Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,3

a little shriek.

‘Don’t worry – it can’t move. It’s as harmless as I am. You must have knocked its leg off when you hit out at it!’ He was laughing at her.

‘Oh, I didn’t!’ she said reproachfully. She loathed it but she loathed to hurt, even more. ‘I never even touched it! All I hit was air . . . I couldn’t possibly have hit it. Not its leg off.’

‘All right then. It’s another locust. But it’s lost its leg, anyway. You should just see it . . . It doesn’t know the leg isn’t there. God, I know exactly how that feels . . . I’ve been watching it, and honestly, it’s uncanny. I can see it feels just like I do!’

She smiled at him, sideways; she seemed suddenly pleased at something. Then, recalling herself, she came forward, bent double, hands upon her hips.

‘Well, if it can’t move . . .’ she said, hanging over it.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ he laughed. ‘Touch it.’

‘Ah, the poor thing,’ she said, catching her breath in compassion. ‘It can’t walk.’

‘Don’t encourage it to self-pity,’ he teased her.

She looked up and laughed. ‘Oh you – ’ she parried, assuming a frown. The locust kept its solemn silly face turned to her. ‘Shame, isn’t he a funny old man,’ she said. ‘But what will happen to him?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, for being in the same boat absolved him from responsibility or pity. ‘Maybe he’ll grow another one. Lizards grow new tails, if they lose them.’

‘Oh, lizards,’ she said. ‘ – but not these. I’m afraid the cat’ll get him.’

‘Get another little chair made for him and you can wheel him out here with me.’

‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘Only for him it would have to be a kind of little cart, with wheels.’

‘Or maybe he could be taught to use crutches. I’m sure the farmers would like to know that he was being kept active.’

‘The poor old thing,’ she said, bending over the locust again. And reaching back somewhere into an inquisitive childhood she picked up a thin wand of twig and prodded the locust, very gently. ‘Funny thing is, it’s even the same leg, the left one.’ She looked round at him and smiled.

‘I know,’ he nodded, laughing. ‘The two of us . . .’ And then he shook his head and, smiling, said it again: ‘The two of us.’

She was laughing and just then she flicked the twig more sharply than she meant to and at the touch of it there was a sudden flurried papery whirr, and the locust flew away.

She stood there with the stick in her hand, half afraid of it again, and appealed, unnerved as a child, ‘What happened? What happened?’

There was a moment of silence.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said irritably.

They had forgotten that locusts can fly.

The Amateurs

They stumbled round the Polyclinic, humpy in the dark with their props and costumes. ‘A drain!’ someone shouted, ‘Look out!’ ‘Drain ahead!’ They were all talking at once.

The others waiting in the car stared out at them; the driver leaned over his window: ‘All right?’

They gesticulated, called out together.

‘ – Can’t hear. Is it OK?’ shouted the driver.

Peering, chins lifted over bundles, they arrived back at the car again. ‘There’s nobody there. It’s all locked up.’

‘Are you sure it was the Polyclinic?’

‘Well, it’s very nice, I must say!’

They stood around the car, laughing in the pleasant little adventure of being lost together.

A thin native who had been watching them suspiciously from the dusty-red wash set afloat upon the night by the one street light, came over and mumbled, ‘I take you . . . You want to go inside?’ He looked over his shoulder to the location gates.

‘Get in,’ one young girl nudged the other towards the car. Suddenly they all got in, shut the doors.

‘I take you,’ said the boy again, his hands deep in his pockets.

At that moment a light wavered down the road from the gates, a bicycle swooped swallow-like upon the car, a fat police-boy in uniform shone a torch. ‘You in any trouble there, sir?’ he roared. His knobkerrie swung from his belt.

‘No, but we’ve come to the wrong place—’

‘You having any trouble?’ insisted the police-boy. The other shrank away into the light. He stood hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, looking at the car from the street light.

‘We’re supposed to be giving a play – concert – tonight, and we were told it would be at the Polyclinic. Now there’s nobody there,’ the girl called impatiently from the