Patrick stepped off the bus and onto a burning street. Barricades of blazing tires choked Main Road as he made his way to his former home, sending plumes of black smoke into the dying day. The smell of petrol clung to the air. Flames danced from all sides of the road, making it difficult to know where to tread. He had been heading to his new place—a small bedsit tacked onto someone’s house, about five minutes from the home he used to share with Mary. The bus ride home had started uneventfully, but with each new passenger the chatter grew. The children had staged a demonstration at the local high school. They were peaceful, but the police had opened fire anyway. One child, maybe two, had been shot; others were missing. Patrick listened, not daring to ask questions. Grace was fine, of that he was sure. She wouldn’t be caught up in a demonstration of that sort. His daughter was far too timid a creature. She preferred to stay in the background and not be noticed.
Yet she also had a willful streak in her. Mostly she did what she was told, obeyed orders without talking back. But then, out of the blue, there’d be a day when she’d just dig her heels in, refuse. She was like Mary in that way, although not as insolent. When it happened, the child’s defiance was all the more infuriating because it surprised him, coming out of nowhere as it seemed to. Like that one time she’d disappeared for half a day into the bushes near the airport. He had looked all over for her, combing the streets trying to find her—she had never ventured away from home before. Then just as the sun was setting she had reappeared, with a smirk on her face as if nothing had happened. He had not been able to control his rage. Yes, she could be defiant in the most surprising ways. But he didn’t think someone with her innate fearfulness would go near such trouble as had happened at the school today.
Yet, as the bus drew nearer to the township, uncertainty gnawed at him. If something had happened to Grace, he would surely have heard by now. Mary or the principal would have called him at work, he reasoned. But he had just started this new job as a mechanic at JB’s Autos, and now he couldn’t remember whether he had given Mary his new phone number, what with the trouble between them.
Patrick tried to stay calm, picturing the girl safe in bed or watching television in the living room. That’s probably what she was doing right now. Still a layer of sweat beaded his body. Waves of fear rose from his belly to his chest. What if the unthinkable had happened? He had already lost one child. He wouldn’t be able to stand the loss of another.
He shot a little prayer heavenward. Please, God, let her be okay. Then he laughed at himself, for hadn’t he long ago forsaken God? Or God forsaken him? But habits die hard. Give me a child for the first seven years of their life, and I’ll give you a Catholic for the rest of their life, the brothers at school used to say, only half joking. Most of Patrick’s young life had been testimony to that sentiment. By the age of ten he had been adept at leading three younger siblings to Mass each Sunday. Then there were novenas on Tuesdays, praying of the rosary Thursdays, and catechism on Sundays. He’d served as an altar boy, helped his mother when she volunteered to wash and iron the priests’ robes at the local parish. He’d dutifully taken himself to confession every two weeks, making sure, in advance, to examine his heart and conscience for the tiniest speck of wrongdoing. Because sin left unchecked, even the seed of sin, destroyed lives; and he, Patrick de Leeuw, had determined from the age of reason that he would live a life worthy of redemption.
Not that he deserved redemption. He knew himself, even as a young boy, to be tarnished with the stain of sin. He was a lowly sinner like all the rest of them, but he had been taught that redemption could be found through striving for goodness and humble supplication before God. It had been drummed into him: always know that you are a sinner; never forget that. Work hard to atone for that sin. He always did. He would go to confession, determined to start anew and not sin again, as the priest exhorted.
But then the problem of sinning would creep in, again and again. Always, even moments after atonement, the very second after the priest’s absolution, he would find himself doing wrong again, or find the shadow of a bad thought flitting through his mind. He would be stained and dirty again. He would feel guilt and remorse, and the priest’s confessional would not be close enough to absolve him as quickly as he needed. The maintenance of a state of sinlessness became increasingly difficult. And then the thing at school happened, and he’d been so sullied that he could never again think of himself as clean, sinless, again. Certain sins could not be forgiven, especially if one had willingly participated in them. At the age of fifteen, God left him, and Patrick gave up trying to find him again.
