Three Plays Page 4

  PATRICIA: But – what can I say to that? Do you expect me to change it? Make it all – better?

  LOOKSMART: You gave up. You withdrew at the exact moment it was your chance to step forward. Do something. Save her.

  PATRICIA: I did save her. I tried. I pulled the dog away. I got it back into the house.

  LOOKSMART: I thought you cared, but you didn’t. I thought I meant something, but I didn’t. All you cared about was protecting your seats!

  PATRICIA: I don’t know what you’re trying to say, Looksmart. Can’t you see that all of this – it’s lost.

  LOOKSMART: Lost? It isn’t lost. I think about it every day.

  Silence.

  He is almost weeping.

  PATRICIA: The shame. The shame of it. Oh, I don’t know. That dog was trying to please us, that’s all. It had learned that. To be like that. From the country. Richard. Me. A poison we have, we grow up with. Now it’s been passed on to you. The dream of the dog. The dream of the dog doing its work. Destroying everything.

  LOOKSMART: But you must pay. You must pay for what you’ve done.

  Silence.

  PATRICIA: Believe me, I do.

  BEAUTY enters. She is dripping wet, her feet covered in mud.

  BEAUTY: Mesis, I have looked everywhere and I can’t find uBaas.

  PATRICIA: Beauty, I want to ask you.

  BEAUTY: Mesis?

  PATRICIA: I want to ask about your sister. Grace.

  BEAUTY: Yebo, Mesis?

  PATRICIA: I want you to tell me what happened the day she died. And I want the truth.

  BEAUTY: Yebo, Mesis.

  PATRICIA: You have nothing to be afraid of.

  BEAUTY: Yebo, Mesis.

  Silence.

  BEAUTY: The dog outside. It killed her.

  PATRICIA: Yes, but before that. At the dairy. What did you see?

  BEAUTY: Lutho (Nothing), Mesis.

  PATRICIA: Then why do you look so afraid?

  LOOKSMART: Ungesabi (Don’t be afraid), Beauty. Siyalazi iqiniso (We know the truth).

  BEAUTY: (To LOOKSMART.) You do not know the truth.

  PATRICIA: You must not be afraid.

  BEAUTY: Mesis, I can’t say.

  PATRICIA: You know Richard. He is a sick man now. You are the only one who saw the whole of what happened and still remembers.

  BEAUTY: I was a small girl then, Mesis. I am not sure of what I saw.

  PATRICIA: I won’t blame you. For telling me. I promise you that. Beauty – please. You must speak!

  BEAUTY: I was finishing with the cows, letting them out into the – I was about to do the cleaning with the hosepipe and – and – and –

  PATRICIA: And?

  BEAUTY: I was turning on the tap when – the noise, it is coming from the storage room. So I open the door a little bit, very soft, so I can see – and then I see.

  PATRICIA: What do you see, Beauty?

  LOOKSMART: They’re on the floor, aren’t they?

  BEAUTY: Yes.

  LOOKSMART: His hand over her mouth.

  BEAUTY: She sees me and –

  LOOKSMART: Qhubeka (Carry on), Beauty!

  PATRICIA: Did she get away from him then?

  BEAUTY: Yebo, Mesis.

  PATRICIA: The dog. Did Richard unchain the dog?

  BEAUTY: He undo the chain and the dog running –

  LOOKSMART: Ja. He waits to see the dog catch her, doesn’t he? He waits to make sure. Isn’t that it, Beauty?

  BEAUTY: That – is it.

  LOOKSMART moves away, satisfied.

  PATRICIA: Why didn’t you tell the police?

  BEAUTY: I was afraid.

  PATRICIA: Does Richard know what you saw?

  BEAUTY: No one knows what I saw.

  PATRICIA: Did ever try anything – with you?

  BEAUTY: Cha (No), Mesis. uGrace was the last one. From the farm.

  Silence.

  PATRICIA: Thank you, Beauty. We won’t speak about this again.

  BEAUTY: Ngiyabonga, Mesis.

  Silence.

  BEAUTY: But what about uBaas? Do you still want him?

  The ambiguity hangs in the air.

  PATRICIA: (To LOOKSMART.) What have you done to him?

