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The Dream House

The Dream House: A NovelHigginson, Craig

WorkbookTitle:

In the prologue by the author entitled, The First Dream House, he begins by saying:

There are many houses we pass through during our lives. Maybe it’s true that they also pass through us. Some of them remain with us, and we are able to return to them long after they are gone. One such house was a farmhouse in KwaZulu-Natal, just over the hill of the boarding school I attended between the ages of ten and fourteen.” This is where the idea for the setting originated.

What could Dream House mean for you? Do you feel nostalgia over a house or a place? Are all of your memories of that house or place good?

What could “Dream” mean in the title? Could it have more than one meaning?

Structure:The novel has a five-act structure, like the Shakespeare plays we study. This is pertinent because Craig Higginson is a playwright, and the idea for this novel actually came from one of his plays, Dream of the Dog. Dogs have an important role in the novel. What connotations might one associate with dogs?

The novel’s structure is also similar to a play because each character takes a turn on the stage in a sense – the author writes in third person limited to the point of view of each of the characters in turn. One might think of the five parts as the Acts and each person’s perspective as the Scenes. This is interesting because Higginson can then manipulate what he tells us through each narrator, and so what is revealed is just as important as what they try to hide (or simply do not know). None of their points of view can entirely be trusted, because each of them is flawed, like all human beings are, and they are also limited to their own perspectives. Make predictions about what kinds of secrets and resentments might they

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keep from each other based on the information given in the review below. There is space for notes on each character after the review.

Review by Beverley Jane Cornelius

“This is a strange land we live in,” Looksmart says to Patricia in Craig Higginson’s novel, The Dream House. The small farm in the KwaZulu Natal Midlands that they inhabit — a microcosm of the strange land in which they live — is particularly strange, especially on the night that Patricia andLooksmart reunite.

It is Patricia’s last night on the farm. She has sold the land after decades of breeding ponies there and now, as an old woman, plans to relocate and to spend the remaining years of her life watching the ships in Durban’s bay from the verandah of the family home where her father used to drink his gin and tonic. But on this final misty night, as she attempts to quietly pack up her memories, together with her belongings, Looksmart returns to unsettle everything Patricia thinks she remembers.

Patricia and Looksmart haven’t seen each other for twenty five years or more, not since he completed the private boarding school education that Patricia funded, and, although they have often thought of each over the years, the reunion is nothing that either would have expected.Like the mist that is so prevalent in the KZN Midlands, the narrative reveals and hides, in turn, different aspects of their story. The events of the night unfold from the perspective of five characters — Patricia, Richard, Beauty, Bheki, and Looksmart — who, also, each recount past events that gradually reveal the links and entanglements of their lives.

The novel has five parts and it is in this neat and overlapping narrative structure that Higginson’s ability as a playwright shines through. The sections, or ‘acts’, are each rounded off so dramatically and skillfully that I imagined I could hear the stage curtain swish closed; while the authentic and plausible dialogue draws the focus in so tightly that it is as if a spotlight is shining on the characters. Reading The Dream House, I was reminded of Chekhov’s play ‘The Cherry Orchard’. I detected parallels in its depiction of Patricia as a woman reluctantly giving up a family farm in the midst of greater socio-political changes, and of all the characters grappling with their changing roles within society and their relationships with one other.

The dramatic qualities of the text are subtle, however, and serve as support for the interiority that the novel, as a literary form, allows, and which Higginson exploits with his multi-voiced approach. These qualities, together with the poetic imagery and verisimilitude used to describe the surroundings, produce a novel that evokes an intense emotional response and raises questions about the wisdom of exploring the past. Should we ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ or is it better to shoot them, as Patricia does, and bury them deep in the earth? Can a trauma, experienced in the past, ever be resolved in the present?

Much of contemporary South African literature focuses on the traumas of the past and I have noticed a delineation between authors who are inclined to offer a glimmer of hope in their narratives, and those who, rather, present a melancholic dead-end with no way out of the perpetual recycling of trauma. Throughout The Dream House, the threat of violence simmers beneath the surface of the prose and I held my breath as I neared the end: having carefully escalated the tension, would this story of frustrated communication end in trauma and violence, or would there be some sort of resolution. Given the entanglement and intensity of the novel’s themes — for example, of memory, remembering and forgetting, of sex, love, and marriage, of mental health, of birth and

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death — I was apprehensive that the novel would not sustain its intensity and would end in anticlimax. However, the conclusion, though quiet, is satisfying, and depicts uncannily the state of transmutation ordinary South Africans are currently navigating in this “strange land we live in”.Beverley Jane Cornelius is a PhD candidate in English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Having read the review, try to predict the tensions the writer explores with each character. Consider their names, what these could mean, and how they might contribute to the tension.

Patricia: strong lead character who helps Looksmart by sending him to school. She is getting old but is still formidable.

Looksmart: the other main protagonist and recipient of Patricia’s benevolence as a child. He is also the developer on the land she is leaving and battles with identity and belonging.

Beauty: helper and sister of Grace who died on the farm, which upset Looksmart – ironically not beautiful.

Bheki: helper, chauffeur and the object of Beauty’s unrequited affection.

Richard: Patricia’s very unimpressive husband with dementia and the foil of her father.

One commentator has remarked that Bheki is under developed. Can you suggest why this might be?

Epigraph: There is no better way to know us Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.–TED HUGHES

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The epigraph is cryptic until one comes back to it at the end to consider what it could mean. Wolves are predators and there is a sense that this meeting signals danger. About this line of poetry, Ann Skea writes:

Hughes has used such savage wolf imagery before with similar implications. An earlier poem, ‘A Modest Proposal’(Hawk), was written at a time when many of his poems were inspired by the new, intense relationship between himself and Sylvia Plath. In it, he writes, seemingly autobiographically: “There is no better way to know us / Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.” The desire which these wolves have for each other creates a terrifying atmosphere of danger: it is an all-consuming distraction in which each competes against the other for “a mad final satisfaction” which will be achieved by making “the other’s body and the whole wood… its own.”

With this in mind, and with the benefit of being able to reflect on the novel as a whole, the epigraph makes considerably more sense. Come back to this epigraph after reading the novel and decide why you think it is an apt choice:

ACT ONE

The ExpositionPOV: Patricia She draws back the curtains to reveal the mist.

Richard rarely leaves the house these days and nothing makes much sense to him anyway… Her body is an ageing and not quite trustworthy companion whose inner workings have only grown more mysterious over time.

Beauty will have heard her the first time, but she only ever responded on the second or third call, perhaps hoping Patricia would forget what she wanted, or forget that she wanted anything at all.

In Durban, Beauty will go for driving and English lessons.She deserves a better job.Patricia and Richard will not be there forever and the girl will need to move on. She has a whole life ahead of her.

‘I couldn’t sleep last night. Could you?’ ‘Not so good, Mesis.’

