Small Circle of Beings

by Galgut, Damon

  I think of Stephen, the polite, demure lines of his body. I see him atop Gloria MacIvor and feel, in the slippery pounding of Cedric as he coaxes me closer to my nightly death, a triumph of a sort.

  Stephen phones me one day as I am weeding in the garden. For the first time since our parting he sounds unsure of himself. Who, he wants to know, is the man I am with?

  I tell him it’s not his concern.

  He knows, he says. It’s only that he’s heard from people in town, from David, that I am seeing somebody … He only thought to ask …

  I tell him again it is none of his business.

  Though this is the extent of our discussion, I sing with retribution. Across the miles of telephone cable, I sense the beginnings of his fear.

  Cedric knows, of course, about Stephen, but we don’t discuss him much. He still exists as a presence in the house and I have kept, for reasons I don’t understand, a picture of him above the fireplace. It is a picture taken long ago in which he is bent over, smiling, his teeth gleaming beneath his moustache. His hair is short and neat, cut close to the narrow shape of his head. One night I come into the lounge to find Cedric crouched before the fire, into which he has cast this picture. The frame burns first, curling in the heat. We stand and watch.

  ‘He mustn’t be here,’ explains Cedric, and grins. The light of the fire is in his teeth.

  ‘Ohh,’ I sigh, as if I understand, but the glass of the photograph breaks with a painful, gnashing sound.

  After this, it is inevitable that Cedric moves in here. This he does at the start of the following summer. It is a year now since the sickness began, and I take stock of our lives as we carry Cedric’s furniture, item by item, into the house. He has given up his cottage down the hill and is to be another person in our midst, a lover and father to us. (I would like him, perhaps, as a husband, but this we have never discussed.) He is also a great deal more: Salome and Moses watch with glum resentment the arrival of their new master. Short and red, loud of voice, he takes command. It is no longer I who control the running of affairs. From the time they arrive in the mornings, the servants are given tasks by Cedric, who has, it seems, a different vision to my own. He sets about rearranging the furniture in the house. This table, he thinks, should be there. The couch is unpleasing where it is. We are all conscripted, servants and family, to move things about. I say nothing as rooms that have been ordered in particular ways since I was young are rearranged in accordance with Cedric’s whims. He doesn’t like the study as it is; David, he decides, must sleep here instead. And we dutifully move the furniture from David’s room into the one at the end of the passage. The study – with its useless arrangement of desk and bookcases – is transplanted to this other space where, night in, night out, David and I endured his illness.

  This is not all. The garden, too, Cedric feels, is not acceptable this way. With wheelbarrows, picks and spades, we are required to assist Moses in the moving and removal of flowerbeds. We rip up plants by their soft white roots and toss them down in piles. We smooth over the places where they have stood and cover the sites with grass. Now beds must be dug and we do so, chopping from the even green turf big rings of soil. We lay down compost and plant seeds and David is given the job of watering them each day.

  David becomes sullen with the labour. He is unused to work under Stephen’s rule and resents, I suppose, obeying orders. But, as Cedric has said, he is a soft child and must learn the way of the world.

  My mother, for the first time since she moved there, is forced from her rooms. Cedric requires a place to work, and there is none better than this separate flat behind the house. I try to explain this to my mother, to reason with her, but she wants none of it. She has been deeply disturbed by the sudden frenzy of activity around her. She cannot understand any more than the servants the need for change. She has watched with evident fear from behind her curtain as flowerbeds are erased and new ones created. Now, when I approach her, she bolts her door and pushes a chair against it. I have become strange to her, I suppose, in the way that I seem strange to David and the servants. How can I explain that change is necessary for us, for all of us?

  Cedric breaks down her door. There was, he explains afterwards, no other way. In a squeal of bursting wood he invades her room and emerges with her, trembling, into the light. She is given the spare bedroom in the house, to which he has her belongings removed: her ornaments, books, the clothes she never wears. She continues to flutter about her room as Cedric cleans it out, but when it becomes clear that this is no longer her place, she locks herself in her new quarters and does not emerge for days.

