July's People Read Free Page A

great height. Bam was satisfied the vehicle would not draw a stray bomb shat by some aircraft from the black army’s bases in Moçambique that might reconnoitre the bush and find a suspicious sign of white para-military presence in an area where even a broken-down car was a rarity.
    July’s home was not a village but a habitation of mud houses occupied only by members of his extended family. There was the risk that if, as he seemed to assume, he could reconcile them to the strange presence of whites in their midst and keep their mouths shut, he could not prevent other people, living scattered round about, who knew the look of every thorn-bush, from discovering there were thorn-bushes that overgrew a white man’s car, and passing on that information to any black army patrol. If not acting upon it themselves?
    July broke into snickering embarrassment at her ignorance of a kind of authority not understood—his; and anyway, he had told them—everybody—about the vehicle.
    —Told them what?—She was confident of his wily good sense; he had worked for her for years. Often Bam couldn’t follow his broken English, but he and she understood each other well.
    —I tell them you give it to me.—
    Bam blew laughter. —Who’ll believe that.—
    —They know, they know what it is happening, the trouble in town. The white people are chased away from their houses and we take. Everybody is like that, isn’t it?—
    —But you can’t drive.—She was anxious, for their safety, he should be believed.
    —How they know I’m not driving? Everybody is know I’m living fifteen years in town, I’m knowing plenty things.—
    It was some days before the vehicle ceased to be the point of reference for their existence. What was left of the tinned food was still there; the box containing Victor’s electric racing-car track that it was discovered he must have put in under cover of adult confusion. There was nowhere, in this hut, to put anything: —It’s not worthwhile dragging everything out.—But Victor nagged for his racing-car track. —It only means you’ll have to dismantle it and pack it up again.—
    He had the habit of standing in front of her with his demands; she walked round him.
    He planted himself again. —When are we going?—
    —Vic, where’s there to set it up? And there’s no electricity, you can’t run it.—
    —I want to show it.—
    —To whom?—
    The black children who watched the hut from afar and scuttled, as if her glance were a stone thrown among them, re-formed a little way off.
    —But tell them they mustn’t touch it. I don’t want my things messed up and broken. You must tell them.—
    She laughed as adults did, in the power they refuse to use. —I tell them? They don’t understand our language.—
    The boy said nothing but kicked steadily at the dented, rusted bath used for their ablutions.
    —Don’t. D’you hear me? That’s July’s.—
    The demijohn of water was empty. Royce, the littlest, kept asking for Coca-Cola: —Then buy some. Go to the shop-man and buy some.—She put paraffin tins of river water on the fire. She would cool the boiled water overnight; —It’s madness to let them drink that stuff straight from the river. They’ll get ill.—
    Bam got the blaze going. —I assure you, they’ve been drinking water wherever they find it, already … it’s impossible to stop them.—
    —What’re we going to do if they get ill?—
    But he didn’t answer and she didn’t expect him to. There lay between them and all such questions the unanswerable: they were lucky to be alive.
    The seats from the vehicle no longer belonged to it; they had become the furniture of the hut. Outside in an afternoon cooled by a rippled covering of grey luminous clouds, she sat on the ground as others did. Over the valley beyond the kraal of euphorbia and dead thorn where the goats were kept: she knew the vehicle was there. A ship that had docked in a far country. Anchored in the khakiweed, it would