Get A Life

The longer the letter in return was unwritten, rewritten when she came home from Chambers to the old house that had never echoed empty on occasions when he was away and would be back on this day or that; when she lay in the dark and his side of the bed was flat, no body-horizon to be made out, the interpretation of what had come about was different. Life-work. All his life he had worked not grudgingly or unhappily, it appeared, with the satisfaction of doing what he had to do, conscientiously, in activity he wouldn't have chosen. The only culmination: retirement. The experience close to if not exactly fulfilment of his avocation (there's that mention he'd 'sifted the dust' that yields the past on an archaeological site), wasn't that enhanced by the realisation that there is another avocation, to love again. They go together. The woman and the archaeology. The lovemaking and the digs.

Perhaps this should be the contents of the letter, final draft before it got written. She did not think she could put it to the son, not even him. Even he would take it thankfully as a rationalisation. Rationalisation being essential in any solution for his mother. At least he would be too preoccupied, as he should be, with the remaking of his own life, to see how the rationalisation sifted through the familiar, familial dust to show everything of what the life of those two, parents, had been. Ordinary. A version of it. Just as his taking up again his wife/child/containing house – the elements of home – seemed to be reassembled.

The written letter was not any one of the unwritten drafts with their flourishes of emotion, contradictions of cruelty (who would have thought you'd make a fool of yourself pushing seventy) and sad understanding (it's still good together, yes, even in bed).

Honest. To be the way he was.

I can't tell you I am anything but almost disbelieving, amazed. Because I've noticed, oh over all our years, even since you've been getting old, women having an eye for you, but Hilde didn't give any sign whatever of responding to you any more than she did to me. The same smile. And you – do I stupidly think people, the man and the woman, know each other so well after all those years that there couldn't be a change going on in one without the other sensing it. Apparently I did, do, think so. While we were together with the guide she was just that, smiling. You were just attentive, as I was, to the vivacious precision of her guidance to places and objects we wanted to see, and her knowledge of their history and meaning. No gallantry towards her – you know what I mean. In fact I thought you were relieved, in a way, when she excused herself from eating with us, we've never been at a loss for something we want to exchange over a meal alone. Perhaps I misread you, the strain of hiding the responses you were beginning to feel to her meant it was a relief for her not to be around for a while.

I suppose I should feel some reproach of her. But I won't. And there's no point, for her or for me, in her feeling 'bad'. As you write, it's happened, you both made it happen. From the letter it seems you don't know what you want (blocked out 'except not me') at present. So let it be an extended holiday, for now. I have shown your letter to Paul but for the girls the extended holiday will be the only explanation why you haven't come back, you're following more archaeological digs. The awkwardness that may result, if Emma gets to know you're lingering in Central America she'll want to persuade you to hop over to Brazil and see our grandchildren. ('Grandchildren'. Was that cruel; but she left the ambiguous reference, did not cross it out.)

The letter was typed on her word processor. When she took up the copy, she had ready to write in her own hand, I love you. She wrote only the version of her name by which he knew her, Lyn.

It was unnecessary to warn Paul not to tell his sisters about the nature of the extended archaeological holiday. There was not much contact with them, anyway; family occasions of Christmas and New Year were long over and the social life arranged by Benni was peopled by her advertising colleagues now drawn together with some of his bushboys. Since he was no longer in quarantine, his affectionate sister Emma hadn't emailed from Brazil; presuming he didn't need her wild, amusing messages any more. Often it was Benni who would suggest his mother should come to dinner, and Lyndsay would arrive with a bottle of good wine. Benni would dutifully also ask, what news of Adrian, and appeared to listen as innocently as she did when Lyndsay told of some wonderful region he'd just driven through, adding – You two really must go to Mexico one day, it's dramatic. Worth the trip for the Museum of Anthropology alone. – If this was an interregnum his mother was managing it just as she had managed the isolation of quarantine.

She and her son have again something in common, as there was unknown to each in his reversion to childhood and her matching reversion, then, of reliving the shame of four lollipop years. They have each the dedication beyond the personally intimate, of belonging to the condition of the world. Justice. The survival of nature. Whatever the condition of their intimate lives, she was fully committed with her colleagues to the complexities, the apparent dead ends to be followed and disproved, the nuance of statements to be deciphered, the lies to be disentangled from facts, in the corruption cases for which they were briefed, and which certainly would go on, with adjournments and referrals, for months. Another extended period. And he, with Thapelo and Derek, was back and forth to the coastal dunes, now, of the Eastern Cape, where the government's decision to allow mining for titanium and other metals was pending – same area as the toll highway project. The subject of begetting another child, companion for Nickie, had not come up again. What he had said, that time, put an end to it. They made love when he was home from the dunes, smelling, she told him, of the sea; which roused her, evidently. He assumed she had protected herself against insemination. Protected herself from Him.

His mother became somehow part of the life returned to, taken up, in his house; as if with the end of its occupation as a place of quarantine and in the absence of the father, the old house was no longer home. She was quite often found with Nicholas and Benni, when he came back to the city, to his life there. Seems she had some sort of relationship, if not close at least comfortable, to the combination personality Berenice/Benni with whom she had little in common. Well – himself and the boy. As the archaeological holiday, the fulfilment of an avocation long denied – that was how it came to be unspokenly accepted – indeed extended it took on something of the established ordinariness that had been achieved by Lyndsay in the period of a quarantine. Apparently she filled her time in the company of other women rather than the married couples who were her friends and Adrian's. Her son supposed this was usual with women not looking for a new man, or disadvantaged by age or a sense of distaste for such a pursuit; not something he would have given a thought to if it hadn't been out of concern about his mother. Apart from the parents' circle of mutual friends, she had tended to have hers among the legal fraternity – fraternity, yes, because most judges and prominent lawyers were male. She brought to lunch one Sunday what it is clear was a particular new friend, not a lawyer but a social worker, and not a nice middle-class do-gooder like the ones who might be among the married couples, but a woman employee of the local government Social Welfare department. She was coloured, one in whose broad face, a composite image of the Khoi Khoi, San, Malay, Dutch, English, German and only the past knows what else, was pleasingly mixed. She was presented as Charlene-Somebody but cut in with a laugh, Just call me Charlene, that's me.

Lyndsay defined, in dismissal of modesty – She's been introducing me to the realities my colleagues and I only see as the end result. She took me yesterday to a hospice, no, I suppose you'd call it a halfway home for babies. Abandoned babies, some of them HIV-infected or already with AIDS. -

– Ghastly thought. That must have been hard to take. – Benni, like Adrian, is also honest, coming out with the crude reaction others would suppress in order not to appear to lack human feeling.

This Charlene sensed some explanation was appropriate for how the introduction to a reality came about, and also perhaps unable to suppress an impulse to show her quality in becoming mentor to someone in a high position of the authoritarian world. – Ag, you see, I've just been a witness in that big case, you know, my brother-in-law who was kicked out of his firm, his job, he was assistant manager in a supermarket, because he's got AIDS – how he got it, that's another story, not for me – the trade union made a case to defend him and Mrs Bannerman was the chief lawyer -

– Unlawful dismissal. We won. It's something of a test case with implication for others. Charlene Damons was an outstandingly good witness – the attorney who was supposed to prepare her said it was the other way about -

The two women laughed; this testimony must have been what led Lyndsay to take an interest in the woman. Obviously initiated some opportunity to talk to her; time has long passed when coffee shops were segregated and there was nowhere to go. Over the Sunday lunch Lyndsay encouraged voluble Charlene, who didn't need much urging while she composedly enjoyed her food and the usual wine the host's mother contributed, to tell about her work among people suffering HIV and AIDS, in particular workers employed in industry and chain stores.