  So Cedric’s workshop is here, at the edge of the lawn. It is from this building that we hear the harsh crash of his chisel. It is a mysterious place, a factory of sorts, to which big chunks of rock are brought, from which those statues emerge. They stand now on my grass, these beasts and men on their pedestals of stone, twisting and rearing all about like images from my mother’s dreams. I wander between them in my new and growing garden, looking with dazed confusion on what has taken place while I, it seems, was away.

  Stephen phones again. Could we, he wonders, meet in town somewhere. There is something he wants to discuss.

  At a plastic outdoor table in the tea-garden in town, in the shade of a dirty yellow umbrella, Stephen confesses his mistake. ‘I want to come back to you,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what I thought I was doing.’

  I am unmoved. I listen in silence to the pleas of this man, whose skin has drawn tight and tired across his face. There is a patch of dead hair at his fringe. I look over his shoulder as he speaks, at the fat blue pigeons that waddle between the tables. When he is finished, I shake my head. I am happy, I tell him, happier than I ever was with him. He is no match for Cedric. There was a time, I go on, when I would have taken him back, but that is now long gone. Sadly I dab at my lips with my serviette. Then, with infinite politeness and cruelty, I take my leave of him, walking away over the slate path, trying not to cry.

  This is my revenge. There is that in me, I must concede, that will not be satisfied by any repayment at all.

  ‘Does your father ever ask about me?’ I say to David, when he next returns from a weekend away.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, and does not blink.

  David is becoming a problem. He no longer talks or laughs of his own accord. He is rude and abrupt with Cedric and even, sometimes, with me. At the supper table he sits, head down, and eats in silence. When asked a question, he mutters as brief a reply as possible and goes on chewing. It is not to be borne. I have stood by him in his time of crisis and deserve more than this. I speak to Cedric about it: the boy must be disciplined.

  His father, you see, is soft with him.

  Cedric beats David for the first time one night when he is rude to me at supper. He uses the flat of his hand on the back of his legs. The blows are hard and stinging, startling me with their loudness. I go to him in his room afterwards, where he lies sobbing on his bed. It is necessary, I explain, that this takes place. I care for David and want him to be good. David goes on crying, his face in his arm. On the smooth backs of his thighs I see the perfect shape of Cedric’s hands, swollen in red.

  After this, he beats the boy often. For reasons that begin to seem slight even to me, he will leap up and seize him by the upper arm, whirl him about in the air and lash out with an open, spread-fingered hand. I hear the smack of skin, David’s cries. I wonder, dimly, at the process that is taking place. Once, when David on the lawn outside has disturbed Cedric taking a nap, he receives a hiding that knocks him off his feet. I watch from the window as he staggers to the ground and remains there, crouched on hands and knees. Cedric continues to talk to him, using the reasonable even tones that give credit to his status in our house. But afterwards, when Cedric has gone back inside and David has at last stood up, wiping at his face, I see that he has wet himself where he fell.

  I go to David outside, but as I approach, his pale white face seals itself before me like a
clam. ‘David . . .’ I begin, but he turns away.

  We no longer speak, this boy and I. The equality we had achieved in bedrooms and in hospitals is gone. I see now, for the first time, that he is not as small or gentle as he was. His legs are longer than before. His hair is cut differently, and the bones in his face are changing shape. I try. Another day, another week, while Cedric is in his workshop behind the house, I confront David as he sits in the kitchen. ‘What,’ I ask, ‘has happened to us? Why don’t you look at me when we talk?’

  ‘Because,’ he says, glaring at his nails.

  I must be content with this reason.

