“It’s not flattery if it’s true.”
The waiter comes over to take the order: two coffee caramel muffins.
Half an hour later, Nomsa has told Kristof about her job, recently begun, as a junior analyst at a stockbroking firm; the pressure she feels from her father, a tycoon in Johannesburg, for his only child to succeed spectacularly in business and to start a family and raise children, especially now that she is already twenty-seven; and the feeling on some days that she is on top of the world and on others that she is a failure. He nods, grimaces, laughs and shakes his head at the right places.
“You’re a good listener, you know?” she says. Then she adds, “Look, I should have said something earlier. I have a boyfriend.”
“I’m sorry,” Kristof says, grinning, comically slapping his head with his hand. “I should have known. Lucky guy. I’m not going to try anything. I respect your choice.”
“Thank you.”
“Of course, you didn’t know me when you met him.”
Nomsa swats at Kristof with a serviette.
“Just kidding. Anyway, at least I can be your once-off muffin friend.”
The waiter comes for their plates. “Can I interest you in anything else?”
“No thanks,” says Kristof. “I’m happy with what I’ve got here.”
“You’re bad, you know that,” says Nomsa, briefly placing her fingers on Kristof’s forearm.
He allows himself to be touched, but does not offer any physical movement in return. Along with his muffin, he has drunk two strong black coffees. His eyes are sharper than before, his gaze more intense.
“Since we’re only here for coffee, once and never again,” says Kristof, “there’s a kind of freedom in that. I can speak my mind.”
Nomsa waits, her hands now clasped around her cappuccino for warmth.
“Life is short and tough, and there aren’t many moments of grace. But here we are, and there’s that rare electric spark when two souls touch. Even if we don’t see each other again, I’m grateful for that.”
Divine Muffin is getting busier. The tattooed waiter and his colleagues are taking orders, juggling plates on their forearms. The air smells of bitter coffee and baked goods.
“Okay,” says Kristof quietly. “Well, that’s off my chest. It was lovely to meet you, to have coffee with you. And so, goodbye.”
When he gets up to pay the bill at the counter, he puts his hand down on hers for a moment. Her hand is warm, the same temperature, as if they are two parts of the same creature.
Kristof turns off Main Road and drives for a few minutes until he is on the street containing Maria’s house. Two days ago he took this road to the departmental counselling session with her.
He does not see Maria on the street. She is probably in her house; her car is in the driveway. But he drives more around the area – wide roads with broad tar pavements, patches of trees and grass. The streets are calm compared to Main Road: there are few drivers and no hooting. Kristof moves slowly, cruising. The white light of this winter morning sharpens the scene, delineating every tree, rendering the green wire fencing of Paradise Primary School dramatic. In a cul-de-sac, protected from cars by a bollard, three kids are playing piggy-in-the-middle with a tennis ball. He gives them a wave as he passes them. Polite children: one boy waves back, smiles, before throwing the ball high over a girl’s head. Then Kristof sees Maria. He often experiences coincidences of this kind; sometimes he regards himself as a locus of unlikely events. She is wearing a pair of black jeans and a green shirt this morning, an arresting combination with her short blonde hair. Maria is walking up the street, weighed down with shopping bags. Her pregnancy is a subtle curve. It seems that the other philosophers did not notice it at the session – at least, no one mentioned it afterwards – but to Kristof it is quite obvious.
“Hi,” he says, opening his car window and leaning his head out, smiling. “Would you like a lift?”
“Oh, hello,” she replies after an uncertain moment, her hand above her eyes to shield them from the morning light. “Sorry, I didn’t see you at first. That’s very kind of you –”
“Not at all.”
“But I’m happy to walk, thanks.”
“I think that’s great,” says Kristof. “That’s the right decision.”
She laughs, lowering her shopping bags to relieve her fingers.
“That’s the way to exercise – doing real chores. The hunter-gatherer way. Carrying shopping bags is the closest we get to our primal way of life. Except that we don’t hunt down our shopping.” After a pause, he says: “Well, I won’t detain you any longer. I hope you have a lovely weekend.”
“Thank you. You too.”
“It’s a day that makes you glad to be alive, isn’t it? I find that life – just bare life – is quite underrated. Breathing, for example, and seeing the sky. Enormously satisfying, in certain moods. Almost unbearable. But maybe that’s only my morning coffee speaking.”
“Well, that’s a good recommendation for coffee. Maybe it would save people from coming to psychologists!”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Psychology is about as essential as a profession can get. People underestimate the power of words.”
There is a pleasant silence between them. His arm is hooked comfortably out of the window. Her face is a little moist from carrying the bags, even though it is a cool day. It appears that Maria has pushed herself.
“Goodbye, then,” says Kristof. And off he drives. His car, he notices through the rear-view mirror, is watched by Maria as it speeds up the road.
Three
Morning sickness does not only happen in the mornings. After lunch Maria bends, hands on knees, vomiting – a force beyond her control – onto the paving stones outside the house. Her nausea has only escalated since her meal of salty crackers and ginger tea – supposedly a palliative. When she came out earlier to fetch the post, moving from the comforting gloom of her therapy room into a sunny winter’s morning, her sickness peaked.
The paving stones are wet with vomit. This sight, plus the acrid smell, brings the nausea swimmingly round again. Frustratingly, her morning sickness does not recede after a good vomit. It persists.
She goes inside to boil water for pouring over the paving stones. While the kettle is on, she heads to the bathroom to rinse and brush her teeth. The room remains as her mother left it on the day of the accident: New Age magazines in a wicker basket and Claudia’s collection of green frogs, plastic and ceramic, on the windowsill, the front frog coquettishly lounging on its side in a pink petticoat. I should chuck out all this junk, she thinks as she brushes her teeth, but even the thought is wearisome.
Maria picks up one of the frogs and stares out the open window at the ivy-coated wall of the neighbour a few metres in front of her. She can hear the drain pipe trickling water, and wonders idly when last Claudia’s gutters – now, strangely, her own – were checked. It’s been nine months since the event in the forest, and she doubts her mother paid the gutters much attention before then, knowing her attitude towards household maintenance. The phone rings, and she rushes to get there in time.
“Maria? Kristof here. So pleased I caught you. Do you have a moment?”
“Of course.” How strange it was bumping into him on the weekend, and now a further call from this man, just five days later.
“I phoned to thank you for last week’s session. I forgot to mention it when I ran into you. A group of philosophers