Talion by Beyers de Vos

Author:Beyers de Vos
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781485903499
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2018-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

20

Mr October stands at the kitchen sink. She walks past the kitchen, on her way out.

‘Going to Frennie’s?’

She rolls her eyes, and nods curtly. She’s wearing a new jacket: denim, expensive.

‘Where did you get that?’

‘Nowhere.’

‘What happened to the window?’ he asks. And the money in my closet, he wants to add. But doesn’t.

‘I broke it earlier. Sorry.’

‘Has anyone else been in the house today?’

‘No, Pa.’

‘Okay.’

‘Bye.’

He walks towards the dining room, stopping in front of the framed portraits of his parents. He carefully touches the dust mark where someone ran their thumb along the drawing of his mother.

He doesn’t think about his parents very often; hasn’t thought about them in years. His parents had been plain people. Quiet. His mother did what mothers did and his father did what fathers did, as far as he could tell. They lived in Eersterust, out to the west of the city. A small, conservative community. He still owns the house they lived in, although he hardly ever goes there now. And why would he? He hated the place, the poverty of it, the oppression.

He takes his phone from his pocket and dials. The woman on the other end of the line doesn’t even let him say hello before she says, ‘She’s here, Abraham. She’s safe. I’ll drop her again later. Don’t worry.’ He hangs up. The same phone call he makes every night. Every night that he isn’t in his car following her around. Making sure she can live her life on her terms.

The portraits of his parents stare at him impassively. He should have thrown them out ages ago. Is this what his daughter would think one day, thirty years from now, standing in a dining room of her own? Would she look up suddenly as she was setting the table and think about a father she had long forgotten? Would he be nothing but a rough slash in her memory, too?

Her mother would always be with her, because her mother was taken so violently, so sentimentally.

How would he be taken?

How would all this end?

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