Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

She talked to me about that Saturday night as if it were some particularly daring party escapade to boast about. I couldn't see how she'd want to; she should have talked to him, really, it was his affair just like his other affair. She was determined to bring it up with me. — You never open your mouth, but I suppose you wonder why anyone'd do such a stupid thing.—

— Like what? — But she knew I was stalling; and she didn't want to come right out with it, either—'trying to kill myself.

— I'd had a bust-up with Marcia, she's always so nosy, like into everything, sticky fingers getting in my hair. I don't know why I let her pester me to spend the night, anyway. And the crowd that turned up at her place because they knew her folks were away, Jimmy and Alvin and that lot. I can't stand them, really. She said Jackie and Dawn and them (how many years had my father spent trying to get his Baby to drop her peers' bad grammar) were coming but she's a liar, she did it to persuade me to stay with her, because they never came. What was there to do but smoke. So I was rather stoned, and on top of it, when I wanted to get away from them and their lousy yakking and yelling and dancing like a pack of drunk wildebeest, there was a couple busy on the bed. They hadn't even shut the door.—

I nodded and kept my head turned away. She saw I didn't want to be presented with this version, this performance — an-other one, in our house.

— The bathroom was the only place to get away.—

The packet of Gillette Sword, the dagga and the self-pity. I wish I didn't have so much imagination, I wish that other people's lives were closed to me.

— They just made me sick. Sick of them.—

Now I knew what Baby was really telling me. I knew who 'they' were; known to us both, not the crowd at Marcia's place on a Saturday night who were not my crowd.

She wanted some response to help her inveigle me — her innocent dumb brother — into an attitude she wanted me to adopt. She was trying buddy-buddy with me.

I only listened; she had to say herself what she hoped I would. — I suppose I could have gone home. It's not far. But you can imagine the fuss, with Ma, me arriving at two in the morning when she thinks I'm tucked up giggling in bed with a bosom friend. That's the problem with not having your own place. Living with the family. Parents, okay. Even the best parents in the world, we're different, not like them. Once you're grown up you've got to forget about their life. Let them have it, it's their business and you've got your own life to live. You have to have a place. — She looked at me to see if she was succeeding. — Can't go running to them, they've got a life of their own.—

Now she chattered away from what she had got said, gabbling about the flat in another grey area she and Jackie and Dawn and two Indian fellows, probably, were going to share, they'd take her in as soon as she got a job, and I understood what she'd been telling me when she was supposed to be confessing why she wanted to die on a Saturday night among strangers. Baby was covering up for him, again. My father. She was warning me off: his life. Poor Baby. His Baby, still.

He was able to forget so quickly.

She encouraged him — she's just like him, after all, although she looks like my mother, she's devious and lying as he is. She found a job with an insurance agent (I think one of the fellows who were sharing the flat and perhaps she was sleeping with him) and she would come flying into the house when it suited her, bringing flowers or a ripped hem for my mother to mend, hooking an arm round my father's neck and kissing his ear, if he happened to be there, and calling, if he was not — as she left, her mouth full of some of my mother's goodies she was carrying away: —Don't forget to give Pa my love! — She was pretty and talkative and amusing, mimicking and laughing and begging for gossip about family and friends she never saw, any more.

I don't know whether my mother ever told him what Dr Jasood said about her animation. Her vulgarity splashed all over my mother. Yet she said to me more than once — As long as Baby's busy and happy— My mother, too, was saying something else: that since nothing could be done about Dr Jasood's diagnosis of my sister's state, my mother was thankful she was proving resilient enough to divert it to some purpose of her own.

You would have thought nothing had happened. We settled into an uncanny sort of normality, an acceptance of the rearrangement of our lives to his convenience. I know for a fact that several times he took my mother to gatherings at the house of some white people where that woman of his was also present. My mother had to sit down and eat with her.

And I have been to where she lives. Where he goes to her. He sent me. Could you believe it?

There was someone who always knew where Sonny was.

The Security Police. He knew that, Hannah knew that. It did not count as witness, as intrusion. The Security Police work secretly as any love affair.

A man who has been convicted of a crime against the State will continue to be watched as long as his life or the State that convicted him lasts; whichever endures the longer. A woman who associates with such a man will be watched. The third presence in the lovers' privacy is the Security Police; anonymous, unseen: a condition of the intimacy of political activists. The men who had taken Sonny away and locked him up in detention, knew. Knew about him. Were in it with him. It was not in their interest to blow this kind of cover. If he had been an important revolutionary figure they (easily) might have arranged with a country hotel to bug the rondavel, and leaked tapes to the Sunday press to smear his character. They could have got the Minister to place a ban on his movements. But they did not, because while he was without restriction, running to the rendezvous of his lady-love, he might also lead them to those of his underground associates still unknown to them.

After what nearly happened that Saturday night (this was the only way he could allow himself to formulate it) Sonny realized that someone else ought to know where he could be found. In case something actually happened. There in the house. But to whom could he go? Whom could he tell, if my daughter is bleeding to death in the bathroom, fetch me from this address? If Aila collapses in that kitchen, if he — Will — gets electrocuted fixing a light-plug, call me from Hannah's bed, close to the earth. He would be driving alone — once it was to the ghettos of the Vaal Triangle, where the community organizations' rent boycott was becoming a major campaign, he was thinking how best to respond to their problems of spontaneous violence against corrupt councillors — and, suddenly, he would have an impulse to lift his hands from the steering-wheel. Let go. The car skidding, careering, turning over and over, taking him. He would gain control of himself in a sweat. Had not let go; had not let his mind swerve back to what might have happened that Saturday night.

Hannah did not know about these moments — it was perhaps the first thing ever he kept from her — but she had the instinct, for her own protection, that he ought to be encouraged to talk about his daughter — Baby. The very name of the girl came awkwardly from him: Hannah saw he was hearing it now as he imagined she must — silly, sugary, cheap lower-class sentimentality of the ignorant poor in the ghetto of a small town where you couldn't even use the library. It embarrassed him to realize, indeed, how stupidly, crassly, the substitute for a name was stuck upon the grown girl. The woman; a woman, now, like Aila and like Hannah. — D'you remember her at all, dancing, the night you were at my house for a party?—

— Of course. — How could she not remember every detail of that party, the second time only that she had seen in their own home the family to which he belonged by right, and when he was still, just out of prison, a materialization she couldn't take her eyes off.