Patricia Wiley Character Analysis

She doesn’t know what possessed them to plant those trees. To protect them from the wind, the sun, the view? It hardly matters now. Soon the trees will be cut down and cleared away, along with everything else. The people who come to live here afterwards will know nothing about any of them, and maybe it will be better that way.

“Are we dead yet?”

“No.”

“You will tell me when we’re dead?”

“If I can, Roo, I will.”

She has many strategies to silence him. One of them, and often the most effective, is wit.

“So you’re off tomorrow,” he says, already knowing the answer.

“Straight after breakfast.”

“Without a backward glance, I hope.”

“In my experience, backward glances only crick the neck.”

The problem of what to do with the past would have to carry on in the future.

He has a shameful secret: even today, he’s unaccustomed to the freedom he’s been given to drive around the country and go wherever he likes. Whenever he sits down in a restaurant or cinema, surrounded by white people, a part of him still expects someone to ask him politely to leave. It is a thing he could never mention to his daughters or even his wife. They would laugh at him and accuse him of making it up. 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.

As she speaks, she recalls the times he used to tease her, when teasing—no doubt learned in part from her—was the mode between them. At the time, their world seemed to permit little else: it didn’t even allow them to touch. But now there is no affection in this echo of their old style. Today everything between them seems to bristle with innuendo and hurt.

“If I remember myself correctly,” he says, “I would have wanted to eat that fish.”

“But you were a gentle child, always wanting to please.”

He lets out a sound like laughter and turns away.

“Don’t you mean always wanting to please you?”

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.

So naturally he remembers that day they went to fish. It was a thing that was impossible to forget: him learning to cast on the front lawn, weaving the line back and forth through the air, back and forth, and her perched up there on her stoep, ordering him about and laughing at him like he was her toy, her toy monkey, with a battery up its arse.

“Of course, you would have forgotten what a car right out of the box looks like, or smells like. The freshly stitched leather, the air of wealth that breathes out of the air conditioner. My car is like a racehorse—skittish, responding to my every thought, my lightest touch. But you wouldn’t know anything about that. Not these days. What with that wreck of yours still sitting there under its tin roof.”

Like a fat toad, he wants to add, at the heart of his life.

“What exactly do you want me to be afraid about?”

“What you have always been afraid about: the truth.”

“The truth?”

She says this as though the truth is a concept only children believe in, like dragons and houses made out of bread and cake.

But it is a nascent anger he is beginning to feel concerning Beauty—not pity. What did the girl expect by staying on in this place, especially after what happened to Grace? To remain on the farm was to condone what had happened here—and that was one thing he himself was never prepared to do. At the time, of course, Beauty can’t have been older than thirteen, but she has had a good twenty-five years since that moment to develop some self-respect.

He’s never understood the workings of the house. The fact is it was never his house, but hers, handed down from her father. While he was there on good behaviour. Which is why he thinks he chose bad behaviour.

He was a fool for coming here. But what did he expect? A miraculous transformation? People like her are still sitting in their houses. People like him are still looking in.

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.

“You know what I can’t forgive?”

“Sorry?”

“It is that you wanted to protect your seats.”

“My what?”

Each time, the house is less built. Is it that he is going further back in time? Is he going backwards the more he runs? If so then when will he stop? What is he aimed at? He stands on the large concrete slab in the middle of nowhere and ponders this, and eventually he sits.

It is not so much that he is dead. It is more that no one appears to have been born. They still have their whole lives ahead of them. Nothing that needs to be undone has yet been done.

“The first thing I saw on getting back from boarding school,” he says, “was a black puppy, playing in the garden, chewing a rubber ball to bits. The second was Grace, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. As our love grew, that dog in the garden was growing too. My love and your fear, they grew together. And now, I can no longer separate them. When I think of one, I see the other. I see that double thing, that creature—the beast. Circling the garden, dripping blood.”

“No one knows what I saw.”

Beauty seems to say this with the knowledge that this statement, for the first time, is no longer true: two others now know what she saw. What she saw no longer belongs to her: it will become a part of the general story that is used to define her sister.

