by Tracy Going
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“What do you want me to do?” she snaps. “It’s not my fault he ran away.”
“Thank you,” I say.
I put the phone down.
It is the only conversation I ever have with her.
The accused’s bail is withdrawn and a warrant of arrest is issued, but it changes nothing for me as I am left floundering.
The rumours are rife. It is whispered that he’s in East Africa, hiding out somewhere between Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. I know his brother has development projects on the go in the region so it makes sense that he would take flight there, but still I am astonished. I am shaken to my inner, crumbling core. It is unbelievable that he has absconded. It is not only preposterous – it is absolutely and unequivocally shameful.
I am bewildered and I am angry, and I am determined not to let him get away.
I contact the office of the Police Commissioner George Fivaz and ask to speak to him personally. I am put onto one of the national deputy commissioners instead, and I meet with him for coffee. I want the accused’s name entered into the database of Interpol. I want his name engraved on the list of fugitives. I insist.
The deputy police commissioner assures me that a man fleeing the law can only run so hard, so far and so fast.
It would take one year to catch him.
I would wait.
But waiting is an adjournment. It is an obstruction between now and one day, whenever. It is the infancy of uncertainty, depression and isolation. And the months ahead bleed into each other as I try to maintain control over my life and contain my despair while I wait.
I am still co-anchoring the radio breakfast show and presenting my TV show, Lebone – Women on the Move. I rise in the morning, do what is necessary and collapse onto my bed in between, as I slowly lose all my ability to face the light.
I joined Summit TV as an evening Business News anchor a few months before and am now broadcasting from there two nights a week. I am extremely grateful to be appointed to the team of heavyweight presenters when so many are hesitant of being tainted by me and my court case.
But in between I put living and dreaming aside.
I am no longer producing a weekly insert for the magazine programme Private & Confidential, but producer Pieter hasn’t discarded me. Soon after the accused flees, Pieter puts together a programme on intercultural healing. He wants me to consult a sangoma for one of the inserts, and I am willing. I am searching for guidance and answers and am content to surrender myself to the unknown.
It is the sage words of the sangoma that enable me to process in advance, and then help me to accept, that I am voiceless and that, despite all my best efforts, I cannot alter the outcome. My testimony in court, and my exhausting and debilitating fight for justice, will come to almost naught. It is inevitable. I am defenceless against the money, the power, the patriarchy, all the lies and deception. I am impotent against the biased reasoning of a court where there is no insight or understanding or compassion to even begin to comprehend the complexity of power and control an abuser exercises over a victim.
Selby, the sangoma, operates from a small cottage in a back garden of a home in Melville. It is a dark room and the air hangs dense with the rich, sweet smell of smouldering impepho, the perfumed plant of the past. It is a sacred herb, with a flower that never withers and the divine purpose of bringing clarity to healers and diviners. Selby, with his open, engaging face and generous, enveloping embrace, is a bone diviner.
He is already burning impepho and calling on the spirits to bring their presence and their ‘remembering’ when I enter the cottage. Graciously, he sits me down and explains that he’d be connecting with his ancestors and other departed souls to bring me the messages I most need to hear. I am entranced.
We then kneel opposite each other on the carpet before crossing our legs beneath us and settling into the reading.
He unties his soft, thin, black cloth bag and spreads it out between us. He removes its precious contents – the bones, stones, coins and other valued bits – and holds them delicately in his hands before he closes his eyes, to keel and to clap as he invokes the ancestors.
There is a melodic chant as he ventures into the past. Then, quickly, he opens his hands and flings the contents from his palm. He tosses them away, casting them out onto the flat black cloth.
“You are in danger,” he says cautiously. “You must protect your walls. There is someone looking in.”
He opens his eyes, his stare vacant, as though his mind is not in this realm.
I look back, my eyes stretched wide.
“You must be careful,” he says, his voice low and ominous.
“Yes,” I answer softly.
Sitting directly across from him, I wonder what he has really seen. Is he speaking to ancestral spirits from the grave, is he really receiving this message through the dry bones of the dead, or is it simply me carrying the stink of fear like decaying flesh falling from bones?
He speaks of many other things before he collects all his pieces together, wraps them back into the black cloth and puts the bundle aside. Then he passes me a length of rope. It is an ordinary rope made of white fibre with edges unravelling from years of gentle handling. He instructs me to tie a knot. He takes the knotted rope from my hands, holds it lightly, tumbles it around a little and then throws it out.
It lies before me like a rope with a knot.
“There is a matter,” he says. “It is a legal matter.”
“Yes,” I say, breathless.
He is quiet as he unties the knot, freeing it of its tension. He looks at me knowingly.
“You will win,” he breathes. “But not in the way you want.”
Twenty-six
“Bruce, you’re hurting me!”
It is my mother screaming.
I can hear her agony through the haze of my sleep, through the closed door of my bedroom. It is the first time I’ve heard her in such pain and, as I leap from my bed and bolt across the room, I know instantly that this time it is different. I grab at the door, yank it open and launch myself down the passage, closer to her blood-curling screams.
