The Innocence of Roast Chicken Page 8

  Faced with his lack of response, I quieten. Breathing is difficult, my indrawn breath almost a sob.

  He breaks the silence, his voice quiet but darkened with the agony I know so well. ‘I don’t know how much longer I can take this. Kate, tell me truthfully, have you never enjoyed our lovemaking? Never? Not even in the beginning?’

  ‘This has got nothing to do with sex!’ My voice is high, far louder than his. ‘I didn’t say I didn’t like sex. You bastard. You know – you knew a long time ago – I hate having my hands held like that. I hate it.’

  ‘But Kati, for God’s sake, that was years ago. You reacted so badly to it because you hardly knew me. You thought I was going to hurt you. But we’ve been married for years now. You must know I would never hurt you. You must surely have some trust in me and our relationship.’

  ‘I’ll never trust anyone that far!’

  He flinches as my comment hits him.

  ‘Then what have we got, Kati? You tell me, what have we actually got to show for all these years?’

  He turns towards me and now his eyes bore into mine in angry despair. Mine drop to watch my hands picking and picking at the small balls of cotton formed on the duvet cover.

  I hear, as usual, that his voice has changed with his easily softened emotions: ‘Ag, Kati, don’t you know sex is my way of giving you love on a platter? It’s the only time I ever feel at all close to you – for me, it’s a sharing.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with love, or sharing. You men, you glorify your primitive urge to conquer and control. I shouted “Stop it” there at the end. You never even heard me. You couldn’t have stopped if I’d been crying or bleeding to death. I don’t say that I don’t feel sensations – I do, so don’t think you can get into that male defence that I’m frigid. I just can’t stand the domination involved. You use me, you use me like a plastic doll. And that’s another thing – you talk about trust. That’s one thing I hate about sex. It needs trust only because it’s so close to hurting. You wouldn’t need trust if you couldn’t glimpse every man’s raw brutality when he’s pounding away.’

  ‘Oh, Kate, that’s such a perverted way of looking at love and lovemaking. I wish I knew how to help you. I wish I knew that I still wanted to help you.’

  He sighs.

  ‘Sometimes I think it would be easier to give up on you, although there are times when I can still just feel or catch a glimpse of that vulnerable damaged child in you. There’re still parts of you I love. But they’re retreating, Kate, they’re retreating. You seem to be getting worse – more tightly bound, more desperate to hold yourself in …’

  I sit, my forehead burning. I resent him and his gentle insights. I hate the fact that, no matter how I’ve protected and guarded myself, he knows things about me – he can pity me. I am what I never wanted to be. I’m vulnerable to him. I resent him for it, more and more as he knows me better and better. And I find I have to punish him for it more often as time goes on. But, at the same time, it ties me to him. To protect myself, my vulnerable coiled self, I have to keep him close by for my secret snail soul to be truly safe.

  ‘Don’t think you can make everything my fault. No one could be turned on by you. You think you can twiddle my nipples a bit, like you’re tuning into a radio station, and then leap at me. And then you practise being a scrum-half – quickly in and quickly out.’

  He knew his punishment was coming. He took it without flinching, his mouth twisted into a smile.

  ‘It’s sad, you know, Kate, that we’ve come to this. I loved you so much at varsity I thought I could protect you for ever. And I really – shit, I was naïve – I genuinely believed that my love would open up your pitiful, damaged little psyche and that one day I’d know what it was that did this to you.’

  I think of him as he was, that enormous boy-man, with emotions that flashed uncurbed across his innocent face. I remember when I first noticed him, when he smuggled his pathetic white rat from the psychology class to protect it from being dissected by biology students.

  He blushed when my eyes caught him slipping the disgusting feral creature – its nose twitching and its bald tail twining – under his sweatshirt. ‘We’ve made the little buggers perform so many tricks for their food, I think this one deserves a little rest. After all I’ve trained him to do, I don’t think he should be sliced up.’

