Absolution (28 page)

‘You wish to do what? To make me realize my faults and my failings, I suppose,’ I say to Nora now. ‘To remind me of everything I did to wrong you.’

‘Yes, there is that,’ Nora says, a smirk pushing out through her pout, a smirk and a pout we share. ‘And after all,
you
have summoned us. What’s more, you’re not sufficiently
penitent
, Clare. You are a
terrible
sinner, and yet you don’t go to church, you ignore tradition, you do nothing to demonstrate that you regret or repent.’

‘Each person has her own form of repentance. I repent in my own way, in private,’ I insist. ‘I repent in ways that even you, the dead, may not see.’

‘And if I am, as you appear to think at this very moment, nothing but some hallucination of your own mind, then wouldn’t that suggest your attempts at repentance have failed?’ Nora shakes her head and those eyes that so often flashed in fury, eyes that screamed and raged as loudly as her voice when she bellowed wrath at me as a child, eyes that judged and condemned, autocratic as any dictator, grow gentle before me.

We sit in silence for a further hour in the middle of the night, two sisters, so alike, separated by time. ‘Is this the price I must pay,’ I finally bring myself to ask, ‘this waking of the living?’

‘Price? You speak of a single price? There is not one price. There are many prices for what you have done, all the acts you have committed. Prices, debts, and balances against you, Clare. You have but begun to repay them.’

*

Now that I have summoned you and Nora, brought you forth, how do I make you go, Laura? If I wore black, if I fasted and lit candles and recited incantations, retreated to hermitage caves in the wilderness, perhaps you would allow me to live out the rest of my days and nights unmolested.

After her wedding, her embrace of her husband’s church, Nora chastised me for failing to be observant. ‘Faith is what you need,’ she said. ‘You need faith to put you on a better course. You are an evil woman, Clare, and someday that evil will catch you up.’

‘As a child I played at faith,’ I remember saying, furious that she should presume to lecture me about something so personal, ‘in the way that one will play at dressing up as princesses. I always knew it was imaginary. To you, I know, faith has always had a corporeal reality. I cannot explain how we came to see things so differently.’

Nora clucked at me, looking more superior than she usually did. We were in the old house on Canigou Avenue and Mark was crawling around on the floor while Nora photographed him. ‘Someday God will find you,’ she cooed, and snapped a photo. ‘He will choose you and take you. You are mistaken if you think you have free will. Faith is not a matter of individual choice.’

‘It is
my
choice!’ I shouted, feeling the rage pulse in my eyes. ‘It is my choice not to believe in comforting fantasies. Comforting fantasies are undoing this world. By the laws of comforting fantasies one group feels it right and proper to subjugate all others.’

‘And what about my nephew? Are you going to let my boy grow up outside of the church, without God?’

‘He is not
your
boy!’ Mark looked up at me, startled, and began to cry. ‘He is my child and William’s child and we will raise him to be an ethical man, a good man, not a man who feels himself above any other person because of the colour of his skin or the god he bows down before.’

‘Children can’t find their own way,’ Nora said, taking a picture of Mark wailing in my arms, my face wild with fury. ‘They must have guidance. They must have adults to guide them properly.’ Another photo: a flash and more screaming.

‘It’s time for you to go,’ I said, opening the door.

Nora came again last night, looking much as she did on that day I remember. She speaks as she always now speaks, with a salutation followed by hours of annoying pronouncements about my work. And then, rising from where she was sitting, she placed her ghostly hands over my face and I could feel my eyelids through her fingertips. As her hands fell away and I opened my eyes once again, I found myself in an unfamiliar room, still sitting at the end of a bed, but not my own, not in this house. I looked down at my legs and saw Nora’s in their place, sheathed in a nightgown. A man was lying beside me and I knew from the smell of his aftershave and the camphor cream rubbed into the soles of his feet that it must be my brother-in-law, Stephan. The door to this new room rattled with a sudden force and my hand rose to my mouth, though I had not thought to move it. My feet twitched but I had not compelled them to do so. Stephan murmured in panic and I turned to look at him. The body I inhabited was acting of its own volition; I was merely a visitor within it.

