Small Circle of Beings

by Galgut, Damon

  ‘If you want to be a baby, David, go to your room.’

  David, soft and edible and pale as the baby he is, must go.

  I follow later, to where the light is inevitably off, the curtains, as usual, drawn. I sit on the edge of the bed. I dare to touch him with my hand. ‘David,’ I plead. ‘Why do you cry? It would be all right if only you didn’t cry.’

  Now, as then, he sobs.

  ‘He loves you,’ I go on. ‘If you’d just let him, he’d be such a good father to you –’

  ‘I have a father,’ David says. ‘I don’t need another one.’

  We sit, while I stroke him with my hand. It’s dark in here. Outside, the moon throws down its light about the house, like silver hoops onto a peg.

  ‘Do you think,’ I say at last, my voice too soft for me, ‘do you think I married Cedric because Stephen went away?’

  ‘You didn’t marry him,’ says David. ‘Did you?’

  The question answered, it’s too difficult somehow to stroke his back. I let my hand fall and we sit, side by side on the edge of the bed, while the night booms about us in the throats of frogs. After a very long time I get to my feet. Touching at my hair as if it is coming loose, I leave his room.

  To bring them closer, I suggest to Cedric that David should call him Father – ‘so that you’re not a stranger to him.’

  Cedric discusses this with David the following evening. Though the door is closed and, after some time, I hear raised voices and the sound of beating, David hereafter refers to this man as Father. ‘Here is your supper, Father,’ he says.

  Or: ‘Here is your coffee, Father.’

  ‘Thank you, David,’ says Cedric, and smiles.

  But David, he does not smile. He gazes back with slightly unfocused eyes, as though thinking about some thing else of great moment, and turns to leave.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Cedric will call from his low, deep chair before the television set.

  ‘To bed, Father.’

  ‘Before you go, come and give your Father a kiss. A bedtime kiss.’

  I watch from the crack in the door as David must cross on slipper-swollen feet to the chair, must bend and kiss Cedric on the mouth. ‘There,’ says Cedric, and pats him on the bum. ‘You know I’m as good to you as I can be.’

  ‘Yes,’ says David.

  ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ says David. ‘Father.’

  Stephen calls me again, angry on the phone. What is this, he wants to know, about David calling Cedric his father? He is no such thing. ‘You’re not even married to him,’ he says.

  ‘Not yet,’ I reply coldly, and hold the telephone like a club.

  There is a pause. Softer than before, he says: ‘Are you going to? Marry him, I mean?’

  ‘I’m free to do exactly as I please,’ I say, and put down the phone.

  I sit for a long while, hands pressed into my eyes, and weep. But, for all the suffering this would bring to Stephen, I cannot have Cedric as my husband. I think of the long march up the aisle, wrapped about in white. I begin to feel faint.

  There is a great deal of silence, now, in the stony house we live in. I speak more to Moses and Salome than to the people who share my roof. My mother, though she seems happy enough in her new room, has taken to wandering far afield each day. She sets out in the mornings, a weird and lonely figure, fading into the bush. In the evening, at sunset, she returns, her wild hair full of burrs, scratches on her hands. I fear that one day she will not come back at all, but I say nothing. I pluck the thorns from her skin and wash her tiny wounds. She does not speak to me. David, as usual, keeps much to himself. And Cedric, fiery, short Cedric who has redeemed me from my solitary state, has lapsed into silence too. He grunts a great deal, though, and scratches his head with thick, gingery fingers. He has brought with him from his cottage a large television set; it stands in the lounge, in front of our now unused fireplace. At night, after supper, it is here that he goes: slouched down in an armchair, eyes fixed unblinkingly on the aquatic movement of the screen. Occasionally, he farts.

  I never join him there. I hate the television, and instead I go to my room. So it is at the dinner table in the evenings that we are closest to what I most desire: that small circle of beings, the family. Even my mother is present at these gatherings, hunched over the table like a harmless old predator, spearing at her peas. She munches with an open mouth, surveying us as she does from veiny, yellow eyes.

