Get A Life

by Nadine Gordimer

  He could call Benni. At work. Or on her mobile if she's driving; is she wearing the no-hands model with the ear-aperture attachment he insisted on buying for her when the only thought for exposure to radiation likely to affect them was that said to exist in the old models clamped to the head. He cannot lift the hand, no device of the millennial gods of communication could reach across infinitude between how he lies and the module console-desks, Corbusier lookalike chairs, leather sofas for clients, professional flower arrangements, blown-up images of improbably beautiful or famous people and landscape paradises, from award-winning advertising campaigns; Berenice is admirably successful. A fax – to whom? His team, Thapelo and Derek, stick figures in the area where the intention to site a pebble-bed nuclear reactor plant has to be opposed. When he was in a wilderness her city place did not exist for him, as at her console in that city space his wilderness did not exist for her.

  Neither does. Both equally unreachable. He's the receded. It's him. Far away.

  Planes can land on automatic pilot. He's got up and gone to the bathroom reserved for him. Radiation is carried in urine and faeces. As he pees it just occurs to him, will he ever wake up with an erection again.

  They have not left him really alone. There's the servant, now called housekeeper. Except that he's alone, apart, with anybody – everyone. His mind continues haphazard ridiculous wanderings; dogs are put in quarantine quarters, for months, when taken to other countries, a precaution against carrying rabies infection from Africa. Poor doggie. For him, the doctors have said, about sixteen days, including the first few in hospital isolation. Enough. Then he'd be fine, clear.

  First they'd assured that the removal of the gland would be all that was necessary for a cure, he'd be fine, clear.

  Then they'd had to admit that sometimes residual thyroid tissue remained after surgery. Could be intentional – to continue something of the normal function of the thyroid gland; sometimes inadvertent. Which was the case in his instance was not volunteered and what was the point of questioning anyway.

  Neither his wife nor the parents were aware that of course he knew about the treatment for residual malignant tissue before the doctors told him and his wife. After the announcement by telephone of what had him by the throat, an early morning in the bedroom, he had gone that day to the university medical school and said he was doing research which required use of a medical library. There he had his own consultation with documentation on papillary carcinoma, the most serious form of thyroid cancer. More frequent in women and in both sexes more frequent in the young. So: thirty-five, a candidate. Read on. If there is suspicion that after thyroidectomy some tissue remains, then radioactive iodine ablation must follow. This radioactive iodine treatment is dangerous to others who come into contact with the individual who has received it.

  Iodine, the innocent stuff dabbed on a child's scratched knee.

  A few weeks' isolation. Fine, clear. Now sure the assurance, again, this time.

  He would have to know, from within.

  Primrose (it's not only whites who dub their offspring with pretentiously inappropriate names, a queen in ancient times, a flower in the imagined gardens from which the rich conquerors came) has left his breakfast prepared according to new household instructions. Tea and toast on an electric hot tray, fruit and yoghurt, honey, a cereal he doesn't know still existed, must have been something his mother remembered in connection with him as a child. A spoonful tastes like hay.

  Primrose who knows him, of course, from ordinary occasions visiting the parents, does not appear. Through the windows open to let in the morning sun (what time is it, does a watch really know) there comes a low busy conversational twitter. He used to have budgerigars in a cage in this house as a kid, they would communicate confidentially like that – Lyndsay, his mother, who couldn't bear to have creatures caged, communicated the realisation of the birds' imprisonment to him. He must have given them away. But this low morning conversation was not that of caged birds but Primrose and some friends passing whatever the time was for them. He had not been told of the problem of Primrose as a member of the household. Realised it only as he ate the food prepared by her and heard her, unseen, in the cadence of African voices speaking their own language.

  Adrian and Lyndsay had had to decide what to do, whether this woman, innocent of danger, innocent of any family responsibility towards the son, should be exposed at all. Lyndsay woke up in the night after a long discussion earlier and spoke aloud as if it were continuing. Adrian stirred and said the right thing she hadn't taken into account, as he so often did. (So much for her legal mind.) They must speak to Primrose: the decision to send her away must not be seen as a banishment from her place in their lives but come about with her full understanding and acceptance as their duty to her safety.

