She has a cousin in Cape Town, she replies, she can stay with him.
The doctor is older than her, unshaven, with dark, hooded eyes. She has been told his name but did not catch it. He may be Jewish, but there are many other things he may be too. He smells of cigarette smoke; there is a blue cigarette pack peeking out of his breast pocket. Does she believe him when he says that her mother is not in danger? Yes, she does; but she has always had a tendency to trust doctors, to believe what they say even when she knows they are just guessing; therefore she mistrusts her trust.
‘Are you absolutely sure there is no danger, doctor?’ she says.
He gives her a tired nod. Absolutely indeed! What is absolutely in human affairs? ‘In order to take care of your mother you must take care of yourself,’ he says.
She feels a welling-up of tears, a welling-up of self-pity too. Take care of both of us! she wants to plead. She would like to fall into the arms of this stranger, to be held and comforted. ‘Thank you, doctor,’ she says.
Lukas is on the road somewhere in the Northern Cape, uncontactable. She calls her cousin John from a public telephone. ‘I’ll come and fetch you at once,’ says John. ‘Stay with us as long as you like.’
Years have passed since she was last in Cape Town. She has never been to Tokai, the suburb where he and his father live. Their house sits behind a high wooden fence smelling strongly of damp-rot and engine oil. The night is dark, the pathway from the gate unlit; he takes her arm to guide her. ‘Be warned,’ he says, ‘it is all a bit of a mess.’
At the front door her uncle awaits her. He greets her distractedly; he is agitated in a way that she is familiar with among the Coetzees, talking rapidly, running his fingers through his hair. ‘Ma is fine,’ she reassures him, ‘it was just an episode.’ But he prefers not to be reassured, he is in the mood for drama.
John leads her on a tour of the premises. The house is small, ill-lit, stuffy; it smells of wet newspaper and fried bacon. If she were in charge she would tear down the dreary curtains and replace them with something lighter and brighter; but of course in this men’s world she is not in charge.
He shows her into the room that is to be hers. Her heart sinks. The carpet is mottled with what look like oil stains. Against the wall is a low single bed, and beside it a desk on which books and papers lie piled higgledy-piggledy. Glaring down from the ceiling is the same kind of neon lamp they used to have in the office in the hotel before she had it removed.
Everything here seems to be of the same hue: a brown verging in one direction on dull yellow and in the other on dingy grey. She doubts very much that the house has been cleaned, properly cleaned, in years.
Normally this is his bedroom, John explains. He has changed the sheets on the bed; he will empty two drawers for her use. Across the passage are the necessary facilities.
She explores the necessary facilities. The bathroom is grimy, the toilet stained, smelling of old urine.
Since leaving Calvinia she has had nothing to eat but a chocolate bar. She is famished. John offers her what he calls French toast, white bread soaked in egg and fried, of which she eats three slices. He also gives her tea with milk that turns out to be sour (she drinks it anyway).
Her uncle sidles into the kitchen, wearing a pyjama top over his trousers. ‘I’ll say goodnight, Margie,’ he says. ‘Sleep tight. Don’t let the fleas bite.’ He does not say goodnight to his son. Around his son he seems distinctly tentative. Have they been having a fight?
‘I’m restless,’ she says to John. ‘Shall we go for a walk? I’ve been cooped up in the back of an ambulance all day.’
He takes her on a ramble through the well-lit streets of suburban Tokai. The houses they pass are all bigger and better than his. ‘This used to be farmland not long ago,’ he explains. ‘Then it was subdivided and sold in lots. Our house used to be a farm-labourer’s cottage. That’s why it is so shoddily built. Everything leaks: roof, walls. I spend all my free time doing repairs. I’m like the boy with his finger in the dyke.’
‘Yes, I begin to see the attraction of Merweville. At least in Merweville it doesn’t rain. But why not buy a better house here in the Cape? Write a book. Write a best-seller. Make lots of money.’
It is only a joke, but he chooses to take it seriously. ‘I wouldn’t know how to write a best-seller,’ he says. ‘I don’t know enough about people and their fantasy lives. Anyway, I wasn’t destined for that fate.’
‘What fate?’
‘The fate of being a rich and successful writer.’
‘Then what is the fate you are destined for?’
‘For exactly the present one. For living with an ageing parent in a house in the white suburbs with a leaky roof.’
‘That’s just silly, slap talk. That’s the Coetzee in you speaking. You could change your fate tomorrow if you would just put your mind to it.’
The dogs of the neighbourhood do not take kindly to strangers roaming their streets by night, arguing. The chorus of barking grows clamorous.
‘I wish you could hear yourself, John,’ she plunges on. ‘You are so full of nonsense! If you don’t take hold of yourself you are going to turn into a sour old prune of a man who wants only to be left alone in his corner. Let’s go back. I have to get up early.’
SHE SLEEPS BADLY ON the uncomfortable, hard mattress. Before first light she is up, making coffee and toast for the three of them. By seven o’clock they are on their way to Groote Schuur Hospital, crammed together in the cab of the Datsun.
She leaves Jack and his son in the waiting room, but then cannot locate her mother. Her mother had an episode during the night, she is informed at the nurses’ station, and is back in intensive care. She, Margot, should return to the waiting room, where a doctor will speak to her.
She rejoins Jack and John. The waiting room is already filling up. A woman, a stranger, is slumped in a chair opposite them. Over her head, covering one eye, she has knotted a woollen pullover caked with blood. She wears a tiny skirt and rubber sandals; she smells of mouldy linen and sweet wine; she is moaning softly to herself.
She does her best not to stare, but the woman is itching for a fight. ‘Waarna loer jy?’ she glares: What are you staring at? ‘Jou moer!’
She casts her eyes down, withdraws into silence.
Her mother, if she lives, will be sixty-eight next month. Sixty-eight blameless years, blameless and contented. A good woman, all in alclass="underline" a good mother, a good wife of the distracted, fluttering variety. The kind of woman men find it easy to love because she so clearly needs to be protected. And now cast into this hell-hole! Jou moer! — filthy talk. She must get her mother out as soon as she can, and into a private hospital, no matter what the cost.
My little bird, that is what her father used to call her: my tortelduifie, my little turtledove. The kind of little bird that prefers not to leave its cage. Growing up she, Margot, had felt big and ungainly beside her mother. Who will ever love me? she had asked herself. Who will ever call me his little dove?
Someone is tapping her on the shoulder. ‘Mrs Jonker?’ A fresh young nurse. ‘Your mother is awake, she is asking for you.’
‘Come,’ she says. Jack and John follow her.
Her mother is conscious, she is calm, so calm as to seem a little remote. The oxygen mask has been replaced with a tube into her nose. Her eyes have lost their colour, turned into flat grey pebbles. ‘Margie?’ she whispers.
She presses her lips to her mother’s brow. ‘I’m here, Ma,’ she says.