He shakes his head. ‘You’re not doing this again.’ He’s not smiling now. He looks tired.
She wants to throw herself against him, to collapse into his arms if she knew he would have her there. Instead she says, ‘Don’t look at me like that.’ She turns to the mirror to examine her skin.
‘I’m not criticising you, Rachel,’ he says. ‘I’m just tired of your games. You’ve got a child now. You can’t be selfish. You can’t play with your health.’ His accent deepens when he speaks to her, as though he becomes more of himself. He starts to sound like his mother, and less like he ever belonged to her.
‘I’ve got a child? Since when did our child become mine?’
He laughs in an attempt to lighten the air around her.
‘You just don’t spend enough time with him.’
He pulls the plug in the basin and puts the wet teabag aside, letting the jewelled liquid go. He runs fresh water from the tap and lathers up his face. ‘I work every day to feed us all,’ he says. ‘Try living without me and the work I do.’
‘If I only had the chance.’
If he hears her he doesn’t respond.
‘Sometimes I think you don’t want me any more,’ she tells him. She makes a pretence of creaming her face again, plucking stray hairs from her eyebrows. He says nothing. He moves the razor across his cheeks and she watches as pathways are made in the snow of the cream on his skin. ‘I can’t even remember the last time we had sex,’ she tells him. ‘Or a conversation.’
He turns and holds the razor midway between his shoulder and his jaw. ‘What do you call this?’
‘This isn’t a conversation. This is me talking to a wall.’
His eyes are stone. Not the cool grey-blue of seaside shale but a deep, penetrating brown. Hardened lava close to the liquid burning at the centre of the earth. ‘Look at you,’ he says. ‘Listen to you. I’m too scared to touch you in case you snap in half.’
She stares at his reflection through the mirror. His words bring her back to where she is.
‘I have to wake Jack,’ she says.
‘Rachel.’
She pauses at the bathroom door. ‘What?’
‘Your brother may be dead. Don’t try to kill us, too.’
In the kitchen she sits with the child in his chair and the kettle boiling, cereal on a spoon in her hand. Kamal comes in dressed in a brown shirt and pale jeans. He flicks the switch on the wall and the steam subsides, disappearing back into the kettle again.
‘Thanks,’ she says.
When he’s made her tea he brings it over, and places the mug on the window sill. He moves his hand to her face and holds her chin. It forces her to look at him. ‘What are you doing today?’ he asks.
‘No plans. I’ll go shopping for the week, so you and Jack will have enough to eat while I’m gone.’
‘Hey,’ he says softly, ‘I know it’s hard.’
She thinks of his architect’s studio downstairs, the place that swallows him whole every day. This man who is nothing like her knows everything that she is, discovers always what is hidden.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asks.
She looks at him. His eyes are on her. He wants to see where she’s hiding and something inside her gives towards him, yields to him momentarily. The child takes the spoon from her hand and waves it in the air until there is porridge in his hair and on the floor.
‘Like I could float away,’ she whispers.
He takes her to the airport in the evening. They travel the whole way there without words. The big roads twist through the suburbs and she watches the houses change the further away from the nucleus of Durban they go. There is the clean suburban tranquillity and then the neat RDP structures that sit like boxes on the hill, and further on are the makeshift informal settlements where any construction material at all will do. What random hand of fate decides where we end up in life, she wonders as she watches the local world spin by. Why are the rich and the poor viewed almost as separate species when we love, hate and bleed the same, when we carry the same prejudices? Why is one woman’s fate to be a domestic worker all of her life, and another’s to pay for the services of that worker, all of her life and with little chance, ever, for those roles to reverse? Why is transformation essentially an academic term, when the majority of those affected never experience anything different from what they know? Why is status mistakenly judged by what we have, where we live, the way that words are formed, shaped in the mouth? Why, when we are all born with a brain and a heart and two hands?
When they arrive at the airport Kamal pulls into the drop-off zone and the engine idles without turning off.
‘I feel like you’re leaving me,’ he says, looking ahead.
‘Take care of Jack.’ She fumbles in her bag for the identity document that will confirm who she is when she collects her ticket.
‘I’ll see you on Saturday. If I fly up I might ask you to fetch me.’
‘I won’t have a car,’ Rachel says. ‘You might have to catch the Gautrain.’
‘You could organise something. You could borrow Maya’s car.’
Rachel looks at the tarmac.
‘Don’t shut me out.’ His voice is soft and low, but his eyes are elsewhere, watching an aircraft cut through the sky.
‘Thanks for the lift,’ she says. She leans forward, and kisses him on the side of his face.
‘Rachel,’ he says. ‘Don’t leave me, Rachel.’
His words float on the moment before they dissipate. Already she’s walking away from him, a small and fragile shape of cloth and bone and hair.
CHAPTER 3
The sprawl of houses recedes into the distance, merging with the Soweto wash like a blue-grey watercolour painting. Sizwe Dube moves his lips in a prayer for his people, a benediction for himself. He thinks of Thomas, and wonders where in space and time his friend is right now. The funeral will be soon. Maya, Thomas’s wife, has finally given up. Finally, she believes her husband to be dead – perhaps only for closure, to release any sense of uncertainty.
Maya is the type of woman who still believes that certainty is possible in the world. It is the code she lives by. Sizwe watched her create her precise and determined home with Thomas in the suburbs through the early years of their lives together, as though she believed that the structure itself would be etched into time if she continued to pour her efforts into maintaining the façade. For Maya there has never been any kind of in-between. Sizwe knows he is mourning in his own way, but he knows too that Thomas is a free man once more.
He paces himself through the movement of his feet. He doesn’t want to arrive at work too soon. He wants to leave no room for doubt in the plans he has conjured up in his head on the many journeys, back and forth, between Soweto and the affluent high-rise of Sandton City. And after work, Busi will come to his mother’s house. He knows it. She has to.
Poetry, then, has been relegated to the background for now. Sizwe has always known poetry as his gift, from far back when he was a small boy. Even then it was as if the words rushed through him like the wind, and he only had to catch them, and write it all down. But what a wind brought, it could also blow away.
He walks on and watches the people that pass him. He thinks again of Busi, young and pliable as fresh earth. In time she will change and harden. Age dries you up like the soil long after the rains have stopped. Time will