‘Do you have any questions?’ he says then, smiling kindly.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘If you don’t mind.’
‘Not at all. Please go ahead.’
I ask. He answers.
It’s a rare form of the disease, he tells me. Nobody is exactly sure what causes it, but that is beside the point. The point is that there are four stages to the disease, and David has entered the fourth and final stage.
‘You must not raise your hopes,’ the professor says. ‘I’m afraid that there is very little chance.’
He speaks directly. Perhaps because my senses have been blunted over the many days past, his words have little effect. I lean forward and say:
‘There is a chance.’
He considers me gravely. He is a busy man.
‘David is still very, very sick,’ he says. ‘You must remember that. The operation has removed the growth, but it has not contained the illness. The illness is everywhere. Everywhere. You must bear that in mind.’
I bear it in mind. I know these facts: his body is full of cells that are multiplying without cause. This condition has spread from his glands to his brain. His liver is eighteen times its normal size and two per cent functioning. He is thinner than a thong.
‘What can you do for him?’ I ask.
‘We are giving him treatment.’
The first time I hear this word, it is with relief. I am prepared to give in to these men in white coats, to allow them their way with their pills and their needles.
I go in to the hospital twice a day: for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. That is all I am allowed. During the rest of the day I wander in town, I go shopping. In the evenings I return to where I sleep, which is at the home of Stephen’s sister and her husband. Her name is Linda. His name is Glenn.
Linda is as tall as Stephen, but where his hair is rough and dark, hers is fine and white. Her skin is covered with blemishes and freckles, marked like a surface on which stains have formed. There is a gap between her two front teeth through which her tongue gleams pink. She is a nervous woman, always changing position and touching at her face with long, unpainted nails. She wears slacksuits and belts with flat shoes, under which her body seems even thinner than it is.
‘You must be so worn out,’ she cries. ‘My dear.’
Like the rest of her, her voice is reedy and dull. I have never liked her much. I don’t know her well, as she and Glenn come up to see us only over Christmas. But I can’t bring myself to trust her now, with her pleas of sympathy, her offers of help.
‘Anything,’ she says. ‘Anything, my dear, that you might need.’
‘Yes,’ says Glenn. ‘You have only to ask.’
He is a short man, and overweight. He is a journalist by profession and wears journalists’ clothes: casual, colourless, neat. His pouchy face wobbles as he talks, pushing out words like little puffs of smoke. I have no reason for believing so, but I suspect he treats Linda badly.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘It’s very good of you.’
‘Not at all, my dear . . .’
‘It’s only a pleasure,’ says Glenn, shaking his head.
They live in a flat close to the city centre. It’s not a large flat, but is equipped, Linda explains, with everything they need. I am given a key of my own.
My room is blue and pink, with a white carpet on the floor. There is a bathroom next door. From my window I have a view of a large park in the adjoining block, full of gravel drives and trees.
I go for walks in this park in the long evenings, with the light dying overhead — so much more easily than we. The shadows gather, clotting like blue blood under trees and fountains, spilling out. There is a statue in the middle of the park, cast in iron: the figure of a man I have not heard of, who stands in stiff, ungainly clothes, staring out into the gloom. Pigeons roost beneath his hat.
How strangely and how much my life has changed. There are moments now when I reflect on all that has taken place and like a woman asleep, I jerk to my senses, amazed. Nothing is the way it was. All that I had taken for granted has been pulled out from under me like a mat. My home – the house built of stones and straw – is far away from here, so far that I can only imagine it.
Stephen is there. He drove down to be with me when he heard about the operation, but has since gone back. There is work to be done, he explains. He has a school to run. I feel sorry for Stephen, who has no choice, but I miss him enough to be angry with him. He phones me each night and the sound of his voice provokes me to tears.
‘Don’t cry,’ he says. ‘I know it’s hard.’
‘It’s easy on you,’ I say. ‘I’m the one who has to be here, watching . . . If you only knew what they’re doing to him . . .’