  David hates peas. ‘Can I leave these?’ he says. ‘I’ve had half.’

  ‘All right,’ I say, and smile at him.

  Cedric looks up, fixing on David, down the table, his hard crimson stare. ‘David,’ he says. ‘Come here.’

  David stands at the head of the table next to Cedric, holding his plate in his hands. It trembles slightly. We, my mother and I, have become quite still as we watch what must, in the end, be a scene.

  ‘Peas are good for you, David,’ says Cedric. ‘You must eat your peas.’

  ‘I don’t like peas,’ says David. His voice is very like his plate: a flat, a shiny thing, that trembles on the air.

  I watch as Cedric takes his fork. He sticks it into the peas on David’s plate and lifts it. There is a pause before David’s mouth, as it always does, accepts. He chews.

  Cedric feeds to him the plate of peas. Then he reaches for the dish and fills the plate again with the evil green pellets. Again, he takes the fork. David, not moving, not blinking, eats them all. He cries as he stands, but quietly, as if at something he remembers that has nothing to do with us.

  Later, as we lie in bed, I say to Cedric, ‘That was not necessary.’

  Moonlight falls between us on the bed, cold and hard.

  ‘You are too close,’ he says. ‘The two of you. It’s not natural for you to be so close.’

  ‘We’re not,’ I protest. ‘Since you have come, we hardly know each other.’

  I hear myself. There are things I realize then, as I lie on the freezing sheets.

  ‘Oh, I love you,’ says Cedric. ‘I love you so much.’

  I don’t doubt he does. His fury and his turmoil are his gift to me: the only gift this man can make.

  I wander then, for days, with the white concussive understanding of what I have done. Unbeknown to myself, while I was unsuspecting, I have allowed into our lives a terrible force I am not capable of stopping. I stand on the back stoep and look out over the garden, at the new flowerbeds, the statues I do not recognise. I turn and face into the house, in which the rooms, the furniture, have been changed. From far away, drifting to me like smoke, I hear the sound of Cedric in the bathroom. Water splashes and runs as he scrubs, scrubs, to cleanse himself of things too deep for soap.

  My mother is beside me on the stoep, leaning on her knobbled wooden walking stick. She giggles to herself, a thin, sawing noise. ‘Everything goes,’ she says. ‘Everything goes.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, hugging myself. ‘But what must I do?’

  ‘Ask Sammy,’ she says, and laughs again.

  ‘Tell me,’ I cry shrilly, ‘tell me what to do.’

  But she only shakes her head. She shuffles away down the stoep, a frail grey outline in the dusk. She is followed, a little way behind, by the separate translucence of her dog.

  Thus it is on an evening like any other, when we have eaten supper and the gas-lamps have all been lit, staving off with their simple yellow light the burden of darkness from outside, that I tell Cedric he must go. We sit in the lounge, he and I, with the television on, but I am in front of the screen. I speak calmly, with the calm of desperation after too many beatings, too many pains, too much sickness altogether.

  He listens. I don’t remember exactly what it is I say, but they are only words: I love you. I do. But I, we, cannot live this way. It is better to be alone than to have to be this way.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  When I am done, he continues to look at me. The glow of the gas-lamp is in his eyes. He has, it appears, lost interest in m
e. After a long wait, I leave him there. And it’s now, after I’ve left the room, that he gets to his feet. I hear glass break. Wood cracks. I am back in the room and watching as he begins to destroy what he can see. My mother has left her walking stick on the chair. Armed with this, Cedric is spinning about the room, a man electrified, lashing out in every direction with his length of wood. I see vases break. Tables overturn. He kicks at a bookcase that slowly, uprooted, topples and spills. ‘Aahh,’ he cries. ‘Bitch. Bitch.’ The stick comes down.

