9275 Gcse English Literature Short Stories

INTERNATIONAL
GCSE
ENGLISH LITERATURE
(9275)
Short stories anthology
For teaching from September 2016 onwards

For exams May/June 2018 onwards
For teaching and examination outside the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
VERSION 3
OXFORD AQA INTERNATIONAL GCSE ENGLISH LITERATURE
SHORT STORIES ANTHOLOGY

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Oxford AQA International GCSE English Literature (9275)
CONTENTS
V. S. PRITCHETT THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT 4
TED HUGHES THE RAIN HORSE 11
AHDAF SOUEIF SANDPIPER 17
GRAHAM GREENE THE DESTRUCTORS 24
JHUMPA LAHIRI A REAL DURWAN 37
DORIS LESSING THROUGH THE TUNNEL 45
JACKIE KAY MRS VADNIE MARLENE SEVLON 52
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 57
3
THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT

V S PRITCHETT (1900 – 1997)
1 It was the dead hour of a November afternoon. Under the ceiling of level mud-colored
2 cloud, the latest office buildings of the city stood out alarmingly like new tombstones,
3 among the mass of older buildings. And along the streets, the few cars and the few people
4 appeared and disappeared slowly as if they were not following the roadway or the
5 pavement, but some inner, personal route. Along the road to the main station, at intervals
6 of two hundred yards or so, unemployed men and one or two beggars were dribbling
7 slowly past the desert of public buildings to the next patch of shop fronts.
8 Presently a taxi stopped outside one of the underground stations and a man of thirty-five
9 paid his fare and made off down one of the small streets.
10 “Better not arrive in a taxi,” he was thinking. “The old man will wonder where I got the
11 money.”
12 He was going to see his father. It was his father’s last day at his factory, the last day of
13 thirty years’ work and life among these streets, building a business out of nothing, and
14 then, after a few years of prosperity, letting it go to pieces in a chafer of rumor, idleness,
15 quarrels, accusations and, at last, bankruptcy.
16 Suddenly all the money quarrels of the family, which nagged in the young man’s mind, had
17 been dissolved. His dread of being involved in them vanished. He was overcome by the
18 sadness of his father’s situation. “Thirty years of your life come to an end. I must see him. I
19 must help him.” All the same, knowing his father, he had paid off the taxi and walked the
20 last quarter of a mile.
21 It was a shock to see the name of the firm, newly painted too, on the sign outside the
22 factory and on the brass of the office entrance, newly polished. He pressed the bell at the
23 office window inside and it was a long time before he heard footsteps cross the empty
24 room and saw a shadow cloud the frosted glass of the window.
25 “It’s Harold, father,” the young man said. The door was opened.
26 “Hullo, old chap. This is very nice of you, Harold,” said the old man shyly, stepping back
27 from the door to let his son in, and lowering his pleased, blue eyes for a second’s modesty.
28 “Naturally I had to come,” said the son, shyly also. And then the father, filled out with
29 assurance again and taking his son’s arm, walked him across the floor of the empty
30 workroom.
31 “Hardly recognize it, do you? When were you here last?” said the father.
32 This had been the machine-room, before the machines had gone. Through another door
33 was what had been the showroom where the son remembered seeing his father, then a
4
34 dark-haired man, talking in a voice he had never heard before, a quick, bland voice, to his
35 customers. Now there were only dust-lines left by the shelves on the white brick walls, and
36 the marks of the showroom cupboards on the floor. The place looked large and light. There
37 was no throb of machines, no hum of voices, no sound at all, now, but the echo of their
38 steps on the empty floors. Already, though only a month bankrupt, the firm was becoming
39 a ghost.
40 The two men walked towards the glass door of the office. They were both short. The father
41 was well-dressed in an excellent navy blue suit. He was a vigorous, broad man with a
42 pleased impish smile. The sunburn shone through the clipped white hair of his head and
43 he had the simple, trim, open-air look of a snow man. The son beside him was round-
44 shouldered and shabby, a keen but anxious fellow in need of a hair cut and going bald.
45 “Come in, Professor,” said the father. This was an old family joke. He despised his son,
46 who was, in fact, not a professor but a poorly paid lecturer at a provincial university.
47 “Come in,” said the father, repeating himself, not with the impatience he used to have, but
48 with the habit of age. “Come inside, into my office. If you can call it an office now,” he
49 apologized. “This used to be my room, do you remember, it used to be my office? Take a
50 chair. We’ve still got a chair. The desk’s gone, yes that’s gone, it was sold, fetched a good
51 price — what was I saying?” he turned a bewildered look to his son. “The chair. I was saying
52 they have to leave you a table and a chair. I was just going to have a cup of tea, old boy,
53 but — pardon me,” he apologized again,“ I’ve only one cup. Things have been sold for the
54 liquidators and they’ve cleaned out nearly everything. I found this cup and teapot upstairs
55 in the foreman’s room. Of course he’s gone, all the hands have gone, and when I looked
56 around just now to lock up before taking the keys to the agent when I hand over today, I
57 saw this cup. Well, there it is. I’ve made it. Have a cup?”
58 “No, thanks,” said the son, listening patiently to his father. “I have had my tea.”
59 “You’ve had your tea? Go on. Why not have another?”
60 “No really, thanks,” said the son. “You drink it.”
61 “Well,” said the father, pouring out the tea and lifting the cup to his soft rosy face and
62 blinking his eyes as he drank, “I feel badly about this. This is terrible. I feel really awful
63 drinking this tea and you standing there watching me, but you say you’ve had yours — well,
64 how are things with you? How are you? And how is Alice? Is she better? And the children?
65 You know I’ve been thinking about you — you look worried. Haven’t lost sixpence and
66 found a shilling have you, because I wouldn’t mind doing that?”
67 “I’m all right,” the son said, smiling to hide his irritation. “I’m not worried about anything, I’m
68 just worried about you. This — ” he nodded with embarrassment to the dismantled
69 showroom, the office from which even the calendars and wastepaper basket had gone —
70 “this — ” what was the most tactful and sympathetic word to use? — “this is bad luck,” he
71 said.
72 “Bad luck?” said the old man sternly.
5
73 “I mean,” stammered his son, “I heard about the creditors’ meeting. I knew it was your last
74 day — I thought I’d come along, I . . . to see how you were.”
75 “Very sweet of you, old boy,” said the old man with zest. “Very sweet. We’ve cleared
76 everything up. They got most of the machines out today. I’m just locking up and handing
77 over. Locking up is quite a business. There are so many keys. It’s tiring, really. How many
78 keys do you think there are to a place like this? You wouldn’t believe it, if I told you.”
79 “It must have been worrying,” the son said.
80 “Worrying? You keep on using that word. I’m not worrying. Things are fine,” said the old
81 man smiling aggressively. “I feel they’re fine. I know they’re fine.”
82 “Well, you always were an optimist,” smiled his son.
83 “Listen to me a moment. I want you to get this idea,” said his father, his warm voice going
84 dead and rancorous and his nostrils fidgeting. His eyes went hard, too. A different man
85 was speaking, and even a different face; the son noticed for the first time that like all big-
86 faced men his father had two faces. There was the outer face like a soft warm and
87 careless daub of innocent sealing wax and inside it, as if thumbed there by a seal, was a
88 much smaller one, babyish, shrewd, scared and hard. Now this little inner face had gone
89 greenish and pale and dozens of little veins were broken on the nose and cheeks. The
90 small, drained, purplish lips of this little face were speaking. The son leaned back
91 instinctively to get just another inch away from this little face.
92 “Listen to this,” the father said and leaned forward on the table as his son leaned back,
93 holding his right fist up as if he had a hammer in his hand and was auctioning his life. “I am
94 65. I don’t know how long I shall live, but let me make this clear: if I were not an optimist I
95 wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t stay another minute.” He paused, fixing his son’s half averted
96 eyes to let the full meaning of his words bite home. “I’ve worked hard,” the father went on.
97 “For thirty years I built up this business from nothing. You wouldn’t know it, you were a
98 child, but many’s the time coming down from the North, I’ve slept in this office to be on the
99 job early the next morning.” He looked decided and experienced like a man of forty, but
100 now he softened to sixty again. The ring in the hard voice began to soften into a faint
101 whine and his thick nose sniffed. “I don’t say I’ve always done right,” he said. “You can’t
102 live your life from A to Z like that. And now I haven’t a penny in the world. Not a cent. It’s
103 not easy at my time of life to begin again. What do you think I’ve got to live for? There’s
104 nothing holding me back. My boy, if I wasn’t an optimist I’d go right out. I’d finish it.”
105 Suddenly the father smiled and the little face was drowned in a warm flood of triumphant
106 smiles from the bigger face. He rested his hands on his waistcoat and that seemed to be
107 smiling too, his easy coat smiling, his legs smiling and even winks of light on his shining
108 shoes. Then he frowned.
109 “Your hair’s going thin,” he said. “You oughtn’t to be losing your hair at your age. I don’t
110 want you to think I’m criticizing you, you’re old enough to live your own life, but your hair
111 you know — you ought to do something about it. If you used oil every day and rubbed it in
112 with both hands, the thumbs and forefingers is what you want to use, it would be better. I’m
113 often thinking about you and I don’t want you to think I’m lecturing you because I’m not, so
114 don’t get the idea this is a lecture, but I was thinking, what you want, what we all want, I
6
115 say this for myself as well as you, what we all want is ideas — big ideas. We go worrying
116 along but you just want bigger and better ideas. You ought to think big. Take your case.
117 You’re a lecturer. I wouldn’t be satisfied with lecturing to a small batch of people in a
118 university town. I’d lecture the world. You know, you’re always doing yourself injustice. We
119 all do. Think big.”
120 “Well,” said his son, still smiling, but sharply. He was very angry. “One’s enough in the
121 family. You’ve thought big till you bust.”
122 He didn’t mean to say this because he hadn’t really the courage, but his pride was
123 touched.
124 “I mean,” said the son, hurriedly covering it up in a panic, “I’m not like you . . . I . . .”
125 “What did you say?” said the old man. “Don’t say that.” It was the smaller of the two faces
126 speaking in a panic. “Don’t say that. Don’t use that expression. That’s not a right idea.
127 Don’t you get a wrong idea about me. We paid sixpence in the pound,” said the old man
128 proudly.
129 The son began again, but his father stopped him.
130 “Do you know,” said the bigger of his two faces, getting bigger as it spoke, “some of the
131 oldest houses in the city are in Queer Street, some of the biggest firms in the country? I
132 came up this morning with Mr. Higgins, you remember Higgins? They’re in liquidation.
133 They are. Oh yes. And Moore, he’s lost everything. He’s got his chauffeur but it’s his wife’s
134 money. Did you see Beltman in the trade papers? Quarter of a million deficit. And how long
135 are Prestons going to last?”
136 The big face smiled and overflowed on the smaller one. The whole train, the old man said,
137 was practically packed with bankrupts every morning. Thousands had gone. Thousands?
138 Tens of thousands. Some of the biggest men in the City were broke.
139 A small man himself, he was proud to be bankrupt with the big ones; it made him feel rich.
140 “You’ve got to realize, old boy,” he said gravely, “the world’s changing. You’ve got to move
141 with the times.”
142 The son was silent. The November sun put a few strains of light through the frosted
143 window and the shadow of its bars and panes was weakly placed on the wall behind his
144 father’s head. Some of the light caught the tanned scalp that showed between the white
145 hair. So short the hair was that his father’s ears protruded and, framed against that
146 reflection of the window bars, the father suddenly took (to his son’s fancy) the likeness of a
147 convict in his cell and the son, startled, found himself asking: Were they telling the truth
148 when they said the old man was a crook and that his balance sheets were cooked? What
149 about that man they had to shut up at the meeting, the little man from Birmingham, in a
150 mackintosh . . .?
151 “There’s a fly in this room,” said the old man suddenly, looking up in the air and getting to
7
152 his feet. “I’m sorry to interrupt what you were saying, but I can hear a fly. I must get it out.”
153 “A fly?” said his son listening.
154 “Yes, can’t you hear it? It’s peculiar how you can hear everything now the machines have
155 stopped. It took me quite a time to get used to the silence. Can you see it, old chap? I can’t
156 stand flies, you never know where they’ve been. Excuse me one moment.”
157 The old man pulled a duster out of a drawer.

158 “Forgive this interruption. I can’t sit in a room with a fly in it,” he said apologetically. They
159 both stood up and listened. Certainly in the office was the small dying fizz of a fly, deceived
160 beyond its strength by the autumn sun.
161 “Open the door, will you, old boy,” said the old man with embarrassment.
162 “I hate them.”
163 The son opened the door and the fly flew into the light. The old man struck at it but it sailed
164 away higher.
165 “There it is,” he said, getting up on the chair. He struck again and the son struck too as the
166 fly came down. The old man got on top of his table. An expression of disgust and fear was
167 curled on his smaller face; and an expression of apology and weakness.
168 “Excuse me,” he said again, looking up at the ceiling.
169 “If we leave the door open or open the window it will go,” said the son.
170 “It may seem a fad to you,” said the old man shyly. “I don’t like flies. Ah, here it comes.”
171 They missed it. They stood helplessly gaping up at the ceiling where the fly was buzzing in
172 small circles round the cord of the electric light.
173 “I don’t like them,” the old man said.

174 The table creaked under his weight. The fly went on to the ceiling and stayed there.
175 Unavailingly the old man snapped the duster at it.
176 “Be careful,” said the son. “Don’t lose your balance.”
