Get A Life

The pebble-bed nuclear experiment may be the apocalyptic one, nuclear experiment you can walk away from; there are also pla

– So now it's the Australians in on the act. Haai! Pondoland, it's recognised all over the world, the centre of endemism, the great botanical treasure, n'swebu, man! The government wants to put a national toll highway through it, tear it up, and now they're going to let an Aussie company in to mine the dunes, destroy the coastline too. This Transworld Company says it's identified reserves there, sixteen million tons of heavy minerals and eight million tons of ilmenite. One of the biggest mineral sand deposits in the world. Yesus! This what we mean by attracting foreign investment? Mining on the beaches, same time the Minister of Tourism says the Germans, the Japanese and what-what flying in are big in our economic future -

Primrose has appeared with a tray of paper cups and the fruit juice prescribed for the one she cares for at some sort of distance decreed for her by her employers. She doesn't know where to put the burden and Thapelo interrupts himself, sweeps up the papers from the table, laughing and chaffing with her in what he's recognised, in an earlier encounter with her here in the garden, is her language among his four or five.

– The aspect for us to hammer -

Thapelo waves his cup across his colleague's half-sentence. – The road and the mining are linked – like that, nê? – He bangs the flimsy cup, overflowing, down upon the table, clasps one fist in the other.

Invigorated by the piece of theatre, his colleague tries again. – The aspect for us to go for is the broadest effect of danger the toll highway carries, pleas for beauty destroyed in these issues are regarded as going soft, just sentimental objection to progress -

– Chief, lalela, hear me, I think you're wrong there. You know that after mining tourism's our best income source. Who's coming to look at a mine, and a highway like they've got all over where they come from. -

– I'm talking about the Amadiba, my brother, they're living on the Wild Coast, five communities, not so? Go for them. From the plan you've shown me, the route of the highway plunges right through people's houses and fields, straight over their mealies. Staple food. What about the Amadiba Tribal Trust? Need to make them shout. Loudly. All stops out. Rally the traditional leaders; the government has to hear them; you know it's policy, government's having to recognise right now all kinds of questions on land distribution rights. -

– Derek's due down there next week. -

– And the National Road Agency? Any new statement from them? The figures they give for employment their grand highway will create – short-term, do they admit that. -

– The government must vuka! Open their eyes. See what's getting by in the name of development. All over the country. What about the cost of demissioning the pebble-bed plant? If it does light up that huge grid claimed, it can only last about forty years… -

The Hadedas landing from the house roof squawked derision. Their familiar companion took up quietly: – And the disposal of the nuclear waste. Where? -

Thapelo had brought photographs and surveyors' charts he had forgotten last time he came by. They bent over them, now and then, Thapelo constantly trespassing the distance at which his mate held him off, his forefinger returning to the toll highway, stabbing at a feature, the array spread among makeshift refreshment, coffee half-downed, the way they took it in the forest, in the bush, the desert. Thapelo had in a pocket – where was it, now – a pencil-length of root, shrunken and withered dead digit of a mangrove tree from the wetland they'd not long ago researched together, and the half-shell, patterned blue on cream like a fragment of Chinese porcelain, of a bird that would soon be extinct. Thapelo had the habit of absently gathering such small signs as he walked. When he was there, the garden was an enclave, paused at together, a wilderness.

Thapelo had left.

The eggshell and root, there on the table.

How many more days go by in the garden.

There are markers other than time on the way back from this state of existence. Not all are reassuring. Not without confusion. Yes, the doctors had given the cancer all clear. Only: after some months – How many months? – A shrug; somewhere between three and six, we'll do a scan. That's all. A precautionary follow-up. Most unlikely, but it can be that another radioactive treatment is indicated in some cases.

But now, so far as radioactivity is concerned? He is no longer radiant. All clear.

He hears otherwise, from his body.

His decision is to remain a week or so in a kind of halfway – between the leper refuge and the return, harmless to the human fold. How could Be

How long since he had come alive like this with Berenice/Be

Under the hands of a man.

Never had a sexual relation with a doppelgänger, a replica of myself: that's how he sees the act. No homophobia, either, each to his or her own sexual instincts; he's attracted to women and although there's enough evidence they're attracted to him – advances to be read even from among his wife's friends – men evidently were not. No gay proposals although his working life is intimately and virtually exclusively among his own sex.