The new guard at the window of RESEPTION was chewing a rhythmic matchstick and listening to a soccer match on the radio. The quick hissing of the static kept interrupting his doze.
“Excuse me,” said Joanna.
Don’t smile. Don’t smile. You’re here on serious business.
“Can you help me? I’m looking for—” But she didn’t know what she was looking for, did she? Where had they taken her son? The matchstick moved up and down as the guard’s tongue, unseen, flicked at it inside his mouth. They looked at each other through the glass, two species meeting in an aquarium. She thought obscurely of Robben Island, of the thick air of visiting hours, of not saying the things that should have been said. How could she describe what had happened? Who would tell her what to do now? She wanted to smash the window and shake this man by the lapels of his uniform.
The guard beckoned to her and she leaned forward, but it turned out that he meant the matron who was passing heavily by. He jerked his head at Joanna and then settled back in his chair, his duty done.
The woman stopped, wheezing. Her hooped earrings swung in sympathy. “What are you doing here again, lolo?” she asked. “Who are you looking for?”
Oh. My-Wife-Gladness! Thank God.
It nearly undid Joanna. She wanted to throw herself into the woman’s arms, lodge in her crevices, host and parasite. Here was an interpreter, a guide. Together they would navigate the crude spaces of the new territories.
“James,” Joanna managed, and My-Wife-Gladness nodded. She took Joanna by the upper arm and turned her around. Then she pointed down the longest, dimmest corridor, at a set of swing doors with portholes and metal skirts.
“He’s in there, my darling,” said the nurse. “I’m coming nownow, see?” She gave Joanna a gentle little push, and hurried away.
I must keep walking, thought Joanna. If I stop again now I won’t ever get there. I will be trapped in this cavern forever. Maybe that’s what hell is: having to make your way to the door that never gets any closer.
The corridor was elongated and blurry – clearly they were saving electricity here too – and the echoing space took Joanna back to her teenage years with the Christian Brothers in Kimberley, to the cave above the Valley, to all the dank retreats of school kids and Satanists. It gave her something to cling to. It made her chant under her breath as she trudged:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum, whispered Joanna, as she picked up her pace, marching in time to the verse. Oh, good. My legs do still work. For a moment there I was worried.
She knew she was ridiculous, racketing on about anything that came to her, a pinball machine. It was the panic; it was the grief; it was the horror and the loss: they kept intruding when she wanted to think about the slippery linoleum. I’ve lost him, she told herself. This time I really have. And now I must hold off the awfulness. I can dam this terrible feeling up and let it out when I’m ready, in manageable streams, like the brown water that comes down off the mountain to the Atlantic. Joanna walked and whispered, and the corridor, inexorable, shovelled her towards the double doors. She moved her head from side to side, noting the scratched beige lockers, the good wood of the casements of the windows. She half-expected crystals to form on the panes as she watched. Joanna thought, I can’t believe they let me in here by myself. What if I stole something? Why is there no one else here?
She suddenly, abruptly, missed her own mother. She wanted not to be walking alone down this grim passage like a near-death experience. She wanted, more than anything, to feel her mother hold her hand. She wanted to be herself again, Joanna who had never met Jan; Joanna who had never had a child, with all the possible futures still open before her, all the afternoons on the couch reading idly whatever came to hand, all the days used so casually instead of hoarded the way they were now. She wanted them back. She wanted it all back. She wanted to be able to choose. Now, in the hospital passage, with its notices about radiation and sharps, she could not believe that her own body had presented her with offspring, distended itself until it was veined and webbed, and then burst, separating her wet and thinking cells into Joanna-the-mother and James-the-child. It must have happened to someone else, not this person who was looking for a set of swing doors that held a monstrous thing behind them, the end of the living world.
If I don’t go inside, thought Joanna, I won’t have to know. I can just stay here. Or I can turn around and walk back up the way I came. No one will know. Just My-Wife-Gladness, and she’s busy. And the guard, and he doesn’t care. I can go home – but here the thought dissipated, because she knew that when she opened the back door she would smell the presence of James like biscuit crumbs, see his cars on the sea-blue carpet, anchored like tiny ships.
She was there, against the double doors. Joanna didn’t wait: she had had enough of waiting. She leaned against the doors, using her weight as ballast. At first they refused to give, and she thought, Oh! The decision has been made for me! I don’t have to do this after all! She felt her heart lightening, a red balloon expending at last in her aching chest.
But then the doors opened – of course they did – and Joanna was forced inside by her own momentum.
The room was just as quiet as the corridor but for the tinkling of metal instruments like a dentist’s office. My-Wife-Gladness had not returned, vanished somewhere in the hospital’s labyrinth. In her place was a twitchy, overshaven little man with bumps along his jawline where the razor and the hair follicles had imperfectly met. He waited a beat, settled the last few instruments on a plastic tray, and then cleared his throat. It seemed to Joanna that he was amputated at the waist: she only saw him behind his bench. They faced each other, one on either side of the counter where the ominous child-shaped mound rounded the frayed sheet.
“Mrs Lykken? Are you the mother?” the man asked her softly. He cocked his quick head to one side, like an otter, watching her intently. His hands were behind his back, avoiding the false moves that would offend the mourning. That seemed to Joanna to be dishonest.
I’m not going to weep, she told herself, not in front of this man. There’s time for that later. I just need to get through this bit now, and then when I’m alone, I’ll cry as much as I want. She nodded and concentrated on the loose threads at the border of the sheet, the pale blue cpa stamp repeated endlessly in its circle, stars in the Milky Way. Cape Provincial Administration, thought Joanna. This sheet must be older than I am! She tried to imagine how many bodies it had concealed, how many still faces had been secretly imprinted on it like the Shroud of Turin. Did they launder it each time? But then she thought it probably didn’t matter to the dead. Maybe they liked the company.
The wet-looking man was still looking at her carefully, judging his timing like a conductor, a magician. Joanna expected him to be holding a white-tipped baton behind his back. He would whip it out and cry, Kul jou hier, kul jou daar – en sie’ daar! And James would rise again slowly, rubbing his round red cheeks and calling croakily for juice. A laugh puffed out from her chest and the technician flinched. Good, thought Joanna savagely. I’m glad this is making you jumpy.
The man sighed. He lifted his right hand and twitched the sheet away from the face in a practiced movement. Joanna had just enough time to think, Haven’t enough other people done this before me? Do I have to do it too?
Pee-pah! Pee-pah!
Wake up, James! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!
Boo!
James was stretched out on the counter, a folding affair like a picnic table or an ironing board. His hair was damp and swept back off his forehead. Somebody had washed him. He looks like the baby in the black box, thought Joanna.
She retched, but she didn’t cry.