177 The old man looked down. Suddenly he looked tired and old, his body began to sag and a
178 look of weakness came on to his face.
179 “Give me a hand, old boy,” the old man said in a shaky voice. He put a heavy hand on his
180 son’s shoulder and the son felt the great helpless weight of his father’s body.
181 “Lean on me.”
8
182 Very heavily and slowly the old man got cautiously down from the table to the chair. “Just a
183 moment, old boy,” said the old man. Then, after getting his breath, he got down from the
184 chair to the floor.
185 “You all right?” his son asked.
186 “Yes, yes,” said the old man out of breath. “It was only that fly. Do you know, you’re
187 actually more bald at the back than I thought. There’s a patch there as big as my hand. I
188 saw it just then. It gave me quite a shock. You really must do something about it. How are
189 your teeth? Do you have any trouble with your teeth? That may have something to do with
190 it. Hasn’t Alice told you how bald you are?”
191 “You’ve been doing too much. You’re worried,” said the son, soft with repentance and
192 sympathy. “Sit down. You’ve had a bad time.”
193 “No, nothing,” said the old man shyly, breathing rather hard. “A bit. Everyone’s been very
194 nice. They came in and shook hands. The staff came in. They all came in just to shake
195 hands. They said, ‘We wish you good luck’.”
196 The old man turned his head away. He actually wiped a tear from his eye. A glow of
197 sympathy transported the younger man. He felt as though a sun had risen.
198 “You know — ” the father said uneasily, flitting a glance at the fly on the ceiling as if he
199 wanted the fly as well as his son to listen to what he was going to say — “you know,” he
200 said. The world’s all wrong. I’ve made my mistakes. I was thinking about it before you
201 came. You know where I went wrong? You know where I made my mistake?”
202 The son’s heart started to a panic of embarrassment. “For heaven’s sake,” he wanted to
203 shout, “don’t! Don’t stir up the whole business. Don’t humiliate yourself before me. Don’t
204 start telling the truth. Don’t oblige me to say we know all about it, that we have known for
205 years the mess you’ve been in, that we’ve seen through the plausible stories you’ve
206 spread, that we’ve known the people you’ve swindled.”
207 “Money’s been my trouble,” said the old man. “I thought I needed money. That’s one thing
208 it’s taught me. I’ve done with money. Absolutely done and finished with it. I never want to
209 see another penny as long as I live. I don’t want to see or hear of it. If you came in now
210 and offered me a thousand pounds I should laugh at you. We deceive ourselves. We don’t
211 want the stuff. All I want now is just to go to a nice little cottage by the sea,” the old man
212 said. “I feel I need air, sun, life.”
213 The son was appalled.
214 “You want money even for that,” the son said irritably. “You want quite a lot of money to do
215 that.”
216 “Don’t say I want money,” the old man said vehemently. “Don’t say it. When I walk out of
217 this place tonight I’m going to walk into freedom. I am not going to think of money. You
218 never know where it will come from. You may see something. You may meet a man. You
9
219 never know. Did the children of Israel worry about money? No, they just went out and
220 collected the manna. That’s what I want to do.”
221 The son was about to speak. The father stopped him.
222 “Money,” the father said, “isn’t necessary at all.”
223 Now like the harvest moon on full glow the father’s face shone up at his son.
224 “What I came round about was this,” said the son awkwardly and drily. “I’m not rich. None
225 of us is. In fact, with things as they are we’re all pretty shaky and we can’t do anything. I
226 wish I could but I can’t. But” — after the assured beginning he began to stammer and to
227 crinkle his eyes timidly — “but the idea of your being — you know, well short of some
228 immediate necessity, I mean — well, if it is ever a question of — well to be frank, cash, I’d
229 raise it somehow.”
230 He colored. He hated to admit his own poverty, he hated to offer charity to his father. He
231 hated to sit there knowing the things he knew about him. He was ashamed to think how
232 he, how they all dreaded having the gregarious, optimistic, extravagant, uncontrollable
233 disingenuous old man on their hands. The son hated to feel he was being in some peculiar
234 way which he could not understand mean, cowardly and dishonest.
235 The father’s sailing eyes came down and looked at his son’s nervous, frowning face and
236 slowly the dreaming look went from the father’s face. Slowly the harvest moon came down
237 from its rosy voyage. The little face suddenly became dominant within the outer folds of
238 skin like a fox looking out of a hole of clay. He leaned forward brusquely on the table and
239 somehow a silver-topped pencil was in his hand preparing to note something briskly on a
240 writing pad.
241 “Raise it?” said the old man sharply. “Why didn’t you tell me before you could raise
242 money? How can you raise it? Where? By when?”
10
THE RAIN HORSE

TED HUGHES (1930 – 1998)
1 As the young man came over the hill the first thin blowing of rain met him. He turned his
2 coat-collar up and stood on top of the shelving rabbit-riddled hedgebank, looking down into
3 the valley.
4 He had come too far. What had set out as a walk along pleasantly remembered tarmac
5 lanes had turned dreamily by gate and path and hedge-gap into a cross ploughland trek,
6 his shoes ruined, the dark mud of the lower fields inching up the trouser legs of his grey
7 suit where they rubbed against each other. And now there was a raw, flapping wetness in
8 the air that would be downpour again at any minute. He shivered, holding himself tense
9 against the cold.
10 This was the view he had been thinking of. Vaguely, without really directing his walk, he
11 had felt he would get the whole thing from this point. For twelve years, whenever he had
12 recalled this scene, he had imagined it as it looked from here. Now the valley lay sunken in
13 front of him, utterly deserted, shallow, bare fields, black and sodden as the bed of an
14 ancient lake after the weeks of rain.
15 Nothing happened. Not that he had looked forward to any very transfiguring experience.
16 But he had expected something, some pleasure, some meaningful sensation, he didn’t
17 quite know what.
18 So he waited, trying to nudge the right feelings alive with the details - the surprisingly
19 familiar curve of the hedges, the stone gate-pillar and iron gatehook let into it that he had
20 used as a target, the long bank of the rabbit-warren on which he stood and which had
21 been the first thing he ever noticed about the hill when twenty years ago, from the distance
22 of the village, he had said to himself ‘That looks like rabbits.’
23 Twelve years had changed him. This land no longer recognised him, and he looked back
24 at it coldly, as at a finally visited home-country, known only through the stories of a
25 grandfather: felt nothing but the dullness of feeling nothing. Boredom. Then, suddenly,
26 impatience, with a whole exasperated swarm of little anxieties about his shoes and the
27 spitting rain and his new suit and that sky and the two-mile trudge through the mud back to
28 the road.
29 All around him the boughs angled down, glistening, black as iron. From their tips and
30 elbows the drops hurried steadily, and the channels of the bark pulsed and gleamed. For a
31 time he amused himself calculating the variation in the rainfall by the variations in a dribble
32 of water from a trembling twig-end two feet in front of his nose. He studied the twig,
33 bringing dwarfs and continents and animals out of its scurfy bark. Beyond the boughs the
34 blue shoal of the town was rising and falling, and darkening and fading again, in the pale,
35 swaying backdrop of rain.
36 He wanted this rain to go on for ever. Whenever it seemed to be drawing off he listened
11
37 anxiously until it closed in again. As long as it lasted he was suspended from life and time.
38 He didn’t want to return to his sodden shoes and his possibly ruined suit and the walk back
39 over that land of mud.
40 All at once he shivered. He hugged his knees to squeeze out the cold and found himself
41 thinking of the horse. The hair on the nape of his neck prickled slightly. He remembered
42 how it had run up to the crest and showed against the sky.
43 He tried to dismiss the thought. Horses wander about the countryside often enough. But
44 the image of the horse as it had appeared against the sky stuck in his mind. It must have
45 come over the crest just above the wood in which he was now sitting. To clear his mind, he
46 twisted around and looked up the wood between the tree stems, to his left.
47 At the wood top, with the silvered grey light coming in behind it, the black horse was
48 standing under the oaks, its head high and alert, its ears pricked, watching him.
49 A horse sheltering from the rain generally goes into a sort of stupor, tilts a hind hoof and
50 hangs its head and lets its eyelids droop, and so it stays as long as the rain lasts. This
51 horse was nothing like that. It was watching him intently, standing perfectly still, its soaked
52 neck and flank shining in the hard light.
53 He turned back. His scalp went icy and he shivered. What was he to do? Ridiculous to try
54 driving it away. And to leave the wood, with the rain still coming down full pelt was out of
55 the question. Meanwhile the idea of being watched became more and more unsettling until
56 at last he had to twist around again, to see if the horse had moved. lt stood exactly as
57 before.
58 This was absurd. He took control of himself and turned back deliberately, determined not
59 to give the horse one more thought. If it wanted to share the wood with him, let it. If it
60 wanted to stare at him, let it. He was nestling firmly into these resolutions when the ground
61 shook and he heard the crash of a heavy body coming down the wood. Like lightning his
62 legs bounded him upright and about face. The horse was almost on top of him, its head
63 stretching forward, ears flattened and lips lifted back from the long yellow teeth. He got one
64 snapshot glimpse of the red-veined eyeball as he flung himself backwards around the tree.
65 Then he was away up the slope, whipped by oak twigs as he leapt the brambles and
66 brushwood, twisting between the close trees till he tripped and sprawled. As he fell the
67 warning flashed through his head that he must at all costs keep his suit out of the leaf-
68 mould, but a more urgent instinct was already rolling him violently sideways. He spun
69 around, sat up and looked back, ready to scramble off in a flash to one side. He was
70 panting from the sudden excitement and effort. The horse had disappeared. The wood was
71 empty except for the drumming, slant grey rain, dancing the bracken and glittering from the
72 branches.
73 He got up, furious. Knocking the dirt and leaves from his suit as well as he could he looked
74 around for a weapon. The horse was evidently mad, had an abscess on its brain or
75 something of the sort. Or maybe it was just spiteful. Rain sometimes puts creatures into
76 queer states. Whatever it was, he was going to get away from the wood as quickly as
77 possible, rain or no rain.
12
78 Since the horse seemed to have gone on down the wood, his way to the farm over the hill
79 was clear. As he went, he broke a yard length of wrist-thick dead branch from one of the
80 oaks, but immediately threw it aside and wiped the slime of rotten wet bark from his hands
81 with his soaked handkerchief. Already he was thinking it incredible that the horse could
82 have meant to attack him. Most likely it was just going down the wood for better shelter
83 and had made a feint at him in passing - as much out of curiosity or playfulness as
84 anything. He recalled the way horses menace each other when they are galloping round in
85 a paddock.
86 The wood rose to a steep bank topped by the hawthorn hedge that ran along the whole
87 ridge of the hill. He was pulling himself up to a thin place in the hedge by the bare stem of
88 one of the hawthorns when he ducked and shrank down again. The swelling gradient of
89 fields lay in front of him, smoking in the slowly crossing rain. Out in the middle of the first
90 field, tall as a statue, and a ghostly silver in the under-cloud light, stood the horse,
91 watching the wood.
92 He lowered his head slowly, slithered back down the bank and crouched. An awful feeling
93 of helplessness came over him. He felt certain the horse had been looking straight at him.
94 Waiting for him? Was it clairvoyant? Maybe a mad animal can be clairvoyant. At the same
95 time he was ashamed to find himself acting so inanely, ducking and creeping about in this
96 way just to keep out of sight of a horse. He tried to imagine how anybody in their senses
97 would just walk off home. This cooled him a little, and he retreated farther down the wood.
98 He would go back the way he had come, along under the hill crest, without any more
99 nonsense.
100 The wood hummed and the rain was a cold weight, but he observed this rather than felt it.
101 The water ran down inside his clothes and squelched in his shoes as he eased his way
102 carefully over the bedded twigs and leaves. At every instant he expected to see the prick-
103 eared black head looking down at him from the hedge above.
104 At the woodside he paused, close against a tree. The success of this last manoeuvre was
105 restoring his confidence, but he didn’t want to venture out into the open field without
106 making sure that the horse was just where he had left it. The perfect move would be to
107 withdraw quietly and leave the horse standing out there in the rain. He crept up again
108 among the trees to the crest and peered through the hedge.
109 The grey field and the whole slope were empty. He searched the distance. The horse was
110 quite likely to have forgotten him altogether and wandered off. Then he raised himself and
111 leaned out to see if it had come in close to the hedge. Before he was aware of anything the
112 ground shook. He twisted around wildly to see how he had been caught. The black shape
113 was above him, right across the light. Its whinnying snort and the spattering whack of its
114 hooves seemed to be actually inside his head as he fell backwards down the bank, and
115 leapt again like a madman, dodging among the oaks, imagining how the buffet would come
116 and how he would be knocked headlong. Halfway down the wood the oaks gave way to
117 bracken and old roots and stony rabbit diggings. He was well out into the middle of this
118 before he realised that he was running alone.
119 Gasping for breath now and cursing mechanically, without a thought for his suit he sat
13
120 down on the ground to rest his shaking legs, letting the rain plaster the hair down over his
121 forehead and watching the dense flashing lines disappear abruptly into the soil all around
122 him as if he were watching through thick plate glass. He took deep breaths in the effort to
123 steady his heart and regain control of himself. His right trouser turn-up was ripped at the
124 seam and his suit jacket was splashed with the yellow mud of the top field.
125 Obviously the horse had been farther along the hedge above the steep field, waiting for
126 him to come out at the woodside just as he had intended. He must have peeped through
127 the hedge - peeping the wrong way - within yards of it.
