There was a smell of burning, and the faint intoxication of rotting oranges from the dustbins. I walked closer to the level line offences, trailing the fingers of my left hand lightly across the corrugations so that they rose and fell in an arpeggio of movement. I thought of water. Of the sea — oh, the surprise, the lift of remembering that there was the sea, that it was there now, somewhere, belonging to last year’s and next year’s two weeks of holiday at Durban — the sea which did something the same to your fingers, threading water through them … like the pages of a thick book falling away rapidly ripply back beneath your fingers to solidity. — The sea could not be believed in for long, here. Could be smelled for a moment, a terrible whiff of longing evaporated with the deeper snatch of breath that tried to seize it. Or remembered by the blood, which now and then felt itself stirred by a movement caused by something quite different, setting up reactions purely physically like those in response to the sea.
“Helen? Where you go-ing—?” A child with her hair in curlers hung over the fence, standing on an old packing case. A tiny kitten whose eyes were not yet open nosed the air mewing from her tight hand.
“Somewhere,” I said, not looking back.
“Aren’t you going to bioscope?”
I had passed. The back of my head shook slow vehement denial. “Where you go-ing?” the child shouted. “Somewhere!” I shouted, down the end of the road, now. In the gum plantation that bordered the Mine property I came to a stop beneath one of the firm trunks and stood patiently peeling off the curling bark. It was tough, fibrous and dry to my tugging, and it came away with a crackle and a tear, leaving a smooth gray surface soothing beneath my palm. The trunk was hard and cool, like the pillars at the library. I sat down on a stone that had a secret cold of its own and began to pull off the scab on my knee. I had been saving that scab for days, resisting the compelling urge just to put the edge of my nail beneath it, just to test it. … Now it was a tough little seal of dried blood, holding, but not deeply attached to the new skin hidden beneath it. I did it very slowly, lifting it all round with my thumbnail and then pinching the skin between my forefinger and thumb so that the edge of the scab showed up free of the skin, a sharp ridge. There was the feeling of it, ready to slough off, unnecessary on my knee; almost an itch. Then I lifted it off quick and clean and there was no tweak of some spot not quite healed, but only the pleasure of the break with the thin tissue that had held it on. Holding the scab carefully, I looked at the healed place. The new pink shiny pale skin seemed stuck like a satiny petal on the old; I felt it tenderly. Then I looked at the scab, held on the ball of my thumb, felt its tough papery uselessness, and the final deadness that had come upon it the moment it was no longer on my leg. Putting it between my front teeth, I bit it in half and looked at the two pieces. Then I took them on the end of my tongue and bit them again and again until they disappeared in my mouth.
The Mine houses had their fences and hedges around them, their spoor of last summer’s creepers drawn up about their walls. I went down the dust road through the trees and out onto the main road that shook everything off from it, that stood up alone and straight in the open sun and the veld.
It was different, being down on the road instead of up in the bus or the car, seeing it underneath. A firm tar road, blue colored and good to walk on, like hard rubber. I trotted along, pressing my heels into it. Now and then a car hooted behind me and I stepped onto the stony side where dry khaki weed fastened its seed like a row of pins to the hem of my dress. I liked the feeling of the space, empty about me, the unfamiliarity of being alone. Two Mine boys were coming toward me; passed me, the one wearing his tin underground helmet and khaki trousers drawn in with string around his bare ankles, the other in a raggy loincloth beneath a gray blanket patterned with yellow and cyclamen whorls. They were smoking pipes; one had a little homemade pouch, of some animal skin, in his hand. I looked straight ahead, sternly. When I had gone on a bit, I looked back. But they were a long way off, not caring, laughing as if they were separated from each other by a stretch of veld and wanted to make themselves heard. A delivery boy from the town zigzagged past on his bicycle: a smart boy whistling in black-and-white shoes, brown trousers and a bow tie. A curious feeling prickled round my shoulders. Was there something to be afraid of?
The red dust path turning off to the stores was somewhere I had never been. There were children on the Mine, little children in pushcarts whose mothers let the nursegirls take them anywhere they liked; go down to the filthy kaffir stores to gossip with the boys and let those poor little babies they’re supposed to be taking care of breathe in heaven knows what dirt and disease, my mother often condemned. Other children called them the Jew stores, and sometimes bicycled down there to get some stuff to fix bicycle punctures. I slowed. But to turn round and go back to the Mine would be to have been nowhere. Lingering in the puffy dust, I made slowly for the stores huddled wall to wall in a line on the veld up ahead.
There were dozens of natives along the path. Some lay on the burned grass, rolled in their blankets, face down, as if they were dead in the sun. Others squatted and stood about shouting, passed on to pause every few yards and shout back something else. Quite often the exchange lasted for half a mile, bellowed across the veld until one was too far away to do more than wave a stick eloquently at the other. A boy in an old dishcloth walked alone, thrumming a big wooden guitar painted with gilt roses. Orange peels and pith were thrown about, and a persistent fly kept settling on my lip. But I went on rather faster and determined, waving my hand impatiently before my face and watching a white man who stood outside one of the stores with his hands on his hips while a shopboy prized open a big packing case. The Mine boys sauntering and pushing up and down the pavement jostled the man, got in the way. He kept jerking his head back in dismissal, shouting something at them.
He was a short ugly man with a rough gray chin; as I stepped onto the broken cement pavement he looked up at me with screwed-up eyes, irritably, and did not see me. His shirt was open at the neck and black hairs were scribbled on the little patch of dead white skin. “Cam-an!” He grabbed the chisel from the shopboy and creaked it under the wooden lid. The shopboy in his European clothes stood back bored among the Mine boys. I went past feeling very close to the dirty battered pavement, almost as if I were crawling along it like an insect under the noise and the press of natives. The air had a thick smell of sweat and strange pigment and herbs, and as I came to the door of the eating house, a crescendo of heavy, sweet nauseating blood-smell, the clamor of entrails stewing richly, assailed me like a sudden startling noise. I drew in a breath of shock and saw in the dark interior wooden benches and trestles and dark faces and flies; the flash of a tin mug, and a big white man in a striped butcher’s apron cutting a chunk of bruised and yellow fat-streaked meat from a huge weight impaled on a hook. Sawdust on the floor showed pocked like sand and spilled out onto the pavement, shaking into the cracks and fissures, mixing with the dust and torn paper, clogged here and there with blood.
Fowls with the quick necks of scavengers darted about between my trembling legs; the smeary windows of the shops were deep and mysterious with jumble that, as I stopped to look, resolved into shirts and shoes and braces and beads, yellow pomade in bottles, mirrors and mauve socks and watch chains, complicated as a mosaic, undisturbed, and always added to — a football jersey here, an enamel tiepin there, until there was not one corner, one single inch of the window which was not rich and complicatedly hung. Written on bits of cardboard, notices said CHEAP, THE LATEST. In the corners drifts of dead flies peaked up. Many others lay, wire legs up, on smooth shirt fronts. From the doorways where blankets somber and splendid with fierce colors hung, gramophones swung out the blare and sudden thrilling cry — the voice of a woman high and minor above the concerted throats of a choir of men — of Bantu music, and the nasal wail of American cowboy songs. Tinseled tin trunks in pink and green glittered in the gloom.