thighs. ‘And you kept paying and getting what you thought was your for-value-received, until one day the market bulled and the price got too high and you let the whore go. Isn’t that it? Of course it is, that’s why you aren’t saying anything. That’s why you won’t look at me. Because you’re scared. Because I’m right. Because you can’t face the truth. Well, come on, Shepard. Say something. Let’s hear it. Or am I not even worth a pathetic, half-hearted excuse? Come on, Shepard. I’m waiting. What have you to say to me?’
‘There was a fax waiting for me when I got out of the disciplinary hearing,’ Shepard said, very quietly. He did not move in his chair. He did not look at Gaby. He did not look away from her. He did not register anything on his field of vision. ‘It was from home. From my folks in Lincoln.
There was a car crash. In Santa Barbara. Carling was driving. Fraser is dead. Aaron is critical in intensive care. The car crossed the centre line – the police don’t know how yet – and hit an oncoming tanker. Carling always was a shit driver. She died instantly. Fraser was the front seat passenger. He always had to ride up front. Privilege of being oldest. They cut him out but he was dead by the time they got him to the hospital. Aaron suffered massive internal injuries. His back is broken. He may not live. If he does, it’s certain he will be paralysed from the waist down. One of my sons is dead, along with my ex-wife; the other is crippled. That is what happened to me today.’
To Gaby, it was as if he had got out of his ugly leather chair, crossed the room and driven his fist wrist- deep into her belly. She could not breathe. She could not see. The world ceased to exist. She found herself standing against the wall, head thrown back.
‘Oh, dear Jesus, Shepard.’
‘Perhaps I could have borne it, perhaps in time I could look at the world around me again and see something good and rich, if there had been someone I could trust to hold me if I put my weight on her. Someone I put my life, my career, my personal and professional integrity on the line for, someone I made a dumb mistake for, once, that grew to devour me. Someone for whom I was prepared to crucify myself before the UNECTA General Council to save her from the consequences of her impetuosity, and when the General Council said no, compromised security by leaking the information to someone in a position to do something with it. But I’m stupid; you’ve told me that, you must be right. The world isn’t like that, is it? I lean, my support seems sound, I trust it with my full weight and it snaps and I fall.’ He stood up. The movement was as slow and precise as a piece of Japanese drama. ‘I’m going out now.’
‘Shepard!’ Gaby screamed.
The living room door closed.
‘Shepard!’ she screamed again.
The front door closed.
‘Shepard,’ a third time.
The Mahindra’s door closed. She heard the engine start and saw the headlights swing across the curtains. Gaby threw her head back and howled like a dying animal.
Finished.
51
Ring.
Come on.
Ring ring.
Answer it.
Ring ring ring. I know you’re there, it’s three-thirty in the morning, where else are you going to be?
The mahogany door opened.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Gaby asked the tall young black woman standing in the hall dressed in a hastily- wrapped kimono.
‘I live here,’ the woman said. ‘Who the hell are you?’
Miriam Sondhai appeared behind her.
‘It’s all right. I will take care of this.’
The young woman moved behind Miriam Sondhai but did not leave. She suspiciously studied Gaby with her arms full of crumpled star tapestry.
‘Miriam, it’s all over with Shepard. I can’t live with him any more, can I stay here?’
‘No.’
Gaby’s foot had been over the threshhold.
‘What?’
‘No, you cannot come into my house,’ Miriam Sondhai said. ‘It is not open to those who abuse its trust. I know what you did, Gaby McAslan. You are not so clever as you think, nor I so stupid. My PDU logs outgoing and incoming calls. I know I am forgetful, but not so much as not to know when I go out running. You covered up too well; if you had made it a break-in, I would never have suspected, but there was only one person knew the alarm codes. Why did you have to deceive me? Why did you not ask me for this information?’
‘Would you have given it to me?’
‘So, because you are on the side of truth and right and good, that excuses it, does it?’
‘Miriam, I’m sorry.’
‘No, you are not. You would do it again if you had to. You would break into my house, hunt through all my private, personal things, abuse the trust I have put in you. Even now, you think you can turn up on my doorstep and imagine that it is all right for you to ask me for help because you think I do not know what you did.
‘Everything I entrusted to you, you abused. So, I will give you one last trust, and then I will not be afraid that you may abuse it, because there will be nothing more of me you can take. Listen, Gaby McAslan.
‘When I was eight, my mother’s mother came up from Chisimaio to mind me while my mother was at a conference in Cairo. I was happy to see her; I loved my grandmother. I was excited when she hired a taxi and took me into town. I thought we would go shopping. But we did not drive to the markets, or the streets where the foreigners bought things with dollars and Deutschmarks. She took me to a house in the suburbs beside an Islamic school. It was the house of the teaching mullah. My grandmother introduced me to him, told me he was a very holy man and that I must do whatever he said.
‘He took me into the kitchen and made me sit on the table. Then he made me pull up my skirt and he took a razor blade and cut off my clitoris. My grandmother kept saying that this was right, it was a good thing, now men would want me and I would make a good wife and bear many children. But it would not stop bleeding in the taxi, or in the house. My grandmother was scared, but she did not dare take me to the hospital because my father would learn what she had done while I had been entrusted to her care. She wrapped sheets around me to stop the bleeding, but it would not stop and she got really frightened and ran away. The cook found me when she came in to make the dinner and took me to my father’s hospital. He called my mother, she came back on the first flight from Cairo to comfort me, but what is cut away can never be put back. Female circumcision had been the way in my mother’s family; her mother had done it to her, and she had sworn that it would never happen to her daughter. But she had been betrayed by the person she trusted. She never saw or spoke to her mother after that. On her dying bed the old woman called for my mother to forgive her, but she would not come to see her. My grandmother died unforgiven.’
The young woman put a hand on Miriam’s shoulder.
‘I was a child; I loved my grandmother. I trusted her. She took me to a man who mutilated me with a razor blade on a kitchen table. What you have done to me is no different, Gaby McAslan.’
Miriam Sondhai turned away. The housemate looked at Gaby as if she were something that had died in the porch, then closed the heavy mahogany door.
‘Fuck you, Ms Pure and Perfect!’ Gaby shouted. ‘And your fucking lesbian girlfriend too! You’re not going to get very far with her with no fucking clitoris! I don’t need you! I don’t need any of you!’
She blared the car horn peevishly all the way down the drive and along Nkrumah Avenue. It left a high- pitched echo in her head: the sound of it all coming apart. She had always thought it would all come apart with a rending crash, or an avalanche thunder, not this constant hiss of everything being destroyed atom by atom. She
