Guerrillas (32 page)

He said, “I was frightened of what I saw.”

“Why were you frightened?” She touched the tip of her cigarette, as yet without ash, on the thick rim of the ash tray.

“It always happens like that. I knew I would be involved with you. I knew you were going to come back.” He whispered, “You told massa?”

She looked at him. Her moist eyes were full of irritation, alarm.

He looked at the lighter in her cigarette hand and said, “I remember that. From the Sahara.”

She held out the cigarette to the ash tray; she was about to swallow. He squeezed her hand hard over the ash tray; and her face moved to his, her mouth open, the cigarette falling from her fingers, the lighter hurting in her palm. Her mouth opened wide
and pressed against his, and her lips and tongue began to work.

He took his mouth away and said, “Be calm. You’re too greedy. You give yourself away when you kiss like that. A woman’s whole life is in her kiss.”

He released her hand; the lighter fell on the glass-topped table. Her head remained thrown back on the chair; when he went to her mouth again he found her lips barely parted, her tongue withdrawn. He said, “That’s better.” Very lightly, he ran the tip of his tongue between her lips, then on the inside of her lower lip. Then, still lightly, he sucked her lower lip. He took his mouth away and looked at her. Her eyes were still closed. She said, “That was lovely.” He held her face between his hands, jammed the heels of his palms on the corners of her mouth, covering her almost vanished period spots, distending her lips. He covered her mouth with his; her lips widened and she made a strangled sound; and then he spat in her mouth. She swallowed and he let her face go. She opened her eyes and said, “That was lovely.” He put his hands below her wet armpits and began to lift her. But she stood up of her own accord.

She said, “Your eyes are shining.”

“Your eyes are screaming still.”

He touched her with the tips of his fingers in the small of her back, and casually, like old lovers, they walked into the bedroom.

She saw the bare ocher-washed walls, the shiny brown fitted wardrobe, and, through the high wide window, the pale sky. The bathroom door was ajar: she saw the low tiled wall around the shower area, the dry concrete floor. Standing separate from one another, they began, without haste, to undress. The bed was unmade, the mattress showing at the top, the middle of the rumpled sheet brushed smooth and brown from use and spotted with stiff stains. The yellow candlewick bedspread hung over the end of the bed and rested on the maroon carpet.

Jane, unbuttoning her blouse, smiled and said, “Your candle-wick bedspread.”

“So you remember it. You didn’t seem to care for it the last time.”

She nodded slowly, once, and gave her mischievous smile. She
took off her blouse and threw it on the brown chest of drawers. Against the rest of her the red, aged skin below her neck looked like a rash; the little folds of flesh in her shaved armpits were wet. She let the Moroccan necklaces fall, with a little ripple of metallic sound, on the chest of drawers. She didn’t take off her brassiere: her breasts were small: he noted that shyness. She stepped out of her shoes and was at once small. She didn’t step out of her trousers, but lifted one leg after the other, in an athletic movement, and pulled the trousers off: a rough, masculine sound. Suddenly, then, her pants a shrunken, wrinkled roll on the carpet, she was on the unmade bed, sighing, smiling at him, her head on the oily pillow; and she looked big again. She opened her legs, put her hand there, and drew her fingers upward through moist flesh and hair. The wanton’s gesture: he noted it, and he seemed to say, “Hm.”

She said, “I hate that shirt.”

“I am taking it off.” His voice was soft.

When, looking very big, he moved toward her, she closed her eyes. She said, “Kiss me, Jimmy,” and waited with lips open, tongue withdrawn. Crouching beside her, he jammed his palms against the corners of her mouth. She made the strangled sound and he covered her mouth with his. He made her swallow, and she rested her hands on his back and said, “Love, love.”

