She didn’t bat an eye. It was hilarious.’
Everyone laughs, shaking heads in mock horror. We’ve all heard it or something like it before from MPs. After a while these anecdotes have become the only way we can relate to one another. They make the experience of working here less depressing.
There’s a lull in conversation while everyone pictures the scene and I take the gap to ask about what I’ve just heard, trying to frame it as a general question. If the president has people watching everywhere, I don’t want to be one of the watched.
‘Hey, does anyone know anything about some Special Forces that we’ve got for policing? “Tearrooths” or something.’
Most of them shake their heads, but Thinus, the defence advisor, looks at me pointedly, his face growing paler than it usually is, making his freckles stand out more. He stands up and, though he’s short and wiry, his presence feels large and ominous.
‘Where did you hear about that?’ His question comes out in a hiss.
My mouth works faster than my brain, thankfully. ‘I think I read about it somewhere this morning, maybe on the train. I was just wondering.’
‘I doubt that’s in the news. If I were you, I wouldn’t talk about it any more. It’s likely to land you in trouble, Adnan. Anyway, what are you doing reading about security? Aren’t fish your thing?’
His tone has turned cold and everyone notices. I don’t respond so the others start to make awkward exits, mumbling that they should get back to their desks. I’m tempted to leave too, but I wait for them all to be gone. I want to see if he has anything else to say. When it is just the two of us any half-efforts to be friendly disappear altogether. His voice is pure venom.
‘I mean it. Don’t go asking about those. There is only trouble that can come from it.’
He says it in a low firm voice, so even if there were others around, only I would hear him. As he walks out of the lounge I realise I’ve been holding my breath for the second time today. When I look down my hands are trembling and I don’t know whether it’s nicotine or nerves, but I know I can’t stay silent about this. Something bad is going on. I have to tell Miles. He’ll know what to do.
TUESDAY
CHAPTER 7
Thuli
Today, Doctor Mofokeng’s offices are bathed in natural light and I’m always amazed that they’re somehow able to block out the sound from the outside world. Could be double-glazing, but I think it’s also something about the doctor herself that seems to take sound and transform it, to take questions based in worry and angst and turn them into sensible statements with solutions.
I’d guess she’s in her early fifties, though I’ve never asked. Her body reminds me of my mother’s. Soft in all the places a woman can be soft, yet presenting the appearance of a firmness that is comforting just to be near. Today must be my twelfth session with her, and I feel so safe here, yet I don’t feel like I know anything about her.
Her desk is always neat and tidy, with no papers or photo frames showing a happy family, husband or wife, or any grandkids. There is nothing that reveals her life outside this room, just her MacBook, always closed, not even a desktop background to give an inkling of taste or preference.
There is a large window in her office that looks out into the dappled overgrowth of a bougainvillea bush, and on the ledge are potted plants that I have watched change throughout our sessions. A new blossom here, a dead leaf there, are signs to me that time is in fact passing and that time changes things. Signs that things are growing, myself included if I’m lucky.
‘I’m glad you still decided to come, Thulebona, especially with everything that’s going on up campus. I’m sure the stress of all that must be affecting you?’ She makes a statement a question like a good shrink is trained to.
‘I wasn’t going to come. Only, I’ve been seeing things that make me feel worse than the protests do.’
‘What have you seen?’
Doctor Mofokeng only wears matching clothes, as though everything is tested against a colour palette. Today it’s shades of green, which are soothing to look at. I wonder if she keeps things paired up to avoid being a distraction from whatever torments people are dealing with in here. If you look at her for long enough, it’s easy just to zone her out. But she’s asked me a question, and I guess the university pays her to listen, so I tell her everything I told Helen. She listens, as though it’s all completely normal.
‘It sounds like those images you’re seeing upset you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re only seeing them in your mind, when you’re “glitching”?’
‘Yes.’
‘Could there be any reason that these images you’re seeing aren’t real?’
She’s been politely trying to convince me, without ever overtly saying it, that these glitches I’m having are actually flashbacks, manufactured by my brain to try to make sense of what happened to me. I’d like to believe I was going mad too. For once it’s the far less scary option. It would mean there was something clearly wrong, something that could be fixed. It would give me some room to get it all under control. To treat it like I would any other illness. But it’s not that simple.
Mom says black people don’t go mad; they just sometimes hear their ancestors a little too loudly. For Mom, these visions of mine could equally have been sent by the Lord to cure me of my unholy sexual urges, or the rambling echoes of a spirit inside me. How she reconciles the ancestors and the Lord, damnation and her love for me – that’s none of my business.
‘I think they’re real because …’ I know they’re real. ‘Because all the other things I’ve seen so far have happened; even when they hadn’t happened yet in real life, after I saw them in a glitch, they came true.’
‘And how does it make you feel, this ability to see things ahead of time?’
Responsible, for everyone and everything. Terrified. Exhilarated. Helpless.
‘It feels like I have to do something.’
‘What is it that you feel you have to do?’
‘Change things, you know, like, stop bad things from happening.’
‘You feel like you want to stop bad things from happening?’
When she writes in her notebook, I don’t know what to feel. I’m the one who’s dictating the story, but how she hears it is so far beyond my control. How or what anyone thinks about what I say is something I’ve had to let go of. The only listening I care about is Sindiwe’s.
‘Well, I have to do something, don’t I? I mean, I don’t want anyone else to get hurt …’
She sits quietly, letting me think about what I’m leaving out of that sentence. Like me. Of course, she knows about what happened to me, and so I don’t have to go into the gory details again.
That’s why I started coming here. The university is probably only paying so that I don’t give them any bad publicity by telling the news that I was gang-raped within five hundred metres of the dorms, by other students, whom they’ve chosen to let finish their studies. The university recommended I go for trauma ‘debriefing’ and offered to pay after Sindiwe insisted I at least report what had happened to the campus police, if not the real ones. So, the good doctor-shrink is my consolation prize for losing the lottery of being born a woman. Better than nothing, I guess.
‘Have you been seeing things more often?’
Her question punctures my flashback and I’m grateful for it. I haven’t told the good doctor that I can control the