No Time Like the Present: A Novel (19 page)

You’re never alone in a room, always some other form of life is there with you. She moves to close the window against the rain in the air and she’s signalled to by the slither of a silverfish moth out of one of the books in the shelves she is passing.

She tries to stamp on it with the bony edge of her thumb joint but of course its form is made for escape—gone. She clatters out books from the stack of four or five into which it’s vanished and several more of the creatures fall from the pages. It’s more difficult than swatting flies. If they live on paper it is easier to get at in the loose form than between the covers of books. There is an adjoining tier of shelves she and Steve bought from a made-to-measure carpentry store in a mall partly owned by an Indian comrade who has become a successful businessman—Steve’s academic documents and papers are haphazardly piled there. What a feast. She begins to stir among them, taking out a bundle, and a few sheets, some newspaper cuttings, escape scattered on the floor. No silverfish to be seen; but the whole paper collection ought to be tidied up, she straightens at least the shelf she has disturbed, and gathers to replace what has fallen. The newspaper cuttings are flimsy and falter out again. They are in the familiar format of advertisements; all have in heavy black type their product: AUSTRALIA. The dates on which they appear, some almost a year back, some recent, are in his handwriting. AUSTRALIA CALLING AUSTRALIAN MIGRATION AUSTRALIA. Australia needs your skills today! SERIOUS ABOUT AUSTRALIA? She begins to pick up snatches from one to another—she must slow down, read the texts while her mind in another mode of attention, intrigued, tries to answer why he should cut and keep these. ARE YOU INTERESTED IN LIVING IN AUSTRALIA ON A TEMPORARY OR PERMANENT BASIS? LOOK NO FURTHER. Explore hidden opportunities. Trustworthy, spectacular success rate. For ONLINE ASSESSMENT AND INFO…IMMIGRATION AUSTRALIA. Consultancy will be holding a free seminar. The seminar will cover recent immigration announcements and what Australia has to offer. We are specially interested in those people with degrees. Immigration lawyer will be available for one-on-one consultations…cost applies…AUSTRALIA. Hosting a seminar. Space is limited so please call to reserve your seat. Available for appointments to inquire about our upcoming Australia migration event covering various migration pathways. Click on Immigration Seminars. Please join us for a free seminar on…

If he is thinking of writing something about the phenomenon, skilled people leaving the country (an issue for the university) how is it he hasn’t mentioned this, said anything, as we do, to each other. I would be interested, he knows. Show me this stuff.

Hidden away as if they were love letters from some woman.

Because she would not allow herself the explanation that she couldn’t believe, consider, she found herself at the door of the Andersons, as she might have dropped in from a walk. Unthinking, it was not likely anyone would be home at this time in the afternoon: at work and the boys still in school. She herself wouldn’t have been back in the Suburb if the property dispute case she was engaged in as attorney to one of the advocates in the firm she had joined, hadn’t been remanded and he’d postponed the discussion until the next day. But Jake opened the door, after a wait. He was rumpled, hair and clothes, must have been resting, back early, he often suffered headaches since the hijack attack. Barefoot, he led her in.—Isa’s not home yet.—But if without realising it she had wanted anyone it was him, the comrade who was Steve’s fellow male. The small talk. Asking Jake if he was all right, how was he feeling. He waved hands down himself in apology for dishevelment. She held out the cuttings.—Do you know these?—He moved them between thumb and first finger, as with cards in a game.—Of course, they’re in the papers regularly. Why?—

—I found them today, fell out of some journals and things Steve keeps.—

He’s scanning; while taking time to read what she’s telling him.—So? I suppose he keeps lots of cuttings, many things happen to us, you find you’ve forgotten…get dates mixed up—then you need to—

—If he’s writing something for the
Umkhonto
veterans (just come to her) he hasn’t said anything about it to me.—As if it were a question.—Not to me. We haven’t taken much notice of guys taking the plane for Perth, whoever they are.—

Why has Jabu presented these cuttings. What does she want him to say. Steve’s pissed off. We’re all pissed off with what’s becoming of the country.

Jake lifts eyebrows in avoidance and rubs a hand across his face to rid himself—weariness or refusal.—How do I know.—

He knows. Puts the wad of cuttings—evidence she’s seen—from one hand to another. And gives them back to her.