  But he’d already been watching me for weeks.

  ‘Do you remember when I first noticed you?’ he asks now. ‘You made the whole tut laugh. It was the first time you’d opened your mouth that year. You told that pretentious little twerp of a psycho lecturer that you thought his “science” was about as exact as water-divining. And you called him “nothing but an advanced spoon-bender”.’

  He is smiling slightly, but he doesn’t look at me. I think he is working through our relationship for his own benefit, trying in that solid, exact way of his to make sense of it all in his own mind.

  ‘Jesus, you were beautiful. I could see you were beautiful – you still are, no matter how much you try to hide it.’

  He glances at me and away again, to the window and the buzzing morning sunshine.

  ‘And so fucking clever. I’ve always been proud of you, do you know that? I was proud of you skimming through your Masters while I was plodding through my BA, repeating first year, and struggling to get my LLB.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when this beautiful creature actually agreed to come back to my digs with me. And then you unveiled those marvellous, myopic eyes from behind those glasses, and that body from all its wrappings. I’ll never forget my first glimpse of those breasts and those provocative legs.’

  There is silence for a long time. So long that it seems he has given up his clumsy attempt at communication, at letting me know how he feels about me. I think of him as he was, the gentlest person I’ve ever known. That’s what ensnared me. But, over the years, I’ve taken such perverse pleasure in needling him into violent eruption. I have a bitter enjoyment in proving to myself over and over again what I came to believe so early, that savagery lurks everywhere, in everyone.

  ‘And then, against all the odds, you were a virgin,’ he says suddenly.

  I remember that, of course. I remember that dingy little back room in the run-down, historic house. The scrappy, worn carpet covered little of the dusty floorboards. His double-bed mattress lay on the floor in the middle of the room from where I could look up and, if my glasses were on, see the titles of his books arranged on rough wooden planks held up with bricks. I remember being amused by his choice of books, interspersed with university texts, so earnest and romantic: D. H. Lawrence, Rod McKuen, E. M. Forster and L. P. Hartley. And on the end, the innocent volume of hackneyed Eastern philosophy by Kahlil Gibran.

  ‘You were a virgin!’ he almost accused, that day when it had snowed in Grahamstown for the first time in years. It had seemed so easy, so other-worldly, to slip through the blanketed, muffled town to his digs in African Street.

  ‘Well, for fuck’s sake, there’s no need to be so awestruck. This isn’t a valuable antiquity you’ve discovered here. We do exist, you know.’ I felt irritated, as if he had something on me.

  ‘No, I think it’s great. It’s just that you always seemed so contained, so sophisticated, really. This makes me feel so tender – and, like, protective. I’m sorry. I should have been gentler. I just thought that I wouldn’t stand a chance if I wasn’t a dynamite lover. I’ll teach you to like it. I’ll be so gentle you won’t believe it.’

  And at times, I believe he thought he had. I’m a great faker. It’s just that lately, in these days of everybody else’s jubilation and hope, I grow tired of pretence.

  Our courtship and marriage went along just fine, for years it seems to me. It was comfortable. And it was never too deep for my anxiety level. It was an easy arrangement; he laughed at my jokes. I hurt him quite often, with my sniping, and we bicker
ed, but before he always seemed to get over it.

  ‘You know, the real reason I fell in love with you …’ His voice startles me and I look up to see his rough, gentle face, ‘… was your total, hidden vulnerability. I felt so, well, protective. It made me want to nurture you and – shit, am I stupid! I thought my love could heal you. Oh, ja, sometimes I’d give it up for long stretches. I’d think I just had to give you more time. And I could live with that. You made me laugh.

  ‘It’s just that now, I don’t know how much longer I can stand the agony of it. Just as everything else is filling me with such hope and optimism, you’re coiling yourself further and further inside yourself. And your jibes get worse. You didn’t used to be such an absolute bitch. Jesus, but no one can hurt me like you can.’

