Moira would love to motivate me back to health like the best friend in a romantic comedy, but she is starting to accept that this isn’t going to happen. She became hopeful a few months ago when she noticed I was losing weight. It happened soon after the rape symposium.
The more I think about sturdy, corn-fed, fiction-Lucy, the more my own flesh seems to melt and thaw.
“Are you working out?” Moira asks when she first notices.
“Are you dieting?” she asks when she notices again.
A few weeks later, “Are you eating at all? You’re almost transparent. I can see the skull beneath the skin.”
I hold my hands up to the light. She is right. The webbing between my thumb and forefinger has become translucent. If I narrow my eyes, I can see the light squirming pink and blue and yellow and orange through my skin.
Fiction-Lucy has strong, bucolic calves. I had them myself once. My ankles were never dainty; they provided a strong base from which I supported myself. Now my ankle bones nudge against their surrounding flesh like whitened knuckles. I trip over my own feet and turn my ankles for no reason.
“There’s nothing to you. A puff of wind could blow you away.”
But I have things to do before I come apart and disperse like ash. I need to find John Coetzee. I need to stand in front of him and say, “You took something from me. Give it back.”
“Word on the street is that he can’t find a publisher for his second book,” says Moira.
I find this hard to believe. “Surely he was offered a multi-book deal with his first contract?”
“He was, but his agent persuaded him not to take it. She thought he could do better. After the success of the first book, she was going to put the second one up for auction and make a killing. The big writers never accept multi-book contracts. They sell each new book to the highest bidder and flog the translation rights and foreign country rights as separate deals. No two-for-the-price-of-one for them.”
I still find this hard to believe. It is impossible to overstate how big a splash Coetzee’s book made when it first came out. Before he went into hiding, he was lionised by the literati in a way that made Salman Rushdie look like small fry.
Articles were written about him in The New York Times—in Granta, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Times, The Guardian, the Independent, The Atlantic, even Rolling Stone. People would pay good money to read his laundry list, never mind his next novel.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I say. “For someone of Coetzee’s calibre, there is no such thing as an unsellable novel.”
Moira shrugs. “I’m only telling you what I hear. His agent has screwed up big-time. When the offers for the second novel weren’t as high as she hoped, she took it off the market and started writing to various publishers personally. But everyone knew it had failed to sell at auction, so they started low-balling her. And you know what publishing is like. Everybody knows everybody, and they all talk to each other. So, Publisher A heard that Publisher B had turned it down, and made an even lower offer.”
I smile. Moira’s assumption that she and I “know what publishing is like” is based on our experience of the minuscule world of South African academic publishing. Could we extrapolate from that and assume that the billion-dollar transatlantic publishing industry works in the same way?
Perhaps we could.
In academia, it is reputational death to have one’s article turned down by too many journals. Word gets around and nobody wants to touch your piece, even if the original reason for turning it down was simply that it wasn’t a good fit for a particular journal. Editors fear association with your untouchable article.
“Coetzee’s new book has the cheese touch,” Moira says. “He’s the Greg Heffley of literary fiction.”
Now I know she is exaggerating. Coetzee’s reputation as the man who wrote the book of the century can’t have died that quickly.
“What about the Australians? If he’s living there now, aren’t they eager to claim him as their own?”
“They are, but his agent won’t let him look at their offers. It would be too much of a climb-down to give his second book to an Australian publisher. Besides, they pay peanuts compared to the Americans and the British.”
This is smile-worthy too. As PhD candidates and junior lecturers, Moira and I were grateful to have our work picked up by journals that paid nothing, all for the sake of exposure. We would have given our right arms for the hundreds of thousands of Australian dollars no doubt being flung in Coetzee’s direction.
“What else have you heard?”
Moira shakes her head. “You have squeezed the lemon of gossip until the pips squeak. I have nothing more for you.”
“In that case, I must go. I have to visit my father.”
* * *
Moira leaves at once. She thinks I mean right now—that I am leaving to visit my father as soon as her car pulls out of the driveway. I pick up my car keys on the way out to strengthen this illusion. After she has driven away, I put them back and settle in my chair again. The visit to my father is only on Sunday.
This is what PTSD does. It concertinas time. Sunday’s visit to my father presses up against me like an importunate lover. I can’t leave too small a gap between Moira’s visit and the visit to my father. That would be too much company in too little time. I can’t tolerate that much socialising.
They say old age turns you into a caricature of yourself. This is what rape has done to me. It has stripped me of my youthful ability to tolerate people and things. I am no longer adaptable. I can’t take life as it comes. I struggle to walk and talk at the same time. I need plenty of warning if something is going to happen. I hate spontaneity. I find refuge in routine.
When Sunday comes around, I wake up early to get ready. I put on my full-length knickers, my American tan tights, my bra and girdle, my long, thick skirt, the blouse that buttons all the way up to my chin, my cardigan. I lace my feet into flat leather shoes. I put on spectacles to shield my face.
I know what I am doing. I am making myself less rape-able. I’m falling for the old lie—that women are raped because of what they are wearing. But I can’t help myself. It feels as though I am going into battle fully prepared.
If my father’s house is the battleground, he and I are non-combatants. The ghosts of that night battle alongside us, unnoticed by my father and ignored by me.
This is not the house where it happened—the farmhouse. That was badly burned. The police say my father and I were lucky to get out alive. That was the first time I heard myself described as lucky after the rape, but it wasn’t the last. I was lucky to be alive, lucky not to be more seriously injured, lucky not to be pregnant, lucky not to have contracted AIDS. I had never been so lucky in my life.
This is a new flat my father bought after the fire. It is convenient for his golf club and for the shops and the theatre. He employs a housekeeper who cooks and cleans for him. My father is sixty-nine years old. He was in his early forties when I was born. I am used to having the oldest father.
