wouldn’t he.—
Royce made his way patiently round the whole question to approach his brother shyly, confidentially. —You going to buy one of those little buggies, Vic? I mean, if you get two rands?—
—Where can you buy them. Here. They had them in Sandton, at Pick’n Pay. That’s where you get them.—
—Ask July, Vic. Why don’t you ask july? Vic?—
Emotion suddenly came back to the boy; his lids reddened. —Well, one thing—I know one thing, not all Africans are nice like July. Some of them are horrible. Horrible.—
Nyiko, Gina’s friend, who slipped in and out the hut all day as the passing fowls did, had come in and gone straight to Gina in the lover-like seclusion of childhood intimacy. They stood hand-in-hand, looking mildly on at Victor’s suffering. Gina pulled a kitten for each of them from the cat’s teats and the minute creatures were possessed by a tension of claws and mewling as much too great for them as the boy’s anger had been for him.
There came the expected admonition from a parent—the mother. —You must not keep taking them away from the cat. They’re only two days old.—
The father spoke to the mother in the sub-language of hints and private significance foreign to the children. —Maybe Nyiko knows whose cat it is? Perhaps we can give the whole bang-shoot where it belongs.—
She looked at him; token acknowledgement given to someone who speaks from a premise that doesn’t exist.
Through Gina, he questioned Nyiko. The little girl giggled. She crinkled her nose and showed her teeth; and was asked again. Gina waggled the hand in hers. Nyiko giggled and swayed from foot to foot. —Daddy, she doesn’t understand. She says nobody’s got a cat.—
—I see, I see. Everybody has cats, just as cats have fleas.—
The little girl was impatient of his flirtatious fondness. —No -oo , I told you. Nobody’s got one … she says.—
In the afternoon he went to fish at the river. He and his family couldn’t bring themselves to eat barbel but the other people appreciated them. He left the children down there and came back in time to listen to the four o’clock news. She was lying on the bed; any one of the hut’s occupants who found himself in sole possession for an hour would at once take the opportunity of having the use of the bed. He saw her; saw himself as he was when he sometimes lay there; and thought of the prisoner as he is always visualized in his cell. He himself had become able to sleep at will, since he had been in this place: will himself out of it, away from her, from the children, waiting for him to get them out of it.
No martial music.
They listened to the news. The reception was bad, the reader a stumbling speaker—who was left, at the state broadcasting service’s splendid towers of granite, to do such a job?
Possibly the transmission no longer came from there—the service had always concealed so much, it probably would never announce it had been forced to evacuate and was operating from some temporary hideout. The hard-pressed but stolidly bureaucratic-sounding reports quoting ‘authoritative sources’: was the Brigadier of the Citizen Forces, in whose name an assessment of the success in ‘containing’ Soweto from the Diepkloof Military Base was given, one who had in reality run like anyone else? Was the eye-witness account of the recapture of the Far West Rand mines—so haltingly putting together the description of a rout that didn’t seem to fit the features of a landscape natal to the daughter of My Jim Hetherington—a Bunker fantasy? Such reverses that were incontestably admitted were so ominous; last night the Union Buildings in Pretoria were ‘partially destroyed’. No mention of a rocket attack, this time. The pile must have been blown up from within, they were probably actually fighting with their bodies and hands over Sir Herbert Baker’s colonial grace in pillars and sandstone. Or maybe they had blown it up themselves rather than
Royce made his way patiently round the whole question to approach his brother shyly, confidentially. —You going to buy one of those little buggies, Vic? I mean, if you get two rands?—
—Where can you buy them. Here. They had them in Sandton, at Pick’n Pay. That’s where you get them.—
—Ask July, Vic. Why don’t you ask july? Vic?—
Emotion suddenly came back to the boy; his lids reddened. —Well, one thing—I know one thing, not all Africans are nice like July. Some of them are horrible. Horrible.—
Nyiko, Gina’s friend, who slipped in and out the hut all day as the passing fowls did, had come in and gone straight to Gina in the lover-like seclusion of childhood intimacy. They stood hand-in-hand, looking mildly on at Victor’s suffering. Gina pulled a kitten for each of them from the cat’s teats and the minute creatures were possessed by a tension of claws and mewling as much too great for them as the boy’s anger had been for him.
There came the expected admonition from a parent—the mother. —You must not keep taking them away from the cat. They’re only two days old.—
The father spoke to the mother in the sub-language of hints and private significance foreign to the children. —Maybe Nyiko knows whose cat it is? Perhaps we can give the whole bang-shoot where it belongs.—
She looked at him; token acknowledgement given to someone who speaks from a premise that doesn’t exist.
Through Gina, he questioned Nyiko. The little girl giggled. She crinkled her nose and showed her teeth; and was asked again. Gina waggled the hand in hers. Nyiko giggled and swayed from foot to foot. —Daddy, she doesn’t understand. She says nobody’s got a cat.—
—I see, I see. Everybody has cats, just as cats have fleas.—
The little girl was impatient of his flirtatious fondness. —No -oo , I told you. Nobody’s got one … she says.—
In the afternoon he went to fish at the river. He and his family couldn’t bring themselves to eat barbel but the other people appreciated them. He left the children down there and came back in time to listen to the four o’clock news. She was lying on the bed; any one of the hut’s occupants who found himself in sole possession for an hour would at once take the opportunity of having the use of the bed. He saw her; saw himself as he was when he sometimes lay there; and thought of the prisoner as he is always visualized in his cell. He himself had become able to sleep at will, since he had been in this place: will himself out of it, away from her, from the children, waiting for him to get them out of it.
No martial music.
They listened to the news. The reception was bad, the reader a stumbling speaker—who was left, at the state broadcasting service’s splendid towers of granite, to do such a job?
Possibly the transmission no longer came from there—the service had always concealed so much, it probably would never announce it had been forced to evacuate and was operating from some temporary hideout. The hard-pressed but stolidly bureaucratic-sounding reports quoting ‘authoritative sources’: was the Brigadier of the Citizen Forces, in whose name an assessment of the success in ‘containing’ Soweto from the Diepkloof Military Base was given, one who had in reality run like anyone else? Was the eye-witness account of the recapture of the Far West Rand mines—so haltingly putting together the description of a rout that didn’t seem to fit the features of a landscape natal to the daughter of My Jim Hetherington—a Bunker fantasy? Such reverses that were incontestably admitted were so ominous; last night the Union Buildings in Pretoria were ‘partially destroyed’. No mention of a rocket attack, this time. The pile must have been blown up from within, they were probably actually fighting with their bodies and hands over Sir Herbert Baker’s colonial grace in pillars and sandstone. Or maybe they had blown it up themselves rather than
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