Absolution by Patrick Flanery Page B

like a plough or the guard on the front of a train, and he dreamed of driving the truck fast and forward, so that Bernard’s face became black with the road and the road became white with his face.

Sam
    A Saturday night. At great expense, Greg has Nonyameko come in for the evening so the two of us can go out to dinner. We drive around into the City Bowl, park up on Kloof Street and have a drink with one of the artists represented by Greg’s gallery. The night is warm, so we decide to walk down the hill to Saigon for sushi. As we pass Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck a young woman comes out of the darkness.
    ‘Excuse me gentlemen, I don’t mean to be rude,’ she says. Moved by some kind of metropolitan instinct, I turn away. I don’t hear the next words. Out of the corner of my eye I look at her face and clothes, wondering where the clipboard is. She’s either doing a survey for the city, I think, or she’s selling magazine subscriptions, or canvassing for a charity.
    Then the story comes out and I can’t help listening. She does odd jobs for people but was unable to find work today. She doesn’t think that ninety rand to pay for a night in the shelter is going to fall out of the sky. She has a daughter. They lost their house. She begins to tremble. I keep my body turned away. New York has hardened me against this kind of plea. But Greg listens, asks me if I have any money, any coins, he doesn’t have any change. I take out my wallet, remove the largest silver coins I have in the change compartment, and ignore the hundreds of rand in notes. The woman has an educated accent; she isn’t drunk and doesn’t appear to be high. As I’ve been trying to decide whether to give her fifteen rand or twenty, she’s covered her face and started to cry. Maybe, I think, she’s a drama student. I knew drama students in New York who were sent out to beg on the streets as a test of their skill. Grades for the exercise were awarded on a scale peggedto how much each student earned in handouts. The thinnest ones always got A’s.
    ‘Here,’ I say, and empty the coins into her hand. She mumbles, ‘I’m so ashamed, I am so ashamed.’ I know that the money’s too little. I tell her not to be ashamed and hold her gaze and say it again. She has a crescent of dark freckles around her eyes and brow. Her clothes are good but dirty.
    ‘There’s nothing shameful about asking,’ I say, and we leave her. Fifteen or twenty rand is nothing to me – less than five dollars, less than four.
    As we walk down the hill Greg says, ‘I couldn’t pass her knowing that we were going to spend several hundred rand on raw fish and beer. I think she was telling the truth. It could have been drugs or something else, but I think she was telling the truth.’
    ‘It doesn’t actually matter,’ I say.
*
    At the end of our interview yesterday I asked Clare what my purpose was, why she herself didn’t write about her past.
    ‘You mean why I didn’t choose to write a memoir?’
    ‘Yes. Or autobiography.’
    She had me at the door and was trying to transfer me over to Marie, so that I could be ushered out of the house. ‘I can’t see my life as a totality, or as a continuous narrative. I wouldn’t know how to write my own life in that way.’
    ‘But what about fragments?’
    ‘Yes, fragments, I suppose I could write fragments – I have written about moments. Transitional periods. Narratives of personal trauma, specific traumas. I can write about periods of my life but not my whole life. I wouldn’t know what to put in and what to leave out. Or, I guess what I mean is, I would want to leave out so much there would be very little left. That’s why I need you.’
    I wasn’t looking for it. The image comes when I don’t want it, in the middle of the night, bloated with fish and beer.
    I’m standing at the screen door, not alone. Someone else puts his palm against the wooden frame. He tightens the palm into a fist and knocks three times. It’s a