  Strangely, it is in this final act of destruction that I am safest. I stand by, immune, and gaze as he lays waste to what I own. In the end he comes to a halt: head bowed, choking, he tries to breathe. Foam is on his lips. And all about him, spreading, it seems, in ripples from their source, concentric rings of glass and metal and wood move soundlessly outwards.

  Later, of course, he comes to me where I lie in bed, wrapped in my nightgown, turned to the wall. He sits on the mattress behind me, a dull and heavy weight. He is crying, loudly so that I can hear. (I too have been crying, but quietly, to myself.) He puts a hand on my back. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  I do not move.

  ‘Please,’ he says. ‘I will be better than I’ve been. I promise I’ll try. I promise …’

  I say nothing. Riven from inside, but still, I lie and breathe.

  After he has left, I get out of bed. On bare feet I go down the darkened passage to David’s room and open the door. The light is off here too, and I peer into the black. But David, sprawled on his side in sleep, fills the whole mattress; there is no place for me. Aching and somehow ashamed, I close the door again.

  The statues are the last to go. After the clothes, the furniture, the books have been packed into boxes and ferried away, load after load, down the hill, it is the statues that they come to fetch. From the unlighted window where I stand to watch, it’s a bizarre and soundless sight: men in blue overalls, moving like spectres on the frost-stricken ground, uprooting and bearing away the figures of horses, men, snakes. Cedric watches from the stoep, hands in pockets, quiet. When they come to it, he motions them to leave the statue of the goat. Vigilant and evil, this is for me.

  Winter is on us again. Cedric goes back to his cottage at the foot of the hill, where he lived for so long before he met me. We are left again, survivors: my mother, my son, myself. We continue to live, if that is the word, in this house, which has become, though it hardly seems possible, huger and more silent than before. The quietness has overtaken us all, so that our thoughts resound in us like noise. I find myself often standing quite still and hearing, through the long cold passages, the cadence of the jungle about us borne in on the air. It is a slow, inevitable sound: the soft creaking of a dark, immense, relentless progress. All around us, on the hill, trees inch up towards the light. Leaves take shape. Branches, bristling with thorns, are straining for the sky. I mourn.

  FOUR

  12

  Stephen, in the occasional glimpses I catch of him, seems older to my eyes than ever. Though there are no wrinkles in his skin, his face is tired and long. Pouches have begun to form beneath his eyes, beneath his chin. We are all older, I suppose, but it takes a conscious effort to recognise this fact. I pore over my image in the glass, but can see no change. David has grown even taller and has more hair on his body. My mother defies time as she has done since she went mad.

  Strangely, it is in Salome and Moses that I confront the passing of the years. I see them one day as the couple they are: grizzled and grey, their dark skins scored and riven like earth. They move stiffly and with pain. They take longer in the evenings, when they set out into the bush, to fade from my sight.

  And Moses, it seems, is kinder to Salome. At least he does acknowledge her as they go about their daily business. From time to time I see him cast a glance at her; I see her smile. Once, as they walk back to their hut, the inside of which I have never seen, I see him take her by the hand. Thus joined, stepping angular and awkward as storks, they wander into the gloom of grass and vanish.

  So it is not a surprise to be approached one day by this strange black pair, who are whitening as they grow old. They are restless and uneasy, shifting on their feet, as they stand before me where I sit in my familiar window seat that looks down the valley. Moses speaks on their behalf.

  Inscrutable to the last, he says that he and his wife are tired now. They have grown old in the service of this family, having worked for my mother before me. They would like, if it is not too much trouble, if I do not mind …

  ‘I understand,’ I say.

  They have a son, they tell me. He and his wife are looking for work, if I thought I needed somebody, perhaps I would consider …

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I understand.’

  It feels strange to say goodbye to them, this odd twosome who have expended their lifetime on a house and a garden that they do not own. Without warning, as silently as they first appeared in it, they take their leave. Before they go, Salome cups her hands and dips her head in a gesture of acknowledgement; but it feels like mockery to me. Seared, trembling as if I have been burnt, I stand on the back stoep and watch them retreat into the thick green jungle: going, going.