– What happens to the babies? Many die? And if they survive, with treatment. They do get treatment? – Benni is wiping the traces of icecream from round Nickie's mouth.

– Many die. What can you do. They've been left in public toilets. Some in the street, the police find them and bring them in. -

– The mothers? -

– Nobody knows the mothers, who're the fathers. -

Lyndsay has been turned away, listening. – But when you see them, their faces. They look like someone. Not nobody. -

There's proof. Nickie, icecream-besmeared face, looking like – Paul, Benni, Lyndsay. Adrian. And progenitors farther back. As the elements that converge in the Okavango; as the natural forces of alchemy create the sand dunes secreting minerals from still earlier formations.

The new kind of family lunch passed uneventfully enough with the guest; Paul and Benni didn't encounter her again. Lyndsay was engaged in a new case, her next offering was not an individual but a letter, first of several, read out to the family as sometimes she brought along an email from Emma; a letter from Adrian telling something of whatever it was that he was living. A state awkward to categorise. Travels to the mountains, natal region of Zapata, more Rivera paintings seen, the weather. Archaeological excavations, of course. In one letter, he said he was thinking of writing something. The experience of seeing these unearthed accomplishments of the ancient past when you belong to an era where there are wars going on over who possesses weapons that could destroy all trace of it. (The letters were addressed like publicity leaflets headed 'The Occupier', 'Dear family' on the first page.) When Lyndsay came to these few sentences her distanced tone sounded to the others a sign that they were meant for her alone.

She probably wrote back – would she? – the same kind of letters with matters skimmed from the surface of what the family was living; whether there were words, residue of the exchanges of the personal, not the ancient, past, coming privately from her to him was her own affair, her son couldn't speculate any more than he could foresee any resolution the parents might come to for themselves.

The government's announced project for a Pondoland 'marine protected area' wasn't going to be any resolution for the sand dunes on that coast. It protected the waters alone. The Australian-based Mineral Commodities could still go ahead with their plan to mine twenty kilometres of the dunes. With Thapelo and Derek surrounded by a paper-territory of surveyors' maps and their own field notes, the team sat with representatives from Earthlife Africa and the Wildlife and Environmental Society following the trail of contradictory statements, a palimpsest over what was before them.

– The Minister's passing the buck. Just listen again. Environmental Affairs: 'The Minister remains opposed to the mining and instead supports ecotourism in the area. But ultimately the decision to mine on the Wild Coast rests with the Minister of Minerals and Energy.' Ja-nee. – Derek's jerks of the head mimic 'yes-no'.

– The Mineral Commodities outfit must have submitted for the Aussies the application to Minerals and Energy by now. Department's sitting on it. While that's going on and Mineral Commodities' spin doctors are lobbying, you can depend on that, we've got to keep pushing, man, pushing. They're going over the Pondoland Marine Park projects, they say, to 'assess' how it will affect their mining plans, but that's nonsense, shaya-shaya, their chief exec's already said the frontal dune and riverine systems had always been excluded from the mining areas – they're not – Thapelo hoists the flag of one of the surveyors' maps.

A heat of frustration rises with it. Paul waves a hand up across the table as if clearing this emanation. – Lobbying – that's only part of the strategy. Bribery is going to serve them even better. The option they've given to a black empowerment company that represents the very community, the traditional leaders we counted on, the people we've been lobbying to protest misuse of their land, threat to their subsistence. A fifteen percent stake in the mining deal, ten million dollars. Ten million! How does that divide up among – how many people? It doesn't; going to be shares on the stock exchange. Doesn't matter. It's a sum that fills the sky. – His rolling glance tilts inadvertently at Thapelo, who shouldn't be singled out; wanting the empowerment of money is a characteristic of whites as well, at least human temptation isn't discriminatory. The difference is whites have held that power exclusively, so long. – How does that look for protest against the toll road that's going to break up their habitat, the mining that's set to destroy the dunes there? So? We don't want rural blacks to have a share in the growth of economic power? It's not for them? They're out of the mix in our mixed economy? What're we going to say to that. -

Thapelo slaps his hands across his chest to strike and grab his biceps. – We have to live with it, Bra. Race sensitivity's out, my man, for this thing. Those big money boys know how to operate rings round us. For sure there's a link, a deal, between the toll highway and the mining, let the Mineral Commodities set-up and the government deny it, shout from now till tomorrow, you saw how the National Road Agency says the road will reduce transport costs, that's important for the products of the mine, getting the stuff to the smelter. -

– And finally to the stock exchanges of the world. -

– And the ten million dollar shareholders scattered by the highway. Who'll get the dividends. -

– The makhosi. -

Paul turned from the contest of words to decisions. – We're only a couple of months before the deadline for final objections to the mining project. Co-ordinate all the organisations and groups for action, jack up overseas support (Berenice's vocabulary comes in useful, an unfamiliar weapon). Get a life, man! – Let's make up and bring a high-profile party of save-the-earthers to come as observers of what's at stake – not the low-voltage ones we've had – some pop stars who'll compose songs for us, Come rap for the planet, prove they're good world citizens… it's cool now for the famous to take up causes -

– Right on, my brother! -

Maybe her advertising agency would know exactly how to manipulate this, now desperately become like any other publicity campaign.

Lyndsay had left a message among those waiting on his mobile phone. Responding to relevant others, he forgot about it. She called again – it's just to say she'd like to come round this evening, if he and Benni were going to be home, hadn't seen them for a week. Yes, eat with us. No, she'd come for coffee. You know we don't drink coffee after dinner, Ma, and neither do you. Laughter. For a drink then, fine.

His mother arrived after nine without acknowledgement of being later than expected and with the air of having pleasantly concluded some preoccupation. Benni, in the worldly sophistication of Berenice, even tolerantly wondered to herself whether Lyndsay hadn't found some man attracted to her, she still looks good despite her age; it can happen. Mother and son had a glass of wine, Benni for some reason puts her hand over the glass Paul has put beside her. Must be some new diet she's put herself on, well-promoted… There's Danish aquavit in the cupboard, which she favours, but the Scandinavian association is perhaps not tactful.

– I've been meaning to tell you for some weeks but there have been legal complications, still are… no point in waiting for that to be final. You remember, I brought a welfare worker, witness in one of my cases, along to lunch. Someone who'd taken me to see abandoned babies – children in a home. Well, I went back there on my own a few… a number of times. I felt, I don't know, there was a child, a small girl, she's about three the paediatrician says, one can't be exact with an abandoned child, she responded to my turning up – presence. She was brought in by the police seven months ago, that means she was about two years old, then. She'd been raped and she's HIV-positive. She had to be (Lyndsay, always professionally, unhesitatingly precise – hands up – at a loss how to define this for others)… reconstructed… surgery… weeks in the children's hospital. Apparently it was successful, far as they can tell with a female so young. Then she was handed back to the institution. They're happy – the people in charge at that place – if they think you're trustworthy, you want to give one of the inmates – kids – a treat, an outing. So I took her to the zoo, you must introduce Nickie to the baby seal that's just been born – she was ecstatic. I've decided she couldn't go on living in an institution, good though it is. There are very few adoptions of HIV-positive children. The home has released her already. She's with me. I'm adopting her. -

– What have you done. – He has stumbled into some place in Lyndsay's life closed against him. Can't see her there. -

I'm finding out. Quite an experience. – She raises eyebrows, serene. – You can imagine how delighted Primrose is. She's in charge while I'm in Chambers and court. -

His mother gives time for silence, for Paul and Benni/Berenice to accept what is done. Her son is with her in quarantine in the garden, they are statues, commemorating their habitation there. – How will Adrian. What about Adrian? -

She is alone with Paul, since the quarantine there will always be this facility, apart from the presence of others.

