JAN STOOD AT THE SECURITY GATE. She couldn’t allow him back over the threshold. Where was he living now? With Devi? Joanna couldn’t bring herself to care.
His long face was horsey with dismay. “I thought there was going to be a coffin.”
“No. No coffin.” Joanna couldn’t stand the thought of putting James under the ground. She kept picturing them spading soil over his face while he struggled to breathe, blinking the grains out of his eyelashes, like the the people in the cave. It was going to be hard enough to consign his body to the flames, as the man had put it. Joanna had thought, At least I’ll know that he’s warm enough. Kushushu. She hadn’t decided whether to put the blue dressing gown in the show coffin with him or not.
Jan had taken something out of his pocket. It looked like a ticket to a concert. He waved it, a concession.
“But this. I have this.”
It was a piece of A4 paper, folded into quarters. He didn’t know what to do with it.
She felt her throat closing against whatever was coming next. It was bound to be unpleasant, some amalgamation of administration and horror. He held it out to her through the bars of the gate. The advert had shown a wrecking ball being smashed into the metal criss-crosses of the door. What they didn’t show you was after the ball had swung back again, you could pop the door out of its frame with a screwdriver. We believe what we want to believe, thought Joanna. That’s what makes it magic.
“What is it?”
“Just read it,” he told her. “See what you think.”
Joanna finally unlocked the security gate. She came out a little way, like a weatherman out of a clock, and took the piece of paper. She sat down on the wall. The paper felt damp to her, adhesive.
Jan’s handwriting was familiar, all in capitals, with gaps between the tops of the letters and their bottoms.
Dear James
You are fourteen hours old. You have been slapped and wrapped in blankies; your mother has frowned for the camera; your father is grinning from ear to pinkish ear. He is outside on the verandah with his friends, passing round a cherry-flavoured cheroot. He has a head cold; it makes the sound of the ocean seem further away than it is; it makes people less interested in tonguing the cheroot when it’s their turn. The moon shifts on the water, like you could walk over it all the way to Hangklip, like anything is possible. It is older than you. It is older than anything you can imagine, wrinkled as the soles of your feet.
James, Iago, Jiminy, Jim: naming babies is easier than naming dogs, but not much. James is a good one, I think. Whatever you will be called by people who love you and people who don’t, for now you are still at the Medi-Clinic, humped like an earthworm in your incubator. So many babies in that room, said your mother, before they made her get back into her bed. What she meant was, So many babies, and I was one of them. So many of them, and how do you tell which is your own, your special one, different from all the others? How can you ever be sure? The change still escapes us, infant all the way up (even now when I am in the traffic in the morning I cannot believe I am the same person who was making tea, naked, an hour ago, that an hour ago every one of us in the traffic was doing something else).
We forget because we have to. If we remembered each thing it would make us crazy with time sickness and distraction. People seem obliged to say this at a birth, and I am one of them, even though it’s hard to say what it is exactly that I think you should know – about your dad, about the world. (I don’t know what to feel. I have nothing to compare it to.)
We are so glad that you are here, your father, your mother, your ancestors. There’s been so much already and there is still so much more to come: the travelling, the swollen feet, the juggling of finances and tokens of trust, the old coins mixed in with the new, the family jewels.
But for now there is this fulcrum, the cold verandah, the moon one slice away from full.
Forgive your parents for what they are about to do in the name of their love and discipline. Forgive them for falling back on the old sayings in the new kingdom:
While you’re under my roof.
Don’t do as I do.
This hurts me more than it hurts you.
Come on in, James, my son, even though it’s hard in these parts. Come on over and stay a while; don’t give up on us now.
Your loving
Dad
Joanna was streaming again.
“Don’t,” said Jan. “You’re making the paper wet.”
He tried to take the letter back, but she was holding onto it too tightly. It ripped down the middle. They each sat, Solomonic, looking stupidly at the fragments.
Joanna wiped her face. “When did you write this? I didn’t see you.”
Jan frowned. “When you were passed out afterwards. They made me go home. I couldn’t sleep. And then some people came over, and I wanted to remember how it felt. I wanted him to know that we loved him. I was going to give it to him when he was, I don’t know, sixteen, when we were fighting. All that.”
He looked at her, suddenly desperate, and she thought, My God! He is human after all! “I just didn’t want to lose him, Joanna. My dad and I, we’ve never been close. You turn twelve, and suddenly your parents just drift away from you. They let you go. You know what my father said?”
“Tell me.”
“He said that my smell changed. He was always making me go and shower. He told me that he couldn’t stand the way I smelled. Do you know what that was like?”
She did. She knew exactly what it must have been like in the deep fug of winter, with the fire going and the windows steamed up, not to be allowed outside, to be penned in with the old animal, to be circled by the young one, all the roads still stretching away from that centre, like a pentacle, like a star.
For the second and last time in their lives together, she said to Jan, “I do.”