Get A Life

Perhaps this should be the contents of the letter, final draft before it got written. She did not think she could put it to the son, not even him. Even he would take it thankfully as a rationalisation. Rationalisation being essential in any solution for his mother. At least he would be too preoccupied, as he should be, with the remaking of his own life, to see how the rationalisation sifted through the familiar, familial dust to show everything of what the life of those two, parents, had been. Ordinary. A version of it. Just as his taking up again his wife/child/containing house – the elements of home – seemed to be reassembled.

The written letter was not any one of the unwritten drafts with their flourishes of emotion, contradictions of cruelty (who would have thought you'd make a fool of yourself pushing seventy) and sad understanding (it's still good together, yes, even in bed).

Honest. To be the way he was.

I can't tell you I am anything but almost disbelieving, amazed. Because I've noticed, oh over all our years, even since you've been getting old, women having an eye for you, but Hilde didn't give any sign whatever of responding to you any more than she did to me. The same smile. And you – do I stupidly think people, the man and the woman, know each other so well after all those years that there couldn't be a change going on in one without the other sensing it. Apparently I did, do, think so. While we were together with the guide she was just that, smiling. You were just attentive, as I was, to the vivacious precision of her guidance to places and objects we wanted to see, and her knowledge of their history and meaning. No gallantry towards her – you know what I mean. In fact I thought you were relieved, in a way, when she excused herself from eating with us, we've never been at a loss for something we want to exchange over a meal alone. Perhaps I misread you, the strain of hiding the responses you were begi

I suppose I should feel some reproach of her. But I won't. And there's no point, for her or for me, in her feeling 'bad'. As you write, it's happened, you both made it happen. From the letter it seems you don't know what you want (blocked out 'except not me') at present. So let it be an extended holiday, for now. I have shown your letter to Paul but for the girls the extended holiday will be the only explanation why you haven't come back, you're following more archaeological digs. The awkwardness that may result, if Emma gets to know you're lingering in Central America she'll want to persuade you to hop over to Brazil and see our grandchildren. ('Grandchildren'. Was that cruel; but she left the ambiguous reference, did not cross it out.)

The letter was typed on her word processor. When she took up the copy, she had ready to write in her own hand, I love you. She wrote only the version of her name by which he knew her, Lyn.

It was u

She and her son have again something in common, as there was unknown to each in his reversion to childhood and her matching reversion, then, of reliving the shame of four lollipop years. They have each the dedication beyond the personally intimate, of belonging to the condition of the world. Justice. The survival of nature. Whatever the condition of their intimate lives, she was fully committed with her colleagues to the complexities, the apparent dead ends to be followed and disproved, the nuance of statements to be deciphered, the lies to be disentangled from facts, in the corruption cases for which they were briefed, and which certainly would go on, with adjournments and referrals, for months. Another extended period. And he, with Thapelo and Derek, was back and forth to the coastal dunes, now, of the Eastern Cape, where the government's decision to allow mining for titanium and other metals was pending – same area as the toll highway project. The subject of begetting another child, companion for Nickie, had not come up again. What he had said, that time, put an end to it. They made love when he was home from the dunes, smelling, she told him, of the sea; which roused her, evidently. He assumed she had protected herself against insemination. Protected herself from Him.

His mother became somehow part of the life returned to, taken up, in his house; as if with the end of its occupation as a place of quarantine and in the absence of the father, the old house was no longer home. She was quite often found with Nicholas and Be

Lyndsay defined, in dismissal of modesty – She's been introducing me to the realities my colleagues and I only see as the end result. She took me yesterday to a hospice, no, I suppose you'd call it a halfway home for babies. Abandoned babies, some of them HIV-infected or already with AIDS. -

– Ghastly thought. That must have been hard to take. – Be

This Charlene sensed some explanation was appropriate for how the introduction to a reality came about, and also perhaps unable to suppress an impulse to show her quality in becoming mentor to someone in a high position of the authoritarian world. – Ag, you see, I've just been a witness in that big case, you know, my brother-in-law who was kicked out of his firm, his job, he was assistant manager in a supermarket, because he's got AIDS – how he got it, that's another story, not for me – the trade union made a case to defend him and Mrs Ba