  LOOKSMART: I have not seen your husband yet. It was to you I came to speak.

  PATRICIA turns back to BEAUTY.

  PATRICIA: Thank you, Beauty.

  BEAUTY nods and leaves.

  Silence.

  PATRICIA: Looksmart – I think I owe you an apology.

  LOOKSMART: You think?

  PATRICIA: But – neither can I undo what has happened. What Richard has done, he has done. And I will never be able to take back that terrible thought I had – you say I had – when that young girl lay bleeding.

  LOOKSMART: Yet, you are sorry?

  PATRICIA: Yes, I am sorry. Even if that doesn’t seem enough.

  LOOKSMART: Enough? Enough for what?

  PATRICIA: For you to walk away from here. For you to go out and try to become – something new. I suppose I’m only asking about hope.

  LOOKSMART: Hope? Ag, I’ve tested that one out. And what do you see? The picture of success. A man in a suit. A car, wife, two children. Everything I’ve ever done, I’ve done it with hope.

  PATRICIA: That’s not so bad, is it? I never managed to have a child.

  LOOKSMART: There’s more to a man than a suit!

  PATRICIA: What – are you saying you aren’t gratified by your success?

  LOOKSMART: I am saying that I wish for you guilt! Darkness! I don’t want you to leave this place without a backwards glance. To spend your last days looking at – at the sea – with your mind all clear, your sleep easy! I want you to remember that dog like I remember that dog, and I want you to be haunted and – and – and – decayed away by it!

  Silence.

  PATRICIA: I do understand how you feel.

  LOOKSMART: Rubbish!

  PATRICIA: I know what it is. To die quietly.

  LOOKSMART: Rubbish.

  Silence.

  PATRICIA: I married him because I was pregnant. My father wanted to kill him when he heard, but I talked to him and he gave us this farm instead. He was a good man, my father. Perhaps the only good man in my life. And when he died, he died thinking I was happy, hoping I was happy, taking my word for it. You were a small boy then. Always hanging around the house. And I think I was happy then. Happy for a bit.

  LOOKSMART: You told me you never managed to have a child.

  PATRICIA: What?

  LOOKSMART: But he made you pregnant.

  PATRICIA: I did have one.

  LOOKSMART: And this one child – it is still alive or what?

  PATRICIA: I think that is my business.

  LOOKSMART: (Losing it again.) Well – I want to make it my business! I want to know about this child. Because once – a long time ago – I thought you cared about another child. You sent me to that fancy school, you gave me that blazer, corrected all my English. You woke something up and then killed it. You killed it as surely as you made me to kill that fish!

  PATRICIA: We let that fish go!

  LOOKSMART: We didn’t.

  PATRICIA: We did!

  LOOKSMART: We didn’t!

  Silence.

  PATRICIA: I gave you everything you ever asked for. You wanted to go to that boarding school, so I sent you. Don’t you remember the trunk full of tuck? The labels me and your mother sewed on? The letters. Remember the letters you used to write? Every Sunday evening, for five years, I wrote back.

  LOOKSMART: And every holiday I came home to sleep in my mud hut.

  PATRICIA: Well how would your mother have felt – her sleeping over there and you here with us?

  LOOKSMART: And I’m sure your husband would have welcomed me in!

  PATRICIA: Well I did what I could. And you were there every morning. Standing on the stoep. Always wanting to help. So I taught you all about my roses. I would give you work to get on with – pruning, mulching, dead-head
ing. And when you were done you would clean my car – every square inch of it.

  LOOKSMART: And give me some small change for my efforts.

  PATRICIA: It’s quite natural to earn some pocket money, you know. (Off his look.) And in the end when I taught you to drive that car, you loved it! Don’t tell me you didn’t love it! And don’t tell me you didn’t love your school! What would you have preferred? Staying here – herding cows, mucking out? Because that’s what would have happened. Swallowing your anger, illiterate, working for him! Sending you to that school was the one good thing I did with my life. I tried to do one good thing. One good act against a great tide of – filth!

  LOOKSMART: Tell me about your son!

  PATRICIA: What?

  LOOKSMART: What happened to your son?