128 However, this last attack had cleared up one thing. He need no longer act like a fool out of
129 mere uncertainty as to whether the horse was simply being playful or not. It was definitely
130 after him. He picked two stones about the size of goose eggs and set off towards the
131 bottom of the wood, striding carelessly.
132 A loop of the river bordered all this farmland. If he crossed the little level meadow at the
133 bottom of the wood, he could follow the three-mile circuit, back to the road. There were
134 deep hollows in the river-bank, shoaled with pebbles, as he remembered, perfect places to
135 defend himself from if the horse followed him out there.
136 The hawthorns that choked the bottom of the wood - some of them good-sized trees -
137 knitted into an almost impassable barrier. He had found a place where the growth thinned
138 slightly and had begun to lift aside the long spiny stems, pushing himself forward, when he
139 stopped. Through the bluish veil of bare twigs he saw the familiar shape out in the field
140 below the wood.
141 But it seemed not to have noticed him yet. It was looking out across the field towards the
142 river. Quietly, he released himself from the thorns and climbed back across the clearing
143 towards the one side of the wood he had not yet tried. If the horse would only stay down
144 there he could follow his first and easiest plan, up the wood and over the hilltop to the
145 farm.
146 Now he noticed that the sky had grown much darker. The rain was heavier every second,
147 pressing down as if the earth had to be flooded before nightfall. The oaks ahead blurred
148 and the ground drummed. He began to run. And as he ran he heard a deeper sound
149 running with him. He whirled around. The horse was in the middle of the clearing. It might
150 have been running to get out of the terrific rain except that it was coming straight for him,
151 scattering clay and stones, with an immensely supple and powerful motion. He let out a
152 tearing roar and threw the stone in his right hand. The result was instantaneous. Whether
153 at the roar or the stone the horse reared as if against a wall and shied to the left. As it
154 dropped back on to its forefeet he flung his second stone, at ten yards range, and saw a
155 bright mud blotch suddenly appear on the glistening black flank. The horse surged down
156 the wood, splashing the earth like water, tossing its long tail as it plunged out of sight
157 among the hawthorns.
158 He looked around for stones. The encounter had set the blood beating in his head and
159 given him a savage energy. He could have killed the horse at that moment. That this brute
160 should pick him and play with him in this malevolent fashion was more than he could bear.
161 Whoever owned it, he thought, deserved to have its neck broken for letting the dangerous
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162 thing loose.
163 He came out at the woodside, in open battle now, still searching for the right stones. There
164 were plenty here, piled and scattered where they had been ploughed out of the field. He
165 selected two, then straightened and saw the horse twenty yards off in the middle of the
166 steep field, watching him calmly. They looked at each other.
167 ‘Out of it!’ he shouted, brandishing his arm. ‘Out of it! Go on!’ The horse twitched its pricked
168 ears. With all his force he threw. The stone soared and landed beyond with a soft thud. He
169 re-armed and threw again. For several minutes he kept up his bombardment without a
170 single hit, working himself up into a despair and throwing more and more wildly, till his arm
171 began to ache with the unaccustomed exercise. Throughout the performance the horse
172 watched him fixedly. Finally he had to stop and ease his shoulder muscles. As if the horse
173 had been waiting for just this, it dipped its head twice and came at him.
174 He snatched up two stones and roaring with all his strength flung the one in his right hand.
175 He was astonished at the crack of the impact. It was as if he had struck a tile - and the
176 horse actually stumbled. With another roar he jumped forward and hurled his other stone.
177 His aim seemed to be under superior guidance. The stone struck and rebounded straight
178 up into the air, spinning fiercely, as the horse swirled away and went careering down
179 towards the far bottom corner of the field, at first with great, swinging leaps, then at a
180 canter, leaving deep churned holes in the soil.
181 It turned up the far side of the field, climbing till it was level with him. He felt a little surprise
182 of pity to see it shaking its head, and once it paused to lower its head and paw over its ear
183 with its forehoof as a cat does.
184 "You stay there!" he shouted. "Keep your distance and you’ll not get hurt."
185 And indeed the horse did stop at that moment, almost obediently. It watched him as he
186 climbed to the crest.
187 The rain swept into his face and he realised that he was freezing, as if his very flesh were
188 sodden. The farm seemed miles away over the dreary fields. Without another glance at the
189 horse - he felt too exhausted to care now what it did - he loaded the crook of his left arm
190 with stones and plunged out on to the waste of mud.
191 He was halfway to the first hedge before the horse appeared, silhouetted against the sky
192 at the corner of the wood, head high and attentive, watching his laborious retreat over the
193 three fields.
194 The ankle-deep clay dragged at him. Every stride was a separate, deliberate effort, forcing
195 him up and out of the sucking earth, burdened as he was by his sogged clothes and load
196 of stones and limbs that seemed themselves to be turning to mud. He fought to keep his
197 breathing even, two strides in, two strides out, the air ripping his lungs. In the middle of the
198 last field he stopped and looked around. The horse, tiny on the skyline, had not moved.
199 At the corner of the field he unlocked his clasped arms and dumped the stones by the
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200 gatepost, then leaned on the gate. The farm was in front of him. He became conscious of
201 the rain again and suddenly longed to stretch out full-length under it, to take the cooling,
202 healing drops all over his body and forget himself in the last wretchedness of the mud.
203 Making an effort, he heaved his weight over the gate-top. He leaned again, looking up at
204 the hill.
205 Rain was dissolving land and sky together like a wet watercolour as the afternoon
206 darkened. He concentrated, raising his head, searching the skyline from end to end. The
207 horse had vanished. The hill looked lifeless and desolate, an island lifting out of the sea,
208 awash with every tide.
209 Under the long shed where the tractors, plough, binders and the rest were drawn up,
210 waiting for their seasons, he sat on a sack thrown over a petrol drum, trembling, his lungs
211 heaving. The mingled smell of paraffin, creosote, fertiliser, dust - all was exactly as he had
212 left it twelve years ago. The ragged swallows’ nests were still there tucked in the angles of
213 the rafters. He remembered three dead foxes hanging in a row from one of the beams,
214 their teeth bloody.
215 The ordeal with the horse had already sunk from reality. It hung under the surface of his
216 mind, an obscure confusion of fright and shame, as after a narrowly escaped street
217 accident. There was a solid pain in his chest, like a spike of bone stabbing, that made him
218 wonder if he had strained his heart on that last stupid burdened run. Piece by piece he
219 began to take off his clothes, wringing the grey water out of them, but soon he stopped that
220 and just sat staring at the ground, as if some important part had been cut out of his brain.
16
SANDPIPER
AHDAF SOUEIF (B.1950)
1 Outside, there is a path. A path of beaten white stone bordered by a white wall-low, but not
2 low enough for me to see over it from here. White sands drift across the path. From my
3 window, I used to see patterns in their drift. On my way to the beach, I would try to place
4 my foot, just the ball of my foot, for there never was much room, on those white spaces
5 that glinted flat and free of sand. I had an idea that the patterns on the stone should be
6 made by nature alone; I did not want one grain of sand, blown by a breeze I could not feel,
7 to change its course because of me. What point would there be in trying to decipher a
8 pattern that I had caused? It was not easy. Balancing, the toes of one bare foot on the hot
9 stone, looking for the next clear space to set the other foot down. It took a long time to
10 reach the end of the path. And then the stretch of beach. And then the sea.
11 I used to sit where the water rolled in, rolled in, its frilled white edge nibbling at the sand,
12 withdrawing to leave great damp half moons of a darker, more brownish-beige. I would sit
13 inside one of these curves, at the very midpoint, fitting my body to its contour, and wait.
14 The sea unceasingly shifts and stirs and sends out fingers, paws, tongues to probe the
15 shore. Each wave coming in is different. It separates itself from the vast, moving blue, rises
16 and surges forward with a low growl, lightening as it approaches to a pale green, then
17 turns over to display the white frill that slides like a thousand snakes down upon itself,
18 breaks and skitters up the sandbank. I used to sit very still. Sometimes the wave would
19 barely touch my feet, sometimes it would swirl around me then pull back, sifting yet
20 another layer of sand from under me, leaving me wet to the waist. My heels rested in twin
21 hollows that filled, emptied and refilled without a break. And subtle as the shadow of a
22 passing cloud, my half moon would slip down the bank - only to be overtaken and
23 swamped by the next leap of foaming white.
24 I used to sit in the curve and dig my fingers into the grainy, compact sand and feel it grow
25 wetter as my fingers went deeper and deeper till the next rippling, frothing rush of white
26 came and smudged the edges of the little burrow I had made. Its walls collapsed and I
27 removed my hand, covered in wet clay, soon to revert to dry grains that I would easily
28 brush away.
29 I lean against the wall of my room and count: twelve years ago, I met him. Eight years ago,
30 I married him. Six years ago, I gave birth to his child.
31 For eight summers we have been coming here; to the beach-house west of Alexandria.
32 The first summer had not been a time of reflection; my occupation then had been to love
33 my husband in this - to me - new and different place. To love him as he walked towards my
34 parasol, shaking the water from his black hair, his feet sinking into the warm, hospitable
35 sand. To love him as he carried his nephew on his shoulders into the sea, threw him in,
36 caught him and hoisted him up again; a colossus bestriding the waves. To love him as he
37 played backgammon with his father in the evening, the slam of counters and the clatter of
38 dice resounding on the patio while, at the dining-room table, his sister showed me how to
39 draw their ornate, circular script. To love this new him, who had been hinted at but never
40 revealed when we lived in my northern land, and who after a long absence, had found his
17
41 way back into the heart of his country, taking me along with him. We walked in the sunset
42 along the water’s edge, kicking at the spray, my sun-hat fallen on my back, my hand, pale
43 bronze in his burnt brown, my face no doubt mirroring his: aglow with health and love; a
44 young couple in a glitzy commercial for life insurance or a two-week break in the sun.
45 My second summer here was the sixth summer of our love - and the last of our happiness.
46 Carrying my child and loving her father, I sat on the beach, dug holes in the sand and let
47 my thoughts wander. I thought about our life in my country, before we were married: four
48 years in the cosy flat, precarious on top of a roof in a Georgian square, him meeting me at
49 the bus-stop when I came back from work, Sundays when it did not rain and we sat in the
50 park with our newspapers, late nights at the movies. I thought of those things and missed
51 them - but with no great sense of loss. It was as though they were all there, to be called
52 upon, to be lived again whenever we wanted.
53 I looked out to sea and, now I realise, I was trying to work out my co-ordinates. I thought a
54 lot about the water and the sand as I sat there watching them meet and flirt and touch. I
55 tried to understand that I was on the edge, the very edge of Africa; that the vastness ahead
56 was nothing compared to what lay behind me. But - even though I’d been there and seen
57 for myself its never-ending dusty green interior, its mountains, the big sky, my mind could
58 not grasp a world that was not present to my senses - I could see the beach, the waves,
59 the blue beyond, and cradling them all, my baby.
60 I sat with my hand on my belly and waited for the tiny eruptions, the small flutterings, that
61 told me how she lay and what she was feeling. Gradually, we came to talk to each other.
62 She would curl into a tight ball in one corner of my body until, lopsided and uncomfortable,
63 I coaxed and prodded her back into a more centred, relaxed position. I slowly rubbed one
64 corner of my belly until there, aimed straight at my hand, I felt a gentle punch. I tapped and
65 she punched again. I was twenty-nine. For seventeen years my body had waited to
66 conceive, and now my heart and mind had caught up with it. Nature had worked admirably;
67 I had wanted the child through my love for her father and how I loved her father that
68 summer. My body could not get enough of him. His baby was snug inside me and I wanted
69 him there too.
70 From where I stand now, all I can see is dry, solid white. The white glare, the white wall,
71 and the white path, narrowing in the distance.
72 I should have gone. No longer a serrating thought but familiar and dull. I should have gone.
73 On that swirl of amazed and wounded anger when, knowing him as I did, I first sensed that
74 he was pulling away from me, I should have gone. I should have turned, picked up my
75 child and gone.
76 I turn. The slatted blinds are closed against a glaring sun. They call the wooden blinds
77 sheesh and tell me it’s the Persian word for glass. So that which sits next to a thing is
78 called by its name. I have had this thought many times and feel as though it should lead
79 me somewhere; as though I should draw some conclusion from it, but so far I haven’t.
80 I draw my finger along a wooden slat. Urn Sabir, my husband’s old nanny, does everything
81 around the house, both here and in the city. I tried, at first, at least to help, but she would
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82 rush up and ease the duster or the vacuum cleaner from my hands. ‘Shame, shame. What
83 am I here for? Keep your hands nice and soft. Go and rest. Or why don’t you go to the
84 club? What have you to do with these things?’ My husband translated all this for me and
85 said things to her which I came to understand meant that tomorrow I would get used to
86 their ways. The meals I planned never worked out. Um Sabir cooked what was best in the
87 market on that day. If I tried to do the shopping the prices trebled. I arranged the flowers,
88 smoothed out the pleats in the curtains and presided over our dinner-parties.
89 My bed is made. My big bed which a half-asleep Lucy, creeping under the mosquito-net,
90 tumbles into in the middle of every night. She fits herself into my body and I put my arm
91 over her until she shakes it off. In her sleep she makes use of me; my breast is sometimes
92 her pillow, my hip her footstool. I lie content, glad to be of use. I hold her foot in my hand
93 and dread the time - so soon to come - when it will no longer be seemly to kiss the dimpled
94 ankle.