The door rattled again and I found myself running towards it, Nora’s body bracing against the wood, looking back at Stephan cowering on the bed. Nora hissed at him to call for help, but as his hand went for the phone her body was thrown back by the door crashing open. We landed on the floor against the bed’s
footboard, a report of pain echoing along Nora’s shoulders – a pain I could feel, but only at one remove, more pressure than pain.

A man came through the door and closed it behind him, although the latch no longer engaged and it swung back open, letting in light from the corridor – just like the light from my own corridor coming into my own bedroom. The man did not bother to wear a mask. If a person could be said to look rational, this man did. But his was not the face of the man I had come to know in the weeks after Nora’s death, the man who was charged and found guilty and never denied the charges.

I wonder, Laura, what you looked like when you killed, if your face was composed, if you were fully conscious of your actions, as this man appeared to be, or if you were overcome with rage and the blaze of the moment. I picture your mouth drawn in a line, see the lips pushed together: a rational mouth, a mouth in harmony with what the rest of the body is doing. And then I cannot help seeing a different you, a woman enflamed, screaming vengeance, unfurling a tongue of fire.

There was nothing wild-eyed or impulsive about my sister’s assassin. He knew his task and undertook it without breaking a sweat or allowing his hands to shake. The smell of shit filled the room as the man rested the silencer of his gun against Nora’s face. I felt something release in my sister’s body and a hot wetness spread across the legs. In an instant Stephan had moved towards the window and, as if strings connected the two, the man moved in the same direction, firing his gun three times.

I did not want to turn around to look but Nora’s body did. I knew already what Stephan Pretorius looked like in death. The stench of shit and urine that seared my nostrils billowed out from Nora’s lap, mingling with the smells of gunpowder and the gun’s oils, the odours of a crude beast created by the highest of animals – a beast with no place in nature.

The man with the gun then turned to Nora. As he took aim, I felt the bowels of the body I occupied loosen again, the liquid
warmth continue to flow down onto the floor, and though I wanted to plead, to beg this man to pardon my sister, I could not make Nora’s mouth move, could force no sound to come out.

As I watched the man’s finger curl round the trigger, I woke alone in my own bedroom with the memory burning across my eyes of Nora’s destroyed face – a screaming pope disintegrating into darkness.

Such experiences can be explained in only two ways according to the logic by which I live, a logic which does not allow for the supernatural, though it was by the trappings of supernatural practice, my sham nekyia round the fire, that I seem to have occasioned these recent phenomena. The cause is either psychological, meaning that my own sense of guilt and complicity in evil acts has grown to the point that even my conscious mind is affected as if in a dream state. Or the cause is physical, and perhaps, in that case, the crueller of the two: the loss of my mind by the process of a self-annihilating dementia, though I am not aware of any other psychological abnormalities, memory problems or confusions, and the doctors have all pronounced me sound.

I can understand the allure of the supernatural. To explain your and Nora’s visits as a haunting, as the intrusion of a world beyond the physical one before me, would be the more comforting explanation. And in the absence of any other, it may be the one I am forced to believe.

*

Now that Sam has left me in peace for the foreseeable future, I set aside the last of your notebooks, Laura, my guide to the final weeks before your disappearance, the days you spent in the company of Sam. I turn instead to one chosen at random from the middle of the pile, wondering how it is possible that for twenty years I have left these ten volumes largely unread. It is not entirely true. At moments of greatest weakness and need and grief, I have picked one up, read a single page until I could not see clearly
enough to read any further, and put them away again in the safe for months or years. Any hope I had that the books might provide clues to your whereabouts was overcome by my own selfish grief.

