Small Circle of Beings

by Galgut, Damon

  After this time, that familiar silence comes between us. We barely speak. It is less difficult this way: he comes and goes as he pleases. When he needs something of me, he asks, and I provide it. For the rest, he fends for himself. He goes out a great deal. He goes, I believe, on his camping trip to the mountains. He has friends, but no girlfriends that I can see. He, like me, loves the forests and goes for long, solitary walks under the trees. I watch him from my window-seat as he goes about his business and remember him as, yes, a little boy who once fell ill.

  There are resentments I hold despite myself. I must blame him, I suppose, for what he did to me: the husband that I lost, the lover that I gained. But these were things over which he had no control. I tell myself: it isn’t his fault. There was nothing he could do.

  In any event, it becomes easier now to live with this knowledge. I approach closer each day to my own death, which will make nonsense of my life. I wonder how it is that I will reach my end: will I trip down a staircase and break my neck? Will my car, on one of my numerous drives into town, swerve off the road and smash into a tree? Or will I, old and worn, slip peacefully into death as into sleep?

  These are foolish thoughts, for my mother, so much older than I, goes on. She wanders each day on the lawn about the house, surveying her domain from her fierce and shattered face. She comes to me one day and takes me by the hand. Did I know, she whispers, that David is terribly ill?

  ‘No, Mother,’ I say. ‘That was long ago.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘That was now.’

  Time is a meaningless affair to her. She moves without effort between past and present. But it occurs to me that there is a vision in her madness: for yes, the sickness has continued, growing without sound in the combustion of our hearts.

  It is shortly after this that David leaves, for ever and for good. He has finished his schooling and has decided, he tells me one day as I am preparing food, that he is going to the city to look for work. He is tired of life out here so far from people. He is tired of the small and dirty town at the bottom of the hill. He wants to go to the big city, where buildings are tall, where things are taking place. A heart is beating, he believes, in the city somewhere.

  I say nothing. What is there to say? I smile to myself, because I may otherwise cry, as I slice onions in my hands.

  He takes his leave on a still evening soon after Christmas. Summer is at its height. The sun is going down behind the mountains as I come out, and shadows stretch long and pale across the grass. He is waiting on the lawn, a thin, bony figure, the beginnings of a beard on his face. He turns to me as I emerge, as if about to speak. But he says nothing as we face each other in the last blue light. Bats are flickering through the air.

  ‘David,’ I say. ‘You must take care.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You too.’

  ‘You will come back,’ I say, ‘and visit me.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’ll write, too.’

  I believe he will.

  I go to him. We embrace then, on the cooling grass, as we have been unable to do for years and years. We cling to each other. Then it is done. He pulls away. He bends to his rucksack on the grass, in which he has packed his clothes. He takes it up on his shoulder. ‘Goodbye,’ he says, and starts to walk away into the forest.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I say. I raise a hand.

  He fades between the trunks of trees.

  I stand for a long while after in the cleared place behind the house. The evening deepens around me like a tide. Above my head the stars are coming out, high, frosty, and far. I am, I suppose, at peace: though the bats continue to flutter about me.

  It is a few nights later that my mother starts the fire, but I prefer to think of it, for some reason, as that night: after I turn and walk up from the grass I hear the dog barking and I smell smoke. I begin to run. In my bedroom my mother has set fire to my bed. She stands before it, waving the box of matches in her hands and dancing from foot to foot. ‘Burn,’ she cries. ‘Oh, burn!’

  ‘Mother!’ I shout. ‘What have you done?’

  The garden hose is outside the window and I manage to drag it in and put the fire out, but there is a great deal of smoke. The smell is dreadful. Afterwards I stand and survey the destruction: the charred black square on which I have slept, on which I have conceived a child, on which I have dealt in love. This is the bed, I suppose, on which I too was conceived and born. It hisses now, and smoulders. The wallpaper above it is curling and black. The floor shines with water.

  ‘Oh, Mother,’ I say. ‘What a mess.’