95 On a black leather sofa in a transit lounge in an airport once, many years ago, l watched a
96 Pakistani woman sleep. Her dress and trousers were a deep, yellow silk and on her dress
97 bloomed luscious flowers in purple and green. Her arms were covered in gold bangles.
98 She had gold in her ears, her left nostril and around her neck. Against her body her small
99 son lay curled. One of his feet was between her knees, her nose was in his hair. All her
100 worldly treasure was on that sofa with her, and so she slept soundly on. That image, too, I
101 saved up for him.
102 I made my bed this morning. I spread my arms out wide and gathered in the soft, billowing
103 mosquito-net. I twisted it round in a thick coil and tied it into a loose loop that dangles
104 gracefully in mid-air.
105 Nine years ago, sitting under my first mosquito-net, I had written, ‘Now I know how it feels
106 to be a memsahib.’ That was in Kano; deep, deep in the heart of the continent I now sit on
107 the edge of. I had been in love with him for three years and being apart then was a variant,
108 merely, of being together. When we were separated there was for each a gnawing lack of
109 the other. We would say that this confirmed our true, essential union. We had parted at
110 Heathrow, and we were to be rejoined in a fortnight, in Cairo, where I would meet his
111 family for the first time.
112 I had thought to write a story about those two weeks; about my first trip into Africa: about
113 Muhammad al Senusi explaining courteously to me the inferior status of women,
114 courteously because, being foreign, European, on a business trip, I was an honorary man.
115 A story about travelling the long, straight road to Maiduguri and stopping at roadside
116 shacks to chew on meat that I then swallowed in lumps while Senusi told me how the meat
117 in Europe had no body and melted like rice pudding in his mouth. About the time when I
118 saw the lion in the tall grass. I asked the driver to stop, jumped out of the car, aimed my
119 camera and shot as the lion crouched. Back in the car, unfreezing himself from horror, the
120 driver assured me that the lion had crouched in order to spring at me. I still have the photo:
121 a lion crouching in tall grass - close up. I look at it and cannot make myself believe what
122 could have happened.
123 I never wrote the story, although I still have the notes. Right here, in this leather portfolio
19
124 which I take out of a drawer in my cupboard. My Africa story. I told it to him instead - and
125 across the candlelit table of a Cairo restaurant he kissed my hands and said, ‘I’m crazy
126 about you.’ Under the high windows the Nile flowed by. Eternity was in our lips, our eyes,
127 our brows - I married him, and I was happy.
128 I leaf through my notes. Each one carries a comment, a description meant for him. All my
129 thoughts were addressed to him. For his part he wrote that after I left him at the airport he
130 turned round to hold me and tell me how desolate he felt. He could not believe I was not
131 there to comfort him. He wrote about the sound of my voice on the telephone and the
132 crease at the top of my arm that he said he loved to kiss.
133 What story can I write? I sit with my notes at my writing-table and wait for Lucy. I should
134 have been sleeping. That is what they think I am doing. That is what we pretend I do: sleep
135 away the hottest of the midday hours. Out there on the beach, by the pool, Lucy has no
136 need of me. She has her father, her uncle, her two aunts, her five cousins; a wealth of
137 playmates and protectors. And Um Sabir, sitting patient and watchful in her black
138 jalabiyyah and tarha, the deck-chairs beside her loaded with towels, sun-cream, sun-hats,
139 sandwiches and iced drinks in Thermos flasks.
140 I look, and watch, and wait for Lucy.
141 In the market in Kaduna the mottled, red carcasses lay on wooden stalls shaded by grey
142 plastic canopies. At first I saw the meat and the flies swarming and settling. Then, on top of
143 the grey plastic sheets, I saw the vultures. They perched as sparrows would in an English
144 market square, but they were heavy and still and silent. They sat cool and unblinking as
145 the fierce sun beat down on their bald, wrinkled heads. And hand in hand with the fear that
146 swept over me was a realisation that fear was misplaced, that everybody else knew they
147 were there and still went about their business; that in the meat-market in Kaduna, vultures
148 were commonplace.
149 The heat of the sun saturates the house; it seeps out from every pore. I open the door of
150 my room and walk out into the silent hall. In the bathroom I stand in the shower tray and
151 turn the tap to let the cool water splash over my feet. I tuck my skirt between my thighs and
152 bend to put my hands and wrists under the water. I press wet palms to my face and picture
153 grey slate roofs wet with rain. I picture trees; trees that rustle in the wind and when the rain
154 has stopped, release fresh showers of droplets from their leaves.
155 I pad out on wet feet that dry by the time I arrive at the kitchen at the end of the long
156 corridor. I open the fridge and see the chunks of lamb marinading in a large metal tray for
157 tonight’s barbecue. The mountain of yellow grapes draining in a colander. I pick out a
158 cluster and put it on a white saucer. Um Sabir washes all the fruit and vegetables in red
159 permanganate. This is for my benefit since Lucy crunches cucumbers and carrots straight
160 out of the green-grocer’s baskets. But then she was born here. And now she belongs. If l
161 had taken her away then, when she was eight months old, she would have belonged with
162 me. I pour out a tall glass of cold, bottled water and close the fridge.
163 I walk back through the corridor. Past Um Sabir’s room, his room, Lucy’s room. Back in my
164 room I stand again at the window, looking out through the chink in the shutters at the white
165 that seems now to be losing the intensity of its glare. If I were to move to the window in the
20
166 opposite wall I would see the green lawn encircled by the three wings of the house, the
167 sprinkler at its centre ceaselessly twisting, twisting. I stand and press my forehead against
168 the warm glass. I breathe on the window-pane but it does not mist over.
169 I turn on the fan. It blows my hair across my face and my notes across the bed. I kneel on
170 the bed and gather them. The top one says, ‘Ningi, his big teeth stained with Kola, sits
171 grandly at his desk. By his right hand there is a bicycle bell which he rings to summon a
172 gofer-’, and then again: ‘The three things we stop for on the road should be my title:
173 “Peeing, Praying and Petrol”.’ Those were light-hearted times, when the jokes I made were
174 not bitter.
175 I lie down on the bed. These four pillows are my innovation. Here they use one long pillow
176 with two smaller ones on top of it. The bedlinen comes in sets. Consequently my bed
177 always has two pillows in plain cases and two with embroidery to match the sheets. Also, I
178 have one side of a chiffonier which is full of long, embroidered pillowcases. When I take
179 them out and look at them I find their flowers, sheltered for so long in the dark, are
180 unfaded, bright and new.
181 Lying on the bed, I hold the cluster of grapes above my face, and bite one off as Romans
182 do in films. Oh, to play, to play again, but my only playmate now is Lucy and she is out by
183 the pool with her cousins.
184 A few weeks ago, back in Cairo, Lucy looked up at the sky and said, ‘I can see the place
185 where we’re going to be.’
186 ‘Where?’ I asked, as we drove through Gabalaya Street.
187 ‘In heaven.’
188 ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘And what’s it like?’

189 ‘It’s a circle, Mama, and it has a chimney, and it will always
190 be winter there.’
191 I reached over and patted her knee. ‘Thank you, darling,’ I said.
192 Yes, I am sick - but not just for home. I am sick for a time, a time that was and that I can
193 never have again. A lover I had and can never have again.
194 I watched him vanish - well, not vanish, slip away, recede. He did not want to go. He did
195 not go quietly. He asked me to hold him, but he couldn’t tell me how. A fairy godmother,
196 robbed for an instant of our belief in her magic, turns into a sad old woman, her wand into
197 a useless stick. I suppose I should have seen it coming. My foreignness, which had been
198 so charming, began to irritate him. My inability to remember names, to follow the minutiae
199 of politics, my struggles with his language, my need to be protected from the sun, the
200 mosquitoes, the salads, the drinking water. He was back home, and he needed someone
201 he could be at home with, at home. It took perhaps a year. His heart was broken in two,
202 mine was simply broken.
203 I never see my lover now. Sometimes, as he romps with Lucy on the beach, or bends over
21
204 her grazed elbow, or sits across our long table from me at a dinner-party, I see a man I
205 could yet fall in love with, and I turn away.
206 I told him too about my first mirage, the one I saw on that long road to Maiduguri. And on
207 the desert road to Alexandria the first summer, I saw it again. ‘It’s hard to believe it isn’t
208 there when I can see it so clearly,’ I complained.
209 ‘You only think you see it,’ he said.
210 ‘Isn’t that the same thing?’ I asked. ‘My brain tells me there’s water there. Isn’t that
211 enough?’
212 ‘Yes,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘If all you want to do is sit in the car and see it. But if you
213 want to go and put your hands in it and drink, then it isn’t enough, surely?’ He gave me a
214 sidelong glance and smiled.
215 Soon, I should hear Lucy’s high, clear voice, chattering to her father as they walk hand in
216 hand up the gravel drive to the back door. Behind them will come the heavy tread of Um
217 Sabir. I will go out smiling to meet them and he will deliver a wet, sandy Lucy into my care,
218 and ask if I’m OK with a slightly anxious look. I will take Lucy into my bathroom while he
219 goes into his. Later, when the rest of the family have all drifted back and showered and
220 changed, everyone will sit around the barbecue and eat and drink and talk politics and
221 crack jokes of hopeless, helpless irony and laugh. I should take up embroidery and start on
222 those Aubusson tapestries we all, at the moment, imagine will be necessary for Lucy’s
223 trousseau.
224 Yesterday when I had dressed her after the shower she examined herself intently in my
225 mirror and asked for a french plait. I sat behind her at the dressing-table blow-drying her
226 black hair, brushing it and plaiting it. When Lucy was born Um Sabir covered all the
227 mirrors. His sister said, ‘They say if a baby looks in the mirror she will see her own grave.’
228 We laughed but we did not remove the covers; they stayed in place till she was one.
229 I looked at Lucy’s serious face in the mirror. I had seen my grave once, or thought I had.
230 That was part of my Africa story. The plane out of Nigeria circled Cairo airport. Three times
231 I heard the landing-gear come down, and three times it was raised again. Sitting next to
232 me were two Finnish businessmen. When the announcement came that we were re-
233 routeing to Luxor they shook their heads and ordered another drink. At dawn, above Luxor
234 airport, we were told there was trouble with the undercarriage and that the pilot was going
235 to attempt a crash-landing. I thought, so this is why they’ve sent us to Luxor, to burn up
236 discreetly and not clog Cairo airport. We were asked to fasten our seat belts, take off our
237 shoes and watches, put the cushions from the backs of our seats on our laps and bend
238 double over them with our arms around our heads. I slung my handbag with my passport,
239 tickets and money around my neck and shoulder before I did these things. My Finnish
240 neighbours formally shook each other’s hands. On the plane there was perfect silence as
241 we dropped out of the sky. And then a terrible, agonised, protracted screeching of
242 machinery as we hit the Tarmac. And in that moment, not only my head, but all of me, my
243 whole being, seemed to tilt into a blank, an empty radiance, but lucid. Then three giant
244 thoughts. One was of him – his name, over and over again. The other was of the children I
245 would never have. The third was that the pattern was now complete: this is what my life
22
246 amounted to.
247 When we did not die, that first thought: his name, his name, his name became a talisman,
248 for in extremity, hadn’t all that was not him been wiped out of my life? My life, which once
249 again stretched out before me, shimmering with possibilities, was meant to merge with
250 his.
251 I finished the french plait and Lucy chose a blue clasp to secure its end. Before I let her run
252 out I smoothed some after-sun on her face. Her skin is nut-brown, except just next to her
253 ears where it fades to a pale cream gleaming with golden down. I put my lips to her neck.
254 ‘My Lucy, Lucia, Lambah,’ I murmured as I kissed her and let her go. Lucy. My treasure,
255 my trap.
256 Now, when I walk to the sea, to the edge of this continent where I live, where I almost died,
257 where I wait for my daughter to grow away from me, I see different things from those I saw
258 that summer six years ago. The last of the foam is swallowed bubbling into the sand, to
259 sink down and rejoin the sea at an invisible subterranean level. With each ebb of green
260 water the sand loses part of itself to the sea, with each flow another part is flung back to be
261 reclaimed once again by the beach. That narrow stretch of sand knows nothing in the
262 world better than it does the white waves that whip it, caress it, collapse onto it, vanish into
263 it. The white foam knows nothing better than those sands which wait for it, rise to it and
264 suck it in. But what do the waves know of the massed, hot, still sands of the desert just
265 twenty, no, ten feet beyond the scalloped edge? And what does the beach know of the
266 depths, the cold, the currents just there, there - do you see it? - where the water turns a
267 deeper blue.
268
23
THE DESTRUCTORS
GRAHAM GREENE (1904 – 1991)
1
1 It was on the eve of August Bank Holiday that the latest recruit became the leader of the
2 Wormsley Common Gang. No one was surprised except Mike, but Mike at the age of nine
3 was surprised by everything. “If you don’t shut your mouth,” somebody once said to him,
4 “you’ll get a frog down it.” After that Mike had kept his teeth tightly clamped except when
5 the surprise was too great.
6 The new recruit had been with the gang since the beginning of the summer holidays, and
7 there were possibilities about his brooding silence that all recognised. He never wasted a
8 word even to tell his name until that was required of him by the rules. When he said
9 “Trevor” it was a statement of fact, not as it would have been with the others a statement of
10 shame or defiance. Nor did anyone laugh except Mike, who finding himself without
11 support and meeting the dark gaze of the newcomer opened his mouth and was quiet
12 again. There was every reason why T, as he was afterward referred to, should have been
13 an object of mockery — there was his name (and they substituted the initial because
14 otherwise they had no excuse not to laugh at it), the fact that his father, a former architect
15 and present clerk, had ‘come down in the world’ and that his mother considered herself
16 better than the neighbours. What but an odd quality of danger, of the unpredictable,
17 established him in the gang without any ignoble ceremony of initiation?
