Small Circle of Beings

by Galgut, Damon

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing,’ she whispered. We sat on in the darkness, confined to our separate selves. Behind us those eternal mountains glowered, just as they had done when they confronted the bearded Voortrekkers in their wagons. But the graceless Boers had not been daunted. I saw them in my mind’s eye as they shuddered and crashed over this trivial barrier that Africa had thrown up against the consuming tread of their oxen. Our heritage was no less ox-like in its solidity and stance. But then – so many oxen are made of clay. Above us the slow white torrent of stars wheeled imperceptibly across the sky. And down in the valley those red fires burned on, burned on.

  RICK

  His mother was a small woman, stocky as a snowman. She had bad teeth. Her nostrils were just too wide for her nose.

  She would begin at the breakfast table: ‘I was going to be a sculptor. I wasn’t going to have a family. But when I met your father, he made me change my mind.’

  ‘Joan,’ Dad would say.

  That was her name.

  ‘Look at my hands,’ she ignored him. ‘These are the hands of a sculptor. I used to chip at stones with these hands.’

  Her hands were like stones themselves, Shell thought, grey and rough, with mens’ nails. The joints of her fingers were stony, too. He could hear them rasp when they moved. He could not see his mother chipping stones. It was hard to imagine her doing that.

  ‘Your father rescued me from a life of stones,’ she said. She laughed.

  Behind their thick glass, he could feel that Dad’s eyes were on him.

  ‘The grass needs cutting,’ he would say, as he poured orange juice in a neat stream. ‘Perhaps, Shell …’

  ‘This afternoon,’ he promised.

  His mother licked the ends of her fingers and blinked at him.

  ‘Thank you, Shell,’ Dad said. He looked very good in a grey jacket. He had a plump briefcase that he carried too.

  It gave Shell a strange joy to push the roaring mower over the passive green lawn. Small stones spat out sideways. He would tie his shirt about his waist and move across the grass with the raw scent of torn blades breathing over him. The house was above, watchful. He could see the window of his bedroom.

  He thought they were a normal family, which is to say that there was nothing remarkable about them: Shell, his sister Estelle and their two parents. They had lived for fourteen years in this stony cottage under thatch, with the high hills about. Shell could remember no other life. Nor could he conceive of a future that did not in some way include being young and here. He was happy to be so.

  But his mother was not happy for him. She would try to change him:

  ‘Shell,’ she said. She pinched at the edges of her dress so that he could see her agitation. ‘Shatsi …’

  He stood at the verge of the back stoep. Light was caught in the vine overhead; the slate was mossy with shadow. It was a clear day.

  Avoiding her concerned gaze, he told her once again: ‘I don’t like to talk to people.’

  ‘But Shatsi. Why not?’

  ‘I just don’t,’ he said, picking at a leaf.

  ‘That’s not an answer. You have to learn. You have to work at being …’ Her sculptor’s hands chopped at the air. ‘Sociable,’ she cried at last, and subsided into her dress. ‘You have to be sociable.’

  ‘I try.’

  ‘Shatsi, you do not. You do not try. Would you say your behaviour yesterday was evidence of trying? Would you?’

  Mrs Fynn was exasperated. A small burst of saliva came from her mouth and misted down to the slate. He watched it settle. The day before, Estelle had had some friends round for a braai; he had climbed out of his window rather than walk through the lounge and past them.

  ‘They’re older than me,’ he said. His fingers were tearing the leaf now into tiny bits. He dropped them at his feet.

  ‘Not all of them. Not all of them, Shatsi.’

  ‘I don’t care.’ His obstinacy had brought him to tears; he bit at the inside of his lips.

  ‘That is precisely the point. That is precisely what concerns me. It is impossible to talk to you, Shell … I think I have a migraine coming on.’

  She was prone to these. She would lock herself in her room for hours or days with the curtains drawn. Shell looked at her with interest, though still through tears. He could only picture her as she must lie in the dark room with a cloth upon her forehead, bulging with pain. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Shatsi,’ she murmured. ‘Will you try, Shatsi? For me? … Just try, is all I’m asking …’ He didn’t answer. ‘It’s because I love you,’ she said viciously. ‘Only because I love you.’

