Patrick Flanery - Absolution

I know what such dreams mean. The loss of the coat, being tricked into abandoning something I will need in the future that protects and comforts, I can only assume is about the fear of dispossession, of becoming dispossessed. I would not believe in such things if the dream and its variations were not so persistent in my unconscious life. The dream of ill-preparedness is more obvious, and comes most often when I am worried about an impending public appearance. I know why this dream has returned. I have agreed to something I should never have, the appearances at the Winelands Literary Festival in five months’ time that will put me before my public, such as it is, and the series of lectures in Johannesburg that are the price Mark has extracted from me for hijacking his identity in the new book. It is a kind of exposure I can barely stomach.

But Nora’s presence, and your own brief coming, Laura, does not have the quality of a dream. If it is not an actual haunting, then it is some kind of hallucination or delusion, a projection of my own disturbed mind. And if that is what it is, like the insomnia I have been suffering off and on for the last several years (perhaps it is even an effect of the insomnia, the hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation), then I can see no point in resisting it.

‘You wish to do what? To make me realize my faults and my failings, I suppose,’ I say to Nora now. ‘To remind me of everything I did to wrong you.’

‘Yes, there is that,’ Nora says, a smirk pushing out through her pout, a smirk and a pout we share. ‘And after all, you have summoned us. What’s more, you’re not sufficiently penitent , Clare. You are a terrible sinner, and yet you don’t go to church, you ignore tradition, you do nothing to demonstrate that you regret or repent.’

‘Each person has her own form of repentance. I repent in my own way, in private,’ I insist. ‘I repent in ways that even you, the dead, may not see.’

‘And if I am, as you appear to think at this very moment, nothing but some hallucination of your own mind, then wouldn’t that suggest your attempts at repentance have failed?’ Nora shakes her head and those eyes that so often flashed in fury, eyes that screamed and raged as loudly as her voice when she bellowed wrath at me as a child, eyes that judged and condemned, autocratic as any dictator, grow gentle before me.

We sit in silence for a further hour in the middle of the night, two sisters, so alike, separated by time. ‘Is this the price I must pay,’ I finally bring myself to ask, ‘this waking of the living?’

‘Price? You speak of a single price? There is not one price. There are many prices for what you have done, all the acts you have committed. Prices, debts, and balances against you, Clare. You have but begun to repay them.’

*

Now that I have summoned you and Nora, brought you forth, how do I make you go, Laura? If I wore black, if I fasted and lit candles and recited incantations, retreated to hermitage caves in the wilderness, perhaps you would allow me to live out the rest of my days and nights unmolested.

After her wedding, her embrace of her husband’s church, Nora chastised me for failing to be observant. ‘Faith is what you need,’ she said. ‘You need faith to put you on a better course. You are an evil woman, Clare, and someday that evil will catch you up.’

‘As a child I played at faith,’ I remember saying, furious that she should presume to lecture me about something so personal, ‘in the way that one will play at dressing up as princesses. I always knew it was imaginary. To you, I know, faith has always had a corporeal reality. I cannot explain how we came to see things so differently.’

Nora clucked at me, looking more superior than she usually did. We were in the old house on Canigou Avenue and Mark was crawling around on the floor while Nora photographed him. ‘Someday God will find you,’ she cooed, and snapped a photo. ‘He will choose you and take you. You are mistaken if you think you have free will. Faith is not a matter of individual choice.’

‘It is my choice!’ I shouted, feeling the rage pulse in my eyes. ‘It is my choice not to believe in comforting fantasies. Comforting fantasies are undoing this world. By the laws of comforting fantasies one group feels it right and proper to subjugate all others.’

‘And what about my nephew? Are you going to let my boy grow up outside of the church, without God?’

‘He is not your boy!’ Mark looked up at me, startled, and began to cry. ‘He is my child and William’s child and we will raise him to be an ethical man, a good man, not a man who feels himself above any other person because of the colour of his skin or the god he bows down before.’

‘Children can’t find their own way,’ Nora said, taking a picture of Mark wailing in my arms, my face wild with fury. ‘They must have guidance. They must have adults to guide them properly.’ Another photo: a flash and more screaming.

‘It’s time for you to go,’ I said, opening the door.

Nora came again last night, looking much as she did on that day I remember. She speaks as she always now speaks, with a salutation followed by hours of annoying pronouncements about my work. And then, rising from where she was sitting, she placed her ghostly hands over my face and I could feel my eyelids through her fingertips. As her hands fell away and I opened my eyes once again, I found myself in an unfamiliar room, still sitting at the end of a bed, but not my own, not in this house. I looked down at my legs and saw Nora’s in their place, sheathed in a nightgown. A man was lying beside me and I knew from the smell of his aftershave and the camphor cream rubbed into the soles of his feet that it must be my brother-in-law, Stephan. The door to this new room rattled with a sudden force and my hand rose to my mouth, though I had not thought to move it. My feet twitched but I had not compelled them to do so. Stephan murmured in panic and I turned to look at him. The body I inhabited was acting of its own volition; I was merely a visitor within it.

The door rattled again and I found myself running towards it, Nora’s body bracing against the wood, looking back at Stephan cowering on the bed. Nora hissed at him to call for help, but as his hand went for the phone her body was thrown back by the door crashing open. We landed on the floor against the bed’s footboard, a report of pain echoing along Nora’s shoulders — a pain I could feel, but only at one remove, more pressure than pain.

A man came through the door and closed it behind him, although the latch no longer engaged and it swung back open, letting in light from the corridor — just like the light from my own corridor coming into my own bedroom. The man did not bother to wear a mask. If a person could be said to look rational, this man did. But his was not the face of the man I had come to know in the weeks after Nora’s death, the man who was charged and found guilty and never denied the charges.

I wonder, Laura, what you looked like when you killed, if your face was composed, if you were fully conscious of your actions, as this man appeared to be, or if you were overcome with rage and the blaze of the moment. I picture your mouth drawn in a line, see the lips pushed together: a rational mouth, a mouth in harmony with what the rest of the body is doing. And then I cannot help seeing a different you, a woman enflamed, screaming vengeance, unfurling a tongue of fire.

There was nothing wild-eyed or impulsive about my sister’s assassin. He knew his task and undertook it without breaking a sweat or allowing his hands to shake. The smell of shit filled the room as the man rested the silencer of his gun against Nora’s face. I felt something release in my sister’s body and a hot wetness spread across the legs. In an instant Stephan had moved towards the window and, as if strings connected the two, the man moved in the same direction, firing his gun three times.