18 The gang met every morning in an impromptu car-park, the site of the last bomb of the first
19 blitz. The leader, who was known as Blackie, claimed to have heard it fall, and no one was
20 precise enough in his dates to point out that he would have been one year old and fast
21 asleep on the down platform of Wormsley Common Underground Station. On one side of
22 the car-park leant the first occupied house, No. 3, of the shattered Northwood
23 Terrace — literally leant, for it had suffered from the blast of the bomb and the side
24 walls were supported on wooden struts. A smaller bomb and incendiaries had fallen
25 beyond, so that the house stuck up like a jagged tooth and carried on the further wall relics
26 of its neighbour, a dado, the remains of a fireplace. T, whose words were almost confined
27 to voting ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the plan of operations proposed each day by Blackie, once
28 startled the whole gang by saying broodingly, “Wren built that house, father says.”
29 “Who’s Wren?”
30 “The man who built St. Paul’s.”
31 “Who cares?” Blackie said. “It’s only Old Misery’s.”
32 Old Misery — whose real name was Thomas — had once been a builder and decorator. He
33 lived alone in the crippled house, doing for himself: once a week you could see him
34 coming back across the common with bread and vegetables, and once as the boys played
35 in the car-park he put his head over the smashed wall of his garden and looked at them.
24
36 “Been to the loo,” one of the boys said, for it was common knowledge that since the bombs
37 fell something had gone wrong with the pipes of the house and Old Misery was too mean
38 to spend money on the property. He could do the redecorating himself at cost price, but he
39 had never learned plumbing. The loo was a wooden shed at the bottom of the narrow
40 garden with a star-shaped hole in the door: It had escaped the blast which had smashed
41 the house next door and sucked out the window frames of No. 3.
42 The next time the gang became aware of Mr Thomas was more surprising. Blackie, Mike,
43 and a thin yellow boy, who for some reason was called by his surname Summers, met him
44 on the common coming back from the market. Mr Thomas stopped them. He said glumly,
45 “You belong to the lot that play in the car-park?”
46 Mike was about to answer when Blackie stopped him. As the leader he had
47 responsibilities. “Suppose we are?” he said ambiguously.
48 “I got some chocolates,” Mr Thomas said. “Don’t like ’em myself. Here you are. Not
49 enough to go round, I don’t suppose. There never is,” he added with sombre conviction.
50 He handed over three packets of Smarties.
51 The gang was puzzled and perturbed by this action and tried to explain it away. “Bet
52 someone dropped them and he picked ’em up,” somebody suggested.
53 “Pinched ’em and then got in a bleeding funk,” another thought aloud.
54 “It’s a bribe,” Summers said. “He wants us to stop bouncing balls on his wall.”
55 “We’ll show him we don’t take bribes,” Blackie said, and they sacrificed the whole morning
56 to the game of bouncing that only Mike was young enough to enjoy. There was no sign
57 from Mr Thomas.
58 Next day T astonished them all. He was late at the rendezvous, and the voting for that
59 day’s exploit took place without him. At Blackie’s suggestion the gang was to disperse in
60 pairs, take buses at random and see how many free rides could be snatched from unwary
61 conductors (the operation was to be carried out in pairs to avoid cheating). They were
62 drawing lots for their companions when T arrived.
63 “Where you been, T?” Blackie asked. “You can’t vote now. You know the rules.”
64 “I’ve been there,” T said. He looked at the ground, as though he had thoughts to hide.
65 “Where?”
66 “At Old Misery’s.” Mike’s mouth opened and then hurriedly closed again with a click. He
67 had remembered the frog.
68 “At Old Misery’s?” Blackie said. There was nothing in the rules against it, but he had a
69 sensation that T was treading on dangerous ground. He asked hopefully, “Did you break
70 in?”
25
71 “No. I rang the bell.”
72 “And what did you say?”
73 “I said I wanted to see his house.”
74 “What did he do?”
75 “He showed it me.”
76 “Pinch anything?”
77 “No.”
78 “What did you do it for then?”
79 The gang had gathered round: it was as though an impromptu court were about to form
80 and try some case of deviation. T said, “It’s a beautiful house,” and still watching the
81 ground, meeting no one’s eyes, he licked his lips first one way, then the other.
82 “What do you mean, a beautiful house?” Blackie asked with scorn.
83 “It’s got a staircase two hundred years old like a corkscrew. Nothing holds it up.”
84 “What do you mean, nothing holds it up. Does it float?”
85 “It’s to do with opposite forces, Old Misery said.”
86 “What else?”
87 “There’s panelling.”
88 “Like in the Blue Boar?”
89 “Two hundred years old.”
90 “Is Old Misery two hundred years old?”
91 Mike laughed suddenly and then was quiet again. The meeting was in a serious mood. For
92 the first time since T had strolled into the car-park on the first day of the holidays his
93 position was in danger. It only needed a single use of his real name and the gang would be
94 at his heels.
95 “What did you do it for?” Blackie asked. He was just, he had no jealousy, he was anxious
96 to retain T in the gang if he could. It was the word ‘beautiful’ that worried him — that
97 belonged to a class world that you could still see parodied at the Wormsley Common
98 Empire by a man wearing a top hat and a monocle, with a haw-haw accent. He was
99 tempted to say, “My dear Trevor, old chap,” and unleash his hell hounds. “If you’d broken
100 in,” he said sadly — that indeed would have been an exploit worthy of the gang.
26
101 “This was better,” T said. “I found out things.” He continued to stare at his feet, not
102 meeting anybody’s eye, as though he were absorbed in some dream he was unwilling — or
103 ashamed — to share.
104 “What things?”
105 “Old Misery’s going to be away all tomorrow and Bank Holiday.”
106 Blackie said with relief, “You mean we could break in?”
107 “And pinch things?” somebody asked.
108 Blackie said, “Nobody’s going to pinch things. Breaking in — that’s good enough, isn’t it?
109 We don’t want any court stuff.”
110 “I don’t want to pinch anything,” T said. “I’ve got a better idea.”
111 “What is it?”
112 T raised his eyes, as grey and disturbed as the drab August day. “We’ll pull it down,” he
113 said. “We’ll destroy it.”
114 Blackie gave a single hoot of laughter and then, like Mike, fell quiet, daunted by the serious
115 implacable gaze. “What’d the police be doing all the time?” he said.
116 “They’d never know. We’d do it from inside. I’ve found a way in.” He said with a sort of
117 intensity, “We’d be like worms, don’t you see, in an apple. When we came out again
118 there’d be nothing there, no staircase, no panels, nothing but just walls, and then we’d
119 make the walls fall down — somehow.”
120 “We’d go to jug,” Blackie said.
121 “Who’s to prove? And anyway we wouldn’t have pinched anything.” He added without the
122 smallest flicker of glee, “There wouldn’t be anything to pinch after we’d finished.”
123 “I’ve never heard of going to prison for breaking things,” Summers said.
124 “There wouldn’t be time,” Blackie said. “I’ve seen housebreakers at work.”
125 “There are twelve of us,” T said. “We’d organize.”
126 “None of us know how...”
127 “I know,” T said. He looked across at Blackie. “Have you got a better plan?”
128 “Today,” Mike said tactlessly, “we’re pinching free rides...”
129 “Free rides,” T said. “Kid stuff. You can stand down, Blackie, if you’d rather. . . .”
27
130 “The gang’s got to vote.”
131 “Put it up then.”
132 Blackie said uneasily, “It’s proposed that tomorrow and Monday we destroy
133 Old Misery’s house.”
134 “Here, here,” said a fat boy called Joe.
135 “Who’s in favour?”
136 T said, “It’s carried.”
137 “How do we start?” Summers asked.
138 “He’ll tell you,” Blackie said. It was the end of his leadership. He went away to the back of
139 the car-park and began to kick a stone, dribbling it this way and that. There was only one
140 old Morris in the park, for few cars were left there except lorries: without an attendant there
141 was no safety. He took a flying kick at the car and scraped a little paint off the rear
142 mudguard. Beyond, paying no more attention to him than to a stranger, the gang had
143 gathered round T; Blackie was dimly aware of the fickleness of favour. He thought of
144 going home, of never returning, of letting them all discover the hollowness of T’s
145 leadership, but suppose after all what T proposed was possible — nothing like it had ever
146 been done before. The fame of the Wormsley Common car-park gang would surely reach
147 around London. There would be headlines in the papers. Even the grown-up gangs who
148 ran the betting at the all-in wrestling and the barrow-boys would hear with respect of how
149 Old Misery’s house had been destroyed. Driven by the pure, simple and altruistic ambition
150 of fame for the gang, Blackie came back to where T stood in the shadow of Old Misery’s wall.
151 T was giving his orders with decision: it was as though this plan had been with him all his
152 life, pondered through the seasons, now in his fifteenth year crystallized with the pain of
153 puberty. “You,” he said to Mike, “bring some big nails, the biggest you can find, and a
154 hammer. Anyone else who can, better bring a hammer and a screw-driver. We’ll need plenty
155 of them. Chisels too. We can’t have too many chisels. Can anybody bring a saw?”
156 “I can,” Mike said.
157 “Not a child’s saw,” T said. “A real saw.”
158 Blackie realized he had raised his hand like any ordinary member of the gang.
159 “Right, you bring one, Blackie. But now there’s a difficulty. We want a hacksaw.”
160 “What’s a hacksaw?” someone asked.
161 “You can get ’em at Woolworth’s,” Summers said.
162 The fat boy called Joe said gloomily, “I knew it would end in a collection.”
28
163 “I’ll get one myself,” T said. “I don’t want your money. But I can’t buy a sledgehammer.”
164 Blackie said, “They are working on No. 15. I know where they’ll leave their stuff for
165 Bank Holiday.”
166 “Then that’s all,” T said. “We meet here at nine sharp.”
167 “I’ve got to go to church,” Mike said.
168 “Come over the wall and whistle. We’ll let you in.”
169 On Sunday morning all were punctual except Blackie, even Mike. Mike had a stroke of
170 luck. His mother felt ill, his father was tired after Saturday night, and he was told to go to
171 church alone with many warnings of what would happen if he strayed. Blackie had
172 difficulty in smuggling out the saw, and then in finding the sledgehammer at the back of
173 No. 15. He approached the house from a lane at the rear of the garden, for fear of the
174 policeman’s beat along the main road. The tired evergreens kept off a stormy sun: another
175 wet Bank Holiday was being prepared over the Atlantic, beginning in swirls of dust under
176 the trees. Blackie climbed the wall into Misery’s garden.
177 There was no sign of anybody anywhere. The lav stood like a tomb in a neglected
178 graveyard. The curtains were drawn. The house slept. Blackie lumbered nearer with the
179 saw and the sledge-hammer. Perhaps after all nobody had turned up: the plan had been a
180 wild invention: they had woken wiser. But when he came close to the back door he could
181 hear a confusion of sound hardly louder than a hive in swarm: a clickety-clack, a bang
182 bang, a scraping, a creaking, a sudden painful crack. He thought, it’s true, and
183 whistled.
184 They opened the back door to him and he came in. He had at once the impression of
185 organization, very different from the old happy-go-lucky ways under his leadership. For a
186 while he wandered up and down stairs looking for T Nobody addressed him: he had a
187 sense of great urgency, and already he could begin to see the plan. The interior of the
188 house was being carefully demolished without touching the outer walls. Summers with
189 hammer and chisel was ripping out the skirting-boards in the ground-floor dining-room:
190 he had already smashed the panels of the door. In the same room Joe was heaving up the
191 parquet blocks, exposing the soft wood floorboards over the cellar. Coils of wire came out
192 of the damaged skirting and Mike sat happily on the floor, clipping the wires.
193 On the curved stairs two of the gang were working hard with an inadequate child’s saw on
194 the banisters — when they saw Blackie’s big saw they signalled for it wordlessly. When he
195 next saw them a quarter of the banisters had been dropped into the hall. He found T at
196 last in the bathroom — he sat moodily in the least cared-for room in the house, listening to
197 the sounds coming up from below.
198 “You’ve really done it,” Blackie said with awe. “What’s going to happen?”
29
199 “We’ve only just begun,” T said. He looked at the sledgehammer and gave his
200 instructions. “You stay here and break the bath and the wash-basin. Don’t bother about the
201 pipes. They come later.”
202 Mike appeared at the door. “I’ve finished the wires, T,” he said.
203 “Good. You’ve just got to go wandering round now. The kitchen’s in the basement. Smash
204 all the china and glass and bottles you can lay hold of. Don’t turn on the taps — we don’t
205 want a flood — yet. Then go into all the rooms and turn out the drawers. If they are locked get
206 one of the others to break them open. Tear up any papers you find and smash all the
207 ornaments. Better take a carving knife with you from the kitchen. The bedroom’s opposite
208 here. Open the pillows and tear up the sheets. That’s enough for the moment. And
209 you, Blackie, when you’ve finished in here crack the plaster in the passage up with your
210 sledgehammer.”
211 “What are you going to do?” Blackie asked.
212 “I’m looking for something special,” T said.
