‘I’ll go and pack some things for you,’ she said. ‘How long will you be away?’
He didn’t bother answering. Priscilla walked to the stairs, one heavy step at a time, carrying the dead weight of a failed marriage. Packing her husband’s bag took no time at all. She’d done it often enough. All she had to do was take the ironed and folded clothes from the cupboard and place them in the bag. There was a time when she had chosen his outfits with care, looking at which ties would go with which suits. Now she pulled off the first ties that came to hand and left the suits in the dry cleaner’s cellophane wrapper.
She walked out into the upstairs hallway and checked the girls’ bedrooms. They were both fast asleep. She envied their escape from a day of howling emotion and eternal loss. From where she was she could hear Josiah snoring, slumped on the sofa. She couldn’t be bothered to wake him and cajole him to bed. Those days were over.
Priscilla went into Lesedi’s room. Sitting on his bed she pulled his pillow towards her, settled it in her lap, and remembered the boy who would sit there, eyes staring at her in wide-open innocence, as she told him stories about his father and the other freedom-fighters. She lifted the pillow to her face and breathed deep, sucking in what remained of him. She had had such dreams for him. But the mother who had once known every crease and dimple on her child’s body also knew that the innocence that had been so endearing in the boy had been a weakness in the man.
She blamed herself. She had armed him with idealism, but that alone was not enough to withstand the greed and guile of the world around him. Looking back, she realised that she had tried to make of Lesedi all that she had once hoped his father would be. And she had succeeded. But what good was idealism when it lay beaten and dormant in a corpse? The thought filled her eyes with tears, not the reflexive kind she had shed in public earlier that day at the funeral, but a convulsive outpouring that came from somewhere deep inside her. Priscilla cried for her son, but she cried for herself, too, for she knew that a part of her had died that day.
She buried her face in the pillow and waited for the pain to dull. And when it did, it was replaced by something else: a mother’s desire to make sure her son had not died in vain.