AFTER SCHOOL JOANNA HEADED DOWN Recreation Road to the beach again with James in his pram. Suicide hour, some parents called it. Arsenic hour, said the others. Four o’clock was when it kicked in: every day without fail, James would realise anew that he was small and the world was large, that everything he wanted he could not have, that he would have to start all over again when he woke up the next morning. He wept, endlessly and pitifully, refusing to eat or sleep or be comforted, unless – There is a God! There is a God! thought Joanna – he was moving. Joanna hated driving, and she also hated that she could never do anything only for herself. The next best thing was to stuff him into his pram and take him out, where the sound of the traffic soothed him and the kind people of Fish Hoek kept stopping them to tell her what an adorable little poppet he was.
It was the only exercise she could stand. She was so tired, but she was also heavier since she’d had him. Other women dropped the baby weight; Joanna had a case of what Jan called Writer’s Bum. She dragged her new body around with her like luggage, a pack mule, a rocking horse, tethered fore and aft.
Most days she made it. Joanna knew when she saw the outline of the statue next to the Zibi Bin on the beach playground that she was going to be okay. “Every day we survive is one less day we have to do this,” she told James grimly and often, and grimly and often she prayed that it would not rain.
The statue, cast in bronze, was of two figures straight out of an Archie comic. A boy in his swimming trunks stood over a reluctant girl in her bikini. He was yanking at her arm in a way that Joanna thought brutal: FROLIC, said the plaque below them. It sounded like an order. VROLIKHEID, it said on the other side. The pleasure of being pulled into the water against your will was terrifying, thought Joanna. So terrifying that sometimes you were reduced to tears by the bully’s unkindness, and then they said, to mask their shame, “Can’t you take a joke?”
Joanna was fairly sure she would not be FROLICKING in her bikini on the beach for the next year, at least. She would not be FROLICKING anywhere at all.
The beach had other attractions. James liked to stand braced against the knee-high wall and watch the cars in the parking lot, shouting, “Car! Car!” and, occasionally, “Twuck!” The playground equipment terrified him. Joanna, who had been the kind of child who had only played on the jungle gym once all the other kids were off it, left him alone.
Today her usual bench was obscured by the bulk of a tourist, a white man, hugely fat but unblemished, as if he had been picked clean by seagulls. He was hung around with a camera like a mayoral chain. He was pretending to look out to sea, and then taking pictures of the children in the playground. The kids – where were their bloody parents? – ignored him. They were squeezing like frogs through the hanging tires, or fighting each other for the swings.
“It’s the best time of day.”
It was the fat man. Joanna hated it when strangers tried to talk to her. There was something awful about him. If you were a child clapped against that massive chest, you would never escape.
“It is,” agreed Joanna, abrupt. She avoided looking him in the eye.
“The golden hour.” The fat man turned and began snapping pictures of James as fast as he could, as if their exchange had made them familiars.
Joanna was too polite to say anything – Why? Why? Why? asked Doctor Renfield. He’s doing something wrong! – but she grabbed James and lifted him out of the way of the lens. She turned her back on the cameraman and pushed James’s legs back through the pram’s harness, and then she took off at a run – wee-wee-wee, all the way home.
After his supper and his bath and his thirty-ninth reading of Little Miss Muffet Counts to Ten, James was finally out of the way. The two adults sat at the table, where the light threw its lasso around them. Jan was reading the paper while they ate supper.
“Jan,” she said, to test him, “what’s the golden hour?”
“The magic hour,” he corrected her. His default setting was impatience.
“Golden hour, magic hour – what is it? Why is it special?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m just interested.”
“Okay. The last hour of light during the day. That golden light. It makes everything look better.”
“And the first hour of light in the morning as well?” Joanna wanted her dawn vigils to have some reference point too, some significance that would lift them out of the ordinary.
“Yes, both of them.”
“Do they look the same?”
“Pretty much. The insertion of shadow” – Jan really spoke that way to her now, as if he thought he was being recorded – “creates contrast. Depth. Objects are side-lit by the low sun and they’re given texture and shape.”
It sounded overly dramatic. He looked at her suspiciously, as if he had heard what she was thinking.
“Why?”
It came tumbling out. Joanna told him about the fat man on the beach, the violation in his lens.
“It was the way he was doing it, Jan. So quickly, as if he knew someone was going to try to stop him. It was like he was stealing their souls.”
“Rubbish. He’s just probably just some amateur photographer, or a student who had an assignment.”
“He was a paedophile!”
“You’re overreacting.”
“He gave me the creeps.”