The words flung down before him.

– What about Adrian. -

She went back to that babies' shelter, one Saturday when she had walked past a toy shop in a mall and been beckoned by a display of anthropomorphic bears, monkeys and leopards dressed in jeans. Nickie had pillow-mates like these; there was a jungle gym she'd noticed the unidentified children climbing when she accompanied her outstanding witness to their reality, but were there any toys like these, personal treasures. She bought a few, and went to drop them off in the rundown quarter of the city where the institution was. Those inmates old enough to walk or at least sit were having their supper at tables right for their size. A small girl she recognised from the first visit jumped up, overturning some mess in her plate, and came running, to the toys, not the woman; she took her time, gazed at the bear, the leopard, the monkey, and carefully chose the monkey. Others clamoured round.

Was it foolish to bring a few luxury toys where there were – how many had Charlene said – thirty or more babies and children, the number went up and down as some died and one or two, healthy ones, might be adopted. Would they quarrel over possession – the recognised girl had run off with her monkey. Well-meaning could be mistaken.

She returned a week later, not with gifts that might obviously cause trouble, maybe create a contentious privilege, difficult to imagine a child who doesn't have any, in the democracy necessary in such a place – to ask if she could take the claimant of the monkey to the zoo to see real ones. The girl had been in care for months, she was told, found without a name, not old enough to know if she did have one, the staff called her Klara. Getting to know the features that made the child whoever it was, she was (couldn't be expressed to oneself less clumsily) proposed the wonderful mystery of the personality, how it may be signalled in the set of the nose, the shifting line of lips in speech (this little creature talks a lot, an incoherent coherence of whatever African language she had shaped when she learnt to speak and the English she had learnt to obey from the whites among the Salvation Army people whose institution cared for her). Here was a small being creating herself. The distinguished-looking woman, maybe a politician or something, who came back after Charlene brought her, became well-known to the Army's female Major and was allowed to take lucky Klara away for weekends, then was listed a foster-parent, Klara officially in her care. A bed, a place vacant for another, born not in a manger but a public toilet. Better not ask what next for the small girl if the lady tired of her. Because Lyndsay, also, did not know what next. For herself; for the child; in the meantime she did not make her guest? charge? known to Paul and his family.

Her own motives were suspect to her. Then they were of no concern, she and this stranger with a vividly distinct self, stranger no more, had a life in common. A nursery school accepted her, dropped off there every morning by Lyndsay on the way to Chambers, and Primrose kept her fluent in a mother tongue in the afternoons. Lyndsay did mention to a colleague that she was taking care of someone's black child; it was not the sort of temporary situation without precedent in the individual social conscience of their legal practice – at least had not been during the apartheid years when clients defended on charges of treason sometimes had no choice but to leave a child abandoned. There was a good chance, said the paediatrician Lyndsay took the child to, that her HIV-positive status would correct itself shortly; the blood count was encouragingly mounting. This reprieve could happen only in children. So there was an interim decision; don't look further than that. She wrote one of the spaced letters she and Adrian exchanged, like the form letters to aunts etc. taught to phrase, at school, where she told that Paul was in a helicopter monitoring the terrible floods in the Okavango, and related the progress of Nicholas swimming over-arm instead of dog-paddling, beginning to count up to twenty-five, recognise words in story-books. (Relating to herself; Klara, able already to string red and white beads alternately on a cord, has to be stopped from attempting to climb the jacaranda in the garden, insists on mastering the use of a fork at the age of about two-and-a-half or three.)

Enquiries, to someone who dealt with these things, about the processes of adoption are routine in informing oneself how the child might better be offered to someone where she could grow up in the company of siblings, a father and mother. There was no point she would really remember when instead she had become the adoption applicant, informing herself. The process is not simple, even in the case of a child of unknown parentage, abandoned no-one knows by whom. But it was the time to inform her son and his family.

Should Paul's mother be invited to bring along the child when she came to his house; where Nickie was? Lyndsay, that awesome lawyer rationalist (Berenice's one of the impoverishers of their mother tongue who make the epithet as devoid of religious force as 'fuck' is devoid of force to shock), not only decides at her age and in her situation to adopt a small child but must have one who is infected with the Disease. Does anyone honestly know whether or not it can be transmitted ways other than sexually or by blood? If by blood, what happens when two children play together and there are scratches, blood exchanged. Nickie's a boy, quite rough, if still small. Benni/Berenice – everything must be taken into consideration – decides to put a hold on such visits, tactfully, until Paul is home. She knows Lyndsay well enough, in the shift the plight of Adrian has somehow brought about, to think Lyndsay will understand, not comment upon to Paul.

– The child's accepted at a nursery school. – Paul's like his mother, depends on evidence, whether it's a conservation back-of-beyond or their private lives in question.

– Not all nursery schools. Wasn't there even a case – a woman went to court when a kid was refused. The nursery school pointed out that very young children bite when they get in a temper. -

– The child's how old? -

– It's not sure, about three. I suppose they tell by the teeth and not all come out at the same rate. Nickie's were early. -

Benni was not particularly surprised, not confused as he was, he saw, when his mother came out with it just before he went to the drowned Okavango that now was the scene in unobliterated vision, present after-image in his awareness. He could not place, with Lyndsay, this action. She had never been particularly fond of children, it seemed, kept a kind of privacy even between herself and the four she bore (had it been Adrian who wanted a family, and now left them to her) and she didn't drool and coo over her grandchildren although she and Nickie were rather companionable, he loved this special friend.

Benni appeared rather to be amused by his discomfiture. The wilderness is an innocent environment whatever else he exposes there; he doesn't know what goes on in the real world. Doesn't know it's become quite trendy to adopt a black child, or an orphan from, say, Sarajevo or India. She could tell him it proves something. But in Lyndsay's instance, she can't hazard what.

She sees he won't oppose – whatever Lyndsay decides, he is convinced is all right. For Nicholas: he doesn't decide, for Nicholas. She should, she wants – fuck him if he doesn't put his child first, above all the orphans in the world – to turn on him angrily but she does not. In this life put together since the time he went home again, out of touch, there is still, underneath, something between him and the woman who is his mother that shuts out everyone. He's here in the bedroom but the lines are down.

Whatever it is she wanted to prove by adopting in old age, and on her own, a child who might die and whose physical possibilities of growing up with the birthright of a female, clitoris, labia, and vagina, must be damaged however clever the surgery was, his mother's choice isn't an easy one. This bright and beguiling little girl is self-willed in excess of her size and approximate age, manipulative, a show-off in the spotlight of demanded attention and the next half-hour gloweringly withdrawn. – Just plain naughty. – The foster-mother/grandmother laughs even when exasperated.

Who knows if the virus covertly hunts this child down as rogue cells may still be holed up somewhere along his bloodstream. His mother is an old hand at interpreting prognosis, monitoring it coming about either in its negative or positive proof, back in the quarantine, his. And as then, she somehow establishes, creates ordinariness in this other unwelcome metamorphosis of a family – Adrian missing, some other being added – out of uncertainty, the unresolved. Which surely you've learnt by example of ecological solutions, is a condition of existence? No? Is she compensating for lack loss of him, Adrian – is he coming back? Is she punishing Adrian by showing she makes bolder choices than his, going all the way to the exhibition (no less) of extreme moral choice, taking on some child not orphaned but even worse, abandoned, and still further from human to inhuman act, a victim raped, disease-infected, while in the state of total innocence. Is his mother showing off; as the showing-off, the rages, the defiance of the flirtatious round-eyed, soft-mouthed near-baby is a punishment of whoever conceived her, abandoned her, thrust and tore open her body, planted a virus there.

