Personal remarks can’t offend someone dead-beat in the back. ‘How d’you think such a young man comes to be without front teeth?’
She giggles whisperingly and keeps her voice low, anyway. ‘Well, you may not believe me if I tell you…’
‘Seems odd… I suppose he can’t afford to have them replaced.’
‘It’s — how shall I say — a sexual preference. Most usually you see it in their young girls, though. They have their front teeth pulled when they’re about seventeen.’
She feels his uncertainty, his not wanting to let comprehension lead him to a conclusion embarrassing to an older woman. For her part, she is wondering whether he won’t find it distasteful if — at her de-sexed age — she should come out with it: for cock-sucking. ‘No one thinks the gap spoils a girl’s looks, apparently. It’s simply a sign she knows how to please. Same significance between men, I suppose… A form of beauty. So everyone says. We’ve always been given to understand that’s the reason.’
‘Maybe it’s just another sexual myth. There are so many.’
She’s in agreement. ‘Black girls. Chinese girls. Jewish girls.’
‘And black men?’
‘Oh my goodness, you bet. But we white ladies don’t talk about that, we only dream, you know! Or have nightmares.’
They’re laughing. When they are quiet, she flexes her shoulders against the seat-back and settles again. The streets of a town are flickering their text across her eyes. ‘He might have had a car accident. They might have been knocked out in a fight.’
They have to wake him because they don’t know where he wants to be set down. He is staring at her lined white face (turned to him, calling him gently), stunned for a moment at this evidence that he cannot be anywhere he ought to be; and now he blinks and smiles his empty smile caught on either side by a canine tooth, and gulps and gives himself a shake like someone coming out of water. ‘Sorry! Sorry! Sorry madam!’
What about, she says, and the young man glances quickly, his blue eyes coming round over his shoulder: ‘Had a good snooze?’
‘Ooh I was finished, master, finished, God bless you for the rest you give me. And with an empty stummick, you know, you dreaming so real. I was dreaming, dreaming, I didn’t know nothing about I’m in the car!’
It comes from the driver’s seat with the voice (a real Englishman’s, from overseas) of one who is hoping to hear something that will explain everything. ‘What were you dreaming?’
But there is only hissing, spluttery laughter between the two white pointed teeth. The words gambol. ‘Ag, nothing, master, nothing, all non-sunce—’
The sense is that if pressed, he will produce for them a dream he didn’t dream, a dream put together from bloated images on billboards, discarded calendars picked up, scraps of newspapers blown about — but they interrupt, they’re asking where he’d like to get off.
‘No, anywhere. Here it’s all right. Fine. Just there by the corner. I must go look for someone who’ll praps give me a rand for the taxi, because I can’t walk so far, I haven’t eaten nothing since yesterday… just here, the master can please stop just here—’
The traffic light is red, anyway, and the car is in the lane nearest the kerb. Her thin, speckled white arm with a skilled flexible hand, but no muscle with which to carry a load of washing or lift a hoe, feels back to release the lock he is fumbling at. ‘Up, up, pull it up.’ She has done it for him. ‘Can’t you take a bus?’
‘There’s no buses Sunday, madam, this place is ve-ery bad for us for transport, I must tell you, we can’t get nowhere Sundays, only work-days.’ He is out, the plastic bag with the radio under his arm, his feet in their stained, multi-striped jogging sneakers drawn neatly together like those of a child awaiting dismissal. ‘Thank you madam, thank you master, God bless you for what you done.’
The confident dextrous hand is moving quickly down in the straw bag bought from a local market somewhere along the route. She brings up a pale blue note (the Englishman recognizes the two-rand denomination of this currency that he has memorized by colour) and turns to pass it, a surreptitious message, through the open door behind her. Goodbye master madam. The note disappears delicately as a tit-bit finger-fed. He closes the door, he’s keeping up the patter, goodbye master, goodbye madam, and she instructs—‘No, bang it. Harder. That’s it.’ Goodbye master, goodbye madam—but they don’t look back at him now, they don’t have to see him thinking he must keep waving, keep smiling, in case they should look back.
She is the guide and mentor; she’s the one who knows the country. She’s the one — she knows that too — who is accountable. She must be the first to speak again. ‘At least if he’s hungry he’ll be able to buy a bun or something. And the bars are closed on Sunday.’
Keeping Fit
Breathe.
Breath. A baby, a chicken hatching — the first imperative is to breathe.
Breathless.
Breathe! Out of this concentration, in which he forgets even the rhythm of his feet, is a bellows pumped by the command, the admonition, the slap on the bottom that shocks the baby into inhalation — comes his second wind. Unless you go out like this, morning and evening, you never know what no one can remember, that first discovery of independent life: I can breathe.
It came after twenty minutes or so, when he had left behind houses he had never entered but knew because they were occupied by people like himself, passed the aggressive monitoring of dogs who were at their customary gateposts, the shuttered take-away, prego rolls & jumbo burgers, and the bristling security cage of the electricity sub-station. These were his pedometer: three kilometres. Here where the grid of his familiar streets came up short against the main road was the point of no return. Sometimes he took a circuitous route back but this was the outward limit. Not quite a highway, the road divided the territory of Alicewood, named for the daughter of a real estate developer, from Enterprise Park, the landscaped industrial buffer between the suburb and the black township whose identity was long overwhelmed by a squatter camp which had spread to the boundary of the industries and, where there was vacant ground, dragged through these interstices its detritus of tin and sacking, abutting on the highway. Someone — the municipality — had put up a high corrugated metal fence to shield passing traffic from the sight.
At six o’clock on a Sunday morning the four-lane road is deserted. A wavering of smoke from last night’s cooking fires hangs peacefully, away on the other side, the sign of existence there. In the house he has left, a woman, three children, sleep on unaware that he has risen from her bed, passed their doors, as if he has left his body in its shape impressed beside her and moved out of himself on silent running shoes. The exhausted tarmac gives off a bitumen scent that is lost in carbon monoxide fumes during the week; he is quietly attracted, at his turning point, to mark time a few paces out on the road, having the pounded surface all to himself. It is pleasant as a worn rubber mat underfoot.
He began to run steadily along it. Now no landmarks of distance; instead, memory in a twin stream started to flow in its own progression, the pumping of his heart sending blood to open up where in his brain cells flashes of feeling and images from boyhood were stored at one with the play of fragments from the past week. Tadpoles wriggling in his pocket on his way home from school and the expression of irritation round his accountant’s mouth when he disputed some calculation, the change in the curve of a girl’s buttocks as she shifted her weight from one leg to another standing in front of him in a bank queue on Friday and the sudden surfacing of his father’s figure bending about in a vegetable garden, looming, seen at the height of a child who has done wrong (run away, was it?); the same figure and not the same, with an arthritic leg laid out like a wooden one and the abstracted glance of someone able now only to move towards death, the scent of the girl in the bank as her sharp exhalation of impatience sent the message of her body to his — all this smoothly breathed, in and out. In the flowing together of contexts the crow of a cock in the city does not come incongruously but is more of a heraldic announcement: day, today, time for ghosts to fade, time to return. The cock-crow sounds from over there behind the fence, a place which itself has come about defying context, plan, definition, confusing the peasant’s farmyard awakening with the labourer’s clock-in at the industries close by.