The Lying Days by Nadine Gordimer

wouldn’t matter which way you put it on, so long as that axle arrangement was at the right angle.” He paused a moment and closed his teeth on a match, and I thought he would speak to me, but he had merely paused to ponder something and suddenly he had it: “Of course you must understand that a thing like this isn’t foolproof … not by any means. And I can’t really say unless I see it.” And then with a sudden confidence: “But it should be all right, I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be perfectly all right.”—He had a way of putting his head on one side and turning one hand up.
    I did not even wonder what it was they were talking about. I simply stood there. Now Ludi lifted his head round to me. “Again?”
    The curious inability to speak came over me. I nodded hard, smiling.
    â€œThat child hasn’t been out the water the whole day,” said Mrs. Koch, interrupting her conversation with a little thin woman who was crocheting as she talked.
    â€œOh, well …,” said Ludi, getting out of his shorts. He gave a shrug and the half-lift of a smile to the man to whom he had been talking, as one acknowledges the necessity of pleasing a child. He pulled off his shirt and we went down toward the water together. But when the cool rill closed over our feet and the breath of the sea lifted to our faces, we began to walk along the water line. “You can’t go anywhere without mother finding a friend,” Ludi said. “Leicester’s got about as much mechanical sense as that shell. Stupidity of his questions—”
    He seemed to lose interest in what he was saying. We walked right away up the beach and over some rocks and to another beach, a smaller one, where the sand was coarser and bright. I picked up a handful and saw that it was not sand at all, really, but the fragments of shells, pounded to a kind of meal by the pestle of the sea on a mortar of rocks. I showed it to Ludi and he looked at it and then blew it off my hand and dusted my hand and let it fall, in a gesture that suddenly seemed to me to express him, all that, in him, was exciting and wonderful to me. And just as the thought was bursting over me in a curious turmoil of feeling, a physical feeling,like a kind of blush, that I had never felt before, he put his hand down on the nape of my neck. It caught my hair back from my head so that I had to walk stiffly, and, noticing this, seriously and capably as if he were adjusting something he had made, he slid his hand under my hair to free it.
    Our feet were hurt by the coarse shingle and we wandered to the rocks and sat with our feet in the pools. We talked about the sea and the life of the sea around us, and I picked the tiny conical towers of winkles off the rock with my fingernail and threw them back into the water. I said: “Let’s go in …?” He stretched himself backward against the rock and for answer, or rather as if he had forgotten to answer, looked at me slowly, smiling and yet not smiling, a look of regret, willing reluctance—a look that puzzled me. My greatest concern was to keep from him anything that might remind him that I was still a child, and so I did not want him to know that it puzzled me, that anything he did or said could puzzle me. I smiled as if in understanding. But the smile must have been too quick, too bright. He shook his head. I said: “Why do you do that over me?”—with the anxiousness which came up in me so quickly. He said with a little beckoning jerk of the chin: “Come here.” And very carefully I slid to my knees in the water, and arranged myself nearer to him and timidly put my hand, that jumped once, in reaction from the contact, on his knee. He kissed me as he had done the night before but this time I held my mouth slightly open though I kept very still. Then he breathed softly on my cheeks and kissed me again several times, and between the kisses