LITMIR.BIZ

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the ceremony in the giant hall. She took his beautiful brown fingers and linked them with her own as the rituals played out. Kamal looked down, surprised, at the top of her head. They rarely held hands any more. But it wasn’t just that. Love changed, and love changed people. With marriage sometimes came the need for more space, less touch. It was as though the wedding itself was the melting pot for human hearts, and the rest of time afterwards was about learning to live alone again.

      After the wedding she’d watched Thomas and Maya closely. Then she’d thought her theory all wrong. Her brother still touched his wife as though they were new lovers. He put his hands on Maya’s shoulders, she clung to his waist. They retained a physical affection that was still publicly demonstrated, something that seemed naturally lost to couples with children. Children brought something else to a marriage, and equally took something away. Childlessness preserved an innocence, some kind of affection. Thomas and Maya still clung to each other for comfort, for entertainment, for companionship, and they still had conversations that sustained themselves through content, rather than arguing or drifting into meaninglessness. Sometimes Rachel believed that relationships could recover from the ravages of family and domestic life. Sometimes, once the glue of the children no longer held, she thought there might be nothing else to fall back on.

      Sometimes Kamal spent the night away for work, and she revelled in the solitude his absence brought once Jack was fed and asleep. She spent more and more time at the park, in the shopping malls with Jack in the daytime. She began to resent it that Kamal worked from home, although he had built their house, although he had made their lives comfortable, although he still tried to reach for her in the private spaces of their relationship. But even in the dual conspiracy of the marital bed she had felt their separateness growing. She turned from him and feigned sleep because she wanted most desperately not to share it any more, but to claim her own body back.

      She had fed Jack from her breast until she felt sucked dry, until she stopped consuming nutrients enough to allow that he might benefit from her body. Rather than give it away, rather than share it all around, she wanted to withdraw her own self to make it invisible, to make her body disappear. She wanted to fly back in time, back to cold grey streets where she could walk forever and never meet a person who knew her, or who would want anything from her. Now she was connected to people and an extended family that she barely understood. Now she was expected to come up with presents and dinners and visits to people she would never otherwise have chosen, if she had not chosen Kamal.

      Would Jack grow up and wonder if his parents were happy? Was this a phase that would stretch on through time until they were old and Jack was gone from the house, until their lives remained half-lived and they must decide if there is still enough of a bond between them to go through with it, all the way into old age? Perhaps they would continue to dream of another kind of life – one that would become increasingly impossible to achieve with every passing day.

      CHAPTER 5

      There is a lonely road that winds into the heart of the country, a road that begins where the city of gold’s glow ends and another land rises. Here is an earth painted flat in fields of brown and orange that goes so far into the distance as to meet the edge of the sky. Thomas stares out through the window at that land and dreams of a time long gone, when what carried a man was made of living flesh and was not mechanical, when what a man carried was little more than what was necessary to get him through the day.

      For some hours after the city’s edge there is no more change in the landscape. He thinks of a time when a journey across the countryside meant that a man became a part of it, that animal and human and earth would breathe and sweat and pound together to become one in order to travel any distance. Beneath him the bus’s engine hums and he feels the tremor of the open road reach his fingertips. He wonders what happened when they finally found his car, burnt out and abandoned. He muses about his own funeral: what they will arrange for him, and whether there will be flowers.

      The bus travels on through the day. Passengers board and disembark in places remote and flat with few hills and dry earth and nothing but a petrol station and a convenience store, a contemporary oasis where people replenish or freshen up and refuel. Once, he leaves the bus to stretch his legs. He keeps his cap and sunglasses on and walks to the low white-painted fence that marks the edge of the property, turns and walks back again. While he walks he listens to the silence on the stretching land. He visits the restroom to relieve his bladder of the building pressure. Afterwards he finds his way into the cool interior of the shop. He can’t decide from the overpackaged merchandise what he wants to eat. The labels confuse him, now that he no longer knows who he is. Finally he chooses an expensive wedge of biltong wrapped in cellophane, and a litre of bottled water. It is the last time he’ll afford himself such luxuries. He pays at the till and the woman hands him change.

      ‘Thanks,’ he says. He quickly turns away, but her eyes are already on the money in the next customer’s hand.

      Later he dreams with his head against the trembling window. He dreams he is running through smoke so dense that it chokes him, and when he looks down he sees Sizwe’s poetry scratched into the dust. He dreams of a woman who walks to the edge of the world and looks out at the sea. In the dream she draws patterns on his face with the mud made by the sand at her feet. When he wakes he wipes his eyes with a hand across his face but his cheeks are still dry. Maya. A moment of dread rumbles deep inside him. He forces his eyes to the sky and tells himself that there is more than one kind of life. He is, at whatever cost, still allowed to choose.

      The woman in the seat across from him catches his glance and looks away but he doesn’t know if it is because the child beside her is crying, or if he himself has been whimpering in a world other than this one.

      When the sun arcs high the landscape changes from wheatfields to arid country. The road stretches out long and endless towards a place he’s only heard of at the edge of the continent. Mounds of hard earth much taller than a man break the horizon in places. Sheep are dotted like specks in an antique oil painting. The seat beside him is empty and he tries to keep it that way by placing a book and his jacket there, though his erratic concentration won’t allow him to read. The further they travel into the heart of the land, the emptier the bus becomes. It is as though it’s a vehicle that provides this deep interior with her victims as one by one they disembark. It’s as though the road he is on is a one-way journey that could take him all the way to the other side.

      As evening stretches out, the sky turns deep blue, then a dust-like grey before it succumbs to the night. The stars are more numerous than he has known. What stirs inside him now he has not felt since he was a child in the back seat of his father’s car on family holidays, when they travelled the country roads by night to avoid the heat of the summer days. This is beauty, he thinks. He cannot keep his eyes from above.

      They come to a place at the end of a continent often described as dark, but there is no darkness here. The town’s light drains the sky of stars and the pavements burst with yellow light. Multitudes of people, weary from working all day, wait in long lines on the pavements to go home.

      The bus rattles along a wide-built road with streetlights that stretch above it like the thin arms of dancers. The bus slows and screeches and moans before it comes to a halt at a place with no markers or sign that it is a bus stop. He is the third-last remaining passenger. The floor is littered with flat cigarette butts walked over many times. The driver shifts the gears, twists his body around and calls out through the glass plate that divides him from the rows of empty seats behind. ‘This is it. This is your stop. Though what you want here in this godforsaken place, only you and your maker can know.’

      Thomas rises from his seat and reaches to the racks above to haul down the single hold-all carrier bag. He places the cap on his head and adjusts the scarf against the collar of his jacket. Thanking the driver, he climbs from the vehicle onto the pavement. The last two passengers also disembark. The bus hisses and sighs, shifts into gear and travels, empty now, away from him.

      There are houses and structures and concrete buildings on either side of the road. This place lies between his own past and his own future. He can access neither until he steps out into the new world that waits for him alone.

      * * *

      He

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