Lyndsay takes Nickie and Klara to the zoo. Klara demands, The sa-el, the sa-el, and Lyndsay corrects her. The two children raise a chant: The see-al, the see-al! Other visitors smile at the little scene, assuaging pleasantly their guilt of the past when the zoo was closed to blacks except on one day a week and black and white children did not chant together.

Does his mother feel Adrian 's eyes on her from somewhere in the fjord – wherever whatever – the stratosphere that is his absence? Does he see these occasions of hers as defiance?

Or isn't she thinking of Adrian at all, at the zoo with her grandchild and her child. Not when she and Klara come to the son's house at weekends – it's nice for Nickie to have a playmate who is naturally part of the family. Adrian has left Mexico. But not to come home. When they're at table together, the Paul-and-Benni table that has become the family one now that Lyndsay doesn't set it at the old family home, there is a dismissal of awareness that there is an empty chair. Apparently it's a ruling that the father's, the individual Adrian 's choice be respected. Human rights exclude mawkish sentimentality as useless while disguising that it is painful is a better reason. He is in Norway with his sometime guide. They live in Stavanger, one of the northern ventures he and Lyndsay never made. Hilde has a sister there; I'm occupying a flat in the old family house, I have a view of the port. He writes in the first person singular, not 'we'. Of course it must be that Lyndsay writes back at intervals that match those of his letters; has she told him, does she write about Klara; she will have told him that the Judicial Commission has appointed her to the Bench. She is about to become a judge. A son has to stop himself from blurting, He'd be so proud of you – the licence of high emotions that allowed him to tell her, He always loved you so much, was over. Adrian is in Stavanger, taken retirement and presumably writing his thoughts on seeing – what was it – the dug-up accomplishments of ancient times while living in an era of weapons that could destroy itself without trace.

Nickie and Klara get on well together in the contesting manner of small children, she a tough match for the elder and male. And when he retaliates by tugging at a vulnerable attribute she has and he hasn't, her dreadlocks (Primrose insists on plaiting them to adorn a fashionable little black girl), she squeals piteously for help as the playmate who when pinned down on the grass had yelled that a gogga was biting him. Nothing further has been said between Paul and Benni about the girl's HIV 'status', in fact that established euphemism placed at a remove the remote possibility – unproven? – that the contact of scratched knees could transmit infection. Only when tussles between the two tumbling and cavorting children become too intense, the no-escape moment when a boxer is forced against the ropes, both Paul and Benni rush, colliding to part them. Lyndsay keeps the girl's fingernails very short: whether for hygiene or a precaution to which she would not admit credibility.

All right, the zoo. City children learn of their existence – co-existence – with animals other than cats and dogs. When Nicholas is older, take him along on working assignments; it'll be some years, the conditions are not for small kids, but a youngster of eleven or twelve, that'll be the time. Children see something of the wider concept of the environment on television – does Benni really put the boy in front of nature programmes, as supposed, instead of the monster-hero sagas he takes as his spacemen toys come to life. That's not seeing, smelling the living creature in flesh and fur; at least a zoo provides that. But childhood doesn't provide only in a garden, signals to what is going to be decisive in adulthood. There's the extraordinary dark memory like those in nightmares, but not dispelled by morning, and time: the eagle, in that same zoo which is now his mother's treat for the next generation, hunched on claws within the stone walls and close roof of a cage. Something frightening in prescience of what would only be understood, known, shared years later: despair. The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

Benni lifts and drops her shoulders, which stirs her breasts; kill-joy, not everyone can have the freedom of the wilderness and anyway he retreats into silence, some other place, when (again) she offers one of the clients' game parks, no cages there, foreigners fly thousands of miles to find marvellous. She has again suggested a stay, his mother and Klara included, this time, at one of the weekend breaks away from the city, Agency-featured, these beautiful half-wildernesses. All he says absently is that the children are too young to spend hours being driven around in a four-by-four. You need Japanese stamina for that. And so makes Benni laugh. Thank – what are their gods? – for the Japanese, they're the staples of our tourist industry!

There is a place where the eagle he has not forgotten, its species, is free. That's a nearby outing for the children, the family, owed by this father who too often is absent; in his wilderness.

The Black Eagle, Aquila verreauxii, has been breeding at this cliff above a waterfall since 1940. These highly territorial birds, with a weight of approximately five kilogrammes and a wingspan of up to 2.3 metres are one of Africa 's largest and most majestic eagles. The Black Eagle pair in the Roodekrans territory can be seen all year round. They spend their days hunting, soaring, displaying, or perching on their favourite roosting spots, where they rest and preen. They live on the Rock Hyrax, hares, and guinea fowl. The breeding cycle commences in March/April, when one of the two nesting sites will be used in a specific breeding year. Sticks are placed to form a nest cup that will be completed with leafy twigs. This creates a soft lining in the cup prior to egg laying which normally occurs in May. The male performs spectacular courtship displays during the refurbishment. The pair mate for life and take a new mate only if one should die.

Paul read out from a leaflet picked up at the entrance to the park space, half botanical garden for indigenous African species, half wildlife protection habitat. The two small children neither listen nor understand, the information is for himself, Lyndsay and Benni, Nicholas and Klara are simply excited at the beginning of any excursion. Do they know what an eagle is? You're going to see a ve-ery big bird. Lyndsay attempted to make the excitement specific but the focus of the two for whom the world of nature is new was wide and low, there were gaudy butterflies to chase and Nickie spied a caterpillar articulated like the coaches of a toy train. Paul carefully lifted it from a leaf, opened the boy's hand and placed it gently in the palm, to protests from Berenice. But he addressed Benni, the boy's mother. He mustn't be taught to be afraid of everything that isn't human or domesticated. And if it happened to be a scorpion? That's part of the knowledge: learning to recognise what's harmful and what's not.

Life-skills – that's the term she would understand. And he doesn't expect – or want – anyone to understand that what he's been able to say simply, without his kind of jargon is – simply – the principle of what he does, it's called ecology.

Lyndsay turns out to know more about the strange sculptural plants than he. It used to be said of such growths that they're like something from the moon, but now it's known there is no growth on the moon, there's no comparison with nothingness. She is able to name substitutes for leaves like buttocks; an elephantine lump of grey as a desert species from Namibia which stores water in its bulk for nourishment during the long dry years. In the period when Namibian independence was being negotiated she had been there as part of a legal team and Sam Nujoma himself had arranged for her to be taken into the desert – not that Paul or his wife would know or is likely to remember who the first president of the country's sovereignty was.

From every experience, professional or otherwise, there's always some aspect detached from the whole. The negotiating process subsumed by the history-that-is-memory; the identity of some weird growth is there, available, named.

While the family outing straggles along the paths to the waterfall you can hear but not see: in the susurration, I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving.

(The children chasing about each other or the butterflies butt against adult thighs as if these were tree trunks.)

That's all that comes out of that state of existence, and why not; so definitive as it was at the time. And it did not happen, the leaving. Mate for life. The affair is over. Case closed; it has not been reopened for long years. And now quite differently – no, come on, admit it – the same, has been reopened. I am sixty-five I never imagined this could happen it's happened to Hilde and me. The child chosen as black, defiled, infected, nameless – something else that has happened. One of the states of existence. Paul is taking up each child in turn to be swung round him as he walks; the son has come out of quarantine and seems to be in possession of a new state.