Ethunzini

Notes:

Just as the mist hides things from sight, there are things hidden in the past that slowly come into focus. Also, are these curtains opening on a stage?

Patricia’s character is fleshed out. It is rundown, like the house.

What should we make if this? Does this sound like a fair criticism? If true, is she justified for this surly hesitance?

Whilst this sounds very magnanimous, ought they not to have realised her potential before they approached death and would no longer need her? Whose responsibility is it if you recognise intellect but know the person is trapped by circumstance?

Convivial on the surface. One is tempted to feel quite warm towards Patricia as she shares what she believes is a common melancholy about leaving with her helper. For Beauty, perhaps staying has been harder.

Name means “into the shade”

Red timber - can we read into the colour and name of the

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The bloodwoods…

All her life, Patricia has been accompanied by a hurricane of dogs… When her body had gone cold [one of her dogs], Patricia asked Bheki to bury her in the bloodwood grove, where all the other dogs had been buried [and her daughter – can we read into this?]It was on that day that she decided to sell the farm. Shortly after the death of Finnegan, he [Richard] disappeared for a whole night.

Bheki later found him naked inside a disused porcupine hole that he’d scooped…

Patricia and Beauty had a private laugh about it, but it couldn’t carry on. None of it could.

The Durban house was a hundred and fifty years old and whenever anyone walked inside it, it creaked like an ancient ship. It stood on top of the hill in Glenwood and overlooked the harbour and the bluff. It was the house she had grown up in and she has had dreams about it her whole adult life. She wanted to spend her last days doing little more than staring at the sea.

She has decided not to get the cooker fixed: she has been rather hoping the whole house would go up in smoke, with all of them inside it.

‘Are we dead yet?’ ‘No.’ ‘You will tell me when we’re dead?’ ‘If I can, Roo, I will.’ ‘You think I’m not here, but I am.’ ‘Roo, I know very well you’re here.’

Surrounding farms are being turned into golfing estates and syndicated trout farms.

Bheki will be driving them down to Durban the next day and has agreed to stay on as their gardener and chauffeur. Patricia tried to send him to a better school when he was still a boy, but it soon became clear that Bheki had no interest in books.

trees? They’re referred to quite often. Blood - pain, death, sacrifice... the rape? These connotations are all possible.

Her dogs are important to her, but she is pragmatic. She knows no one will want her old dogs so she shoots them. This is off-putting. Are people also sometimes treated as expendable, like dogs, in SA?

Death - blood – bloodwoods. The death of her dog made her think about her own ageing.

She is deeply affected by the passage of time. She knows her heart will stop too one day, and it is time to get her affairs into order.

Richard is clearly senile, but his behaviour was triggered by the death. Why does he react so badly? What secrets is he harbouring?

Is this a coping mechanism or just cruel?Richard is a handful and they are not able to watch him on the big property.

Link to title - The Dream House. But is it the only house where dreams take place or are smashed? Perhaps this house is also a house of dreams.

Whilst this seems morbid, the alternative is a slow and undignified death, like Richard’s degeneration. Is it fair to wish this on young Beauty?

Quite tender and sad. Roo feels intimate, but like a mother to her son, not a husband and wife.

He’s in there, trapped in his own mind. Why is this important?

Homes like theirs are becoming rare. There is a sense of the inevitable here.

The benevolent benefactor. Is this is what will redress the imbalance? Why only the young boys and not young Beauty as a child?

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As for Richard, he gave up any pretence at being any good at anything after her father died.[About her beloved father] He might have died too young, but even then he had a full life to look back on. And a great deal to be proud of. He was fortunate in that way. Most of us don’t have that, do we?’‘They say he was a good man.’ ‘The one good man in my life.’

POV: Beauty’s thoughts on Richard

Even now she is frightened of uBaas. She has come to know his body better than anyone–even uMesis. Often, in the mornings, he will be aroused as a husband should be for his wife. He never seems to know what to do with himself–and she chooses to ignore it, just as she has chosen to ignore every other shameful thing about him. He will sometimes call her Mother or Mum… they both know that he is the one with the power over her, and that he will never let either of them forget it. She doubts he knows what he is looking for. She certainly doesn’t. But such a thing doesn’t concern her: even before he went mad it was like he was mad. He would mutter to himself as he strode around the farm, forever looking for something to get upset about. POV: Patricia reflects on loveThey have been lovers for over thirty years. It doesn’t matter that they have hardly touched in fifteen of them, and that they only see each other every other month: as soon as they’re together again, some of their old feeling re-enters the air Patricia likes to think that she fell in love with him because he was every-thing Richard was not. John claimed to have read the complete works of Tolstoy twice, while Richard would occasionally page through the Farmer’s Weekly on the loo. John could recite whole passages from plays Patricia had never even heard of, while Richard could recall only his permanent sense of

Quite ineffectual/impotent as a farmer and as a husband.

She's tried to live a meaningful life but feels as though she has failed.

This is an unflattering comparison for Richard.

Even in his reduced state, she views him as dangerous. We find out why later. Can you predict why this might be?

The indignity of age. Is it reasonable to expect Beauty to care for him like this? Is it fair that she has no other choices in life?

Is his mind totally gone? This comment is ominous.

Redemption, perhaps? Have his past deeds driven him mad? Is this clever foreshadowing and suspense-building?

Patricia’s affair comes as a surprise. Can we perhaps understand why though?

Richard does not compare favourable at all.

Richard sounds tedious and self-serving. John is definitely his foil.

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grievance.Patricia has long since stopped going to church, but John still attends without fail: the old headmaster, handing out the body and blood of Christ to rows of disbelievers. Patricia liked to joke that she was yet to meet an Anglican who actually believed in God.

‘In my experience, backward glances only crick the neck.’

‘Oh, quite all right. I suppose I was feeling sentimental.’ ‘You? Sentimental? That doesn’t sound like you.’ ‘What do you want the boy educated for?’ he had asked her, as though the boy wasn’t in the room.

‘Because he’s clever, and I want him to use his cleverness for the general good.’

The whole of the Midlands is engulfed in cloud, and the windows of the car are still smeared opaque by the dead dogs’ noses.

POV: Beauty cleaning upThe problem of what to do with the past would have to carry on in the future. … scraping the remaining chicken bones and roasted vegetables in a chipped enamel dog bowl and stacking the plates at the sink The small red plastic suitcase fitted most of her clothes, and one decent-sized box was enough for her towels, bedding and kitchen utensils, as well as all the other things that had been handed down– … like the tape deck radio that uMesis gave her when the tape deck got jammed and only the radio part would work. The cup is the first thing she has deliberately stolen from uMesis… she also feels for it. UMesis used to treasure that cup above any other cup, and there was a time she would drink from nothing else. Fifteen years ago, uMesis started up a savings

What does this mean? The tradition is maintained but of real faith there is none? Certainly, John behaves unconventionally for a Christian, but this just makes him more human.

