Hortensia let her arm fall over his body, she listened to the unrelenting labour of his breathing.
Peter kept trying to say something, but always just a dry scratch of sound came. And then he slept for several days, waking up to drink, or sometimes when the nurse was clumsy with the drip he would startle. But mostly he slept. As if, after all his days of illness and her unrelenting disinterest, as if making up for what was definitely lost, Hortensia stayed with him throughout this time, only going away to eat one meal a day. She ate because the doctor said she had to; she had no appetite. Or she would leave for the bathroom, stare at her face in the mirror, brush her hand over the tight-cropped coils on her head, wonder who she was. Who she’d become.
Once, coming back into the room, Hortensia overheard the nurses.
‘Poor bastard.’
‘What a way to die, hey? Someone should show mercy – you know, pull the plug.’
‘You!’ Hortensia shouted. She rushed in and walked up to the nurse’s face, stuck her nose into her, wanted to pump her with fists. ‘Don’t you dare.’
‘Mrs James, I was just—’
‘Don’t. You. Dare.’
On her frightful and violent insistence, the nurses left and Hortensia telephoned the medical care. Asked that the nurses not come back.
‘What seems to be the problem?’ the man on the other end of the phone wanted to know.
‘They have no respect. None. And no kindness for a man so close to death. I won’t have them here again. And no replacements. I would die before you humiliate us again.’
The confused man apologised, still unclear of the grievance, unsure what to write down on his complaint form.
The phone rang and Hortensia let it go to voice-message. It was the doctor calling, explaining about the drip; it was due in just under twelve hours and could Hortensia please at least let a nurse in to administer.
Hortensia climbed into the bed with Peter, holding him the way she’d grown accustomed to over the last few days. He tried to talk; she wiped the sweat on his forehead that his feeble exertions produced.
Later that night Hortensia called the doctor back to tell her they would not need a nurse to come through. That in fact no nurse would ever again come into her house as long as she lived. But certainly none was required for Peter James – he was dead and in no further need of drips.
FIFTEEN
WITH THE COMMITTEE meeting coming up, Ludmilla called Marion again.
‘So the State has made an offer. Money. Let’s see. If the Samsodiens decline, it could still go to court. Stubborn, these people are.’
‘Ah.’ Instinctively, Marion got up to shut her bedroom door. She had a picture of Hortensia listening in. She dropped her voice, ‘I read an article.’ A piece had been published in the Argus, addressing the much talked-about reopening of the claims. A few cases were profiled. The Samsodiens had been evicted in the Sixties and forced to sell their land for a paltry few thousand rand. Marion recalled Ludmilla referring to it as a bargain. The article suggested the land was now worth over 100 million. Bargain would have to have been an understatement. ‘Seems a little … unfair, perhaps.’
Ludmilla scoffed while Marion realised she’d just referred to apartheid conditions as ‘a little unfair’.
‘The sale was clean. It was a good deal. Sometimes this happens.’
Marion didn’t have the words ready. She wanted to suggest that the conditions were governed by a law that was … unjust.
‘Marion, you still there?’
Marion had avoided history. Or she’d invented her own. After all, what was history but a record of what gets noticed? Noticing, it seemed to Marion, was what life was really about. Noticing and not noticing, remembering and forgetting.
Marion had studied architecture in an attempt to forget.