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.

For the past six months, he has had a lover: a white woman with a daughter who attends the same school as his girls. She is wealthy and lives alone on a hill that overlooks the old city centre of Johannesburg. Her house is made almost entirely of pale blue glass, and yet she remains to him opaque. They are dipping their toes into the forbidden, as one might try out a new drug.

He doesn’t even particularly like his lover—as a person, that is—but at the time he didn’t have the right words to repel her. Nor did he have the inclination, in spite of not quite liking her: he was too curious, even flattered, to turn away.

It may be his dream house—this house transformed almost beyond recognition—but it still comes from her. Perhaps too much 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.

Nothing has ever come back to her. Everything around her—and much that has been happening in the country at large has only confirmed this—has only ever held evidence of loss or decay.

But recently she has also been observing all the new buildings starting up out of the earth, and the green crops of weeds appearing in the most improbable places. A few days ago, when she and Bheki were driving into the village, she noticed a cloud of yellow butterflies hovering around the weeds and spilling over across their path. Bheki drove on through them as though they weren’t there, and neither of them said a word about it, but in that instant Patricia saw that there was an altogether different way of viewing the world: as an inexhaustible source of renewal and growth.

“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.”

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. Looksmart said it was time for black people to help each other. That the time of getting help from the whites is finished. And he agrees with this. 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.

As they labour along the road, the image of the black puppy keeps finding its way back into her head: the way it would run along the fence of the dog-run after the girls going toward the dairy, stumbling over its paws, while she sat back and laughed at it.

“Beauty – please. You have to tell me the truth.”

“But he said they loved each other desperately,” she says. “He said she was good.”

“Good?”

The world hangs in the air like the word ‘truth’: simply as another way of presenting oneself to the world.

“She had nothing,” Beauty continues, “and uBass—he paid her. Sis’ Grace did not think about good or not good. Ubezama ukuphila.”

“She was trying to survive?”

Patricia has to repeat the phrase in English in order to accept it fully.

“Mesis,” she says, “you must find the truth for yourself.”

She doesn’t know what possessed them to plant those trees. To protect them from the wind, the sun, the view? It hardly matters now. Soon the trees will be cut down and cleared away, along with everything else. The people who come to live here afterwards will know nothing about any of them, and maybe it will be better that way.

“Are we dead yet?”

“No.”

“You will tell me when we’re dead?”

“If I can, Roo, I will.”

She has many strategies to silence him. One of them, and often the most effective, is wit.

“So you’re off tomorrow,” he says, already knowing the answer.

“Straight after breakfast.”

“Without a backward glance, I hope.”

“In my experience, backward glances only crick the neck.”

The problem of what to do with the past would have to carry on in the future.

He has a shameful secret: even today, he’s unaccustomed to the freedom he’s been given to drive around the country and go wherever he likes. Whenever he sits down in a restaurant or cinema, surrounded by white people, a part of him still expects someone to ask him politely to leave. It is a thing he could never mention to his daughters or even his wife. They would laugh at him and accuse him of making it up. 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.

As she speaks, she recalls the times he used to tease her, when teasing—no doubt learned in part from her—was the mode between them. At the time, their world seemed to permit little else: it didn’t even allow them to touch. But now there is no affection in this echo of their old style. Today everything between them seems to bristle with innuendo and hurt.

“If I remember myself correctly,” he says, “I would have wanted to eat that fish.”

“But you were a gentle child, always wanting to please.”

He lets out a sound like laughter and turns away.

“Don’t you mean always wanting to please you?”

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.

So naturally he remembers that day they went to fish. It was a thing that was impossible to forget: him learning to cast on the front lawn, weaving the line back and forth through the air, back and forth, and her perched up there on her stoep, ordering him about and laughing at him like he was her toy, her toy monkey, with a battery up its arse.

“Of course, you would have forgotten what a car right out of the box looks like, or smells like. The freshly stitched leather, the air of wealth that breathes out of the air conditioner. My car is like a racehorse—skittish, responding to my every thought, my lightest touch. But you wouldn’t know anything about that. Not these days. What with that wreck of yours still sitting there under its tin roof.”

