Free Ten Days by Gillian Slovo

Marcus, she knew well, but there were also many with whom she had only a nodding acquaintance and some she had never met. They were united by what had happened, and as the crowd parted to let the two women through, Cathy was greeted by a smile here and an embrace there.
    Such a warm inclusivity in this most terrible of times. Yet in the midst of it, Ruben’s father, who was standing at the other end of the room, looked very much alone.
    â€˜The police didn’t bother to tell us he was gone.’ He had been saying this when Cathy had first arrived early that morning, and he was still saying it. ‘Our friends had to bear that strain. Nobody else cares. His death didn’t merit more than a small mention, and only in one newspaper.’
    Reverend Pius shifted to one side to make room for Cathy on the black settee that was jammed against a heater. Just as in Cathy’s flat, the heater was on and the room was boiling. No one seemed to notice, or if they did they didn’t seem to care.
    â€˜When we went to the police station to ask them what had happened, they didn’t even offer to seat us,’ Ruben’s father continued. ‘We can’t say nothing, they told us, except that someone phoned them to complain about Ruben’s behaviour. We told them: that cannot be. Everybody knew Ruben. Nobody would have rung the police, not without first asking us. All the man reply is: you have to speak to the IPCC. He wouldn’t come out from behind his bulletproof glass and look us in the eye and speak to us, human being to human being. We are the ones who have suffered such great loss, but he was the one to feel unsafe.’
    â€˜Come now, Bernard.’ Ruben’s mother patted the place beside her. ‘Come, look.’
    Her husband came to the settee, but as she turned the page of the album, he wasn’t really looking. She stopped and reached up to take his hand and squeeze it. He squeezed hers back. A beat as they looked at each other, and then she dropped her hand and turned another page.
    â€˜He was such a happy child.’ She pointed at a photograph of the young Ruben, circa five years old. He was kneeling on a patch of grass, holding a football and smiling up into the lens. ‘Always wanting to know everything. Full of love.’ She blinked back tears and carried on scrolling through a detailed record of the growing boy.
    It was hard not to be drawn into the pleasure that she took in each of the images of her son, her fingers occasionally dropping to the page to stroke his face. It was even harder not to see her agony and the adjustment demanded of her to come to terms with what had happened. Her tenses continually had to be fast-forwarded into a present in which she could not yet bring herself to believe. ‘This friend,’ she pointed to a photo of Ruben with another boy, ‘is a favourite who he sees . . .’ a pause, ‘saw almost every week. He is here now.’ She pointed to a youngish man who was sitting, solitary, on a hard chair. Noticing her pointing finger, he dropped his head and covered his eyes with a hand. ‘He’s a good boy,’ she said, before going back to the album. She sped up, pages turning almost carelessly, creating a flickering blur out of Ruben’s childhood until at last she stopped.
    It was a photo of an adolescent Ruben. Facing the camera. No smile or other welcome. A blank and uncompromising stare.
    Ruben’s mother’s eyes had filled with tears. ‘He lost his bearings,’ she said. ‘All of a sudden he went somewhere in his head and we found we could not follow where.’ She turned another page. ‘We were visitors only on occasion.’ And there was the adult Ruben, the one Cathy had known and the one above the mantelpiece, and he was smiling. ‘Sometimes, with the medication, then he would come back to us.’
    â€˜To us, perhaps, but not to himself.’ This from