They arrive suddenly at the sight of a swag of silver down the dark of rock-face. The children did not appear to find it so striking, perhaps to them it was the bath water gushing from a giant tap. As they all drew nearer the cliff, rifted steeply in a narrow jagged cut beside the waterfall, rose to block the sky: go no farther. There was a grass plateau between bush-shaggy hills on either side, before the pool where the water fell and quietened. Now the plunge was white and in swift heavy strands, some leapt thinly to drop independently, chiffon of mist strayed, the water-voice volume turned up to an obliterating ringing in the ears. Klara danced with her hands over hers. Well it's not Niagara but it's pretty impressive. Benni appreciative, to Paul as if it was a spectacle he had created.

He must find the eagle. Flights of small birds scattered the sky above the cliff. He scanned the cliff again and again and discovered the two nests, if the haphazard collection of dry black twigs on ledges were nests. Benni had waited her turn at the telescope provided for visitors and reported the people around her confirmed these were the nests. While he was narrowing his focus on what seemed no more than garden detritus, his gaze was suddenly swivelled up and round by something that blocked out peripheral vision on the left. The eagle, not hunched way back in despair, the sail of a huge black wing glancing. He called out to the others, the mother, the wife, and in the stance of braced legs, head making an arc of his back, followed the flight, powerful enough to challenge the sky, of a scale to match it. The eagle, now a black cloak unfurled, now an immense black paper kite soaring, was in an arabesque with another, they were dipping and rising in great circles around the air up there, for a moment one of the spread wings actually blinded the sun as a man's hand across his eyes can do. There was a flash of white when the underside of this missile was revealed, but the plumaged body, like the hook of the head, hardly made out, was of no significance, the wings were the being of the creature's mastery. Lyndsay was the one who noticed leafy twigs, as the leaflet had described, on the mess of the nest on the right – from the viewer's not the bird's point of view. The wings of night against sun-paled sky continued to plane and dip; and then there was a descent, the transforming mastery that was the eagle's was gone, collapsed in a bird. As it readied to land on the nest that surely couldn't contain it, it seemed to gather itself together, almost fold up, only head and beak erect. The head had not mattered, in the air. Only the wings. They had appeared to be directed only by the intelligence of their own velocities, power over air and space. He inveigled himself near the front of the small gathering at the telescope. A head faced straight at him, drawn close by the glass. A flat dark head holding the great black polished orbs that are eyes, ringed with gold. These orbs separated by a broad white scimitar ending in a black hook. A nose a beak – it's impossible to take in the features of any face as a total vision – if this creature has what could be called a face at all, it is received as a certain feature of a face. (A woman's mouth, that's what he always sees.) This being named eagle turns the head; in profile the head hardly demarcated from the neck and the wide shoulders of the wings confirms the definition: the statement of the curve of the nose-beak, sense-organ and weapon. How is it that the high curved nose of Semitic people, the Jews and Arabs, is despised as unaesthetic by other peoples, when it has kinship across the species, with the magnificent eagle? Now the folded, self-domesticated creation somehow settles itself on its Procrustes' bed of twigs, some of them falling as the claws (noticed for the first time) extend and retract for a hold, and they, across species, are like the knobble-boned crenellated skin of very old human hands, although these retain powers which the hands never had.

Lyndsay has taken the children down to the low wooden barrier on the verge of the pool. Is the susurration louder or muffled by the overhang of the cliff and awareness of the crowding hills; it encloses her along with the imperceptible mist rather than comes through the ears. There was a dinner at the house of a judge whose colleague she is about to be, she was placed at table as unattached guests are beside another apparently unattached guest, in the male-female protocol. He is a retired judge from some other region of the country – she would hardly be partnered with somebody younger. The talk is of politics, the last elections and the President's appointment of a woman as Minister of Justice. If the man assumes that his neighbour welcomes the appointment because she is herself a woman, he is in for what no doubt will be a surprise. Her contribution to the comments in chorus above the plates and flower-piece: I'm celebrating the Minister not because she is a woman and so am I, but because she is exceptionally well qualified for the portfolio. If it had been a man with the same credentials, I'd be raising my glass to him. There was laughter and bravos from several of the men, and a glance-shaft of disapproval from a woman. But no-one could question the judge-elect's position on human rights.

Klara and Nicholas are shaking the slats of the barrier and have to be stopped. Klara's angry: Swim! Swim! A new word acquired along with the swimming lessons she was having in company with Nickie. There are two small boys flashing darkly agile skinny legs, paddling at the edge of the water although there is a sign indicating that this is forbidden, a rule ignored by the trio of women, two wearing the hijab, to whom they belong. Hopeless to explain, even to Paul's son, that nothing must disturb this habitat. Klara's begun to collect leaves and throw them at the pool, but always safely misses.

Probably it was the remark about the appointment of the woman Minister that made him more interested in his dinner partner with whom he had engaged in casual exchange before the subject animated the guests. Must have been told she was about to go to the Bench – a hostly precaution against the embarrassment of asking, And what do you do? He'd also picked up something, one of those useful scraps that start a conversation. And you're interested in archaeology, we all need a break when on the Bench, I know too well. No, that was her husband; and since the spouse wasn't in the place occupied by the retired judge, there was the casual explanation, He's visiting sites in Mexico. The liveliness of the continuing political discussion put an end to the subject.

It emerged easily that they held views of a judiciary in their transformed country in common, with the intriguing circumstance that he was viewing participation from his past on the Bench under apartheid segregation law and she was about to enter her appointment in a democracy. Seventy or a year or two older, then; no attempt to draw remaining strands of blond-grey hair across the bald head above a cliff forehead, tall and upright, looked still to have his own teeth. He sat across other tables in the restaurants where there followed invitations to dinner with him. Why not. He is a colleague with interests in the theatre and art exhibitions apart from his successfully concluded profession, no avocation, just the pastime pleasures of a life. He speaks of his wife who died two years ago. She has found it honest in the openness that excludes familiarity, with someone her own kind, a colleague in law, to tell him that she is parted from Adrian Bannerman. He does not intrude any questions.

Now she hears from a friend that he wants to marry her. Only yesterday, in the course of a phone conversation with a woman for whom a call is a confession of her own intimate decisions and a preoccupation with those of others. The man 'is in love with her'. At his age, more than sixty-five, when it does, can happen. They have not gone to bed.

She picks up Klara, this circumstance of hers, happened, chosen, to distract the child, pointing out a big black bird balanced there on the rock.

Marry her. Do you become a virgin again, to an ageing man? That's why first there's a rumour as a preparation for the unexpected passionate kiss in place of the civilised goodnight peck between new friends, which she tolerated, come on – half-enjoyed – put down to the bottle of good wine finished over dinner. For him, not to be attributed to wine but as a show of confidence in his ability – still – as a lover. The idea of marriage a kind of delicacy, a prelude, because they are not young, to becoming lovers.

Klara struggles, she is not interested in something you can't grab for, far away.

The water is so loud you could almost shout against it without being heard. Not here in the nature conservation park or in Stavanger.

Middle-age folly – how old, in my forties. But our time after, and the last time whenever it was. Adrian.

The last man inside me.

Mate for life.

Klara slides free down that body.

His mother rejoined Paul who was reading out to his wife further information he had found in an array of pamphlets on a bench. Only two eggs, that's the entire clutch. It'll happen next month, June. The first egg laid hatches and is followed about a week later by a second. The two chicks, known as Cain and Abel. The first-born, Cain, has already grown when Abel comes out of his shell. Cain and Abel fight and generally Abel is killed by Cain and thrown from the nest. The survivor is fed by both parents until around December when it's able to fly… five years to reach adulthood and black plumage… time for the eagle to find its own mate and territory.

