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

stumbled: she pressed further against the door frame.
    —What’s been forgotten?—
    She moved her head slightly in dismissal, and he was stayed.
    It was nothing he could put a name, a cause to, ask what’s the matter would be some sort of intrusion. Although it’s impossible to accept that there are times when the trust of intimacy fails. She said very distinctly, I don’t want to go. It resounded in his silence as if she had shouted. She was so known to him, the pillars of her thighs close together, the line of her neck he would follow with buried face to her breasts, yet this was someone he couldn’t approach in whatever was happening. How say stupidly, what’s wrong.
    Of course she is thrilled delighted with the house, the terrace where she’s looking forward to putting out their child to play in the sun…she had planned zestfully how the rooms would serve them, she agreed that he could sign for occupancy. I don’t want to go. She knows it has no meaning; they are gone, it remains only to close the door and drop the keys with the caretaker.
    Nothing could break the moment. Carrying the bride over the threshold was in his embrace. She didn’t cry but took a few rough broken breaths. Her breasts pressed familiarly against him. He didn’t ask, she didn’t tell.
     
    Leave behind, a drop into space. From the place that took them in when nowhere, no one allowed them to be together as a man and a woman. The clandestine life is the precious human secret, the law didn’t allow, the church wouldn’t marry you, neither his for whites nor hers for blacks. Glengrove Place. The place. Our place.
     
    Isa, Jake and Peter Mkize surprised them that first night, arriving with Isa’s chicken and mushroom stew to heat up for the first time use of the stove, wine for which glasses were dug out of packing boxes. Jabu was putting Sindiswa to sleep alone in her own room.— Khale, Khale , take it easy getting her accustomed to things. If I were you I’d keep her at her old day care for a bit before you move her to the one that’s nearer.—Isa, the senior resident, wants to be useful. Slowly, careful . Comrades, even if white, find expressive the few words in the languages of black comrades they’ve picked up. The presence of the three neighbours in the impersonal chaos of displaced objects is order of a kind. They slept well, the new tenants.
    On Sunday someone shook at the wrought-iron gate for attention and there was one of the dolphin-men from the church pool holding a potted hibiscus.—Hi, welcome to the residents’ association, there isn’t one but make yourselves at home anyway.—In shared laughter of the unexpected they gestured him in for coffee but he couldn’t stay, was due to make a jambalaya lunch, his turn to cook.—Come and swim when you feel like it, it’s a teacup, but it’s a cooler…In the afternoon when they tired of unpacking Jabu decided they should take Sindiswa on a walk and they passed the fondly mock-wrestling water, as they had seen the day they came to find Jake’s house. Jabu lifted Sindiswa’s little arm to wave a hand at the revellers.

 
    You shift furniture about: this way, that, not in the relation bed to door, sofa to window these had before, back there. And the new purchases must find the right relation.
    Commonplace physical acts can lead to the jolt of other, acceptedly established arrangements. He had gone back to the chemistry of paint as decoration, protection against the weather, after concocting Molotov cocktails in local adaptation. With the need of the demand of using it illegally in the cause of revolution that had somehow justified his rather random choice of a career, was he to stay in the paint manufacturing industry as the meaning of his working life. It came to him—again. A shift implied. Wasn’t there some other, a need of now, that would verify a working life in some way, as concocting a Macbeth witches’ brew had been imperative in another time. A luta