The Lying Days (2 page)

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.

There were people there, shadowy, strange to me as the black men with the soft red inside their mouths showing as they opened in the concentration of spending money. There was even a woman, in a flowered alpaca apron, coming out to throw something into the pavement crowd. There was another woman, sitting on an upturned soapbox pulling at a hangnail on her short, broad thumb. She yawned—her fat ankles, in cotton stockings, settled over her shoes—and looked up puffily. Yes? Yes? she chivied a native who was pointing at something in the window at her side, and grunting. “—Here,” she called back into the dark shop, not moving. “He wants a yellow shirt. Here in the winder, with stripes.”

I passed her with a deep frown; it was on my face all the time now. My heart ran fast and trembly, like the heart of a kitten I had once held. I held my buttocks stiffly together as I went along, looking, looking. But I felt my eyes were not quick enough, and darted here and there at once, fluttering over everything, unable to see anything singly and long enough. And at the same time I wanted to giggle, to stuff my hand in my mouth so that a squeal, like a long squeeze of excitement, should not wring through me.

Even when I was smaller, fairy tales had never interested me much. To me, brought up into the life of a South African mine, stories of children living the ordinary domestic adventures of the upper-middle-class English family—which was the only one that existed for children's books published in England in the thirties—were weird and exotic enough. Nannies in uniform, governesses and ponies, nurseries and playrooms and snow fights—all these commonplaces of European childhood were as unknown and therefore as immediately enviable as the life of princesses in legendary castles to the English children for whom the books were written. I had never read a book in which I myself was recognizable; in which there was a “girl” like Anna who did the housework and the cooking and called the mother and father Missus and Baas; in which the children ate and lived closely with their parents and played in the lounge and went to the bioscope. So it did not need the bounds of credulity to be stretched to princes who changed into frogs or houses that could be eaten like gingerbread to transport me to an unattainable world of the imagination. The sedate walk of two genteel infant Tories through an English park was other world enough for me.

Yet now as I stood in this unfamiliar part of my own world knowing and flatly accepting it as the real world because it was ugly and did not exist in books (if this was the beginning of disillusion, it was also the beginning of Colonialism: the identification of the unattainable distant with the beautiful, the substitution of “overseas” for “fairyland”) I felt for the first time something of the tingling fascination of the gingerbread house before Hansel and Gretel, anonymous, nobody's children, in the woods. Standing before the one small window of the native medicine shop I no longer could be bored before the idea of the beckoning witch and the collection of pumpkins and lamps and mice that shot up into carriages and genii and coachmen or two-headed dogs. Not that these dusty lions' tails, these piles of wizened seeds, these flaking gray roots and strange teeth could be believed to hold tight, like Japanese paper flowers, magic that might suddenly open. Not that the peeled skin of a snake, curling like an apple skin down the window, could suggest a dragon. But the dustiness, the grayness, the scavenged collection of tooth and claw and skin and sluggish potion brought who knows by whom
or how far or from where, waiting beneath cobwebs and neglect … the shudder of revulsion at finding my finger going out wanting to touch it! It winked suddenly like the eye of a crocodile that waited looking like a harmless dry log: you did not know what you might be looking at, what awfulness inert in withered heaps behind the glass.

It was at this moment that a small boy came skipping down the pavement white and unconcerned with a tin pistol dangling against his navy blue pants, and a bicycle bell tringing importantly in his hand. He walked straight past me with the ease of someone finding his way about his own house, and dodged through the Mine boys as if they were the fowls, making up their minds for them when they did not seem to know whether they wanted to step this way or that. He was dark, but his eyes were big and light beneath childishly rumpled eyebrows: he was gone, into a doorway farther up.