  He let himself be kissed then, a bloodless blow between the eyes. Then she released him and was walking away over the cool slate. Her voice seemed to echo still, very faintly, to his ear; but it was only the hot shrieking of the cicadas in the valley below.

  She sent his father to him a week later, where he lay on his bed upstairs, hands behind his head. Dad sat on the coverlet, half turned away. It was early evening, with the last of the light coming in through his window. It made the grey hair silver on the head of this man he hardly knew at all. The room about them had become a tiny terrain of stretched shadows and shapes wavering in the twilight. His desk, his bookcase, the old pine cupboard, all were melting towards the floor. Shell, with his tense hands cupped at the curve of his head, looked at his father and saw him for a jagged instant as if he’d never done so before: he saw a middle-aged man, uncertain of himself, his face a hasty assembly of bits. Large blue eyes under heavy brows; ears entirely visible, not touched by hair; a mouth as prim as a kitten’s. And those hands clenched between his knees. Delicacy did not come easily to Dad.

  ‘We’re only worried about you,’ Dad said. ‘It’s for your sake we’re concerned.’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘I’m sure you are.’ He nudged his glasses up his nose, although he didn’t need to. ‘What about school?’

  ‘What about school? School’s okay.’

  ‘Do you have friends? Do you play with the other boys? At … break … ?’

  ‘Ja.’ Shell decided to lie, if that would dispel these demands. ‘I play at break. I’ve got lots of friends at school.’

  Dad sat, considering. His shoulder blades showed through his shirt. ‘Why don’t they ever come here?’

  ‘We live too far out. We’re miles away from anything.’

  ‘Estelle’s friends come here. She has friends here every Sunday.’

  She did too, groups of gangly adolescents who sat about on the back stoep, holding meat over a fire. Shell avoided them. He even climbed out of windows to avoid them.

  ‘I don’t like people,’ he said at last, and sighed for this revelation to them both.

  Dad turned his head to look at him, his large eyes larger behind their lenses. His mouth was trembling. He almost looked frightened as he stared down at his odd son lying on the bed. He cleared his throat and said: ‘That’s no way to talk. You know you don’t mean that.’

  ‘That’s just the way I am,’ said Shell, and rolled sideways into the pillow. Bats tumbled silently outside the window.

  They didn’t speak about it again, at least not to him. He knew, though, that they watched him carefully from behind their curtains; from over their magazines; from beneath their eyelids.

  Estelle never mentioned it at all. Estelle, in fact, hardly spoke to him about anything. She was a thin girl with hair a little less white than his. Her braces had come off a year before and now her teeth were perfectly straight. He’d noticed that she wore an occasional touch of makeup. Once or twice he’d come into the lounge and found her painting her nails. These dabs of colour she applied to her body fascinated him, though perhaps only because her manner had lost all hue. She did not – as before – consult or tease him. She shrugged off even his accidental caress. Sometimes still, to be truthful, she would pinch his arms as he passed, twisting his skin with cruel fingers. ‘Pig,’ she hi
ssed through her even teeth. Then let him go.

  It was difficult to believe that this was the same sister who, soiled and careless as he, would play every afternoon with him in the forests nearby. She hadn’t cared about clothes or nails then.

  Now she covered herself if he walked into the bathroom by mistake, one arm across her chest, the other slammed shut between her legs, squealing until he withdrew.

  She was indifferent to his jealousy. He followed her at school from a distance. During break he would stand at the edge of the playground, kicking at stones, watching Estelle talking to her group of sycophants. Hands on hips, hair longer than it was allowed to be, she chewed gum and sniggered about teachers. Sometimes she even sniggered about him; he could tell by the way the circle of faces avoided looking in his direction, while they laughed and laughed. Their laughter made him blush, but it didn’t drive him away.