  Cedric hits me for the first time one morning as he is getting dressed. I can no longer remember exactly what began our argument. I think he bumped his head on the corner of the dresser, and I laughed, unaware that he’d hurt himself. Suddenly I find myself seized by the hair and dragged out of bed. I strike the floor with all the lame weight of ignorance. I am astounded. Still numb, not comprehending, I am raised to my feet and punched in the face. My vision is extinguished, briefly, like the converging light of a television screen put off. When it returns to me, I am sitting on the edge of the bed, holding my bruised jaw, and he is kneeling in front of me, his red face suffused with concern. ‘I’m sorry,’ he tells me, over and over. ‘I don’t know what happened.’ But I can barely hear him for the creaking noise of my neck.

  It happens next perhaps a month after this, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. This time, the assault is prolonged. There is a malice in it. I have upset him because I was rude with him and, like a child, I must be punished. He drags me into the bedroom and locks the door. He begins to hit. I back away, I try to plead, but he is stolid, purposeful, to all appearances calm. He advances on me, brandishing his fists like clubs. He kicks me once, twice, on the shins. ‘Coward,’ I shout, and he twists his hand into my hair, wrenching my head sideways. In all the black-edged panic of my heart, I search for help in the house about. My voice comes out of me, surprising me more than him, a thin, single beam of light or sound: ‘David,’ I cry. ‘Come quickly!’

  What he is supposed to do, this twelve-year-old boy with a scar on his throat, I cannot say.

  He doesn’t come. The door, anyway, is locked. I watch, slow as sand, as that knuckled hand floats gently towards me through the air. It strikes: an impact I register as sensation, not pain. The room shatters, then composes itself again. My one eye is dead, gone blank as black, but Cedric, ever concerned, is propping me up. He keeps me from falling by holding hard to the front of my dress. He strikes again and breaks my nose.

  There is a lot of blood. After he has gone, storming out, I suppose, to where he makes form out of stone, I must find a way to stand. I must change into a clean dress without stains. Then, with running eyes, my nose still pouring redly down my chin, I take myself to the car and drive slowly into town.

  Dr Bouch, his round lips tight on some deep disapproval, tends to me. He tapes up my nose. He puts ointment on my blackened eye. It will take time, he says, for the swelling to go down. I must be careful.

  A silence falls between us. He inches his head forward, onto the pulpy pink cushion of his hands. ‘I want to know what happened to you.’

  I look at him from my one clear eye. I take a breath. ‘David,’ I say, ‘hit me with a cricket ball.’

  There is a pause.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure of that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, and am surer than I was.

  11

  It must be said that Cedric doesn’t hit me often. Once a month, perhaps, or less, I do something that upsets him enough to strike. But he is always sorry afterwards, when the deed is done. Then he takes me in his arms and cradles me, rocking me from side to side. ‘Oh,’ he croons. ‘How could I do this to you? I’m such an awful person! Awful!’

  ‘No,’ I protest. ‘It’s me, me who’s awful! I provoke you,’ I tell him, ‘into behaving that way.’

  We cling to each other like babies and cry.

  I take David aside one day. ‘I don’t want you to tell your father,’ I say, ‘about what Cedric does. He won’t understand.’

  David shrugs, looking at his feet.

  It’s true: Stephen could not possibly understand the passion that must inevitably give rise to violence on occasion. He is, after all, only a headmaster. His hands are soft and slim and have never chopped at stone.

  I am given to understand, from what I hear, that Stephen no longer lives with Gloria MacIvor in town. When I ask David about this, he confirms that, yes, Auntie Gloria has moved out. Stephen is alone, in a flat as suitably bare and empty as the home to which I returned. I am sorry for him, I suspect, though am unsure of how.

  So it is with dismay that I hear from David that he would like to leave me here and go to live with Stephen. He tells me one evening after supper, while Cedric is in the bath. We are standing on the back stoep, while a bleak twilight settles on the land. David speaks with difficulty and, when he has done, bursts suddenly into tears. For the first time since the sickness he runs at me, throwing his arms around my chest, butting his nose into my arm. He sobs.

  Moved, I react. ‘Why, David?’ I say. ‘What is the matter? Is it me? Is it something I have done?’

  He makes no reply, only cries.

  ‘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: