Read Online Small Circle of Beings by Damon Galgut - Free Book Online

as I stare at him.
    ‘I’m afraid so. To be on the safe side.’
    The interview is over.
    Ten years, I know already, is too long a time for either of us to endure. David is my son. He has been in me more deeply and more intimately than any lover I’ve had. We
undergo this attrition together.

6
    It is at some time now, while we are living this way with so much distance and time between us, that betrayal begins. I have no thoughts, no profound understandings to offer.
Perhaps the sickness in our midst makes deception easier to practise. I prefer to think, however, that we begin to see each other honestly, and cannot bear what we see. At any rate, I have no
warning. I think back over the weekends that Stephen has spent with me here. I remember the phone calls he’s made, but find no clue to what is taking place.
    The first I learn of it is when I receive a call one evening after returning from the hospital. I am greeted with a slow, strange breathing on the other side.
    ‘Hello?’ I say.
    ‘Do you know,’ a voice informs me (a woman’s voice, muffled and high), ‘that your husband is having an affair?’
    ‘What?’ I say, unsure whether I’ve heard correctly. But there is only a silence before the line goes dead.
    I am suddenly weak. Shock falls over me like a blinding white dome in which I am moving, silent and bereft.
    Linda is concerned. She follows after me, tugging at my arm. ‘What?’ she cries. ‘Was it the hospital? Is it David?’ When I continue to ignore her, she can no longer
resist. ‘Has it happened?’ she says.
    ‘No,’ I say. ‘It isn’t that.’
    The next day, sick and sleepless, I pack my bag. I tell Linda that I must go home. ‘To settle some matters,’ I say. She twitters consent, but I can tell by the way
she looks at me from her frightened grey eyes that she knows something is wrong.
    Before I leave, I go to the hospital to tell David I shall be away for a day. He accepts the news without concern, but when Dr Tredoux, on his daily rounds, inserts the second needle into his
arm, he releases a thin high wail I’ve never heard from him before. We cling to each other with tiny mammal hands, the sick boy (my child) and I. The sound of his cry is in tune with
something in me, so that for a moment we sing out together: high, lonely, and in pain.
    I get back home in the late afternoon, with the shadows of the trees stretched long and pale across the grass. It is strange to see the house again after being away for so
long. There is no sign of anybody. A pelt of dust is on the floor. ‘Salome!’ I call. ‘Moses!’ But there is no reply.
    I sit down to wait in the lounge, in the large armchair at the window. The gas-lamps are unlit, and the shadows deepen about me as the evening comes on. There is no sound from inside the house,
except for the occasional squeak or fart of rafters. Outside, the air buzzes gently with birds and insects.
    Eventually, I hear the noise of Stephen’s bakkie from far down the road, long before it comes into view, trundling across the grass and out of sight again around the corner. Before, when
all was well, I used to go out to greet him when he came home. But not tonight. He must see my car when he parks his, but he doesn’t hurry. In fact it is a long time before I hear the tread
of his footsteps on the lawn and he appears on the stoep, walking slow and stiff, trailing on the air like smoke.
    It’s twilight now. A blue darkness has welled up from the ground, drifting like fine spray into the air. He comes to a stop in the doorway, leaning disjointedly against it as he would
never have done in time gone by. We look at each other, silent, across the shadow-scarred boards of the floor. And I see, yes, that he too has had a vigil to keep up, alone in the house with its
walls of stone, filling up with darkness as with water.
    ‘Hello, Stephen.’
    ‘Hello,’ he says, and at last tears loose from the jamb, comes staggering across the floor towards