I see him a second later. He’s already inside the store, striding in a long grey coat to the rows of art books on the far side. He looks like a wizard, the trickery of time in his pockets where his hands are held. His head is bent and his thick dark hair is almost completely grey now, against his sallow skin. He’s a shadow sent to remind me again that darkness will always be in the world, forever and wherever I go and when I least expect it. His skin is smooth at the hollow of his cheeks but his mouth carries new lines. I fly out of myself. I fly in my head to my daughter behind the shelf to whisk her away, but my body freezes in the chair. I can’t move or he’ll find me. I should fly to my feet to protect my cub, but instead panic forces its way into my throat, travels down my chest and its fingers reach and pull at the pit of my stomach. I expect him to go to the business section, I will him there, but it’s closest to the children’s side, in the direct line of sight of my daughter. Instead he stays where he is, his eyes travelling over the rows of volumes on modern and historical art history and architecture. I feel my anger rise. How dare he claim interest in anything that was hers? He is a being of witchcraft and sorcery, and he is out to steal my own blood, a man of evil, standing there looking so cultured, so alone. It frightens me, that solitariness, the visage of a man growing old, marked by a singular despair. Time freezes. I realise how deeply I still fear him.
I watch his back, Hayley hidden behind the rows of books. I could get up, whisk her away, take Devin with me, but fear is an enemy that makes me unable to move. Did I say Devin? Suddenly I can’t see him, he’s moved behind a pillar, but no, he’s not there. My eyes scurry all over the shop – I can’t see Hayley either.
‘I got these three!’ The books slam on the table beside my elbow, a crash that brings me hurtling back into the moment that has Hayley standing beside me. ‘Yummy,’ she says. ‘You got me a white chocolate.’ She leaves the books and sits down on the opposite side of the table.
‘I don’t think there’s time to drink it. Let’s leave the books here; your dad wants us at home.’
Her face is already in the cup and concealed from me behind a china moon. She wants the world because it still tastes sweet to her. Let me not give over my fear into her keeping. His back to us is a tall wall for my eyes to keep on climbing.
‘Look at my books,’ Hayley says. ‘What do you think?’
I barely flick my eyes at the covers. There are horses there, and also trees and signs of magic; my eyes can’t take it in.
‘Did you get something for Dad?’ She grasps at the bird book and points at the illustration on the cover. ‘That’s a Knysna Lurie,’ she says. ‘I think. But it’s not called that any more.’ She has a moustache of white across the top of her lip, a crescent above a mouth that thinks it knows the whole world and how it works.
‘Hayley,’ I say to her. I try to suppress the urgency in my whisper. ‘You know the rule about speaking to strangers?’
‘What rule?’ Her eyes are blank and wide, and she raises the perfect arches of her eyebrows. I realise that she’s toying with me. I grab her hand across the table in an attempt to imprint on her my own anxiety. She stretches her closed lips in a mock-smile. ‘I know, Mom.’
‘You just follow that rule, okay? It doesn’t matter how close I am, or where you are, you follow that rule.’
‘What if a stranger asks me for help? What if a man’s been in an accident and the car drove over his leg, and he asks me to help him? I must ignore him?’
‘You’re being ridiculous.’
‘I’m not! Sometimes strangers aren’t bad people. What if I’m lost? What if I need to ask a stranger directions?’
I sigh and let go of her hand, lean back and look away. She’s right, of course, but perhaps more than that, she likes to point out that I can also be wrong.
She gazes through me, disengaging from me. ‘You talk to strangers, all the time.’
‘I’m an adult. I’m just warning you it can be dangerous. Even now that you’re older. There are people out there who don’t wish everyone well.’
‘I won’t go anywhere with anyone. I promise you.’ She’s considerate enough of my feelings not to roll her eyes overtly, but in the minute movement of her head I intuit that she wants to.
‘Do you know that? Or are you just saying it?’
She looks at me then, searching my face. Her eyes are translucent and they contain the colour and light of my own dreams. Beauty is more startling when you don’t understand it.
‘Well actually, Mom, don’t have a heart attack, but I spoke to a stranger just now,’ she tells me suddenly and she wipes at her mouth with the back of her sleeve.
‘What?’
‘A man.’
‘Where?’
‘Back there.’
My heart. I look up. I can’t see Marshall. Anger surges through me, providing enough adrenaline for me to get up and look for him and hunt him down and put my fingers around his neck and my claws into his coat, but that would mean leaving my baby alone here, vulnerable and doe-eyed at the table. I see a full head of hair, thick and grey. A man turns to speak to a woman and it’s not him, not even close. I grab Hayley’s arm across the table and she yells softly. She pulls back from me and knits her brows in a horrified question.
‘What did he say? Hayley? Can you show me which man?’
‘Mom you’re acting weird. What’s wrong with you?’
I breathe out and she breathes in. ‘What did he say, Hayley?’ I say it softly now, resigned.
‘He said hello.’
‘Is that all?’
