Nadine Gordimer - Get A Life

What is it: to go back.

The individual, the woman, the desire – the persona Benni/Berenice. Create her as the father did the mother, going over her being after she'd endangered it shouting, What do you want .

The man standing alone in the night of the garden ran away, back. The only time out in the garden ever at that time of night was when allowed to stay up to celebrate a New Year in a radiance of fireworks.

Back, to gain forgiveness, make up to the small boy (he's the spitting image of you over again) for desertion by Daddy! Paul! while the fingers had to be prized off the bars of the gate. Oh the boy's so young, that will be forgotten, filed away in childhood.

Only to come back, maybe, before a psychiatrist trying to unknot an adolescent's painful aggression. So many half-grown about whom no parents can fathom why these menacing creatures they've produced are as they are.

What do you want. What did you want. What did you settle for.

Five years passed – a state of existence in which the question – if it is one, because a choice was made – doesn't sound from within. There was – is – no place for it there. But this unimaginable concept of Life Time, the inconceivable: a state of existence which could-should never have happened, brings a knowing of that which was not admitted. The emanation irradiates the hidden or undiscovered.

To go back, to the contradiction that surely cut through the intimacy a man and a woman make together. That unit of being that is sexual fulfilment within the other conditions of being, being in the world , commitment of religious or political faith, commitment of values (can't weigh them in year-end bonus), what you live by in what matters, idea of what is meaningful for each in the aims of work, beyond the common needs it meets – can it be divided. You go your way I go mine while we belong easily together. A good fit. The evidence of that achievement the two-in-one tender flesh of the child. Who wants to face the fact that this 'achievement' also can result from the greatest possible alienation between a man and a woman 'together': rape.

Benni means well when Berenice offers a weekend transition from the state where the Untouchable has been a hermit within his own body – my god, of course she's tried to understand what this is, in her way – and coming: home. To take up where everything was left off. Meant well. So why allow an answer to a question, so long never put to the self, to open up such significance. It was nothing, her thought to please, quickly passed over. A nothing he has all the time in this existence to follow how and why it would come to mind in the one who proposed it. For Benni there is a Berenice solution to his return from an absence unlike any, a few days' break in the bush offered by one of the clients whose public relations the Agency handles. Luxury suites, pool and sauna, the Big Five sure to be seen on game drives, a portable bar on board the open-viewing vehicle. He loves the bush doesn't he, its animals, birds, insects, before he goes home again to their threesome life together let him return to make the connection with the working life he's so wrapped up in. For Benni, Berenice's recommendation is a microcosm of that wilderness. She's right, in a way. These places simulate life in the wild for indigenous animals who otherwise would not survive industrial and urban expansion; the territory bought by what is known as the leisure industry is land where the equally indigenous people were driven out by conquest of old colonial wars and exchanges of papers of possession for paper money, ever since, between generations of conquerors become lawmakers. Many of the corporate clients of whom the Agency is proud (high-profile is the coveted category in the business) are consortia that bid for rights to build resorts where the environment won't survive this kind of development, nevertheless. There was – is, he must not think of as no longer there, the terrain where he is not – a consortium lobbying the government with assurance of exceptional tourist potential, economic uplift of the surrounding region (the full litany), for such a scheme to build an hotel, casino, yacht marina as part of the vast drainage plan the government envisages. Development Disaster.

Whom does Berenice believe. Him, her man, or the client. What is her conviction when he comes from the wilderness and tells of the irreplaceable forest felled to make way for the casino, the fish floating belly-up in all that's left of a watercourse diverted to feed an Olympic-size swimming pool and replica of one of the fountains of Rome. What's her conviction within herself. His, or the client's? Or it's not as crude as that. Macho as that, she would interpret. It's something – Stop. Stop hearing the answer. But you cannot go back without knowing it.

She is that persona who has no need of convictions.

What is it? A terrible lack. A kind of awful purity? A virginity; or underdevelopment. That term fits.

Don't judge. For five years, if you count only the outward symbol of marriage as the unit of intimacy, not the love affair that preceded the formality, there was present always that while occupying the same bed you don't occupy the same fundament: to know your conviction of being in the world . Conviction, which? You cannot have two to live tolerantly by, outside the sense of self. One for the client and one at home. How could he, himself, whose work, reason-to-be is preserving life, live so long with an intimate, herself, who was successfully complicit in destroying it.

Living in isolation, all along. Even when inside the woman.

Later, in the garden, away from the closeted emanation in that room, what is this all about but an obvious matter of the incompatibility between the advertising industry and environmental protection. Two clichés. So what? Can't even call it by its true term. Irreconcilability. Because the world, in distinction from the individual, has no absolutes, there's a mix that goes along prescriptively with the mixed economy. And what about the woman, Benni/Berenice. What a prick the woman's chosen man has been. Yes, revealed as nothing but the prick in his relation to her.

The innocence of the tree that was climbed, the perspective of being alive, from up there, the mind's sketch of the treehouse-gynaeceum of the sisters – everything accepted, the sin behind the pampas grass, capture of the freedom of butterflies, fall of the slingshot bird.

But it was in the Garden that expulsion came once there was Knowledge.

Divorce? Divorce after she's endured, on her side of the quarantine, did her job, earned the means of common needs, took care of the child calling Daddy Paul , smiled and joked anecdotally for normality across the divide between outdoor chairs. While this brings no counsel from the uncertain waverings of the jacaranda fronds, tongues in trees, there comes a prolonged ringing from the house. Goes ignored, until whoever it was hangs up. But the caller determinedly keeps trying. Such obstinacy must somehow be responded to. Still – as now – unsteady, upright from supine, the way to the house seems slowly gained. The ringing gives up; and starts once more, an encouragement.

– So you laz-zy, how's it? Chief, haai ! We never hear from you! So much happening. I'm back onto the pebble-bed scene, now, it's dynamite, my man, I can tell you. But what are the doctors doing, keeping you locked away like this, do you feel okay? When're you coming back? Aren't you due for remittance of sentence by now… So… good, that's great. Sharp – sharp! Say, you hear the latest – the Institution of Nuclear Engineers says the new reactor at Koeberg gonna be 'walk away safe'. 'Walk away safe.' I thought you'd like to take that walk, Bra. But if the Minister gives Government go-ahead, we'll have him in court against this 'favourable environmental impact assessment evaluation' his boys have come up with. Man, I've got plenty to tell you, what's going on, we're getting more support groups joining protest every day. Big names. Amazing. I promise you. The man's gonna find the nuclear a hot seat… so when can I come to your place, I don't know where you are -