  ‘Lovely,’ she whispers. ‘So beautiful.’

  She is a wizened woman, too old for her age. I take the matches from her. I see that she has singed her hair; there is a small burn on her hand. Sighing, I lead her from the room. I cannot sleep here and I am tired, too tired, to clean this up tonight.

  I take my mother to the bathroom and remove her clothes. For once she is willing to submit to this ordeal. I fill the bath and she climbs in. On the floor on my knees beside her, I wash her. I lather her body, which is a yellow ancient thing, and rub it down. I soap her legs, her belly, the frail shape of her shoulders. I wash her hair. By the time I am done, the water is grey with the dirt of many months. Though I haven’t washed myself, I feel cleaner for this labour.

  I dry her with a towel. Then I dress her in one of my old white frocks. I put slippers on her feet. I brush out her grey hair about her head and pin it back. Then we both, she and I, look at ourselves in the steamy mirror: side by side at the edge of the bath.

  ‘Time for bed,’ she says and claps her hands.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s late.’

  ‘Come on,’ she cries. ‘No dawdling. It’s a long day tomorrow.’

  She leads me by the hand up the passage to the lounge. There she has laid a mattress on the floor in front of the fireplace, where the coals are glowing. I undress and roll into bed. She gets down on her knees and kisses me.

  ‘Nighty-night,’ she says.

  ‘Mother,’ I say. ‘Don’t go.’

  She looks at me a moment and smiles. Over her shoulders I can see the photographs on the wall of all my family gone past. There is a picture there of my father: Sammy, the elusive grinner with his cruel and gentle mouth.

  ‘I’ll stay,’ says my mother. ‘But just for a bit.’

  ‘You mustn’t be afraid,’ she says, ‘of the dark.’

  She turns off the lamp. Then she lies down beside me, a thin and parched white figure who is soft, at last, to my touch. We cling to each other. In this way we lie, twined like lovers or enemies, inseparable in our embrace. We sleep.

  LOVERS

  ‘No …’ he said.

  Then he settled back into the pillows and was gone. Around him the crinkled sheets were like the white surface of a pond on which he was impossibly floating. I stared at him for a long time. He stared back, but his eyes were clouding over, as though smoke had filled the inside of his head.

  After a while I stood up. I went to the windows and closed the last little gap in the curtains. Then I pulled the bedclothes straight over him and gently eased his head on the pillow. With the tips of my fingers I smoothed his eyes closed, as they do in films. I stood, looking down at him: a face as white and tight as bandages on his skull. On the coverlet, his right hand was stretched out, frail and grey, amphibian with age. He wore, as he’d always done – day and night, for forty-six years – a gold ring on his middle finger. I touched this ring. It was a cold, hard contact. I bent over and kissed him on the mouth. (I realised I’d never done this before. Even as a little boy on my way to bed, he’d always turned his head slightly so that I kissed him on the tiny dent of flesh at the corner of his mouth.) His lips were cold and clean as the gills of a fish. I straightened and, with a last glance round at this room – so bare, so neat – I turned and went out to my mother.

  She sat in the wooden straight-backed chair in the lounge. She always sat here. It was angled towards the white-barred windows a
nd the garden beyond. A pale sunlight came over this garden now, so that the trees stood against it as hard as wire. I approached from behind. I could see at first only her head over the back of the chair, round and dark as a cannonball. (Her hair was actually grey, I knew, but she dyed it black. She bound it up into a dense knot, which she fixed against the back of her head with three silver pins. The position of this knot had never varied from day to day.) I could hear the relentless clicking of her needles before I came round the side of the chair and saw the white wool flickering in her hands.

  She was always knitting – jerseys, scarves, socks. But since he’d been put to bed she’d been knitting something I couldn’t make out; it didn’t seem to be anything useful at all. It poured off the edges of her long needles, metres and metres of white wool, row after row, that now lay collected about her feet in ripples. All day she sat in this chair and knitted. I’d heard her at night too, long after I’d gone to bed. Clickety-click. Clickety-click.

