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  So I start to speak in tongues like a worshipper in some charismatic church. Perhaps if I open my mouth and let loose a stream of Xhosa-sounding words, it will turn out that I can speak it after all. But the stream slows to a trickle, and the trickle dribbles to a halt. And the rape begins.

  Rape is the gift that keeps on giving. I was raped many times that evening at the farmhouse. Too many times to count. You’d think that would be something you would never lose track of. But I did—and I have also lost count of how many times I have been raped in my dreams. I don’t always remember the dreams, but I wake up with tears on my cheeks and pain between my legs, and I know it has happened again.

  It used to be every night. Now it’s not. Perhaps I am getting better.

  * * *

  Coetzee knew it was my father who interrupted the rape. It was widely reported in the media. A reporter for the campus newspaper, The Constantia Reporter, speculated about what it must have been like for a father to walk in on such a scene. She had a turn for the poetical. She was an English major with ambitions of joining John Coetzee’s creative writing programme.

  Her flight of fancy, lyrical as it was, did her no good. Coetzee retired as soon as the ink on his book deal was dry. He never took on another creative writing student, and now he has disappeared.

  What was it like for my father to find me in that position? The father in Coetzee’s book is a cold fish. He is undemonstrative and detached. His daughter discourages him from any of the mutual soul-searching he might want to undertake.

  The moment my father’s eyes locked with mine over the heaving shoulder of my assailant, they filled with pity.

  As a parent, it is widely understood, you would do anything to spare your child pain. You would transfer that pain onto yourself if you could. You feel homicidal rage towards anyone who hurts your child.

  My father was one of those traditional dads who joked about buying a shotgun when I grew up. He was suspicious of any boy who showed an interest in me. As I entered puberty and my body changed shape, he became awkward about physical contact between us. He would hug me sideways with one arm. If he knew I was menstruating, he wouldn’t hug me at all.

  My father has never been comfortable with me as a sexual being. If he could have kept me small and pre-pubescent forever, he would have done so. I know this doesn’t reflect well on him. His attitudes were patriarchal and outdated. They denied my agency as an adult, and as a person with control over my sexual choices. But that’s the way he was.

  What must have been going through his mind when he walked into the sitting room of the farmhouse to find me in the middle of a gang rape? My clothes were in tatters, having been torn from my body. My face and neck were covered in blood from the nicks they’d given me with their knives to make me more cooperative. My legs were splayed open, numb from having been held in an unnatural position for so long.

  The man rutting above me was finally finished, after sawing away for what seemed like an eternity. This was the moment my father walked in on.

  The little girl he had taught to walk, and to swim, whose hand he had held while crossing the road, was undergoing the most profound violation a person could endure. He stood motionless, paralysed with shock. Then he flung himself forward and shouted. They fell back at once in the face of this paternal ire.

  I rolled over and clutched the shreds of my T-shirt together, not to hide my breasts from my attackers, but to hide them from my father. I tried to raise myself onto all fours, but my legs were thick and stupid. They felt as though they belonged to someone else. All except my hips, where a distant, screaming ache was emerging.

  My arms trembled too much to hold me up. I fell on my face twice, adding to the bleeding and bruising already there. By the time my father came back in, having scattered my assailants, I had given up on trying to rise without assistance. I lay on my side, tears leaking onto the floor, distressed at my father’s distress, wishing I could have spared him this.

  He walked past me without a word.

  It’s over, I thought. I have disgraced myself. But he was fetching a blanket, which he threw over me in silence.

  After a long while, he said, “You must wash yourself, girl. You must get their stink off you. I will run you a bath.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  I wanted to scrub myself forever. I wanted to flay the skin from my bones. A clean skeleton, washed pristine by the tides, and brought forth onto the shore. Those are pearls that were her eyes.

  He shuffled to the bathroom. I laid my cheek on the scratchy sisal carpet and watched his feet retreating down the passage. Swish pof, swish pof went his sandals. His ankles were thin and brittle, tendons jutting, bones stretching the skin thin. I saw age in my father. At sixty-eight, he wasn’t all that old, but there was mortality in the papery skin and angle of bone.

  He will never recover from this, I thought. I have tipped my father over middle age and sent him rolling towards death.

  I heard the pounding of water filling the bath and saw steam billow into the passage. Good. The hotter the better. Let me boil myself. No trace must remain. The steam had an acrid smell that tickled my nostrils and caught at the back of my throat. It got thicker and thicker until I couldn’t see down the passage. Yes, good. A cauldron to cleanse myself in.

  The steam coalesced into a darker patch. My father burst out of the murk.

  “Fire! Fire!”

  Yes, fire. A cleansing fire.

  “I thought there was time, but there isn’t. We must go now.” Go? Go where?

  His hands scrabbled at my shoulders, plucked at my neck.

  “Get up, child. Get up. The house is burning. We have to go.”

  I want to stay. He can’t lift me. I’m too heavy. He will have to leave me here. The fire will cleanse me.