She says this again later to Looksmart. She is not speaking literally and this demonstrates how pragmatic she is. It explains her pragmatism with her dogs and how she copes with the revelations that follow.

Why might this be? Remember this for later.

About Looksmart. There are definitely racist undertones.

She feels she has a duty. Is this magnanimous or something else? The picture of the white saviour is distasteful. It also seems as if his name was prophetic – Looksmart.

Higginson’s writing is evocative. It’s like the curtains are being drawn and the ghosts of yesterday make themselves known...

This is inevitable. It is both literal and figurative, as we will see...

Everything about their lives seems chipped. They are scraping the remains of their lives together, like these leftovers.

An insignificant portion for such long service. Does this represent her worth?

She deserves more, surely. The scraps are handed down, half useless. Is this kindness?

What can we make of this theft? It seems sad – what was important to Patricia makes this chipped mug valuable to her. Is there an offensive assumption being perpetuated here?

Beauty’s dream house is far more modest and hard won.

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account for the house, and every month uMesis has added a bit more. All Beauty wants is a roof over her head that she can call her own.POV: Patricia watches Richard run offRichard has been angling to dig her up even before the earthmovers arrived. Her grave is marked by a simple stone, with only her name–Rachel–and a single date marked on it: the date of her birth and her death. He has that furtive, loping glee of a baboon stealing mealies. Had there been a gun at hand, she might have taken a shot at him.The exposition moves towards the inciting incident – Looksmart visits Patricia.

POV: Looksmart drives up to the houseHe lowers his window and inhales the smell of wet earth and rot. If anything, the mist only gets thicker when he switches on his lights and continues into it. He has a shameful secret… Yet it is a thing he feels: he is an intruder in his own land, condemned to arriving at places where he will never quite belong.

He told himself that he would be coming here out of hate.

These days he recollects his hatred with fondness and some regret, as a race he was once fit and lean enough to run. And with the prospect of her comes the luxury of his old hate, which starts to filter back into his blood, thick and fragrant. POV: Patricia in the houseA rubbish bag is sitting next to her wheelchair, waiting for its load of junk, but there’s an overall numbness, a feeling of vacancy, a weight in the arms, that makes it seem impossible to move. She thinks once more of burning down the house.

Finally, we understand where Richard keeps wandering off to.

He's rebelling by running off again and she's indulging in an honest but uncharitable thought. It’s almost funny.

The damp makes everything rot, like their memories and nostalgia it is all mouldy. Overripe.

Confronting the past doesn't make things easier, and sometimes it obscures things more.

Is this at the heart of the story? By claiming to help him did Patricia leave him without any true identity?

This seems clinical. Normally hate rises up unbidden but he has to tell himself to hate.

He wants closure and is forcing himself to hate, but does he still feel this?

Foreshadowing: This bad memory rekindles his hate.

Exploration of the tragedy of a life at its end and all that's left is the dregs.

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ACT TWO

POV: Richard on the runAnd where have all the animals gone? His herd of cows, the barn full of chickens. Is this something the old bitch has achieved? She was always jealous of his activities on the farm. Did she blow up the buildings with all the animals inside? With her, anything is possible: there is no end to her malice. Where have they hidden you? There’s no doubt in his mind that she’s calling for him from under the earth.

POV: Looksmart enters the houseThe kitchen looks smaller than he envisaged, and humbler. The old man would always stir up everything around him, infect everyone with his air of crisis, his potential for rage, his habitual disappointment. But most distinctly he can recall a picture of Richard, crouched in front of a pair of leopards he shot in Kenya. The young man is gazing vacantly over the photographer’s shoulder, apparently detached from his casual act of violence. Her skin is dull and puffy and covered in a fine down, and her feet are bare and propped up on a box, the toes sticking out at odd angles, like the teats of a cow. He is used to seeing her delight at seeing him. Her world was always put on hold whenever he came into this room. But it has been many years–almost twenty-five, in fact–since they were last in each other’s company. ‘What do you want?’

POV: Patricia hears Looksmart enter… clacking, more like a woman’s high-heeled shoes–yet it is also a man’s tread, deliberate and leisurely. There is a readiness in her that has been learned over time that protects her from anything

Notes:

What a strange view of Patricia - certainly not the feeling we have when we are in her head.

He has a feeling of torment by captors. Is it actually his own conscience and he is his own tormentor?

The trick of growing up makes big things seem small.

He is a disappointment and is disappointed in his lot. Richard is the antagonist, but a castrated one.

Foreshadowing. We learn more about his penchant for violence later.

Vulnerable

There's a sense of foreboding.

What do you make of her defensive greeting?

His shoes signal money, smart dress shoes.

She's formidable. Unafraid - keen even.

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resembling fear. She almost has an appetite for it, this confrontation with a man with no face, who steps into her house uninvited, makes himself at home and decides on ways of taking back from her. ‘Good evening, Madam.’ The word ‘Madam’ sounds immediately absurd, consciously absurd, intended to suggest, perhaps, that Patricia’s reputation has preceded her. But her reputation for what, exactly? Too much lies between them. And for reasons that are not yet clear to her, Patricia knows even now that anything they might say to one another will be dangerous, difficult. ‘You certainly seem different. You’re wearing a suit.’ She means this as a compliment, but he seems to take immediate offence. ‘That is what I am like these days. I wear a suit.’ He still looks to her like someone in service, wearing his suit with defiance, but secretly being chafed at the collar.‘Is that because I’m wearing a suit?’ It is not the suit that strikes her as irregular, but his way of wearing it. He seems to be too conscious of it, as if he’s wearing it as some form of disguise–or as a calculated affront. She wishes she knew the words to bring him back. The secret phrase that might unlock him and end this apparent pantomime. ‘Oh yes,’ he says, sarcastic–and still ridiculous. ‘Although I see you’re still here where I left you. Only a bit smaller than I pictured you. And not half so frightening.’…‘Frightening? But I was never that.’ She can’t but feel hurt by this, misrepresented ‘Thank you, Madam,’ he says, sounding pensive but still important, ‘but I think I’d prefer to stand.’

Today everything between them seems to bristle with innuendo and hurt.

He is mocking her. Suggest why he might do so?

Why? Note that this sense of danger is harder to convey on the stage. Writing about it conveys it easily.

He seems defensive in this skin, the suit, uncomfortable and too quick to take offence. How does this flesh out his character and the possible motive for being there?

Why is he resentful and seem to feel like an interloper in these ”borrowed robes”? But they're not borrowed. He can't let go of his past and feels out of place in his new life.

Direct suggestion that this is a play of sorts. The writer is foregrounding his intention?

Is what we think of ourselves the same as what others see? Can we trust her view of herself?

Madam still sounds facetious. Standing gives him psychological power - height.

The diction is uncomfortable, and it contributes to the sense of foreboding.

