Absolution
want everyone to know. Terrorists would be blamed. At that moment the police were raiding several properties and two remote farms suspectedof operating as training camps. Did you imagine the knock on my own door that morning, the men, the memories that knock conjured of an earlier knock, many years ago, on the morning after a similarly horrific night? You dismissed the consequences for the rest of your family – you had to in order to survive. I understand that, at least.
    And me? What of me? What should I have said when the men asked, when they shouted? What did I know? I tell myself that I knew nothing that could have changed anything at that point. Earlier, though – if they had come the day before, or the day before that, demanding I confess what I knew of my daughter’s plans and her associates, I can no longer say what I might have given away. And why, I ask myself now, every day that passes, did I not take the chance myself? To save you, to save others, I might have betrayed you. Would a defeat on that day have changed the course of anything, the balance of lives lost against lives saved?
    There was no news for you, who knew all that mattered on that day. You clawed in the sand trying to make up your mind – cruel, an ostrich in the wilderness.

1989
    The boy understood that his Uncle Bernard had been a soldier once and still called himself a warrior. This was a reason for doing and not doing all kinds of things. A warrior did not listen to music except when going into battle and a warrior trained his body to live on less, to eat only once a day, twice at most. A warrior knew the psychology of his enemy. A warrior had to rely on nature for survival and so a warrior had to be – what was it he said? – intimately acquainted with the bitch.
    This meant that when they went on these drives there was no music.
    Are we going into battle? Bernard barked, when the boy asked if he could turn on the radio.
    No , the boy said, even though he didn’t know if this was the answer Bernard wanted to hear.
    Then no music, hey? No battle, no music. You got to keep your mind focussed. Music and food, these things distract a person, man .
    Was my father a warrior?
    Bernard laughed and rolled down the window and spat into the wind.
    The boy remembered car trips with his parents to see his Aunt Ellen in Beaufort West, and once to visit friends in Kenton-on-Sea. The radio was always on, all the time, even if his parents complained that the music was terrible. It was something to drown out the sound of the road and the hot wind that came in through the windows if it was a dry month, or the rain on the roof that hammered them deaf if it was wet. Music made time pass, sped up the hours that seemed so much longer driving fast in a car. The boy would fall asleep to music, especially if it was theold-fashioned music his parents liked, and wake after dark when they arrived on the street where his aunt lived, and felt himself being carried inside by his mother or father and tucked between sheets stretched tight over the cushions of the sofa in his aunt’s lounge, a sofa that smelled like one of his parents’ parties if it were held in a sweet shop or bakery.
    On the road that night with Bernard, the boy thought about how he hadn’t seen his aunt in at least a year. He wondered if he would see her again. Somewhere he was sure he had her phone number and address. If only she knew how things were, he couldn’t imagine that she’d let him stay with Bernard. He’d asked Bernard if they couldn’t get a cat or a dog, to have some company on the long trips. I’m not running a blerry zoo , Bernard had said, I don’t like animals .
    The boy tried to stay awake, to watch Bernard out of his right eye, the road with his left, but the images kept coming together so that the man’s face turned black and the road turned white. As he fell asleep, the boy imagined that he had the strength to tie Bernard to the front of the truck, so that his head was

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