Читать книгу The Fall - Jen Thorpe - Страница 12

Thuli

Today, Doctor Mofokeng’s offices are bathed in natural light and I’m always amazed that they’re somehow able to block out the sound from the outside world. Could be double-glazing, but I think it’s also something about the doctor herself that seems to take sound and transform it, to take questions based in worry and angst and turn them into sensible statements with solutions.

I’d guess she’s in her early fifties, though I’ve never asked. Her body reminds me of my mother’s. Soft in all the places a woman can be soft, yet presenting the appearance of a firmness that is comforting just to be near. Today must be my twelfth session with her, and I feel so safe here, yet I don’t feel like I know anything about her.

Her desk is always neat and tidy, with no papers or photo frames showing a happy family, husband or wife, or any grandkids. There is nothing that reveals her life outside this room, just her MacBook, always closed, not even a desktop background to give an inkling of taste or preference.

There is a large window in her office that looks out into the dappled overgrowth of a bougainvillea bush, and on the ledge are potted plants that I have watched change throughout our sessions. A new blossom here, a dead leaf there, are signs to me that time is in fact passing and that time changes things. Signs that things are growing, myself included if I’m lucky.

‘I’m glad you still decided to come, Thulebona, especially with everything that’s going on up campus. I’m sure the stress of all that must be affecting you?’ She makes a statement a question like a good shrink is trained to.

‘I wasn’t going to come. Only, I’ve been seeing things that make me feel worse than the protests do.’

‘What have you seen?’

Doctor Mofokeng only wears matching clothes, as though everything is tested against a colour palette. Today it’s shades of green, which are soothing to look at. I wonder if she keeps things paired up to avoid being a distraction from whatever torments people are dealing with in here. If you look at her for long enough, it’s easy just to zone her out. But she’s asked me a question, and I guess the university pays her to listen, so I tell her everything I told Helen. She listens, as though it’s all completely normal.

‘It sounds like those images you’re seeing upset you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re only seeing them in your mind, when you’re “glitching”?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could there be any reason that these images you’re seeing aren’t real?’

She’s been politely trying to convince me, without ever overtly saying it, that these glitches I’m having are actually flashbacks, manufactured by my brain to try to make sense of what happened to me. I’d like to believe I was going mad too. For once it’s the far less scary option. It would mean there was something clearly wrong, something that could be fixed. It would give me some room to get it all under control. To treat it like I would any other illness. But it’s not that simple.

Mom says black people don’t go mad; they just sometimes hear their ancestors a little too loudly. For Mom, these visions of mine could equally have been sent by the Lord to cure me of my unholy sexual urges, or the rambling echoes of a spirit inside me. How she reconciles the ancestors and the Lord, damnation and her love for me – that’s none of my business.

‘I think they’re real because …’ I know they’re real. ‘Because all the other things I’ve seen so far have happened; even when they hadn’t happened yet in real life, after I saw them in a glitch, they came true.’

‘And how does it make you feel, this ability to see things ahead of time?’

Responsible, for everyone and everything. Terrified. Exhilarated. Helpless.

‘It feels like I have to do something.’

‘What is it that you feel you have to do?’

‘Change things, you know, like, stop bad things from happening.’

‘You feel like you want to stop bad things from happening?’

When she writes in her notebook, I don’t know what to feel. I’m the one who’s dictating the story, but how she hears it is so far beyond my control. How or what anyone thinks about what I say is something I’ve had to let go of. The only listening I care about is Sindiwe’s.

‘Well, I have to do something, don’t I? I mean, I don’t want anyone else to get hurt …’

She sits quietly, letting me think about what I’m leaving out of that sentence. Like me. Of course, she knows about what happened to me, and so I don’t have to go into the gory details again.

That’s why I started coming here. The university is probably only paying so that I don’t give them any bad publicity by telling the news that I was gang-raped within five hundred metres of the dorms, by other students, whom they’ve chosen to let finish their studies. The university recommended I go for trauma ‘debriefing’ and offered to pay after Sindiwe insisted I at least report what had happened to the campus police, if not the real ones. So, the good doctor-shrink is my consolation prize for losing the lottery of being born a woman. Better than nothing, I guess.