For a year afterwards, his torment knew no bounds. Although he was keeping up the dizzying cycle of pretense—daily Mass, Sunday Mass, novenas, confession—he knew in his heart that he was not good enough for God, would never be good enough. It didn’t matter that he tried. Wracked with anguish, Patrick tried to imagine the life, and afterlife, that lay before him. Damnation, eternal damnation awaited him. Contemplating his fate, the fear of God became permeated with a slow-rising anger. Why would God have created him this way—stained and flawed—knowing full well that the attainment of purity would never be his? And why had God let these things happen to him? Was his life a cruel joke, and did God watch on in amusement as he strove and failed in an endless, agonizing cycle? Was that God? If it was, then he wanted no part of God. Fuck that. This decision relieved him.
And so he came to take pleasure in his sinfulness, enjoying his willful defiance. He wallowed in his soul’s squalor and found a deep satisfaction in examining the many facets of his wrongdoing, flaunting them in the world’s face. Fuck you, church, and fuck you, God! He took up drinking, grew to enjoy it. Yet even in his most drunken excess, a kernel of fear remained. It was there, worrying him, like a tiny grain of sand in his shoe, a dull undercurrent to his life and pleasures. God was watching, waiting. Although he had turned his back on God many times, the knowledge of a supreme being watching his every move had never really left him. Recently he had tried going to the big evangelical tents. They were so different, much happier. He had even gotten baptized, but deep inside, couldn’t shake the feeling that he was faking it. God was really hollow; you could make him anything you wanted him to be. Patrick had never felt his presence.
But at times like these—where was the girl?—he still went to God, like an addict reaching for a fix, and prayed like a child with blind belief. Did God ever answer him? He couldn’t say. For years he’d had Mary. Some would have called her a prayer answered. But the impulse to do things he knew was wrong, the vertiginous pull of pleasure, was often stronger than his love for her.
He was twenty-one when they’d married, determined that his life would be different from the one he’d known growing up in the cramped street where everyone knew each other’s business. He would treat her like gold, unlike the way he had seen his father treat his mother, sentencing her to an early grave. The blows he’d witnessed inflicted upon his mother had broken more than the bones in her tiny body: he had seen, along with the bruises, the destruction of her spirit, her light being snuffed out bit by bit, until there was nothing left but a shell of a woman who, at forty-five, succumbed to a stroke. The eldest child, Patrick had despised his father for what he’d done to his mother. He despised himself even more for his inability to protect her.
Things would be different with Mary. There was a sadness in her which evoked in him the urge to protect, to try again where he had failed with his mother. But Mary’s sullen, hard side, her refusal to be dominated, vied with her childlike softness that so enchanted him. She could be hard to her core, capricious in her whims, fluctuating often in manner between guileless, beautiful child and bitch. She could play on his sympathies one moment, elicit cosseting and affection, and then reject him with her very next breath. Patrick wasn’t always sure which Mary he’d encounter. During their short courtship, he had watched these moody fluctuations with wry amusement, indulging her as one would a spoiled child. Once they were married, he would put his foot down. It would be time for her to grow up. They’d be a family, and he’d be the head. He would be in for a bit of a time breaking her in, but no doubt he would be able to do so within a few months. Once she conformed and settled into the role of wife, he would be a good husband to her. He was not his father’s son. He would be the proud head of his family, a protector and provider to Mary and the children they would have together.
Their wedding had been a small affair. Between the two families there was not much money. Mary wore a simple gown, white of course, stitched by his aunt Patricia. He was dapper in the first and only suit he would own. Standing next to her on their wedding day, his pitch black suit offset her lovely black eyes, which were darker than ever but glinting with a love he could feel when he looked into them. Till death do us part, they both said.
Had he still believed in God then? Thinking back now, he could not remember. But he had meant it when he had promised before God to love, cherish, and protect his wife. That promise meant something, if not to God, then to himself, even as Patrick remembered, in that very moment of vow-making, his proclivity toward pleasure. This he would overcome, and in loving his wife, would create for himself the life he had always craved.
Patrick had not reckoned on Mary’s shameful confession in their marital bed on their wedding night. In their new closeness, and faced with a similar need to exorcise the past as she stepped into their shared life as husband and wife, Mary had unburdened herself of a deep and heavy secret.
For a few weeks after their marriage, Patrick considered a divorce. But he was a Catholic, and that would be difficult. He wished to heap no more shame on himself by exposing her past. Annulment was an option, but he had dithered too long. It was easier to remain married, but the life he had dreamed of with Mary had been destroyed.
