Beautiful Screaming of Pigs by Damon Galgut Read Free Book Online

long-fingered hand to my arm, filled abruptly with
earnestness of her own. ‘Let me tell you something, Patrick. In this world you can have anybody you want, absolutely anybody, if you just focus exclusively on them and keep at it. Don’t
waver, don’t let your attention slip. People will come round to any idea, even an idea they hate, if you persist. Persist. Don’t ever give up.’
    So Godfrey persisted. Everybody in the class knew; by then the tension was palpable. And when she eventually gave in and invited him to her room for an ‘extra lesson’, what followed
on was inevitable. The sex that first time was stupendous, she said. ‘Like an astral fuck, Patrick, if you know what that feels like. He banged my head against the wall at one point. I still
have the bump – here, give me your hand.’ And she made me feel the oval lump on the back of her skull, like a secret badge.
    Things calmed down a little after that, but still their affair was intense. She was leaving soon, so time was limited. On top of that, liaisons between staff and students were illicit, so all
their encounters were furtive and charged with danger. They coupled in cars or out in the open air sometimes. There was always a rough edge to it, a touch of the violence of that first time.
    ‘What do you mean, violence?’ I said cautiously.
    ‘Well, not violence , really. Not like you think. I just mean... he’s not soft. He never kisses me, for example.’
    ‘Never?’
    ‘No. And he won’t let me lie close to him afterwards. He’s quite cold. It’s hard to get any feelings out of him. But that’s his background, you know. The kind of
life he’s led.’
    When she got back from her time up north, she was full of new energy and enthusiasm. I could sense it from afar, in the letters she sent me up on the border. She didn’t tell me about
Godfrey – not till I returned home – but she was full of that new talk about being in harmony with the continent. And when she did eventually give me the full story, she wanted me to
believe that sleeping with Godfrey ‘was a political act’.
    Despite all this nonsense, she did look very happy. There was a radiance in her face that I hadn’t seen before. That she felt so good made me feel good in turn. I was partaking vicariously
in this elemental connection; this contact she’d made with the earth. After the military twilight I’d recently been through, I also needed union with Africa. I didn’t understand
her esoteric jargon, her talk of belonging and peace, but I liked seeing my mother in this state, and I didn’t question it too much.
    I also didn’t believe she would see him again. I knew her too well, and how her big passions faded quickly away. He was a radiant idea, but after he’d phoned for a few weeks she
would get bored, meet someone else, and this particular phase would be past. So I happily joined in her plans to go back up to Windhoek to see him, never thinking for a moment that it might
actually happen. It was just talk and fantasy, nothing real. But after a year, a year and a half, had gone by, the phone-calls were still coming, and the talk was still the same. And even so, when
the first free elections were due, and my mother declared that there could be no more fitting time to go back up to Windhoek, I still didn’t entirely believe her.
    It was only now – now that we were actually here – that the idea had become fact. Maybe this was true for her as well as for me. Thousands of other people had come here for the
elections, for the first true day of freedom, but we were here to see him.
    While my mother was in the bath I sat on my bed, the light off, watching the under-lit spectacle of the township through the window. It was a scene you would never find in any
upmarket white suburb: the dogs running around, the little groups of people in the street, the dirt and drunkenness – the raw vitality of it all.
    My mother took a long time to get ready. When she