Cain and Abel. But what if one chick's a female – suppose you can't call one of these birds a hen.

Benni/Berenice is right. Lyndsay offers – She also gets kicked out, I suppose, it's a way of keeping the balance of nature, Paul? Neither too many nor too few males and females for breeding. But it's horrible. -

Leaning on the balustrade of rough steps hewn into the cliff, the language of the pamphlet in hand fails to represent the being of the withdrawn black entity on the bed of dead wood and the other disappearing off into the sky and returning in the guise of a menace or as deliverance of omniscience, as the surveyors' plans and the reports he writes fail to represent the Okavango or the Pondoland dunes. Oh this is not the smallness of man stuff, against nature. Romanticising what's too heavy to handle. Cain and Abel. The old Bible provides an object lesson here in the non-human, the creatures who according to evolutionary hierarchy go back too far to have developed a morality.

Except that of survival.

If you thrust a toll highway through the centre of endemism, the great botanical marvel, n'swebu, and you gouge ten million tons of heavy minerals and eight million tons of ilmenite from the sea-sculpted landscape of sand dunes, isn't that the morality of survival. Isn't that to industrialise? And isn't industrialisation, exploitation (it's termed that only in its positive meaning) of our rich resources, for the development of the economy, the uplift of the poor. What is survival if not the end of poverty. It's been pledged at the third inauguration of democratic government: the end of poverty. And if Abel has to be thrown from the nest by Cain; isn't that for a greater survival. The eagle allows this to happen, its all-powerful wings cannot prevail against it. Survival. Ten dams for one delta seen from Space. Civilisation goes against nature, that's the credo for what I do, I am. Protect. Preserve. But is that the law of survival. You preserve, Chief, and you're the one who trusts nature? Co-existence in nature is limited brutally – Cain throws Abel out of the nest – among creatures of which we're an animal species. Knowledge come in the quarantine of the childhood garden that perhaps whatever civilisation does to destroy nature, nature will find its solution in a measure of time we don't have (the pamphlet informs that this area was a sea, uncountable time before the rocks were pushed upward), that knowledge doesn't go far enough. A cop-out. Civilisation as you see it in your opposition of nature to the Australians' mining, the ten dams in the Okavango – it's child's play, a fantasy, when you admit the pragmatism in nature. No use returning to the photograph reproduced of the piece of fluff, morsel of life that is Abel, and looking for a solution.

The family outing is over. Monday the four-wheel drive back to the wilderness with Derek, Thapelo, according to the week's plan of research to which there is never a final solution, ever. That's the condition on which the work goes on, will go on. Phambili.

Benni was approaching, in her face the questioning brightness of one who has been wondering where he's got to. Berenice's had enough of nature, then, is coming to suggest they go home.

But when up the rock she reaches him, she says nothing. Their attention is attracted by an intense shadow above the trees whose lighter shade and sunlight break up the solid outlines of his face and body and hers. The grand stunt of the eagles, there, maybe the courting display described in the pamphlet.

The eagles have lifted away to their higher altitudes. The branches obscure viewing.

She has taken a step down, from him, backwards.

– Paul -

A signal for him to follow; he hands her the pamphlet, souvenir.

– I'm pregnant. Another child. -

– How did that happen. -

She shakes her head tenderly, in guilt. It's not because she tried another man, the cruelty he sees, of that solution. – I didn't tell you, but I haven't been taking any precaution. -

– So. For how long. – If the roving cells had continued to survive in his body, they could have disappeared by now, the pilot light of deadly radiance that he believed pursued them, could have gone out.

– Only the last two months. -

– So. What do you want to do. -

– Want to tell you. -

'So': it means there is an alternative he wants, abortion.

If Berenice would crumple into tears, effective in TV imagist resolution of confrontation, Benni waited steadily, only her hands came up, the fingers interlaced and her chin rested on this fist of – supplication, defiance.

He did not jump down to embrace her he stretched out his hand the palm wide the fingers spaced and curved and her hand came from support of her face to meet his grasp as if she were to be pulled from a foundering boat or a landfall.

Not an epiphany, life moves more slowly and inexorably than any belief in that. Except there's the question of why she chose that moment and place to announce herself. Well. Did she think, was she given courage (what a bastard to have said, Get yourself another man), the telling of the abortion of Abel from the nest made time and place propitiate, for the right perception.

Lyndsay was told. A sibling for Nicholas. Although he was not so much an only child now that Klara was – an unexpected form of relationship, unnamed, as she had been. Lyndsay herself doesn't define it, the child has not been taught to call her mama, or should it be grandma – that's the question but not a problem: she's Lyndsay to the child, and this doesn't undermine authority; or what looks like love, apparently.

Benni is overwhelmingly energetic, working in her advancing position at the Agency to take advantage of the improvement in the economy, as beautiful as ever, the face above the thickening body. When gestation is over (difficult not to think in terms of the vocabulary familiar for the other mammals that should be saved from extinction) will be the time to judge. If what is born is not affected, mutated in some way by sperm spurted from a body that had emanated radiance. Only then. In the meantime have to trust. What? Benni's instinct. Her contribution to starting over in a new state of existence. She has had a scan which reveals the curled-up foetus has male genitals already formed. A son. Be able to think of this being as a son when other things have been verified. You can be guilty of what you were not responsible for. Derek and Thapelo are congratulatory when they notice, on Sunday lunch invitations, the mound his wife carries under her flowing robe (Berenice's flair has taken to African dress as most attractive, in her present shape). Their jubilation – did they think a man wouldn't be able to make it after the state of quarantine – is infectious, it calls for a few beers Thapelo contributes to be enjoyed with rations in the wilderness. Nickie's hand is taken by his mother and placed on her belly; your little brother's waiting in there. He won't be as big as me. Everyone laughs at the premature one-upmanship. But there is a gleaming joy of curiosity and anticipation that may be what will banish for good the fingers forced from the iron gate, Daddy! Paul! Klara hears she too will have a little brother. Why not? A family has to be constituted for one who has none. She has been introduced to Jacqueline, the one of Paul's sisters who lives in the city, not Brazil or on an ostrich farm. Jacqueline's adolescent daughters make a great fuss of the little girl, putting bangles on her arms and bows on her dreadlocks. Likely Lyndsay may have told the prospective grandfather of the new addition expected by his son, in one of the occasional letters to Stavanger. No response to Paul and Benni, from there. If the father writes to her, the mother doesn't bring letters to the family, any more; the absence is not noted, perhaps not noticed, Klara and Nickie are playing a wild game, friends are expected. Lyndsay has sat for the first time in her judge's robes, at her elevation in court. If she's mentioned that, tie must be allowed to be proud of her. Still.

Lyndsay came with a letter again one day, without the accompanying happening of the child, and after calling to ask if he was alone. Yes, his wife Benni couldn't forego a promotional cocktail party which Berenice should host despite the hard swell under the beaded African robe that announced, in medical jargon, her term was approaching.

His mother ignored Nickie watching the children's television programme he demanded with Benni's inherited charm. Taking it out of a courier's plastic packet she, once more, gave over the letter. The son found the envelope unopened – uncomprehending, ready to be irritated, what's this for, Ma, looked away from her. The address: the writing unfamiliar.

He slit the top of the envelope carefully and drew out the folded sheet at the same time handing it towards her, but she came to stand close beside him, head bent to read it together.

Stavanger.