‘Have you been seeing things more often?’

Her question punctures my flashback and I’m grateful for it. I haven’t told the good doctor that I can control the glitches now, that I taught myself how to on the days when I couldn’t come to campus. Or at least, I can control the time that I glitch to, but not where I am. How that works is still a mystery to me. Until I understand it, I don’t want to tell her.

‘I guess I’ve been seeing things in the glitches regularly. I mean, I keep seeing this same thing over and over – that’s what’s bugging me. Hector jumping up onto that block, then getting shot. Over and over and over, always the same.’

‘Is there a chance that you might be exploring how you’d feel if Hector were to die?’

‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘Could this be a type of imaginary punishment?’

‘Punishment?’

She flicks back in her notebook.

‘In our last session you expressed that you were angry with Hector. That you felt that he’d let you down. Do you still have those feelings?’

I can feel my face reacting when she says his name, and when I have to spit it out of my mouth. He knew what type of guys Mvusa, Sid, and Ntozimbi are. They knew he wanted Sindiwe for himself, and were just looking for a way to show off to their master. Like dogs pissing on a pole. Is it Hector’s fault they decided to do that by beating me, tying me up, and raping me until I lost consciousness? Possibly not, but it was his duty as my friend to stop his own friends from ever even having ideas like that. It was his duty to choose better friends in the first place. It was his duty to acknowledge what they’d done, what had happened to me, instead of pretending not to know.

Of course I’m angry, I’m furious.

‘I try not to think about it. Anger isn’t going to help me feel any better. I have to see him every day because he and Sindiwe are running this show, so—’

‘Have you warned Hector about what you’re seeing?’

‘We don’t talk any more.’

‘You don’t talk any more?’

She’s silent again, wanting to see if I’m ready to dig a little deeper. I don’t feel like it, and I’m starting to regret coming here. I should have just stayed up campus with Sindiwe listening to the students listen to crappy music, taking selfies and singing. But I don’t want to lose this slot. I’m scared if I don’t keep coming, the university will stop paying. Right now I need Doctor Mofokeng to make sure that, like those window-ledge plants, I am changing.

But I’m not budging on this one. I’m done talking about Hector today. I cross my arms and sit back in a perfect sulking posture, and she lets it go.

‘How are things going with Sindiwe?’

‘They’re going good. We’re trying to take care of each other.’

I can’t keep sulking if I’m talking about her. If I were a poet, I’d have filled books and books with words about her, knowing that all of them would not be enough to describe her. She is everything.

‘Tell me about what taking care of each other looks like?’

I think back to waking up on campus after Hector’s pack of thugs were done with me. I stumbled back home, and ignored all the advice I’d ever heard about what to do if you were raped because my desire to be clean was greater than the desire for some two-years-down-the-line-unlikely-criminal-justice. I washed myself until it hurt, scalding hot showers, scrubbing brushes, antiseptic soap. I figured if I wasn’t going to go to the police, then I wanted every cell of those evil motherfuckers off me. Then the soap ran out and I went to the kitchen to find something else and all that was there was bleach. It was feeling tempted to use it that made me call her. I recognised I was too far gone. I didn’t want to die.

‘It looks like … Sindiwe just knows how to make me feel better. To make me feel safe.’

‘What does safety look like in your relationship?’

When she arrived that night, I gave her the short version of what had happened. Telling her had immersed me in the shame and fear and terror again, and it felt as if I hadn’t washed at all. She’d listened, shaking her head and holding my hand. When I was done, she had pulled me up and led me to the kitchen. It had been like going home to a funeral.

Women know grief is hungry work, and though the food can’t reach the sadness, you have to eat to survive. She cooked, we ate in silence, then she made tea, made a shopping list and went out, returned, arms laden with bags, and restocked my fridge as if we were preparing for the apocalypse. We stayed at home for almost a week before she had to go back to class for a test.

