J. Coetzee - Slow Man

'I think not.'

'Oh yes, Mr Rayment, I'm afraid so. For the foreseeable future I am to accompany you.' She raises the arm that has been shielding her eyes, and he sees she is smiling faintly. 'Bear up,' she says. 'It's not the end of the world.'

Half an hour later he looks in again. She is asleep. Her lower denture bulges out, a faint rasp like the stirring of gravel comes from the back of her throat. It does not sound healthy to him.

He tries to return to the book he is reading, but he cannot concentrate. Moodily he stares out of the window.

There is a cough. She is standing in the doorway in her stockinged feet. 'Do you have aspirin?' she says.

'In the bathroom, in the cabinet, you will find paracetamol. It is all I have.'

'No good pulling faces at me, Mr Rayment,' she says. 'I did not ask for this any more than you did.'

'Ask for what?' He cannot keep the irritation from his voice.

'I did not ask for you. I did not ask to spend a perfectly good afternoon in this gloomy flat of yours.'

'Then go! Leave the flat, if it so offends you. I still have not the faintest idea why you came. What do you want with me?'

'You came to me. You -'

' I came to you? You came to me !'

'Shush, don't shout, the neighbours will think you are beating me.' She slumps into a chair. 'I'm sorry. I am intruding, I know. You came to me, that is all I can say. You occurred to me – a man with a bad leg and no future and an unsuitable passion. That was where it started. Where we go from there I have no idea. Have you any proposal?'

He is silent.

'You may not see the point of it, Mr Rayment, the pursuit of intuitions, but this is what I do. This is how I have built my life: by following up intuitions, including those I cannot at first make sense of. Above all those I cannot at first make sense of.'

Following up intuitions: what does that mean, in the concrete? How can she have intuitions about a complete stranger, someone she has never laid eyes on?

'You got my name out of the telephone directory,' he says. 'You are just chancing your arm. You have no conception of who I really am.'

She shakes her head. 'Would that it were as simple as that,' she says, so softly that he barely catches the words.

The sun is going down. They fall silent and, like an old married couple declaring truce, sit for a while giving ear to the birds screeching their vespers in the trees.

'You mentioned the Jokics,' he says at last. 'What do you know about them?'

'Marijana Jokic, who looks after you, is an educated woman. Hasn't she told you? She spent two years at the Art Institute in Dubrovnik and came away with a diploma in restoration. Her husband worked at the Institute too. That was where they met. He was a technician, specialising in antique technology. He reassembled, for instance, a mechanical duck that had lain in parts in the basement of the Institute for two hundred years, rusting. Now it quacks like a regular duck, it waddles, it lays eggs. It is one of the pieces de resistance of their collection. But alas, his are skills for which there is no call in Australia. No mechanical ducks here. Hence the job in the car plant.

'What else can I tell you that you might find useful? Marijana was born in Zadar, she is a city girl, she would not know one end of a donkey from the other. And she is chaste. In all her years of marriage she has never been unfaithful. Never fallen into temptation.'

'I am not tempting her.'

'I understand. As you said, you want merely to pour out your * love upon her. You want to give. But being loved comes at a price, unless we are utterly without conscience. Marijana will not pay that price. She has been in this situation before, with patients who fall for her, who cannot help themselves, so they say. She finds it tiresome. Now I will have to find another job: that is what she thinks to herself. Do I make myself clear?'

He is silent.

'You are in the grip of something, aren't you?' she says. 'Some quality in her draws you. As I conceive it, that quality is her burstingness, the burstingness of fruit at its ripest. Let me suggest to you why Marijana leaves that impression, on you and on other men too. She is bursting because she is loved, loved as much as one can expect to be in this world. You will not want to hear the details, so I will not supply them. But the reason why the children too make such an impression on you, the boy and the little girl, is that they have grown up drenched in love. They are at home in the world. It is, to them, a good place.'

'And yet…'

'Yes, and yet the boy has the mark of death on him. We both see it. Too handsome. Too luminous.'

'One wants to cry.'

They are growing lugubrious, the two of them, lugubrious and drowsy. He rouses himself. 'There is the last of Marijana's cannelloni in the freezer, with ricotta and spinach,' he says. 'Would you like some? After that I do not know what your plans are. If you want to stay the night, you are welcome, but that must be the end of it, in the morning you will have to leave.'

Slowly, decisively, Elizabeth Costello shakes her head. 'Not possible, I am afraid, Paul. Like it or not, I will be with you a while yet. I will be a model guest, I promise. I won't hang my undies in your bathroom. I'll keep out of your way. I barely eat. Most of the time you won't notice I am here. Just a touch on the shoulder, now and then, left or right, to keep you on the path.'

'And why should I put up with that? What if I refuse?'

'You must put up with it. It is not for you to say.'

IT IS INDEED true, Elizabeth Costello is a model guest. Bent over the coffee table in the corner of the living-room that she has annexed as her own, she spends the weekend absorbed in a hefty typescript, which she seems to be annotating. He does not offer her meals, and she does not ask. Now and again, without a word, she disappears from the flat. What she does with herself he can only guess: perhaps wander the streets of North Adelaide, perhaps sit in a cafe and nibble a croissant and watch the traffic.

During one of her absences he hunts for the typescript, merely to see what it is, but cannot find it.

'Am I to infer,' he says to her on the Sunday evening, 'that you have come knocking on my door in order to study me so that you can use me in a book?'

She smiles. 'Would that it were so simple, Mr Rayment.'

'Why is it not simple? It sounds simple enough to me. Are you writing a book and putting me in it? Is that what you are doing? If so, what sort of book is it, and don't you think you need my consent first?'

She sighs. 'If I were going to put you in a book, as you phrase it, I would simply do so. I would change your name and one or two of the circumstances of your life, to get around the law of libel, and that would be that. I would certainly not need to take up residence with you. No, you came to me, as I told you: the man with the bad leg.'

He is getting tired of being told he came to this woman. 'Wouldn't you find it easier to use someone who came to you more willingly?' he remarks as dryly as he can. 'Give up on me. I am not an amenable subject, as you will discover before long. Walk away. I won't detain you. You will find it a relief to be rid of me. And vice versa.'

'And your unsuitable passion? Where would I find another such?'

'My passion, as you call it, is none of your business, Mrs Costello.'

She gives a wintry smile, shakes her head. 'It is not for you to tell me my business,' she replies softly.

His hand tightens on his crutch. If it were a proper, old-fashioned crutch of ash or jarrah, with some weight to it, instead of aluminium, he would bring it down on the old hag's skull, again and again, as often as might be necessary, till she lay dead at his feet and her blood soaked the carpet, let them do with him afterwards what they will.