Lyndsay recognised the handwriting from the statement of expenses the guide had presented at the end of each week of services in Mexico. She sensed her lips moving as she and her son read, as if following a foreign language. Dear Mrs Bannerman, I didn't want to shock over the phone, so I write to tell you he died last night, Adrian. In his sleep, the doctor came at once, I called. It was heart failure. He did not suffer. It was after the theatre. We had a nice walk by the sea in the afternoon. That was yesterday, 14th. So that was the date when it happened.

Both stopped reading. What happened: he stayed behind in Mexico, he went to Norway. Gone away. It is difficult to realise another departure. If this had been a letter from Adrian telling at last that he was not coming back, the state of retirement he was in, Stavanger, was final, would that have been different? But what an insane escapist thought. Even if they were having it together. Adrian is dead. He hasn't announced finality. He's silent about it. Lyndsay and he read poetry together when they were young, tags remain, 'Death is silence, things which are not'. The guide he retired to speaks, writes for him.

Her son – their son – stirs the sheet of paper; they must read on. As if there is anything to say. Already told: died in his sleep, in bed beside the guide of course, no suffering, she knows because she was there, she simply sensed there was no rise and fall of breath or his body was cold against hers. They had walked together in the afternoon on the beautiful North Sea beach, Sola, a theatre where the streak of wet in the light from the stage that touched his cheek announced another kind of grief.

Read on. A gap, a pause at the word processor before a new start to this letter. Mrs Bannerman (again, though surely thought of as Lyndsay, embarrassment, guilt at the appropriation of retirement or late assurance that this title of marriage would never have been usurped) Mrs Bannerman, I have made all the enquiries, I will do it immediately you give me details where he must be received. My telephone number and email is at the top of the page. I can arrange it. I will send his body.

Smiling.

How else. In the grief she also must feel.

They walk into early evening light in the garden of Paul 's house, to which he returned from that other garden. Up and down, slowly, legs move even if mind doesn't. To the shrubs and the acacia where the children's swings hang twinned, one's been strung up for Klara too; and back. Lyndsay trips over an abandoned toy in the rapid rise of darkness in Africa and he steadies her; also himself, to speak. Silence is only for the dead. Adrian.

Let's go in.

It's no-one else's decision, only theirs, as the conditions of another state of existence were finally between them alone in quarantine. He doesn't dutifully indicate, it's yours to decide, you, his lover, that indefinable relation dubbed by law and church, wife. Do you want him back; if dead. Did he ever express that primeval urge, to be buried in his natal soil. The idea that his death in the logical sequence of events after retirement would happen elsewhere never occurred. He could have had a heart attack and died in the Arctic under the aurora borealis, that retirement venture with Lyndsay that didn't come off. Preserved in ice ready to be flown home.

Home. From Stavanger. Begin over again, from the grave. Or the ashes of the crematorium. There are new beginnings, in place. This's not home you left to follow so late, in archaeological digs, your avocation.

Smiling.

Found it.

They didn't tell other members of the family, not Jacqueline, not Susan, not Emma in Brazil, of the offer. An email was sent thanking the guide and declining. His mother asked Paul to place his name alongside hers. He had his sense of loss carried with him in the wilderness that still needed him and his team, Derek, Thapelo, always new threats to which there must be human solutions (if your father dies do you now exist in his place, nature's solution). If there's a possibility for the dune mining project or the pebble-bed nuclear reactor to be outlawed that's proof that what is a vocation and an avocation may be worth pursuing in the limited span of one individual's minuscule existence, not seen from Space.

What she – Lyndsay – does with sorrow – it must be? – cannot be asked and must not be pried at or spied upon. The life of parents is a mystery even when you are paired off with someone in a version of the state, yourself. She has her successes, as the defeat of destruction of the Pondoland dunes, if achieved, would be a success at least partly attributable to Derek, Thapelo and himself. She's been appointed to serve on the Constitutional Court, and this is no Gender Affirmative post, that's certain.

Adrian is not a taboo subject. Paul does not know that she has on her desk in her office at the Constitutional Court a photograph of Adrian she took when they were together at an archaeological site in Mexico. They speak of Adrian when a context comes up to remember something he might have remarked, laughed at with them, and when listening to music together, talking of his depth of understanding from which she profited and, yes, Paul's evidently growing enjoyment must have come, even of those composers she's never learnt to listen to without a sense of psychic disruption, Stockhausen, Penderecki etcetera. Perhaps the only way to break the silence is to have passed on something. Impalpable.

A well-secured box addressed in the same unfamiliar hand eventually was delivered, containing a few small archaeological artifacts, a reproduction feather headdress of the kind seen being made with delicate ancestral skill by vendors outside the Museum of Anthropology, and what was evidently a draft of thoughts on the experience of seeing unearthed accomplishments of the ancient past when you belong to an era where there are wars going on over who possesses weapons that could destroy all trace of it. She gave the artifacts, headdress, and the manuscript to the Department of Archaeology at a university where one of the academics was a friend. She asked, maybe the university press would publish the draft in some form.

EDEN OF AFRICA FACING THREAT OF BEING SUBMERGED BY FLOODS

This is the kind of lyrical drama a newspaper headline makes of the waters Noah must have seen. But not from Outer Space. Not from a helicopter. The team has come back from a second survey of Okavango to map-covered walls, spread aerial photographs and half-drunk cups of instant coffee. Which is the reality? Here or there. It's not normal to live in two environments, every traveller knows the disorientation, disbelief, that is the brief consequence of leaving home and walking out into a foreign country ten hours later. But this consequence of being back among domestic objects and four walls, from wilderness, earth or water is a condition of living, not jet lag.

As they go over in their minds and talk what was seen down below, the observations shouted, half-heard, to one another against the racket of the helicopter, there is another question of which is the reality: the 'Eden' treasure feared threatened or the people of the central delta there, told they must abandon their homes before the rising waters. What's going to happen to them anyway, if ten dams that will alter the cosmic picture of the world as seen from Space are built?

Shouldn't be thinking about this, like this. The practice of conservation, boots in the mud, Thapelo's occasional addition of beers to basic supplies, concentrates on one issue at a time, some sort of sequence in activity while the commissions keep sitting, for or against. What is in the others' minds – about these people.

Derek's glance moves down a newspaper cutting that had reported interviews with the Delta people about the dams. – No-one will evict us from our ancestral lands. It is a gift from God, and our forefathers' soil. -

How does this emotional stuff, no doubt genuine as many (hopeless) defences are (isn't that the principle of rousing the Amadiba over the effects of the toll highway), strike Thapelo? He's one of those all over Africa who were long ago evicted from the forefathers' soil. And even what was left to them was 'a gift from God', the white man's God, not the ancestral ones? 'God': the first colonial civilising dispensation, a token something of a whole country dispossessed.

Thapelo needs none of his white mates' tact; seventeen months in solitary detention in the bad old days and none of the Gods did anything about it. He smiles and lifts his fingers softly up, down, from where his hands rest on the table, saluting respect to the ancestors but in acceptance of realities. His people have had to abandon their homes so many times and not for reasons of their safety before a flood.