There’s nothing more for them to say to each other.

His lawyer woman produced the evidence to him that night when Gary Elias had been persuaded to go to bed, Sindi was already in her room listening to Michael Jackson, and Wethu in her chicken coop cottage with the TV Steve had bought for her in compensation for loss of the company of collaterals in KwaZulu. The place, the room where the momentous is about to be raised,
to happen
, comes out of ignored familiarity, to a new focus that will be stored when paper cuttings have been eaten by silverfish moth and the change of existence they propose has either been effected—or never existed. The much-lived-in room of the house in the Suburb occupied since Glengrove Place, the chairs bought to provide missing comfort, the pictures painted by artists in the common kind of experience, one in Brazil, the others in Africa, shared with the house occupants, the school blazer left lying, face-down books, cracked tray with sunglasses among coffee cups and half-empty bottle of wine, a ballpoint pen with Mickey Mouse head: witness. She looked round in inventory as she took from somewhere in the cotton dashiki she liked to exchange for her court clothes, some of the cuttings AUSTRALIA.

—They fell out when I was cleaning up this afternoon. From your papers.—

—Yes.—

Now she is waiting for his recollection: commonplace curiosity, something for chatter round the Dolphin pool.

He had picked up the tray; he lifted from it Gary Elias’s Mickey Mouse pen, balancing the burden with the other hand. He placed the pen on the table.

—I wasn’t getting into your things.—Comrades respect privacy however intimate and long-tested a relationship. He stood with the tray; at once it had become her responsibility to speak, say whatever there was to say.

But—urgent between them this is not an argument.—You’ve never said, I mean, you were keeping this—about Australia. What for.—

Another silence. His eyes are on her, they see each other in a way they do, not in the familiarity dear to them, if sometimes taken for granted.—I was, I am going to talk to you.—

—Australia.—She is slowly working not just her shoulder but her body. She doesn’t want to go on.—Tell me, you’re not really thinking Australia. Us.—

—I have been. For us, Sindi, Gary Elias. I know how you feel, it’s how I feel too—felt.—He went away carried the tray to the kitchen she heard it meet the metal surface of the space beside the sink.

He brought the declaration back with him, standing it unfurled to them.—Was this what it was for, what we did—The Struggle. Comrades—reborn clones of apartheid bosses. Our ‘renaissance’. Arms corruption, what’s the nice procedure in your courts, the never-never—the Methodist dump just one of the black cesspots of people nobody wants, nobody knows what to do with—‘Rights’ too highfalutin’ to apply to refugees—shacks where our own people supposed now to have walls and a roof, still living in shit, I could go on and on as we do, the comrades. I’m in the compound of transformation at a university, schools don’t have qualified teachers—or toilets—children come to learn without food in their stomachs.—

At the Fifty-second Annual Conference of the African National Congress in Polokwane: Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, Praise name Msholozi, Chief of Intelligence in
Umkhonto we Sizwe
who had been a prisoner on Robben Island for ten years, and operated in exile from Mozambique and Swaziland.

He was elected President of the ANC by a majority against a breakaway faction as well as supporters of the country’s President Thabo Mbeki, who had dismissed him as Deputy President over the case, two years earlier, of corruption, President Mbeki making whatever the court verdict—the court decision was that the indictment was set aside—a moral judgement of involvement with a charge of this nature as disqualifying a man from the second highest position in the land.

There was tumultuous celebration, particularly by the youth, who sang with Zuma his theme song ‘
Awuleth’ umshini wami
’, bring me my machine gun, an
Umkhonto we Sizwe
war cry which (if not to be used literally) was surely going to bring them jobs, houses, cars, feast of the good life when—again taken for granted—he would be next President of the country. He had testified in court he was aware the young woman with whom he had sexual intercourse in the rape charge was HIV-positive: in his victory speech at the Polokwane Conference he declared ‘all structures of government should actively participate in the fight against HIV and AIDS in all facets of the national strategy—prevention, treatment, support for families affected, infected.’

Zuma President of the Party.

—Your father will be elated.—

If it was meant wryly to share her feelings, it was a mistake. She turned her head in her familiar gesture of finality. Stupid of him, he saw: how could she, as they both did, deplore the result and, as she would have to, accept in the privacy of her relationship with Baba, her father’s satisfaction.

