Читать книгу All That is Left - Kirsten Miller - Страница 10

There is a lonely road that winds into the heart of the country, a road that begins where the city of gold’s glow ends and another land rises. Here is an earth painted flat in fields of brown and orange that goes so far into the distance as to meet the edge of the sky. Thomas stares out through the window at that land and dreams of a time long gone, when what carried a man was made of living flesh and was not mechanical, when what a man carried was little more than what was necessary to get him through the day.

For some hours after the city’s edge there is no more change in the landscape. He thinks of a time when a journey across the countryside meant that a man became a part of it, that animal and human and earth would breathe and sweat and pound together to become one in order to travel any distance. Beneath him the bus’s engine hums and he feels the tremor of the open road reach his fingertips. He wonders what happened when they finally found his car, burnt out and abandoned. He muses about his own funeral: what they will arrange for him, and whether there will be flowers.

The bus travels on through the day. Passengers board and disembark in places remote and flat with few hills and dry earth and nothing but a petrol station and a convenience store, a contemporary oasis where people replenish or freshen up and refuel. Once, he leaves the bus to stretch his legs. He keeps his cap and sunglasses on and walks to the low white-painted fence that marks the edge of the property, turns and walks back again. While he walks he listens to the silence on the stretching land. He visits the restroom to relieve his bladder of the building pressure. Afterwards he finds his way into the cool interior of the shop. He can’t decide from the overpackaged merchandise what he wants to eat. The labels confuse him, now that he no longer knows who he is. Finally he chooses an expensive wedge of biltong wrapped in cellophane, and a litre of bottled water. It is the last time he’ll afford himself such luxuries. He pays at the till and the woman hands him change.

‘Thanks,’ he says. He quickly turns away, but her eyes are already on the money in the next customer’s hand.

Later he dreams with his head against the trembling window. He dreams he is running through smoke so dense that it chokes him, and when he looks down he sees Sizwe’s poetry scratched into the dust. He dreams of a woman who walks to the edge of the world and looks out at the sea. In the dream she draws patterns on his face with the mud made by the sand at her feet. When he wakes he wipes his eyes with a hand across his face but his cheeks are still dry. Maya. A moment of dread rumbles deep inside him. He forces his eyes to the sky and tells himself that there is more than one kind of life. He is, at whatever cost, still allowed to choose.

The woman in the seat across from him catches his glance and looks away but he doesn’t know if it is because the child beside her is crying, or if he himself has been whimpering in a world other than this one.

When the sun arcs high the landscape changes from wheatfields to arid country. The road stretches out long and endless towards a place he’s only heard of at the edge of the continent. Mounds of hard earth much taller than a man break the horizon in places. Sheep are dotted like specks in an antique oil painting. The seat beside him is empty and he tries to keep it that way by placing a book and his jacket there, though his erratic concentration won’t allow him to read. The further they travel into the heart of the land, the emptier the bus becomes. It is as though it’s a vehicle that provides this deep interior with her victims as one by one they disembark. It’s as though the road he is on is a one-way journey that could take him all the way to the other side.

As evening stretches out, the sky turns deep blue, then a dust-like grey before it succumbs to the night. The stars are more numerous than he has known. What stirs inside him now he has not felt since he was a child in the back seat of his father’s car on family holidays, when they travelled the country roads by night to avoid the heat of the summer days. This is beauty, he thinks. He cannot keep his eyes from above.

They come to a place at the end of a continent often described as dark, but there is no darkness here. The town’s light drains the sky of stars and the pavements burst with yellow light. Multitudes of people, weary from working all day, wait in long lines on the pavements to go home.

The bus rattles along a wide-built road with streetlights that stretch above it like the thin arms of dancers. The bus slows and screeches and moans before it comes to a halt at a place with no markers or sign that it is a bus stop. He is the third-last remaining passenger. The floor is littered with flat cigarette butts walked over many times. The driver shifts the gears, twists his body around and calls out through the glass plate that divides him from the rows of empty seats behind. ‘This is it. This is your stop. Though what you want here in this godforsaken place, only you and your maker can know.’

Thomas rises from his seat and reaches to the racks above to haul down the single hold-all carrier bag. He places the cap on his head and adjusts the scarf against the collar of his jacket. Thanking the driver, he climbs from the vehicle onto the pavement. The last two passengers also disembark. The bus hisses and sighs, shifts into gear and travels, empty now, away from him.

There are houses and structures and concrete buildings on either side of the road. This place lies between his own past and his own future. He can access neither until he steps out into the new world that waits for him alone.

* * *

He stands looking left and right with the bag in his hands. A small truck passes, rusted and old, low to the ground. In the open back men in overalls hold spades and forks. They stare at him where he stands in the cold mist, but he doesn’t look at their faces. ‘I could be anywhere,’ he whispers to the empty air. He is struck, immobile, by the choice he has made.

He waits ten minutes before a man approaches, tall and warmed by layers of clothing. Thick glasses take up half his face. Thomas looks at him and tries to find something that he recognises there, an echo or a voice from a long time ago, but there are only the glasses, and the time gone, and the way the man’s head tilts a little to the side. Houses surround them, some brick and some painted bright and some fenced and patrolled by mangy dogs with bright eyes and matted coats. They bark at him before losing interest, distracted by what they scrounge for in the dust.

The men find each other on the side of the street. The world waits for the night to pass.

‘Lucas,’ Thomas holds out his hand. The other takes it warmly in his own, and shakes it.

‘Thomas. My god, you’ve grown.’ Both men laugh. ‘Did you have a good journey?’