Today he looks young. His skin is plump and rosy. The thinning thatch of hair on his head appears thicker and more luxuriant. His shoulders have widened, and his waist has narrowed. The dressing gown and slippers he was so prone to wearing in the daytime are nowhere to be seen. Instead he is wearing cream trousers (he would call them slacks: slax) and a pale-pink golf shirt with a crocodile stitched over the pocket.
“Come in, child. Come in.”
He holds the door open and stands back to let me pass. He presses a kiss onto my forehead, but his eyes don’t hold mine. He hasn’t looked me steadily in the eye since that night. My shame hangs between us like a carcass on a butcher’s hook.
My father’s flat doesn’t have an old-man smell. My nose prickles with detergent and polish—smells that have become uncommon in my own home. My house is the one that smells as though it belongs to an elderly person. My father has furnished his new home with the bachelor trappings of a much younger man. One wall of the sitting room is entirely taken up by a flatscreen television. I can see a PlayStation console peeking out behind it.
“So! How are you?” His eyes flick towards me and skitter away again. “I mean, this week. How was your week?” Asking me how I am opens an existential maw neither of us wants to deal with. My week is much safer.
“My week was okay,” I say. “I had quite a lot of proofreading work and even one editing job.”
“So you’re keeping your head above water?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. That’s very good.”
My father has never urged me to finish the rewrites on my PhD, even knowing how close it was to completion. He never had one himself, although he was officially working on it when he took early retirement from the university after the misunderstanding with the female student. I think it is easier for him if I am perpetually working on mine too.
“And how was your week?” I ask.
“Sherry?”
I nod. My father has been pouring me sherry since I turned eighteen. It started when sherry was the only alcoholic drink he kept in the house. Now his stash has expanded and diversified to include gin, vodka, brandy, whisky (Scotch), whiskey (Irish), Sambuca, port, and rum. But he still offers me sherry. Not “Would you like a drink?” Just “Sherry?”
When I can focus my thoughts enough, I speculate that he genuinely believes sherry to be my favourite drink. Or perhaps sherry is the only drink he considers appropriate for a woman of my age. Or perhaps he wants to keep his stash to himself, and chooses not to share it with me. I think this is the most likely option. My father is not miserly, precisely. Misers take as much pleasure from denying themselves expensive treats as they do from denying others. My father enjoys spending money on himself, but not on anyone else. As human failings go, it is not the worst.
His biggest fear is that my editing and proofreading work will dry up, and I will no longer be “keeping my head above water.” Then I might apply to him for funds, and common decency would force him to oblige. Every time I visit, I see him visibly relax when he confirms that my head is still above water.
He pours me a scant half-glass of sherry, and two fingers of Talisker malt for himself. The whisky makes a luxurious gurgling sound as it splashes into the crystal.
“So . . . my week. Very difficult. A real struggle. I tear my hair out every time I have to deal with the insurance company.” He mimes grabbing the wisps of hair at the side of his head and pulling them out by the roots.
I make a sympathetic noise. “Still? After all this time? What excuse are they using now?”
“They are disputing the value of the furniture. Your mother and I kept records of some of the antiques we bought, but not all. And most of the records we had disappeared in the fire. They are asking me to prove which tables were yellowwood, which kists were stinkwood, and so on. But I can’t.”
“I thought you kept papers like that in a safe deposit box in the bank?”
“Again, some, but not all. Some of the papers we kept in the house.”
He still sometimes says “we” as though my mother were alive. She has been dead for eight years. Breast cancer. She died two days after my twentieth birthday. Twenty is not the worst age at which to lose your mother. You are an adult. Independent. Making your own way in the world. (It felt like the worst age.)
Sixty-one is not the worst age to lose your wife, either. Your only child is grown up. You have no need to worry about who will pick up the slack in terms of child-rearing. You are still young enough to meet someone else. (I don’t know if it felt like the worst age.)
“It must be a worrying time for you.”
He brushes the worry away. “It’s fine. I’ll get through it. Just . . . if they phone and ask you about the contents of the house, please say that the furniture was all antique, dating from the days of the Colony.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you. You are a good child.”
I happen to know that some of the furniture was flat-pack modern, dating from the days of the OK Bazaars. But I agree to the venal offence of lying to the insurance company. My father has been through a lot. A little extra insurance money is the least he deserves.
We eat a Sunday lunch of supermarket rotisserie chicken with vegetables and roast potatoes pre-prepared by his housekeeper. It is not a bad meal. There are individual crème caramels in plastic containers for dessert.
After coffee, I wait until a decent interval has passed and then I stand up, saying, “Well, I’d better be going. I want to finish some work this afternoon. Thank you very much for lunch.”
“It’s a pleasure.”
I lean in for him to kiss me on the forehead. We say goodbye and I walk out of his flat, listening for the careful click of the door closing behind me. I try to unclench my stomach muscles as I reach the car. It doesn’t work, so I try abdominal breathing—a relaxation exercise taught me by my therapist. It feels as though I am trying to inflate a balloon against the resistance of an iron band.
I put my key in the ignition and let my head fall back against the headrest. It is better to allow the images to come now rather than tonight when I am asleep.
My father’s eyes jumping away from mine as though my gaze scalded him. Meeting his gaze over the shoulder of one of my attackers that night. His eyes didn’t falter then, but held mine with a steady regard. His hand shaking my shoulder, trying to rouse me, telling me the house was on fire, and we had to go. The Minnie Mouse helium balloon he bought when he came to visit me in hospital. I slept for hours at a time. Every time I opened my eyes, the balloon had sunk a little lower, until one day it lolled drunkenly on the carpet and they told me it was time to go home.