‘No. It got my mother what she always wanted though. For me. She still lost him.’
‘I didn’t know Grace was the type to have favourites.’
‘You should know it.’
‘I never felt it from her.’
‘Because you were her favourite too.’
‘Do you think Rachel knew that?’
‘Probably. Definitely.’
‘So you’re a teacher because Grace wanted you to be one. Noble Lucas.’
‘The favourite child can do what he likes, anything he wants to. The blessings are there already. Lower down in the pecking order and you do what’s right, what your parents demand, what society wants from you. Always looking for love, I suppose. For that complete and elusive approval.’
‘What did you want to be then?’ Thomas asks.
‘I would always have been a teacher.’
‘You would have chosen it anyway?’
‘I don’t know any other life. Another choice is for someone who isn’t me. Someone who hasn’t had my life. I became what I was meant to be. There wasn’t another way.’
It is late when they go to bed. Lucas shows him to a room tacked on to the back of the house as though it was built in hurried afterthought. A low bed stands neatly constructed beneath an open window. A small cupboard covers one section of the opposite wall. There is a washbasin with a tap, and little else.
‘It’s not what you’re used to,’ Lucas says. ‘Very basic. Nothing fancy here. But this is my life. This is what you get now.’
Thomas tells Lucas that despite his previous life of privilege, he’s never wanted anything more than this, exactly what is before him. He places the bag beside the cupboard and pulls at the zip to open it. Lucas sits on the edge of the bed as Thomas unfolds his clothes, piece by piece, and hangs them. At the bottom of the bag is the camera.
‘Be careful with that thing,’ Lucas tells him. ‘It won’t last long if too many people see it.’
Thomas takes the camera out and detaches the lens, which he wraps in an old shirt. He does the same with the mechanical body. He places these at the back of the cupboard behind a woollen blanket that was put there for his use in cold weather. ‘I’m looking for different pictures now,’ Thomas says. He places a toothbrush and his shaving kit on the narrow ledge of the white porcelain basin that is cracked from the tap all the way down on the left side.
‘This isn’t much of a place for pictures,’ Lucas says. ‘If pictures are really what you’re looking for.’ He stands and yawns. In the doorway he stops and turns, gives Thomas a last look. ‘What are pictures for anyway?’ he asks.
‘To hold on to whatever we think we have,’ Thomas smiles.
Lucas leaves the room to find his wife and prepare for bed.
Thomas drifts to sleep listening to the sounds of Lucas and Lumka muttering to each other from their room. He hears the different tones of their voices sinking and rising, though he can’t make out the words He pulls the blankets closer around his head. The pictures in his mind are of movement and motion with the rhythm of the journey still fresh. He has left the curtains open. Through the window the sky hangs suspended. He looks out and feels the depth of the whole world stretching in to penetrate his being before releasing him, allowing him to finally fall softly into sleep.
He dreams he is back home with Maya. She stands in the kitchen beside the stove and stirs a great big pot that holds something thick and dark as a soup of mud. When he asks her in the dream what is inside the pot, she shakes her shining black hair and adds salt and spices to the mixture from the rack above her head. She sniffs at the stew, tastes from the spoon and smiles, and she tells him it is only their future that she is cooking up.
CHAPTER 6
All alone stuck in a virgin hole
All alone
Where shadows are metaphysical microphones
That stoned the carcass of my soul’s bone
Between midnight prophecy
And God’s heartbeat
But I was born forlorn
Like lost crops chopped off the soil’s throne without
Hesitation yet circumstance
Failed to flush my infant development
Like a foetus that was pregnant with abortion supplements
Yet I supplement these facts with righteous biceps
Yes I the apocalyptic
Born from revelation’s manuscripts:
Patmos is home
Blindness is just vision’s moan
Moaning for the quickening of the devil’s abortion at home
Because all alone I was …
The electric fluorescent lights hum above him as Sizwe works on his most recent composition. The words skim his lips like a soft breeze across a temporary landscape. He keeps his eye on the till where the last customers transact their purchases, and the floor manager begins to cash up.
… There; developing in a virgin hole where
Purity became a birthmark implanted
To be a growing seed in my soul’s being
Alone
In a place where dark curtains
Hide the beauty of birth aborted
In white linen
Where forgotten memories are masculine women
Giving birth to a new earth
Hidden beneath my soul’s church
Where pulpits levitate like slit wrists on the hands of an exorcist
Who insists on delivering sin into its being
Part of a righteous thing
Where nothings become somethings
Sweet like mockingbirds humming …
His foot taps compulsively to the beat of the poem that struck him like lightning this morning. He’d had twenty minutes in the taxi to jot it down. It still needs work but it is essentially fully formed in his head. The core of the work, the root of it comes upon him like a cadence from nowhere. He understands instinctively that although the real power lies in the performance, the wonder and the magic begin with the simple construction of words.
Times of solitude are just invisible prison walls that haunt us who are born
Free from the nocturnal dreams of a bastardised reality.
All alone.
The slap on his back comes like a crack, a whip of a hand. ‘Hey Manfred, your lips are moving.’ Extracted from his parallel existence where he is the poet who speaks to the people, the hand brings him back to the place where he’s the shop assistant, answerable to this pale and pimply man who is younger both in age and spirit than he is. He turns. Their eyes meet. The words come out and he is astounded that the source is deep inside him. ‘At least I have something in my head for my lips to move to,’ Sizwe says.
‘What did you say?’ The manager’s voice is soft.
‘To translate,’ says Sizwe, ‘At least I have a brain.’
He looks down at the watch on his forearm. It has just gone five o’clock. Behind him a colleague closes the huge glass doors that extend all the way up to runners on the ceiling. Sizwe takes in the comfort of routine, the