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Query: Why ask whether his father is in love with Mrs Noerdien when he has so obviously fallen for her himself?

Undated fragment

Idea for a story.

A man, a writer, keeps a diary. In it he notes down thoughts, ideas, significant occurrences.

Things take a turn for the worse in his life. ‘Bad day,’ he writes in his diary, without elaboration. ‘Bad day … Bad day,’ he writes, day after day.

Tiring of calling each day a bad day, he decides to simply mark bad days with an asterisk, as some people (women) mark with a red cross days when they will bleed, or as other people (men, womanizers) mark with an X days when they have notched up a success.

The bad days pile up; the asterisks multiply like a plague of flies.

Poetry, if he could write poetry, might take him to the root of his malaise, this malaise that blossoms in the form of asterisks. But the spring of poetry in him seems to have dried up.

There is prose to fall back on. In theory prose can perform the same cleansing trick as poetry. But he has doubts about that. Prose, in his experience, calls for many more words than poetry. There is no point in embarking on an adventure in prose if one lacks confidence that one will be alive the next day to carry on with it.

He plays with thoughts like these – the thought of poetry, the thought of prose – as a way of not writing.

In the back pages of his diary he makes lists. One of them is headed Ways of Doing Away with Oneself. In the left-hand column he lists Methods, in the right-hand column Drawbacks.

Of the ways of doing away with oneself he has listed, the one he favours, on mature consideration, is drowning, that is to say, driving to Fish Hoek one night, parking near the deserted end of the beach, undressing in the car and putting on his swimming trunks (but why?), crossing the sand (it will have to be a moonlit night), breasting the waves, striking out into the dark, swimming until his physical powers are exhausted, then letting fate take its course.

All of his intercourse with the world seems to take place through a membrane. Because the membrane is there, fertilization (of himself, by the world) will not take place. It is an interesting metaphor, full of potential, but it does not take him anywhere that he can see.

Undated fragment

His father grew up on a farm in the Karoo drinking artesian water high in fluoride. The fluoride turned the enamel of his teeth brown and hard as stone. His boast used to be that he never needed to see a dentist. Then in mid-life his teeth began to go rotten, one after another, and he had to have them all extracted.

Now, in his mid-sixties, his gums are giving him trouble. Abscesses are forming that will not heal. His throat becomes infected. He finds it painful to swallow, to speak.

He goes first to a dentist, then to an ear, nose and throat specialist, who sends him for X-rays. The X-rays reveal a cancerous tumour on the larynx. He is advised to submit to surgery urgently.

He visits his father in the male ward at Groote Schuur Hospital. He is wearing general-issue pyjamas and his eyes are frightened. Inside the too-large jacket he is like a bird, all skin and bone.

‘It is a routine operation,’ he reassures his father. ‘You will be out in a few days.’

‘Will you explain to the brothers?’ his father whispers with painful slowness.

‘I will phone them.’

‘Mrs Noerdien is very capable.’

‘I am sure Mrs Noerdien is very capable. I am sure she will manage until you come back.’

There is nothing more to say. He could stretch out and take his father’s hand and hold it, to comfort him, to convey to him that he is not alone, that he is loved and cherished. But he does no such thing. Save in the case of small children, children not yet old enough to be formed, it is not the practice in their family for one person to reach out and touch another. Nor is that the worst. If on this one extreme occasion he were to ignore family practice and grasp his father’s hand, would what that gesture