  The tall heavy woman, ageing gourd filled with a life of many troubles, rather than a delicate yellow flower, who had never before been called into the livingroom to sit down and talk with her employers, nevertheless gave them the uninhibited attention their good relations, her considerate working conditions and excellent pay, she found naturally called for. The white people didn't try any of the sentimental coming close many did with blacks these days when they wanted something from you, the mama didn't start off with the you-are-a-mother-yourself bit. And there was no father for the dad to claim as a father like himself; the man who had fathered Tembisa, the boy for whose education at a private school the employers were paying – had long gone back to his wife in the Transkei. First Adrian explained in detail Paul's illness, treatment, and this strange aftermath unlike that of any other illness. When she didn't follow, she pinched her mouth, lifted her cheeks to their high bones and asked: What – what. It was both a question and horrified compassion; of course she had enquired, every day, for news of his condition while he was in hospital, shaking her head, God will see he comes through. They had to explain, while not offending this faith, that he had not come quite through, not yet. Once she had heard the facts there was little need to explain why he could not go home to his young wife and child. She pre-empted them. – He must come here to us. – Didn't they know she had enjoyed sharing the care of the little boy when Mama was in charge while the mother was busy with the doctors and the husband?

  There was the proposal, she would go to her home in the new government housing scheme in the district where she was born, a house they had, in fact, helped her, with a gift of the down-payment, to build for her mother.

  – How long. -

  They did not know. Adrian reassured her; she would have her full wages.

  She brooded, a pause they respected without offering a repetition of explanations.

  – Take a little holiday. – Adrian tried again.

  She addressed Lyndsay, there are considerations men, who everywhere, at her mother's house or this one, have everything done for them, do not understand. – How can you manage? -

  Lyndsay gave a small grunt of a laugh. – I don't know. But I will. -

  And now to Adrian, the man. – Her work every day and the papers she bring to read at night. I see the light on late. -

  How can you manage meant: I do not go. So then there were three in concentrated discussion, like complicity. How could she stay? Was it possible to arrange her presence, as they had arranged the study for quarantine tenancy; ensure that her duties would entail the absolute minimum of contact with danger from touch, clothing, utensils – who knows about the air breathed.

  But all was accepted on some unspoken understanding that they – the mama and her husband – were allowing her to put herself at risk along with them, the only ones who had reason to. Perhaps the woman had survived so much in her life that she couldn't really believe in the danger they couldn't say came only from a cough, from a person's shit, from pus or blood. Something he gave off, some kind of light you couldn't see.

  What do you do when you have no purpose, are allowed no purpose but something his mother has called 'recuperate'. As good a term as a
ny other euphemism for – whatever. You can call up anything you want on the Internet, what about this? He could not really believe he was going to have to die, rogue cells were moving around right now within the territory of himself; dying is a remote business, has no reality when you are in your thirties, all that can happen is you're run over by a bus. Shot by a hijacker. His work is scientific, in collaboration with the greatest scientist of all, nature, who has the formula for everything, whether discovered or still a mystery to research by its self-styled highest creation; in that university library, naturally, he'd read up everything about the thyroid gland, that hidden nodule in your neck he could put a hand up to feel for, if it hadn't been removed. It is a vital factor in growth along with the pituitary, which is hidden behind your forehead, he wouldn't have come to adolescence, physical and mental maturity, without it. These sites should be marked like the sacred signals coloured on the brows of Hindus. So, demonstrably, the gland has an effect on emotions aside from its necessary physical manifestations if it decides to go erratic, an excess of thyroid gland production causes tachycardia, a rapid heartbeat. Some even aver a connection between excessive thyroid activity and creative ability in the arts – the imagination is accelerated, too. You take it that your type of intelligence is decided by the size and composition of your brain – that's it. But there are these other little pockets of substances whose alchemy influences, and interferes – even directly – in what you are. Many other abstruse details about the component now missing from his neck, a scar at the spot where it once secretly functioned and where the cells turned rogue in crazy proliferation. He's able to meet doctors almost on their own informed scientific ground, so to speak, and what he's wanted to know from early on when he was told the gland must be removed, is what his life would be without it. He was told not to worry, let's just beat the cancer. You'll take some routine medication. And that is? Oh something called Eltroxin, substitutes for the thyroid's function, very well.

  Back in his allotted room he hears someone else's human bustle, with him out of the way the woman is running a vacuum cleaner somewhere. There is the stereo equipment set up by his father and the cassettes Benni didn't forget. Surely there is no purposelessness the music you love cannot deny by the act of your listening. There's the elephant study and other books you never have time enough to read. The laptop computer. Briefcase of papers to collate and write up from the St Lucia wetlands research with Thapelo and Derek. And the telephone. What will there be to say to the person at the other end.

  What do you do when you have no obligation, no everyday expectation of yourself and others?

  You get out of where you are. Leave the walls of gaping emptiness behind. His feet took the way used in childhood, through the deep windows in the livingroom, to the garden. A man was loosening a bed round shrubs, the tines of a heavy fork biting into firm ground with each heave, he paused halfway in a movement and raised a hand in the kind of greeting salute a black worker is expected to give a white man, he completed the rhythm of his half-movement and the fork sounded his effort and the earth's resistance to it. Someone with a purpose.