I could not have said why the sight of another child was so startling. He seemed to flash through my mind, tearing mystery, strangeness, as a thick cobweb splits to nothing brushed away by the hand of a man. I was interested now in the native customers inside the medicine shop who were buying roots and charms the way people buy aspirins. I watched one boy who took his money from a yellow tobacco bag and then had a measure of greenish flakes poured into a second tobacco bag. Another was turning a tiny empty tortoise shell over in his hand; I wondered how much such a thing would cost, then remembered that I had no money. It was a charming little mound of brown and amber medallions, so neatly fitted. … Perhaps I could come back and get one someday. I felt a longing of affection for the tortoise shell which was to me a creature in itself; I would carry it everywhere with me, look at the light through its stripy shell the way the light looked through a leaf or the stained-glass window that the Millars had put up to the memory of their son, in the church.

The boy did not buy the shell. It went back onto the wooden shelf. I pressed nearer the window and made a spy hole with my hand against the rheumy glass to see in better, and as I did so my eye was caught by another eye. Something was alive in the window: a chameleon, crouched motionless and matching on a bundle of
gray-green sticks until then, was making its way slowly up the rib of wood that seamed the corner of the window. Its little soft divided feet, each one like two little slender hands joined and facing outward from the wrist, fluttered for a hold and swayed, feeling the air. One eye in the wrinkled socket looked ahead, the other swiveled back fixed on me. Ah-h! I cried, scratching my finger at the glass and leaning my whole weight against it. I followed the creature all up the window and down again, when it walked across the floor high-stepping over the piles of herbs and objects. Then it stopped, swayed, and a long thin tongue like one of those rude streamers you blow out in people's faces at Christmas shot unrolled and curled back again with a fly coiled within it. The thin mouth was closed, a rim of pale green. Both eyes turned backward looking at me.

I turned away from the medicine shop and went on along the pavement, past a shoemaker's, two more outfitter's and a bicycle shop which had a bicycle cut out of tin and painted red and yellow hanging in the doorway, and sold sewing machines and portable gramophones. Inside the shop the small boy leaned with his stomach against a battered counter. The bottom of his face was heavy with concentration and he had an oilcan and a length of chain in his hands. A baby of about three scuffed the dust on the cement at his feet and said over and over, liking the sound of the words and not expecting an answer, “Let me! Letme, letme, letme.” There were only two more stores. Then the bare rubbed dust that had been veld but had worn away beneath ill-fitting mine boots and tough naked toes (the skin of the natives' feet was like bark, the nails like thorn). There native vendors squatted beside braziers offering roasted mealies and oranges arranged in pyramids. They sat comfortably, waiting for custom to come to them; they looked levelly out at the Mine boys looking around with money to spend, parcels from the stores under their arms, sometimes a loaf of bread white under the black hot armpit. The gramophones from the stores made music and there was gossip and shouting above the tiny hammering of a man who sat crosslegged beating copper wire into bracelets:—they caught the sharp winter sun like the telephone wires. Fowls hung about the mealie braziers, and just where the stores' pavement crumbled off into the dust, a boy sat with a sewing machine, whirring the handle
with his vigorous elbow jutting. Beside him were khaki and white drill trousers, neatly patched over the knees with crisscross strengthening in red and blue. He himself wore a curious loose garment, like a nightshirt.

Even though it was winter there were flies here (one settled lovingly on me again, this time bumbling my ear) and above the gusts of strong sweet putrescence enveloping suddenly from the eating house, the smoke of burned mealies and the rotten sweetness of discarded oranges squashed everywhere underfoot, there was the high, strong, nostril-burning smell of stale urine. It had eaten the grass of the veld away, it had soured the earth with a crude animal foulness. I could not place it (a faint whiff, overlaid with disinfectant, came out of the public cloakroom near the bus terminus where my mother would not let me go); but my lip twitched up in distaste. The shouting seemed part of the smell and the twirl of flies; I felt suddenly that I wanted to bat at my clothes and brush myself down and feel over my hair in case something had settled on me—some horrible dirt, something alive, perhaps.—A child had once crammed a locust down my back at school, and for days afterward I had sudden attacks of shuddering all over the surface of my body so that I had wanted to tear off my clothes and examine every inch of my skin.