Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [66]
The December holidays arrive and still his father has no job. They are all four in the house now, with nowhere else to go, like rats in a cage. They avoid each other, hiding in separate rooms. His brother absorbs himself in comics: the Eagle, the Beano. His own favourite is the Rover, with its stories of Alf Tupper, the one-mile champion who works in a factory in Manchester and lives on fish and chips. He tries to lose himself in Alf Tupper, but he cannot help pricking his ears to every whisper and creak in the house.
One morning there is a strange silence. His mother is out, but from something in the air, a smell, an aura, a heaviness, he knows that that man is still here. Surely he cannot still be sleeping. Is it possible that, wonder of wonders, he has committed suicide? If so, if he has committed suicide, would it not be best to pretend not to notice, so that the sleeping pills or whatever he has taken can be given time to act? And how can he keep his brother from raising the alarm?
In the war he has waged on his father, he has never been entirely sure of his brother’s support. As far back as he can remember, people have remarked that, whereas he takes after his mother, his brother has his father’s looks. There are times when he suspects his brother may be soft on his father; he suspects his brother, with his pale, worried face and the tic on his eyelid, of being soft in general.
In any event, if his father has indeed committed suicide, it would be best to steer clear of his room, so that if there are questions afterwards, he will be able to say, ‘I was talking to my brother,’ or ‘I was reading in my room.’ Yet he cannot contain his curiosity. On tiptoe he approaches the door. He pushes it open, looks in.
It is a warm summer morning. The wind is still, so still that he can hear the chirruping of sparrows outside, the whirr of their wings. The shutters are closed, the curtains drawn shut. There is a smell of man’s sweat. In the gloom he can make out his father lying on his bed. From the back of his throat comes a soft gargling as he breathes.
He steps closer. His eyes are growing accustomed to the dimness. His father is wearing pyjama pants and a cotton singlet. He has not shaved. There is a red V at his throat where sunburn gives way to the pallor of his chest. Beside the bed is a chamber pot in which cigarette stubs float in brownish urine. He has not seen an uglier spectacle in his life.
There is no sign of pills. The man is not dying, merely sleeping. So: He does not have the courage to take sleeping pills, just as he does not have the courage to go out and look for a job.
Since the day his father came back from war service they have battled each other in a second war which his father has stood no chance of winning because he could never have foreseen how pitiless, how tenacious his enemy would be. For seven years that war has ground on; today at last he has triumphed. He feels like the Russian soldier on the Brandenburg Gate, raising the red banner over the ruins of Berlin.
Yet at the same time he wishes he were not here, witnessing this shame. Unfair! he wants to cry: I am just a child! He wishes that someone, a woman, would take him in her arms, make the sore place better, soothe him, tell him it was just a bad dream. He thinks of his grandmother’s cheek, soft and cool and dry as silk, offered to him to be kissed. He wishes his grandmother would come and put it all right.
A ball of phlegm catches in his father’s throat. He coughs, turns on his side. His eyes open, the eyes of a man fully conscious, fully aware of where he is. The eyes take him in as he stands there, where he should not be, spying. The eyes are without judgment but without human kindness either.
Lazily the man’s hand sweeps down and rearranges his pyjama pants.
He wants the