The evening tips over the windowsill, onto the carpet, spreads. Helen turns off the television, returns to the kitchen and stirs the onion with a wooden spoon. She flicks the hotplate to its maximum.

'I was watching that,' Harold grumbles.

She sighs, adds the celery and chopped carrots and sautés until golden brown. She adds the tomato, skinned and diced, then the mushrooms. She hears Harold's shuffled feet to the bathroom, then the light switch.

The space in the room frightens her. Everything is too wide, so open. She adds the peas, water, tomato sauce, celery salt and sugar. The faucet creaks when she turns on the tap at the sink. Hot is cold and cold is hot. For eleven years...Harold comes in. He can't find the remote. Look in the crack between the pillows, she tells him. It sometimes falls there when you're not looking. She's aware of a heaviness in her heart- the awareness of gravity.

They sit down to eat. Harold is propped up on the couch with a dinner tray hovering above his thighs. A serviette is tucked into his checkered gown, tucked where it overlaps beneath the hollow at the base of his throat, between the clavicles. She crosses her ankles, uncrosses them, recrosses them with the left one on top.

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Her mother's cousin Merle with the yellow teeth, would trill, Have I got a nice boytjie for you! and Helen would pale and raise her eyes to heaven. Much to the horror of their future children, Helen and Harold were related before they married. Indirectly. Harold's aunt had married Jeffrey Hurwitz, and Jeffrey's mother and Helen's grandfather were brother and sister. So Fanny, Helen's mother, and Jeffery, Harold's uncle, were first cousins.

They met when Helen was still at school. She was seventeen in 1962 and completing her matric. Harold was older, twenty-one, studying at the university's medical school. He was taken with her, but she was seeing someone else at the time.

Their paths crossed a second time during her Honours year in psychology. She was doing her clinical internship in the psychiatric ward of the hospital where Harold was working as a houseman. He would keep her entertained for hours with anecdotes of his experiences there: A large man with multiple fractures to his skull reported hearing voices during the daytime. What kinds of voices? Harold asked, overjoyed to be treating his first schizophrenic, to which the man replied, Calling Dr. Rosenthal, Calling Dr. Rosenthal. Over the loudspeaker. A stout officer with one kidney, an enlarged liver, a distended abdomen and oedematous extremities was brought in by his girlfriend, although he felt perfectly fine. No complaints, sir? No complaints. Not one? Not one. Nothing? Nothing. Everything normal? Everything's normal, except- Except, except? Except that I don't sleep at night. Hallelujah. I'm a night watchman. And Helen's favourite: The catatonic woman, who had been standing in the same position for about a year, who took one look at Harold and said, Don't huck me a chainik.

Their courting was an impassioned one. There was a lot of breaking up and making up. Once on a separation Helen spotted Harold at the far end of her grandparents' Rosh Hashanah table. What are you doing here? she asked him, mortified. Your grandmother invited me and I came, was his simple response. They would quarrel, Harold would storm out, Helen would shout, I never want to see you again! and he'd phone a week later with, How's it? How's it going?

They married in the spring of 1968. Helen wore a gown of ivory silk, with ivory lace wrapped around her upper body, forming a collar around her neck and ending in two bubble sleeves over her forearms. Harold's mother's hair was coiffed in an orange puff, the two flowergirls wore lilac, Harold wore a bowtie, and Helen's four brothers were the pole holders.

She'll never forget how, at the celebration following the ceremony, her grandmother's demented sister, Ida, started screaming, Harold, you donkey! You donkey! and had to be carried out.

Once they were married, Harold became restless. Helen had just submitted her Masters dissertation and he felt the time ripe for them to see the world. He penned an application for a university in the States with the intention of specializing in cardiothoracic surgery. Helen thought the idea absurd: the division of cardiotharacics in the institution in which he'd studied was well and good, and in the country where the first human heart transplant had just been performed. But Harold was granted late enrollment and in early January of the year following their wedding the Rosenthals headed for the East Coast.

They stayed in a motel complete with neon light-bulbs and a view of Dunkin Doughnuts for the first month, and afterwards took a downstairs apartment in a large house in the suburbs. Helen began work at a local children's clinic. She would rise at dawn, prepare coffee for Harold, prepare breakfast, put on all the clothes that she owned at once, and then sit in the car and wait while he scraped the sleet off the windshield.

