Page 6 - In a different register - Sample

She said the photos were taken not far from where we met for the first time in the Kalk Bay bookshop after our long correspondence on Realism following my lecture series. She reminisced: You were standing diffident, absorbed by a book to the centre-right. Oh hullo, you said, glancing at me sideways when I came up to you. We went to a restaurant overlooking the Bay. That day I was flustered because I had locked the keys in the car and had to ask you to take me home to get the spare. I imagined that you would think it a ruse for something more intimate. I saw the whole incident of you being The Professor, the keys, the car, the struggle to gain access to my house, the physical discomfort of needing to relieve myself, the embarrassment of it all, feeling I had to abruptly cut off any offer of help from you and yet sensing the overture of a touch I longed for, as an action replay of significant aspects of my life, a symbolic representation much as a dream reveals so much in one small complete vignette that has layers of meaning. I had two recurring dreams from probably the age I am in the photos: There is black man trying to get into the house through my bedroom window. My room is as it always is in the darkness with the Blue Gum Tree in the unkempt tumble of a vacant plot behind the house silhouetted against the night sky. I keep my eyes riveted on the window in terror waiting for the moment he will enter but I always wake up before he does. In the other: I am floating in a clear sky suspended under a vaguely anthropomorphic cloud. It is claustrophobic.As you can see, Albert, I have returned to my roots. My grandmother played the organ at Holy Trinity in St James. In his old age whenever we passed that church my father would say, that is the church where your grandmother played the organ. On cold winter mornings she would warm her hands in hot water before she went off to practice. I was actually born in Johannesburg, next greatest city after Paris, at the Queen Victoria under the sign of Virgo, which has the hieroglyphShe pointed to it on the back of one of the photos.She showed me a studio one of her mother as a baby perched on an animal skin