  The big woman came round from the back of the house, the usual woollen cap askew on her head cockily ridiculing the prissy English 'Primrose'. – You all right? Everything okay? -

  Across the width of the lawn, for her safety, he thanked her for breakfast, showing off his smattering of Zulu, the only African language he'd usefully acquired for work in rural areas, thought by whites to be some kind of African lingua franca. The attempt was almost a connection with his working, functioning life. She laughed. – My pleasure. My pleasure. – Along with 'Have a nice day', conditioned formulae everywhere in divided worlds to bring policies of reconciliation to an everyday level of polite convention. As an unbeliever unthinkingly will respond 'Bless you' to someone who sneezes. The new demotics have reached even this one, an old-fashioned black woman, no dreadlocks, no railway tracks woven with the hair on her head, no topknot of yellow-dyed false curls he's familiar with among the beautiful sister-executives in Berenice's advertising agency, or the elegant secretaries, high-breasted and nose in the air, in the government offices his work takes him to. The phone is ringing from the room he left, but when he gets there to lift the receiver the caller has hung up.

  Immeasurable tide of weariness has come back. He is lying on the bed again when later the call is loud beside him. It is Benni. – I tried you earlier -

  – I was in the garden. -

  – Oh good. -

  Lyndsay and Adrian cancelled their cruise to the Arctic Wondrous Northern Lights aurora borealis and fortunately it's apparent neither Paul nor Berenice remembered it was planned, so there were no protestations necessary to convince anyone that this was of no account. The trip had been Adrian 's idea because he sensed that his Lyn was in two minds about what that ominous state, retirement, would mean, supposing she joined him in it, and the fact of choosing to go somewhere, now, some remote travel they'd never thought of, would show that ventures could be part of the new state. This journey, from the extreme of the Southern Hemisphere to the extreme of the Northern, would convey that without need of words between them. Just as she must know he loved her, still even desired her, as he did when they first began to live together.

  The parents tried to avoid going out in the evenings without making it too obvious that they were staying at home because of him. When there was a concert with a programme Adrian particularly wanted to hear – his pleasure in Penderecki, Cage, and Philip Glass came from an eclectic depth of understanding she envied as beyond her – he went, she stayed at home with Paul. And in a way that was a treat, when last had mother and son the chance to spend an evening alone together. The small boy, the adolescent one mustn't intrude upon too closely, emotions must turn away from the one woman to other women, the young man with whom there had been adult friendship and understanding of one another – these had become the man with a wife and child. Now alone they spoke mostly of his work and how he felt about it – privately, essential to his being – as probably she thought he did only with his woman, his wife. His almost angry dedication, there were so many forces, political, economic, against it, had essential dependent connections with her work in the law that they had never really discussed before. The question of how, which rivers and seas should be exploited is decided ultimately by laws promulgated by governments. Paul and Thapelo and Derek might prove that this form of exploitation in a particular environment may be managed with benefit to human, animal, organic growth and the atmosphere; that form, in another environment will sicken the human population with effluent, starve animal species of their food habitat, take more from the sea than it can replace. But the 'findings' of ecological research by government-approved project entrepreneurs are produced as some sort of justification in going ahead with their projects. Never mind the independent researchers (the Pauls and Thapelos and Dereks) who prove otherwise; their findings can be given token attention, oh yes, the enterprise projects doctored up a bit as a concession – and the disastrous proceeds. So environmentalists have need of consultation with lawyers who know what loopholes, under the law, used by project entrepreneurs, must be anticipated and exposed while independent research is in progress.

  Consultations like this one under quarantine. He's not allowed alcohol and when she forgets, in the mingle of their voices become familiar again, and says, let's have a glass of wine, she quickly corrects: no, I'll put the kettle on, what about camomile tea. He's smiling and lightly moving his head, you have your red wine, and she tips her head to match his movement, smiling refusal.

  Her son is so exhausted by what they have both entered in intimacy that he has to go to bed before his father has returned from the concert.

  There are other emanations than those she had been exposed to in a tête-à-tête. There are individuals for whom music moves on with its oxygen like the circulation of blood in the body and the brain, after it has been heard. Adrian came back in this serenely heighten
ed state. It does not result from the kind of music you can hum, that she knew before he introduced her to something that opened her perceptions. People give one another things that can't be gift-wrapped. But she had not experienced the music with him tonight, not even at the level she could have expected with Penderecki and Cage. He read a little while beside her, one of the autobiographies unburdening the ugliness of the political past which they handed to one another to applaud or argue about.

  They had already said what there was to exchange about the evening at home. – How'd it go, was he all right. – - It was good, I think he forgot… – - Not easy to talk, I know. – - No, we talked. About his work just as if he's in the middle of it. -

  It was not the time to ruin the possibility of sleep by speaking of what this brought to mind, was never out of mind: would he ever take up that work again.