  ‘Oh, now I see it. Suddenly you want all your ducks in a row. You think the country’s on the up and up, your career’s on the way to perfection as far as you’re concerned and so, as the perfect complement to the perfect life, you want the flawless, picture-book marriage.’

  He sighs and rouses himself, shifting his still-naked body. The breeze riffles his dried hair as he reaches for the Saturday Star. He fetched it from outside much earlier, with a towel wrapped around his waist. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and stroked my unbound hair – with his irritating look of wonderment.

  I feel a pale pity for him, despite myself. ‘Shall we divide some of the pages out between us?’

  ‘No,’ he says gruffly. ‘It’s OK. You read it.’

  He is clearly, in his petulant hurt, going to be obstinate about accepting my small shred of contact.

  ‘I’ll have another look through the Weekly Mail,’ he says.

  ‘Oh yes, of course you should. No aspirant labour lawyer should be caught dead without … oh, and don’t forget to memorise bits, you never know when you might be called upon to prove that you actually read it.’

  He retrieves the paper from his bedside table and ignores me, leaning against his pillows, as close to the edge of the bed as he can get. I lean forward, the duvet tucked tightly across my breasts, and page through my newspaper.

  A piece of me, a coiled snail piece of me, wishes to stretch out, naked and raw, and touch his aching body. But I know I won’t do it. I know I can never open myself up to that extent. The only way I will make contact will be to smash my closed shell against his unprotected flesh.

  I fold a news page precisely. ‘So, I see that your clients aren’t the only ones grabbing the headlines with a strike this week. Look at the terrible crisis the country’s in over the Breweries strike: “Panic over beer shortage for Christmas”. Now isn’t that a prospect too ghastly for the South African male to contemplate!’

  He turns a page, but doesn’t look up. Oh my God, but he’s unyielding when he is in that wounded frame of mind. His great bear jaw knots and unknots as he turns each page with those large wrists and fingers, gently folding each as if it’s rice-paper.

  I skim over all the ‘age of miracles’ stories. I am so sick of this forced optimism sweeping the land. I glance at the articles heralding tomorrow’s ‘Welcome the Leaders’ rally, but they are filled with ‘jubilation’ and hopes for a peaceful gathering. Joe hasn’t mentioned the rally for a week, and neither have I. There is no way he’ll get me into an ‘expected crowd of 100 000’ toyi-toyiing people, all ‘jubilant’ and keeping ‘within the spirit of peaceful action’. I flip pages in irritation.

  ‘I see your clients had to think of something really impressive to be noticed this week, what with the “Welcome the Leaders” rally to contend with: they had to resort to firebombing a child. Listen here: “The child of a casual worker is in critical condition following the firebombing of his home.” Mind you, I suppose we should say “scab”, shouldn’t we? Maybe you think he deserved it. How dreadful to be the child of a scab.’

  I watch him wrestling with his adopted ‘silent’ position for a moment. With Joe, silence can never win out for long.

  ‘Kate! That’s an appalling thing to say. Of course it was a terrible incident. I haven’t spoken to them, but I know the union guys will be devastated. They’ve never advocated violence. But you have to remember there’s two sides to everything …’

  ‘Oh my God, now you’re going to say it’s all OK in the struggle for democracy because “look what they did to Biko”.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, don’t be fucking stupid. Can’t you see that spontaneous explosions are inevitable – can’t you see that? This is a highly emotionally-charged situation here.’

  ‘All I can see is that management must be laughing this week. They’re starting to look lily-white while your guys are looking distinctly scummy. And look here,’ I say, stabbing a finger at the page. ‘The union’s all petulant about their image – they’re accusing management of telling the media about the violence just to put them in a bad light.’

  I watch, with a certain wry satisfaction, as his attitude hardens in the face of my baiting.