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But how vividly she recalls that afternoon. She and the boy setting off from the house, across that field. He running ahead of her, the red fishing rod held up like a spear, and she following behind with the fishing box, a blanket and their picnic lunch… Is it possible she has brought all her memories together into this one boy–the one boy who stood out? ‘But you were a gentle child, always wanting to please.’ ‘Don’t you mean always wanting to please you?’

POV: Beauty looking for RichardSometimes, uBaas will cry out for no clear reason, and she is able to discover him.At other times he will be standing quite still, and you can pass him close enough to touch him without seeing him. She said all the women who lived on the farm were visited by tokoloshes at night, including uMesis, and that they were condemned to barrenness and dead children as a result. ‘You were a gentle child,’ says uMesis. ‘Always wanting to–’ They came to the farm when Looksmart’s mother was pregnant, with a story of a father in prison for a thing barely breathed about. A rape or a murder. The kind of crime for which he was fortunate not to have been hanged. Beauty looks up at last, her gaze burning into the indifference of his shoulder. Had either of them looked at her now, they might have seen the knowledge inside her eyes, smouldering like a fire, but without any light in it. But they are both too attached to their own concerns to see anything else.

POV: Patricia A few years later–still smarting from Looksmart’s ingratitude–she told John Ford that the young man’s behaviour didn’t bode well for the rest of the country.

Yet he still seems such a boy: at any moment, she is expecting him to show her his homework.

This memory seems important until we read the comment that follows. How can she feel that way? Surely each boy is individually important and memorable? This is offensive.

The root of his resentment towards her, but this is not all there is between them.

Have the ghosts of his past broken him?

Now he is the ghost – a shadow of himself.

Prophetic. The reader should pay attention too. African wisdom goes beyond what people can logically know. There's respect being shown here, but you only realise it with hindsight.

We’ve read this already. The writer stitches the story together by overlapping the narrative.

Beauty tells us Looksmart’s backstory. This echoes the rape of Grace, which is also not paid for.

Beauty’s name is ironic. She is treated as insignificant and subservient, but this passage shows her cognisance of things thought beyond her.

White arrogance. Why should he be grateful?

He does soon, the plans for the new houses.

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He turns to look at her. Then he steps towards her, again like a performer for the stage.

She wonders whether she should be afraid of him. There is certainly something dangerous about him–more the boy in him than the man. But if fear is still far off, what she experiences in its place is a vacant sadness: that she and the boy with the fishing rod should have come to this. ‘Oh, backward glances only crick the neck.’ ‘Come, come, Madam. In my head, I can’t separate you from this farm.’ ‘And everyone has something or other they can choose to complain about.’ ‘Like what?’ he says, again all ironic. ‘Like getting old? Like being rich?’

‘You have a whole future ahead of you. Why concern yourself with me and Richard? We are nothing in the world. We are practically antique.’ ‘What are you saying? That the past is unimportant?’ ‘Sorry, did I say something–inappropriate?’ ‘There’s no need to apologise, Madam.’ ‘Apologise? But–I don’t think I did.’

POV: Richard still on a questThe phantom woman has veered off along another pathway, and he pauses as a runnel of warmness spreads down his legs. He does that at times: pisses without warning. It is a thing that happens of its own accord–the workings of his body being someone else’s department. The spade. But the earth is soft: he doesn’t need a spade. He will dig her up like a dog.

POV: Beauty It is one of the things she loves about Bheki: his awkwardness amongst others, and the privacy he carries with him, even in the presence of uMesis

This is a play for him. He is a stranger in his own life and he seems to blame her. He doesn’t fit in with his mother’s people, nor does he fit in with her.

It’s this uncertainty that creates tension for the reader. Do you think he is dangerous? Why?

She still thinks of him as “the boy”. Is this the usual racist juvenilization of black people, or is it because she mothered him in a sense? He is her “boy”, but why “the” “boy”?

She said this before - who is she trying to convince of this? Herself?

Is that the problem? He can’t separate her from his own alienation which he feels started there with her.

He blames her for having money, even though it helped to educate him. He could be alluding to the unfairness of apartheid - she benefitted so it is her fault too, no matter how much she tried to redress the wrong by educating him.

He is offended. He needs something from her so that he can let go of the past. An apology? More than that?

They’re at cross-purposes here. He DOES want an apology, and she does NOT want to give one. She apologises for saying something irrelevant, but she is clear that what he wants an apology for, she won’t give.

He is reduced to a child. There is no dignity in getting old. It is a recurring theme in the book.

Dogs are important in this book. They trust implicitly and are rewarded with a grave. Richard is becoming more and more like a dog, pissing himself and trying to dig up his child. He is in a kind of grave or wasteland of his own in his broken mind.

Bheki is noble and private. There’s a quiet strength about him.

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or uBaas. No, that is not true: they treat women like Beauty differently when they are with other men. Those women who can be laughed off. Those women who stand alone in the world because they are not attractive to any man with eyes, with standards. She knows uMesis and Looksmart can’t be left alone in the house. Some dark event is hurtling towards them, like a train coming through the night, aimed straight for the house. POV: Looksmart ‘Are you saying you have a clear conscience about the past?’ She looks at him with apparent incomprehension, perhaps bordering on fear. Does she think he is speaking generally? She seems to have no idea of what he means specifically, but then she’s never been much good at interrogating herself. ‘Few of us can say they have a conscience about the past,’ she says. ‘I doubt such a thing exists.’

She was always cleverer than he, even when he was the cleverest boy at that very clever school. She had cleverness in her blood. She never needed to open a book or make an effort to think. ‘How easily you let yourself off the hook.’ ‘What hook?’ She might be cleverer, but he knows he has a far better memory than she: for while she was in the clouds, he has been on the ground, living amongst the rest of humanity, knowing all along how her particular kind of cleverness diminished them. … him learning to cast on the front lawn… ordering him about and laughing at him like he was her toy, her toy monkey, with a battery up its arse.

You gave me a rock to smack its head. I had to hit

Another reference to the irony in her name.

Another clever passage to create tension.

He still seems to want an apology. Do you agree that she should apologise?

She may seem cleverer, but he can read her too.

What does this mean? Write it down and interrogate it. Does she mean that by not being complicit there is no guilt? Surely doing nothing is just as bad?

There's something impressive about Patricia. Even Looksmart recognises this.

Fishing reference.

Them? The marginalised during Apartheid.

This is quite graphic. Is it accurate? Can anyone tell someone else how to feel about their experiences?

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its head with a rock.’ ‘All I’m saying, Madam, is that I think we do far too much of this–letting people off the hook. You see, I’m a far more effective fisherman now.’ He can see that she still isn’t sufficiently afraid of him. For his whole life, it seems to him, he has been circumnavigating her sensitivities. Even after he left her, her gaze was still fixed upon him. … looking more frightened of him at last–now that he is losing the ability to speak. ‘Are you afraid?’ he asks her. ‘Is that what you’re after?’ He doesn’t answer this, but he realises that it is indeed what he’s after, or at least some part of him. He has come here to witness the resurgence of his hatred and her fear, and he is prepared to wait up all night if that’s what it takes.