‘I know. Of course I know. But what else can I do?’
It has become possible for us to snap. Even Stephen, in his tight blue suits, is given to irritation these days. We are not what we were.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s difficult for both of us.’
‘Stephen,’ I say, and I start to cry again. ‘I want to come home. I want this to be over.’
‘It will be over,’ he says, ‘soon enough.’
Over weekends, when he can, he drives down to be with me. We sleep together then in my blue and pink room in Linda’s flat. These are awkward times for me, with Linda bobbing around her brother like a frightened moth.
‘Poor Stephen,’ she says. ‘What a terrible strain. Back and forth.’
It is a long way, but he doesn’t, I think, resent the trip. It is five hours in the car; five hours that bring him to David and to me. But Linda’s pity puts questions in my head: am I a burden to him? Does he begrudge me his time?
I ask him.
‘Of course not,’ he says. ‘How can you think that?’
‘I just wondered.’
He comes to me and takes my face in his hands. He looks into my eyes. ‘You don’t look well,’ he says. ‘You need a rest.’
‘I know,’ I say. Before I can help it, I begin to cry again. I am so ashamed of these tears, over which it seems I have no control. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘Why don’t you take a break? Why don’t you go away?’
‘And David? What about him? What will he do while I’m away and there is no one, no one, to be with him?’
He doesn’t reply. There is nothing to say.
When Stephen is here, we go in together to visit David.
My heart lurches at the way he smiles when he catches sight of his father. I am jealous, I admit, of his delight. Things are easier between them now than ever before. Distance and pain have made them warm to each other. Stephen takes his hand and they talk.
‘How are you doing, big boy?’ says Stephen.
‘Fine,’ says David. ‘But they hurt me.’
‘It’s the only way to make you better.’
‘I know. But it’s sore.’
‘You must be a big brave boy,’ says Stephen. ‘For me. For your father.’
They grin, conspiring.
While he is here, Stephen makes a point of seeing Professor Terry. They get on well, these two, in the way of professional men. They shake hands and talk over the vast surface of the desk that stands in the professor’s office.
‘Can you give me an idea of how he’s responding to the treatment?’ Stephen asks, fingers steepled under his chin.
‘Well, Stephen,’ the professor says, blowing out his cheeks. ‘It’s difficult to say. The drugs are very powerful, but it’s early days yet. Early days. As I have told your wife, you must not raise your hopes.’
‘I understand,’ says Stephen pleasantly. He rises to go. ‘I’m afraid we must be off.’
‘Goodbye, Stephen. See you next weekend.’
I remember for a long time afterwards, and with bitterness, how pleasantly Stephen accepted that he should not raise his hopes.
We are, of course, all of us under pressure. Never before in our lives have we had to contend with such thing
s as dispute and separation. But it occurs to me, as it has before, that my husband is not the person I believed him to be.
The treatment of which Professor Terry spoke is a complicated business. Each morning, at a certain hour, a Dr Tredoux comes into the room, followed by two nurses pushing a metal trolley. On this trolley are instruments of various kinds and bowls of steaming water. Dr Tredoux is a friendly man. With great bravura he enters, grinning broadly, rolling up his sleeves. ‘How are we today?’ he booms, as if all of us are suffering together. He goes to the tap to wash his hands, humming as he does some mindless, silly tune. The nurses close on David. They take his pulse, his temperature. They ruffle his hair. Despite these signs of friendliness, David is not deceived. He looks at me with wildly rolling eyes, holding his breath. Eventually he begins to cry.
‘What’s this, what’s this?’ Dr Tredoux advances on the bed till he looms whitely over us, big as an angel. ‘We’re not frightened, are we? Of a little pain?’
David doesn’t answer. His hand grips mine like the jaws of a dog.
They unbutton and remove David’s pyjama top. Then, still humming, as unconcerned as if he is making himself a sandwich, Dr Tredoux prepares a syringe. He takes it from a sealed plastic bag. He inserts a needle. One of the nurses ties a piece of rubber tubing about David’s upper arm. The other stands opposite me on the other side of the bed. She looks at me and smiles.