  I sat in the armchair to the right. From here I could see her in perfect profile as she sat, staring out at the garden. She didn’t look down at her hands as they worked. She didn’t, at first, turn her head to look at me. She only continued to sit in the straight wooden chair, stately and grim, weaving out like a white web from her bony hands the strange patterns that mounted about her feet.

  ‘Mother,’ I said.

  After perhaps a minute the needles stopped. She stared straight ahead silently, into the garden, for another moment. Then she did, eventually, turn her head and look at me. I glared back at her. She turned her head to the front again. From her suddenly limp fingers I saw the knitting slide. The needles and their endless strands of wool tumbled from her grasp and fell to the carpet. They made a soft noise as they landed, like a small, perfunctory sigh.

  I never saw her knit again.

  She didn’t cry, my mother – not then, not ever. The days that followed were difficult and sad. I’m not given to tears myself; I have always found them unnecessary. But I cried from time to time over the week that followed his death. At unexpected moments, as I spooned sugar into my tea, or as I closed a certain door, there would flash into me a violent scarlet grief I hadn’t experienced before. And I would cry: fierce tears that didn’t last long. I tried to remember my father. My earliest recollections were sparse and thin. They were of a tall skinny man with black hair brushed back straight from his forehead. Below his left nostril was a mole, round and neat, with hairs growing from it. Later he would pluck these hairs. And the hairs that made his eyebrows meet in the middle. I would come into the bathroom to brush my teeth before school, and he’d be standing in front of the mirror in his pyjama pants and vest, leaning toward the glass in concentration as he tweezed from the bridge of his nose these small, offensive hairs. He dropped them carefully into the bin. My mother kept a neat bathroom and would have disapproved of even tiny hairs on the floor. We both, he and I, understood this.

  He was not fond of words. He didn’t speak much and, if he did at all, it was usually to offer advice. ‘If I were you,’ he’d say, ‘I would put my shirt away.’ Or: ‘I suggest, old man, that you make up your bed.’

  My mother approved of shirts put away, of beds made up. She would sweep through the house in her colossal skirts, inspecting the rooms. She made a rushing noise as she moved, like a purging fire.

  ‘Clean up there,’ she’d cry in a voice that could only be described as spotless. ‘Wash the dishes, James.’

  My name is James. I can’t help that. It’s a name, I believe, that my mother gave to me. Her father’s name was James. She felt obliged to signify due loyalty by naming me after him. Family loyalty is something by which my mother has always placed a lot of store.

  Her name is Lydia. My father’s name was Ivor. She was born in Cape Town and lived there for the first eighteen years of her life. He was born in Pretoria, but met her in Cape Town when he attended university. He studied business science. He was a businessman all his life, up till four years before his death, when he retired. I knew little of his work. He had an office in town. He would go to work after I had already left for school. His departure in the mornings was an event I could only imagine. I knew his return, however. At five every afternoon he would arrive on the bus. I could see him from my bedroom window, walking with tentative steps up the drive, his briefcase under his left arm. He had three suits, blue, brown and beige. He wore different suits on different days; my mother laid them out on the bed in the mornings. She took them out in a certain sequence, following a private pattern I could never decipher. Perhaps it was the blue suit on Monday, the brown on Tuesday, the beige on Wednesday. Then the sequence would begin again, so that Monday was beige again. Perhaps this was the way it was. I don’t know.

  I would go to the kitchen when he arrived. I would always go on some pretext, such as to make tea. I would be there as he came through the door. I would look up as he stepped inside, as if surprised. ‘Hello, Father,’ I’d say.

  ‘Hello, James,’ he’d say, and smile. I seem to recall – though I could be mistaken here – that he had a moustache at this time. If so, it has been gone for many years. But I seem to recall a moustache, through which his front tooth, capped in gold, glinted at me.

  ‘How was work?’ I said.

  ‘Work was fine. Was fine.’ He stood, unsure of himself, as if arriving at a stranger’s house for the very first time. ‘What did you do today?’

