The Lying Days Read Free Page B

coiled within it. The thin mouth was closed, a rim of pale green. Both eyes turned backward looking at me.
    I turned away from the medicine shop and went on along the pavement, past a shoemaker’s, two more outfitter’s and a bicycle shop which had a bicycle cut out of tin and painted red and yellow hanging in the doorway, and sold sewing machines and portable gramophones. Inside the shop the small boy leaned with his stomach against a battered counter. The bottom of his face was heavy with concentration and he had an oilcan and a length of chain in his hands. A baby of about three scuffed the dust on the cement at his feet and said over and over, liking the sound of the words and not expecting an answer, “Let me! Letme, letme, letme.” There were only two more stores. Then the bare rubbed dust that had been veld but had worn away beneath ill-fitting mine boots and tough naked toes (the skin of the natives’ feet was like bark, the nails like thorn). There native vendors squatted beside braziers offering roasted mealies and oranges arranged in pyramids. They sat comfortably, waiting for custom to come to them; they looked levelly out at the Mine boys looking around with money to spend, parcels from the stores under their arms, sometimes a loaf of bread white under the black hot armpit. The gramophones from the stores made music and there was gossip and shouting above the tiny hammering of a man who sat crosslegged beating copper wire into bracelets:—they caught the sharp winter sun like the telephone wires. Fowls hung about the mealie braziers, and just where the stores’ pavement crumbled off into the dust, a boy sat with a sewing machine, whirring the handlewith his vigorous elbow jutting. Beside him were khaki and white drill trousers, neatly patched over the knees with crisscross strengthening in red and blue. He himself wore a curious loose garment, like a nightshirt.
    Even though it was winter there were flies here (one settled lovingly on me again, this time bumbling my ear) and above the gusts of strong sweet putrescence enveloping suddenly from the eating house, the smoke of burned mealies and the rotten sweetness of discarded oranges squashed everywhere underfoot, there was the high, strong, nostril-burning smell of stale urine. It had eaten the grass of the veld away, it had soured the earth with a crude animal foulness. I could not place it (a faint whiff, overlaid with disinfectant, came out of the public cloakroom near the bus terminus where my mother would not let me go); but my lip twitched up in distaste. The shouting seemed part of the smell and the twirl of flies; I felt suddenly that I wanted to bat at my clothes and brush myself down and feel over my hair in case something had settled on me—some horrible dirt, something alive, perhaps.—A child had once crammed a locust down my back at school, and for days afterward I had sudden attacks of shuddering all over the surface of my body so that I had wanted to tear off my clothes and examine every inch of my skin.
    I looked at these dark brown faces—the town natives were somehow lighter—dark as teak and dark as mahogany, shining with the warm grease of their own liveness lighting up their skin; wondering, receptive, unthinking, taking in with their eyes as earth takes water; close-eyed, sullen with the defensive sullenness of the defenseless; noisy and merry with the glee of the innocent. And to me, in my kilts and my hand-knitted socks and my hair tied with neat ribbon, they were something to look at with a half-smile, as I had watched the chameleon in the window.
    I crunched to the path and the road over burned veld that dissolved crisply in puffs of black dust round my shoes and I passed a Mine boy standing with his back to me and his legs apart. I had vaguely noticed them standing that curious way before, as I whisked past in the car. But as I passed this one—he was singing, and the five or six yards he