Get A Life (11 page)

Lively dialogue continues. Other projects on hold while being developed discreetly are the national toll highway through the Wild Coast, that great botanical treasure of endemism, crop lands of subsistence farmers; the mining concession for the sand dunes and – the dams. The ten dams. The Okavango. As astronauts grasp from Outer Space the beauty of this cosmic scale of waterways, so its existence as an ecological world phenomenon has become clear to international environmental agencies from their perspective down on earth. Paul since his return to work has been delegated by his team to research and prepare a study of the region. He's the one to meet the representatives from Save The Earth and the International Rivers Network who come to see for themselves what can be understood from the perspective with your feet on the ground, as a site of planned destruction important to world ecology.

He has been back. Back home: a wilderness. Accompanying these people who represent international concern. He was utterly renewed in watching, listening, storing their responses to the glory of the complex not even the mysteries of the imagination, the subconscious, could conjure, so that the assurance he had had in his radiant isolation that he would be restored to himself with a return to the wilderness, was subsumed if not needed to be remembered.

One of those women, often scientists, who look as if they have never been children and are in an indeterminate age for a lifetime, spoke aside to him rather than her colleagues. – How marginal, demeaned, remote… I don't know… left out of it. – And another in the group, a man, murmured in the slowly extinguishing light of early evening, You feel… -

Hearing this apparently general reaction too overwhelmment by splendour beyond skylines he doesn't tell, no, you have to endure being in it: a menacing part of it. Its evil genius: enterprise from Australia, private and state hubris in Africa.

How are things going? A friend at the Agency risks as an afterthought to presenting copy for a cosmetics brand campaign. Does she mean, is the husband quite well again. Or does she unknowingly ask the question, is he himself again. Berenice takes the hesitant, kindly-meant enquiry in the second, unspoken sense.

Benni is particularly affectionate and carefully considerate with Paul, as one is, would be, with anyone who had been seriously ill. Rather, has come back from a life-threatening experience of some kind, any kind. Hijack, plane crash, earthquake. This of his was no ordinary illness; she comes to know more and more, day by day, night by night, in self-perceptions of unease. Making love is surely the ultimate in the enactment of loving, in the eagerly generous response he must find in entering her body he will find himself again. As he used to be. They make love more often than ever. She is ashamed, even to admit deeply buried within her awareness, she has some fear that what enters her, what is enveloped by her dark clasping passageway, carries some alien light, still. Denial of the fear makes her the one who initiates caresses if he has not, putting her hand on his penis when he is already half into sleep. With time the shaming fear disappears under intense pleasure and its expectation of being experienced again and again. This man who has come back to her, whoever he is, makes love… how to explain it to herself, best leave it alone – as if each is the last in his life. So he must be happy? Her work sensibly defines satisfaction of one kind or another as happiness, persuading people that to buy a new-model car or luxury cruise tickets is to satisfy a need to be happy. He has never been particularly communicative, gregarious as she is, drawing attention and company; the attraction of opposites – well-known – evident in their marriage. Yet she feels that what happened to him maybe means he must instinctively move towards contact with others, now, not confined with his acolyte bushmates in the emptiness of the wilderness; come to life in the variety of friends and stimulating jostle of lively acquaintances she and many other intelligent – yes – people enjoy. To bring this about as what appears naturally, she includes that rather charming bushmate of his, Thapelo – cool! – who wasn't even afraid to go and sit with him in his untouchable quarantine – in drinks parties and occasional dinners with a mix of colleagues and even clients, some of whom are really interesting people in fields of know-how that surely would intrigue anyone. Paul's real closeness, outside the bed, is of course with their small boy, he reads to Nickie during the times when in his absence she used to set the kid up before children's TV programmes, makes things with him out of bits of fruit boxes, joins in the games when Nickie's friends come round to play. The young mothers looking on tell her she's lucky, the man's a great father. Between field trips he goes alone for his blood tests at the laboratory. She chooses the right moment to ask if everything was all right. He tells her the doctors say so.