– Safari guides report animals have drowned; we didn't see any bodies floating. -

– Didn't fly low enough and they might be caught in the submerged reeds and stuff. -

– An elephant? Submerged? -

– Doesn't mention the big guys. -

There's a season of flood, at expected levels, part of the ecological balance dealing with the salts, every year. But such extensive and unusual waters; a great inundation. Copies of background documents are handed round. An expert geoscientist, McCarthy, has found – predicts? – that after about 150 years toxic salts will destroy all plants (Derek starts to read aloud and the other two shush him as they read for themselves)… and at this point the floodwaters should erode the islands and release salts into the swamp. But with perfect timing papyrus and hippo grass upstream will have encroached into channels, causing sand levels to rise and blocking their flow. (Silenced Derek glances up: Man, we know all that. The others won't be distracted: Chief, you never know it all.) The water is diverted elsewhere and the old islands dry out. Then in that mysterious way it does, the peat in these dry areas catches fire (somebody's god strikes a match?) creating a mosaic of burning forests up to fifteen centimetres deep… these wild fires can burn for decades, destroying all life growing above them. After the fires have died, summer rains flush saline poisons deep below ground. Nutrients from the fires combine to form fertile soils… in this way the flow of water and creation of islands is constantly changing… the entire organism named Okavango renews itself.

Splendid, triumphant. Wola! Cho! Jabula! Phambili! Only the exclamations picked up from Thapelo's languages are adequate. The Okavango 's revenge. Originating hundreds of kilometres away, every year with the spring rains the rivers Cuebe, Longa, Custi, Cichi, Cubango – Africa-named before the white men dubbed them with that other reality, discovery for Europe – send a pulse of water, no, now a magnificent flood, the perennial wetland becomes a high waterland (what does it look like from Space!). Drowns projects, obliterates the idea of ten dams. And carries its own knowledge of dispersal, subsidence, knowledge of its own means of renewal in time.

Read on. However there is a problem against which the living swamp has not had time to develop a defence: humans.

The intention to build ten dams is not submerged.

So what is the reality. The human reality, Chief, Bra, however you're seen or you see yourself, the immediate, market reality – that's what counts in what you learn from the mother of your children, one in the womb, is the real world. Okavango left to itself will renew eternally. That is: woah! – eternity also has to be defined: as long as the earth is not ended by explosions of irreversible radiance. People don't live eternity; they live a finite Now. The mining of the dunes. Now the Australians have made a deal with a fifty-one percent black-owned company. The blacks are to have a fifteen percent share in the dunes mining project. While we were busy working with the International Rivers Network, the World Conservation Union, the Wild Life and Environmental Society, all our good acronym partners, the Aussies were spending nine months, same gestation period as the human ovum fertilised by a radiance survivor's sperm, negotiating this agreement which – confidently – now will allow to be granted from the Government a prospecting permit for the eighty-nine million rands, around eight million pounds, international enterprises may be quoted in many currencies, to proceed. That's the official-speak to express it, 'Allow to be granted'. A worthy incentive isn't a bribe, my Bra. No-one can disagree with the necessity for blacks to enter the development economy at a major level, fifteen percent is a good start? Thapelo gives a grand fanfaring laugh, for celebration or derision: is it yona ke yona or shaya-shaya, this bit of black empowerment? There's also the concomitant reality that a toll highway carrying the derived minerals and ilmenite (used in the fabric and the beauty business, cosmetic industries) to a smelter and processor in the city centuries ago named by homesick Europeans 'East London', might bring a weekly wage to replace the sacrifice, God's gift of a few crop fields, unique endemism, and twenty-two kilometres of sand dunes which used to be fished from instead of mined. Bring hi-fi systems and cars. Yes! Easy to sneer at materialism and its Agency seductions while existence within it has the luxury of dissatisfaction, the wilderness to oppose it.

Who's to decide.

This kind of research has no place in this room with two mates – we just happen to be earth-brothers if not blood-brothers – Thapelo and Derek with whom is shared what the self pursues as reality. She. Benni, it must be allowed, is the other reality. Berenice. Hers, chosen, or advised by its effectiveness in the finite. Get a life! The Agency admonishment.

This kind of subject is left in the garden.

In quarantine.

Thapelo tips his chair, boots lifted, rights it with the flourish of impact to the floor loud before them.

A summons. He senses danger; distraction.

Benni's soft hand on his cheek against the prickle of morning's beard wakes him, her Berenice voice coaxingly calls his name. Half-returned, half in the other world of sleep, can't help receiving the calm purpose with which the female, like any in the wild, approaches what must be a cataleptic ordeal; the reverse of the invasion of the body by demonic light, the contrary, a desertion by what has been tenderly part of it, feeding from a common life-blood. She slides the African robe over her belly, ready to go to a birth-place here in the city, a clinic not a hide under bushes, but the purpose of shelter for the event is the same. It's something that cannot be shared. At least she understands he is not one to be a spectator, present. He's not the man who massaged her feet at the event of the first child.

In the meantime.

The floods have subsided. During the waiting period Queen MaSobhuza Sigcau of Pondoland has told the press that employees of the sand dunes mining project were ordering people in the area to 'vacate' their homes because preparations to mine were beginning. They were given documents of agreement to sign; many are illiterate and some lost their cattle and sheep as a result of being forced to move. There have been different commands for this kind of thing. Juden heraus. Take your choice. And our country's signed, ratified the International Biodiversity Strategic Action Plan (what a mouthful, nearly as difficult to spit out as to carry out) – how's the Minister heading off to tell the World Convention we're going to allow a four-lane highway through one of the named hotspots of global diversity? You answer that one! The answer comes. Vuka Mister Minister! Get a life!… Well, at least we have to admit they've had to back down and allow an appeal against their go-ahead for it… Haai! – delaying tactics. Let the protestors get tired and fall asleep. Meanwhile. The ten dams? All quiet right now but such cosmic plans get shelved, not torn up. And the Australians? Still happy they're going to get the rubber stamp to take sixteen million tons of titanium minerals plus eight millions of ilmenite out of the dunes; sure-sure prepared to hang in there for it. The pebble-bed reactor? Needs something like ten billions – what's that in dollars, pounds, euros – from foreign investors to help out if it's to be built, but it's not abandoned – No way, my man! – - The 'feasibility' and 'safety' of it are being 'conitinuously evaluated by the relevant Government Department'. Voetsek, we don't want you. Read it aloud from the Stop Press edition. 'These were the harsh words from environmental supporters, a delegation of the Nuclear Energy Costs and the Earth Campaign gathered outside the British Trade Investment offices in Johannesburg today to hand over a memorandum denouncing British Nuclear Fuels as a "nightmare" investor in partnership with Eskom and the South African state-owned Industrial Development Corporation, a consortium to oversee commercialising of the pebble-bed modular reactor.' Meanwhile. The lapse of time medically decreed before the scan which would decide whether the body should again be irradiated, passed. All clear for the present; another scan, maybe, delayed for another decision.

The son has emerged to take on the world with all the necessary equipment, weapons – two arms, two hands, ten prehensile fingers, two legs, feet and toes (verify ten), the genitals which were already evident in the foetal scan, a shapely head and open eyes of profound indeterminate colour that are already reacting with the capacity of sight. The sperm of the radiant progenitor-survivor has achieved no distorting or crippling of the creation.

Destruction takes on many states of existence; on this one the predatory stare has gone out. Must invite Thapelo and Derek again for a couple of beers where there's new life confirmed.

Thapelo is first with exuberant confirmation of other news that had given off smoke signals to the waiting three, through their eavesdropping connections. Minister of Environmental Affairs, van Schalkwyk, has set aside (abandoned? a for real no-no? maybe) a decision made a year before this month of birth to construct the Pondoland Wild Coast toll road. And the Minister of Minerals and Energy, she's announced that the pebble-bed nuclear reactor is halted. 'Pending further environmental assessment'; yes – oh of course.

But what about the sand dunes, the titanium, the ilmenite for the pretty girls' makeup, my brothers!

Final licence of destruction must never be admitted, granted. That's the creed. Work to be done. Yona ke yona. This is it. Phambili. There's a half-triumphal burst of laughter to be shared.

Wet the baby's head! Derek toasts.