POV: Patricia Only a week ago, a friend from a nearby farm, a woman she hadn’t seen for several years now, was tied up with wire and raped, and then her throat was cut. They tied her up like a bale of hay and slaughtered her like a sheep: it was a good farm murder. ‘How can I? You’re being so–perverse.’ ‘You think I’m a pervert?’ ‘That’s not what I said!’

POV: Looksmart It is frightening, horrible, alluring: the thought that a man in his position might decide to kill her. ‘Beauty!’ Then he understands: she doesn’t want to call the girl in front of him: this time, she didn’t call out the name in her usual way, which is almost sung, the second syllable far higher than the first.‘Try it again, Madam.’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘That is not how it’s usually done.’‘She won’t come unless you call her like you’re calling one of your dogs.’ ‘How dare you speak to me like–’ ‘Like what?’ he almost laughs. ‘Like a

In some ways, is he the fish? Or is he resentful for Grace and others?

Fishing metaphors abound.

Why should she be? Why isn’t she?

His need to please her has been a millstone around his neck.

She can’t relate to him when he seems uneducated. It makes him dangerous.

Why would he want this?

What is the author’s intention by including this incident?

How can it be “good”? Does she mean typical?

Why does he deliberately misunderstand “perverse”? Is he still mocking her?

Alluring? Define and then unpack this thought.

15


dog?’ What did the girl expect by staying on in this place, especially after what had happened to Grace?To remain on the farm was to condone what had happened here ‘Of course I know who Grace was,’ she prattles on. ‘She was the girl from the dairy who died.’ ‘Who died or was killed, Madam?’ You don’t even know my name!’ ‘It’s Looksmart, of course.’‘That is not my name.’‘But I was there when you were born,’ she practically shouts. ‘I remember the exact moment your mother named you Looksmart!’

Another dog comparison. A simile this time. People are dogs.

What choice did Beauty have? She was/is poor. This is glib.

Girl?!

What does he mean? Why would he reject the English name he was given at birth?

ACT THREE

POV: Patricia It took another hour of screaming and not screaming before the baby came out, grey and wet and rubbery, like a big dead fish. But it wasn’t dead. Patricia lifted it up and it took its first breath–and screamed. And everyone, except the mother, laughed. She never told Richard about the newborn child. Children had become one of the topics they avoided. But it was more than that. She had found a place where Richard was not, where something altogether outside of him existed. Not so much against Richard as in the opposite direction from him, towards everything Richard was not–towards life.

POV: Richard outside amongst the broken, rundown buildings.… he doesn’t trust these guests. The way they choose to live, for example. Without even a roof over their heads.

Notes:

Looksmart is the fish on her hook.

He is a life thief.

Not a choice!

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POV: Looksmart ‘The big Baas Richard! When I think of him, I think of a soft, white moth: small, weak, without any blood. When I take him between my finger and my thumb to find out what is there, I find he has just turned to dust.’ But he felt even then that words were not to be trusted.It was the way words were used in the world that made them, and those who relied too much on them, suspicious. ‘Looksmart, I hope you aren’t about to make a serious mistake.’ And then he understands: that is exactly what he has come here to do: to risk making a serious mistake. ‘Did you never wonder why her clothing was in tatters?’‘It was the police’s job–to wonder about that.’ Yes, that was what he understood on that day: that for Patricia, Grace was in another category: like that cry of hers they heard, she was slightly less than human. And this small fact, it was enough to change every other fact between himself and Patricia. It undid every single one of Patricia’s acts of kindness, if acts of kindness they ever were. And it was on this small fact that he would build his hate. ‘Her head down, not wasting any breath for screaming–and then the dog, the Baas’s dog, black and silent, galloping fast–it is three, then two, then one pace behind her.’ ‘Then Grace is–she is like a double creature,’ he continues, ‘she is half a woman, half a dog, and she utters a sound so horrible, I don’t even recognise it as her, as coming from her–but it brings a dozen farm workers into the garden within seconds. They gather around, like men around some–sacrifice.

And they are mute, they are mute with horror. He wonders what has happened: there’s an alien

There’s something inhuman about this description – insubstantial/subhuman.

He feels manipulated by words.

Again, this sounds very ominous. Is it realistic?

Patricia makes a mistake responding like this. It is callous.

She didn't react the way she should have. Patricia should have been outraged. Is he right? Why is this upsetting him? Unpack this.

Small? Can we agree that it is “small”?

Now the dogs are Patricia and Richard. They also symbolise apartheid white South Africans – they are attack dogs.

No one moves to save her, no one can. This was the situation for black workers in Apartheid South Africa – powerless.

PTSD? Do We understand him better now? He is howling in pain recalling the horrific incident of Grace’s death.

17


howling in the room,POV: Patricia What she can recall is her irritation with the girl. … and when it finally pulled itself free, instead of remaining where she was and talking the dog down, she turned and ran off screaming–so what else could the dog do but attack? She also remembers how useless the other workers were, standing around like men turned to stone, waiting us usual for the Madam to step in and help. Why wouldn’t Looksmart admit that it was she–Patricia–who stepped in and got the dog off the girl? Patricia would have shot that dog if Richard hadn’t stopped her. ‘What was that girl to you?’ she asks him.

POV: Looksmart speaks to BhekiHe runs outside across the uneven lawn and retches in the rosebushes.Patricia revolts him. Her reaction is inhumane. A miraculous transformation? Nothing has changed. People like her are still sitting in their houses. People like him are still looking in.

Yet cleaning the car reminded him of what he did not have: by the end, the car always gleamed in a way that excluded him.

Power lies with those who withhold their information from others. If you give yourself away, you no longer own yourself.

He knows that Bheki won’t refuse a cigarette, in spite of his veneer of dignity. Underneath, he’s as needy as the rest of them. They use English with a certain awkwardness, like two people who imagine they are being overheard.

For them, English remains the language of lies and liars. ‘I’m saying that if you don’t want to go down to Durban, you can stay here on the farm. I will give

Again, very callous.

Whilst this might be true, she is still a human being.

From her point of view, they are useless, but helpless describes their situation better. Patricia sees herself as some kind of saviour, educating Looksmart and saving Grace, like many, white, South Africans who didn't do much to change the status quo, but stepped in when it was not too inconvenient.

That girl? She was not a girl. She's being juvenilized and her life trivialised.

Patricia’s attitude revolts him.

Little has changed since apartheid ended. That is the problem – the Apartheid hangover. He still feels unworthy, despite his success – forever excluded.

The car seemed too good for him, even though he can afford these luxuries now, he still feels excluded/unworthy.

Is this true power?

Patricia likes to think she is generous, but is she if her staff are “needy”?

