The Lying Days Read Free

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