Not every chance is an opportunity. Sometimes a chance is just a waste of time.

Klein Jan, Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, Northern Cape, South Africa (source)

 

She doesn’t understand why he’s taking his wife’s death so badly, the woman has been dying for half a year now, he’s had ages to prepare for today. But Manie is unravelling, like the bottom of his jersey, she’s noticed him jerking at the thread.
(p. 17*)

She carries it away and goes in search of a needle and thread. If Rachel keeps such things. Kept. The mental correction is satisfying, like a stiff joint clicking into place. Rachel will always be in the past tense now.
(p. 18*)

In the same impassive way that Salome sweeps and cleans the house and washes the clothes of the people who live in it, she looked after Ma through her last illness, dressing and undressing her, helping her to bathe with a bucket of hot water and a lappie, helping her to go to the toilet, yes, even wiping her arse for her after she used the bedpan, mopping up blood and shit and pus and piss, all the jobs that people in her own family didn’t want to do, too dirty or too intimate, Let Salome do it, that’s what she’s paid for, isn’t it? She was with Ma when she died, right there next to the bed, though nobody seems to see her, she is apparently invisible. And whatever Salome feels is invisible too. She has been told, Clean up here, wash the sheets, and she obeys, she cleans up, she washes the sheets.
(pp. 19-20*)

She looks real, which is to say, ordinary. How would you know she is a ghost? Many of the living are vague and adrift too, it’s not a failing unique to the departed.
(p. 35*)

Only one thing on my mind since hearing about Ma, funny that, just how it works, Eros fighting Thanatos, except you don’t think about sex, you suffer it. A scratchy, hungry thing going on in the basement. Torment of the damned, the fire that never goes out. But still, despite bodily appetites, he feels that he’s chasing some emotion he can’t quite name. Might even be love, though that would surprise him. She’s given him comfort today, for sure. Yes, to lie a long time among her plump undulations, that would be peaceful.
(pp. 41-42*)

What do you think about them, that family?
Lexington hesitates, smiling broadly out of nervousness, to no effect. They are good to me, sir.
They are good to you, yes, yes. But what do you think about them?
No, I am not thinking about them, sir. I am only doing, not thinking.
The statement is untrue, but Lexington cannot answer truthfully. He senses that the minister wants something, but to give him what he wants might endanger his position. It is not always possible to please two white people simultaneously.
(p. 49*)

He loiters, his eyes going over the shape of Astrid’s body, especially her breasts and legs. He’s an old guy, forty at least, and not attractive, bald with bad skin, but she can’t help responding to his stare. Shifts from one hip to another, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Funny how you can always sense male attention, especially when it’s concealed, and she thinks that this old man wants to say something to her, he has a dirty word he wants to speak aloud, and part of her wants to hear it too.
(p. 56*)

Then they’re standing there with not much to add, and the big scene is over. His arrival merely a minor sensation in the end, the prodigal returning, a drama everybody has seen before. Boredom sets in quickly. You come back after long vanishment and the surface closes as if you were never gone. Family quicksand.
(pp. 68-69*)

She twitches the curtains around him, but not enough to block out the whole ward. Anton can see a black man in the next bed, bandaged up like a mummy. Verwoerd must be spinning in his grave, can’t believe they haven’t changed the name of the hospital yet. The man groans aloud from inside his wrappings, not quite a word, unless it’s in a foreign language, the language of pain. Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It’s just the living part we still have to work out.
(p. 69*)

Fred Winkler, eldest of the three brothers, has been working on Manie for a couple of hours already. All the basics done, the orifices cleaned out and corked up, to stop the leakage. There’s a lot of letting go at the big moment, same way you came into the world you make your exit again, incontinent and howling, but don’t tell anybody. Part of the evidence that has to be washed away, to conceal the crime. What crime is that? The crime of death. Nonsense, Fred, there is no crime, you are providing a service, that’s all. His late father, also Fred Winkler, who taught him and his brothers this business, being a mortician is a family sort of thing, who would do it otherwise, his father said to him long ago, You have to make them look peaceful. That’s what the family wants to see, that their loved one is at peace. Bullshit. What they really want to see is that their loved one is alive. They want to believe that Manie is only sleeping. It’s the family that wants to be at peace.
(pp. 84-85*)

You’re not to repeat any of it, she hisses through her fingers. Any of what I told you, not to anyone!
Of course not, Amor says. Why would I?
You can see she means it and Astrid is briefly calmed, but soon after they’ve arrived at the house she feels the need to withdraw to the bathroom to purge her inner turmoil. She really wants to turn herself inside out today. Poor, mistaken Astrid! You can’t puke up the thought which pains you most, namely that you and your sister have somehow changed places, and Amor is on a trajectory that by rights should be yours.
(p. 89*)

You understand, he says, people don’t always take what you give them. Not every chance is an opportunity. Sometimes a chance is just a waste of time.
Yes, she says. But a promise is a promise.
(p. 108*)

Something awful about being the messenger, you’re always tainted by the message.
(128*)

What do they want from him? What is family for? An interesting question, which Anton resolves to interrogate later in his journal.
(p. 152*)

Everything’s been happening for a while. That’s the trouble with the world, it’s not original, no surprises up its sleeve, it repeats itself like some old auntie with dementia. Same stories over and over, so tired of it.
(p. 156*)

Desirée doesn’t blame herself for much, she never has. The natural order, as far as she’s concerned, is that the world is there to try to please her, and she is there to feel disappointed by it.
(p. 165*)

He has a sweet, soothing smile, only partially obscured by facial hair, and it complements his voice, which reminds some women of a doctor’s bedside manner, and oftentimes that voice has got him further than just the side of the bed, though of course that was long ago, before he became so concerned with the spirit.
(p. 173*)

The dead are gone, the dead are always with us.
(p. 191*)

Amor in her bra on the roof. Middle-aged Amor in her bra on the roof. There she sits, at the centre of her story, not the same people she used to be, nor the ones she might yet become. Not old yet, but not young any more either. Midway somewhere. The body past its best, starting to creak and fail.
(p. 193*)

*according to my reader

Damon Galgut - The Promise (Europa, 2021)