Patrick Flanery - Absolution

Perked up by the caffeine, she decided to watch a locally made espionage thriller about a mercenary who had been involved in every ‘low-intensity conflict’ of the second half of the twentieth century — the Congo, Angola, Nicaragua, etc. — and specialized in infiltrating liberation movements believed to have Communist backing. In the film, the man finally meets his match in the head of a special MK unit planning the Church Street bombings in 1983. Over the course of the film the mercenary infiltrates the unit, but begins to find himself sympathizing with the very ANC agents he is attempting to undermine, and whose bombs he has been ordered to sabotage, in hopes that they will blow up themselves instead of the South African Air Force headquarters.

Clare fell asleep before she could discover what happened to the mercenary — whether he became a turncoat and helped the ANC, or proceeded with the sabotage. She could not remember the details of the actual case, but seemed to recall that things had not gone strictly as planned. She assumed, though, that the film was fiction, that no mercenary mole working on behalf of the apartheid government had been involved, at least not in that particular case.

She opened her eyes to find the test pattern humming on the television screen, and above that the insistent buzzing of the intercom. It was ten past midnight.

‘Who is that? Mark?’ she shouted, squinting at the intercom’s video monitor and turning on the floodlights to illuminate the front gate.

‘I’ve lost your clicker, Mother,’ he said, leaning out the window of his hire car. ‘You don’t need to shout. It’s not a transatlantic link.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes, I’m alone. It’s perfectly safe for heaven’s sake. Just hurry up before someone does come along.’

Clare pushed the button to open the gate and watched on the monitor as Mark’s car lurched up the drive. She waited until the gate had closed, certain that no one had followed him in, before opening the front door. Perhaps Marie’s idea for a double set of gates was not so ludicrous. It was possible to imagine how one might be followed or ambushed. It drove Clare mad that her own country could make her think in this damnable way, make her lose all trust and belief in the best nature of her fellow citizens.

‘What are you still doing up?’ gesturing at Clare’s creased day clothes, her shirt stained with red wine and a glob of drying gravy.

‘What else did you expect me to do? You didn’t call, you didn’t let me know when to expect you.’

‘I thought I said—’ stammering, unknotting his tie, out of breath and still holding his attaché case in one hand ‘—I thought I explained that I had an all-day meeting with clients, and dinner with colleagues this evening.’

‘You charged out of the house without saying a word to me. Perhaps you mentioned it yesterday.’

‘I was feeling distracted this morning and not in the best of moods. I apologize unreservedly. Honestly, Mother, I’ve had a guilty conscience about you all day, after what I said to you this morning.’ He paced around at the entrance to the lounge, still working his tie with one hand, until it came loose and he was able to whip it off and throw it over a chair. It was unlike him to shed something in this way, to be anything less than fastidious.

She picked up their earlier conversation as though there had been no lapse. ‘Perhaps I have held an inflated sense of my own importance, but I hoped you might understand why this should be so. There is nothing to prove that Nora and Stephan’s deaths were not the result of my carelessness, Mark, just as there is, admittedly, nothing concrete to say that they were. But I cannot help feeling what I do. Harsh words or the suggestion of draconian punishment, those do not help in a case like mine. I do not respond well to threats of punishment. When I raised the matter with you, what I wished for was an open engagement. I spoke of it only because I respect your mind, and your sense of justice, not because I wished to burden you. I want you to understand what haunts me, what increasingly and quite literally keeps me awake at night. If I cannot tell you, then whom can I tell?’

He shook his head and rolled his eyes. ‘If it helps you to forgive my brusqueness, then try to understand that part of my response this morning was total exasperation with the role you had assigned me. I didn’t want to play it. I didn’t like the choice of dialogue. I wanted to write my own response, but felt I couldn’t. I said what I believed you wanted me to say, in the way that you wanted to hear it. If you love me then give me the chance to speak my own words and not yours. Stop playing ventrilo—’

‘Then speak! Say what you have to say.’

‘Then don’t interrupt me!’ he shouted, his face reddening. They stood in silence for a moment and then the phone rang. Clare wanted to ignore it but feared it might be Marie.

‘Mrs Wald?’

‘Yes? Who is this?’

‘It’s your neighbour, Donald Thacker.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I saw that your lights were all on, and that a car had come in. I wanted to be sure there was nothing the matter.’

‘Nothing in the least. Thank you for your concern. I must say goodnight now. I have a guest,’ she said, and put down the phone. ‘My neighbour,’ she said to Mark. ‘A busybody English widower.’

Mark dropped into a chair, flinging his attaché case onto the carpet. He took an inhaler from his jacket pocket and administered himself a dose.

‘Please go ahead. I shall remain silent,’ Clare said. ‘For a change, I shall be the one to listen.’

Mark looked exhausted and glanced at Clare in a way that made her feel she was expecting far too much of him. She did not want to cause him further sadness or pain, or to force him to shoulder a duty that was by rights only hers to bear.

‘You gave me your confession,’ he said, his breath coming more steadily. ‘Now I wonder if you’d be willing to hear mine? Like yours, it’s not a confession of a crime per se. I think we can agree that you’ve committed no crime. Equally, mine isn’t a confession of sin, since sin is something I don’t believe in, and I suspect you don’t either, though I realize we’ve never had that conversation. So it’s a secular confession of — I don’t know what to call it. Let’s call it a secular confession of shortcoming, as yours was something like a secular confession of carelessness. These are confessions that we can only make to each other. Maybe, I don’t know, I might be able to say this to Dad, though he and I don’t speak about things like this. It’s not easy for me, as the person who listens to other people’s grievances and failures and who’s always looking for flaws and shortcomings in my professional life, to describe my own, or even to admit that I have any.’

He paused, and as he was about to speak again the phone rang.

‘Blast that man,’ Clare said, and picked up the phone. ‘What do you want?’

‘Mrs Wald? It’s Donald Thacker again. I’m sorry to bother you but I noticed that the lights were still on and I wondered if perhaps something was wrong only you couldn’t say because you would be overheard. If there is something wrong, why don’t you say to me “Yes, I would be very happy to join your bridge party,” and then I should know that I ought to phone the police.’

‘Really, Mr Thacker, I must go now. I am busy with my guest,’ she said, and put down the phone. ‘A most insistent man. Please continue.’

‘The year that Laura disappeared, she came to see me in Jo’burg. I was single, working all the time, putting money aside. If things got worse I thought I might emigrate. I’ve never told you this, have I? I was on the verge of packing it in and going abroad — I was also afraid that my medical exemption would no longer be enough to keep me safe from the army, that things were getting so desperate they’d force even the likes of me to shoulder a gun, or at least press me into serving in some more bureaucratic capacity. In any case, the time I’d spent at Oxford convinced me I could live in England if I had to. And if not there, then Australia or New Zealand, or even the Netherlands. So I was saving up in expectation of leaving. I knew it would take everything I could scrape together to do it comfortably, which was the only way I was prepared to do it. I didn’t want to suffer. Laura came to me the spring before she disappeared. It was a strange meeting. She spoke almost in gibberish. I wondered if she was on drugs of some kind. I knew what she was involved in and even having her in my flat terrified me. The last thing I wanted was her activity attaching itself to me and ruining my own chances of getting out of the country. But what I remember most from that last meeting was how frightened she seemed.’