I can hear my father’s heavy grunts.
I know he has her in the bathroom.
Then suddenly I am screaming too.
“No, Dad, you’re hurting her,” I shout, my sobs and screams mingling as one.
“Please let her go,” I beg. “Please, Dad, please!”
I am standing in the doorway, framed in the fluorescent light of the bathroom as it spills into the darkness of the passage. My father is holding my mother by her mouth, his hand holding her lower jaw. He has her bottom lip in his grip, twisting it viciously, holding it as though in a vice as he smashes her head repeatedly into the corner of the bath, on the sharp edge where the green tiles meet.
I get there just in time to see him leaning over her, smacking her head down hard, before tightening his hold and hauling her up toward him again.
“No, Dad. Let her go,” I cry.
He straightens, and as he glowers at me in his alcoholic rage, he loses his grip.
My mother is a broken bundle on the tiles, her nightie torn from her shoulders.
“Be careful,” she mumbles. “He’s going to hurt you.”
Her words are bloodied and indistinct as she mumbles her warning, gesturing weakly.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” I assure her, wrenching myself out of his reach as he lurches after me. “He’s too drunk to catch me.”
Then I run.
I run as fast as I can, him stumbling behind me, falling forward, groaning with each grab, his stale beer breath warm on my neck, my back. It is only in the dining room that I manage to gain enough distance between us that I can unlatch a window and leap out into the night.
But I have nowhere to go. Just the dark gloom of late night.
The water tank towers above me but offers no refuge, nowhere to hide. I don’t want to run off into the black veld.
Then I hear him shouting, calling my name.
“Tracy!”
He is around the other side of the house. I know that any minute now he’s going to come careening around the corner, staggering into his charge, and he’ll find me easily, my pale, fleecy pyjamas beckoning like a beacon, a guiding light in the dark.
“Tracy!” I hear. “I’m going to find you!”
My father is going to hurt me.
Another flashback. Always the same intense, uninvited memory crashing through my mind, twisting and turning before me, tormenting me as I try to escape. It is a relentless recollection from the past; the night I ran and hid from my father.
I was eleven years old. It was the middle of the night and I had no idea where to run to. I remember hiding close to the stone wall, outside my mother’s sewing room. I had no slippers on my feet. I could hear my father’s voice in the distance. He was shouting out my name. It sounded slurred and strangled, as though he already had his hands around my neck. I knew I needed to get away. I knew I needed to find somewhere to hide – and then I remembered that the pool was standing empty for the winter. It was my only refuge, the white, hollow haven to the side of the house … between him and me. That meant I needed to move in his direction, toward him, to get away. I clutched at the uneven edges of the stone to guide myself along the wall in the dark. I crouched down low, listening for his shouts to determine exactly where he was, and then I crept across the garden and slid silently into the pool. I curled into a ball, pulled my pyjama top over my head and buried myself tight against the steps, camouflaging myself against the whiteness and the cold.
Later, I heard him leave, heard the key in the ignition of his car and the spray of pebbles and sand as he took off, perhaps he thought I had run away. Once he had been gone long enough, I found the courage to tiptoe back into the house. I crawled under my bed, making certain that none of me was sticking out. And then I waited for the morning.
It is fleeting flashes of this memory that so disturb me, always coming back, refusing to leave, shadowing me in and out of my consciousness with no regard for time or place.
It comes in the glint of glass, a pot falling, a stranger’s glance.
It is involuntary and relentless and soon the darkness has so invaded my being that I completely yield to it in my search for oblivion. For nine months I sleep and I sleep and I eat; boxes and boxes of biscuits offering me comfort in my pain. I lift myself to work, then I come home and I cry and I sleep and I eat. It is all I am able to do.
In December, I force myself from my slumber and haul myself out of bed to attend the official opening of the 16 Days of Activism campaign. It is the year this international awareness campaign opposing violence against women and children is introduced in South Africa. The event is a spectacular affair, with a thousand guests, among them leading business people and their spouses, socialites, politicians and parliamentarians.
I am the professional Master of Ceremonies for the night. I am a woman who has been abused – it is a fitting profile. I am wearing a ballgown that fans spectacularly around me. On the outside I’m elegant and glamorous, but inside I am vulnerable, frail with fatigue, and hopelessly overwhelmed by my own circumstances. I am completely ill equipped to cope with the evening.
It is my role to guide everyone through a tribute paid to women who’d lost their lives to violence. It has been rehearsed that as I raise my hand in honour to those murdered at the hands of their abusers, the lights to the decorated venue would be switched off and the room would be thrown into a dramatic, crushing darkness. It is then that every single person, each one having received a candle as they entered, would light it in remembrance. At every table one match would be struck, and then the candle would go from person to person, symbolically passing the flame, until the room is awash with 1000 candles flickering flimsily before being silently snuffed out.
As arcs of fluttering white and gold sweep across the room and delicately infuse the darkness, I break. I disintegrate, right there before everyone. I heave and gasp my anguish as I fall apart, and then flee the room.