213 It was nearly lunchtime before Blackie had finished and went in search of T Chaos had
214 advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china. The dining-room was
215 stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the
216 destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters
217 where they worked with the seriousness of creators — and destruction after all is a form of
218 creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become.
219 Mike said, “I’ve got to go home for dinner.”
220 “Who else?” T asked, but all the others on one excuse or another had brought provisions
221 with them.
222 They squatted in the ruins of the room and swapped unwanted sandwiches. Half an hour
223 for lunch and they were at work again. By the time Mike returned, they were on the top
224 floor, and by six the superficial damage was completed. The doors were all off, all the
225 skirtings raised, the furniture pillaged and ripped and smashed — no one could have slept in
226 the house except on a bed of broken plaster. T gave his orders — eight o’clock next
227 morning, and to escape notice they climbed singly over the garden wall, into the car-park.
228 Only Blackie and T were left: the light had nearly gone, and when they touched a switch,
229 nothing worked — Mike had done his job thoroughly.
230 “Did you find anything special?” Blackie asked.
231 T nodded. “Come over here,” he said, “and look.” Out of both pockets he drew bundles of
232 pound notes. “Old Misery’s savings,” he said. “Mike ripped out the mattress, but he missed
233 them.”
234 “What are you going to do? Share them?”
235 “We aren’t thieves,” T said. “Nobody’s going to steal anything from this house. I kept these
30
236 for you and me — a celebration.” He knelt down on the floor and counted them out — there
237 were seventy in all. “We’ll burn them,” he said, “one by one,” and taking it in turns they held
238 a note upward and lit the top corner, so that the flame burnt slowly toward their fingers.
239 The grey ash floated above them and fell on their heads like age. “I’d like to see Old
240 Misery’s face when we are through,” T said.
241 “You hate him a lot?” Blackie asked.
242 “Of course I don’t hate him,” T said. “There’d be no fun if I hated him.” The last burning
243 note illuminated his brooding face. “All this hate and love,” he said, “it’s soft, it’s hooey.
244 There’s only things, Blackie,” and he looked round the room crowded with the unfamiliar
245 shadows of half things, broken things, former things. “I’ll race you home, Blackie,” he said.
246 Next morning the serious destruction started. Two were missing — Mike and another boy
247 whose parents were off to Southend and Brighton in spite of the slow warm drops that had
248 begun to fall and the rumble of thunder in the estuary like the first guns of the old blitz.
249 “We’ve got to hurry,” T said.
250 Summers was restive. “Haven’t we done enough?” he asked. “I’ve been given a bob for slot
251 machines. This is like work.”
252 “We’ve hardly started,” T. said. “Why, there’s all the floors left, and the stairs. We haven’t
253 taken out a single window. You voted like the others. We are going to destroy this house.
254 There won’t be anything left when we’ve finished.”
255 They began again on the first floor picking up the top floorboards next the outer wall,
256 leaving the joists exposed. Then they sawed through the joists and retreated into the hall,
257 as what was left of the floor heeled and sank. They had learnt with practice, and the
258 second floor collapsed more easily. By the evening an odd exhilaration seized them as
259 they looked down the great hollow of the house. They ran risks and made mistakes: when
260 they thought of the windows it was too late to reach them. “Cor,” Joe said, and dropped a
261 penny down into the dry rubble-filled well. It cracked and span among the broken glass.
262 “Why did we start this?” Summers asked with astonishment; T was already on the ground,
263 digging at the rubble, clearing a space along the outer wall. “Turn on the taps,” he said.
264 “It’s too dark for anyone to see now, and in the morning it won’t matter.” The water
265 overtook them on the stairs and fell through the floorless rooms.
266 It was then they heard Mike’s whistle at the back. “Something’s wrong,” Blackie said. They
267 could hear his urgent breathing as they unlocked the door.
268 “The bogies?” Summers asked.
269 “Old Misery,” Mike said. “He’s on his way,”

270 he said with pride.
31
271 “But why?” T said. “He told me. . . .” He protested with the fury of the child he had never
272 been, “It isn’t fair.”
273 “He was down at Southend,” Mike said, “and he was on the train coming back. Said it was
274 too cold and wet.” He paused and gazed at the water. “My, you’ve had a storm here. Is the
275 roof leaking?”
276 “How long will he be?”
277 “Five minutes. I gave Ma the slip and ran.”
278 “We better clear,” Summers said. “We’ve done enough, anyway.”
279 “Oh, no, we haven’t. Anybody could do this —” “this” was the shattered hollowed house
280 with nothing left but the walls. Yet walls could be preserved. Façades were valuable. They
281 could build inside again more beautifully than before. This could again be a home. He said
282 angrily, “We’ve got to finish. Don’t move. Let me think.”
283 “There’s no time,” a boy said.
284 “There’s got to be a way,” T said. “We couldn’t have got this far . . .”
285 “We’ve done a lot,” Blackie said.
286 “No. No, we haven’t. Somebody watch the front.”
287 “We can’t do any more.”
288 “He may come in at the back.”
289 “Watch the back too.” T began to plead. “Just give me a minute and I’ll fix it. I swear I’ll fix
290 it.” But his authority had gone with his ambiguity. He was only one of the gang. “Please,”
291 he said.
292 “Please,” Summers mimicked him, and then suddenly struck home with the fatal name.
293 “Run along home, Trevor.”
294 T stood with his back to the rubble like a boxer knocked groggy against the ropes. He had
295 no words as his dreams shook and slid. Then Blackie acted before the gang had time to
296 laugh, pushing Summers backward. “I’ll watch the front, T,” he said, and cautiously he
297 opened the shutters of the hall. The grey wet common stretched ahead, and the lamps
298 gleamed in the puddles.
299 “Someone’s coming, T No, it’s not him. What’s your plan, T?”
300 “Tell Mike to go out to the lav and hide close beside it. When he hears me whistle he’s got
301 to count ten and start to shout.”
302 “Shout what?”
32
303 “Oh, ‘Help,’ anything.”
304 “You hear, Mike,” Blackie said. He was the leader again. He took a quick look between
305 the shutters. “He’s coming, T”
306 “Quick, Mike. The lav. Stay here, Blackie, all of you till I yell.”
307 “Where are you going, T?”
308 “Don’t worry. I’ll see to this. I said I would, didn’t I?”
309 Old Misery came limping off the common. He had mud on his shoes and he stopped to
310 scrape them on the pavement’s edge. He didn’t want to soil his house, which stood jagged
311 and dark between the bomb sites, saved so narrowly, as he believed, from destruction.
312 Even the fanlight had been left unbroken by the bomb’s blast. Somewhere somebody
313 whistled. Old Misery looked sharply round. He didn’t trust whistles. A child was shouting: it
314 seemed to come from his own garden. Then a boy ran into the road from the carpark. “Mr
315 Thomas,” he called, “Mr Thomas.”
316 “What is it?”
317 “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Thomas. One of us got taken short, and we thought you wouldn’t
318 mind, and now he can’t get out.”
319 “What do you mean, boy?”
320 “He’s got stuck in your lav.”
321 “He’d no business...Haven’t I seen you before?”
322 “You showed me your house.”
323 “So I did. So I did. That doesn’t give you the right to...”
324 “Do hurry, Mr Thomas. He’ll suffocate.”
325 “Nonsense. He can’t suffocate. Wait till I put my bag in.”
326 “I’ll carry your bag.”
327 “Oh, no, you don’t. I carry my own.”
328 “This way, Mr Thomas.”
329 “I can’t get in the garden that way. I’ve got to go through the house.”
330 “But you can get in the garden this way, Mr Thomas. We often do.”
33
331 “You often do?” He followed the boy with a scandalized fascination. “When? What right . . . ?”
332 “Do you see . . . ? the wall’s low.”
333 “I’m not going to climb walls into my own garden. It’s absurd.”
334 “This is how we do it. One foot here, one foot there, and over.” The boy’s face peered
335 down, an arm shot out, and Mr Thomas found his bag taken and deposited on the other
336 side of the wall.
337 “Give me back my bag,” Mr Thomas said. From the loo a boy yelled and yelled. “I’ll call the
338 police.”
339 “Your bag’s all right, Mr Thomas. Look. One foot there. On your right. Now just above. To
340 your left.” Mr Thomas climbed over his own garden wall.
341 “Here’s your bag, Mr Thomas.”
342 “I’ll have the wall built up,” Mr Thomas said, “I’ll not have you boys coming over here,
343 using my loo.” He stumbled on the path, but the boy caught his elbow and supported him.
344 “Thank you, thank you, my boy,” he murmured automatically. Somebody shouted again
345 through the dark. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” Mr Thomas called. He said to the boy beside
346 him, “I’m not unreasonable. Been a boy myself. As long as things are done regular. I don’t
347 mind you playing round the place Saturday mornings. Sometimes I like company. Only it’s
348 got to be regular. One of you asks leave and I say Yes. Sometimes I’ll say No. Won’t feel
349 like it. And you come in at the front door and out at the back. No garden walls.”
350 “Do get him out, Mr Thomas.”
351 “He won’t come to any harm in my loo,” Mr Thomas said, stumbling slowly down the
352 garden. “Oh, my rheumatics,” he said. “Always get ’em on Bank Holiday. I’ve got to be
353 careful. There’s loose stones here. Give me your hand. Do you know what my horoscope
354 said yesterday? ‘Abstain from any dealings in first half of week. Danger of serious crash.’
355 That might be on this path,” Mr Thomas said. “They speak in parables and double
356 meanings.” He paused at the door of the loo. “What’s the matter in there?” he called.
357 There was no reply.
358 “Perhaps he’s fainted,” the boy said.
359 “Not in my loo. Here, you, come out,” Mr Thomas said, and giving a great jerk at the door
360 he nearly fell on his back when it swung easily open. A hand first supported him and then
361 pushed him hard. His head hit the opposite wall and he sat heavily down. His bag hit his
362 feet. A hand whipped the key out of the lock and the door slammed. “Let me out,” he
363 called, and heard the key turn in the lock. “A serious crash,” he thought, and felt dithery
364 and confused and old.
365 A voice spoke to him softly through the star-shaped hole in the door. “Don’t worry, Mr
366 Thomas,” it said, “we won’t hurt you, not if you stay quiet.”
34
367 Mr Thomas put his head between his hands and pondered. He had noticed that there was
368 only one lorry in the car-park, and he felt certain that the driver would not come for it before
369 the morning. Nobody could hear him from the road in front, and the lane at the back was
370 seldom used. Anyone who passed there would be hurrying home and would not pause for
371 what they would certainly take to be drunken cries. And if he did call ‘Help,’ who, on a
372 lonely Bank Holiday evening, would have the courage to investigate? Mr Thomas
373 sat on the loo and pondered with the wisdom of age.
374 After a while it seemed to him that there were sounds in the silence—they were faint and
375 came from the direction of his house. He stood up and peered through the ventilation-
376 hole—between the cracks in one of the shutters he saw a light, not the light of a lamp, but
377 the wavering light that a candle might give. Then he thought he heard the sound of
378 hammering and scraping and chipping. He thought of burglars—perhaps they had
379 employed the boy as a scout, but why should burglars engage in what sounded more and
380 more like a stealthy form of carpentry? Mr Thomas let out an experimental yell, but
381 nobody answered. The noise could not even have reached his enemies.
382 Mike had gone home to bed, but the rest stayed. The question of leadership no longer
383 concerned the gang. With nails, chisels, screwdrivers, anything that was sharp and
384 penetrating, they moved around the inner walls worrying at the mortar between the bricks.
385 They started too high, and it was Blackie who hit on the damp course and realized the
386 work could be halved if they weakened the joints immediately above. It was a long, tiring,
387 unamusing job, but at last it was finished. The gutted house stood there balanced on a few
388 inches of mortar between the damp course and the bricks.
389 There remained the most dangerous task of all, out in the open at the edge of the bomb-
390 site. Summers was sent to watch the road for passers-by, and Mr Thomas, sitting on the
391 loo, heard clearly now the sound of sawing. It no longer came from the house, and that a
392 little reassured him. He felt less concerned. Perhaps the other noises too had no
393 significance.
394 A voice spoke to him through the hole. “Mr Thomas.”
395 “Let me out,” Mr Thomas said sternly.
396 “Here’s a blanket,” the voice said, and a long grey sausage was worked through the hole
397 and fell in swathes over Mr Thomas’s head.
398 “There’s nothing personal,” the voice said. “We want you to be comfortable tonight.”
399 “Tonight,” Mr Thomas repeated incredulously.
400 “Catch,” the voice said. “Penny buns — we’ve buttered them, and sausage-rolls. We don’t
401 want you to starve, Mr Thomas.”
402 Mr Thomas pleaded desperately. “A joke’s a joke, boy. Let me out and I won’t say a thing.
35
403 I’ve got rheumatics. I got to sleep comfortable.”
404 “You wouldn’t be comfortable, not in your house, you wouldn’t. Not now.”
405 “What do you mean, boy?” but the footsteps receded. There was only the silence of night:
406 no sound of sawing. Mr Thomas tried one more yell, but he was daunted and rebuked by
407 the silence — a long way off an owl hooted and made away again on its muffled flight
408 through the soundless world.
