Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,204

it had been, he had made a mutton stew. Eddie loved mutton; but of course it had not been made with a treat for him in mind.

After they had eaten, the men went out into the yard. The moon was not yet risen. The light from the kitchen window touched shallowly the zinc glint of the garage door as it rolled up sufficiently for them to duck in. It rattled down behind them. Eddie didn’t think it was working smoothly enough. ‘Better get us some oil, Charlie, or it’s soon going to rust.’ Charles raised eyebrows, opened nostrils, swallowed a yawn, a man without tenure. While they were checking the heavy picks, the spades and black plastic sheeting Charles had laid in ready for the end of waiting, Joy didn’t mind doing the washing-up on her own for once. If there was something practical to plan, the men liked to do it behind the outhouse door, where they were in tactile reach of the means by which what they were discussing was to be realised.

They were gone a long time. She took a beer from the fridge with her to the living room and turned on Eddie’s tape player, which was always beside his end of the sofa as a pipe smoker will have his paraphernalia handy on a chair-arm. After she had told Vusi about seeing Eddie hitch a lift, she had made it possible for herself to keep out of everyone’s way, all day. In order not to be with Vusi and Charles, not to sit around with them in that same room, or to be in the bedroom which was, after all, Charles’s room as well, she had dragged cardboard boxes, rags, old bones, torn Afrikaans newspapers the black man who used to live in the yard had collected, to the front garden and made her bonfire among the broken poles of the pergola. Now she felt the comfort of being together with them once more – all three of them, Vusi, Charles and Eddie, although they were not in the room with her. The music was whatever Eddie had left in the player; a tape with a strong beat. All on her own, she began to dance, smiling to herself as if to others dancing towards and away from her. She worked off her sandals without pausing, and danced on the nap of the ugly rug Charles had bought along with the job-lot ‘suite’ to make a show to the Naas Kloppers of the district that the house was meant really to be lived in. Rhythm tossed her head and the knot of hair loosened and slowly unravelled, then swung from shoulder to shoulder. She threw her glasses on to Vusi’s chair. At night, moths circled in place of flies above the lop-sided pink shades, falling singed; her bare feet trod one now and then. Her small breasts rose and fell against her chest like a necklace; she swooped and shook, swayed and softly sang.

Vusi’s dreaming face, that had so little to do with the temporal level of his thoughts and actions, took the wash of crude 60-watt light from the chandelier, suddenly in the doorway. The face appeared to her as a wave of phosphorescence in the dark wake of the house around her movements might reveal a head from a submerged statue. Eddie and woolly Charles came up behind him.

She had no breath left, her mouth was open in a panting smile. ‘Come on.’ It could only be Eddie she summoned.

She went on dancing.

Eddie was standing there.

Slowly, Eddie began to stir to life, first from the hips, then with this-way-and-that slither and stub of the feet, then with the pelvis, the buttocks, the elbows, the knees, and as his whole body and head revived, moved to her.

Eddie and Joy were dancing.

Charles could dance only when drunk; a performing bear, round and round; sometimes some girl’s teddy bear. He stretched out on the sofa, occupying Eddie’s end as well, and smiled at them encouragingly. He might have been a father happily embarrassed to see a neglected daughter coming out of herself.

Before the tape ended Vusi fetched his saxophone. That voice that was strangely his own entered the room ahead of him, playing along with the beat, speaking to them all, one last time.

When signs were not noted for a week or so in a suburb where the fugitive had been active, residents there at once lost interest in having it trapped. So long as it