  But a thousand red devils roared into the room and I was on my feet, clutching the blanket around me, running for the life I thought I no longer wanted.

  CHAPTER 4

  Nothing is ever all bad, not even rape.

  A few weeks later, I missed my period. I had always been irregular, so I didn’t think much of it. Then coffee started to taste like metal and my sense of smell heightened to the point of pain. I could smell layers of odours everywhere, always with an underlying stink of rot. My stomach was unsettled most of the time. I didn’t throw up, but I wanted to.

  I missed another period. And another.

  At four months, I went to have it confirmed. The obstetrician squirted jelly on my slightly protruding abdomen and slid his sensor over it. The monitor leaped into life. For a moment, it looked like a pot of thick marmalade boiling on the stove. Then the image resolved itself into a hydrocephalic baby.

  Of course, the child of such a coupling would be a monster.

  The obstetrician said nothing. He moved his sensor this way and that, freezing the image occasionally to take measurements. I wondered how bad the abnormality was. Was he steeling himself to tell me the truth, or had the delivery of bad news become routine to him?

  “Everything looks fine. The four chambers of the heart are present and correct. The nuchal layer is within normal limits. The spine is well developed, with no signs of spina bifida.”

  “But the head. Is there anything that can be done?”

  “The head is normal. What is troubling you about it?”

  “It’s so big.”

  “That’s normal for Baby at this age. Their heads are quite large in relation to their bodies.”

  “Can you tell the sex?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t sure if you wanted to know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s a boy.”

  At the next scan, I was told that the bloodwork was normal. At the next, he was lying with his head up, but that could still change, right up until the last minute. At the seven-month scan, his head was down, and his buttocks were tuck
ed under my diaphragm. At the eight-month scan, my placenta was looking good.

  I was well throughout the pregnancy. Better than well. Everyone said I was glowing. I was the picture of health. My father said I had a self-absorbed, placid look. One day when I was picking vegetables for dinner at the farm, he said I looked like a peasant. He thought I belonged to the soil, and that my child would belong to the soil too. That made me feel peaceful and grounded, as though I had atoned for the sins of the white man in South Africa. I had taken the grievous act of colonialism upon my body and atoned for it with my rape. I had refused to name my attackers because I knew it was right to stay silent. The punishment was mine to endure alone, and now I was reaping the blessings that came after.

  At nine months and two days, the baby was born after a tenhour labour. He was a beautiful boy with wise, brown eyes. An old soul, everyone said. Something within me healed when I held him in my arms for the first time. Mother Nature saw to that.

  It’s you, I thought. Of course it is. Everything happens for a reason. Nothing is ever all bad.

  He was a peaceful, joyful child. He slept well and fed well. I nourished him with my own body and he thrived. He slept in my bed, always content, never crying. Every time he smiled at me or reached up and touched my face, my wounds healed a little more.

  At eight months, he crawled. At twelve months, he walked. At thirteen months, he started to talk. Mama. Mama. There was no one for him to call Dada. Which one of them had fathered him? I had no way of knowing. Sometimes it felt as though they all had. As though their sperm had fused inside me to create this child that was an amalgam of them all. He had been born out of that terrible night. We had created him together.

  His skin was brown, and his hair was curly and soft. Strangers on the street came up to tell me how beautiful he was. A modelling agency tried to scout him. He could read before he started nursery school. The teachers told me he was a prodigy, that he belonged in a programme for gifted children. Their eyes lit up when he arrived for school each morning. He brought joy wherever he went.

  Today, he is the light of my life. He is the reason I wake up in the morning. The reason I have the strength to go on. He has coalesced all the meaning in my life into one focal point.

  More than that, he represents the future of South Africa. Born out of violent conflict, he represents peace and reconciliation. Black anger and resentment collided with smug white neocolonialism, and he was the result. The best of both cultures. A blending of everything that is good and hopeful in this country.

  * * *

  That didn’t happen.

  I took the morning-after pill. I took it so fast my hand was a blur of motion as I swallowed the tablets. The police were trying to take a statement and the doctor was trying to do a rape kit, but all I was interested in was how fast I could get my hands on Plan B. I didn’t know I had up to seventy-two hours to take it. I thought it literally had to be taken the morning after.

  I think even if I had known, I would still have wanted to take those pills straight away. The thought of anything taking root inside my body was an abomination to me. It would have felt like a cancer, not a baby. It was a demon and I was one of the Gadarene swine. I would have done anything, anything at all, to cast it from my body.

  The pills did not agree with me, especially in combination with the antiretrovirals I had to take as well. Within two hours, I was vomiting violently. The doctor told me there was every chance I had vomited up the pills. She made me take them again to ensure their effectiveness. Then she thought I’d probably had a double dose as I ran the full gamut of side-effects, from the common to the virtually unheard of. Vomiting, diarrhoea, exhaustion, migraine and stomach cramps, spotting, severe abdominal pain, and vertigo: I had them all.

  It was as though whatever was trying to implant in me was resisting being cast out.