Soon she became ill. She was pregnant with their first child and there was bleeding, a threatened miscarriage. The physician ordered bed rest and Helen would lie around, feeling useless, watching the dust collect all around her. Too exhausted to cook, she would ask Harold to get take-aways on his way home from work, usually pizza. She would lift her head from the pillow and say, Please Harold, put it on a plate.

She begged him for them to return home, and he begrudgingly transferred the remainder of his internship.

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Well all his fancy Western medicine couldn't save him now, she thinks with some satisfaction. She takes the chicken out of the freezer to defrost.

Harold is on the floor fixing a roller-draw that's broken. He's jamming the screwdriver into the unhinged wheel with no appreciable skill, believing himself to be doing God's work. He's sprawled out, legs splayed, belly drooping. His body has grown more and more peculiar over the years, she thinks. Not unlike a potato on sticks. Or like one of those avocado pear pips that he insists on balancing on toothpicks in a glass of water in the hope that one day it will shoot a root and they will be able to plant it in the garden and grow an avocado tree.

She rubs the chicken portions with oil. They're having Chutney Chicken and Bananas.

The skinniness of his legs is exaggerated by the perpetually rising hemline of his shorts. He traipses around the flat in shorts invisible to the naked eye, a grey t-shirt, slippers, and his gown. His beloved gown- drenched in yoghurt, covered in fruit stains, with bits of chewing gum hanging off it, post-its stuck on it, and an aroma of coffee around it.

With the expanding waistline, the atrophy of his limbs, and the disappearing shorts, came the narrowing of Harold's diet to its current menu of, for breakfast: raw oats with one tablespoon ground Miracle Seed Mix, five or six almonds, five or six blueberries, and a fat-free, unflavoured yoghurt (from his store in the refrigerator in the garage); for lunch: two grain biscuits, half a carton of cream cheese (from his store in the refrigerator in the garage), and an apple or a carrot; and then Helen's spectacular dinners.
She combines the salt, curry and cinnamon and rubs over each chicken portion. She combines the honey, lemon juice, chutney and mustard and pours the mixture over the chicken. She places the roasting dish in the oven to bake and then pages through the cookbook: Upside Down Chicken Pie, Barbequed Chicken, Chicken with Zucchini and Tarragon.

She takes her tea to the computer and googles tarragon. Tarragon n. a perennial herb native to the Northern Hemisphere.

There's a thump in the kitchen. Harold's dropped the drawer onto his toe. She hears him cussing, cursing to himself, then cursing her, 'Jesus, Helen, why does nothing work around here? It seems like just as I've finished fixing something, it breaks again. And what are all these magazines doing on the counter? They've been here for weeks!'

In the months leading up to his heart attack, Harold's short-term memory had become so poor that he began to carry a ballpoint pen and a wad of post-its around with him at all times. There were notes on the dashboard, notes on the breadboard, notes on the toilet flush. When he forgot to leave notes, he bought a small black dictaphone and would record himself driving to work taking notes.

Lately, he'll deliberately plant a variety of items (CDs, paperclips, prestik) in various locations around the apartment. If the marked item should remain unmoved for more than twenty-four hours, he'll shriek, See, I told you so!

She punches 'Harold Rosenthal' on the keyboard and clicks search. Eight hits: Harold Rosenthal, well-respected cardiothoracic surgeon, resident at...Harold Rosenthal, Honorary Professor...Harold Rosenthal, pioneer of the Rosenthal Technique, an intricate...blah, blah, blah. Donkey. She takes a sip of tea, types 'Helen Rosenthal', and gets twelve hits: Helen Rosenthal, one of the founding members of the Johannesburg Parent and Child Counseling...Helen Rosenthal, draft research paper with the running title...Helen Rosenthal, world famous figure-skater...cake decorator from Tel-Aviv...homeless shelter owner for abandoned dogs.

They swop places, passing each other in the passage. Harold pretends not to see her and then trips on the telephone cord. She carries on walking.

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On returning from abroad they moved into a block of flats on Princess Place street. On spring day, September first 1970, Alex was born. Helen was twenty-four then, only just coming into her adulthood. Her parents were critical: She was feeding the child too much, She wasn't feeding him enough, Why wasn't she feeding him by clockwork?

Harold was wonderful in helping her to find her footing. And Alex was such a sweet child. He would fret a little, but was mostly easy-going and jovial. But at times she felt overwhelmed. She told Harold that she felt cooped up and would like to have a proper garden. He said that they couldn't afford to move then, and she took a locum job.

