he does the boys who are sent to his office to be punished. I am an object to him at times like these; an irrational, emotional being who cannot command herself. I think he feels distaste.

  He is away most of the day, though, and is spared the relentless process that is taking place. It is I who spend my days in the tiny room, sitting at the bedside and passing the hours. My mother still comes to join us there, but she is not as talkative as before. For one thing, David is hardly interested in conversation anymore. But I value her presence now, why I cannot say. It’s a comfort to me to have her there, an older, dimmer version of myself, a reminder to me of what I may become.

  It’s not just weakness that makes David quiet: among the pills that I reluctantly feed him is a drug that lessens the pain he feels. But this drug also slows him down, wrapping his mind in bandages I cannot penetrate. He speaks thickly (when he does), as if his tongue is made of wool.