A Domestic Catalogue
Upon returning to a house “she thinks of as her own” a character’s entrance into the domicile of domesticity becomes something else entirely. Imagery becomes disconnected from emotional attachment to create a cataloguing of domestic sterility:
"By the time she comes in through the back door, a hundred and thirty-three minutes and twenty-two seconds have passed since she ran away. Four cars, including the long dark one, have departed, a single new one has arrived. The telephone has rung eighteen times, the doorbell twice, on one occasion because somebody has sent flowers that improbably turn up all the way out here. Twenty-two cups of tea, six mugs of coffee, three glasses of cool drink and six brandy-and-Cokes have been consumed.”
Apartheid
The fundamental lunacy of the South African system of Apartheid is made jarringly and abundantly clear in imagery lacking the usual political directness. The visuals describe nothing more politically charged than a city erupting in joy expressed through a mass of black faces. The punch line at the end becomes like a kick to the stomach:
“The view from the taxi window is a bit amazing. She doesn’t consciously know it but there is a somewhat festive air outside, because yesterday was a public holiday, Youth Day, nineteen years since the Soweto uprising, and today it’s the Rugby World Cup semi-finals, South Africa is playing France later, and the pavements throb and throng with bodies. Never did the middle of town look like this, so many black people drifting casually about, as if they belong here. It’s almost like an African city!”
The Inexplicable Object
Anton is going through his father’s bedroom, sorting through the remains of the lift he has left behind. He takes some money found stuffed behind socks, but then his eyes come to a rest upon on something he can only describe in the immediacy of the moment of discovery as an “inexplicable object”:
"He takes the cryptic thing from next to his father’s bed. Turns it over, sniffs at it, pulling in a faint, old smell of fire. A piece of shell, some reptile, probably a tortoise. Pa was always obsessed with the cold-blooded sort, not so good with the mammals, humans least of all. He puts the piece of shell down again and just then sees the shotgun. Mossberg pump action, inherited from Oupa, nobody else allowed to touch it, though who’d want to, blunt, ugly, charmless thing. Family heirloom, supposedly. Picks it up, holds it, feels the weight and substance. Real. Oh, yes. When you’ve claimed a man’s gun, you claim the man too. Law of the frontier.”
Amor
Amor is, arguably of course, the most interesting character in the entire story. She is often described in terms of being slow, but in an enigmatic way. One is never entirely on solid footing when it comes to getting a complete grasp of what is going on with her. But one is often given opportunity:
“The table stands in a modest, two-bedroomed house in the Berea area of Durban. Susan’s place. There’s a rootedness, a permanence, to the look of the house, the look of the life in it. In the lounge, where Amor sits down soon afterwards to call her sister back, the couch is an old one, well used, and the cushions on it are worn. Likewise the carpet and the pages of the books on the shelves. But nothing in this room belongs to Amor, the look of permanence has been borrowed too. She didn’t used to think about it but these days she does, more and more.”