From that day on, he could never look into those dark pools of light, which had seemed so beautiful, without seeing there the hardness of Mary’s soul. Every time he looked into her eyes, he remembered what she had done. His love had been sullied. Never again would he look at her and be engulfed by the tender mixture of longing, protectiveness, and love. From then on, he could stand to look at her face for only so long. Then, sickened, he would be forced to turn away. Now those eyes mocked him, pleading with him to love but stirring only disgust.
Mary’s beauty, first a source of pride, turned overnight into a torment. It enraged him. How could someone so beautiful have been capable of the thing she had done? How could her looks be so opposed to what he now knew resided in her heart? He wished he could find her ugly. But even though her soul repulsed him, her outward appearance now mesmerized him even more. Mary’s physical allure grew stronger in proportion to his growing revulsion. There was an urge to possess, to own even, her past and somehow erase it. In the physical act of love, he could momentarily do so, but afterwards he would always return to the present, back to Mary and her shamefulness, her hard eyes, and he would push her away. There was no need or desire to protect her, only to possess her. And this Patrick did absolutely.
Mary could leave his sight only to go to work and church. He did not like her working, but had little choice. They had moved, after their marriage, into a new housing scheme for coloureds far outside of the city on the Cape Flats. They were not allowed to buy the property, but as renters their expenses were high and could not be met on his apprentice salary. He allowed Mary to go and work as a shop assistant in a nearby suburb. She was good at her job and soon found a better paying one at the bank. Patrick, always struggling with rules and his temper, never finished his apprenticeship as a mechanic, and he drifted from one low-paying job to another. So he allowed his wife to work, but beyond that decreed that she be home at all times. He had always been an excellent timekeeper. He knew that a trip to the nearby shops should take twenty-five minutes: five to walk there, fifteen to pick out her groceries, five to walk back home. If she exceeded those minutes, he’d be waiting for her, ready with questions. Who had she seen? He would ask her again and again, persisting, hearing, and hating how his voice dripped with a mixture of bile and jealousy. Who have you been with, this time?
It worked: he gained almost full control over her.
For the most part, he thought she had settled down, but often she was sullen and only spoke to him when he spoke to her first. In this barren new place, they knew no one. They had neighbors, but Mary didn’t concern herself with them. He preferred it that way. He didn’t like the idea of his wife gossiping over a fence. Sometimes when he was between jobs, he would watch her walking down Saturn Street coming home from work. She walked with her head up high and her eyes straight ahead of her. If it was cold, she would have her hands deep in the pockets of her coat. If there were people about, she did not pause or stop and speak to anyone. He could see how the neighbors looked at her as she passed, how they fell silent, their eyes appraising her, and the corners of their mouths turned down. And it was true. Mary was standoffish in nature. He had experienced it the days they first met. Some people might have seen her as a snob, with her light complexion, acting white. He could see what they were thinking. Sometimes they scoffed at her within earshot. It was better that way, Patrick thought. He did not want his family’s business being talked about in strangers’ living rooms anyway. For his part, Patrick wondered: what was the use? What was the fucking use of vows and promises and strivings to be good and do right by people? He had been let down.
It was easy to slip back into the old ways, find solace in the shebeens, in the drink and available bodies to be found there. As their six-month wedding anniversary passed, unmarked, he started to follow the path leading to the local shebeen the moment he stepped off the bus from work, delighting there in the distractions from his wife’s beautiful, sour face. Soon he was seldom home earlier than midnight, and never sober. Mary was nearly always asleep when he got home, turned on her side in their bed, away from him.
But then she started waiting up for him. She was obviously distressed at the state he was in. He could see judgement and disgust on her face. One night she cried and put her arms out to him. She pleaded with Patrick to stop, stop his reckless behaviour. She begged him to come back to her. She wanted her sweet Patrick back, she said, the one she had fallen in love with, the man who had her heart. “Don’t speak to me about love!” he had screamed at her.
And then, one night, it happened. For the first time he had raised his fist, and with the force of close to a year’s suppressed rage, smacked it against the vulnerable curve of her lip. Mary crumpled to the floor. A wave of remorse instantly swept over him. Patrick knelt down next to her, cradled her sobbing face, whispered over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.” Gently, he lifted her from the floor and led her to their bed, where he held her until her sobs subsided and she fell asleep in his arms. The sound of her even breathing comforted him. He was struck by the realization that the protective swelling in his chest, which had fled that first night, was back. Gone was the pent-up anger he had carried in every muscle for the past months. There, in this unhappy bed, was tenderness again, an unexpected guest. He welcomed it with relief.