Language is important in the novel. It distances the English reader when it is Zulu, and for the Zulu characters, English creates discomfort/dissonance. Make notes here on the effect:

He thinks he can be better than her as a benefactor.

18


you work. I can help you, and I can help your son.’

POV: Beauty – insights into her positionHe was always reputed to be a boy with too many words inside his head, thinking himself too clever to listen to the sound of anyone else. UMesis looks at her–for a moment–as though she wants to see the world through Beauty’s eyes. But the look lasts only for an instant, because they both know that such a thing can never be done. Even those who see each other every day are finally blind to one another. ‘All you saw was her being loaded into the car.’ Beauty doesn’t like the word ‘loaded’, but she nods anyway.

POV: Looksmart Beauty he considers a rubbish name, like Grace.The poor mothers wanted to raise their daughters up a bit, out of the dirtThe real name of Grace was Noma, like his daughter. POV: Patricia She notices then that the tie has been removed, and that a bit of it is hanging out his jacket pocket, giving the suit a tired look, as though it is panting.

THE FIRST CLIMAX ‘You know what I can’t forgive?’‘It is that you wanted to protect your seats.’‘Instead you say we must go in the bakkie.‘You make us put down blankets, lots of blankets, on the back seat–before I can lay her down, and then I lay her down.’ ‘I drive, as fast as I can, to the nearest hospital–was it in Pietermaritzburg?Yes. And. Well–by the time we get there, I think she’s fallen into a deep sleep. But she’s not asleep, is she?’ When Patricia says nothing, he has to conclude it for her. ‘She is dead.’

POV: Patricia remembers his childhoodThe baby brought all of them together.

The power of words and language comes up often. For Beauty, words are pointless and empty (disenfranchised, even in the New SA).

Does Patricia really care? Beauty accepts that as a servant, you serve. Quietly.

Like goods. Like a body. Not her sister.

They’re English names. Names are telling in the novel.

A tribute to her.

Putting on western apparel which itself seems dog-like, Looksmart seems to simultaneously embrace and reject Western culture.

If this is true, it’s horrific. Unfortunately, memory is unreliable. What he remembers is not what she remembers.

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The child was brought to her like a foal to be inspected, but he was never offered for her to hold, and Patricia never thought to ask for it.

THE SECOND CLIMAX POV: Looksmart ‘It was your husband,’ he says. ‘It was your husband Richard who caused it.’‘Your husband was holding Grace down and he was raping her.’ Well–on that day, when Grace ran away screaming, he unchained the dog outside the dairy–and he let it loose on Grace.’ ‘You are calling my husband a murderer?’ ‘That is exactly what I am calling him.’

POV: Richard He has lost all sign of a path. If there were stars to guide him, or a moon, there might be hope, but wherever he goes there’s only more rain and sludge and grass, with the occasional rock or porcupine hole to trip him up. POV: Patricia She doesn’t know what role Looksmart expects her to play: the outraged landowner, the devastated wife, his mother?

‘If I’d stayed, I might have killed him. I might have buried my hands deep inside of him–and drawn out his heart.’ ‘I’m sorry. But I find all of this difficult to–digest. My husband is far too much of a bigot–’ ‘To fuck a black girl? Evidently not.’

POV: Patricia remembers what Richard was like and why she fell in love with him. It was difficult to believe, but Richard had been a good-looking man once… He had humour and a sly Yorkshire sensuality… he was adept at flattery–and women, in her experience, could rarely resist flattery when it gave the illusion of being accurate. On occasion he would suckle her like a baby while she stroked his hair. The first girl from England had upset her, she

Foal? He is not an animal. This is affection, not love.

The climax appears in Act 3, which is where it should appear according to Aristotle (The Poetics).

This is his life. He is rudderless, so far gone there is no redemption for him. No stars, just mud. It follows the revelation as it is the only reckoning he is likely to ever face – his failed mind.

Implying he is too racist to do this, but this is not how racism works. Rape is about power and subjugation.

This is a concerning image. Did he want a wife or a mother?

20


didn’t mind admitting that. But in the end it was what permitted her affair a few years later with John Ford. ‘And I’m sorry,’ she continues, ‘but there was nothing–nothing at all about going to the dairy to get the bakkie. We loaded her straight into the Merc and you drove it away at once.’ All I know is–I would never have cared about getting blood on my seats!’ As she says this, she believes it, she has never believed anything as firmly as she believes it. ‘But by your own admission, I never even said it!’ ‘You thought it!’

‘It’s because I want you to understand!’ ‘What?’ ‘What I understand!’

POV: Beauty … there are those two people in the sitting room, in the only place where there is any light, but they are like ghosts, taken away by the past, but still blind to one another and unaware of the night that has grown up all around them.

POV: Looksmart ‘But you gave up. You withdrew exactly when it was your moment to step forward and–do something, change something. Save her! 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!’ His wife failed first… could have pulled the rest of him into a more coherent whole.But eventually she gave up and these days, he often thinks, she has probably come to believe there was never any organ missing after all. His daughters, however, are still looking for that missing part of him.They haven’t yet reached the first moment of their disappointment–when they find in him a vacancy to meet the abundance that is in their hearts. I simply can’t remember. Can’t you believe that? Can’t you accept that all of this–it’s lost?’ ‘Lost? It isn’t lost,’ he tells her. ‘I think about it every day.’

Her affair makes a little more sense now perhaps. But does this make it acceptable?

Is this what she wants to believe?

Is this fair? Is his anger at himself for the horizontal oppression - he enforced the rule about keeping the car clean and blamed her?

His frustration is palpable. What does he want her to understand?

Trapped in the past, unable to move on.

He reflects on his adult life and marriage. This is important to him. He has a piece\peace missing and no one can fill this gap. Does he expect this to happen with this encounter? Is it a reasonable expectation?

21


POV: Patricia Beauty arrives covered in mud.Otherwise the mud is intended as a statement: this is the state I am in, or we are in. This is what we have been reduced to. ‘Before the attack,’ Patricia says, ‘at the dairy. What exactly did you see?’ Back and forth, back and forth–and back again. But Beauty does not appear to like what she sees. She had come to think of Beauty as her friend and she thought she knew everything there was to know about her–but, of course, that was only vanity, or laziness, or wishful thinking.

Sex act motion

All of these things. Do you give a friend damaged goods?

ACT FOUR

POV: Beauty finds Richard and dresses him‘Kwenzenjani? Ubukeka engathi uqeda ukubona isipoki.’ ‘I am the ghost,’ she wants to say back to him, ‘I do not exist.’ She wonders then if Looksmart might have murdered him. She thinks at first it’s a statue made of mud, then she sees it’s a child, covered in muck, shrunken away from the cold–but when it moves she sees that it’s uBaas himself, waiting in the rain, forgetting that for a door to open all you need to do is turn the handle or knock. ‘Baas? You have come back.’ For a moment, this feels like their house and uBaas feels like the visitor, the intruder.‘Aren’t you going to let him in?’ Bheki asks this with a touch of irony: the idea of not letting him in seems to amuse him, amuse him with its impossibility. She finds a pale yellow ANC T-shirt from her suitcase and dresses him in this, along with the

Notes:

What's the matter? You look like you're finally seeing the spider (or ghost?)

