Patrick Flanery - Absolution

Surprising herself, Clare found a small white stone and placed it on her sister’s monument. It was not the tradition of her own family’s religion, but somehow it made sense, the stone as a private acknowledgement of a feeling she was unable to describe. It would have been too much to say that she grieved for her sister, and certainly she had no fond feeling for her brother-in-law, but there was a turbulence in her heart that, for a moment, the movement of the stone from the ground to the monument put to rest. When Clare was finished, she asked Marie to drive her home.

‘Would you not like to go for lunch somewhere?’ Marie asked, sounding hopeful.

‘Not now, no, I’m sorry. We can stop for a sandwich if you’re hungry, but I’ve quite lost my appetite.’

Later that day Clare realized that she should phone Ms White. It was near the end of the month. When had the invasion occurred? The beginning of December a year ago, or the end of November a year before that? The dates were fuzzy in her head. It seemed as though it had still been spring, only just warm enough to have had the windows open at night. Ms White was perfunctory on the phone.

‘Well, that is good. You have found the wig. I guess the case is closed.’

‘What of Jacobus and his so-called gang?’

‘You pressed no charges against them, so we have let them go.’

‘Is it as simple as that?’ Clare asked, incredulous.

‘As simple as you make it, madam.’

‘And what of the invaders? Are there no clues?’

‘Invaders?’

‘The people who broke into my old house, of course.’

‘But we had him, Jacobus and his gang, and you said it could not be them, madam. I do not understand. Is it now your wish that we should charge them with robbery?’ Ms White sounded truly perplexed, as though she could not begin to understand the nature or logic of Clare’s intentions.

‘It was not Jacobus, but I need to know who it was. I only wish to know, exactly, who did it — the invasion, the theft. I can tell you only that it was someone from the past. Someone from my brother-in-law’s family. His associates, his brothers, or even his sisters. They wish to punish me.’

‘If this is a family matter, madam, then why did you ever bring the authorities into it? If you knew who it was, why have you wasted our time?’

‘It is not that simple.’

‘Perhaps you should take over the investigation. You are so good at finding. You found your father’s special wig. That is good. Perhaps you will find the intruders. And then you will phone me if you wish. And we will come fetch them for you.’ Like a ball, or a stick, Clare wanted to say. Intruders that were only playthings, a wig, a tin box, two women of a certain age. ‘Or you will settle the matter as it should be settled, madam, as a family.’

But they are not my family , Clare wanted to say. They are nothing to do with me. They know what I have done. They are sending me signs. They are terrorizing me .

There is something I have never told you, Laura, a thing about me that makes us more alike than you might imagine. While I have many regrets — in particular about the kind of mother I was to you, and the kind of mother I never managed to be — I have no greater regret than this: that I failed to tell you the darkest truth about me when you were present to hear it, that I failed to show you, when you needed it, how alike we were. This is my true confession. To confess is all that I can do for you.

It is a story about sisters: my sister Nora, and me.

Perhaps I never told you, but even as small children, Nora teased me mercilessly. I was Giraffe Girl, Goosey, Noose-neck. I’m going to hang you high, Noose-neck , Nora would scream, threatening me with a length of rope. And then when I cried she would clasp me to her and say she didn’t mean it, No offence, Clare , it was all just joking, that’s what sisters did. I stopped loving her when I was eight, after she cut off all my hair while I was sleeping and burned it in the garden. I stopped thinking of her as my dear sister before I ever came of age, even before I was a teenager, long before Nora left home.

At sixteen, Nora was always threatening. She threatened our parents that she would marry that great bullock Boer, Stephan Pretorius, with or without their permission. She once threatened me with a hot griddle from the stove, chasing me through the house and screaming I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! after I used her lipstick. She threatened the cats with drowning and switches. She threatened our parents that she would never see them again if they refused to attend her wedding. She threatened to elope, never to let them meet their grandchildren (a blessing, perhaps, that there were none). She threatened too much. Why, I wondered, was she so unlike me? How do two people become opposites in every way while being raised by the same parents in the same house with the same values and rules? I hardly have an answer today. They were stricter with her, but not in a way that should have produced a tyrant. My father used to say the ghost of his grandmother, whom he remembered with terror, must be haunting Nora, for how else could one explain her wickedness? There were times when I wondered if you had inherited that haunting, Laura, if the echo of Nora’s name in your own betokened some generational curse.

Even as a child, I understood why she would marry Stephan. It was not about love. He was older than her, a man already — a man to replace our father, who was a better man by half. (I know you will protest — that I, too, married a man to replace my father, a man of the law like him, to take his place. Unlike Nora, I was conscious of my folly, and your father was — is — no monster.) Nora’s husband, so unlike our father, had a strong, stout body, florid with health and indulgence. What could our parents say but Yes, we give our blessing ? And even though his was, if you like, a parallel branch of the same Christian tribe (if we can still speak of tribes these days), the Pretorius family seemed as foreign to my parents as we must have seemed to them. On my sister’s wedding night I heard my father weeping in his study in a way that he wept only when he remembered the dead.

One of our father’s clients loaned us a limousine for the day, and we paid the gardener extra to drive us to the church, then to the banquet, and then home afterwards. On the way to the church, the gardener was so excited by the car that he tested the windscreen wipers but could not discover how to turn them off, so we arrived in the blazing sun at the church in our borrowed limousine with the wipers screaming over the dry glass, and even when the car was turned off, the wipers kept screeching back and forth until the car’s battery died. After the ceremony, we had to walk through town to the wedding banquet because there was no room in the limousines that my brother-in-law’s family — dozens of them — had hired to carry themselves. Or perhaps they simply did not wish to risk such intimacy with us. My sister had become one of them, embraced their church, turned her back on our quiet Methodism. Stephan had caused scandal by choosing an outsider, but he stood his ground. He said he loved her. And who could not? She looked like Marilyn Monroe in those days, blonde and flawless as a goddess.

We arrived at the banquet sweating and covered with dust while my sister and her new family were dry and cool, already eating their chilled soup. There had been a ‘mistake’ with the seating arrangements, so that my parents and I were not at the long head table with the wedding party and my brother-in-law’s parents and six brothers and sisters, but at a separate table just to the side, with my aunt and uncle and cousins, a knot of slender, pale bodies, suffocating under all that beef. We were not in any of the wedding photos, except those taken by my uncle, with my sister and her husband out of focus in the background, chewing their braaivleis .