He swerves to the side of the deserted road and turns off the ignition. They stare at each other and he breaks the spell with a smile and slow-moving head, side-to-side. There’s no-one, nothing to witness the embrace, the struggle of each not to let go. Then he suddenly frees himself, gets out of the car, opens the passenger door and takes her by the hand. There are old puddles, soupy with stagnation, to step across. The sagging remains of a broken fence: whose land was this, once. No-one, nothing. The sun rests on their backs as a benign hand, they walk a little while over stubble, viscous hollows bleary with past rain, and cannot walk farther, are arrested by need. And there is some tree that really is a tree, in leaf over a low mound of tender grass grown in its moist shelter.
Lying there they find their way to each other through their clothes like any teenagers making love wherever they can hide. It doesn’t matter. Now they lie, breathing each other in, diastole and systole, and nothing draws near, there is only that indefinable supersonic humming of organic and insect life, the sap rising in the tree, grass sprouting, gauze of gnats hovering, and a silent shrike swoops from a branch to catch some kind of flying prey in mid-air.
He is stirred, eventually, by past reality, in concern for her — remembering the hazards of hunting trips he has taken: I hope there’re no ticks. She moves her head, eyes closed: no. Nothing. Safe. Opens her eyes to see him, nothing else. One of the flying specks has landed on the lobe of his ear, lingering there, while she blows at it. He starts with a faint exclamation, she frees a hand and flicks whatever it is, so small, nothing, away.
SHOOTING UP
The rave is in one of those four-walls-and-roof with creaky boards that has housed all kinds of purposes — a church or school hall where there isn’t, in this neighbourhood, a church or school anymore, and the toilets are across a yard that in the daytime is used by some guys to repair exhausts. Dismembered vehicle parts and gas cylinders have to be navigated to reach where he’s gone off to. There he is, sitting on the broken seat, but he has his trousers on, he’s sure not having a shit, and his sweat-shirt sleeve is rolled back on his bare white arm, he’s got an arm pale and hairless as a girl’s. And just look at it.
I thought you’d kicked the habit.
He laughs. You want to use this seat?
But he allows the arm to be grasped.
Just see your arm.
What’s one more prick? How can you tell one from another, high yourself on booze.
So what’s that on your arm?
Mosquito bite.
Very funny. Hahaha.
Summer, winter, Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere. There’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing! A speck hovering, landing, you can swat with the palm of a hand. It’s not the Reaper with the scythe.
It’s his emissary, Anopheles.
KARMA
‘Karma …. 1) The sum and the consequences of a person’s actions during the successive phases of his existence, regarded as determining his destiny. 2) Fate, destiny. Sanskrit karman (nominative karma), act, deed, work, from karoti, he makes, he does. ’
— THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
‘ … so man is continually peopling his current space with a world of his own’.
Arthur’s wife Norma is the one who is in the group photographs of conferences published in newspapers, she is quoted on the radio and sometimes appears on a TV panel. They have become a couple with a public profile, as the opinion polls would show. He is in insurance, a steady position, wasn’t doing too badly even when they bought the place she set her heart on, a bit beyond their means, then. It looked as if he might become a general manager, eventually, some day — who knows, so they could afford, in another sense, to begin to prepare a place equal to status.
If you don’t have ambitions when you’re young what kind of couple are you? She certainly had had ambition when she finished school top of her class. She’d wanted to go to university, study political science, economics, subjects she’d heard about in the company of her trade unionist parents and their friends, but there was no money. She worked in a factory, in the offices of a restaurant chain, picking up computer efficiency, studied her chosen subjects by correspondence courses, and became one of the working-class whites in the liberation movement. A resilient thread in a net that operated Underground. The movement sent her out of the country on a mission to one of their overseas offices while by some oversight on the part of the political police she still had a passport; when she came back her name appeared on a list of banned persons: her movements and the kind of work she could do to earn a living were restricted.
It was when the leftish-liberal manager of an insurance company did the bravest thing he could steel himself to, and quietly took her on as a filing clerk, that she met Arthur. There are at least two magnetic sources of attraction in the process called falling in love. (Anyone can think of a number of others.) The face, body, of the object-individuaclass="underline" that can be enough. The personality: it may make the above irrelevant. Arthur had no specific sexually-aesthetic taste in what was beauty in a woman, girls were pretty or ugly or just somehow inbetween. Norma, short, with a business-like body (characterised always about some movement and task) and a face in the inbetween category, could not have started the process by means of the first magnetic source. Arthur fell in love, deeply appreciative, with the force of her personality. She was everything he had never been, done everything he had never done. He was one step up out of the working-class from which she came. His father owned a small printing business where his mother acted as receptionist-bookkeeper, they kept clear of politics; the discount price of their middle-class white security, dependent on the local government’s orders for certain forms, might be withdrawn. Arthur was brought up to be honest about money, kind, to respect other people, no matter who or what they were, but without getting mixed with their ideas or problems; make his way as his parents had had to do — for himself. The insurance company was a good start. Whatever happened. In the country. There would always have to be insurance for people’s possessions, against other people who took these from them.
That was life as proposed to him. Yet he read the newspapers, he came face to face with demonstrations prancing anger in the streets, their assault by police with dogs and guns, he saw, in his work at the insurance company, who owned everything in the country. So he refrained from using his privilege, as a white, to vote in the elections while others did not even have the right to demonstrate in the streets. That was his only political stance. He did not tell his parents they were wrong, he himself was wrong to accept skin privilege, do nothing about this but refuse a vote, making his way with the secret justification to himself that when the great change that was coming did come, he would welcome it and claim self-respect not to be found alone in making your way.