‘He asked me what kind of books I like. He wanted to see what books I chose.’
‘And you showed him?’
‘He just wanted to see the covers.’
‘What else?’
‘He asked me how old I was.’
‘Did you tell him?’
‘Yes.’ She selects a book from the pile in her hands and pushes it towards me. ‘He gave me this one. He said he thought I’d like it.’ I examine the cover and my mind buckles as it tries to trace the memory it sparks. It is a collection of folk tales and when I check the publishing details inside, I see it was published before I was born.
‘The Potato King,’ I read off the top.
‘And other folk tales,’ Hayley follows.
‘Did he ask your name?’
‘No—’ And then it came, the slow dawning of a realisation like a dark morning rising on my daughter’s face. ‘Mom,’ she said and her fingers were on my arm. ‘He already knew it.’
I see him at the counter. He’s paying for a small collection of books and some magazines, though the distance is too far for me to get a look at the covers. The teller is a short man with a flash of white teeth; I know him from our several visits to the shop. He’s the kind of man who can serve without irritation. Calm and quiet. Focused on the customer. He places Marshall’s purchases in a large plastic bag with the shop’s logo printed on it and hands it to him. Hayley cranes her neck, trying to see where I’m looking, what I’m on about, trying to unravel a mystery that will never be hers to know. Marshall’s arm drops to his side, the parcel hanging from his fingers. He places it on the floor while he signs the statement for his credit card and hands back the pen, places the card and slip into his wallet and picks up the bag again. He takes three steps towards the door before he turns around. There’s no hesitation in the stretch of his glance. The distance is already measured – he knows exactly where we are. Our eyes meet and I see there is no shame there. But is that what I’m looking for? Is shame what I really want from him? My fingers turn into quivering twigs. He holds me there with his eyes, and what shakes me most is that what I see there is no monster at all, but a kind of slow sadness. He doesn’t leer with lust or greed or evil intent in his eyes. His tongue doesn’t hang from his mouth and his hands are just hands, not monster’s claws. As suddenly as he is there, he turns away and then he is gone, absorbed by the pulsating swell and surge that is the crowd at a s
hopping mall on any ordinary Saturday morning.
That night when I look in on Hayley after she’s fallen asleep with her bedside light still burning, I see the book of folk tales open beside her pillow. Below the writing on one page is the penned illustration of a cow with a large bell around its neck. The opposite page shows a bold, shaggy goat with proud horns. I know those pictures. My mind flashes backwards to Devin, to the few small possessions she salvaged and took to Marshall’s house when we were children. Among them was a book this same size and weight. The drawings in it were simple, in black and white with only occasional colour interspersed. It was one of the books Devin read over and over when we lived in the house at the sea. I never saw her read it again after we moved, but it stayed on her bookshelf among the other books from her childhood all the years that we stayed with Marshall, and he must have seen it there. It was called The Potato King.
I quietly close the book and switch off the bedside light. For a long time in the dark I am immobilised, and cannot take my hand from my daughter’s sleeping form.
On Monday at the studio, tall young men lounge before screens with ridged cardboard cups beside their keyboards. Rounded women peer out from behind heavy curtains of hair.
‘Hey Catherine,’ they greet me as I come in. This is a new generation of film-makers, and they come here to edit their work like I do because it’s still relatively inexpensive and also because it’s social, and a good place to learn. I sit in my usual desk beside the window where the sun will fall directly upon me at around eleven. I boot up the processor and turn on the editing package, then take out a memory stick and slot it into the machine. I put a pair of headphones on to cover my ears. I watch the screen for a long time without doing anything but listening to the sound of my own voice. The abuse of children might as well have been relegated to the moon. The shroud of silence that has surrounded the horror of so many children’s lives for so long will live to haunt us forever if we choose to do nothing. There are fifty-two facilities in this province that cater to the demands of an ever-increasing sickness, and yet children are still too afraid to speak out …
With the words are the accompanying images and I am mesmerised by what I have put together. It’s not that I think my film is good; it’s just that the release it promises renders me immobile, unable to judge or cut it from an objective point of view. Is this what I have to offer the world at the end of my young adult life? An anonymous confession that I hope might offer me some kind of absolution? Or am I doing it too, perpetuating the abuse and exploiting the subjects: using children for my own gain, forgetting to really see who they are? I’m making this film and if it sells I will make money. Child abuse is much in the media nowadays. Is there really anything noble about bringing my brand of enlightenment to the world, or am I riding on the back of a monster I have never properly been able to tame?
‘How’s your film going?’ someone asks me from behind. I hear the words but the answer fails me. Whose film is this anyway? How can I dare to go on? I think of the hours I have spent in people’s private homes, the soft questions to the victims, children all of them, and the clever ways that I couch my words. Each telling of it making the horror repeat itself again for the child, each story more compelling for the film. It was the beautiful children that I paid the most attention to while filming, even if I cast their forms in silhouettes to disguise their faces. Beauty is not so easily escapable, it makes a story more poignant and the empathy of the audience stronger.
