The Promise by Damon Galgut

Author:Damon Galgut [Galgut, Damon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2021-02-15T22:00:00+00:00

ASTRID

She gets back from the hospital to an impatient message from Astrid on the answering machine. Really, really wish you’d get a cell phone, like a normal person. Call me, I want to tell you something.

Amor can hear in her sister’s voice that the something isn’t urgent. It’s a vain or self-important something, and though it matters to Astrid, Amor doesn’t have the strength for it now. Later. She’ll have that conversation later.

There’s a certain time of day she tries to keep for herself and that’s the hour or two after her shift ends. Morning or evening, the ritual is the same. She fills the bath and lights a candle on the edge of it. Then she takes off her uniform, item by item, always careful to do it in the right order, because if she gets the sequence wrong she has to dress again and start from the beginning. Lying in the warm water, while the light in the room changes, she can often forget herself for a while. Or become herself so completely that everything else ceases, including the hard, long day behind her. But she’s unsettled this evening, something jangled at the heart of it all.

Susan comes in later. A heavyset woman with short black hair, maybe. By then Amor is out of the bath and making supper in her dressing gown. They kiss, without much heat.

While they’re eating at the kitchen table, Astrid rings again. Querulous tones in the next room. Where are you, damn it? Been trying all day. Call me back, I have something to tell you.

Aren’t you going to pick up? Susan says.

Amor shakes her head. A heaviness even in the small gesture. I’ll ring her later.

What’s wrong?

I don’t know.

Did you lose another patient?

Yes. But that’s not unusual, is it? Not if you work in the HIV ward.

No, Susan says. Then it wouldn’t be so unusual.

She takes Amor’s hand and holds it while they eat. They don’t talk more but it’s as if a conversation is taking place, one they’ve had many times before. Susan used to work with Amor in the same ward but gave it up a couple of years ago, because it depressed her. These days she’s a health consultant to a big company. She doesn’t think Amor’s job is good for her, doesn’t understand why she keeps on doing it, even when the cost seems obvious.

Most of their conversations are in the past by now. They’ve reached that stage in proceedings and both of them know it and don’t speak of that either. But there is still great softness in two hands linked together on a tabletop.

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.

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