A Kindness Cup Read Free Page A

people.’
    â€˜People!’
    â€˜Yes. People. Christ’s skin was probably as dark as theirs.’
    â€˜My God!’ Mr Buckmaster cried, inspecting her handsomeintransigent features for irony. Christ was the New Testament revealed once a week by a minister who viewed him joylessly. He was presented as totally pale-skinned and it was to a white man they sang their whining hymns. ‘My God! Up north, you know, up in the rain-forest, hunting them down makes a pleasant way of filling in Sunday.’ It could be done straight after addressing his puritan white god. He enjoyed watching her wince. ‘What’s the bag, eh, mate?’ he pursued. ‘Ten? Eleven? Not as good as last week.’
    â€˜Leaving them to rot,’ commented his wife, suddenly brutal and vicious with him. ‘Not even a hole in the ground!’
    â€˜Ach!’ Buckmaster grunted. ‘You’re like all the other women after all.’ He felt unexpectedly pleased with this discovery. ‘Sentimental and stupid. First to squawk if a party of them raped you, though.’
    â€˜I’ve never squawked at rape,’ his wife replied calmly, putting the supper cheese closer to her son’s friend, understanding his subtlety.
    There was a frightful silence. Young Jenner blushed. Even young Fred, thigh doodler of private and particular yearnings, was finding the scrubbed veranda floor of savage interest.
    â€˜There would not be,’ Mr Buckmaster said finally and heavily, ‘room for much else.’ A winner, he felt, in front of Jenner’s bright intelligent eye.
    But the boy gave a last embarrassed gulp at his tea and said to the waiting room, ‘I must be getting back now.’ The innocence of his red hair was startling against his newly educated face. He stood up awkwardly and walked over to the landing uncertain whether to speak again would be the ultimate refinement in this uncivil war. But the wife spoke.
    â€˜Good-bye,’ she said to him. ‘Thank your mother for me, and come again soon.’
    YoungJenner smiled once more, stopped smiling and said good-bye. As he cantered his horse into darkness, he understood that the blows dealt in metaphor were deadlier than the thwack of flesh on flesh. He could not ride fast enough to hear silence move in behind him while his soul lugged a new and doughy knowledge.

D ORAHY SUBMITS tothis pull of fate.
    He packs a small bag, noting how one’s needs in age lie in inverse ratio to the expansion of the soul.
    He hopes. He boards a lumbering coastal vessel that rocks him out of his capital and, after a sea-shaken slumber, wakes after the third night to a sugarville morning of hard blue and yellow north of the tropic. From the salty deck he observes the wide reaches of blue bay water as the boat enters his destiny. Coastal scrub has thinned out its scraggy imprecision and has become the scraggier, scrubbier buildings of a town he has not entered for twenty years, which yet, as he watches the houses grow larger with approach, fills him with a nauseating nostalgia.
    He has kept apart as far as possible from the other passengers all the week, but now, as they join him along the railing, he feels obliged to share the excitement and the chatter. Hands point. Voices cry out. The boat noses its rusty way from harbour to river and river docks.
    There are only two others disembarking and he hopes to avoid them, knowing the town is full of pubs. Their reason for return is the same as his and already, conscious of his ambitions for solitariness, he wonders why he has come. His elderly legs wobble on this Friday morning gang-plank but they are the same legs that strolled through this town twenty years before, and he marvels that he is experiencing grief when, he supposes, rage wouldbe the better thing. Turning his back firmly on the river and the docks, he walks steadily up the slope past the warehouses and enters the town.
    The streets are busy with horses