‘Shame,’ she whispers.
For a moment I’m not sure who she is referring to: me or David. But he is the more obvious subject for compassion. I look down to see what has, once again, become too normal: a little boy in bed, terribly thin, except for the distended bulge that is his liver. His ribs stand out. His skin is grey. The hole in his throat is taped over with gauze. A drip stands beside me, attached by a long pipe to a needle in his hand.
‘There now,’ crackles Dr Tredoux. ‘That wasn’t so bad.’
And I see that he has finished his first task. The syringe is bright with blood. As I watch, he plucks it out like a thorn. The flesh clings, lets go.
Then the next. It is this syringe that David eyes with shivering fear. He rolls away from it in the bed, grabbing at me. ‘Don’t let them,’ he says. ‘Don’t let them.’ But I have no choice: with the nurses, I push him back into the pillow.
Dr Tredoux inserts the needle. He pushes the plunger, sending the column of yellow fluid into David’s arm. It’s over in a moment and the needle is withdrawn. I know very little about the nature of this drug: only that it kills the cells that cause the anarchy. Professor Terry has explained. But in so doing, he tells me, it will kill many healthy cells too. David will lose his hair. He will be sick.
‘The price we pay,’ he says, throwing up his hands.
David begins to vomit. Two seconds, perhaps, after the injection is done, he tells me he can feel it reach his tongue: a taste like rot. And he hunches over in the bed, convulsing with the effort of emptying his body, trying to rid it of this poison. I clutch him. One of the nurses, well trained, is holding a bowl to catch the load. He heaves, shuddering. I raise my eyes to those of Dr Tredoux, who looks steadily back at me, neutral and cool.
The bowl is removed, placed back on the trolley. I touch David’s head to make him look at me, to remind him I am here and on his side. But he doesn’t look up. Greyer than before, blubbering slightly, he falls back over the pillows as if he has been punctured by that needle.
But there is another to come. This is the largest of them all: a syringe as thick as a wrist, a needle as long as a pencil. The nurses seize David. They put over his head a small white jacket that has, at the back, a circular hole cut out of its centre. They roll him on his side so that he faces me. ‘Now curl up,’ says one of the nurses. ‘Come on. It’ll be over in a second.’
‘The quicker you are, the quicker it’ll be done.’ Dr Tredoux flashes a glance at me: an appeal. But I do not flinch. I stare him down.
‘Come, David,’ the other nurse says.
Because David is howling like a wolf and rolling in the bed. He grabs at me again. Finally I cannot stand it anymore and I put out my hand. ‘David,’ I say, ‘you must.’
He subsides, snivelling. There is a fleck of foam at the corner of his mouth. As if he is a dummy, the nurses roll him back onto his side with his knees up against his tummy. He is a foetal shape, the outline of my womb.
We hold him down. The nurses and I, leaning with our weight, pin him in this position to the bed. (‘It is very dangerous,’ Professor Terry has said. ‘He must not move.’) Dr Tredoux, aiming carefully, presses the needle against his spine where it stands out in a ridge in the circular hole in the jacket. Then, a knife into butter, he pushes it in. As it slides, David screams: a sound, primeval, released. It hits me there too, at the base of my spine. They draw fluid out, sucking it carefully from the slender white stalk that holds up his body. Then they inject fluid in. And all the time my son is screaming.
Then it is over. The nurses are putting away the needles and pans. They take the jacket. Dr Tredoux wipes his hands on the white lapels of his coat. ‘There,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t so bad.’
I find myself saying: ‘Thank you.’
They go. For a long time afterwards, David doesn’t move. He continues to lie on his side with his knees drawn up, sobbing hoarsely as though with grief. I don’t know how to console him, or if I want to. I run my hands over him, pressing gently at the spongy texture of his flesh. ‘David,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
‘I have to vomit again,’ he says.