A mud child - what could this symbolise? His value to her? His soul?

This in itself is a comment. Why shouldn’t it be their house?

The incongruity is apt. He is out of his comfort zone.

22


pink anorak.POV: Patricia ‘Nothing else. For the rest of your days, I want you to be sorry, I want you to be sorry–and I want you to carry on telling me only that.’ ‘I suppose what I’m trying to say,’ she continues, ‘is will you be able to go away from here and try to become something–something new?’ ‘I imagine I’m talking about hope.’ ‘What are you saying? That you are not gratified by your success?’‘You want me to be grateful?’ he says. ‘Is that what you want?’‘Is that all you’ve ever wanted? For me to be grateful for all my gifts?’‘You have had opportunities that many would kill for,’ she says, hearing in her voice the same tone she uses with Richard.

‘I will tell you what I want for you, old woman. I want for you guilt, darkness! I don’t want you to leave this place tomorrow without a backwards glance–and to spend your last days looking, looking at the sea, with your mind all clear, your sleep easy–what I want is for you to remember that dog like I remember that dog, and I want you to be haunted and–and decayed away by it!’

You sent me to that school, gave me that blazer, corrected my English–you woke something up and then you killed it–you killed it as surely as you made me to kill that fish!’ ‘We let that fish go.’ ‘We didn’t.’ ‘We did!’ ‘We didn’t!’ ‘Everything you ever asked for. You wanted to go to boarding school, so I sent you… ‘And every holiday I came home to sleep in my mud hut!’

POV: Patricia on the death of her baby Patricia awoke in the hospital room to find a hollow wind running through her body where her child had been. All those cells dividing and re-dividing, to form a child that lacked nothing except a life

Looksmart has finally said what he wants to say. This is the falling action.

She doesn't want his life to be wasted because of her, them. Does this redeem her somewhat?

This is what he came for. Not murder or retribution. Guilt.

The unreliability of multiple perspectives is foregrounded here. He remembers the fish being killed and she is sure it was released. She also sees him as being educated and “released” but he left her partially “dead” inside, lost.

She did care for him, but she did not help his mother. Should she have?

23


Rachel would be forever dead. The emptiness in her body, just below her heart, has never left her. She can summon it up merely by thinking about it. A sensation like butterflies trying to get out. Richard stood around a lot, not meeting her eyes whenever she turned to him.She watched him as he crept away, a lame dog. ‘Didn’t you know that you are the only child ever to be happy in this house?’‘You were like the sun,’ she says. ‘My son.’‘But after a while I came to think of you as another dead child.’ POV: Looksmart about his life nowThis house seemed to him the very picture of luxury. Only now does he see it for what it was: as a place with no more life left in it. He married Annabel knowing that he didn’t love her, but hoping that one day he would. There have also been moments when his flood of gratitude towards her has felt like love. What is it that she sees in me? What is it that she sees when she looks at me? What have I become? But not to reclaim the land that was taken from my people–no. I have come to establish what they call a gated community. For those who are fleeing the crime in the cities. The whites, mainly. And some Indians too. Actually, they’re fleeing us blacks, but I think they prefer to call it “the crime”.’ It now feels less like a school report and more like one of those poems he used to write, which always seemed unresolved somehow until he’d read them out to her. He forgets what the plans once meant: that they were intended to destroy all evidence of her forever:What seems to matter far more for the moment is that she apprehend the boldness of his thinking

Not for Richard. It is a constant torment.

Another dog metaphor.

Wordplay – sun/son.

Ironically the plans do the opposite!

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and award it a gold star. Ah, Madam, you will see: we will whisk this whole place into something you could never imagine, not even in your wildest–nightmares!’ ‘I think it sounds–rather lovely.’

POV: Patricia’s thoughts about his Dream House(s)It may be his dream house–this house transformed almost beyond recognition–but still it comes from her. Perhaps even today he’s too attached to his pain–and all he’s managing to do is reproduce it, with slight variations, all across the valley… a part of her is also pleased by this evidence of his attachment to the house, It makes her feel that–amongst all the degradation–something good might also have come out of it all. They were not for nothing, her endeavours, her father’s endeavours. A trace of their presence will remain here long after they are gone, and new houses will grow out of the earth where future generations might make a better job of things–and find that they are happy. ‘And by tomorrow,’ she adds, ‘we will be gone.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And you will be able to clear yourself of everything–that’s dead.’ Was it safer to despise his mother first? Did he then resent Patricia because she had taught him to be ashamed of his mother? He seems to think that the land, which is ultimately no more than a bit of wet bog between two hills, is the thing that needs to be worked on, whereas the only thing that needs working on is him: Looksmart himself. ‘When I first went to school, my mother would look at me with strange eyes. With the same eyes she used when she looked at you. And by the time school was finished, I don’t think I fitted anywhere. Not with her and certainly not with you.’ Everything around her–and much that has been

He wants to turn her house into a nightmare, but ironically she thinks it sounds like a dream. Instead of destroying the house, he is replicating it! He cannot destroy the past, he is trapped.

This is sad. Patricia’s favour made him resent his own mother. This is part of the reason he feels rootless.

He became a stranger to her – he looked like her son, but he sounded like one of the privileged boys at his school. Was Patricia’s benevolence a gift, or was it a poisoned chalice?

25


happening in the country at large has only confirmed this–has only ever held evidence of loss or decay. She would like to tell him clearly that he was like her son–at least, the closest she ever got to having one ‘Ah, Madam,’ he tells her. ‘This is a strange land we live in. After all this time, you still want to be the mother. And me, I must still be something like your child. But that relationship–it can have no place in the future of this country.’

POV: Richard He is used to this feeling: that he has done a monstrous thing, but that the thing itself has gone off, like an article of clothing ripped away in the wind, and only the feeling it brought with it is left behind.

POV: Beauty She has been expecting blood, violence, doom, not this peculiar sound of laughter.

POV: Richard … a black man wearing a suit. What’s more, laughing with his wife. Engaged in what looks remarkably like happiness. Like young lovers. Yet hardly that, because there sits his wife, large and round and grey and not even seeming to see him.

POV: Looksmart ‘It is a name. Like Baas is a name.’ ‘And what are you doing wearing a suit? Did someone die?’ He doesn’t have to look at her to know what she wants from him: to walk away, to leave this man to his ignominious fate. ‘Do you know there was a time I would have had you whipped?’ Under the gaze of Patricia, Looksmart wipes the mud off his hands onto the other man’s anorak. He thinks that he is going to kill him. Everyone thinks it. Yet the old Baas is doing nothing to defend himself. He seems to be offering himself up, almost to prove a private point. ‘Old man,’ Looksmart tells him, ‘there is nothing you can tell

Why is it important that he rejects her as a mother figure?

