Patrick Flanery - Absolution

It’s an oppressive mid-January day in the tower of Senate House, the windows too small, the air stagnant, the buildings outside a strange blend of the post-industrial, brutalist, and a kind of retro vision of the future.

‘If Cape Town is San Francisco meets Miami Beach,’ Sarah has taken to telling friends in the States, ‘then Johannesburg is Beverly Hills crossed with Cleveland and Blade Runner .’

I’m spending long hours in this office, driving back and forth each day from the house along Jan Smuts Avenue, which is always packed with cars, traffic congested by the shifting widths of the road: three lanes in one direction, to two lanes, to one lane, to two again, and sometimes it feels like five lanes in both directions, when in fact it’s nothing like that big.

‘I love it here,’ Sarah said this morning, ‘this is my idea of paradise — working in a cottage in a beautiful garden with my own swimming pool and great produce. The only drawback is the lingering fear that I might wake up with a shotgun in my face. But I guess that could happen anywhere.’

I pause at the intersection of Jan Smuts and St Andrews; a billboard ahead of me shows a domestic worker in a green uniform kicking a soccer ball under the legend A NATION UNITED. In front of the billboard are signs pointing in opposite directions: THE HEADACHE CLINIC to the right, the SOUTH AFRICAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION to the left. A British oil company has sponsored the billboard. A man approaches my car, walking through the lanes of traffic with a hand-lettered sign: WELDER/PAINTER, his cell number scrawled underneath. There are signs like that all over the city, tacked to trees and taped to walls. When he holds it up to my window, I raise my hand in apology and wave him off.

The task of transcribing the interviews with Clare is taking longer than I expected. It makes me feel as though I’m beginning to drown in her words — and it’s not just the transcripts, but the mountain of material she allowed me to copy from her archive, and the various earlier interviews I had conducted with the few reliable people who would speak about her, not to mention the entire bookshelf in the university library that holds her published works, and the further shelves containing all the books about her books. It seems not so much an impossible task as one that could take years to complete; I have only twelve months until the deadline imposed by the publisher.

I’m about to go buy a cold drink and a bag of popcorn when the phone rings. It’s Lionel Jameson.

‘I was hoping you might forgive my brusqueness back in December.’ His voice squeaks and hums, fast and hoarse with digital static; if I didn’t know better I’d think he was on the other side of the world. ‘To be honest, your visit took me completely by surprise — it was a real shock.’

‘Did you think I was dead or something?’

There’s a silence on the line and then, without answering my question, he blurts out: ‘If the offer of dinner still stands, I’d like to accept it. I think you owe me that much at least.’

I don’t know what to make of his tone, but I speak with Sarah and we agree to have him over on Friday. She goes to Angola early next week and for some reason I feel now that I’d rather not see Lionel alone.

When I phone him back with the address he says, ‘Oh, very posh. Another thing, there’s someone else I’d like to bring along, if that’s okay?’ He doesn’t need to tell me it’s Timothy — I know it already, as if by a premonitory nightmare.

*

On Friday evening, while it’s still light, they arrive in a sleek black car — Timothy’s not Lionel’s. We watch as the gate closes and though we’re reasonably secure in this miniature compound, Timothy gives a practised wave of the device that engages the central-locking mechanism.

‘I know who you are,’ he says, pressing a ten-year-old bottle of Kanonkop Pinotage into my hands, ‘and I assume you remember who I am.’

The difference between the two men could not be more pronounced. As shabby and drawn as Lionel is, his skin climate-damaged and eyes bloodshot, face unshaven for several days, Timothy is overripe and over-processed. His nails have been manicured, his suit is more expensive than anything I’ll ever be able to afford. He’s rotten with success.

After I make the introductions the four of us sit by the pool, drinking sundowners until it gets dark. Timothy now works for the South African Tourist Board. He listens while the rest of us talk, staying silent in a way that unsettles me. Sarah excuses herself every few minutes to take a call or answer an e-mail, absences during which I might have expected either man to say something complimentary about her, but as soon as she leaves Lionel falls silent and both men stare at the ground, swirling their glasses, waiting for a top-up. The cheese and crackers and olives I put out disappear; Sarah and I barely touch them.

I’m about to suggest we go inside for dinner when Timothy finally speaks.

‘Lionel tells me you want to know about Laura Wald.’

‘Yes, though we don’t have to do it now. I just hoped you might be able to tell me something about what happened to her.’

The two men look at each other, as if to check they are still in agreement about some point decided earlier. Minutes pass and it’s almost dark, the sun going down in a single rapid shuttering as a chill spreads across the lawn. A hadeda erupts from the garden next door, beaten metal wings flapping, and lets out a single monstrous cry. Timothy stares at me in a strange, assessing way.

‘Listen, my friend — you don’t have any idea what you’re asking.’

Over dinner, the four of us chat as if there were no history between the men and me. Timothy gives us tips on what to do and see in Johannesburg, where not to go, how seriously to take the security and personal safety warnings. Lionel insists it isn’t as dangerous as we’ve been made to believe. I struggle to concentrate on the conversation, wondering all the while what Timothy meant, catching his eye in brief moments, seeing him studying me when he thinks no one will notice, as if he might not believe I am who I claim to be.

When we finish dinner Sarah excuses herself again, explaining that she’s trying to finish a story before she goes to bed — we agreed in advance that she’d give me space to talk alone with the men. There is no story to finish, no late-Friday deadline she has to meet.

Left alone, silence again overtakes us. They ask me nothing about myself, about my life in the years since I last saw them. If I don’t ask questions, the men don’t speak — I think of them as men in a way that I don’t think of myself. There’s a raw hardness and danger about them, a lack of domestication and care, as though they might break a chair or smash a glass if the fancy struck them, thinking nothing of the consequences. It’s not the way I remember either of them.

‘Is there nothing you can tell me about Laura?’

I’m perplexed by their hesitation and wonder if this is just a particular kind of South African awkwardness that I’ve forgotten — the unwillingness to speak, the filling of silence with small talk, or talking all the way around a subject without ever landing on it.

‘Just what is it exactly that you think you want to know, my friend?’ Timothy asks, smiling in a way that is not remotely amused.

‘I’d like to know what happened to her.’

‘ Ag , no, you wouldn’t, really,’ he says, shaking his head rhythmically, each turn to the left or right punctuating a syllable.

Lionel shifts in his chair, fiddles with his glass, clears his throat. ‘You can’t just leave it at that,’ he says to Timothy. ‘You should tell Sam what he wants to know.’