409 At seven next morning the driver came to fetch his lorry. He climbed into the seat and tried
410 to start the engine. He was vaguely aware of a voice shouting, but it didn’t concern him. At
411 last the engine responded and he backed the lorry until it touched the great wooden shore
412 that supported Mr Thomas’s house. That way he could drive right out and down the street
413 without reversing. The lorry moved forward, was momentarily checked as though
414 something were pulling it from behind, and then went on to the sound of a long rumbling
415 crash. The driver was astonished to see bricks bouncing ahead of him, while stones hit the
416 roof of his cab. He put on his brakes. When he climbed out the whole landscape had
417 suddenly altered. There was no house beside the car-park, only a hill of rubble. He went
418 round and examined the back of his lorry for damage, and found a rope tied there that was
419 still twisted at the other end round part of a wooden strut.
420 The driver again became aware of somebody shouting. It came from the wooden erection
421 which was the nearest thing to a house in that desolation of broken brick. The driver
422 climbed the smashed wall and unlocked the door. Mr Thomas came out of the loo. He was
423 wearing a grey blanket to which flakes of pastry adhered. He gave a sobbing cry. “My
424 house,” he said. “Where’s my house?”
425 “Search me,” the driver said. His eye lit on the remains of a bath and what had once been
426 a dresser and he began to laugh. There wasn’t anything left anywhere.
427 “How dare you laugh,” Mr Thomas said. “It was my house. My house.”
428 “I’m sorry,” the driver said, making heroic efforts, but when he remembered the sudden
429 check to his lorry, the crash of bricks falling, he became convulsed again. One moment the
430 house had stood there with such dignity between the bomb-sites like a man in a top hat,
431 and then, bang, crash, there wasn’t anything left — not anything. He said, “I’m sorry. I can’t
432 help it, Mr Thomas. There’s nothing personal, but you got to admit it’s funny.”
36
A REAL DURWAN
JHUMPA LAHIRI (B. 1967)
1 BOORI MA, sweeper of the stairwell, had not slept in two nights. So the morning before the
2 third night she shook the mites out of her bedding. She shook the quilts once underneath
3 the letter boxes where she lived, then once again at the mouth of the alley, causing the
4 crows who were feeding on vegetable peels to scatter in several directions.
5 As she started up the four flights to the roof, Boori Ma kept one hand placed over the knee
6 that swelled at the start of every rainy season. That meant that her bucket, quilts, and the
7 bundle of reeds which served as her broom all had to be braced under one arm. Lately
8 Boori Ma had been thinking that the stairs were getting steeper; climbing them felt more
9 like climbing a ladder than a staircase. She was sixty-four years old, with hair in a knot no
10 larger than a walnut, and she looked almost as narrow from the front as she did from the
11 side.
12 In fact, the only thing that appeared three-dimensional about Boori Ma was her voice:
13 brittle with sorrows, as tart as curds, and shrill enough to grate meat from a coconut. It was
14 with this voice that she enumerated, twice a day as she swept the stairwell, the details of
15 her plight and losses suffered since her deportation to Calcutta after Partition. At that time,
16 she maintained, the turmoil had separated her from a husband, four daughters, a two-story
17 brick house, a rosewood almari, and a number of coffer boxes whose skeleton keys she
18 still wore, along with her life savings, tied to the free end of her sari.
19 Aside from her hardships, the other thing Boori Ma liked to chronicle was easier times. And
20 so, by the time she reached the second-floor landing, she had already drawn to the whole
21 building’s attention the menu of her third daughter’s wedding night. “We married her to a
22 school principal. The rice was cooked in rosewater. The mayor was invited. Everybody
23 washed their fingers in pewter bowls.” Here she paused, evened out her breath, and
24 readjusted the supplies under her arm. She took the opportunity also to chase a cockroach
25 out of the banister poles, then continued: “Mustard prawns were steamed in banana
26 leaves. Not a delicacy was spared. Not that this was an extravagance for us. At our house,
27 we ate goat twice a week. We had a pond on our property, full of fish.”
28 By now Boori Ma could see some light from the roof spilling into the stairwell. And though it
29 was only eight o’clock, the sun was already strong enough to warm the last of the cement
30 steps under her feet. It was a very old building, the kind with bathwater that still had to be
31 stored in drums, windows without glass, and privy scaffolds made of bricks.
32 “A man came to pick our dates and guavas. Another clipped hibiscus. Yes, there I tasted
33 life. Here I eat my dinner from a rice pot.” At this point in the recital Boori Ma’s ears started
34 to burn; a pain chewed through her swollen knee. “Have I mentioned that I crossed the
35 border with just two bracelets on my wrist? Yet there was a day when my feet touched
36 nothing but marble. Believe me, don’t believe me, such comforts you cannot even dream
37 them.”
37
38 Whether there was any truth to Boori Ma’s litanies no one could be sure. For one thing,
39 every day, the perimeters of her former estate seemed to double, as did the contents of
40 her almari and coffer boxes. No one doubted she was a refugee; the accent in her Bengali
41 made that clear. Still, the residents of this particular flat-building could not reconcile Boori
42 Ma’s claims to prior wealth alongside the more likely account of how she had crossed the
43 East Bengal border, with the thousands of others, on the back of a truck, between sacks of
44 hemp. And yet there were days when Boori Ma insisted that she had come to Calcutta on a
45 bullock cart.
46 “Which was it, by truck or by cart?” the children sometimes asked her on their way to play
47 cops and robbers in the alley. To which Boori Ma would reply, shaking the free end of her
48 sari so that the skeleton keys rattled, “Why demand specifics? Why scrape lime from a
49 betel leaf? Believe me, don’t believe me. My life is composed of such griefs you cannot
50 even dream them.”
51 So she garbled facts. She contradicted herself. She embellished almost everything. But
52 her rants were so persuasive, her fretting so vivid, that it was not so easy to dismiss her.
53 What kind of landowner ended up sweeping stairs? That was what Mr. Dalal of the third
54 floor always wondered as he passed Boori Ma on his way to and from the office, where he
55 filed receipts for a wholesale distributor of rubber tubes, pipes, and valve fittings in the
56 plumbing district of College Street.
57 Bechareh, she probably constructs tales as a way of mourning the loss of her family, was
58 the collective surmise of most of the wives.
59 And “Boori Ma’s mouth is full of ashes, but she is the victim of changing times” was the
60 refrain of old Mr. Chatterjee. He had neither strayed from his balcony nor opened a
61 newspaper since Independence, but in spite of this fact, or maybe because of it, his
62 opinions were always highly esteemed.
63 The theory eventually circulated that Boori Ma had once worked as hired help for a
64 prosperous zamindar back east, and was therefore capable of exaggerating her past at
65 such elaborate lengths and heights. Her throaty impostures hurt no one. All agreed that
66 she was a superb entertainer. In exchange for her lodging below the letter boxes, Boori Ma
67 kept their crooked stairwell spotlessly clean. Most of all, the residents liked that Boori Ma,
68 who slept each night behind the collapsible gate, stood guard between them and the
69 outside world.
70 No one in this particular flat-building owned much worth stealing. The second-floor widow,
71 Mrs. Misra, was the only one with a telephone. Still, the residents were thankful that
72 Boori Ma patrolled activities in the alley, screened the itinerant peddlers who came to sell
73 combs and shawls from door to door, was able to summon a rickshaw at a moment’s
74 calling, and could, with a few slaps of her broom, rout any suspicious character who strayed
75 into the area in order to spit, urinate, or cause some other trouble.
76 In short, over the years, Boori Ma’s services came to resemble those of a real durwan.
77 Though under normal circumstances this was no job for a woman, she honoured the
78 responsibility, and maintained a vigil no less punctilious than if she were the gatekeeper of
38
79 a house on Lower Circular Road, or Jodhpur Park, or any other fancy neighborhood.
80 On the rooftop Boori Ma hung her quilts over the clothesline. The wire, strung diagonally
81 from one corner of the parapet to the other, stretched across her view of television
82 antennas, billboards, and the distant arches of Howrah Bridge. Boori Ma consulted the
83 horizon on all four sides. Then she ran the tap at the base of the cistern. She washed her
84 face, rinsed her feet, and rubbed two fingers over her teeth. After this she started to beat
85 the quilts on each side with her broom. Every now and then she stopped and squinted at
86 the cement, hoping to identify the culprit of her sleepless nights. She was so absorbed in
87 this process that it was some moments before she noticed Mrs. Dalal of the third floor, who
88 had come to set a tray of salted lemon peels out to dry in the sun.
89 “Whatever is inside this quilt is keeping me awake at night,” Boori Ma said. “Tell me, where
90 do you see them?”
91 Mrs. Dalal had a soft spot for Boori Ma; occasionally she gave the old woman some ginger
92 paste with which to flavour her stews. “I don’t see anything,” Mrs. Dalal said after a while.
93 She had diaphanous eyelids and very slender toes with rings on them.
94 “Then they must have wings,” Boori Ma concluded. She put down her broom and observed
95 one cloud passing behind another. “They fly away before I can squash them. But just see
96 my back. I must be purple from their bites.”
97 Mrs. Dalal lifted the drape of Boori Ma’s sari, a cheap white weave with a border the color
98 of a dirty pond. She examined the skin above and below her blouse, cut in a style no
99 longer sold in shops. Then she said, “Boori Ma, you are imagining things.”
100 “I tell you, these mites are eating me alive.”
101 “It could be a case of prickly heat,” Mrs. Dalal suggested.
102 At this Boori Ma shook the free end of her sari and made her skeleton keys rattle. She
103 said, ‘’I know prickly heat. This is not prickly heat. I haven’t slept in three, perhaps four
104 days. Who can count? I used to keep a clean bed. Our linens were muslin. Believe me,
105 don’t believe me, our mosquito nets were as soft as silk. Such comforts you cannot even
106 dream them.”
107 “I cannot dream them,” Mrs. Dalal echoed. She lowered her diaphanous eyelids and
108 sighed. “I cannot dream them, Boori Ma. I live in two broken rooms, married to a man who
109 sells toilet parts.” Mrs. Dalal turned away and looked at one of the quilts. She ran a finger
110 over part of the stitching. Then she asked:
111 “Boori Ma, how long have you slept on this bedding?” Boori Ma put a finger to her lips
112 before replying that she could not remember.
113 “Then why no mention of it until today? Do you think it’s beyond us to provide you with
114 clean quilts? An oilcloth, for that matter?” She looked insulted.
39
115 “There is no need,” Boori Ma said. “They are clean now. I beat them with my broom.”
116 “I am hearing no arguments,” Mrs. Dalal said. “You need a new bed. Quilts, a pillow. A
117 blanket when winter comes.” As she spoke Mrs. Dalal kept track of the necessary items by
118 touching her thumb to the pads of her fingers.
119 “On festival days the poor came to our house to be fed,’’ Boori Ma said. She was filling her
120 bucket from the coal heap on the other side of the roof.
121 “I will have a word with Mr. Dalal when he returns from the office,” Mrs. Dalal called back
122 as she headed down the stairs. “Come in the afternoon. I will give you some pickles and
123 some powder for your back.”
124 “It’s not prickly heat,” Boori Ma said.
125 It was true that prickly heat was common during the rainy season. But Boori Ma preferred
126 to think that what irritated her bed, what stole her sleep, what burned like peppers across
127 her thinning scalp and skin, was of a less mundane origin.
128 She was ruminating on these things as she swept the stair well ̶ she always worked from
129 top to bottom ̶ when it started to rain. It came slapping across the roof like a boy in
130 slippers too big for him and washed Mrs. Dalal’s lemon peels into the gutter. Before
131 pedestrians could open their umbrellas, it rushed down collars, pockets, and shoes. In that
132 particular flat-building and all the neighboring buildings, creaky shutters were closed and
133 tied with petticoat strings to the window bars.
134 At the time, Boori Ma was working all the way down on the second-floor landing. She
135 looked up the ladderlike stairs, and as the sound of falling water tightened around her she
136 knew her quilts were turning into yoghurt.
137 But then she recalled her conversation with Mrs. Dalal. And so she continued, at the same
138 pace, to sweep the dust, cigarette ends, and lozenge wrappers from the rest of the steps,
139 until she reached the letter boxes at the bottom. To keep out the wind, she rummaged
140 through her baskets tor some newspapers and crammed them into the diamond-shaped
141 openings of the collapsible gate. Then on her bucket of coals she set her lunch to boil, and
142 monitored the flame with a plaited palm fan.
143 That afternoon, as was her habit, Boori Ma reknotted her hair, untied the loose end of her sari,
144 and counted out her life savings. She had just woken from a nap of twenty minutes,
145 which she had taken on a temporary bed made from newspapers. The rain had stopped
146 and now the sour smell that rises from wet mango leaves was hanging low over the alley.
147 On certain afternoons Boori Ma visited her fellow residents. She enjoyed drifting in and out
148 of the various households. The residents, for their part, assured Boori Ma that she was
149 always welcome; they never drew the latch bars across their doors except at night. They
150 went about their business, scolding children or adding up expenses or picking stones out
151 of the evening rice. From time to time she was handed a glass of tea, the cracker tin was
152 passed in her direction, and she helped children shoot chips cross the carom board.
153 Knowing not to sit on the furniture, she crouched, instead, in doorways and hallways,
154 and observed gestures and manners in the same way a person tends to watch traffic in a
40
155 foreign city.
156 On this particular afternoon Boori Ma decided to accept Mrs. Dalal’s invitation. Her back
157 still itched, even after napping on the newspapers, and she was beginning to want some
158 prickly-heat powder after all. She picked up her broom – she never felt quite herself without
159 it - and was about to climb upstairs, when a rickshaw pulled up to the collapsible gate.
160 It was Mr. Dalal. The years he had spent filing receipts had left him with purple crescents
161 under his eyes. But today his gaze was bright. The tip of his tongue played between his
162 teeth and in the clamp of his thighs he held two small ceramic basins.
