Beautiful Screaming of Pigs by Damon Galgut

You don’t know what it means, because of this. This .’
    Here – she showed me afterwards – he leaned forward and pinched her hard. For the rest of the trip she carried a bruise, a tiny blue butterfly pinned to her neck. She let out a cry
of pain and shock, and then he burst out of the room, slamming the door behind him. His footsteps jolted away down the stairs. For a while afterwards I couldn’t move; I stayed pressed to the
wall.
    When I went out into the passage the fat lady called to me from downstairs. ‘Is everything all right up there... ?’
    ‘Yup,’ I said. ‘We’re all fine.’
    I went in to my mother. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, crying into a tissue. She was dressed in her underwear, her feet crossed over each other on the floor. She looked lost and somehow
very young. I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shoulders; she leaned her head on me.
    ‘Fucking bastard,’ she said.
    ‘He’s upset. He’ll calm down.’
    ‘He’s upset. What about me?’
    ‘You’re upset too.’
    ‘You’re right, I am. I’m very upset. This isn’t going to work out, Patrick.’
    ‘Don’t you think so?’
    ‘Let’s go out for a drive,’ she said. ‘I have to think.’
    We drove eastward, out of town. The tar went on for a while, then we came to a gravel road going off on one side. We followed it, leaving the houses quickly behind, and were
engulfed again by the desert. Not much further on we came to another border post. Again, the two soldiers, guarding a wasteland of dunes. ‘Don’t you get lonely here?’ my mother
asked them.
    ‘ Ja, mevrou ,’ one said. He seemed a bit startled at the question, or perhaps it was at my mother’s tear-swollen face. ‘Where are you going? To the Moon
Landscape?’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly where we’re going.’
    As we drove on, I said, ‘What is it, this moon landscape?’
    ‘I don’t know, but it sounds right for this afternoon.’ She fished out her tissue again. ‘Oh, Patrick,’ she said, ‘men are such bastards.’
    ‘I know. I don’t like them much either.’
    ‘Well, we don’t have to worry about them now. We’re going to the moon.’
    Half an hour later, we came to a blue-grey terrain of gorges and peaks, spilling away as far as the eye could see. There was a hissing of wind as we got out of the car and started down into the
foothills. Underneath that thin sound, the silence was immense, and neither of us felt like talking. As if by mutual consent we wandered away from each other. I followed a canyon of crumbling black
stone and in two minutes I was utterly alone. I sat down for a while on a rock. In the blasted emptiness, little threads of life followed their course. I saw a tiny cactus, wearing a single yellow
flower like a cockade. At my feet, perfectly preserved, the white carapace of a beetle. I broke it under my heel.
    I walked on again. I kept to the shade at the foot of the hills, but from time to time I saw my mother off in the distance, stalking along the long spine of a ridge. She liked to be high up,
visible and dramatic, back-lit by the sun. At one point a tall cliff rose up where I was walking and I lost sight of her completely for a while. When the cliff dropped away, there she was, naked on
the top of a nearby hill. The hill was an odd conical shape, and she had dropped her clothes in bright patches as she climbed up. Now she was turning round and round, arms outspread, no doubt with
her eyes closed. A soft pink plant, twirling its tendrils, sending signals into the stratosphere. Far up above her, like a dream she was having, a tiny jet unzipped the sky.
    She saw me and yelled across, her voice indistinct: ‘Hey, Patrick! Get undressed!’
    I shook my head and sat down against a boulder to wait for her. After ten minutes or so, it was too hot, and the novelty had worn off, and she started to descend. The clothes went back on, item
by item, and then she was on level ground, crunching