even the human to one side for the moment and to deal only with material facts? To say, with me, like an incantation: the darkness, the street light, the stiletto knife, the puncture, the wound, the blood, the cobbles, the tarmac, the curb . . .”
The speaker went on like this for some time. It was a hot day to be near so many other bodies, listening to such a forceful oration. Kelso and Olivia were familiar with oration—as we have seen, they came to hear it most Saturdays—but they were not accustomed to the heat, at least not here, in England, where they had learned to wear sweater vests and cardigans with everything, no matter what the early-morning sun on their windowpanes implied. Now each stripped off a layer, which Kelso hung over his left arm, crooked to a ninety-degree angle, and found the elevation helped the pain. Olivia, tiring a little of the French poet, turned her attention to an American voice on her left, which turned out to belong to a woman not unlike her own grandmother: the same lion’s face, the same wealth of hair.
“The function,” said this woman, “the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” Your reason for being! thought Olivia, and gripped Kelso’s good hand a little tighter. The fresh pressure was a counterbalance to the pain in his other hand, he could use the one to distract from the other. This worked for a moment. Then the pain re-established itself, more persistent than ever. He could not attend to this woman. He could barely attend to anything.
* * *
• • •
At a quarter past six, a great flock of swallows took flight from the top of Marble Arch and swept over the crowd, so low that many crouched—including most of the speakers—after which everybody straightened up again, the speakers carried right on speaking, the tricky thing became knowing when to leave. Neither Kelso nor Olivia ever wanted to be the one to say: “Let’s go.” They had to place the decision outside of themselves, in the weather or some other external cause, for to leave was to give up on betterment, or to suggest betterment was less fun than the pictures, or the market, or a million other, easier things.
“How’s your thumb? It pain you still?” asked Olivia, in a sudden leap of inspiration. He was holding his left hand to his chest with his right like someone about to say something terribly sincere, an oath, maybe, or a profession of love.
“Oh, Livvy—it’s murder!”
* * *
• • •
They walked back to the station. At the entrance, a newspaper boy was changing the hoarding poster from today’s headline: SIGNS AND SYMBOLS! to tomorrow’s: FORESHADOWING! Kelso stopped, rolled a thin cigarette and lingered a while so as to read the front page, which this particular lenient newspaper boy—they were not all like that—did not stop him from doing. As the boy busied himself cutting the strings off several towers of the Daily Express, Kelso read of venality, poverty, crime, corruption, murder.
“Madness, madness, everywhere,” he murmured, feeling almost as sorry for the world as he did for his mangled thumb.
“Kel, the train soon come!”
* * *
• • •
An old woman sat opposite them. She had a pink scarf tied over her gray curls, too much powder on her nose, and a look on her face like she wished them both dead. Olivia thought: Oh, Lord, even if I hated anyone that much I wouldn’t want to look that way as I did it! How ghoulish this woman looked, snarling like that—almost like Enoch himself. Olivia turned to Kelso to see if he’d noticed but his head was bowed, he held his wrist as if to cut the blood from the offending hand, so that he might feel nothing at all. Olivia raised her own gaze fixedly to the illustration of the Piccadilly Line, choosing to focus on the names of the stops—Cade Bambara, Ponge, Tolstoy, Morrison—mouthing them silently to herself, finding this calmed her, and at the next station the ghoulish woman got off.
* * *
• • •
By the time they got home it was past eight. They’d walked through a summer rowdiness—music from every pub, women dressed as they shouldn’t be, drunk lads revving up their mopeds—and Olivia was more than ready for her bed. The heat in the room was stifling. She hung her