Zoe Wicomb - October

Home at last. The taxi stops behind her car, parked exactly where she left it two weeks ago. Mercia drags in the suitcase, shivers, and switches on the central heating. She wanders through the ice-cold apartment, sparse and elegant after Sylvie’s cramped rooms. Something is wrong, a disturbance of some kind, as if someone has rearranged everything ever so slightly, so that she can’t put her finger on it, can’t say with conviction that the coffee table has shifted an inch to the left. Which is, of course, nonsense.

Is this where she lives? Is this her home? What does she do with all these things, all this space? What would any single person do with all this space? At the time Craig had argued for a smaller apartment, but she would hear none of it. The place had been a bargain at the price, and one room less would not have been significantly cheaper. She stands in the doorway of the vast living room with its ornate cornices and wall of tall windows. Her grand nineteenth-century Glasgow apartment, built by sugar and tobacco lords from the spoils of slavery.

Before her very eyes panning across the rug, the elegant leather sofas, the glass and chrome table, all these things assume the ghostly shapes of objects covered in dust sheeting, all wrapped up and parceled like a Christo project. Mhairi, the cleaner, had once asked her what the Corbusier chaise longue was for. Mercia shudders, shakes her head to free the furniture parcels of their wrapping. This is her home with the marble fireplace and mantelpiece at the far end. The cold hearth smells of Sylvie’s outside grate. She will not light a fire.

Still clutching her coat, Mercia goes to Craig’s room, sits down at his desk at the window, where she can see the man across the road sitting at his own window, reading a newspaper. A man for whom Craig had constructed an entire life in prize-winning free verse. The terra-cotta boxes on his window ledge cling to the corpses of summer flowers — a brown tracery of once-blue lobelia persists, and dead petunia stalks sit bolt upright in rigor mortis. There they will stay until next year, she remembers, lashed by winter wind and snow into bare, spindly stalks. Until spring comes babbling like an idiot, scolding the old roots. Until one Saturday morning in late April when the man will fuss about the window boxes with new trailing lobelia, new petunia plants that in good time will produce their blue and purple flowers. Just like every year that they have lived there, when spring comes down the hill. In April, not October. Would the man recognize himself in Craig’s verse? There is something comforting about not knowing him, knowing nothing about him except for the business with window boxes.

If this home away from Kliprand and her family feels strange, it is only a question of time, a matter of half an hour at most, for the emptiness to be filled with what soon will be familiar routines. Like the gas boiler fired up, pumping hot water through old copper pipes, the warm tick-ticking of radiators slowly thawing into life, spreading invisible warmth. In this empty apartment Craig’s absence hovers like the heat molecules rushing up, out of reach, to cling to the high ceiling. Mercia will not wait for the warmth; she will not call Smithy just yet; instead, she’ll do her messages as the Scots say — a trip to the supermarket, which invariably means a conversation on the corner of Byres Road where she is so often detained by someone she knows. So many students who have passed through her hands. More of a village here than Kliprand. Does no one ever leave this city?

Dr. Ants in Her Pants. That’s what Craig called her when he first flicked through her passport. Only five years old and already bursting with border-control stamps. Where have you not been? he asked, shaking his head.

In those brand-new days there was something of admiration in his voice. Craig had after university spent two years in London, with a trip each to Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam.

Look, he said defensively, I come from a country of folk who once upon a time rushed about colonizing the world, and so freeing those left behind of the horrible Christianity they took along to dump on others. Thereafter, folk needed only to move across the border, either to make good or to relish being in exile. Now, having recovered ourselves, we no longer have to do that, so I’ve come back to Glasgow and this is where I stay put. Healthy or what?

Mercia laughed. In those brand-new days their differences were a source of fond banter. She said, Let’s be accurate: back to the West End of Glasgow. It’s because you can’t find your way in big cities, hopelessly lost in London, nose in the A — Z for the entire two years, no sense of direction; in fact, could you find your way to the south side of this city?

Mercia has always had that fifth sense, even in strange cities, where, after a cursory consultation of a map, she was able to move swiftly through a crowd, confident about her whereabouts. Like a springbokkie, her father used to boast, lifting its nose to smell the direction of the wind, pounding a hoof into the earth, before, quick as a flash, having found its bearings, it leaps off straight as a die to its destination. That is still how Mercia sees herself, propelled effortlessly through the world, eager to see yet another place. Not pathological restlessness, as Craig later diagnosed. She was after all prepared to stay put in Glasgow. In the city’s West End with Craig by her side, she had no desire to move house, to try another city, or even another part of town.

Precisely, he said. So you have the comfort of a home, but rushing about being a citizen of the world means that you don’t have to acknowledge it as home.

This home needs time to make itself more comfortable. As Mercia searches for a warmer coat, ready to wander down to the supermarket, the telephone rings. It is Smithy, darling Smithy, whose voice is like honey, except, that voice is unusually clipped as she asks Mercia to come over for dinner that night. Smithy seems anxious to get off the phone, so that Mercia knows something is wrong, wheedles the news out of her. All right, Smithy says. I planned to tell you later, but here goes: Morag gave birth prematurely last week. The little girl’s been in an incubator for six days, but she’s out now. Tiny, but absolutely fine.

Mercia is pleased to hear it in advance. Now, she says briskly, we need not talk about that tonight. But tears prickle, roll down her cheeks. The trick, she thinks, is to be organized. Instead of rushing out, she makes a careful shopping list of essentials that she could carry the short distance. She does not have the energy to drive.

There is no one to detain her on Byres Road, which is a pity, because the next trick is to have a conversation, at least about the weather. Neither does Mercia meet anyone in the supermarket, but the lady at the till with the elaborate hairdo greets her with a long-time-no-see that allows her to say that she’s just back from Cape Town, that she’s only been away for two weeks. Lucky you, hen, the woman says, it’s all right for some, and she recites the week’s weather forecast, unseasonably cold for the end of October. Already full-blown winter while you were sunning yourself down under.

Back in the apartment, where the heat now envelops her, Mercia treats herself to a long lavender bath. It will all fall into place — everything will be fine — everything in its place — a place where she is immune, where such news need not ruffle, she recites. She congratulates herself. So far she has done well, and besides, why wouldn’t it be fine? It would be foolish, unrealistic, to think of herself as mother to a baby girl. That was not what she’d ever wanted, that she must remember. But neither was it according to Craig what he had wanted. It is another Craig who has become a father. A new man who, unlike Jake, will be a good father, who no longer has any connection with her. Again she corrects herself: fatherhood has not changed anything in relation to her. Craig left when he left. Departed. And she, Mercia, need not think differently about him. Not since he has left the woman who does not want children.