The notebook I take up now dates from the year you began working for the
Cape Record
. You had moved into the furnished flat above a shop on Lower Main Road in Observatory. On a typical morning you got up early to sit outside on the covered balcony, watching the traffic, people and cars, waving to the neighbours, calling out to them, a young white woman in a grey neighbourhood. (‘Don’t you want to live somewhere safer?’ you reported me demanding. Your retort: ‘I don’t want to live in deepest darkest suburbia like you.’)

Your father was giving you money to help make ends meet, though this was something I did not know at the time. I would have protested, said that you should first try to make a go of your life without our help, forgetting the way my own parents subsidized my itinerant years abroad, so much less focussed, so much more extravagant than you ever were, less noble in my aims.
You
wanted to tell the truth,
I
to fabulate and fabricate. In such a time and place, who better to support than you? You and your brother both inherited your father’s love of the truth. I cannot help seeing that as an indictment of my own professional lying.

After your morning coffee you showered, dressed in simple and unfeminine clothes, and went downstairs hoping your battered yellow Valiant would still be where you parked it the night before. (It was stolen once; your father helped you buy another, paid a former student to let you park it in his driveway a few streets away – another secret I did not know.) Each working day you drove fifteen minutes along Victoria Road and into the City Centre, parked, and went to your office.

At first, your editors only allowed you, young and recently finished with your degree at Rhodes as you were, to write obituaries. In the notebook you recorded brief sketches of your subjects:

A retired shopkeeper with three absent children, all emigrated to England. He had nothing but a crippled dachshund to keep him company. The dog will have to be destroyed because no one will take it in. I make the man over into a local prophet, exaggerating his importance and the effect of his death on the neighbourhood. Out of curiosity, I go to the funeral. Two of his children (snobs, but they grieve loudly; the son looks terrified by everyone he meets) come from London, and some old ladies from the street where the man lived. That’s it. Less than ten people at the funeral. Next time I should rather say the man was the second coming, not just a prophet, and then watch the crowds turn out.

Every morning you pored over the death notices. Some days you would arrive to find the night editor had flagged two or three that merited an obituary; on other days you chose for yourself, people of obvious local or national importance, but also others, like the former shopkeeper, men and women never thought important except by the few who knew and loved them.

In between the obituaries, your editor allowed you small general reporting assignments: human-interest stories, court reporting for minor local cases. The truth was, you enjoyed the obituary assignments and made the most of them. Families responded to you. You listened patiently and spoke politely, no matter the person you were addressing. You checked and tripled-checked the facts of the lives you wrote, and then made embellishments so the nobodies sounded even more important than they were (an inheritance from me, I like to think, despite your passion for truth). Families wrote expressing thanks for the quality of your notices and the managing editor joked that you should be employed to write nothing but obituaries, a scribe and chronicler of the dead.

A month into the job you met a woman who had gone back to work as a freelancer for the
Record
after having a child, who was now in school. She was older than you by nearly a decade, but on
that first meeting the two of you discovered a connection.

‘I’m Ilse,’ she said, her dark eyes looking out from an even darker fringe of hair. ‘Have they let you out of the obits prison yet? Tell them you want the crime beat. That’s where the real news is.’

You told her your name and she crossed her arms over her chest and looked at you.

‘You’re Bill Wald’s daughter, aren’t you?’ The tone was more accusation than enquiry. She was tiny, a head shorter than you, but you felt intimidated by her, as though she were an older member of your own family.

You had never heard your father called ‘Bill’, but yes, you said, you were his daughter.

‘He was one of my professors, and a very good friend. I haven’t seen him in ages.’

You thought you recognized her from one of the garden parties your father always insisted on hosting for his Honours students. But that would have been years earlier. Before you knew what you were saying, it came out: ‘Yes, Ilse. I remember how fond of you Dad was.’

Is it possible that you knew, even then, that your father and Ilse had been lovers? I knew it, had known it for years with something like certainty, but you were only a child when she was his student, when the brief affair kept him away from home more than usual, then ended with no explanation and weeks of sulking from him. The next I heard, Ilse – I only ever knew her first name – had married another of your father’s students, and was pregnant.