She expected it and did nothing to stop it. It is impossible to tell whether she is disappointed or relieved.

This emphasises his cruelty. He can’t hide his hatred.

26


me that I don’t already know.’ ‘Do you know what I’m going to do?’ Looksmart continues. ‘I’m going to leave you to your wife.’

POV: Patricia ‘Say the name Grace. Grace! Say it.’ ‘What are you trying to–say?’ ‘Grace.’ ‘What are you trying to do to me? Didn’t the doctors say I was to avoid all stress?’ ‘I could see very well that you recognised him, Richard. It was an act. Is that what this is? Is all of this–an act?’ ‘Of course I know Looksmart. I said at the time it was a mistake–sending him to that school, giving him ideas above himself. ‘And what did you create in the end? Looksmart! He looks like a fucking twat to me. In his fucking suit.’ ‘Well that fucking suit now owns this place, Richard.’ ‘So what’s he going to do with it? Open a shebeen?’ It would be better to spend her last night on the farm. No one has ever really believed in Durban anyway. Which might be why they have never quite managed to pack ‘Who are you anyway? What makes you the judge? All puffed up. Looking down at me. You putrid cunt.’

An apt punishment – she now knows what a diabolical man he is.

This exchange demonstrates that Richard is still aware of his past sins, but he feels no remorse. Can you explain why? Read his comments and unpack them below:

ACT FIVE

POV: Patricia Beauty’s body–out of habit, out of duty–is still leaning in the direction of Richard, as no one has checked up on him yet. It occurs to Patricia that they could stop checking up on him altogether.He could be a parting gift to Looksmart. Only now can she see how ignorant she was:

Notes:

This is nauseating. Despite what she has suffered, she has to serve this diabolical man.

What is she implying?

27


because she had always had a gracious life, she imagined it would continue, and that grace was a characteristic you were born with. And there she is, still dressing him, feeding him, wiping his arse–instead of doing what Looksmart wanted to do, and cutting out his heart. What did Looksmart call him again? A moth–yes–without any substance left.

POV: Bheki Looksmart has promised him a job and he has said he will send Bongani to a special school, so that his disabilities will not hold him back. He thinks it is time he walked away from this distasteful dance he has been engaged in for so long: where he has to disturb the grave of a child just because the Madam has decided it. POV: Patricia on John’s suicide and “lack of imagination”Her crime, it seems–with Richard, with Looksmart, and now with John–has been a lack of imagination. Looksmart’s estate, it could grow up all around them… peer at them through the windows like visitors at the aquarium–staring at strange fish from another time. What sets the body of John aside is the violence of his death–the violence he has done to himself. She can’t look at him and not think of it, not wonder at it. ‘Goodbye, John,’ she says.But John only answers back with his silence: the hard knot of vacancy that will now be in the world whenever she turns to him. My dear PatriciaI wonder where my anger came from. The heavens? My blood? The impotence we must all feel when we sit alone in a house at night–as I am–and look back at the mess we’ve made of our lives? ‘All these years,’ Patricia says, ‘and you never said a word.’

Grace is not a birthright – certainly naming Noma Grace meant nothing in the end.

White people can ask their helpers to do anything, no matter how undignified. Would they stand for this themselves in their own jobs?

She means that she did not see the suicide coming, nor did she foresee how Looksmart would turn out.

They belong to the old order – formerly privileged white people living on their expansive, but crumbling, estate. Relics from the past to be stared at - another fish comparison.

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The Denouement (unravelling)An important exchange with Beauty who lacks the words ‘Why didn’t you leave?’‘But Mesis–this is where I live.’‘But aren’t you angry?’‘I was a child, Mesis. I didn’t know if I should be angry.’‘We do not talk about sis’ Grace,’ Beauty says. ‘When we think of her, we think of her as something–lost.’‘Beauty–please. You have to tell me the truth.’ ‘But why, Mesis?’‘Because that’s all we have left.’- Patricia ‘Mesis, you really want to know?’ ‘Yes!’‘She was with uBaas–there were other times before.’‘UBaas–he would pay her money each and every time. They said that sis’ Grace never loved Looksmart. Not like Looksmart loved her. He was too young for her. His head was–’‘His head had too much words inside it.’ ‘But he said they loved each other desperately,’ she says. ‘He said she was good.’‘She had nothing,’ Beauty continues, ‘and uBaas–he paid her. Sis’ Grace did not think about good or not good. Ubezama ukuphila.’ ‘She was trying to survive?’‘When sis’ Grace died, she was pregnant with uBaas’s child.’He was angry because she wanted to keep it, the child.Then he started to swear, he hit her and I came inside. She ran away screaming, screaming about the child–and uBaas, he came to the road and he freed his dog on her.’ ‘Looksmart is like a boy. In his heart. He will not be able to hear a thing like that.’ ‘Looksmart has his own story,’‘He was very–convincing about it. Why must I now believe you?’‘Mesis,’ she says, ‘you must find the truth for yourself.’That was what Richard said last night. Two dead children. I have two dead children for the ambulance to pick up.‘He killed his own child,’ she says. ‘For uBaas–there was no child.’ ‘When we go to Durban, I will put him in a home.’

Where else could she go?

What did words mean when you lived hand to mouth?

This again points to the fragility/unreliability of memory…

We all have our own story. There are always two sides (or five in this case!) to a story.

We all must.

This is one of the many things that torments him. He is twisted and ugly inside – a monster of his own conjuring.

29


‘A home that is for people who are sick.’POV: BhekiAnd yet, deep down, Bheki can see that the dog trusts her still: it gulps, putting on a brave face, and licks its chops, perhaps hoping Bheki will hand it a biscuit or a bone.It still believes that a man like Bheki will always come second to a dog, and that such a man will never be allowed to harm it.

The ResolutionPOV: Patricia‘The rain is finished.’ Bheki says this as if he is speaking not of the rain but of a broader event–a war or a plague.

But she also senses that the events of that day will never be spoken of again–not if anyone can help it. Even if that double beast in the garden will always be circling somewhere near the centre of their lives, dripping blood. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘isn’t it going to be a lovely day?’ She intends this as an ironic statement, but it doesn’t come out that way: it bristles with a range of meanings, some of them good.

Patricia suspects that she misjudged him yesterday: he was probably far more at home in that suit than she gave him credit for.

‘I suppose he’ll be wanting the keys,’ she says to Bheki. There is an opportunity for one of them to speak, to say a few words that might help them to laugh the moment away, but each of them keeps their peace–and as the two drivers ease forward, they raise their hands and carry on.

Another allusion to the disparity between white landowners and poor black workers.

He is.

As they drive past Looksmart he looks comfortable in his affluent clothing – not “borrowed robes” after all.

To the Dream House – a symbolic handing over.

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