Nadine Gordimer: The Lying Days

One Saturday in late August when my friend Olwen Taylor’s mother telephoned to say that Olwen would not be able to go to the bioscope because she was going to a wedding, I refused to go with Gloria Dufalette (I heard Mrs. Dufalette’s call, out the back door in the next house — Gloriah, Gloriah!) or with Paddy Connolly. — Paddy Connolly’s little brother picked his nose, and no member of his family stopped him doing it.—

“What’ll she do, then?” asked my father.

My mother was pinning her hair ready for her tennis cap, looking straight back at herself in the mirror. Up-down, went her shoulders. “I don’t know. She’s not pleased with anything I suggest.”

But her indifference was not real. She followed me out into the garden where I stood in the warm still winter afternoon. “Now what are you going to do? Do you want to come with Mommy and Daddy and bring your book?” New powder showed white where the sun shone full on her nose and chin; it seemed to emphasize the fact that she was ready and waiting and yet held back. In a sense of power, I did not answer; my mother’s face waited, as if I had spoken and she had not quite heard. “Eh? What are you going to do?”

“Nothing,” I said, richly sullen. I saw the bedroom windows jerked in by an unseen hand; my father was ready, too. They were both waiting, their afternoon dependent upon me.

“Where are you going?”

Somewhere away from the houses resting back round the square of the Recreation Hall, beyond the pines in the road and the gums sounding, over the dry veld and in the town, Olwen was putting on a blue crinoline hat. Who could believe it was happening the same time as the doves spread their fat breasts in comfortable dust baths in the garden? Everything was wailing for me to answer. “Helen! You must make up your mind what you want to do. You know I can’t leave you on your own, the girl’s out.” Yes, I knew that, an unwritten law so sternly upheld and generally accepted that it would occur to no child to ask why: a little girl must not be left alone because there were native boys about. That was all. Native boys were harmless and familiar because they were servants, or delivery boys bringing the groceries or the fish by bicycle from town, or Mine boys something to laugh at in their blankets and their clay-spiked hair, but at the same time they spoke and shouted in a language you didn’t understand and dressed differently in any old thing, and so were mysterious. Not being left alone because they were about was simply something to do with their mysteriousness.

I squatted, digging the point of my hairslide into the white flakes of dead grass. “Helen?” My mother was not angry yet, still impatient; every moment I went on digging at the grass was riskier and nearer to anger. “Not going anywhere,” I mumbled, as if not caring if my mother heard or not. She turned with a skid of her tennis shoe on the gravel and walked into the house. At once she came back again, the key in her hand, my father behind her. It was always strange to see his knees, thin and surprised at their exposure, in shorts; they flickered a suggestion — half recognized, then gone out again — that he had mysteriousness somewhere, was someone else, to be seen by other people the way I could see other people. He had little authority with me; believed that, whenever something went wrong, my mother did not quite know how to deal with me, but refrained from interfering much himself. He would look at the two of us with the head-shaking tolerance of a man listening to the quarrels of two women. “What’s the trouble?” he said now, though he had been told. It was as if he trusted the tale of one no more than that of the other.

Burning with a new and strange pleasure, I did not answer. I could feel them standing tall, over me. “No, we’re just going to leave her here, that’s all,” said my mother briskly and coldly. Her chin was tightened in offense. “The back door’s open and she can just be left to her own devices. If something happens to her it’s her own fault. I’m not ruining my afternoon for her.”

She had gone too far, and spoiled the effect. We all knew that her afternoon was ruined; that she was terrified and convinced that “something” would happen to me; that her stride to the gate was a piece of bravado that cost her more than it was worth. Yet she sat in the car waiting, looking straight before her. “Will you be all right, Nell—? You’ll play quietly in the garden, eh?” said my father softly, touching my head as he followed. At the gate he turned back, as if he were about to make a sudden suggestion. But he closed the gate behind him and got into the car.

I heard it shake into life at the push of the starter button, pant obediently until it was put into gear, swish past the tough grasses at the curb and then swell away up the road. When it had gone, I looked up. Sun stroked the pine trees; there was a faint smell of petrol from the empty road where the car had been. I began to walk round and round the lawn balancing on the bricks which outlined it, whispering over and over — Not going anywhere, not going anywhere. I went and climbed on the gate, hanging out over to the road. Far off, along the houses, someone was hammering. Bellingan’s old black dog was zigzagging with busy aimlessness in the grounds of the Recreation Hall. He went in, in the shadow, came out in the light, like a fish rising and disappearing in water. A car passed; a reminder.

I came slowly back up the path and to the front door, forgetting it was locked. I tried it a few times and then went slowly round the back — Anna’s little room with its padlocked door and shut window protected with homemade tin burglar bars, tight in the quiet — and into the house. In my bedroom I stood before the mirror that was the middle door of the wardrobe, looking at myself. After a long time, steady and unblinking, only the sound of my breath, the face was just a face like other people’s faces met in the street. It looked at me a little longer. Suddenly I slammed the door, ran out of the passage which seemed to take up and give out the sound of each of my footsteps as if it were counting them, and through the kitchen which was noting each drip of the tap and the movement of a fly on a potato peeling. I went straight down the garden path and out of the gate into the road.

The sun pressed gently warm down on my shoulders as I walked in the road. Drifts of brown pine needles glistened in a wavering wash; sloping toward the sides, they were bedded down firmly, inches deep, beneath my feet. I stepped on an old orange peel, sucked out and dried so long that it crushed like the shell of a beetle. Tiny gray winter birds bounced on the telephone wires, flicked away. From the long gardens of the staff houses, doves sounded continuously like the even breathing of a sleeper.

Mr. Bellingan sat on a chair on his lawn with his shoes off and his feet up. His head was dropped to one side behind his paper. Next door two little boys hunched up over something they were making, backs to the gate. I left the row behind me.

Along the rippling white corrugated tin fences of the backs of another row, where the tin garages opened out onto a grassy road, some of the Married Quarters people were cleaning their cars. A man and a woman rubbed away in silence; inside the car, a small child was playing, licking the back window, then smearing it with a dirty pink feeder which was tied round its neck. The baby called out something to me that I didn’t hear. Farther up, a garage leaned heavily upon by an old bare willow was open and spilled out onto the rough track tools, oilcans and the red, tender-looking intestines of a tire. The two Cluff boys with faces fierce with smears, pale khaki shorts hanging distractedly from their hips and their mother’s thick knitted socks sunk into fat rims round their pale legs, were helping someone dismantle a motorcycle. They gave each other technical instructions in terse gasps, as they struggled with the prostrate machine whose handle bars stuck up obstinately in the air.