He put his hand lightly on her shoulder and said, “You look frightened, Jane.”
“I’m thinking I have to go back.”
She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, he allowed his hand to slip off her shoulder, and she stood up.
“But I haven’t come, Jane.”
His eyes were on her. She bent down to pick up her pants, heedless of the hairiness and open flesh, her secret once again, that she was exposing. And, bending down, straightening up, she had in one movement pulled her pants on, covering herself where she was untanned and naked.
He said, “Your mouth, Jane. You have a sweet-mouth too. As soon as I saw you I knew you had a sweet-mouth. We must christen it.”
He continued to look at her. She pulled on her trousers; stepped into her shoes; buttoned her blouse, put on the Moroccan necklaces, and shook her hair into place.
She said, “I think I have to go.”
He sat on the edge of the bed; his erection was subsiding. He said, “You have to go. But you know what you are now. You’ll come again for more.”
“I’ll ring for a taxi.”
“You’ll be lucky if you get one to come here. But you don’t have anything to worry about. Massa is coming for you. Massa isn’t going to let you go.” He stood up; he had shrunken. “We’ll walk across to the Grange and meet massa.”
The telephone was on the chest of drawers but she didn’t lift it. She didn’t leave the room. She stood where she was, between the chest of drawers and the door, and waited for him to dress. The pillow was as she had left it, pressed down and damp; the stained sheet had patches of damp. He dressed slowly. When, lifting his chin, he did the top button of his Mao shirt, he said, “The shirt you don’t like.” She responded in no way.
When they went out into the living room, the cigarette in the blue-tinted ash tray had almost burnt itself out, a disintegrating cylinder of ash. The glass of water on the glass-topped table was where she had put it down. She picked up her lighter and bag and followed him out to the porch. The sunlight on the terrazzo was dazzling. He didn’t shut the front door.
They walked out into the heat and the openness. No trees grew between the house and the wall of bush. The road was lightly rubbled: stray pebbles, loosened bits of tarred gravel, clods of earth. The road ended abruptly, cracked asphalt giving way to a dirt path through a dried-up field, overgrown and then flattened by the drought. The path led to the wall of bush.
Jimmy said, “Massa will be waiting for you. A short walk. Ten minutes.”
She didn’t speak.
He said, “We’ll also meet Bryant. You remember Bryant?”
“I don’t want to see Bryant.”
“But he has something for you. Bryant has something for you.”
The green wall of bush, which from a distance had seemed solid, threaded with the slender white trunks and branches of softwood trees, became more pierced and open as they got closer to it.
Jimmy said, “Bryant and I are not friends now, Jane. You’ll help to make us friends.”
It was cooler in the bush. The ground was dry, covered with dead leaves, and spotted with big patches of sunlight. There seemed at first to be no path, just an intermittent disturbance in the dead leaves; and for the first time since she had followed him out of the bedroom she hesitated. He touched the top of her arm and moved the tips of his fingers down the short sleeve of her cotton blouse. Lightly, then, he held her arm and led her on. Ants’ nests, of dried mud, were like black veins on the white trunks of softwood trees. The wild banana was in flower: a solid spray of spearheads of orange and yellow that never turned to fruit, emerging sticky with mauve gum and slime from the heart of the tree.
Jimmy said, “They say there’s always a snake at the bottom of that tree. So be careful. See but never touch. It’s the golden rule of the bush.”
They were now in the middle of the bush, no light and openness behind them, trees and trees ahead of them.
“So you’re leaving us, Jane. That was why you came. Because you’re leaving. Do you have a nice house in London?”
“I’m used to it.”
“Everything nicely put away, I bet. Is it near Wimbledon?”
“No. It isn’t near Wimbledon.”
“Suppose it burns down while you’re away?”
“It’s insured.”
“You’ll just build another?”
“I suppose so.”
He suddenly squeezed her arm and said, “Smell it, Jane!”
She stopped and looked about her.
He said, “You can smell it?”
“What?”
“Snake.”
“I can’t smell anything.”
“It smells of sex, Jane. Bad, stale sex. It smells of a dirty cunt.”
He released her arm. The bush was becoming brighter; they were approaching openness. And soon, through the trees, the clearing on which the Grange stood could be seen: an expanse of brown in a hard white light. There was a latrine smell, which became sharper. The latrine, with corrugated-iron walls and roof and a sagging, open corrugated-iron door, stood on a rough concrete foundation just outside the bush, in direct sunlight. Brilliant green flies buzzed about it and within it, striking the corrugated iron.
They had come out into the back yard of the Grange: no shade, the bush laid waste, the land sterile. The main building blocked a view of the road and of the fields beyond the road. The corrugated-iron roof glittered; the concrete-block walls were in shadow. A roll of wire netting, old scantlings, a junked metal icebox, white enamel basins: this was part of the debris at the back. A low lean- to shelter, its palm thatch sloping down almost to the ground, was fixed to the back wall; below the thatch there was black shadow. Scattered about the ground were back yard structures and relics of back yard projects: a wire-netting pen, torn in places; chicken coops of wire netting and old board; a dry pit, the dug-out earth heaped up on one side beside a load of concrete blocks.
There was a boy in the shadow of the lean-to. He was sitting on the ground in the angle of the thatch and the ground. His knees were drawn up, and his head and arms rested on his knees. He seemed asleep. His white canvas shoes were yellow with dust; his washed-out jeans were dusty; his elbows were scratched and there was dust on his black arms.
“You remember Bryant?”
Jane said, “I don’t remember him.”
“He remembers you.”
The boy raised his head. His face was twisted and he wore the pigtails of aggression. His eyes were red and blurred, one lid half stuck down. He stood up. He ran back into the lean-to, and when he turned to face them he had a cutlass in his hand and he was in tears.
He cried, “Jimmy! Jimmy!”
Jimmy locked his right arm about Jane’s neck and almost lifted her in front of him, pulling back the corners of his mouth with the effort, and slightly puffing out his shaved cheeks, so that he seemed to smile.
He said, “Bryant, the rat! Kill the rat!”
Bryant, running, faltered.
“Your rat, Bryant! Your rat!”
Her right hand was on the arm swelling around her neck, and it was on her right arm that Bryant made the first cut.
The first cut: the rest would follow.
Sharp steel met flesh. Skin parted, flesh showed below the skin, for an instant mottled white, and then all was blinding, disfiguring blood, and Bryant could only cut at what had already been cut.
He cried out, in tears, in pain, in despair, “Help me, Jimmy!”
Jimmy, responding, tightened his grip around the neck. He scarcely felt the neck; he felt only his own strength, the smoothness of his own skin, the tension of his own muscles. He concentrated on that smoothness and tension until she began to fail. She grew heavy; his strength became useless; and as he felt her fail a desolation began to grow on him. And then there was nothing except desolation.