And you? And you?

But then it comes to her unbidden, as the fear did, she has the strange knowing that he, personally, is not responsible to her. Has decided this.

So that's how things are going.

There is Christmas without the parents They have gone away on the postponed holiday. That means there is no presence in reminder of the quarantine; it is Christmas with the lit-up tree and greedy excitement of the child, a festival like everyone else's, and there's the New Year, baptised with champagne from a liquor chain whose advertising account Berenice handles, a year that the man of the family has lived to see.

Adrian and Lyndsay have not gone on the trip to the frozen northlands he had thought of as an example of the new ventures of retirement. They are in Mexico. That is also a venture never before taken. Lyndsay was delighted with his switch of continents and climates. I'm not thick-skinned enough for below zero! Mexico in late autumn to winter, along their itinerary, was like winter at home on the highveld, cold at night and ideally warm at midday. It's not an organised tour rounded up by sheepdog guides, but as neither speaks nor understands Spanish they found within the first day that to enjoy fully what you're seeing after getting yourself to sites, it would be good to have a local English-speaking person with you instead of keeping your nose stuck in the dingy prose of a guide book. The porter at their Mexico City hotel had a discussion, private since it was in Spanish, with the doorman, called up something on his computer and presented a name and a telephone number. This one is for you. Very excellent. He searched for a personality sufficiently famous to testify to this, and invented if not recalled, Wife of American President was one time going round with her. The recommended guide turned out unexpectedly but happily to be a Scandinavian whose clear English with its definitively enunciated final
t
and
d
, over the phone, was matched by an equally clear knowledge of the history – archaeological, architectural, cultural, political – of where they stood on each site and what they were seeing there; what was before them in palaces, museums, colossal fragments and exquisitely delicate jewellery, all of the ancient past.

She drove them in her Volvo to Cuernavaca and in Guadalajara to stand beneath the Rivera murals (on postcards to each of their daughters and their son Lyndsay wrote how, when she was a student articled to a law firm, she had bought with her first earnings as a weekend waitress a cheap print of Rivera's girl with arum lilies). They climbed the great pyramids without getting too out of breath, explained to the admiring Norwegian that this was because they came from a high-altitude city at home, were accustomed to rarefied air. The guide was admiring of everything, of the phenomenon of life itself, smiling ruthlessly, a kind of well-being, even to be seen in profile by whoever (taking turns) sat beside her while she drove. She was well-rounded but not the obligatory Scandinavian blue-eyed blonde, careless curly dark hair blew back or played tendrils on her pink forehead. Smiling was the natural muscular conformation of her face evidently, even when she was not talking or listening in response. A person with a happy nature, born like that, Lyndsay remarked as she and Adrian summed up the experience of the second day with their unexpected find. Who knows, Adrian said. And of course, the professional archaic smile is part of the tourist guide's package. Anyway she was a pleasant accompaniment, extremely useful to their venture. She was even worldly, intelligent enough to want to be told something of their own country, how it had changed since the end of apartheid (she pronounced the word correctly) – but then Norwegians, people from comfortably stable regions always have an interest, concern born of their contrasting good luck, perhaps, for countries great in area and conflict. Both of them must have had the passing thought, during these happy days of venture, how did this Scandinavian come to be a guide in Mexico. Just because she was fluent in Spanish and English? But there was no wish to be distracted, by a stranger's personal history, from the fascination of the specialised knowledge of medicine in a lost civilisation evidenced by instruments in a glass showcase, and the huge unfurlment of the Ambras Emerald-feather head-dress tall as any man who might have been exalted enough to wear it. These spectacles were on the site, in the place they continued to prize best and return to of all others, famous, or some obscure but known to one as serenely experienced as their Norwegian. This place was the Museum of Anthropology back in Mexico City, inadequately named they at once discovered, for the Dantesque journey through not only the evolution of the human being but on to an unsurpassed achievement of certain skills.