When Alex was twenty-two months, they moved out.

Joshua was born on the tenth of September, five years after the birth of his brother. Alex had gotten used to the exclusivity of his mother by then and was horribly put out by having to share her with a sibling. Harold felt equally excluded and an unshakable alliance formed between himself and the older boy.

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For Harold's sixty-fifth birthday, she makes his mother Hilda's Orange Chicken. It takes her two days. First she coats the chicken pieces with flour. Then she sautés together an onion cut into half moons, one green pepper- deseeded and diced- and two stalks celery. To this she adds the chicken, a chicken stock-cube dissolved in one cup of boiling water, two teaspoons soya sauce, and a cup of orange juice.

When replacing the Knorrox cubes, she notices Harold's stock-on-hand on top of the cupboard: packets and packets of rolled oats, a tupperware of nuts, a supply of Miracle Seed Mix, stale Ryvita, Provita, Crackerbread, unopened Corn Thins, green tea, Nescafé Select, dried mango. Pathological hoarding.

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When Joshua was three years old, Alex spray painted him entirely silver to resemble Ziki Zikombot, the cartoon robot who beeped and grunted and did about nothing else. Alex had a few paint cans leftover from a school project and no one was at home. Joshua agreed and stripped down to his undies. When his younger brother was lock, stock and barrel metallic, Alex realized that he was going to get into trouble. He threw Joshua into the bath and started scrubbing. He scrubbed, the smear got into Joshua's eyes, and then the howling started. Helen returned from the supermarket and opened the front door to a shiny, bobbing bullet screaming blue murder in the entrance hall.

That same year Joshua knocked out one of his two front teeth. They had just come back from visiting Harold's sister overseas and Joshua was en route to his parents' bedroom in the pitch black after a nightmare, when, disorientated from the time lag, he collided with his desk, full impact. His left front incisor detached with its root and floated to the floor. As compensation for the loss, they bought him a parrot, an African Grey. Alex named it Ziki (after Ziki Zikombot. Joshua agreed). They kept Ziki downstairs in the living room. The parrot would call, Hullo Cooks! whenever Helen entered, but would squawk hysterically every time that he saw Harold. After a year of, Hullo Cooks! and, Brrring brrring after the telephone, Harold took Ziki to the aviary.

On the morning of Joshua's sixth birthday, the enamel of his permanent left front incisor appeared on the rose-coloured tissue of his gum, and it snowed. People ran out of their houses, rang their neighbours, ran in circles: Snow in Jo'burg! Snow in Jo'burg! It hasn't snowed here since 1956...

Alex had just turned eleven and informed his parents of his intention to become religious. Helen had to buy him a separate set of crockery and cutlery. By Yom Kippur he wasn't speaking to anybody. But five days later he demanded that his father build him a sukkah for the Feast of Tabernacles. He hung crayoned paper Magen Davids, lemons that kept falling through their loops, and heart-shaped signs saying, I love Hashem. He shunned the family and sat in his construction the whole day, drinking Coca-Cola and saying Kaddish for their heathen souls.

When he was twelve-and-a-half, he spray painted himself entirely silver to resemble the definitive rock star, Ziggy Stardust.

Joshua was less experimental and Alex didn't understand him. He didn't have Joshua's forcefulness, his ability to survive.

Although Joshua could be volatile, his relationship with Harold was temperate for the most part. They neither agreed nor disagreed. Joshua had a certain perception of his father and Harold wasted his time upholding it or defending it. He recognized some of himself in his son and was both touched and repelled at the same time.

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The seasons are changing again and Helen is feeling adventurous. She decides to try her hand at Myrna Rosen's Oriental Duck. She presents the meal to her husband on her mother's porcelain serving platter, but Harold is unimpressed, 'We're Jewish Helen, for God's sake, we don't eat duck. I'm dying, this is no time for jokes.'

As the days lengthen, his condition worsens. He's developed scar tissue in place of the dead myocytes from his attack and it's preventing his heart from functioning properly.

Towards the end, he's so shtupped up on painkillers and anti-inflammatries that he starts to hallucinate, calling Helen 'Venus' and calling her at all hours from the study. Harold, where are you? In the study, and then the receiver would drop.

She finds him on the kitchen floor at midnight, eating ice-cream with a serving spoon. Together they watch the brunfelsia flowers fade to white.

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She never felt trapped. Harold was her husband, she loved him, but they were different - different people - separate in ways that were important.