J. Coetzee - Disgrace

She sits up and blows her nose. 'I saw my GP last night.'

'And is he taking care of all eventualities?'

'She,' she says. 'She, not he. No' - and now there is a crack of anger in her voice - 'how can she? How can a doctor take care of all eventualities? Have some sense!'

He gets up. If she chooses to be irritable, then he can be irritable too. 'I'm sorry I asked,' he says. 'What are our plans for today?'

'Our plans? To go back to the farm and clean up.'

'And then?'

'Then to go on as before.'

'On the farm?'

'Of course. On the farm.'

'Be sensible, Lucy. Things have changed. We can't just pick up where we left off.'

`Why not?'

'Because it's not a good idea. Because it's not safe.'

It was never safe, and it's not an idea, good or bad. I'm not going back for the sake of an idea. I'm just going back.'

Sitting up in her borrowed nightdress, she confronts him, neck stiff, eyes glittering. Not her father's little girl, not any longer.

THIRTEEN

BEFORE THEY SET off he needs to have his dressings changed. In the cramped little bathroom Bev Shaw unwinds the bandages. The eyelid is still closed and blisters have risen on his scalp, but the damage is not as bad as it could have been. The most painful part is the flange of his right ear: it is, as the young doctor put it, the only part of him that actually caught fire.

With a sterile solution Bev washes the exposed pink underskin of the scalp, then, using tweezers, lays the oily yellow dressing over it. Delicately she anoints the folds of his eyelid and his ear. She does not speak while she works. He recalls the goat in the clinic, wonders whether, submitting to her hands, it felt the same peacefulness.

'There,' she says at last, standing back.

He inspects the image in the mirror, with its neat white cap and blanked-out eye. 'Shipshape,' he remarks, but thinks: Like a mummy.

He tries again to raise the subject of the rape. 'Lucy says she saw her GP last night.'

'Yes.'

'There's the risk of pregnancy,' he presses on. 'There's the risk of venereal infection. There's the risk of HIV. Shouldn't she see a gynaecologist as well?'

Bev Shaw shifts uncomfortably. 'You must ask Lucy yourself '

'I have asked. I can't get sense from her.'

'Ask again.'

It is past eleven, but Lucy shows no sign of emerging. Aimlessly he roams about the garden. A grey mood is settling on him. It is not just that he does not know what to do with himself. The events of yesterday have shocked him to the depths. The trembling, the weakness are only the first and most superficial signs of that shock. He has a sense that, inside him, a vital organ has been bruised, abused - perhaps even his heart. For the first time he has a taste of what it will be like to be an old man, tired to the bone, without hopes, without desires, indifferent to the future. Slumped on a plastic chair amid the stench of chicken feathers and rotting apples, he feels his interest in the world draining from him drop by drop. It may take weeks, it may take months before he is bled dry, but he is bleeding. When that is finished, he will be like a fly-casing in a spiderweb, brittle to the touch, lighter than rice-chaff, ready to float away. He cannot expect help from Lucy. Patiently, silently, Lucy must work her own way back from the darkness to the light. Until she is herself again, the onus is on him to manage their daily life. But it has come too suddenly. It is a burden he is not ready for: the farm, the garden, the kennels. Lucy's future, his future, the future of the land as a whole - it is all a matter of indifference, he wants to say; let it all go to the dogs, I do not care. As for the men who visited them, he wishes them harm, wherever they may be, but otherwise does not want to think about them.

Just an after-effect, he tells himself, an after-effect of the invasion. In a while the organism will repair itself, and I, the ghost within it, will be my old self again. But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float toward his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.

There is a ring at the doorbell: two young policemen in spruce new uniforms, ready to begin their investigations. Lucy emerges from her room looking haggard, wearing the same clothes as yesterday. She refuses breakfast. With the police following behind in their van, Bev drives them out to the farm. The corpses of the dogs lie in the cage where they fell. The bulldog Katy is still around: they catch a glimpse of her skulking near the stable, keeping her distance. Of Petrus there is no sign. Indoors, the two policemen take off their caps, tuck them under their arms. He stands back, leaves it to Lucy to take them through the story she has elected to tell. They listen respectfully, taking down her every word, the pen darting nervously across the pages of the notebook. They are of her generation, but edgy of her nevertheless, as if she were a creature polluted and her pollution could leap across to them, soil them. There were three men, she recites, or two men and a boy. They tricked their way into the house, took (she lists the items) money, clothes, a television set, a CD player, a rifle with ammunition. When her father resisted, they assaulted him, poured spirits over him, tried to set him on fire. Then they shot the dogs and drove off in his car. She describes the men and what they were wearing; she describes the car. All the while she speaks, Lucy looks steadily at him, as though drawing strength from him, or else daring him to contradict her. When one of the officers asks, 'How long did the whole incident take?' she says,

'Twenty minutes, thirty minutes.' An untruth, as he knows, as she knows. It took much longer. How much longer?

As much longer as the men needed to finish off their business with the lady of the house. Nevertheless he does not interrupt. A matter of indifference: he barely listens as Lucy goes through her story. Words are beginning to take shape that have been hovering since last night at the edges of memory. Two old ladies locked in the lavatory / They were there from Monday to Saturday / Nobody knew they were there. Locked in the lavatory while his daughter was used. A chant from his childhood come back to point a jeering finger. Oh dear, what can the matter be? Lucy's secret; his disgrace. Cautiously the policemen move through the house, inspecting. No blood, no overturned furniture. The mess in the kitchen has been cleaned up (by Lucy? when?). Behind the lavatory door, two spent matchsticks, which they do not even notice.

In Lucy's room the double bed is stripped bare. The scene of the crime, he thinks to himself; and, as if reading the thought, the policemen avert their eyes, pass on.

A quiet house on a winter morning, no more, no less.

'A detective will come and take fingerprints,' they say as they leave. 'Try not to touch things. If you remember anything else they took, give us a call at the station.'

Barely have they departed when the telephone repairmen arrive, then old Ettinger. Of the absent Petrus, Ettinger remarks darkly, 'Not one of them you can trust.' He will send a boy, he says, to fix the kombi. In the past he has seen Lucy fly into a rage at the use of the word boy. Now she does not react. He walks Ettinger to the door.

'Poor Lucy,' remarks Ettinger. 'It must have been bad for her. Still, it could have been worse.'

'Indeed? How?'

'They could have taken her away with them.'