She felt the pressure of his hands on her shoulders, and suddenly she was turned over on her belly and he was squatting on her, her hips and legs squeezed between his knees, thighs, and feet. He said, “It’s going to be different today, Jane. We’re doing it the other way.” She made as if to rise, but he held her down between the shoulder blades with his left hand, and opened her up with his right. She began to beat her hands on the bed. As soon as, moving down from the base of her spine he touched her where she was smaller, she cried out, “No!” And when he entered, squatting on her, driving in, his ankles pressed against her hips, she began to wail, a dry, scraping, deliberate sound. He said, as though speaking to a child, “But you’re a virgin, Jane. Isn’t it a good thing you came to see me today?” She shouted with real pain, “Take it out, take it out.” She began to wail again. He said, “A big girl like you, and a virgin, Jane? It’s hard. I know it’s hard. But you didn’t bring your
Vaseline, you see. A big girl like you should always take her own Vaseline when she goes visiting.” She said, “Oh my God, oh my God.” He said, “It’s better like this, Jane. You didn’t know that? You mean they never told you it was better with your legs closed? Aren’t you glad you came? It’s always better with your legs closed, whatever way you do it.” He drove deeper and deeper, until he was almost sitting upright on her. He said, “We’re breaking you in today, Jane.” He began to withdraw; sweat from his face and chest dripped on her back; she sighed; but he drove in hard and she shrieked. Her hands stopped beating on the bed; her inflamed face was pressed on one side on the pillow. She stopped wailing; she took her right hand to her mouth and began to bite on her thumb; real tears came. Sobbing, biting her thumb, she began to plead, now with a suppressed scream, now with a whisper, “Take it out, take it out.” Her body went soft; she was sweating all over. He withdrew and said, “There now.” She said, “Have you taken it out?” He said, “Yes, Jane. You’ve lost your virginity.”

She remained just as he had left her, her face on the pillow, the tears running down her nose; her untanned buttocks together, spreading slightly, wet with sweat where he had been sitting on her, the fine hairs there flattened in the sweat and showing more clearly. She sobbed and snuffled.

When he was off her, and beside her, not touching her, she said, like a child, “You made me cry! You made me cry!” Her face was red and wet with tears; but she was oddly calm.

He said, “I knew this about you as soon as I saw you that day. As soon as I saw your eyes and the shape of your mouth.”

“My ‘bedroom eyes.’ ”

He said, very softly, “You are rotten meat.”

It was his tone, rather than the words, that alarmed her. When she turned over to look at him she saw that his eyes were very bright and appeared sightless, the pupils mere points of glitter. He was still erect and looked very big.

He put his hand lightly on her shoulder and said, “You look frightened, Jane.”

“I’m thinking I have to go back.”

She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, he allowed his hand to slip off her shoulder, and she stood up.

“But I haven’t come, Jane.”

His eyes were on her. She bent down to pick up her pants, heedless of the hairiness and open flesh, her secret once again, that she was exposing. And, bending down, straightening up, she had in one movement pulled her pants on, covering herself where she was untanned and naked.

He said, “Your mouth, Jane. You have a sweet-mouth too. As soon as I saw you I knew you had a sweet-mouth. We must christen it.”

He continued to look at her. She pulled on her trousers; stepped into her shoes; buttoned her blouse, put on the Moroccan necklaces, and shook her hair into place.

She said, “I think I have to go.”

He sat on the edge of the bed; his erection was subsiding. He said, “You have to go. But you know what you are now. You’ll come again for more.”

“I’ll ring for a taxi.”

“You’ll be lucky if you get one to come here. But you don’t have anything to worry about. Massa is coming for you. Massa isn’t going to let you go.” He stood up; he had shrunken. “We’ll walk across to the Grange and meet massa.”

The telephone was on the chest of drawers but she didn’t lift it. She didn’t leave the room. She stood where she was, between the chest of drawers and the door, and waited for him to dress. The pillow was as she had left it, pressed down and damp; the stained sheet had patches of damp. He dressed slowly. When, lifting his chin, he did the top button of his Mao shirt, he said, “The shirt you don’t like.” She responded in no way.

When they went out into the living room, the cigarette in the blue-tinted ash tray had almost burnt itself out, a disintegrating cylinder of ash. The glass of water on the glass-topped table was where she had put it down. She picked up her lighter and bag and followed him out to the porch. The sunlight on the terrazzo was dazzling. He didn’t shut the front door.

They walked out into the heat and the openness. No trees grew between the house and the wall of bush. The road was lightly rubbled: stray pebbles, loosened bits of tarred gravel, clods of earth. The road ended abruptly, cracked asphalt giving way to a dirt path through a dried-up field, overgrown and then flattened by the drought. The path led to the wall of bush.

Jimmy said, “Massa will be waiting for you. A short walk. Ten minutes.”

