Epilogue

My father and I are walking along a rocky, boulder-strewn beach in South Africa. It’s a cloudy day, but warm, and the ocean is flat and steely, with the occasional lip of swell breaking up closer towards us, then receding back out into the deep.

He’s been stopping to take pictures of the rocks, the yellow and red lichen, and the odd branches of driftwood scattered about. I have gone on ahead, skipping from boulder to boulder, moving towards a rickety wooden staircase that leads up to a promontory from which the vast expanse of southern ocean glows. Sea birds are ducking over the rocks, and from high on the escarpment above us comes the sound of the wind rushing through these last barriers of the trees before it reaches us and the open world. There’s no one here. I am only aware of my father behind me, following the tracks I’ve made.

I stop. I begin to turn my head. And as I do, everything slows. I have seen this before — this slowing down of the world, this almost audible protraction of time into its infinitesimal digits. The ocean is suddenly frozen. A seabird collapses in a gust and stays there. The rocks are white globes — worlds of stone, I think, perfected this way over millennia. And to think I have never, ever seen them before.

They are everywhere, these stones, and their rounded imbalance separates me so hazardously, so oddly, from the figure of my father, which, I can see, has begun to fall. He is like a tree, I think, as I feel my body begin to lurch in his direction. So tall, so elegant, so straight, and he is falling to the ground. From this distance his eyes look closed to me, almost peaceful, but I can see the paleness in his face, the paleness I should have seen before, the same colour I now see reflected in this stony shore.

As he falls, I can see the angles, the percentages that change in his descent. What at first seemed like such a long way to go is now cut in half, and then again, until that straight ramrod body of his is almost to the ground. I never take my eyes off him even as I run and leap and jump to reach him. But I am not in time — the angle is no more. There is just a sliver of light between him and the stones below, and then there is not even that. Just a slight bounce as he lands, and I see his head rise up a few centimetres, then go down again, with the world as still as it ever has been.

I scream.

Then, finally, I am on him. He is nestled in those stones like a plant unloosed, ripped from its roots and cast about in the shallows. For a moment there is no sound, no movement at all.

And then the silence breaks. He breaths. With great difficulty, but he does. He opens his eyes, and his big brown irises stare at me. His two front teeth are shattered. But he smiles and put his hand on mine. ‘Thank you,’ he breathes.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’

But he shakes his head and lies in my arms, and the world begins to move again. The ocean washes up onto the rocks in a sudden burst, and the seabird is off. I lean down and cradle his head.