Ironic. I felt like laughing. At myself. At people. At life. A few nights ago, I was too scared to stretch out my arm to Emma. Too afraid of rejection, too scared that she would jerk back violently and say, ‘What are you doing, Lemmer?’ with indignation. Too aware of my status, the chasm between us and the consequences of an incorrect assumption.
Emma had stood next to me. Why had she stood beside my bed? Was it because she was a little drunk? Had she remembered the embrace when I had comforted her? Was it because she was lonely, she wanted to be held again, because I was available? Or had she been lost in thought and stood there accidentally? I wasn’t her type. Neither in background, or appearance.
I knew that instant would remain in my head. I would relive it over and over when I lay in my bed at home in the silence of a Loxton night. My single bed.
From Tertia’s room I heard a faint scuffling noise, like muffled footsteps.
With her standing in my doorway there had been no doubt, no question, no difference in position. I was not afraid. Just unavailable. Ironic.
The rhythmic rustling from her bedroom could be ignored or explained away at first. It was slow and soft. But it kept on, way beyond the time frame of logical alternatives.
I pricked my ears. Was it her exercise apparatus? No. Subtler, softer, slyer.
Then the knowledge bloomed like a flower in my brain. It was the sound of a mattress and a bed gently swaying. Endlessly.
Unhurried. Peacefully, the tempo gradually, unconsciously quickening.
A sound joined in. It wasn’t her voice but her breath, forcing past her throat or nose or teeth, keeping time with growing enthusiasm.
My body responded. Faster.
It was very hot in the room.
Harder.
Dear God.
Fiercer. My imagination conjured up the image.
I lay listening, captivated, held. What she was doing was both mean and brilliant.
I wanted to press my hands to my ears. I wanted to make some noise of my own to shut out hers. I did nothing. I lay and listened.
I visualised it. For how long I didn’t know. Four minutes? Eight? Ten?
Eventually she was a machine, racing, fast, in a mad, urgent rush.
If I went in there now, I knew how it would be. Vocally she would encourage me, shout out her joys, she would move artfully, roll her hips with skill, she would turn over and offer a new sensation, she would climb on top, she would know when to withdraw so it would last longer, stretch out the hours, so that she would not have to be alone.
Just like all the rest. Desperate, lonely and meaningless.
My head told me all this. It wasn’t worth it. When everything was over, my conscience would call Emma’s name, but Tertia would want to be held, she would want to light a cigarette and talk about tomorrow.
I got up in one movement. It was only four flowing strides to her door. I saw her on her bed. There was a candle on the bedside cupboard. She lay on her back, knees apart, her beringed finger stroking quickly, the light flickering over her shuddering, sweating body.
She saw me. She had known I would come. Only her eyes betrayed it. Her face was taut with effort and pleasure.
She took her finger away just before I thrust into her violently.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Fuck me.’
PART THREE
33
I was up at twenty to five.
I didn’t stop to think. I didn’t stop to wash. I took my things and crept out like a coward while she slept deeply under the starry Indian heaven. I walked to the Audi and opened the door quietly, tossed in my bag and drove away.
The sun came up beyond Hazyview, the first day of the New Year.
I stopped at a garage and used the restroom. I could smell her on me when I opened my fly to urinate. I washed my member in the basin with sweet-smelling pink liquid soap. I shaved, brushed my teeth and washed my face, but I didn’t feel clean.
I drove to the hospital where Emma lay. I thought about what I must do, but my brain followed other paths.
I lay on top of and inside her and in the searing heat of the moment I said ‘Sasha’ and something changed in her face, a fleeting moment of intense joy, as if she had been discovered, like an island in the ocean.
She had been seen.
‘Yes!’ she answered with glowing green eyes.
I remembered the first time someone saw me.
It was during my first year as a bodyguard, for the Minister of Transport. It was a summer morning on his farm. I was preparing to go jogging on the dirt tracks between the cornfields. He came out of the homestead with a wide-brimmed hat and a walking stick.
‘Walk with me, Lemmer,’ he said, and we walked in silence up the koppie from where he could survey his whole property.
He was a smoker. He sat on top of a big rock, lit his pipe slowly and said, ‘Where do you come from?’ I gave him a broad outline, but he wasn’t satisfied. He had a way with people. He made me open up, so that eventually, while the sun came up behind our backs, I told him everything. About my father and mother and the Seapoint years. When I had finished he thought for a long time. Then he said, ‘You are this land.’
Twenty years old, still wet behind the ears, I said, ‘Sir?’
‘Do you know what made this land what it is?’
‘No, sir?’
‘The Afrikaner and the Englishman. You are both of them.’
I didn’t answer. He gazed into the distance and said, ‘But you have choices, son.’
Son.
‘I don’t know if this country has any more choices. The Afrikaner’s claustrophobia and aggression and the slyness of the Englishman; these things have brought us to this. It doesn’t work in Africa.’
I was dumbstruck. He was a member of the National Party cabinet.
He knocked his pipe out against the stone and said to me,
‘No, sir.’
‘It’s Zulu. It’s where the word
He looked at me through his thick glasses and said, ‘That is what the white man in Africa must search for. If he doesn’t find it, he will forever be a stranger in this land.’
I was too young and stupid to understand what he was telling me. And I never got the opportunity to ask him about it, because he shot himself, on that same koppie, to save his family the trauma of his terminal disease. But I
