Patrick Flanery - Absolution

‘Don’t be ridiculous. You know I don’t mind,’ I would say, wishing you’d had the courage and grace to ask me, or to ask both of us together. I would have given it then, given whatever you asked. If we did not know with certainty what you were doing then we suspected. The law-abiding are not so cagy, so circumspect. We imagined the danger you must have been in and the imagining drove us mad, until, tormented by our worries about you we would find ourselves lying together at night, both awake, unable to sleep because every slipping into unconsciousness was a fall into nightmare visions of you come to grief. What did I fail to do to make you understand that I loved you more than anyone else, would have done anything for you? Why did you set me up as your adversary when all I ever wanted was to be your champion?

Looking at your other notebooks for that period, I see now that your entries become ever more cryptic. On the rare occasions when you record what people say in conversation, you no longer provide named attribution. In place of names are, at first, single initial letters. Later, in the absence of initials there are different colours of ink: red, black, blue, green — a code legible only to you, for which you alone held the key, now lost. Who was black? Who green? Were you yourself red, the most prominent colour, a blaze running across the field of white pages?

In the end even snatches of conversation go. In their place are only dates and times, written in one colour or another. Instead of people, the colours seem to represent locations. It is only in the final notebook that you return to the fluidity of prose, telling the story of your last days, knowing, I now feel certain, that you were not walking merely to some indistinct sense of your own fate. You knew you were crossing the frontier — not to freedom, but to your death.

As the holidays approached, Sam knew that Sarah would want to be with her parents. You don’t have to stay , he said. You should go home now. I’ll come back as soon as I can .

He promised he would see her again in January, and everything would go on as before. He asked Sarah if he could send a few boxes of Ellen’s things to her apartment — photographs and mementoes, the books by Clare Wald that had given him a map to his own self as a boy, all the things he wanted to keep. Ellen’s house was already on the market, the furniture would be sold or donated, the life he had known dispersed once again.

You don’t have to ask , Sarah said, send anything you want to keep .

He knew what this meant, that everything he owned in the world would be with Sarah, in a country that was not his own.

The police continued to assure Sam they were following up leads and would notify him if there were any developments. They promised they were doing all they could. They suggested there was no reason for him to delay his return to New York since he had not been present at the crime and therefore could provide no evidence that might help their investigation.

On Christmas morning he woke alone in his aunt’s house. There was no television to watch and no radio to listen to. He had donated the food in the freezer to the church, which had promised it would be distributed to a needy family. One of the members from the Women’s Federation had brought him a plastic bag full of pastries, half of which he ate for breakfast, listening to the silence and the bells pealing across town and the shriek of eagles shredding the air.

He made a salad for lunch and spent the rest of the day sorting through closets and boxes and files, putting those things he was going to throw away in Ellen’s bedroom, and all that he wanted to keep in his own. No one had been to view the house, but he felt he should begin to put the place in order.

Late in the afternoon there was a knock and when he answered, dragging open the heavy front door and looking through the bars of the wrought-iron gate that was supposed to protect the house from burglars, there was a stranger standing ten centimetres from him.

What do you want? Sam barked. The man stepped back, looking as though he’d been hit in the chest, and Sam immediately regretted his tone. The man would only want food or money, and would have a long story about his family and his hunger and it being an expensive time of year.

Are you Mister Leroux? the man asked. He had a thin moustache and shook when he spoke. Sam realized he was only a teenager in a man’s body.

Do you have some business with Ms Leroux? If you do I’m afraid she’s dead .

Are you not Miss Leroux’s son?

I’m her nephew. What is this about? Say whatever it is you want, Sam thought, just tell me what you need so I can tell you no and send you out of my life.

I’m very sorry to disturb you, sir , the young man said, reaching into his back pocket and retrieving an envelope whose corners were bent. He handed it to Sam, who took it as if it were alive. I was one of Miss Leroux’s students. I was still at university when there was the funeral, and I wanted to say I was sorry to hear that she died. I wanted to offer her family my condolences .

I’m her only family .

Then I offer you my condolences, sir. She was a very good teacher and a very good person. She wrote me references. I was so sorry —

The young man shook his head and turned his back to Sam. Across the street a neighbour was at her window, watching them, a phone in her hand.

Thank you for the card , Sam said. Despite what he felt rationally, he could not bring himself to trust the man. It was possible he was lying, was himself the perpetrator, the murderer with the gun that produced ghastly red inkblots, come to see if there were any other women to rob or rich relatives to fleece. Or he was an emissary of the perpetrators, a scout sent to see if the case was likely to go away or be hounded to conclusion by the survivors.

But no, Sam thought, this man is innocent. If he wanted to do right by the man, whose card — Sam ripped it open — was sincere and elegantly phrased, he should invite him in and give him tea, and perhaps even a token by which to remember his teacher. That’s what Ellen would have wanted. Indeed, Sam was sure that’s what Ellen herself would have done, and she would have done it with far less hesitation. That’s very kind of you. Thank you again for the card .

I’m so very sorry , the young man said. Thank you for your time, sir. I would wish you a happy Christmas but I cannot imagine that it is a happy day for you. So instead I’ll just wish you peace , he said, putting his hands together.

Sam wondered why this kind of exchange, which should have been so natural and appropriate, was something he could not bring himself to do properly. If the man had been white he would not have thought twice about letting him in. He could not think of himself as a racist, he was sure he was not, but one had to be careful. Everyone must understand that one had to be careful.

The house was his although he knew he could never again call it home. He could not live in this town or inhabit these rooms. Let someone else have it. He didn’t know where he belonged. He was not even sure he could live in this country again.

The house sold faster than he’d expected it would, to a young couple expecting a baby. Like his aunt the woman was a teacher. The man had just been hired at the prison. Looking at the scrub-bare hills to the north and listening to the grinding of trucks on the route between Johannesburg and Cape Town that passed through the middle of town, Sam couldn’t imagine wanting to start anything there, let alone a family. It was impossible to drive from one end of Beaufort West to the other without passing the pale walls of the prison built in the middle of the roundabout on the national route. Sam knew what kind of place put a prison at its heart. He notified the neighbours and the church that the house had sold and he would not be coming back. It hadn’t been his choice to come here in the first place, and if he belonged anywhere in the world it was not in the middle of these plains, yawning wide their hunger for more lives.