J. Coetzee - Disgrace

`For my sake or for yours?' he asks her.

'For yours.'

'Won't the police want to see me too?'

'There is nothing you can tell them that I can't,' she replies. 'Or is there?'

At the hospital she strides ahead through the door marked CASUALTIES, fills out the form for him, seats him in the waiting room. She is all strength, all purposefulness, whereas the trembling seems to have spread to his whole body.

'If they discharge you, wait here,' she instructs him. 'I will be back to fetch you.'

`What about yourself?'

She shrugs. If she is trembling, she shows no sign of it.

He finds a seat between two hefty girls who might be sisters, one of them holding a moaning child, and a man with bloody wadding over his hand. He is twelfth in line. The clock on the wall says 5.45. He closes his good eye and slips into a swoon in which the two sisters continue to whisper together, chuchotantes. When he opens his eye the clock still says 5.45. Is it broken? No: the minute hand jerks and comes to rest on 5.46.

Two hours pass before a nurse calls him, and there is more waiting before his turn comes to see the sole doctor on duty, a young Indian woman.

The burns on his scalp are not serious, she says, though he must be wary of infection. She spends more time on his eye. The upper and lower lids are stuck together; separating them proves extraordinarily painful.

'You are lucky,' she comments after the examination. 'There is no damage to the eye itself. If they had used petrol it would be a different story.'

He emerges with his head dressed and bandaged, his eye covered, an ice-pack strapped to his wrist. In the waiting-room he is surprised to find Bill Shaw. Bill, who is a head shorter than he, grips him by the shoulders. 'Shocking, absolutely shocking,' he says. 'Lucy is over at our place. She was going to fetch you herself but Bev wouldn't hear of it. How are you?'

'I'm all right. Light burns, nothing serious. I'm sorry we've ruined your evening.'

'Nonsense!' says Bill Shaw. 'What else are friends for? You would have done the same.'

Spoken without irony, the words stay with him and will not go away. Bill Shaw believes that if he, Bill Shaw, had been hit over the head and set on fire, then he, David Lurie, would have driven to the hospital and sat waiting, without so much as a newspaper to read, to fetch him home. Bill Shaw believes that, because he and David Lurie once had a cup of tea together, David Lurie is his friend, and the two of them have obligations towards each other. Is Bill Shaw wrong or right? Has Bill Shaw, who was born in Hankey, not two hundred kilometres away, and works in a hardware shop, seen so little of the world that he does not know there are men who do not readily make friends, whose attitude toward friendships between men is corroded with scepticism? Modern English friend from Old Englishfreond, from freon, to love. Does the drinking of tea seal a love-bond, in the eyes of Bill Shaw? Yet but for Bill and Bev Shaw, but for old Ettinger, but for bonds of some kind, where would he be now? On the ruined farm with the broken telephone amid the dead dogs.

'A shocking business,' says Bill Shaw again in the car. 'Atrocious. It's bad enough when you read about it in the paper, but when it happens to someone you know' - he shakes his head - 'that really brings it home to you. It's like being in a war all over again.'

He does not bother to reply. The day is not dead yet but living. War, atrocity: every word with which one tries to wrap up this day, the day swallows down its black throat.

Bev Shaw meets them at the door. Lucy has taken a sedative, she announces, and is lying down; best not to disturb her.

'Has she been to the police?'

'Yes, there's a bulletin out for your car.'

'And she has seen a doctor?'

'All attended to. How about you? Lucy says you were badly burned.'

'I have burns, but they are not as bad as they look.'

'Then you should eat and get some rest.'

'I'm not hungry.'

She runs water for him in their big, old-fashioned, cast-iron bath. He stretches out his pale length in the steaming water and tries to relax. But when it is time to get out, he slips and almost falls: he is as weak as a baby, and lightheaded too. He has to call Bill Shaw and suffer the ignominy of being helped out of the bath, helped to dry himself, helped into borrowed pyjamas. Later he hears Bill and Bev talking in low voices, and knows it is he they are talking about.

He has come away from the hospital with a tube of painkillers, a packet of burn dressings, and a little aluminium gadget to prop his head on. Bev Shaw settles him on a sofa that smells of cats; with surprising ease he falls asleep. In the middle of the night he awakes in a state of the utmost clarity. He has had a vision: Lucy has spoken to him; her words - 'Come to me, save me!' - still echo in his ears. In the vision she stands, hands outstretched, wet hair combed back, in a field of white light. He gets up, stumbles against a chair, sends it flying. A light goes on and Bev Shaw is before him in her nightdress. 'I have to speak to Lucy,' he mumbles: his mouth is dry, his tongue thick. The door to Lucy's room opens. Lucy is not at all as in the vision. Her face is puffy with sleep, she is tying the belt of a dressing-gown that is clearly not hers.

'I'm sorry, I had a dream,' he says. The word vision is suddenly too old-fashioned, too queer. 'I thought you were calling me.' Lucy shakes her head. 'I wasn't. Go to sleep now.'

She is right, of course. It is three in the morning. But he cannot fail to notice that for the second time in a day she has spoken to him. as if to a child - a child or an old man.

He tries to get back to sleep but cannot. It must be an effect of the pills, he tells himself: not a vision, not even a dream, just a chemical hallucination. Nevertheless, the figure of the woman in the field oflight stays before him. 'Save me!' cries his daughter, her words clear, ringing, immediate. Is it possible that Lucy's soul did indeed leave her body and come to him? May people who do not believe in souls yet have them, and may their souls lead an independent life?

Hours yet before sunrise. His wrist aches, his eyes burn, his scalp is sore and irritable. Cautiously he switches on the lamp and gets up. With a blanket wrapped around him he pushes open Lucy's door and enters. There is a chair by the bedside; he sits down. His senses tell him she is awake. What is he doing? He is watching over his little girl, guarding her from harm, warding off the bad spirits. After a long while he feels her begin to relax. A soft pop as her lips separate, and the gentlest of snores.

It is morning. Bev Shaw serves him a breakfast of cornflakes and tea, then disappears into Lucy's room.

'How is she?' he asks when she comes back.

Bev Shaw responds only with a terse shake of the head. Not your business, she seems to be saying. Menstruation, childbirth, violation and its aftermath: blood-matters; a woman's burden, women's preserve. Not for the first time, he wonders whether women would not be happier living in communities of women, accepting visits from men only when they choose. Perhaps he is wrong to think of Lucy as homosexual. Perhaps she simply prefers female company. Or perhaps that is all that lesbians are: women who have no need of men.

No wonder they are so vehement against rape, she and Helen. Rape, god of chaos and mixture, violator of seclusions. Raping a lesbian worse than raping a virgin: more of a blow. Did they know what they were up to, those men? Had the word got around?

At nine o'clock, after Bill Shaw has gone off to work, he taps on Lucy's door. She is lying with her face turned to the wall. He sits down beside her, touches her cheek. It is wet with tears.

'This is not an easy thing to talk about,' he says, 'but have you seen a doctor?'