  Now, of course, that mocking group of friends was on the back stoep on Sunday afternoons. Estelle moved easily among them. From his bed he could hear her giggles drifting up to the window. She had become a hard shape with jutting things under her blouse. Tender red buttons appeared on her cheeks. He wasn’t sure that he didn’t hate her.

  Early in the morning his mother would send him out to pick bananas or avocados for breakfast from the trees at the bottom of their property. He would stand with a thin mist rising from the still cold earth, while the first sun caught at the crests of the mountains. Above him the branches spilled skywards, their patterns as intricate and convulsive as his own. Sometimes he would go walking at twilight on the track down by the stream, when moths came blittering through the blue air. All around him the sweaty, steaming undergrowth was in quiet combat with itself; thorn on creeper on shoot on leaf. He thought he could hear groaning, if he tried.

  It was a brutal land, all the more so because it was also fragile; he saw pylons going up between the trees. But there were still places that nobody else knew. Shell knew all the paths around (he’d made some of them himself) and where they joined. There were landmarks to keep him safe: the forester’s hut at the top of the hill, always with smoke coming out the chimney; the stream at the bottom of the valley; the little dam at the beginning of the Nortjes’ property. The mountains themselves gave direction – square onto the house were the cliffs; off to the right, angled towards town, the row of Disciples leered, their petrified grey faces forbidding. To the left was the Spear, its peak not as sharp as it looked from here. Curiosity had taken him there, and elsewhere, even occasionally out of the calm plantations, into forest that had not yet been cut. It was frightening, yes, but he liked to be alone.

  In summer this was a humid place. A dank heat thickened the air. There was a rock slide far upstream where you could skid twenty metres on your bum into an icy pool, and lie afterwards on warm stone while the sun dried you. But winter was too cold for that. Autumn and spring were not very evident to the eye, here where green was a constant colour. But there were other indications of change that one could feel. And smell. Shell carried in him the memory of scents that could pare time away without warning: wood-smoke; the fragrance of crushed leaves; the vile odour of rotting meat (a dead dog in the woods). Even water had a clean tang to his nose.

  Dad had been a sportsman when he was young. He’d tried to teach Shell. On the back lawn in the evenings, after he’d come home from work, they would stand and throw a ball to each other. Shell clutched in the air for the round shape that flew towards him. But his hands were webbed; they clashed; the ball flew aside and hit the lawn.

  ‘You must watch the ball, Shell. All the way into your hands.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You don’t. You close your eyes at the last minute. You can’t miss if you watch.’

  He ran through the glossy air to catch the ball. He ran with happy panic, reaching not for the circle of leather but for the approval of the man who stood at the other end of the lawn, hands on hips, watching.

  ‘Better. Better.’

  ‘I kept my eyes open.’

  ‘You should practise. You should join a team at school and play.’

  ‘I might,’ he said, lying, as he threw the ball back. And his mother stood on the stoep behind her square skirt and shrieked when he missed. ‘Watch!’ she called. ‘Listen to your father!’

  ‘I am!’

  ‘You’re not! I can see from here you’re not!’

  ‘Leave him, Joan,’ Dad said. ‘Leave him alone.’

  Shell was grateful to him for his weary support. He wished that he could be in teams for him, to make him proud. It was a consolation that Dad was not a sportsman anymore and looked as though he’d never been one; he moved too slowly now, and heavily. Dad was a pharmacist. He worked with drugs. All day long he poured careful measures of fluid from tube to tube; perhaps for this reason, his delicate hands could not be hard. His mother would hit Shell sometimes, a cuff with her knuckles at the back of the head. But Dad could never hit, not ever.

  Not even the time with the chocolate.

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Then where? Where did you get it? Shell?’

  He couldn’t answer. They were in the car – the white Triumph his mother used – at the side of the main street in town. Shell held the melting chocolate bar, just opened, in his fist. He stared at it as if it might explain itself to him.

  ‘Did you take it, Shell?’ Dad’s voice was bubbly. Shell wondered if he was going to cry. ‘Did you take it from the café? Did you?’