What he could do right: he enquired from a friend (if not a comrade) at the university who had often spoken of the joys of a cottage on the Cape Coast, whether it might by chance be for hire during the Christmas and New Year period. It belonged to the friend’s father-in-law, and as the family was going to be overseas, this was arranged.

He took the liberty of making the announcement of distraction, Holiday At the Sea, to Jabu and the children as a treat offered rather than a decision to be made between him and her…Coming out of love and concern. She could hardly reject the proposal as irrelevant—in the face of the children’s excitement, Gary Elias announcing at once he would go surfing, his friend had a board he’d borrow.

No Christmas visit to the KwaZulu home at present: understood.—Gary’ll have his time with the cousins in the Easter holidays.—

A New Year.

There was one of the many beaches, clean sand runways to the sea and the sky shown in tourist brochures for foreign visitors. The cottage only a walk away through the bushes. If it were not for newspapers and the radio—no TV in the father-in-law’s retreat—Polokwane, Zuma and what the consequences might have been left behind the door in the Suburb. Australia.

When he came back to the right umbrella among many, with fruit juice and ice cream from the beach shop—And the papers?—He didn’t have to return. Jabu ran loping off across the sand.

They both read with the compulsion that matches thirst with which Sindi and Gary downed juice and ice cream. Sea and sky blotted out in newsprint: the split in the Party confirmed at the Polokwane Conference, rivalry even over the name chosen by the breakaway faction for their new party, ‘Congress of The People’—COPE—claiming both the masses and the ability to meet their needs. Congress of The People.—Well…how can you take the title of an actual, a specific event of ANC history, how many years ago?—That’s what it was.

Flips up her sunglasses.—Why can’t you? It’s a statement, what it promises it’s going to be. Anyway does the name matter. Just the Zuma crowd angry that anything claiming ‘the people’—they’re its property, his property, even the words.—

—It is a
threat
. Look what we’ve lost—Lekota to begin with.—Both have strong convictions of the political integrity, intelligence, honesty of Mosiuoa Lekota, Struggle man known as Terror Lekota until with peace-and-freedom that’s too suggestive of terrorism although in fact it was a nickname celebrating his fame as a football player.—Terror gone—that’s on ANC’s cost of the bill for infighting, back-stabbing, who’s taking bribes from whom, the whole Shaik mess smeared on the party…COPE. This name’s not
nothing
it’s the sign of take-over from our party’s failure, failure of ideals. Promises?—

And that final word has a tone which questions what it means. The election of a new President, new government, new promises. Only a year away from this New Year which has arrived at the beach.

—Don’t we have to have promises—

—Even if our leaders don’t—can’t—keep them.—

Sindi gets up to go and swim.

Sindi hitching at her bikini. Sindiswa’s adolescence, summons of attention to another current of time running with change, she’s walking now with the side-to-siding of buttocks Jabu had when he first saw her in Swaziland, the side-to-siding attractive to men black women have. His daughter in this kind of present.

Gary Elias is out of sight fishing with pals he’d immediately made on the beach. They are coloured, like himself, and various, some black as well as white, nothing remarkable about that, to them. But unthinkable remembered from another childhood: playing on the Whites Only beaches. And at last Sindi and the boy are getting a decent—a human education; but this is because the parents—we—can afford (we’ve ducked comrade principles enough) to send them to private schools. Open to any child of the people. Whose parents can pay.

They’re alone under the umbrella. He takes a swill from a bottle of juice and holds it out for her.

As if she doesn’t see.

—Has something happened at the university.—

The jostle of waves and the hush of their retreat. Doesn’t she understand. That’s not it. You don’t come suddenly to the stage of considering, at a certain point in the living of it, your life, the multiple living of Sindi, Gary Elias, Jabu and self. A shock at some academic decision taken by the Principal he trusts? No. An
un
covery—like the recent one the science faculty dealt with so well, that one of his own brightest students was peddling drugs on campus. The culprit’s defence: to pay hostel fees. No. Or a bypass, when a colleague was given a promotion of responsibility above the Assistant Professor’s own? No. That’s not it. She always had ambitions for him he didn’t covet, care about for himself.