A risk to own anything…

At last, blessedly, the key turns in the lock. By the time he has the door open, Lucy has turned her back on him. She is wearing a bathrobe, her feet are bare, her hair wet.

He trails after her through the kitchen, where the refrigerator stands open and food lies scattered all over the floor. She stands at the back door taking in the carnage of the dog-pens. `My darlings, my darlings!’ he hears her murmur.

She opens the first cage and enters. The dog with the throat wounds is somehow still breathing. She bends over it, speaks to it. Faintly it wags its tail.

`Lucy!’ he calls again, and now fir the first time she turns her gaze on him. A frown appears on her face. `What on earth did they do to you?’ she says.

`My dearest child!’ he says. He follows her into the cage and tries to take her in his arms. Gently, decisively, she wriggles loose.

The living-room is in a mess, so is his own room. Things have been taken: his jacket, his good shoes, and that is only the beginning of it.

He looks at himself in a mirror. Brown ash, all that is left of his hair, coats his scalp and forehead. Underneath it the scalp is an angry pink. He touches the skin: it is painful and beginning to ooze. One eyelid is swelling shut; his eyebrows are gone, his eyelashes too.

He goes to the bathroom, but the door is closed. `Don’t come in,’ says Lucy’s voice.

`Are you all right? Are you hurt?’

Stupid questions; she does not reply.

He tries to wash off the ash under the kitchen tap, pouring glass after glass of water over his head. Water trickles down his back; he begins to shiver with cold.

It happens every day, every hour, every minute, he tells himself, in every quarter of the country. Count yourself lucky to have escaped with your life. Count yourself lucky not be a prisoner in the car at this moment, speeding away, or at the bottom of a donga with a bullet in your head. Count Lucy lucky too. Above all Lucy.

A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. there must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them.

Lucy has come up behind him. She is wearing slacks and a raincoat now; her hair is combed back, her face clean and entirely blank. He looks into her eyes. `My dearest, dearest … ‘ he says, and chokes on a sudden surge of tears.

She does not stir a finger to soothe him. `Your head looks terrible,’ she remarks. `There’s baby-oil in the bathroom cabinet. Put some on. Is your car gone?”

`Yes. I think they went off in the Port Elizabeth direction. I must telephone the police.’

`You can’t. The telephone is smashed.’

She leaves him. He sits on the bed and waits. Though he has wrapped a blanket around himself, he continues to shiver. One of his wrists is swollen and throbbing with pain. He cannot recollect how he hurt it. It is already getting dark. The whole afternoon seems to have passed in a flash.

Lucy returns. `They let down the tyres of the kombi,’ she says. `I’m walking over to Ettinger’s. I won’t be long.’ She pauses. `David, when people ask, would you mind keeping to your own story, to what happened to you?’

He does not understand.

`You tell what happened to you, I tell what happened to me,’ she repeats.`You’re making a mistake,’ he says in a voice that is fast descending to a croak.

`No I’m not,’ she says.

`My child, my child!’ he says, holding out his arms to her. When she does not come, he puts aside his blanket, stands up, and takes her in his arms. In his embrace she is stiff as a pole, yielding nothing.

Excerpted from `Disgrace’, Random House (distributed by Rupa&Co); 8.10 pounds