You’ve got a good holding in tobacco shares, haven’t you? You know people who’ve died of lung cancer. You have No Smoking signs all over your offices. But the dividends are fine.
There is a context; they’re in it. He would never have believed she could be a spiteful woman. He prepares himself, although he is not sure of the exact issue, it must belong somewhere to the only subject they have.
He laughs. Dull-weary. We’re eating chicken and you bought it. I suppose it’s one raised in cruel conditions. Caged.
The last word hits home. What concern is there for chickens while you talk to your son within the walls of a prison.
I’m asking you, it happens to interest me, is to kill the only sin we recognize.
It’s the ultimate, isn’t it. Is that what you mean.
No I don’t.
Lies, theft, false witness, betrayal—
Go on. Adultery, blasphemy, you believe in sin. I don’t think I do. I just believe in damage; don’t damage. That’s what he was taught, that’s what he knows — knew. So now — is to take life the only sin recognized by people like me? Unbelievers. Not like you.
Of course it’s not. I’ve said: it’s the ultimate. Nothing more terrible.
Before God. She pushes him to it.
Before God and man.
I thought for believers there is the way out by confession, repentance, forgiveness from Up There.
Not for me.
Oh why? She won’t let him off.
Because there is no recompense for the one whose life is taken. Nothing can come to him. It’s only the one who killed that receives grace.
In this world. What about the next. Harald, you don’t accept your faith.
Not on this issue, no.
So you sin with doubt. Is that only now? Her gaze is explicit.
No, always. You don’t know because it’s never been possible to talk to you about such things.
Sorry about that, all I could do was respect your need for that kind of belief. I couldn’t take up something I’m convinced does’t exist. Anyway — you’ve allowed yourself the same latitude I have between what does and what doesn’t count. Even with your God behind you.
Oh leave me alone. I’m a killer because you see people die of lung cancer.
At what point does what’s let pass become serious. Harald? If God allows you to condone so much in yourself how do you decide someone won’t take the example that you don’t have to follow the rules because the people who’ve taught you to don’t do so themselves. Of course they know when to stop. Because nothing in their lives goes any further. They’re safe. Making money out of cigarettes, that’s not much of a sin for a good Christian.
Claudia is not looking at him as she speaks. Her head is turned away. If it were to control tears it would break the tension which is both hostile and exciting, his heart gushes like a geyser at his breast, against her. She does not offer tears; she asserts the severance of not seeing him. What has happened has brought into the order of the townhouse what it wasn’t built to contain; she’s right, there — their life together was not equipped to sustain itself so far, to this edge. People have ambition that their sons should go further; theirs has made of this a horror.
She said once, What did I do to him that you didn’t do? He wanted to say now in his controlled voice that he could use with the force of a shout, And what is it I didn’t do for him that you didn’t do? Why me? Because I’m the man. That sudden resort to the female tactic. Putting on the sheep’s clothing of weakness when it suits you. I’m the man and so I’m responsible, I buy shares whose profits you spend, money that kills, I made him a murderer, a dead chicken and a man with a bullet through the head, it’s all on the road to hell.
Hostility had sucked all communication into its vacuum. If he’d opened his mouth, God knows what would have come out.
So Harald is able to believe his son did it and that he must be punished. No confession (already made), repentance in exchange for forgiveness possible. So much for the compassion of Harald’s God and of his Only Son who was conceived not of penetration and sperm (because that’s human and dirty) but who took on himself all human sin to cleanse all others who sin. So much for the religious faith that the father had lived by in moral superiority, going off to pray and confess (what?) every week, and every Sunday taking the small boy with him to give him the guidance for his life, the brotherly love and compassion decreed from on high while the mother turned over in bed and went back to sleep. She carried about within her the wretched apostasy of the father as she had carried the foetus he had implanted when she was nineteen.
The great eye of the sun bleared under a cataract of cloud: the diffused glare confused the planes of the face so that for a few moments Harald and Claudia were not sure which black face this was. They were in the parking ground among police vans, he locked the car with the touch on the electronic device, out of habit, they were turned to the fortress. There was recognition acknowledging them, in the face; they and the man approached each other across the space between arrival and the entrance doors that always seemed so long to cover. Khulu. What was it again: Dladla. From the property where the cottage was. From the house, the sofa. He was leaving after a visit to Duncan. Duncan was back in a cell from the madhouse. They were going to Duncan. A strange suffusion of warmth accompanied their coincidence. Harald had not seen the man since waiting in the house stared at by that other eye, the computer, Claudia probably had not seen him at all since some invitation to the house given by their son in a time before what happened. She found no purpose, nothing to be learnt in going to be confronted by the place, it could only be like being forced to look at a grave where after a post-mortem duly performed a man had been stowed out of mind. The victim disappears, the perpetrator remains. It could only rouse revulsion at what the room had witnessed, and she couldn’t risk this revulsion against the one who said he had performed the act.
Nkululeko ‘Khulu’ Dladla. He, too, brought to the prison what was missing, Duncan himself, somewhere existing outside. Any grim redolence of the house he had about him was evaporated in the glare on prison gravel; they felt some sort of gratitude. They had no-one else; only Hamilton.
A curved tooth of some captured feline set in gold tangled with an ornate Ethiopian cross on the broad breast in the opening of a shirt left unbuttoned. A gleam of cuff-links and a red-stone ring — these elaborations along with the other, anti-materialist convention of frayed jeans and sneakers — he was normality, a variety of contemporary ordinariness made surprising, simple freedom appearing in the sterility of this space before blind walls, like a daisy pushing up through stones.