  ‘I did nothing …’

  ‘You must have done something, James.’

  ‘I did nothing, Father.’

  This was true, I think. I did in fact do nothing in the long afternoons when school was finished. I did not have friends. I was not a popular boy. Looking at old photographs of myself, I see a bloodless, anaemic child looking back at me through square glasses. I had a thin neck in which my adam’s apple stood out like a knuckle. My hair (the shame of it!) was wet down with grease and combed across the top of my head in an arc. My mother did this to me. I’m sure of it: she would stand me in the bathroom and drag the comb across my scalp like a weapon. She bathed me every night long after I was too old for it, scrubbing my face with the rough edge of a flannel. ‘Stand,’ she would say. ‘Let me soap your legs.’

  I hated my mother. I accepted this fact by slow degrees as I grew up, till it resided in me, tiny and dark, a germ that lay too deep for her hands. I hated her with a calm, an easy, and sometimes a pleasant hate. There was no passion in it. She would not have approved of that.

  ‘James,’ she said. ‘I would appreciate it if you could help with … with things. It would be too difficult for me.’

  ‘Of course, Mother,’ I said. ‘Of course I shall help.’

  I helped. While she sat in the wooden straight-backed chair in the lounge, I went through his possessions and packed them into boxes. There was little enough to do. In the bedroom there was a small white cupboard and a chest-of-drawers in which all his clothes were kept. (His were separate from hers, at opposite ends of the room.) I had the privilege of touching the garments I could recall him wearing from my days at school. My fingers came into contact with those suits, blue, brown and beige, that he dressed in to go to work. Although different in colour, they had the same fabric: a smooth felt, worn thin at the elbows. I folded them up and packed them into boxes. I folded everything up and put it all away: shoes, shirts, ties, belts. And the more intimate garments that I could only imagine till then – his socks, his underwear. From all the clothes came a faint scent of mothballs and powder. I pressed my nose into the cloth, squeezing it to make it yield up some other odour, some whiff or trace that might give me a hint of a history, an event, a happening in a life gone past. But there was nothing at all.

  Mothballs and powder.

  I put the boxes into the garage.

  ‘James,’ she said. ‘If you could help with … with the other room. I would be so grateful.’

  ‘Of course, Mother,’ I said. ‘I shall be glad to help.’

  The oth
er room was the study to which he retired at night after supper. I suppose he worked there, though I cannot guess at what. As a child I’d been in there only seldom, and then only on brief errands for my mother. ‘Tell your father he is wanted on the telephone …’ I recalled it from then as a cavernous chamber, carpeted in fur and walled in with books.

  Now it was a small and modest space with nothing impressive about it. The carpet was thin and pale. There were only three bookcases and the volumes in them were covered in a brown skin of dust. (Nevertheless I looked them over and decided on them for myself.) His desk stood before the window. Light came in from the neat winter garden outside. The walls were covered in faded wallpaper and there were some prints hanging at eye level.

  I went through the drawers in the desk. Their contents I also packed into boxes and consigned to the garage. If I’d hoped for a clue here to the heart or mind of the man who fathered me, I was again disappointed. The desk was almost empty, and what there was in it was completely anonymous. Writing pads, pens, staplers, rulers. My hopes lifted when I came upon a tattered brown file in the bottom lefthand drawer, but it contained only some tax forms from years ago. There was not even a signature to be had.

  At supper that night, as I faced my mother down the length of the table, I murmured as gently as I could: ‘Is there any more to be done?’

  She didn’t look up from her soup, but continued to stare into the bowl as her hand conveyed the liquid to her mouth in neat sips. She paused for long enough to say, ‘No, James. That is all.’

  And, two sips later, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It was a pleasure to help,’ I said. ‘Mother.’

  ‘I thought,’ she wheezed, ‘that you could have the books in the study. You may have the room,’ she said, ‘when you come to live here.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Would you like some more soup, James? It’s minestrone and very good for you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘but I won’t.’