  PATRICIA: Who said anything about a son?

  LOOKSMART: What?

  PATRICIA: It was a girl who died, not a son.

  LOOKSMART: And?

  PATRICIA: She was born.

  LOOKSMART: And?

  PATRICIA: There were complications.

  Silence.

  PATRICIA: She was born dead.

  Long silence.

  PATRICIA: They brought her for me to look at. All clean and wrapped, like a gift. But there was no mistaking she was dead. Her little blue eyelids, shut firmly against the world. She was perfect. The only thing she lacked was a life.

  LOOKSMART turns away from her.

  PATRICIA: She was made of wax. She glowed. As if there was a cold yellow moon inside of her – instead of a heart. She was so defenceless, lying there. The way her little head flopped back. Abandoned to the world. Rachel would be forever dead.

  Silence.

  PATRICIA: The nurse brought her back later in a box the size for shoes. I carried her out into another day. A long path ahead of me. With her death at the beginning of it and my death at the end of it. Nothing else in between.

  LOOKSMART: You buried her on the hill.

  PATRICIA: Looking out towards Giant’s Castle.

  LOOKSMART: Ja.

  PATRICIA: I’d made a bedroom for her. All painted white. A wooden changing table, drawers filled with baby clothes and blankets. I’d had my old pram brought up from Durban for wheeling her around the house. When I was a baby, I’d come up here with my parents. I would have my afternoon nap under the fir trees at the front, with the weavers chattering high above me. I wanted the same for her.

  LOOKSMART: What about Richard?

  PATRICIA: There’s nothing much to say about Richard. After the burial, he barely looked at me. I don’t think he’s ever really looked at me since.

  LOOKSMART: And you?

  PATRICIA: I sat here in this chair. For about a thousand years.

  LOOKSMART: You didn’t try again – for another child?

  PATRICIA: It would have had to come through divine intervention.

  They almost smile.

  PATRICIA: Anyway, there was a farm to run. I had to start trying to make some money as Richard seemed so intent on losing it. So I bred Welsh ponies. For other people’s children. I became the most successful breeder in the country for a while. And then one morning – there you were. Running down the corridor like you already owned the place.

  LOOKSMART says nothing.

  PATRICIA: Didn’t you know? You were the only child to be happy in this house.

  LOOKSMART: I didn’t.

  PATRICIA: You were like the sun. My son. I never asked you to come into my life – but you did. As if we’d been connected since that night you were born. As if some part of you remembered. When your teacher suggested we send you to a better school, I didn’t hesitate. We walked around the grounds with the headmaster. You lit up. Said you wanted to go there more than anything. So you went. You’d come back here at the weekends full of stories. And full of mischief, I might add. I started to call you Mr Monologue.

  He smiles.

  PATRICIA: Until one day you started to look at everything with different eyes. The photographs, the horses, even the car. You’d started to judge us. Oh the weight of it – after such lightness! I thought it was adolescence. I hoped it would pass. But it didn’t. Then Grace. Then you vanished. Did I connect your disappearance and Grace? I might have. I tried to ask your mother about it – your sudden departure – but I got nothing out of her. A few years later she vanished too.

  Silence.

  PATRICIA: You know what I would have said if you’d told me you wanted to marry Grace?

  He waits for her to continue.

  PATRICIA: I would have told you that you could do better. You must never marry below yourself. That’s what I did with Richard.

  LOOKSMART: And now? What would you say if I wanted to marry her now?

  PATRICIA: Who knows? I never knew her.

  Silence.

  PATRICIA: Where’s your mother now?

  LOOKSMART: With me. In a cottage at the bottom of our garden. Up there in Johannesburg. You know she grows mealies and spinach in our garden? She says she doesn’t like all that wasted space.

  PATRICIA smiles.

  PATRICIA: And did she know about Grace – you and Grace?

  LOOKSMART: Something of it, perhaps.

  PATRICIA: I could never understand it. The way you went off. I had to think of you as another dead child.

  Silence.

  LOOKSMART: I had to hold tight to my anger that day. In order to leave like that. I know it must have hurt.

  PATRICIA: I survived. You manage to walk things off after a bit.

