The Promise

by Damon Galgut

In the hearse, I mean the house, a certain unspoken fear has ebbed, even if people aren’t sure why and it’s barely been said in words.

First person?

Most of the time, in fact, it’s words that deflect fear, Can I get you another cup of tea? Would you like to try one of my rusks? Marina speaking, of course, she’s adept at pouring oily phrases onto turbulent depths that threaten to spill over.

No quotation marks, a natural style of storytelling, but from whose POV? I had thought Amor.

No, I’m not hungry. And that’s Manie, her much-younger brother, who looks to her eyes like an owl, a baby owl she’d picked up and kept once as a child.

Oh please please please, he says with a vehemence that sounds like anger, though he may not be speaking to her.

The mental correction is satisfying, like a stiff joint clicking into place. Rachel will always be in the past tense now. Manie shivers without his jersey, although the spring day is warm. Will he ever thaw out again? Never while she was alive did he need Rachel as fiercely as he does right now and her absence is like a steely coldness deep inside.

POV shift from Marina in one paragraph to Manie in the next paragraph.

Oraait, he says. Okay.

He walks back down the hill the same way he came up, slashing with the stick at the white tops of the grass, pushing it into termite hills. Letting the world know he’s there.

Four cars, including the long dark one, have departed, a single new one has arrived. The telephone has rung eighteen times, the doorbell twice, on one occasion because somebody has sent flowers that improbably turn up all the way out here. Twenty-two cups of tea, six mugs of coffee, three glasses of cool drink and six brandy-and-Cokes have been consumed. The three toilets downstairs, unused to such traffic, have between them flushed twenty-seven times, carrying away nine point eight litres of urine, five point two litres of shit, one stomachful of regurgitated food and five millilitres of sperm.

Astrid is a fearful person. Among other things, she’s afraid of the dark, poverty, thunderstorms, getting fat, earthquakes, tidal waves, crocodiles, the blacks, the future, the orderly structures of society coming undone. Of being unloved. Of always having been that way.

She dislikes her whole body, as many of you do, but with special adolescent intensity, and it seems even more present than usual today, more thickly, heatedly present.

POV first person and using You.

It’s happened a few times recently that she’s known in advance, just a millisecond ahead of time, that a picture will drop off the wall, a window will fly open, a pencil will roll across the desk.

Today she looks past her reflection in the mirror, feeling certain that a fire-blackened tortoise shell, which sits on the bedside table, will lift into the air. She watches it lift. As if she’s carrying it with her eyes, she observes it move calmly into the middle of the room. Then she lets it drop, or throws it perhaps, for it smashes quite forcefully onto the floor and breaks.

What are we actually talking about? he says. (Salome’s house.) But Amor also runs out of power and collapses back against his chest. When she speaks he can’t hear her.

In the years of questing and searching since Manie was brushed by God’s fire and turned at last to the truth, Alwyn Simmers has been his guide and his shepherd. The rigors of his Church are the joists and stays that keep me upright.

Amazement, in a way. That he could speak like that. Could say what he did. It must be wonderful to be a man! She has a peculiar longing to take him by the hand. Not to lead him anywhere, just to hold on. Or maybe to be led.

And strange too, a strange child. Unusual and maybe tragic, easy to overlook. But tonight her brother, from his high place, seemed to notice me.

The “me” — again a strange shift mid sentence in POV?

Why not? Ag, don’t be stupid. So Salome has gone back to her own house instead, beg your pardon, to the Lombard place, and changed into her church clothes, which she would have worn to the service, a dark dress, patched and darned, and a black shawl and her only good pair of shoes, and a handbag and hat, and like that she sits out in front of her house, sorry, the Lombard place, on a second-hand armchair from which the stuffing is bursting out, and says a prayer for Rachel.

Perhaps she doesn’t pray in these words,

More mystery about who the narrator is

The following exchange takes place between Manie and his eldest child, somewhere.

“Somewhere” — why not a specific place, I wonder. I like this.

For Manie has brooded upon the events of the previous evening, like a hen upon a huge black egg. You have offended my marriage and my religion, and you shall pay.

The middle of the paragraph, with no quotation mark or paragraph break or attribution.

Oh, and don’t overlook Salome, washing plates and cups in the kitchen sink. She’s in her Sunday clothes, what she wore to the funeral, for she was there too, why was it not mentioned before, yes, she was present, almost but not quite in the front, standing behind the family.

Mathematics again! So many metres from here to there, the angle is such that, likely a man-sized shoe, point-blank range. Figures do tell a certain kind of truth, but can easily be turned back whence they come, e.g. 1. Age: Olyphant 53/Hunter 38 2. Years in the service: 34/12 3. Waist size: 48/34 4. IQ: 144/115 5. Number of marriages: 1/3 6. Number of children: 0/6

. He goes on in this vein, but who can listen for long, when the moral pitch is too high for human ears, and his voice a bit squeaky too.

in an accent squashed underfoot, all the consonants decapitated and the vowels stove in.

Not ready for it yet. Can’t go there while she’s weak, and she is weak right now, hollowed out by what her brother did. Just to think of it makes her want to fall down. All the force and fury of him, turned in and poured white-hot down that metal tube, aimed at the very centre of his life. Here/not here/nowhere. Anton, whom she never really knew. Too high, too far, too other. And now no trace is left.

Inside the house, the two women sitting at a table. Lukas has put himself on a chair in the corner and is looking at something on his phone. Two other rooms beyond, almost nude of furniture. Pictures cut from magazines, of beautiful images from nature, cruise ships in exotic locations, are stuck to one wall with putty.

What happens in a room lingers there invisibly, all deeds, all words, always. Not seen, not heard, except by some, and even then imperfectly. In this very room both birth and death have taken place. Long ago, maybe, but the blood is still visible on certain days, when time wears thin.

Amor looks around, at the cracking plaster. The broken cement floors. The missing panes of glass. This...

And this is when Amor lays the piece of paper, which she can’t yet possibly have in her possession, on the table.

Yes. Or it will be very soon, if you can just be patient a little longer.

Salome, who has been patient for thirty-one years, has only recently given up hope, and as you yourself may have discovered along the way, resignation brings relief.

So many years in the same place, or two places rather, this skew little houselet at the base of a hill, and the much bigger house on the other side of it. Passing between the two, belonging to neither, that’s been her life. Nor did she expect it to change.

and if Salome’s home hasn’t been mentioned before it’s because you have not asked, you didn’t care to know. As she’s turned the idea over and over she’s worn it smooth, and she has started to look forward to leaving this place, this house that has never brought her any luck. Now she has to reconfigure her thinking, uncomfortably.

Must we be grateful to you? She shakes her head. Of course not. My mother was supposed to get this house a long time back. Thirty years ago! Instead she got lies and promises. And you did nothing. Salome tries to shush him, but he keeps on. You lived off your family, you took their money, you didn’t want to make a fuss. Now because all of them are dead, you come and give us a present. I saw you looking at it. Nice, nè? Three fucked-up rooms with a broken roof. And we must be grateful?

Both women know they won’t see each other again. But why does it matter? They’re close, but not close. Joined but not joined. One of the strange, simple fusions that hold this country together. Sometimes only barely. They embrace a last time. Frail basket of bones, containing its fire. Pulse beating dimly under your hand.

And when the storm finally passes, in the small hours, it leaves a dripping calmness behind it. Snails unfurl themselves in the undergrowth and push forth, little galleons on a dark green sea, trailing their thin silver wakes. From the soil, musky pheromonal odours twine up like tendrils on the air.