  Their son and his wife appear the very next day, like a youthful version of themselves. He is thirty-two, she twenty- five. What they have done till now I cannot find out; he doesn’t seem to understand my question. I set them to work like their predecessors and reflect, as I stand back in the shade and watch them, that they too may spend their lives in this way and, one day, take their leave of David when they are old.

  This change has no effect on us; we merely go on. My mother, whom I feared would be distraught at the loss of Moses, accepts his son Lucas in his place without a second thought. As if he is his father twenty years ago, she follows him about the lawn and gives him orders.

  ‘There,’ she calls. ‘Trim there. Hurry it up now.’

  David is pleased at their arrival. ‘I don’t have to work in the garden anymore,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s all over now.’

  Free now of trivial duties, he spends his time in his room. For some reason he closes the windows and locks his door; I must knock to gain entrance.

  ‘Yes?’ he says when he opens, as if he’s been disturbed.

  ‘What,’ I want to know, ‘are you doing in here? Why have you closed the door?’

  ‘That’s my business,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t speak to me that way,’ I cry. ‘I have a right, a right to know …’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he shouts, and shuts the door. As I press my weight against it, urgent and in pain, he turns the key against me. I hammer weakly with my fists until, finally, I subside in tears.

  This is the way, now, that we must live. He has accommodated in himself a deep, relentless hatred of me that I must try to fight. He speaks little to me. He leaves the room when I come in. His door, at all times, is locked to me, as if I have done some terrible thing for which he must forgive me. Sometimes I crack; with knotted hands I plead: ‘What is it?’ I cry. ‘What have I done? Tell me, so that I can make it better! Please!’

  ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘I’m your mother,’ I tell him. ‘I sat at your bedside when nobody else would. You owe me for that.’

  ‘I owe you nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing. Nothing.’

  There are moments I suspect this may be true.

  To counter his rage, to win him back, I give myself to his service. I prepare his meals, I carry them through to him. I clean his room myself. Often, for no reason, I come to him where he sits at his desk, reading, and hover over him. ‘Is there anything you need?’ I say. ‘Is there anything, my darling, I can get for you?’

  He rolls his eyes. ‘No,’ he says curtly, and turns a page.

  ‘You have only to call –’ I tell him.

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  With downcast eyes and averted head, he avoids my gaze. At other tim
es, when it is too difficult for me, I sit beside him on the back stoep. He stiffens in his chair, but I speak before he can leave. ‘It’s a beautiful evening,’ I say. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Hm,’ he says, and scratches at his nose.

  ‘I love to sit out here.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘What did you do today?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he says, and rises to go. He retreats into the house, leaving me to rock gently by myself on the dark back stoep: a silly old woman, smiling vaguely to herself as if at a joke.

  There are times when my endless effort angers me. There is a day, for example, when I round on him and, without warning, amazing even myself, I raise my hand and strike. My palm catches him on the cheek and knocks his head around: a savage blow, full of all the other blows I have failed to deliver in my life. He stares at me then, astounded, as he brings his hand up to his cheek.

  Later, of course, I must plead with him through his locked and solid door. ‘Please,’ I say. ‘I didn’t mean it. I don’t know what happened.’

  There is silence, only, from within. Beneath my cheek the cool wood presses against me.

  For all my remorse, however, there is another day soon afterwards when I lose control again. I fly at him, a woman possessed, raining blows upon his head. ‘You are my son,’ I scream. ‘You must love me, you must …’ But my voice trails off as he seizes me by the wrists. Our faces close, straining terribly against each other, he speaks to me through tight-clenched teeth. ‘That is the last time you ever do that to me,’ he says. ‘Do you understand?’

  When he does, eventually, let me go, it is I who, with bruised wrists and burning eyes, must run to my room and hide. I lie on my bed for two entire days, hunched on my side, while the pain in my head rages and swells.