For a while after Patrick took care with his wife. He enveloped her with concern, and showered tenderness upon her. He came straight home from work, abandoning his nightly detours to the shebeen. And when Mary gave him the news that she was pregnant with their first child, he thought they might be a family after all. She became more relaxed, allowing her body and spirit to soften a little into his embrace.
But it didn’t last. It couldn’t. Some or other upset at work, or maybe an absence from home by Mary he deemed longer than necessary—he could not now remember which—and Patrick found himself back at the shebeen, buying rounds for an appreciative crowd. The anger sprouted within him again—its seed had not been eradicated—and fueled by liquor, it erupted again, each time with increased intensity.
Patrick hated the way she would drop to the floor at his first contact and roll herself into a ball, holding her arms over her growing belly, shielding herself and his baby from him as if he were a monster. It infuriated him. And when she cried or pleaded, that infuriated him more. It was better when she was in bed by the time he came home, but he could tell by her breathing when she wasn’t sleeping, all tucked tight, tight with the duvet round her. He saw the swell of her belly rise and fall as she lay there. Before he knew it, his hand would shoot out and he’d see her mouth contort as a lip split. “Liar,” he would whisper. “Whore. You say you care about this child? Liar!”
Soon after their first wedding anniversary, Mary gave birth to a perfect baby boy. He had the sweetest face. When Patrick entered the room where Mary was holding him and gazing down at him enraptured and overwhelmed with love, it took him a few moments to see her tears. She didn’t look up at him, just kept her eyes on the tiny, unmoving, silent little bundle in her arms. Patrick did not have to move closer to know what he knew, to discover what had been given and taken at the same moment.
He stood motionless by the foot of the bed for what seemed like an eternity. Deep anguish distorted the contours of his face, but he would not allow himself to feel it. His eyes burning, mouth contorted, he looked at Mary, accusing her, hating her more than ever as tears streamed down her cheeks. “Happy?” he said. “You’ve killed another baby.” God had punished both of them for Mary’s sin.
Oh, the boy! Now, so many years later, Patrick could still see his small, serene face. The image would stay with him until he drew his last breath. He took out the precious memory of his son, the one with his nose and the curve of his mouth, almost daily, examining that cursed treasure that he couldn’t let go, could not put to rest. And now, on the bus, Grace’s face was somehow blurred into the image of the boy’s, so that, for a moment, he could not remember the features of either of his children. My son, my son! He felt the wound again as he stepped off onto the road, fearing, this time, for Grace.
Patrick made his way through the burning barricades, hurrying straight to the house he had until recently shared with Mary and Grace. There were no cops around, thank goodness, but Patrick clenched his hand around his trusted Okapi all the same. He was not afraid to use it: anyone who thought they could mess with him would find that out. As he branched off from the main road, entering a maze of tributaries, the crowds thinned and the smell of burning petrol faded. A few meters from his old house he broke into a run. Just one more corner and he’d be there. He wanted to touch her, touch his Grace and feel her forehead, her limbs, make sure each part of her was intact. He rounded the bend and headed straight into a row of parked cars. They were outside of Tim’s home. Patrick’s heart stopped with fright. Something was happening here. There were too many cars, too many people milling around on a night when it would be safer to remain indoors. Not a light shone from his old home. Please God, he prayed again. Moving up to the front door, he knocked, repeating the previous night’s scene. “Mary, open the door!”
He saw a faint movement behind the dappled glass. Mary was there, sitting alone in the dark again. “Mary! Where’s Grace?”
Mary got up from her seat and briefly moved out of sight. Then her head appeared through a crack in the small window at the side of the house.
“She’s here. She’s okay. And since when did you care anyway?”
“I need to see her. Please, Mary.”
“She’s asleep. Go away.”
The window squeezed shut. As quickly as relief washed through Patrick, rage flushed his body. Bitch! How dare she! How dare she keep him away from his child? He wanted to pump the door with his fists, but a commotion was brewing next door.
Distracted by the growing crowd, Patrick went off to hear what was happening. Johnny was missing. That was too bad—Patrick was fond of Johnny. After commiserating with the gathering, he found himself in that habit of old, saying a prayer for the boy. He asked if he could help, but no one paid him much attention, and after hanging around for a bit, feeling utterly useless, he walked slowly away into the night.