I am inconsolable. It is only an hour later that I am able to collect myself enough to take to the stage, and make a gasping, mortifying apology, before excusing myself and escaping home, back to my bed.
I should never have been there.
It had all been too much.
Then, another day, I wake to find my son lying on the floor. It is late afternoon and I have spent the entire day in my bed. Sleeping. I am disoriented when I’m woken by his screams. He is beneath my wrought-iron bed, kicking his short legs and flailing his small arms as he cries.
“You’re always sleeping,” he shouts, his words muffled between his tears.
“I’m sorry,” I stutter.
And I am. I am sorry. But I am incapable of giving more than a mumbled apology, unable to lift myself from the pillow. All I want is to disappear, to retreat into obscurity, to surrender myself to my dependable companion: darkness.
It is months later that I am passing through my hallway. The front door is locked and latched as it always is. The hallway is dim and gloomy in the dusk, the last red and orange of the day filtering through the ribbed, glass panels when I briefly catch my reflection in the mirror over the server, the same server that supposedly held a serrated knife so long ago. I am not surprised by what I see. It is the shapeless form of the new me. I am thirteen kilogrammes heavier, my hair hanging limp, my skin inflamed. I am a mess. I realise then how I’ve allowed him and his violence to define me.
I have abandoned myself.
For so long I have struggled to keep myself, my life and my son’s life together after he destroyed it, but it is when he fled that I lost my inner bearing. As I look at that shadowed self in the mirror I know I can never reclaim the person I had been before, that I have forever been altered, but I know too that there is no other way to work through the pain, the hurt and the confusion than to collect together the fragments of my beaten, broken self and somehow meld it all together again.
It is time.
I am more than a battered woman.
I lean forward to confirm that the bruises are gone, and they are; they are long gone and my eyes are crystal clear, but it is then – as so often happens when I look in a mirror – that I am instantly reminded of my father.
I have my father’s dark, blue eyes.
It’s all I have of him really.
My father left Brits and our life with his briefcase in one hand and his ornate mantelpiece clock in the other. At the age of forty-two they were his only meaningful possessions. By fifty-two he was dead, and those two items were long gone. At some point over the intervening years they had been bartered in his desperation for just one more bottle. It had been my childhood request that one day he bequeath the clock to me. I loved its carved wood façade, the slow and steady rhythm of its beat, the tinkle of its chime. It had belonged to my great-grandparents. But now it is gone, and instead, after my father’s death, I was given a photo of him as a child, a copy of his ID and a small, black Bible.
I had placed them in a box in an unused cupboard in my study, forgotten.
I recently took them out.
The photo is still between the glass and its collapsing frame. The copy of his ID has damped over time and the folded page is joined as one where the running ink has fused it together. My father’s face is still visible, however, and so too is the madness in his eyes. I toss it out and then quickly retrieve it from the bin, thinking perchance another day.
It’s only the Bible I really want to keep safe. It is a small, beautifully illustrated, very, very old book. The spine has disintegrated and the pages are flaking apart. It is the first time I ever open it, and find the palest inscription on the inside cover. It is addressed, in the finest point of blue ink, to my grandparents: Philip and May, with regards and best wishes for the future, from Arthur Lee 1939. I have no idea who Arthur Lee is and I can only conclude that it had been a thoughtful
wedding present to my late grandparents.
As I page through it now I find two loose, dulled blue papers. They are the original birth certificates of my twin brother and sister. They take my breath away as I unfurl and read them.
They were issued, and written by hand, one week after their birth, on 12 May 1969. My sister was born at 1:30 am and my brother, David Bruce Going, listed as Twin No. II, at 2:00 am. The birth certificates are boldly inscribed in black fountain-pen ink and as I hold them in my hands I realise that they offer no indication of what lies ahead. It tells me nothing of the life my sister will live, and gives no hint of my brother’s death. All it tells me is that my father has kept these papers safe for many years. In the end, they were his most valuable possession.
I carefully fold them back along their crease lines and return them to where I found them, between the delicate pages of Leviticus. And then, as I close the Bible, with its loose black faux-leather cover, I see a name. It is written in very feint, faded blue and I have to look closely to decipher the small writing. It reads, Margaret. My father’s sister. I realise that, after all these years of keeping it safe, the Bible is not my father’s after all. It belongs to his sister.
So all I really have is that photograph. A garish picture of him as a young boy with rosy cheeks. It is an image that has been enhanced in a studio. It bears little resemblance to the child he must have been.
And now he is gone. I will never receive an apology or an explanation, and I simply have to accept the violence he has bestowed on me. But I will always be his eldest, “my girl”. As his daughter, I can only hope that he wanted his life to be different, and that he had wanted more. And also as his daughter I can only hope, I need to believe, that he would have wanted more for me, for my life to be different.
But being a father’s daughter tells me I belong. It tells me I have a place in this world, that I am worthy.
Twenty-seven
“We’ve found him,” says the deputy commissioner heartily, triumph in his voice.