Zoe Wicomb: October

Jake threw his head back and laughed heartily, healthily for a man who seemed to be shivering, a man she thought who may well have returned to excessive drinking.

Then why not rather write a book for real people about real people? he asked.

You mean a book about people like you? It’s been done, she said curtly, done to death.

Ag don’t be cross, Mercy man, he said, and handed her a large brandy.

Why did she not question his drinking?

Mercia could not be sure that it hadn’t been ushered in as long ago as the millennium itself — the screaming of women in extremis. Was it her new single condition that alerted her to it? Only days after Craig left, in a hotel in Paris, she lay awake, wondering when such requirements for women might have been established.

Fortuitously, there was the conference to keep her occupied shortly after Craig’s announcement. Surely you’ll cancel, Smithy said, no one would expect you to honor that commitment. But Mercia was determined, glad that there was a paper to revise and travel to manage; she even looked forward to questions after her presentation, something she had always found terrifying. It will keep me on my toes, she said; it will make a change from crying.

Determined also to focus on other, less familiar areas, Mercia agreed to chair another panel and so keep at bay Craig’s words that otherwise would mill about her head like midges. But who could have anticipated the sound of women screaming? As she arrived in the late afternoon and threw open the hotel window for air, the small courtyard trilled with a mewling that bounced promiscuously from wall to wall, echoed and amplified gleefully until the final shriek. At night, the sound came from the rooms on either side, the screaming of women. Mercia was not mistaken. Sound had, of course, always leaked from hotel rooms, but it surely had been muted, discreet, as people did not wish to be heard. But this, for her, was a new phenomenon where the female of the species announced her unbridled pleasure. How long had it been going on? It was not as if over the months, the years, she had noted an increase in volume; no, this seemed new, and ubiquitous, the world of couples and congress having taken over. And not having known about it, was that too a mark of her failing relationship?

Two weeks later, as she escaped from the emptiness of the apartment to Berlin, her expectations of screaming women were soundly met. Mercia imagined that the international magazines, the Dutch, German, French and British Elle or Cosmopolitan, or whatever they were called, had been pounding out advice for the twenty-first-century woman: the no-holds-barred shrieks of fulfillment to replace the old angst-ridden Munchian woman, she of the silent scream. Was management doling out prize-winning badges at the breakfast tables? Smithy, who had been prevented from coming along by her younger child’s whooping cough, laughed at her account. Och, you’re a prude, she said, let people be.

Hotels then were for a while at least to be avoided. They were not places in which to learn to be alone, in which to stop crying.

Craig had found someone else, he said, after the throat clearing and required preamble of his respect and devotion to her, Mercia, and he lowered his eyes to scrape together with the edge of his hand bread crumbs on the breakfast table.

Found someone else! Why was that thought to be ameliorative? What prompted the search? she asked. How long had he been looking? Her questions were met with silence. Craig herded the crumbs together into a neat pile. It had not been easy for him; he had suffered beyond measure, but he had come to a final decision: he would leave, and do so that very day. There was nothing to discuss, nothing to be gained from painfully raking over their relationship.

In the study Craig’s books were already all packed up in boxes. Mercia, awash with tears, swallowed repeatedly to find her voice. She said, Yes, okay, of course, she understood, but then could not stop the bile from entering her words. Someone younger, more attractive, someone less preoccupied with her work, with a job that allows for leisure time; indeed — yes, she said that word, indeed — someone with an eager womb? She did not know where that had come from. Craig started, looked up in alarm. Not a young, glamorous, size-ten blonde by any chance? Mercia continued. She hoped that that would be received as self-parody. In the last couple of years she had gathered a few inches around the waist. As had Craig.

Craig shook his head sadly, with disbelief, as if he had expected better of her. As if she had not expected better of herself! Only days later she could have added: and someone who screams. Smithy reported that the woman was not so young after all, looked about forty. But that was no guarantee against screaming. Was it not these days incumbent upon the aging woman to perform youth regardless? Besides, forty was young. A decade or so at that stage made all the difference.

If only Mercia had not referred to the woman’s hair, for according to Smithy, who had walked into them at the Film Theatre, she was in fact blond or blond-streaked like the majority of women in Glasgow nowadays were. Oh, it made Mercia sick, her own delicate tiptoeing around markers of race, required to prevent others from thinking her sensitive about color. She had no such difficulty, thought that if there were a problem, it belonged to her beholder. No doubt a matter of multiple mirrors. Craig would have been the one person to know that she was comfortable in her skin. But that Craig has vanished, has left behind only the question of whether she had invented him.

•••

Mercia lies awake in her brother’s house. On the far wall, in a chaste single bed, under easi-care sheets, she listens to Sylvie’s screaming. It is less embarrassing than puzzling. The girl is hardly a reader of Elle , but then the style columns in the age of globalization probably in no time at all filter such matters through to villages via Sarie . Sturdy Sylvie, not yet plump, with her strong legs and high Namaqua behind, is still youthful. How much longer must she suffer the attentions of a drunk, dysfunctional husband? There will be no escape for a girl of her kind, Mercia muses. She should try to muster sympathy for Sylvie. She does not wonder why she thinks of Sylvie as a girl.

Mercia has much to be thankful for. She knows that she will come to terms with being alone, which is not to say that she does not miss the Craig she knew, that she is not still engulfed by sadness. But she has tried to make the most of post-Craig life by immersing herself in work. How Craig would have laughed at that. Not possible, he would have said, for her to be more immersed in work. Did he resent that? Let others call it complacent, but nowadays she counts her blessings, names them one by one: a research grant and sabbatical; conferences at which to present papers; an invitation to Yale; the monograph on postcolonial memory to finish; and almost certainly a professorship the following year. The book will surely bring further invitations from prestigious institutions abroad, travel to new cities, new countries — even if it does mean hotel rooms in which postmodern women scream.

But how do the poor manage? Must Sylvie put up forever with the attentions of a husband who seems to not like her anymore, if ever he did, and who in his few waking hours shouts abuse at her? What a relief for her if Jake were to find someone else. But there is no knowing what Sylvie’s screaming announces. Mercia shudders at the possibility of the girl being grateful for Jake’s drunken attention. She would like to take her firmly by the shoulders and say loud and clear: it’s over; save yourself, go away and leave him to his drink. But where would she go? Where do people like Sylvie go? Is it in order to leave that she has to give up the child?