The Promise

by Damon Galgut

The line of the main road is stitched out now and then in slow motion by the headlamps of a car, carrying its cargo of human lives, going from somewhere to somewhere.

Terrible to flinch from what you once, briefly, loved, or thought you did, or wanted to think you did. But are shackled to, regardless, for life.

Tojo the Alsatian observes her coming and going without difficulty, because he hasn’t learned that it isn’t possible.

She looks real, which is to say, ordinary. How would you know she is a ghost? Many of the living are vague and adrift too, it’s not a failing unique to the departed.

Much of life consists of sighing and redoing, particularly with Sara.

So people will pity themselves, soaked in sadness over what they’ve lost, with no awareness of other losses close to hand that they have brought about.

And sometimes it’s only when you know life is ending that you can finally give it a meaning.

Dawn is welling up like a wound as they jounce down the track.

Astrid has taken upon herself the silences of the family, she has made herself the messenger and bringer of news between them. It’s a role she needs and resents, and for which she’s needed and resented in return.

But then you come to the road leading out to the farm and when the buildings fall away the old earth shows itself beneath its petticoats, bleached and bare.

Money is what it’s all about. An abstraction that shapes your fate. Notes with numbers on them, each a cryptic IOU, not the real thing itself, but the numbers denote your power and there can never be enough. Power might have saved you, Anton, got you out of the country and put your aspirations in reach. Not too late to redeem yourself, though it may take a while for the numbers to climb again. Meanwhile, you have to dig in, suss out, keep on.

There’s a lot of letting go at the big moment, same way you came into the world you make your exit again, incontinent and howling, but don’t tell anybody.

He’s the sensitive one, could have been a painter, or perhaps a homosexual, but instead he wields his make-up brushes on cadavers, remarkable what you can hide under powder and colour. Not to mention his perfumes, generic bottles of scent he keeps in a little mirrored cabinet on the wall. People stink even when they’re alive, but afterwards it’s much worse, and in Manie’s case there’s something especially off with the leg. The leg is where the snake got him and it’s really bad. Lucky it wasn’t the face. Not much you can do with it, except cut the pants short that side and hide it away. As long as he fits into the coffin.

The countryside looks the same but the laws piled on top of it, the invisible, powerful laws that people make and then lay down at angles across the earth, pressing down heavily, all those laws are changing now. She can feel, almost as if it’s part of the picture in front of her, that she has come back to the same place, but it isn’t the same place any more.

Nothing joins a man to the earth more completely than an umbilical arc of hot yellow urine.

The snake that bit Manie is a young female of the species and at this moment she is lying on display in her tank at the reptile park. Look at the fat scaly awfulness of her, bulging with poison, a hard sheath full of grumous matter, and if she were lolling outside on some country pathway she would be beaten to death just for being what she is.

You understand, he says, people don’t always take what you give them. Not every chance is an opportunity. Sometimes a chance is just a waste of time.

The dead are so much more predictable than the living, with their moods and humours.

The priest is layered in his full regalia, the human equivalent of a peacock.

Foolish old earth, returning and repeating itself, over and over. Never misses a show. How can you bear it, you ancient tart, giving the identical performance again and again, evenings and matinees, while the theatre crumbles around you, the lines in the script unchanging, to say nothing of the make-up, the costumes, the extravagant gestures … Tomorrow and tomorrow and the day after that …