No Time Like the Present: A Novel Read Free Page A

her familiar gesture of acceptance. When she got out of the car to deliver Sindi, suddenly kissed him. Coming back to the car, her eyes were held narrowed as if she were seeing some inner vision. He read it as, we’ll be happy there.
    Decisions always divide into practice. They had to give notice of vacating Glengrove, and it turned out several months’ advice in advance was required. He negotiated this successfully and the stipulation was reduced to one month. As for the house, Jake knew the agent well and the rent was not unaffordably higher than the apartment’s had been, on the guarantee to the owner that although the woman was black these were reliable tenants who wouldn’t fill the house with immigrant refugees or whatever they were from Congo and Zimbabwe, property values must not be allowed to go down as the result of rowdiness. Well, at least the condition wasn’t gender prejudice, they didn’t have to worry about moving into a mini-community where that prevailed. The gays could enjoy their holy pool. Some of the things that had been made do with in Glengrove, second- or third-hand necessities given by comrades when they first clandestinely moved in there, were not worth taking; new purchases, in keeping with a house, had to be made. A table and chairs for the living room—at Glengrove they ate in the kitchen or off the coffee table in the all-purpose room. Jabulile wanted a large refrigerator and freezer, to be paid off along with the furniture on the never-never instalment plan, it was the usual way in the communities she knew, but Steve was alert to how business economy worked to its own advantage, charging hidden interest on the amounts the poor paid every month. He would buy only what they had money to pay for on purchase—these are just trivial differences born of background which come up not only between a couple like theirs. The curtains: on the other hand, she knew a woman in Kliptown (old Location), mother of a colleague teacher, who would make them in her home at a cost below any decorator’s shop. They were completed and could be hung—Jake and Isa helped, it was fun—before the actual move to the house would take place.
    On the morning of the move Jabulile took charge. She bustled authoritatively between the men handling the cardboard cases he and she had filled the night before, herself correcting the carelessness with which they ignored the bold FRAGILE with which some had been carefully marked. Her reproaches were joking, she laughed with the men encouragingly. Displacement made everything unfamiliar to him, out of mind, as if they had never lived there—he was already, as if going home, in the house. He thought it unnecessary when Jabu made tea for the movers, just a delay. But she took mugs out of one of the boxes, talking in the language she shared with the men and he couldn’t follow. To speed things up he broke into her hospitality and quickly took back the emptied mugs with a gesture that they be left behind, not bothering to wash and pack them up again. He became authoritative now, giving a heaving arm to despatch of the boxes to the elevator, ready when it rose again to load it once more. She continued the laughing exchange in their common language with the men, darting back to the kitchen and bedroom to check what she must have already known, that nothing was missed, left behind. With the last batch he squeezed in to go down and help, hasten the loading of the van. The movers had been put in a good mood and took their time, arguing about the placing, how the bed, those chairs, could go here, that box balanced there. At last the double doors were barred across. He and Jabu could follow, with keys to the new kingdom. He had already taken the car out of Glengrove Place’s underground garage; for the last time.
    The elevator was in use, he bounded up three flights of stairs three steps at a time as if he were a schoolboy again and called out at the top, Let’s go!
    His stride almost