‘All journeys are good,’ Thomas says. ‘Moving is what we’re meant to do. It feels good to be moving again.’

‘It depends what we leave behind,’ Lucas replies. ‘And I thought you might have changed your mind.’ The cold takes his words and transforms them into a fine mist: his visible breath. They turn together and walk.

‘It’s good to be out of a city, anyway,’ Thomas says. ‘I feel very strange. Excited. I feel everything.’

‘This isn’t much of a place. There’s sweet nothing here. Roads and buildings and houses and electricity. These are what we need now.’

The yellow light lies flat across their path. There is no moon. A woman collapsed in the gutter with an empty bottle beside her greets them with half-closed eyes. Lucas raises a hand in return. A stray cat tiptoes on quick legs, flattens its body and slinks into a stormwater drain. Thomas follows the creature with his eyes and something moves inside him. On the road is a soggy mound that was once an animal of some sort.

At the corner two girls in jeans with shiny belts and tight shirts lean up against a wall. Three youths loiter beside them, leaning in. The group turn their heads in unison towards the two men. Lucas greets them, but there is no reply. Their attention is caught by the sight of the white man.

‘People will know you soon,’ Lucas says. ‘Nobody stays hidden out here for long.’

‘This is a big country. And they won’t find anything if nobody’s looking.’

Lucas laughs. ‘And what you look for most always escapes you.’

‘I hope that’s not true for me.’

‘So you’re looking for something, Thomas?’

Thomas tilts his face to the sky. What stars there might have been are diminished to nothing by the light from the ground. ‘We’re always looking for something,’ he says. ‘But right now I’m probably most looking forward to a bed.’

‘You could have done it another way, Thomas. A normal person would have got divorced. Sounds easier to me.’

‘There was no reason to,’ Thomas says. ‘It’s not about my wife or my work or even my life. I had to do this. I couldn’t stand my life any more.’

‘Why? A lot of people would envy you. Would want what your life is. Or what it was.’

‘I don’t want anything to follow me any more. We only get one life. I can choose what I want to do with it for myself. Can’t I have that?’

In silence now, they pass houses and dogs and rickety fences, doorways where old men sit and drink their beer alone while soccer games blare out from second-hand television sets.

‘Bafana Bafana aren’t doing so well,’ Lucas says eventually.

‘Everything has its day. It all comes and goes.’

‘Did you tell anyone?’

‘About Bafana Bafana?’

Lucas smiles.

‘Yes. I did tell someone,’ Thomas says ruefully.

‘Oh shit, man.’

‘What?’

‘That was stupid.’

‘I told a friend. He’s safe as houses. He’s the only one who knows. He’ll never say a word.’

Three young women crouch beneath a flickering light and proposition the men as they pass. They titter like small birds amongst themselves.

‘You kids, go home and get some sleep,’ Lucas says. ‘I want to see you in school tomorrow.’

Thomas thinks they are really just tall children, playing dress-up in their mother’s clothes.

‘There are some kids at the school who have never been children,’ Lucas tells him. ‘That bigger one, she’s a wild child. But it’s too late for her now.’

‘Does she have parents?’

‘Both have passed. Now she looks after herself. She still comes to school, and spends most of her nights on the street.’

‘What about Social Services? Can’t they do anything?’

‘I can make sure she gets an education. Beyond that, I don’t know if anyone really cares. There are a million others out there, just like her.’

Before they reach the house, Lucas grips the edge of Thomas’s coat with his fingers. ‘I’m scared for you,’ he says. ‘You don’t know what you’ve done, how stupid you’ve been. How will you go back, if you change your mind?’ He blinks as though the world is another place behind those glasses, as if he can see something else. ‘You can’t go back now. You can’t change your mind, Thomas. This is it. You’ve made your bed.’

‘There’s nothing to go back to,’ Thomas answers. ‘Life is a forward motion. All the way to death.’

In the house a pot of stew is simmering on the stove. A woman lifts the lid and ladles the meat and sauce in steaming heaps onto plates. Lucas hangs his coat and hat on a hook behind the door. ‘This is Lumka,’ he says. The woman looks awkward and wipes her hands on her apron. She nods and gazes intently at the stew. She barely glances at Thomas.

While they are eating, Lucas tells the woman that he’s made up the bed in the spare room. She nods again and raises her eyes to him, but she doesn’t keep them there for long.

‘Thanks for having me,’ Thomas says when the meal is over. Lucas takes a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Lumka scrapes the plates one by one into a bowl of waste.

Outside Lucas offers Thomas a cigarette, angling the soft pack towards him. Thomas shakes his head and Lucas withdraws one for himself from the pack, and puts it to his lips.

‘Lumka … your wife. She’s not happy I’m here,’ Thomas says. It is more of a question than a statement though the sentence stays flat.

Lucas exhales and yawns and rubs his left eye. ‘Change is difficult for everyone. She’ll get used to it,’ he says.

‘Does she also teach?’

‘No. She trained as a secretary but there are no jobs now. Looking after a house is also a job. I tell her that. She doesn’t really think so. We get by though. Teaching salaries are better than they used to be.’

‘Did you always want to be a teacher?’

‘Not really.’

‘Why then?’

‘My mother wanted it. For me and for my brother. For both of us.’ He pats his pocket, finds a lighter and brings a flame to the cigarette. ‘But Xolani wasn’t the type. He was never cut out for teaching.’

‘And you were?’

‘Xolani was my mother’s golden boy. It became more so after he died. I was always trying to keep up, but my brother always won.’ He shrugs. ‘Naturally I did what she wanted. I thought it would get me somewhere.’

‘Did it?’

‘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.