  Silence.

  LOOKSMART: I could have been a good man. Like your father.

  PATRICIA: You have to get rid of – all this.

  LOOKSMART: There are people out there who think I am a good man. My wife. My daughters. You see, I am liked. I have always been liked. Since you first liked me, I have been liked.

  She smiles.

  PATRICIA: What is your wife like?

  LOOKSMART: Like you say your father was.

  PATRICIA: You have been happy?

  LOOKSMART: Sometimes.

  Silence.

  LOOKSMART: Do you know what will happen to this farm after you’re gone?

  PATRICIA: It’s going to some big land development company.

  LOOKSMART: Yebo. The company I work for.

  PATRICIA: You work for them?

  LOOKSMART: Yebo.

  PATRICIA: How extraordinary!

  LOOKSMART: Yebo, Madam. I have come back here – yes. But not to take back the land that was taken from my people – no. But to establish a gated community. It’s for the whites and Indians who are fleeing the cities. They say they’re trying to get away from the crime, but I think it’s us they don’t like – the blacks. Have you seen the plans?

  PATRICIA: No.

  LOOKSMART makes a table out of a box and an old framed picture and spreads out a map, which he has taken from an inside pocket.

  LOOKSMART: Come. Come see for yourself.

  She moves towards the map.

  PATRICIA: What will happen to the house? I hope they knock it down, brick by brick.

  LOOKSMART: The house will be left on top of the hill. We will cut down the gum trees around it to open things up a little. The place needs light. A view of the Drakensberg – izintaba zoKhahlamba (the Zulu name for the Drakensberg)!

  PATRICIA: The trees were there to protect us from the wind.

  LOOKSMART: Stylistically, the house has a vernacular value all of its own. We plan to reproduce it a dozen times, with slight variations, all across the valley.

  LOOKSMART moves away from the map.

  LOOKSMART: The hills I knew so well will be buried in pine plantations. The wetlands will be turned into dams for farming trout. All those birds that surrounded me as a boy – that rainbow that always twittered – it will slowly fade. One morning there will be only silence.

  PATRICIA: How terrible.

  LOOKSMART: The hut I was born in, that will go too. Along with all the other farm buildings. Do you kno
w how long it takes a machine to flatten a mud hut? It’s the work of weeks to build it. But it can be gone again before you can even cry for help. Ja – everything will go except this house. This house will remain alone. But it will be transformed beyond recognition. There will be pale wooden floors, sliding doors, skylights. The stoep extended all around. A turret structure will be added to the north wall for what we call a vertical focus. Ah Madam – you will see. We will whisk this place into something you’d never imagine. Not even in your wildest – nightmares.

  PATRICIA: I think it sounds rather lovely. We should have done all that years ago.

  LOOKSMART: Open plan. Yes.

  PATRICIA: But how did you become involved in all this?

  LOOKSMART: When the sale of this farm reached my ears, I made sure I’d be involved in developing it. I wanted to cut it all up. All the things I’ve never spoken about. Not even to my wife. Do you know – I have never mentioned your name to any single soul?

  PATRICIA: Well tomorrow we’ll be gone. You can finally clear yourself of everything that’s dead.

  LOOKSMART: Dead? Now that I’m here, I feel different about it. At one point, you know – I think I loved you.

  PATRICIA: You did?

  LOOKSMART: I loved you more than my own mother.

  Long silence.

  LOOKSMART: Whenever I talked about the school she would look at me with strange eyes. With the same eyes she used when she looked at you.

  PATRICIA: But you know she often talked about you. We’d sit at the table in the kitchen, the back door open, the puppy snapping up flies – and the letter telling us you’d been made a prefect always in her apron pocket. I’d have to read that letter over and over for her. She was so proud she couldn’t speak. We both were.

  LOOKSMART: By the end of it I fitted nowhere. Not with you, not with her.

  PATRICIA: Perhaps that’s the price you had to pay. You and your mother.

  LOOKSMART: Perhaps it’s the price you had to pay too.

  PATRICIA: Perhaps.

  Silence.

  LOOKSMART refolds the plans, returns them to his pocket.

  PATRICIA: One day you think you might come and visit?