She didn’t speak.

He said, “We’ll also meet Bryant. You remember Bryant?”

“I don’t want to see Bryant.”

“But he has something for you. Bryant has something for you.”

The green wall of bush, which from a distance had seemed solid, threaded with the slender white trunks and branches of softwood trees, became more pierced and open as they got closer to it.

Jimmy said, “Bryant and I are not friends now, Jane. You’ll help to make us friends.”

It was cooler in the bush. The ground was dry, covered with dead leaves, and spotted with big patches of sunlight. There seemed at first to be no path, just an intermittent disturbance in the dead leaves; and for the first time since she had followed him out of the bedroom she hesitated. He touched the top of her arm and moved the tips of his fingers down the short sleeve of her cotton blouse. Lightly, then, he held her arm and led her on. Ants’ nests, of dried mud, were like black veins on the white trunks of softwood trees. The wild banana was in flower: a solid spray of spearheads of orange and yellow that never turned to fruit, emerging sticky with mauve gum and slime from the heart of the tree.

Jimmy said, “They say there’s always a snake at the bottom of that tree. So be careful. See but never touch. It’s the golden rule of the bush.”

They were now in the middle of the bush, no light and openness behind them, trees and trees ahead of them.

“So you’re leaving us, Jane. That was why you came. Because you’re leaving. Do you have a nice house in London?”

“I’m used to it.”

“Everything nicely put away, I bet. Is it near Wimbledon?”

“No. It isn’t near Wimbledon.”

“Suppose it burns down while you’re away?”

“It’s insured.”

“You’ll just build another?”

“I suppose so.”

He suddenly squeezed her arm and said, “Smell it, Jane!”

She stopped and looked about her.

He said, “You can smell it?”

“What?”

“Snake.”

“I can’t smell anything.”

“It smells of sex, Jane. Bad, stale sex. It smells of a dirty cunt.”

He released her arm. The bush was becoming brighter; they were approaching openness. And soon, through the trees, the clearing on which the Grange stood could be seen: an expanse of brown in a hard white light. There was a latrine smell, which became sharper. The latrine, with corrugated-iron walls and roof and a sagging, open corrugated-iron door, stood on a rough concrete foundation just outside the bush, in direct sunlight. Brilliant green flies buzzed about it and within it, striking the corrugated iron.

They had come out into the back yard of the Grange: no shade, the bush laid waste, the land sterile. The main building blocked a view of the road and of the fields beyond the road. The corrugated-iron roof glittered; the concrete-block walls were in shadow. A roll of wire netting, old scantlings, a junked metal icebox, white enamel basins: this was part of the debris at the back. A low lean- to shelter, its palm thatch sloping down almost to the ground, was fixed to the back wall; below the thatch there was black shadow. Scattered about the ground were back yard structures and relics of back yard projects: a wire-netting pen, torn in places; chicken coops of wire netting and old board; a dry pit, the dug-out earth heaped up on one side beside a load of concrete blocks.

There was a boy in the shadow of the lean-to. He was sitting on the ground in the angle of the thatch and the ground. His
knees were drawn up, and his head and arms rested on his knees. He seemed asleep. His white canvas shoes were yellow with dust; his washed-out jeans were dusty; his elbows were scratched and there was dust on his black arms.

“You remember Bryant?”

Jane said, “I don’t remember him.”

“He remembers you.”

The boy raised his head. His face was twisted and he wore the pigtails of aggression. His eyes were red and blurred, one lid half stuck down. He stood up. He ran back into the lean-to, and when he turned to face them he had a cutlass in his hand and he was in tears.

He cried, “Jimmy! Jimmy!”

Jimmy locked his right arm about Jane’s neck and almost lifted her in front of him, pulling back the corners of his mouth with the effort, and slightly puffing out his shaved cheeks, so that he seemed to smile.

He said,
“Bryant, the rat! Kill the rat!”

Bryant, running, faltered.

“Your rat, Bryant! Your rat!”

Her right hand was on the arm swelling around her neck, and it was on her right arm that Bryant made the first cut.

The first cut: the rest would follow.

Sharp steel met flesh. Skin parted, flesh showed below the skin, for an instant mottled white, and then all was blinding, disfiguring blood, and Bryant could only cut at what had already been cut.