  ‘Well, maybe this’ll bring home to management that there’s going to be trouble if they refuse to budge. They can’t just stick on their original offer for ever. And the union can’t stop fighting for what is right, just because of some people …’

  ‘Oh God,’ I say, sighing and rolling my eyes. ‘Not the omelette theory, please.’

  ‘Well, management has just refused to be reasonable. If they won’t move, somebody’s going to get hurt.’

  ‘Yes, let’s have it! Now,’ I say, addressing an imaginary audience near the door, ‘we will listen to Comrade Joe expound on the important role of infanticide in the struggle for a democratic future.’

  ‘Oh fuck you, Kate!’

  ‘Ooh, if only you could do it properly … as properly as you adopt the lefty line, anyway.’

  ‘You’re not going to get to me that way, Kate. I’m not insecure about myself sexually. You think you’re so clever, don’t you? You know I don’t think like a Stalinist. You just make me so mad with your cynical jibes; you get me to say things I don’t really mean. You think it’s funny to manipulate my reactions. But at least I feel …’

  ‘Oh, I feel too, Joe. I feel tired of people posturing and using others for power and advancement.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re actually a reactionary. You really believe that management line. Do you really believe this strike is only about the union “spreading its political wings”? That’s just so much shit about them having to compete for headlines against all the news of political reform.’

  ‘Oh, you mistake me if you think I’m pro-management, Joe. I just have no need to say so in this house. You management-bash enough for two. I believe everyone’s out for what they can get. There’s nothing to choose between the company bosses and the union bosses. This is all just a ranging of two forces that mirror each other. It’s a power play with the workers as the cannon fodder of both sides. When it’s all finished the union guys will sit down very easily with the captains of industry – they’ll all go hunting together, or visit a game farm, or go trout fishing or something.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m in a position to know that this strike is all about bread-and-butter issues. The company is greedy. It can afford to pay higher wages, and managements are going to have to get used to the idea of paying a living wage in the future.’

  ‘I just don’t see what the use of higher wages is, if you have to spend three months of every year without pay to get higher wages for the next year – well, I suppose it’s OK if you’re employed and paid a salary by the union. And it doesn’t seem as if the union is getting anywhere.’

  ‘They just have to use more bargaining chips. That’s why they’ve called a national boycott this week – to try and force management’s hand.’

  ‘Oh, this is such bad news to me. This means that next week I’ll have to sit sagely nodding my head while you try to justify the violence that will follow. I can just se
e you earnestly explaining why poor little shopkeepers should be punished for not complying with your boycott. And I bet you won’t mention the shopkeepers’ “bread-and-butter” issues – the families they have to feed.’

  ‘That’s typical of you to think that’ll happen. These people are disciplined. The union people are committed, intelligent people …’

  ‘And what about the picketing of businesses that could put the poor shopkeepers out of business?’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry if it does. But picketing is a legitimate process, just as calling a national boycott is legitimate leverage to use against a management that won’t move.’

  Joe is standing now, totally unreserved about his nakedness. His hair is wild from the agitation of his large, impassioned fingers. He is breathing heavily as, legs astride, he gazes challengingly at my hunched, duvet-entwined body. My tangled hair, just touching the newspaper, is my only flimsy screen.

  I look up at him suddenly: ‘You take this all in deadly seriousness, don’t you? This role as labour lawyer to the toiling masses. You actually identify yourself with them – you who were never anything more than a vague, wishy-washy liberal before.’

  ‘Yes I do,’ he says. His lower lip juts out as he pauses. ‘However you may mock it, I feel that this chance came for me at just the right time. I feel that, by getting into labour work, I’m identifying with the process of renewal. And I’ve finally reached the point where I can make a stand … I can align myself with the forces of change. Things are happening, Kate, if you haven’t noticed. No one can sit on the fence anymore.’

  ‘Oh, please! Do you really think that you and your legalistic notions are part of this? You’re just momentarily useful. Labour lawyers are the disposable nappies of the struggle – they use you, shit on you, and then throw you away.’