  Then there was a long, tense time during which I waited for my period to start. I knew it should start within three weeks of taking the pills—if I weren’t pregnant. If anything, it should come a little earlier than normal. Mine made me wait the full three weeks. Just as I was about to phone the doctor, it started. I was safe.

  If it hadn’t started, I would have had an abortion. That was clear in my mind. I never for one second considered keeping any foetus that might have resulted.

  Fiction-Lucy not only fell pregnant, she kept the baby.

  In John Coetzee’s book, her pregnancy was a blessing that made up for the rape. So convincingly did he describe her gravid state that many of my friends and family thought I must be pregnant, too. Total strangers agreed. When no baby came, they believed I must have had an abortion. They didn’t approve. My almost-forgotten social media accounts were flooded with people condemning me for being a baby killer.

  They flung Bible verses at me. They bombarded my timelines with blood-soaked photos of abortions. I glimpsed pathetic little bodies in sterile buckets as I flicked through the images, deleting them one by one.

  Then they moved on to what I deserved for having aborted my child. Images of women being gang-raped with my face Photoshopped over theirs became a daily sight—crime-scene photos of women having been brutally and bloodily murdered, now wearing my face.

  Right about the time that John Coetzee was being nominated for his first major literary award, a man started taking photographs of me going about my daily life and posting them online, just to prove that he was watching me and knew where I lived. I went to the police. Thanks to their sensitivity training, they assigned a woman officer to take my statement. She gave me a lecture about how wrong it was to have aborted my baby.

  I told her I hadn’t aborted any baby. She wanted to know why I wasn’t pregnant in that case. I said not all sexual encounters ended in pregnancy. She was sceptical. These were vigorous young men who had taken me, she said. Not the weak, pallid creatures I was accustomed to coupling with. This would definitely have caused pregnancy. I told her I had taken the morning-after pill, and she said that was just as bad as abortion.

  * * *

  Do I blame John Coetzee for creating a fictional child for me? One that I had to take the blame for aborting?

  No, of course not. I am a doctoral candidate in English literature. Well, I was. I am now a deferred doctoral candidate. The external examiner wanted changes made that I have not got around to implementing.

  The theoretical underpinnings of my thesis were predicated on the intertextual conversations between life and literature. Not only is there no text in my classroom—and no Fish in my text—but there is nothing outside the text either. It makes no sense to talk about the author’s intention, when the author, and his or her life, are merely texts feeding into the text that exists on the page.

  My rape was nothing more than a text that John Coetzee chose to feed off for his novel. How could I blame him for that? A student of literature with my level of sophistication did not boggle for an instant at the dialectic involved. I could understand it and make peace with it for the simple reason that I was never at war with it.

  * * *

  Do I blame John Coetzee for creating a fictional child for me? One that I had to take the blame for aborting?

  Of course I do. I blame him every day. The harassment I put up with would never have occurred if he hadn’t written about me, and if his book hadn’t become so ubiquitous. Disgrace is that rare thing—the literary novel that is also popular and widely read, even by people who don’t usually read fiction. He turned my rape into a spectacle and me into a public figure.

  People thought I was fair game. That I had somehow chosen to put myself in the public eye to be commented on and criticised. An astonishing number thought I must have been paid for my role in Coetzee’s book. They still do. No amount of protesting or demurral can convince them that I haven’t profited from the book. A disturbing number of these people are related to me. They ask for handouts at family gatherings.
They send me emails asking me to help put their child through university now that I am rich.

  I don’t understand why Coetzee did what he did, and I will never be at peace with it.

  CHAPTER 5

  Did I benefit from Coetzee’s book? Yes, I suppose I did. As South Africa’s most famous rape victim, I get invited to speak on panels all the time. These aren’t the kind of invitations you get when you are an impecunious graduate student. I’ve had enough of those to know the difference. Those invitations ask you to speak at a conference that stretches across two or three days. At most they might pay for your airfare, but often not. Your accommodation and board are never included, and there is no honorarium. In return for your intellectual capital, they will promise you “exposure.” You will take up these offers again and again because you need to attend a certain number of conferences each year to fulfil the conditions of your bursary.

  South Africa’s number-one rape victim does not get treated so shabbily. These days my invitations to speak come complete with a return air ticket, accommodation at a three-star hotel, all meals provided, and a respectable honorarium. As a former colleague of mine remarked, it was almost worth getting raped for. He grinned as he said it, looking sideways at me, sure I would enjoy his edgy humour. I almost grinned back. My cheek muscles wanted to stretch into their reflexive man-pleasing smile. I stopped them just in time.

  People say stupid things—things they don’t necessarily mean. If they publish them on social media, it can cost them their jobs. My colleague would have been fired if he had tweeted that remark instead of saying it out loud. The public shaming would have ruined his life.

  I am immune to that kind of disgrace. There is nothing I can say that is bad enough to cancel out the horror of what happened to me. My words and my behaviour can always be excused as a symptom of my PTSD.