Zoe Wicomb - October

Mercia is sorry that she has let Sylvie go. She is no nurse, but now there is nothing to be done but to help him to the bathroom, grit her teeth, and get him out of his clothes. Jake, shaking violently, slumps on the tiled floor, incapable of soaping himself. He won’t be touched, and Mercia does not want to touch him. There is nothing to be done other than hosing him down. She fetches washing-up liquid from the kitchen, shakes it haphazardly all over Jake and directs the jet of water at various parts of his body whilst he squeals like a child and rolls into a ball, covering his nakedness. Soap that backside, she says. I won’t stop until you’re clean all over.

They sit across from each other at the kitchen table, an emaciated Jake wrapped in Mercia’s silk dressing gown. The glass in his hand is empty. He has gulped down his whisky and water, and reaches out with somewhat steadier hand for the glass that Mercia poured for herself, still untouched. She waves him on. What does it matter?

Mercia needs water; she is unable to speak. Like a child she probes with her forefinger in the cavity of her mouth, taps along her parched palate. It is a terrain of sun-baked mud, cracked, absorbing sound as if it were moisture, so that, try as she may, no words issue from her lips. Mercia does not have the strength to fetch water from the tap. She gulps repeatedly. When the words finally make it, they are strangled. She cannot look at Jake. She gropes for his hand, but he shakes her off.

How, she asks in a stranger’s voice, do you know all this? How do you know that it’s the truth?

Fanus, he says. Fanus let it out one night. We were drinking at Aspoester. I suppose he had too much on his plate. Their child had died of pneumonia a couple of days before, and he was bitter. Also, he was drunk. The Baatjies brothers were there also — we’d all been drinking — and I can’t remember what we were talking about when he said how could I be sure that Nicky is my child? Then it all came out. Everybody else was quiet and I knew at once that it was true. Actually I’ve known right from the start that somehow something was wrong.

Who’s Fanus? Mercia asks.

Are you mad? Of course you know Fanus Lategan. He was in your class at school. Have you forgotten everything about us, about home?

Mercia wants to say the word, home, after him, but it refuses to be uttered, offers its own pretentious substitutes. Pays de natal. Mal pays.

And who else. . here. . in Kliprand. . knows about it?

Jake stares at her. Dunno. Who cares? So that Mercia answers her own question: everybody, I imagine.

Once sylvie had confided in one person there could have been no stopping the story from circulating, gathering detail and digressions, subplots, salacious frills, and codas as it passed from person to person. Or perhaps people just knew, in the manner of “just” as used in those parts, bypassing source or reason, stories like that having lain dormant for years, knowledge embedded in the sinews of a community shunned by the murrays, lying in wait for the moment of exposure. Oh, she shudders to think. .

Will you stop, Jake shouts, stop thinking of yourself. This is about me, the wrong done to me. I don’t care who knows what. All I know is that he was a dirty vark, a sanctimonious pig, and I should have had the courage to kill him.

Jake is trembling violently; his fists held aloft are clenched, and with his wild, unkempt hair and open mouth he looks like something out of a historical painting. Mercia summons an image: Absalom caught with his head trapped in the oak, raging helplessly, whilst a mule with raised hooves slips out from under him. It is the shadow of the mule, stark in the bright light, she holds on to, a helpful image for Mercia, who does not, will not, think of this Jake as real. So she is able to say calmly, lingeringly, Ac-tually, Jake, was it really only some weeks ago that you heard this nonsense from Fanus? I wonder if you hadn’t heard it a long time ago, that that was why you married her — Sylvie. For revenge?

Jake’s open mouth snaps shut as he stares at her, before beating his head on the table, his face turned away. He is, of course, drunk.

Fanus, Mercia says, is patently wrong about Nicky. One thing is sure, the child is pure Malherbe, unmistakably Nettie’s grandchild. One need only look at those eyebrows, the entire brow is Nettie’s, just like yours.

Jake does not reply, does not lift his head. Horrible choking sounds escape from his throat. That is what Mercia must focus on, on Jake, on Fanus, the messenger. She must not think of Meester, Grootbaas, Nicholas. Her father. Or of the girl.

At school, in the seventies, Fanus Lategan had been the brainbox of the class — a clever boy, equally brilliant at the sciences as he was in the arts, and with a formidable, enviable memory. The midseventies was a breathless time of revolution, with Mercia and Fanus working together on Black Consciousness leaflets. Someone had tried to set the school on fire, and her father, who knew nothing of the clandestine ANC branch they had helped to establish, warned her against the savagery of dangerous, low-down types intent on self-destruction. Mercia nodded meekly. He was of a generation who had pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. He could hardly be blamed for his ignorance, his political naivety; indeed, she pleaded as Fanus spat contemptuously, he was like so many grown-ups a victim of apartheid propaganda. Hell-bent on being respectable coloreds. No point in wasting time arguing with his kind.

Halfway through 1976, through their Junior Certificate year, news of the Soweto uprising rippled through Namaqualand. Mercia and Fanus, not yet sixteen years old, bonded more closely as they listened to the official news, the brazen lies of the SABC, the savage killing spree of the Defence Force, and their resolve strengthened. They were black South Africans who with the dispossessed majority would bring the country to its knees. The following year Steve Biko was killed, and when Kruger, the minister of police, boasted to the world that he didn’t care about Biko’s death, Mercia wanted to know what her father thought of his words. Nicholas stared at her in silence. When she screamed, What do you think? What do you say? he left the room.

Devastated by her father’s silence, Mercia rushed off, turned to Fanus, clung to Fanus, who put his arms around her awkwardly as she listened to his pounding heart. For a couple of days there was an awkwardness between them, a quivering shyness that made their speech rustle helplessly. For many months they remained close friends, but Fanus would move away abruptly as she leaned toward him, would hastily withdraw the hand that she brushed against. Mercia was puzzled; she thought that they loved each other, that such intimacy was nothing less than love. Then it stopped abruptly. Fanus arrived at school one Monday morning speaking in clipped tones, his voice grave as he looked her straight in the eye. No, he was no longer interested in bourgeois poetry, and he waved away the anthology she had promised to bring along. The time for concessions, he said, was over.

From then on he avoided her, and Mercia, devastated by his coldness, wrote many a letter, none of which she sent to him. Had she imagined their special relationship? There could be no return to their former camaraderie, and she could not ask, could not bear the What-do-you-mean reply she was sure to get. There was no point to the letters, no real addressee, for the Fanus of old was a phantom. But the writing helped to mend her broken heart.

It was later that year, in the spring, when she heard from others that Fanus would not be going to university. So much cleverer than she, he was, but the Lategans were poor, the father a farm laborer who would not manage to pay for higher education. They struggled to get their five children through school, and Fanus, as the eldest, had to find work to help with school fees for the rest. It was only fair that they too should have secondary education. Guilt-stricken, and hoping that her father might have a solution, Mercia spoke to him about Fanus, who by now had fused in her mind with the image of a Guguletu schoolboy, arms flung aloft, as the bullet struck.