sets off for the pier, walking quickly, the book held under his arm. Stopping behind a car, he sees Maria and Lionel walking beside the sea wall, nearly back at the parking lot. She has on a short pale-cream dress, just a few tints away from white. Her long legs are covered in skin-coloured stockings, and she is wearing soft brown leather shoes. Walking next to her, Lionel is like some prehistoric fish that has struggled its way out of the deep sea; seeing a beautiful creature of the land, the ancient fish squelches along beside her, desperate to make her its own, though it can only grunt and puff.
Suddenly Lionel does a peculiar thing. He turns Maria towards the sea, faces her towards it, as if to say: look, there is my element, and you could never survive those cold salty depths, and the predators, of which I am one.
Maria doesn’t like it. She turns back again, like a spring that has been forced down returning to its proper place. She raises her left hand to him (she is left-handed; so is Kristof) and then curls back her fingers to show only a thumb. Then she points an index finger, and finally the middle finger too. Lionel cannot endure those provocative fingers, and flashes out his wide, fleshy hand to grip hers. At that point Maria must be saying something especially defiant, because his right hand lets go of her left, speedily withdraws, and delivers a sudden push to her shoulder. She staggers backwards.
Lionel does not have a talent for physical violence. He is an amateur, but of course amateurs are dangerous; one cannot quite predict what they are going to do, since they follow no rational pattern. The scene turns operatic: Lionel feels remorse, and he supports Maria as she straightens up. Meanwhile, the fishermen on the pier have turned to see what is going on. Some are watching, amused, while others approach the pair. One of them says something to the couple, but is ignored. Lionel appears to be humiliated by the encounter, ashamed of what he has done. They spend some time in soothing talk, standing close together on the pier, and then walk back – Lionel, docile, alongside her.
From his position behind the car, Kristof moves around the vehicle to keep himself invisible as the couple pass some metres away. He watches them get into the Pajero and drive off; then he emerges.
A fisherman passes near him, coming off the pier with his rod, bag of catch and teenage son.
“What happened?” asks Kristof.
The fisherman looks at him. “Sorry?”
“There seemed to be a disturbance there.”
“Not my business. You have to ask those people,” says the man, and goes off with his boy.
Kristof walks to his car. As he reaches it, there is a commotion behind him. It is the woman in the black sweater – she has crossed the road from the bookshop – with a man. He is in his sixties, and the lines on his face are those of a mountain. He is tall, powerful. He too is wearing a sweater – thick, brown – and black boots.
“It’s him,” says the woman.
“You!” says the man.
“How may I help?” Kristof asks, using his deep voice.
“You stole that book from us.”
There’s no sense denying it; the position has changed. He takes the book out from under his arm. “Fine,” he says. “Here’s your thing.” The man receives the account of Germany’s glorious adventures. The woman is looking at Kristof. “Don’t I know you?” she asks.
“Now you do,” he says, fumbling with the door of the car.
“I don’t want to see you in our shop any more,” she says. But she cannot seem to tear herself away. Suddenly she points a finger at him. “Of course,” she says. “I know exactly who you are.”
“You don’t know me at all,” Kristof says. He gets into his car, and as he drives away they make no effort to stop him.
Five
The slam of a hard object against glass: Maria jolts awake. In her mother’s double bed she lies on her back, paralysed, interlocking hands draped over her belly to form a barrier. What was that? There is only the distant drone of a few cars on some highway. She slides her foot down the cold sheet to break the paralysis, making it possible to move her arms and shift onto her side so that she faces the bedside clock: 2:36 am. Maria stays like that until her breathing settles and her heart slows to a regular rhythm before she flops onto her back again. Through the window she can see the stars, pointy and bright, in the night sky. Claudia, opinionated about almost everything, believed curtains to be unnecessary. “I must look at the stars,” she would say. “So many of my night hours are spent awake, the stars my only companions.”
The house emits its usual sounds, all easily identifiable: the northwesterly wind lashes the awning outside the window, water drips from yesterday’s first winter storm, and a rat, possibly more than one, scurries across the beams in the roof. She can hear the high-pitched squawks of the rodent’s offspring. Is that what woke her? Yet the noise, as she remembers it, was sharper, as if someone were trying to gain entry – not the shrill bleat of hungry young.
Even while she was sleeping, Maria felt disturbed. She is haunted by strange and vivid dreams. They began a week after her mother’s death. The police report hadn’t come out yet, and all she knew was that her mother had fallen to her death from a precipice in Newlands Forest on a Sunday morning. A serious incident, the police said in her meeting with them, takes time to investigate. Seeing her agitation, the sergeant and his assistant had promised to pray for her. She told them rather to concentrate their efforts on police work, which produced a resentful silence.
Maria’s first dream came as a block of colour, fiery orange, filling her vision. Parting the orange curtain, Claudia glided through, her long black hair framing her face. There were more dreams: sometimes her mother stood at the top of a stone tower, similar to the one on the tarot cards she used. Maria had the sensation, comparable to that which she felt with her clients, that Claudia was about to tell her something important. If asked, Maria would have said that her mother was trying to say goodbye. Despite their difficult relationship, and her sense that she was never truly wanted, Maria believes Claudia wanted to offer her farewell before killing herself. Sometimes she thinks this is only what she wishes to believe, but she feels it strongly.
Of course she expects such dreams, this re-encountering of the dead during sleep, when the unconscious has free rein. In her night life she recreates a wish: a living Claudia. But – and here she can barely give voice to her thoughts, because she has always seen herself as not only intuitive but also rational – there is something odd about these night images. Always it appears to her as though she is awake, and even upon waking she has the sensation that she was not asleep, so vivid are the dreams.
Maria forces herself up from the warmth of the bed for some water. These days she gets so thirsty, it feels more like she’s drinking than eating for two. She makes her way to the bathroom used by her patients, where the light is dimmer, to avoid a further push into wakefulness. The room is spare – only a toilet, a tiny porcelain basin (if the tap is turned a touch too hard, the water sprays the tiled floor) and a medicine cabinet.
She bends to drink from the tap, letting the cool water flow over her lips. A sleeping pill is what she wants. Since her mother’s suicidal plunge, she has not only endured unsettling dreams, but also insomnia. For this she resents Claudia. Maria has tried everything to cure herself, from valerian root to long and tedious runs in the late afternoons – nothing worked, so many wasted hours. Eventually she grew tired of the thoughts that circle in the early hours of the morning, and found a doctor with an easy hand, a poor sleeper himself. Now, with the pregnancy, she dares not risk the blank pleasure of a sleeping pill – though, on a few desperate occasions, she has sliced a pill into quarters, knocked it back with a capful of wine – but the nights for the most part are taunting and never-ending. She opens the medicine cabinet, knowing precisely what it contains: Panado (many patients come to therapy with a headache, or develop one during the session), a spare box of tissues and a brown bottle of PaxMax, a herbal remedy for anxiety.
At