Nadine Gordimer: Get A Life

Most evenings the three listen to music. Adrian has a remarkable collection, not only CDs but rare LPs, even 78s, and the gamut of equipment, antique and the latest, to play them. Adrian has to go about the house to find the particular recordings he wants Paul and Lyndsay to enjoy – an early Klemperer, a contemporary Barenboim – since the racks that hold his collection are stacked here and there, even in passages. Equipment to provide occupation in retirement (he'd been promising himself for years to find time to catalogue his treasures properly), they had had to clear from what was to be his study become the son's refuge. Of course Paul knows he is welcome to banish the listening silence during the weekday desertion by parents (that is how Adrian and Lyndsay think of their absence at office and Chambers). Sometimes he tries it, the complete Fidelio an experiment, and if the recording is a single human voice, Callas with the systole and diastole of the breath that empowers it, present within his four walls, it is one-half of a dialogue with what is missing in his present. Full orchestral stuff which perhaps Adrian hopes for his son will be a rousing affirmation of being, is an unwelcome crowd gate-crashing the silence. He'd rather strain, half-consciously alert to make out if maybe there might be the small domestic sounds of Primrose moving about in the kitchen.

His sister Jacqueline lives with an accountant husband in another suburb. She was a Montessori nursery-school teacher and has substituted their own two children for the general brood who used to receive her maternal care. She sends her brother homemade concoctions she remembers or thinks he likes. Pork sausage rolls. Once a baked banana pudding, upgraded, the accompanying note says, 'from the treat we used to love, by a good slosh of brandy'. She brings the offerings to the gate and Primrose takes delivery. The first occasion, he went to greet his sister beyond the bars and she began to cry at the sight of him; so he kept himself out of the way, after that. But then he had gone strangely, slowly, back to the house and to the bathroom to see in the mirror what she saw. He had become thinner; but it seemed to him only that he looked falsely innocent, artificially younger than he remembered his face as he shaved – before.

Susan, the sister married to an ostrich farmer become unexpectedly prosperous due to the worldwide demand for low-cholesterol steaks, doesn't know what to say to him and phones their mother to enquire after his progress. She graduated from art school but with the inherited rigorous standards of her ambitious mother transferred from a professional vocation to that of art, saw that she did not have the talent to become an abstract painter or a postmodernist, a conceptualist, of originality, and with her father's adaptation to circumstances worked as a restorer of museum paintings before taking to her farmer and his surrealist birds. Emma, the biological prank sister who followed her brother's birth so precipitately, lives in South America, where she is foreign correspondent for a British newspaper. The emigration came about, as it does for many females, because she had married a foreigner – a Brazilian lawyer met when her mother invited him home to dinner during a conference on constitutional law he was attending in South Africa. This daughter was a precocious divorcée, a law student at the time; the only one of the siblings following any tradition of parental careers. Emma's emails greet my almost-twin (only twelve months between their births) hardly popped out before papa popped me in and they arrive every few days to that room designated for him, the very beep of the computer a kind of lively grimace, from her, at what had – what was the term – befallen him. She had no embarrassed reverential awe, no disguised distaste for how he must find himself as one could never imagine oneself being; she asked, came right out with it: absolutely ghastly, I try to imagine how you cope, it must be so unreal, I think it's a good thing I'm far away because I wouldn't believe it, some sci-fi thing in you, my boetie, I'd just hug you. Can't accept you've winged down giving off rays from horrible Outer Space. Lowest common denominator in corny entertainment. Ugh. We'd have a good laugh together, as we've done since we burbled as babies. The sheer absurdity of all this, in your life. Crazy. D'you mean you can't even have a fuck ? There isn't anything she can't say, at her distance – she keeps that distance by not calling, and he understands; she somehow knows he has nothing to relate. Sometimes he sends a brief email in reply, she knows the formula is all he can 'manage', good to hear from you, got the hug, love ya . If she tears the band-aids of convention off his state, it's a wild release; for the moments while he reads and falls to the temptation to reread, he hears himself laughing out loud. But it won't work to leave himself raw, like this, management exists only in ordinariness being imposed, applied and maintained as long – long as he lasts. A test-decreed end. Or test-decreed survival. No more emanation, no light.

He wanders the rooms of the house as if idly cataloguing objects recognised and things acquired, added, for which there is no memory embedded, representing periods and desires of two people postdating the time he quit this house where he is returned as emanation. Inanimate things do not receive cognisance of an ectoplasm, only living beings are aware of such a presence. The Labrador taking a stolen siesta on a sofa lifts her head at someone there, in the room.

Through the deep windows of the living-room, legs thrown over the sill, he finds himself in the garden.

It's only at what must be some regularly spaced day that the man with the great fork or spade or shears is there: the salute. It has become a wave of an implement waggled in the air. He's tried to call back an opening for some exchange but the few words composed in Zulu are not responded to except for a grin that might or might not be incomprehension, maybe the grammatical construction is laughable or the man speaks another language. There's his own voice answered, by a raucous bird-cry. The hadedas come from the rooftop and thrust their telescope beaks sounding for worms in the lawn, as if he were not there.

Seven- (could it be as young as that) eight-year-old with a catapult made from a jacaranda branch and some strips of rubber (old bicycle tyre) aims at the doves still mourning their recitative up on the gutters. The game is forbidden and the one time a bird is hit and falls limp but with life in the glint of the eye it's understood why: death is forbidden. What happened to the bird. Concealed in a dustbin. No, secrecy has more imagination than that, more than the lawmakers could credit. It was buried, a playmate brought in for the rites, there behind the old compost heap, with the stems of some daisies stuck upright in the soil.

It's not often a grown man lies down on his back on grass; there're the plastic-thonged chaises longues meant to be unfolded in the sun or under the shade of the jacaranda. To a naked upturned face; no sky; space. No cloud to give scale in the bleach of glare, no blue to give depth. Grass stirs beneath with minute scratching claws. Perhaps there are beetles, ants, moving unseen as the predator cells in their terrain, all life is one, it's said. On this crawling sensation some weight thuds down, it's the playmate, there's a giggling, gasping struggle; if it's the playmate in turn thrust low on the irritation of the grass, ends in tears. Comes the liar's appeal for mercy – There's a gogga biting me! So this grass is the referee in the savage small-boy fights that are also forbidden. Is that how you treat friends? It's not a game. You will hurt each other.

Which is exactly the intention. To make the cry-baby resort to the intervention of nature to save him from defeat, while the victor never calls for help as he lies pinned to the grass beneath him. Adults put a stop to the battles; or did the atavism pass, had its stage, along with thumb-sucking, and only the white-flag appeal, there's a gogga biting me, become part of the family vocabulary to call for the mercy of laughter when you found yourself in a tight spot.