On his first Monday he left it to them to do the incinerating. Rigor mortis had stiffened the corpses overnight. The dead legs caught in the bars of the trolley, and when the trolley came back from its trip to the furnace, the dog would as often as not come riding back too, blackened and grinning, smelling of singed fur, its plastic covering burnt away. After a while the workmen began to beat the bags with the backs of their shovels before loading them, to break the rigid limbs. It was then that he intervened and took over the job himself. The incinerator is anthracite- fuelled, with an electric fan to suck air through the flues; he guesses that it dates from the 1950s, when the hospital itself was built. It operates six days of the week, Monday to Saturday. On the seventh day it rests. When the crew arrive for work they first rake out the ashes from the previous day, then charge the fire. By nine a.m. temperatures of a thousand degrees centigrade are being generated in the inner chamber, hot enough to calcify bone. The fire is stoked until mid-morning; it takes all afternoon to cool down.
He does not know the names of the crew and they do not know his. To them he is simply the man who began arriving on Mondays with the bags from Animal Welfare and has since then been turning up earlier and earlier. He comes, he does his work, he goes; he does not form part of the society of which the incinerator, despite the wire fence and the padlocked gate and the notice in three languages, is the hub. For the fence has long ago been cut through; the gate and the notice are simply ignored. By the time the orderlies arrive in the morning with the first bags of hospital waste, there are already numbers of women and children waiting to pick through it for syringes, pins, washable bandages, anything for which there is a market, but particularly for pills, which they sell to muti shops or trade in the streets. There are vagrants too, who hang about the hospital grounds by day and sleep by night against the wall of the incinerator, or perhaps even in the tunnel, for the warmth.
It is not a sodality he tries to join. But when he is there, they are there; and if what he brings to the dump does not interest them, that is only because the parts of a dead dog can neither be sold nor be eaten. Why has he taken on this job? To lighten the burden on Bev
Shaw? For that it would be enough to drop off the bags at the dump and drive away. For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway?
For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.
The dogs are brought to the clinic because they are unwanted: because we are too menny. That is where he enters their lives. He may not be their saviour, the one for whom they are not too many, but he is prepared to take care of them once they are unable, utterly unable, to take care of themselves, once even Bev Shaw has washed her hands of them. A dog-man, Petrus once called himself. Well, now he has become a dogman: a dog undertaker; a dog psychopomp; a harijan. Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs. There must be other, more productive ways of giving oneself to the world, or to an idea of the world. One could for instance work longer hours at the clinic. One could try to persuade the children at the dump not to fill their bodies with poisons. Even sitting down more purposefully with the Byron libretto might, at a pinch, be construed as a service to mankind.
But there are other people to do these things - the animal welfare thing, the social rehabilitation thing, even the Byron thing. He saves the honour of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it. That is what he is becoming: stupid, daft, wrongheaded.
SEVENTEEN
THEIR WORK AT the clinic is over for the Sunday. The kombi is loaded with its dead freight. As a last chore he is mopping the floor of the surgery.
'I'll do that,' says Bev Shaw, coming in from the yard. 'You'll be wanting to get back.'
'I'm in no hurry.'
'Still, you must be used to a different kind of life.'
'A different kind of life? I didn't know life came in kinds.'
'I mean, you must find life very dull here. You must miss your own circle. You must miss having women friends.'
'Women friends, you say. Surely Lucy told you why I left Cape Town. Women friends didn't bring me much luck there.'
'You shouldn't be hard on her.'
'Hard on Lucy? I don't have it in me to be hard on Lucy.'
'Not Lucy - the young woman in Cape Town. Lucy says there was a young woman who caused you a lot of trouble.'
'Yes, there was a young woman. But I was the troublemaker in that case. I caused the young woman in question at least as much trouble as she caused me.'
'Lucy says you have had to give up your position at the university. That must have been difficult. Do you regret it?' What nosiness! Curious how the whiff of scandal excites women. Does this plain little creature think him incapable of shocking her? Or is being shocked another of the duties she takes on - like a nun who lies down to be violated so that the quota of violation in the world will be reduced?
'Do I regret it? I don't know. What happened in Cape Town brought me here. I'm not unhappy here.'
But at the time - did you regret it at the time?'
'At the time? Do you mean, in the heat of the act? Of course not. In the heat of the act there are no doubts. As I'm sure you must know yourself '
She blushes. A long time since he last saw a woman of middle age blush so thoroughly. To the roots of her hair.
`Still, you must find Grahamstown very quiet,' she murmurs. 'By comparison.'
'I don't mind Grahamstown. At least I am out of the way of temptation. Besides, I don't live in Grahamstown. I live on a farm with my daughter.'
Out of the way of temptation: a callous thing to say to a woman, even a plain one. Yet not plain in everyone's eyes. There must have been a time when Bill Shaw saw something in young Bev. Other men too, perhaps.
He tries to imagine her twenty years younger, when the upturned face on its short neck must have seemed pert and the freckled skin homely, healthy. On an impulse he reaches out and runs a finger over her lips. She lowers her