Like a fat toad, he wants to add, at the heart of his life.

“What exactly do you want me to be afraid about?”

“What you have always been afraid about: the truth.”

“The truth?”

She says this as though the truth is a concept only children believe in, like dragons and houses made out of bread and cake.

But it is a nascent anger he is beginning to feel concerning Beauty—not pity. What did the girl expect by staying on in this place, especially after what happened to Grace? To remain on the farm was to condone what had happened here—and that was one thing he himself was never prepared to do. At the time, of course, Beauty can’t have been older than thirteen, but she has had a good twenty-five years since that moment to develop some self-respect.

He’s never understood the workings of the house. The fact is it was never his house, but hers, handed down from her father. While he was there on good behaviour. Which is why he thinks he chose bad behaviour.

He was a fool for coming here. But what did he expect? A miraculous transformation? People like her are still sitting in their houses. People like him are still looking in.

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.

“You know what I can’t forgive?”

“Sorry?”

“It is that you wanted to protect your seats.”

“My what?”

Each time, the house is less built. Is it that he is going further back in time? Is he going backwards the more he runs? If so then when will he stop? What is he aimed at? He stands on the large concrete slab in the middle of nowhere and ponders this, and eventually he sits.

It is not so much that he is dead. It is more that no one appears to have been born. They still have their whole lives ahead of them. Nothing that needs to be undone has yet been done.

“The first thing I saw on getting back from boarding school,” he says, “was a black puppy, playing in the garden, chewing a rubber ball to bits. The second was Grace, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. As our love grew, that dog in the garden was growing too. My love and your fear, they grew together. And now, I can no longer separate them. When I think of one, I see the other. I see that double thing, that creature—the beast. Circling the garden, dripping blood.”

“No one knows what I saw.”

Beauty seems to say this with the knowledge that this statement, for the first time, is no longer true: two others now know what she saw. What she saw no longer belongs to her: it will become a part of the general story that is used to define her sister.

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.

For the past six months, he has had a lover: a white woman with a daughter who attends the same school as his girls. She is wealthy and lives alone on a hill that overlooks the old city centre of Johannesburg. Her house is made almost entirely of pale blue glass, and yet she remains to him opaque. They are dipping their toes into the forbidden, as one might try out a new drug.

He doesn’t even particularly like his lover—as a person, that is—but at the time he didn’t have the right words to repel her. Nor did he have the inclination, in spite of not quite liking her: he was too curious, even flattered, to turn away.

It may be his dream house—this house transformed almost beyond recognition—but it still comes from her. Perhaps too much 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.

Nothing has ever come back to her. Everything around her—and much that has been happening in the country at large has only confirmed this—has only ever held evidence of loss or decay.

But recently she has also been observing all the new buildings starting up out of the earth, and the green crops of weeds appearing in the most improbable places. A few days ago, when she and Bheki were driving into the village, she noticed a cloud of yellow butterflies hovering around the weeds and spilling over across their path. Bheki drove on through them as though they weren’t there, and neither of them said a word about it, but in that instant Patricia saw that there was an altogether different way of viewing the world: as an inexhaustible source of renewal and growth.

“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.”

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. Looksmart said it was time for black people to help each other. That the time of getting help from the whites is finished. And he agrees with this. 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.

As they labour along the road, the image of the black puppy keeps finding its way back into her head: the way it would run along the fence of the dog-run after the girls going toward the dairy, stumbling over its paws, while she sat back and laughed at it.

“Beauty – please. You have to tell me the truth.”

“But he said they loved each other desperately,” she says. “He said she was good.”

“Good?”

The world hangs in the air like the word ‘truth’: simply as another way of presenting oneself to the world.

“She had nothing,” Beauty continues, “and uBass—he paid her. Sis’ Grace did not think about good or not good. Ubezama ukuphila.”

“She was trying to survive?”

Patricia has to repeat the phrase in English in order to accept it fully.

“Mesis,” she says, “you must find the truth for yourself.”