I turn around and smile, shrug an answer of semi-defeat. I turn back to the screen and stare at the faces there, some of them not yet blocked out or distorted to conceal their identity. I remember the homes and the smells in the kitchens where housemothers cooked and the feel of the prison on my skin as I hunted down the accused. I watch Vincent’s hollow eyes on the screen and his drawn cheeks as he sucks on a cigarette between sentences, and all the time I am hearing his voice my thoughts are away and thinking of something else.
The mountain must have done something to me today. I can’t do it. Shame dances in colours and patterns before my eyes. I take the memory stick out of the machine and look at it, innocent in my hand. If I ever thought I could redeem myself by making this film, I now know that it cannot be enough.
I open my briefcase and throw the stick in, snap the locks shut and stand up.
‘What, in and out so fast?’ the woman at the desk beside me says.
I smile at her. ‘I think I’m giving up on this one. It just doesn’t feel right.’
‘I’ve made plenty of films like that,’ she says, her eyes returning to her own screen. ‘Where you watch them later and wonder what you were thinking.’ She gives me a sympathetic sideways dip of the head. ‘Sorry Catherine. Just work through the doubt.’
‘That’s the problem,’ I tell her. ‘There is not much doubt left to work through.’
Twenty
‘Devin’s infinite,’ I told my father at the dinner table. Without missing a chew he stretched out and put the pie plate in front of him, cut himself another slice.
‘That’s great for her,’ he said. ‘I wish we all were.’
‘What do you mean, Catherine?’ my mother asked.
Devin looked at me with a moronic expression that displayed a patronising non-comprehension.
‘What you said this morning. On the bus. Infinite. So you don’t have to go to church.’
‘In-fi-DEL, you fuckwit.’
‘Devin!’ My mother threw her fork down.
‘I can’t help it if she’s stupid,’ Devin said and looked down into her lap. Samuel, in a rare moment, seemed as if he was also about to reprimand her, but before he could there was the sound of the front door slamming and footsteps in the tiled hallway and then Marshall was there.
‘Marshall!’ My father said. He half stood up. ‘Are you hungry? We didn’t know you were coming tonight. Dawn, get a plate from the kitchen. Come and eat with us, Marshall.’ It was a false brightness, an animation. I saw Devin tighten. I thought she was like me and hated it when my father got like this, when he sucked up to Marshall because we were living in his house.
Marshall put his briefcase against the wall and moved into the room. He filled it with his dark shiny suit and white shirt and sober tie, though there was the size of the four of us against him. We were never as big as he was in that house. He pulled out the chair next to Devin and sat down. ‘How are you kids?’ he asked. He was looking at me, but he stretched out a hand and held my sister briefly on the back of her head.
‘Fine thanks,’ I said.
When Devin said nothing he looked at her. ‘And how are you, miss?’
Devin pushed the floor with her feet and scraped the chair backwards as my mother entered the room again with a warm plate for my uncle in her hands.
‘Devin! The floor, you’ll scratch Uncle Marshall’s beautiful wooden floor!’
‘My stomach’s sore,’ Devin said.
‘If you want to go upstairs and start your homework, then you’re excused.’
Without a backward glance, Devin left the room. Marshall took the plate from my mother and she ladled a piece of pie and some peas onto it.
‘Not too much,’ he said. ‘I ate on the plane so I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m just being a pig.’
We waited with him at the table as he ate. If my father was rugged, full of cracks and crevices like an ancient mountain, then his brother was seamless like the land beneath a flat desert that stretched forever with sand. He chewed and I could see that both men had been handsome as boys, but if life had stamped its marks of character onto my father’s face, his brother had somehow been protected from it. There was nothing to tell, beneath the smooth face and the flawless skin that seemed subterranean, as though it never saw the sun.
‘So how’s business at the factory?’ Marshall asked.
‘Going well. We’ve had nice orders in, production is up.’
‘Good. I want to open more factories in the other province
s. But before you get excited about prospects, I want to make it clear: I want you where you are.’
‘Marshall, look—’ My father squeezed his hands together, his fingers interlocked.
‘I want to keep you here, Sam. This is my core business, right here. I trust you with it.’
‘Sure.’ My father leaned forward, rested on his elbows. ‘But if you’re looking for someone to manage things further afield, if you’re looking for expansion, I can do it. I could branch out on my own for a bit, get something solid up and running for you. Get my family out of your hair.’
‘Forget it.’ Marshall looked at him, harder than he ever had in front of us. ‘There’s no question. It’s here or nowhere. It’s here, or you’re on your own. I don’t want you messing things up in another part of the country where I can’t keep an eye on you.’
My father looked at me, a glance that was measuring my understanding of the conversation and when he looked back at Marshall, his eyes were begging. ‘Please. Marshall. Things are different now.’
‘Sam, I don’t even know if you still go to your meetings.’
My mother busied herself with crumbs on the table. Her eyes downcast, she didn’t want to take part.
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