– And hubris. – Adrian 's remark as Lyndsay took his hand in confirmation of what they were experiencing together.

Then they were walking the length of the Teotihuacán plumed serpent uncoiled, grey-green. They had seen so many colours and textures hewn from the millennial formations of mountains, and transformed into another, human version of the Creation. Jadeite? Adrian guessed, and was gently corrected by their guide. – Polychrome. It's a full-scale model of the original, too huge to transport, sixth to eighth century a.d. – They were distracted by a giant Mayan eagle above them, unmistakably stone, with menacing beak open in full cry. When they were resting on their hotel bed before dinner Lyndsay was to say that the statement of colossi, relics of an exalted civilisation that Cortés and his successors toppled, came to her suddenly with Adrian's
And hubris
as a flashback of the plane plunging into the second of the World Trade Center towers.

Adrian dozing: Of course, we understand the present a bit better by knowing the past.

Of course: Adrian, missed vocation in archaeology.

What they had both lingered before, irresistible and oddly stirring, was a cinema-sized screen of juxtaposed images, like a series of enlarged passport photographs. But the images were not static, fixed. Each was a skull that changed in the next take and the next, the blink of the camera of time, the bone structure modified, angles and emphasis receded, realigned, flesh-covering emerged, shaping nose, outlining the apertures of eyes and mouth, then flick-flick – a generic human face evolving into a recognisable one: Asiatic, Caucasian, Negroid, the round eyes, the epicanthal folds, the arched nose, the malleable-looking broad flat one, the soft everted lips, the straight thin line in which others meet.

Passport photographs of more than one's ancestry back to a common design of bone. Lyndsay was unaccustomedly loud-voiced although there were other tourists around: – It's a kind of DNA! – And they stood unable to leave the exhibit, now quietly, amusedly pointing out to each other, youngsters exchanging secrets, look how that one's exactly like so-and-so, that one definitely tells that so-and-so has Japanese blood somewhere. And what about us, mmh? Each born of the Western European type that had been two or three generations in Africa; isn't there likely to be some mutation, detail of feature or flesh that records entry of a black strain, not just the evolutionary effect of climate and elements of nouriture. And the juxta-presence of other strains, Malays, Indians, Chinese, all come to Africa over generations. They must take a new good look at the face of the other in the nakedness of a shared bathroom, when he's exposed, freshly shaven, and make-up has been creamed-off her public image. The guide stands by smiling. She must've seen it all numerous times before;
she
is not quite recognisable, anyway, as the definitive Scandinavian type. Mixed exotic interruptions, not an unbroken lineage – what about the Vikings? Their ventures? Great voyagers, maybe their encounters mixed the bloodstock of ancestry. Lyndsay is so rousedly interested that Adrian says to her, not remembering that once she used to say to him, You would have made a good lawyer – You would have been a good anthropologist. – At least as an avocation, like archaeology, but of course law was both vocation and avocation, for her. And with the smiling onlooker, they laughed. Over lunch Adrian offered at a Chinese restaurant their guide recommended (unexpected find in Mexico, like herself), she said with her way of stretching her soft full throat and turning her head back and to one side, they were the most enthusiastic people she'd taken around for years. A compliment is always pleasing. They raised their glasses of Chinese beer to her expertise and tact.

Lyndsay had an important case coming up, one of those arising out of a government agency's inquiries into corruption between government officials, highly-placed politicians, and what is collectively called private enterprise, which includes cabinet members – stockholders in the businesses of their cousins and in-laws. She had to return to prepare with her partners the defence of one of the accused. Adrian knew better than to ask if she really believed the man was not guilty. But he thought it absolutely unnecessary for her to have to return while she was enjoying their new venture so much; why couldn't her partners do without her for once. What did she have partners for, if one could not stand in for another who had worked so hard and selflessly for years. He did not refer to the leave she had taken for frequent absences overseas, those years ago. So long ago.