Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,95

why I had to come back here, well, I’d be grateful. I had my own combo, down in Rhodesia.’ He removed the fish from his narrow middle and sat on a chair turned away from her table.

‘Why don’t we get the boys to stick ’em in, today? They could’ve died after being planted out, after all, ay?’

He seemed too gloomy to hear her. Drops from his wet curls fell on his shoulders. She bent towards him kindly, wheedlingly, meat of her thighs and breasts pressing together. ‘If we put two boys on it, they’d have them in by lunchtime? Dickie? And if it’ll make her happy? Dickie?’

‘I’ve got ideas of my own. But when Madam’s here you can forget it, just forget it. No sooner start something – just get started, that’s all – she chucks it up and wants something different again.’ His gaze wavered once or twice to the wall where the bar had been. Carl Church asked what the fish were. He didn’t answer, and the girl encouraged, ‘Perch. Aren’t they, Dickie? Yes, perch. You’ll have them for your lunch. Lovely eating.’

‘Oh what the hell. Let’s go. You ready?’ he said to Church. The girl jumped up and he hooked an arm round her neck, feeling in her rough hair.

‘Course he’s ready. The black flippers’ll fit him – the stuff’s in the bar,’ she said humouringly.

‘But I haven’t even got a pair of trunks.’

‘Who cares? I can tell you I’m just-not-going-to-worry-a-damn. Here Zelide, I nearly lost it this morning.’ He removed a dark stone set in Christmas-cracker baroque from his rock-scratched hand, nervous-boned as his mother’s ankles, and tossed it for the girl to catch.

‘Come, I’ve got the trunks,’ she said, and led Carl Church to the bar by way of the reception desk, stopping to wrap the ring in a pink tissue and pop it in the cash box.

The thought of going to the lake once more was irresistible. His bag was packed; an hour or two wouldn’t make any difference. He had been skin-diving before, in Sardinia, and did not expect the bed of the lake to compare with the Mediterranean, but if the architecture of undersea was missing, the fish one could get at were much bigger than he had ever caught in the Mediterranean. The young man disappeared for minutes and rose again between Carl Church and the girl, his Gothic Christ’s body sucked in below the nave of ribs, his goggles leaving weals like duelling scars on his white cheekbones. Water ran from the tarnished curls over the bright eyeballs without seeming to make him blink. He brought up fish deftly and methodically and the girl swam back to shore with them, happy as a retrieving dog.

Neither she nor Carl Church caught much themselves. And then Church went off on his own, swimming slowly with the borrowed trunks inflating above the surface like a striped Portuguese man-of-war, and far out, when he was not paying attention but looking back at the skimpy white buildings, the flowering shrubs and even the giant baobab razed by distance and the optical illusion of the heavy waterline, at eye-level, about to black them out, he heard a fish-eagle scream just overhead; looked up, looked down, and there below him saw three fish at different levels, a mobile swaying in the water. This time he managed the gun without thinking; he had speared the biggest.

The girl was as impartially overjoyed as she was when the young man had a good catch. They went up the beach, laughing, explaining, a water-intoxicated progress. The accidental bump of her thick sandy thigh against his was exactly the tactile sensation of contact with the sandy body of the fish, colliding with him as he carried it. The young man was squatting on the beach, now, his long back arched over his knees. He was haranguing, in an African language, the old fisherman with the ivory bracelets who was still at work on the nets. There were dramatic pauses, accusatory rises of tone, hard jerks of laughter, in the monologue. The old man said nothing. He was an Arabised African from far up the lake somewhere in East Africa, and wore an old towel turban as well as the ivory; every now and then he wrinkled back his lips on tooth-stumps. Three or four long black dugouts had come in during the morning and were beached; black men sat motionless in what small shade they could find. The baby on his blue