They’ve left a bowl beside the bed. I hold it for him as he retches. He shudders, then falls back again, an arm across his face as he cries and cries and cries.
Every day this happens.
I go to see Professor Terry in his office. He receives me with a tired but patient air, as if he recognises me for what I am: a meddler, a busy-body.
‘Of course the treatment is necessary,’ he says. ‘You don’t think we do if for pleasure, do you?’
‘No. But I wonder if there isn’t some other way – ’
‘Everybody wonders that,’ he says. ‘We all wonder that every day. Research,’ he tells me, ‘is continuing.’
There is only one other thing I need to know. ‘How long must the treatment go on?’
‘If it is successful,’ he says, leaning forward, ‘he must keep coming back for ten years.’
‘Ten years?’ I repeat, lame in my chair as I stare at him.
‘I’m afraid so. To be on the safe side.’
The interview is over.
Ten years, I know already, is too long a time for either of us to endure. David is my son. He has been in me more deeply and more intimately than any lover I’ve had. We undergo this attrition together.
6
It is at some time now, while we are living this way with so much distance and time between us, that betrayal begins. I have no thoughts, no profound understandings to offer. Perhaps the sickness in our midst makes deception easier to practise. I prefer to think, however, that we begin to see each other honestly, and cannot bear what we see. At any rate, I have no warning. I think back over the weekends that Stephen has spent with me here. I remember the phone calls he’s made, but find no clue to what is taking place.
The first I learn of it is when I receive a call one evening after returning from the hospital. I am greeted with a slow, strange breathing on the other side.
‘Hello?’ I say.
‘Do you know,’ a voice informs me (a woman’s voice, muffled and high), ‘that your husband is having an affair?’
‘What?’ I say, unsure whether I’ve heard correctly. But there is only a silence before the line goes dead.
I am suddenly weak. Shock falls over me like a blinding white dome in which I am moving, silent and bereft.
Linda is concerned. She follows after me, tugging at my arm. ‘What?’ she cries. ‘Was it the hospital? Is it David?’ When I continue to ignore her, she can no longer resist. �
��Has it happened?’ she says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘It isn’t that.’
The next day, sick and sleepless, I pack my bag. I tell Linda that I must go home. ‘To settle some matters,’ I say. She twitters consent, but I can tell by the way she looks at me from her frightened grey eyes that she knows something is wrong.
Before I leave, I go to the hospital to tell David I shall be away for a day. He accepts the news without concern, but when Dr Tredoux, on his daily rounds, inserts the second needle into his arm, he releases a thin high wail I’ve never heard from him before. We cling to each other with tiny mammal hands, the sick boy (my child) and I. The sound of his cry is in tune with something in me, so that for a moment we sing out together: high, lonely, and in pain.
I get back home in the late afternoon, with the shadows of the trees stretched long and pale across the grass. It is strange to see the house again after being away for so long. There is no sign of anybody. A pelt of dust is on the floor. ‘Salome!’ I call. ‘Moses!’ But there is no reply.
I sit down to wait in the lounge, in the large armchair at the window. The gas-lamps are unlit, and the shadows deepen about me as the evening comes on. There is no sound from inside the house, except for the occasional squeak or fart of rafters. Outside, the air buzzes gently with birds and insects.
Eventually, I hear the noise of Stephen’s bakkie from far down the road, long before it comes into view, trundling across the grass and out of sight again around the corner. Before, when all was well, I used to go out to greet him when he came home. But not tonight. He must see my car when he parks his, but he doesn’t hurry. In fact it is a long time before I hear the tread of his footsteps on the lawn and he appears on the stoep, walking slow and stiff, trailing on the air like smoke.
It’s twilight now. A blue darkness has welled up from the ground, drifting like fine spray into the air. He comes to a stop in the doorway, leaning disjointedly against it as he would never have done in time gone by. We look at each other, silent, across the shadow-scarred boards of the floor. And I see, yes, that he too has had a vigil to keep up, alone in the house with its walls of stone, filling up with darkness as with water.
Small Circle of Beings Page 5