no –”
“No money, no investigation,” I finished for him. I grinned sourly, but he had retreated into his usual impassible self.
“We are not a government agency or the United Nations peacekeeping force,” he rebuked me. I didn’t mind. We were back on familiar ground – slightly cordial and mildly acerbic.
“Right, then, can you fill me in?”
“You can still read, can’t you?”
“Why did you give it to me?”
“You have motivation and that’s usually half the battle won right there.”
“Even so –” I started to protest that we would be saving time and I’d be better prepared if he just told me. That same motivation might make me see things less clearly – but I was not going to tell him that. He saw it coming, and stopped me before I began. The torrent of my impatience dried up before I had said a word of it.
“Go and read the damn thing first. Thoroughly. Then we’ll discuss it. I will also want Ditoro in on it.”
He was talking about our own resident ex-policeman and intimidation expert, Tau Ditoro. I sometimes wonder how many of Tau’s type are out there. Sometimes it seems to me they are all over the place, toiling diligently on both sides of the legal fence.
I left him staring morosely out of the window before him at his favourite view: a dirty old brick wall. What did he see or read in it? The changing history of our society recorded on its slimy dampness? I used to wonder. I personally preferred the view out of the window behind him. It offered a more congenial and attractive skyline of Johannesburg – the sight of brave new buildings thrusting ever upwards. But destined to be consumed by smoggy skies if they were ever finished. Still, for a moment you could believe in the human spirit . . . an unstoppable force in everlasting upward motion.
These days, I sometimes think I can also catch a glimpse of the future in the dreary and scarred griminess of the wall.
Chapter 2
I looked in dismay at my desk when I came back in. Someone, probably Mama Mary, our office manager, had left a huge pile of ancient files on top of my desk. They were old in the sense that I was no longer interested in what they contained and had already subconsciously pushed them out of my mind. But they had to be looked at and brought up to date, and action had to be taken where necessary.
For one rebellious moment I thought of going back to Thekiso and asking him to shift them onto someone else or put them on hold for a while, but I could already imagine the curt refusal I would be met with. That was the price one paid for that brief, unguarded smile.
Anyway, I put aside my new-old exciting orange file and got stuck into the old-old boring ones. To do this, I had to do a lot of telephoning. Getting in touch with informants, clients and other interested parties. I also had to go out and ascertain a few facts personally from a reluctant eyewitness who had no phone and was wary of technology of any kind. He had heard too many ghost stories about taped telephone conversations. Somehow he didn’t seem to think I could be so devious as to carry a hidden recording device on my person – innocence, like self-delusion, is always with us.
I was back just about lunchtime and approached our stunning receptionist, Tumi. She has been a rock ever since I joined the firm and even more so in the recent past. She gave me no simulated and false pity but good, practical advice. She was wiser than her years, which I had never presumed to ask about. I guessed she was in her early twenties. You never can tell.
She had my hospital bag ready. Inside there were things she had bought and repackaged, insisting they were the right things to take to a patient like Lesego. I did not have the heart to tell her that Lesego rejected everything except apple juice and sometimes oranges. But I had told her about the flowers. She seemed to understand and had not bought them again. Lesego had said they reminded her of withered flowers on neglected graves.
I almost beat the traffic and the clock. I arrived just as they began letting in afternoon visitors. I don’t know why they have “visiting hours” here, in a private hospital, which everyone had assured me was the best in the city. Somehow one doesn’t question doctors. A childish hangover, I suppose.
I knew the doctor who was bending over the incubator, taking notes.
“Dr Harrison,” I said solemnly, as I always did when I met him on his irregular rounds.
“Mr Maje,” he answered with equal gravity. That was something: he remembered people’s names.
We paused, as usual, to commemorate the awful moment.
“She is doing fine. Very well, in fact,” he then said. The last part he had begun adding in the last few days. To him she had always been a person and not some textbook “foetus”, as those young doctors had insisted on saying when Lesego had first been admitted.
Harrison cracked a joke about a cricket match foul-up. I chuckled and cracked one about a soccer debacle. We beamed at each other in mutual high regard and complete mystification. We got on well together.
“Excellent,” he said.
“Exactly,” I said.
“There is really nothing wrong though with your wife. A broken arm and a few bruises, that’s all. And she will have other children. She should not worry about that.”
“She is not worried about that.”
“I know.”
“Do you still think she will not need . . . ”
“No. I don’t think so. She is a strong young woman and her inner wounds will heal themselves without any help from that. You be there for her.”
“I will be always there.”
“Excellent.”
That was, of course, psychological therapy and counselling. Harrison was my kind of doctor – he shared my mistrust of these things. I don’t say they don’t work, but I hear too many people boast about their treatment as if they are martyrs.
He walked with me to Lesego’s room, nodded me in and went on his measured way down the green corridor.
Lesego’s mother and mine were already there. They must have come in even before the official visiting time, or I had missed them in the chattering knot of visitors when I had arrived. There were two other women with them. They all had their eyes closed tight while their lips moved in earnest, sibilant prayers.
Only Lesego had her eyes wide open. She looked at me from her bed and her eyes pleaded silently for me to get rid of them as soon as possible. The prayers Lesego and I understood these days were those of people in a far-off place called Marakong-a-Badimo near Mafikeng. We would go there as soon as she was back on her feet again.
I shrugged and smiled ruefully. She smiled too. A small smile, but a smile all the same. She had begun doing that lately. And she was also getting impatient with her immobility and incapacity. We waited until the last amen of the longest prayer. The women snapped their eyes open and saw me at the door.
I greeted them and they responded a little shyly and self-consciously. We chatted about this and that, avoiding the central issue. We might have been casual acquaintances passing the time at a bus stop.
“Well, I think we should now go and see the baby,” my mother said. Lately, she seemed to have put herself at the helm.
“We’ll come back on our way out,” Lesego’s mother seconded the motion. There was general agreement and, as they bustled out in stiff, sombre-coloured dresses, Lesego’s mother cast a stabbing eye at me, just as I saw a gleam of triumph in my own mother’s eye. They were soon clattering down the corridor.
I placed the bag near the night table next to the one I had left for her the day before. That was one of Lesego’s conditions regarding hospital gifts: she would open the bag after I was gone. The fact that she didn’t actually use anything seemed neither here nor