Doris Lessing - Under My Skin

I lay flat on my back looking up. The cool spaces under the thatch welcomed me. Yes, and there will be an end to it, just as there was yesterday, and the day before. A lost bee buzzed about, tumbled to the floor, buzzed loudly, and I had an excuse to get up again to let it out of the door, but I did not dare replace the stone, set the door ajar. On my back, arms stretched, I took possession of my cool body, that thudded, pulsed and trickled with sounds. I flexed my feet. I tested my fingers, one by one, all present, all correct, my friends, my friend, my body. I sniffed my fingers where smells of roast beef and carrots lingered. The golden syrup of the steamed pudding sent intense sweetness into my brain, and made my nostrils flare. My forearm smelled of sun. The minute golden hairs flattened as I blew on them, like wind on the long grasses along the ditches. Silence. The dead, full, contented silence of midday in the bush. A dove calls. Another answers. For a moment the world is full of doves, and down the hill wings break in a flutter of noise, and the black shape of a bird speeds across the square of my window. My stomach gurgles. I put down a forefinger to prod the gurgle but it has moved downwards towards … but I had already gained full possession of my bladder, and had learned to ignore the anxious queries it sent up: should you take me to the lavatory? My hands slid, like a doctor’s, down over my thighs to my knees. There was a spot there somewhere, if you prodded it, then just behind the shoulder there would be an answering tweak of sensation. The two places were linked. There were other twinned patches of flesh, or skin. I kept discovering new ones, then forgot where they were, rediscovered them. Just above the ankle … I lay on my back with my legs in the air and pushed my forefinger into the flesh all around the ankle bone – there it was, yes, and miles away, under my ribs, there was a reply, a sensation not far off pain; it would become pain if I continued to press, but I had already moved on, mapping my body and its secret consonances. Did I dare look at the watch? Surely the half hour must be nearly up? I had been lying there for ever. I sneaked a look – no, impossible! The hand must have got stuck, I snatched up the watch, shook it. No, it was alive, all right, and only three minutes had passed. A howl of protest, hushed at once; had she heard, would she come in? I shut my eyes, lying rigid, pretending to be asleep. But dangers lurked in the pretence, for one could easily drop off, and I was not sleepy. I lay listening with my whole body, my whole life … from the other bed I heard a sound like the disturbance of air when a small trapped moth flutters. My friend the cat was there. I jumped up and leaned over her, she was lying curled, and her grey silky fur moved with her breath; she was, like me, enclosed in her own time, in the time of her breath. I was convinced she understood the anguish of afternoon sleep, the half hour which never passed. I touched her little grey paw with my finger, and it tightened as I slid my finger inside it. The claws, like tiny slivers of moon, dug into my flesh and went loose. She made the little sound which meant, I am asleep, so I left her and flung myself down on the bed so hard the springs twanged.

But I could see her there, I had company, if I woke her she would come and join me, her soft weight on my shoulder. But that meant I would have to lie still … outside on the woodpile the houseboy was cutting wood, and the slow sound of the axe was like strokes of a clock. The doves were quiet, I could feel heaviness sit on my lids. I woke myself by drinking mouthfuls of the heavy sweet tepid water from the glass that had bubbles clinging inside it. Each bubble was a little world, and I picked up a straw that had fallen from the thatch and chased the silvery bubbles about inside the glass until they went out, one by one, like birthday candles.

The watchface said five minutes had passed. Misery seized me – dread. The eternities of Mrs Scott’s were described as ‘But it was only two terms, that’s all’, while my parents looked at me, as they so often did, with amusement and with incredulity. Ahead lay the convent and another exile from home … Eternity. My mother read us the New Testament from a child’s version. Eternity: time that never ended. Lying flat on my back, arms flung out, eyes fixed on the cool under the yellow grass that seemed so high above me, I thought of time that never ended. Never ending, never ending … I was holding my breath with concentration. It never ends, never … my brain seemed to rock, my head was full of slowed time, time that has no end. For seconds, for a flash, I seemed to reach it – yes, that’s it, I got it then … I was suddenly exhausted. Surely it must be time to get up? The watch said only ten minutes had gone past. Without meaning to, I let out a great yell of outrage, then slapped both palms over my mouth, but it was no good, my mother had heard and came bursting in. ‘What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’ ‘The watch is wrong,’ I wept. ‘It’s not working.’

She stepped efficiently to the watch, and checked. She had just had time to lay out her Croxley writing pad and envelopes, and sit, letting herself slow down, to assemble scenes from this life of hers, find words that would convey its improbability to her friend, Daisy Lane, who was an examiner for nurses in London. ‘It’s completely wild out here,’ she might have decided to write. ‘We have to bring all the water up the hill in a scotchcart several times a week, and we have to use oil lamps! I wonder what you’d say if you saw this house! But of course, it is only temporary. We’re putting in tobacco this season, and you can make a pretty penny on that!’

She stood frowning at this difficult child, who was squatting on the bed, face streaked with tears, eyes imploring. The mother was uneasy. While the little boy, the good child, slept uncomplaining next door, this child looked as if she were being tortured. But it was with brisk humour she demanded. ‘Now what is all this nonsense?’ and pushed the child down with one hand while she flicked up the bedcover. ‘If you thrash about like that you’ll only get overheated.’

‘But I want to get up, can’t I get up?’

‘No, you can’t. You’ve not been there a quarter of an hour yet.’ And she marched out.

‘For ever … for ever …’ The child was walking with Jesus and his disciples along a dusty road, and it was not the track along the bottom of the hill, where dust lay in thick drifts, soft, red, and where the tracks of beetles or centipedes or buck slowly eroded as the breezes lifted the grains of sand away. It was a rocky yellowish road in – well, it was Palestine, since that was where Jesus was, but the rough dry road was from Persia. The smell in her nostrils now was not Africa, but that other place, where sunlight smelled old, full of stories from hundreds of years ago, Khosrhu and his armies marching across a rockface, but that was before Jesus, thousands of years ago, and then Jesus walked with men in striped headdresses along a dusty track where they stubbed their bare toes on big hot stones and Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth and the Life … what did he mean, what did they mean, hundreds of years ago … ? she would never grow up, never, why even to the end of the day and to bedtime was so long, long time, time was long, long … long time was not eternity, eternity was longer, it was unending, it never ended. From the bed next to hers, under its bundled mosquito net, came a small chattering sound. The cat was dreaming. Her teeth were making that funny sound. She was dreaming of chasing something? Like the dogs who would lie stretched out yelping and yapping with excitement as they chased a buck or a rabbit in a dream. Where was Lion? Where was Tiger? They were asleep in the shade under the verandah. Harry was asleep next door, the good baby. Daddy slept for a few minutes in his chair after lunch. The houseboy still sleepily measured time with his axe. And Mummy was writing to Aunt Daisy, who often wrote to me, from England, sending me presents, and often books about Jesus because she was my godmother. It was she who had sent me the stories about Jesus walking with the men in striped headdresses through the yellow dust … hundreds of years ago, hundreds.