‘She cooks for me. She makes sure I eat. She … she tells me the truth.’

‘Do you feel that others aren’t telling you the truth?’

‘I guess what I mean is that she listens to me in a way that allows me to tell the truth. That she holds me accountable to my own feelings, know what I mean?’

‘Can you explain it in further detail?’

Some time that night – after she had forced me to eat and we had packed the fridge – she began to whisper straight into my hair as we spooned in bed.

‘We have to get you to a hospital. You need to get the medicine to protect you. They can take evidence there, so you can send these guys to jail.’

‘I’ve washed all the evidence away, Sindi. There’s nothing for them to find. Anyway, I’m not putting myself through that. You know nobody ever wins rape cases.’

‘But you could stop them from doing it to someone else.’

‘It’s not my job to save other people when I can’t even take care of myself.’

‘Oh, baby,’ she whispered as I sobbed, ‘this isn’t your fault.’

I knew it wasn’t, but I just couldn’t go to the police and look at a stranger and describe how people had taken from me. So we slept, and in the morning she convinced me we should go to the hospital, if only to look at the wounds I had on my wrists, to get some drugs to prevent STDs, to get painkillers.

She said she would be there – she was there – but she couldn’t protect me from the forensic exam or the cold of the speculum. The doctor explained everything in a kind but perfunctory voice, like it was a script she’d recited a thousand times that day already, or had formed a hard callus around whatever pain she might be experiencing. Instead of feeling comforted, I drifted off entirely, right back to the rape. Right back to that moment, reliving it.

When I came back to myself on the hospital bed, it was like nothing had happened. Sindiwe and the doctor were just as I had left them.

‘I went back there,’ I moaned.

‘Flashbacks to the event are a common side-effect of sexual violence,’ the doctor said, her voice clinical.

But even then, I knew the visions I was seeing weren’t flashbacks. They were something else. Now I call them a glitch, so at least I have a good name for them.

Doctor Mofokeng taps her pen on her notebook, bringing me back to myself.

‘Have you told Sindiwe what you have seen?’

‘No.’

‘Why do you think that is?’

‘Because I know she’ll try to save him.’

‘What would that mean for you?’

‘She could get hurt.’

But the myth says she won’t. Says she’s invincible. Says she is the one who has been chosen to lead our movement. Her father died for this myth. Of course, I haven’t told her that I’ve heard about this either, and I don’t intend to test this myth out by putting the person I love in danger. I don’t want to get into the details with Doctor Mofokeng right now either.

‘How does it feel not to tell her?’

‘It feels …’

She waits for me to finish, and this time I avoid answering not because I don’t want to tell her, but because there is just so much feeling behind lying to the person you love to protect them that it’s hard to put it into a simple word.

‘It’s hard.’

‘How do you think she would feel if she knew Hector were going to die?’

‘Awful. But it’s not like I want him to die. I’m not causing this. I’m just seeing things and hoping that they don’t come true. But I told the journalist, like I said, and hopefully she can fix this.’

‘The journalist who reported on Sindiwe’s father’s death?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see.’ She closes her notebook, interlacing her fingers, signalling to me that our session is almost at a close. ‘Do you feel like the journalist will be able to help you in the way that you want her to?’

‘I hope so.’

She smiles, an unreadable smile, and nods. ‘Well, Thulebona, I hope that when I see you next week, this has all been resolved in a peaceful way for everyone.’

‘Me too, Doctor.’

I mean it, even if she thinks I don’t.

She stands slowly, placing the notebook on the desk and ushering me to the door. I look at her and have the urge to embrace her, to be swallowed by the softness of her green jersey and to feel safe the way I used to feel with Mom before she couldn’t forgive me for loving whom I loved. I catch the faintest smell of perfume, floral and rosy, as she opens the door and moves out of my path. Outside her room, I hear the students chanting.

‘Be safe, Thulebona. Remember to take care of yourself, too.’

I hope I can do what she asks.