  He didn’t answer. He let his silence become an admission, because they both knew anyway. It had been a meaningless deed for him in the dusty shop, while his father’s back was turned at the counter. It hadn’t been criminal, merely a yielding to shiny paper under his hand. Only as his fingers returned to his pocket had the reaching out become an act, and even then not irreversible. There were only short steps needed to undo his motion. If he had to.

  ‘Why, Shell?’ Dad had his arm around his shoulders now. It was this gentleness that frightened him, when he had expected blows. ‘Tell me why.’

  ‘I wanted it.’ A simple truth he couldn’t fault.

  ‘Don’t you understand that you … you can’t take whatever you want?’

  Shell frowned at the chocolate, which was melting onto his hand now.

  ‘Don’t you understand that it isn’t yours? It doesn’t belong to you.’

  ‘He didn’t see me.’ For the first time Shell turned his head to look into his father’s eyes. He was wrong; there were no tears there.

  ‘It doesn’t matter if he didn’t see you. It doesn’t matter if nobody saw you. Not even me. What matters is that you did it. Shell? You did it.’

  Shell was unconvinced, but he didn’t argue. He was more fascinated by this troubled face at his shoulder. Dad had blackheads on the tip of his nose.

  ‘You must go and give it back, Shell.’

  ‘Me?’

  More terrible than the anticipated blow: an abyss had opened in the car. Shell clutched at the seat. The chocolate fell into his lap and he grabbed blindly at it. When he raised his head again his eyes shone with tears. Me. He saw himself staggering back inside, the fat figure of Mr Kakoulla behind his counter. The Greek would bend to hear his faint voice, smiling at this timid child who had some message to relate. Until he heard him; until he was betrayed by Shell’s confession. He began to sob into his sleeve. His helpless father watched.

  ‘Shell –’

  ‘I can’t! Dad … I’m sorry … Please …’

  ‘Don’t cry. Look …’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t … Don’t make me. Please. I’ll never do it again … Please.’

  ‘Shell –’

  At which point Shell swung out a directionless fist, the blow perhaps his father had failed to deliver. He hit Dad in the face. His glasses spun off, landing at his feet; his hands came up to his nose. For a moment they sat side by side, neither moving, both horrified at an event Shell didn’t understand. Then he lunged at him. Shell hugged h
is father’s chest, his ribs against his cheek, tears running into his shirt. Dad patted his head.

  ‘Dad … I’m sorry … I …’

  ‘All right.’

  He pushed Shell firmly away. Contact embarrassed him. He fumbled for his glasses and examined them carefully before putting them back on.

  ‘Dad … I’m sorry.’

  ‘All right. All right.’

  Shell continued to cry, though, as his father started the car and moved out into the street. He saw this unpleasant little town – cramped and tiny, close to the ground – through spilling water. But as they headed back towards the road that would take them to the hills and home, they began to leave behind the towering Greek at his till. Shell grew quiet. They drove in silence. He unwrapped what remained of the chocolate bar. He looked at his father, but no sign, no glance, passed between them. He licked his fingers when he’d finished eating.

  He wasn’t sure whether his mother ever knew about the incident. It was difficult to tell what his mother knew about him. At unexpected times she would seize him, wrestle him in her jointless arms smelling of powder. ‘Shatsi,’ she would croon between kisses that left wet patches on his forehead. ‘Shell, darling.’ Then she’d let him go, her bosom kicking like something alive under her dress.

  There was a time when he’d not been able to help himself. ‘Leave,’ he shouted, his voice so raw that it shocked him too. ‘Leave me alone!’

  She stood back, his mother, aghast, her hands shaking. ‘It’s only love,’ she said.

  ‘I hate it when you touch me. I hate it.’

  ‘Oh, Shatsi,’ she hissed, ‘it’s just that I don’t want you to be like your father. I wouldn’t want that.’

  He couldn’t think what she meant. There was nothing the matter with Dad. He did not treat her badly; he would sit with nodding patience across the table from her, placate her with his voice. It was she who shrieked. It was she who threw the plate that time across the kitchen, so that it smashed against the door and showered little bits into Dad’s hair.