163 “Boori Ma, I have a job for you. Help me carry these basins upstairs.’’ He pressed a folded
164 handkerchief to his forehead and throat and gave the rickshaw driver a coin. Then he and
165 Boori Ma carried the basins all the way up to the third floor. lt wasn’t until they were inside
166 the flat that he finally announced, to Mrs. Dalal, to Boori Ma, and to a few other residents
167 who had followed them out of curiosity, the following things: That his hours filing receipts
168 for a distributor of rubber tubes, pipes, and valve fittings had ended. That the distributor
169 himself, who craved fresher air, and whose profits had doubled, was opening a second
170 branch in Burdwan. And that, following an assessment of his sedulous performance over
171 the years, the distributor was promoting Mr. Dalal to manage the College Street branch. In
172 his excitement on his way home through the plumbing district, Mr. Dalal had bought two
173 basins.
174 “What are we supposed to do with two basins in a two-room flat?” Mrs. Dalal demanded.
175 She had already been sulking over her lemon peels. “Who ever heard of it? I still cook on
176 kerosene. You refuse to apply for a phone. And I have yet to see the fridge you promised
177 when we married. You expect two basins to make up for all that?”
178 The argument that followed was loud enough to be heard all the way down to the letter
179 boxes. It was loud enough, and long enough, to rise above a second spell of rain that fell
180 after dark. It was loud enough even to distract Boori Ma as she swept the stairwell from top
181 to bottom for the second time that day, and for this reason she spoke neither of her hard-
182 ships, nor of easier times. She spent the night on a bed of newspapers.
183 The argument between Mr. and Mrs. Dalal was still more or less in effect early the next
184 morning, when a barefoot team of workmen came to install the basins. After a night of
185 tossing and pacing, Mr. Dalal had decided to install one basin in the sitting room of their
186 flat, and the other one on the stairwell of the building, on the first-floor landing. “This way
187 everyone can use it.” he explained from door to door. The residents were delighted; for
188 years they had all brushed their teeth with stored water poured from mugs.
189 Mr. Dalal, meanwhile, was thinking: a sink on the stairwell is sure to impress visitors. Now
190 that he was a company manager, who could say who might visit the building?
191 The workmen toiled for several hours. They ran up and down the stairs and ate their
192 lunches squatting against the banister poles. They hammered, shouted, spat, and cursed.
193 They wiped their sweat with the ends of their turbans. In general, they made it impossible
194 for Boori Ma to sweep the stairwell that day.
41
195 To occupy the time, Boori Ma retired to the rooftop. She shuffled along the parapets, but
196 her hips were sore from sleeping on newspapers. After consulting the horizon on all four
197 sides, she tore what was left of her quilts into several strips and resolved to polish the
198 banister poles at a later time.
199 By early evening the residents gathered to admire the day’s labors. Even Boori Ma was
200 urged to rinse her hands under the clear running water. She sniffed. “Our bathwater was
201 scented with petals and attars. Believe me, don’t believe me, it was a luxury you cannot
202 dream.”
203 Mr. Dalal proceeded to demonstrate the basin’s various features. He turned each faucet
204 completely on and completely off. Then he turned on both faucets at the same time, to
205 illustrate the difference in water pressure. Lifting a small lever between the faucets allowed
206 water to collect in the basin, if desired.
207 “The last word in elegance,” Mr. Dalal concluded.
208 “A sure sign of changing times,” Mr. Chatterjee reputedly admitted from his balcony.
209 Among the wives, however, resentment quickly brewed. Standing in line to brush their
210 teeth in the mornings, each grew frustrated with having to wait her turn, for having to
211 wipe the faucets after every use, and for not being able to leave her own soap and
212 toothpaste tube on the basin’s narrow periphery. The Dalals had their own sink; why did
213 the rest of them have to share?
214 “Is it beyond us to buy sinks of our own?” one of them finally burst out one morning.
215 “Are the Dalals the only ones who can improve the conditions of this building?” asked
216 another.
217 Rumors began spreading, that, following their argument, Mr. Dalal had consoled his wife
218 by buying her two kilos of mustard oil, a Kashmiri shawl, a dozen cakes of sandalwood
219 soap; that Mr. Dalal had filed an application for a telephone line; that Mrs. Dalal did nothing
220 but wash her hands in her basin all day. As if this weren’t enough, the next morning, a
221 taxi bound for Howrah Station crammed its wheels into the alley; the Dalals were going to
222 Simla for ten days.
223 “Boori Ma, I haven’t forgotten. We will bring you back a sheep’s hair blanket made in the
224 mountains,” Mrs. Dalal said through the open window of the taxi. She was holding a
225 leather purse in her lap which matched the turquoise border of her sari.
226 “We will bring two!” cried Mr. Dalal, who was sitting beside his wife checking his pockets
227 to make sure his wallet was in place.
228 Of all the people who lived in that particular flat-building, Boori Ma was the only one who
229 stood by the collapsible gate and wished them a safe journey.
230 As soon as the Dalals were gone, the other wives began planning renovations of their own.
231 One decided to barter a stack of her wedding bracelets and commissioned a white-
42
232 washer to freshen the walls of the stairwell. Another pawned her sewing machine and
233 summoned an exterminator. A third went to the silversmith and sold back a set of pudding
234 bowls; she intended to have the shutters painted yellow.
235 Workers began to occupy this particular flat-building night and day. To avoid the traffic,
236 Boori Ma took to sleeping on the rooftop. So many people passed in and out of the
237 collapsible gate, so many others clogged the alley at all times, that there was no point in
238 keeping track of them.
239 After a few days Boori Ma moved her baskets and her cooking bucket to the rooftop as
240 well. There was no need to use the basin downstairs, for she could just as easily wash, as
241 she always had, from the cistern tap. She still planned to polish the banister poles with the
242 strips she had torn from her quilts. She continued to sleep on her newspapers.
243 More rains came. Below the dripping awning, a newspaper pressed over her head, Boori
244 Ma squatted and watched the monsoon ants as they marched along the clothesline,
245 carrying eggs in their mouths. Damper winds soothed her back. Her newspapers were
246 running low.
247 Her mornings were long, her afternoons longer. She could not remember her last glass of
248 tea. Thinking neither of her hardships nor of earlier times, she wondered when the Dalals
249 would return with her new bedding.
250 She grew restless on the roof, and so for some exercise, Boori Ma started circling the
251 neighbourhood in the afternoons. Reed broom in hand, sari smeared with newsprint ink,
252 she wandered through markets and began spending her life savings on small treats: today
253 a packet of puffed rice, tomorrow some cashews, the day after that, a cup of sugarcane
254 juice. One day she walked as far as the bookstalls on College Street. The next day she
255 walked even farther, to the produce markets in Bow Bazaar. It was there, while she was
256 standing in a shopping arcade surveying jackfruit and persimmons, that she felt something
257 tugging on the free end of her sari. When she looked, the rest of her life savings and her
258 skeleton keys were gone.
259 The residents were waiting for Boori Ma when she returned that afternoon at the
260 collapsible gate. Baleful cries rang up and down the stairwell, all echoing the same news:
261 the basin on the stairwell had been stolen. There was a big hole in the recently
262 whitewashed wall, and a tangle of rubber tubes and pipes was sticking out of it. Chunks of
263 plaster littered the landing. Boori Ma gripped her reed broom and said nothing.
264 In their haste the residents practically carried Boori Ma up the stairs to the roof, where they
265 planted her on one side of the clothesline and started screaming at her from the other.
266 “This is all her doing,” one of them hollered, pointing at Boori Ma. “She informed the
267 robbers. Where was she when she was supposed to guard the gate?”
268 “For days she has been wandering the streets, speaking to strangers,” another reported.
269 “We shared our coal, gave her a place to sleep. How could she betray us this way?” a third
43
270 wanted to know.
271 Though none of them spoke directly to Boori Ma, she replied, “Believe me, believe me. I
272 did not inform the robbers.”
273 “For years we have put up with your lies,” they retorted. “You expect us, now, to believe
274 you?”
275 Their recriminations persisted. How would they explain it to the Dalals? Eventually they
276 sought the advice of Mr. Chattergee. They found him sitting on his balcony watching a traffic
277 jam.
278 One of the second-floor residents said, “Boori Ma has endangered the security of this
279 building. We have valuables. The widow Mrs. Misra lives alone with her phone. What
280 should we do?”
281 Mr. Chattergee considered their arguments. As he thought things over, he adjusted the
282 shawl that was wrapped around his shoulders and gazed at the bamboo scaffolding that
283 now surrounded his balcony. The shutters behind him, colorless for as long as he could
284 remember, had been painted yellow. Finally he said:
285 “Boori Ma’s mouth is full of ashes. But that is nothing new. What is new is the face of this
286 building. What a building like this needs is a real durwan.”
287 So the residents tossed her bucket and rags, her baskets and reed broom, down the
288 stairwell, past the letter boxes, through the collapsible gate, and into the alley. Then they
289 tossed out Boori Ma. All were eager to begin their search for a real durwan.
290 From the pile of belongings Boori Ma kept only her broom. “Believe me, believe me,” she
291 said once more as her figure began to recede. She shook the free end of the her sari, but
292 nothing rattled.
44
THROUGH THE TUNNEL

DORIS LESSING (1919 – 2013)
1 Going to the shore on the first morning of the vacation, the young English boy stopped at a
2 turning of the path and looked down at a wild and rocky bay, and then over to the crowded
3 beach he knew so well from other years. His mother walked on in front of him, carrying a
4 bright striped bag in one hand. Her other arm, swinging loose, was very white in the sun.
5 The boy watched that white, naked arm, and turned his eyes, which had a frown behind
6 them, toward the bay and back again to his mother. When she felt he was not with her, she
7 swung around. “Oh, there you are, Jerry!” she said. She looked impatient, then smiled.
8 “Why, darling, would you rather not come with me? Would you rather –” She frowned,
9 conscientiously worrying over what amusements he might secretly be longing for, which she
10 had been too busy or too careless to imagine. He was very familiar with that anxious,
11 apologetic smile. Contrition sent him running after her. And yet, as he ran, he looked back over his
12 shoulder at the wild bay; and all morning, as he played on the safe beach, he was thinking of it.
13 Next morning, when it was time for the routine of swimming and sunbathing, his mother
14 said, “Are you tired of the usual beach, Jerry? Would you like to go somewhere else?”
15 “Oh, no!” he said quickly, smiling at her out of that unfailing impulse of contrition – a sort
16 of chivalry. Yet, walking down the path with her, he blurted out, “I’d like to go and have a
17 look at those rocks down there.”
18 She gave the idea her attention. It was a wild-looking place, and there was no one there;
19 but she said, “Of course, Jerry. When you’ve had enough, come to the big beach. Or just
20 go straight back to the villa, if you like.” She walked away, that bare arm, now slightly
21 reddened from yesterday’s sun, swinging. And he almost ran after her again, feeling it
22 unbearable that she should go by herself, but he did not.
23 She was thinking, of course he’s old enough to be safe without me. Have I been keeping
24 him too close? He mustn’t feel he ought to be with me. I must be careful.
25 He was an only child, eleven years old. She was a widow. She was determined to be
26 neither possessive nor lacking in devotion. She went worrying off to her beach.
27 As for Jerry, once he saw that his mother had gained her beach, he began the steep
28 descent to the bay. From where he was, high up among red-brown rocks, it was a scoop of
29 moving bluish green fringed with white. As he went lower, he saw that it spread among small
30 promontories and inlets of rough, sharp rock, and the crisping, lapping surface showed
31 stains of purple and darker blue. Finally, as he ran sliding and scraping down the last few
32 yards, he saw an edge of white surf and the shallow, luminous movement of water over
33 white sand, and, beyond that, a solid, heavy blue.
34 He ran straight into the water and began swimming. He was a good swimmer. He went out
35 fast over the gleaming sand, over a middle region where rocks lay like discolored monsters
45
36 under the surface, and then he was in the real sea – a warm sea where irregular cold
37 currents from the deep water shocked his limbs.
38 When he was so far out that he could look back not only on the little bay but past the
39 promontory that was between it and the big beach, he floated on the buoyant surface and
40 looked for his mother. There she was, a speck of yellow under an umbrella that looked like
41 a slice of orange peel. He swam back to the shore, relieved at being sure she was there,
42 but all at once very lonely.
43 On the edge of a small cape that marked the side of the bay away from the promontory
44 was a loose scatter of rocks. Above them, some boys were stripping off their clothes. They
45 came running, naked, down to the rocks. The English boy swam toward them, but kept his
46 distance at a stone’s throw. They were of that coast; all of them were burned smooth dark
47 brown and speaking a language he did not understand. To be with them, of them, was a
48 craving that filled his whole body. He swam a little closer; they turned and watched him
49 with narrowed, alert dark eyes. Then one smiled and waved. It was enough. In a minute,
50 he had swum in and was on the rocks beside them, smiling with a desperate, nervous
51 supplication. They shouted cheerful greetings at him; and then, as he preserved his
52 nervous, uncomprehending smile, they understood that he was a foreigner strayed from
53 his own beach, and they proceeded to forget him. But he was happy. He was with them.
54 They began diving again and again from a high point into a well of blue sea between
55 rough, pointed rocks. After they had dived and come up, they swam around, hauled
56 themselves up, and waited their turn to dive again. They were big boys – men, to Jerry. He
57 dived, and they watched him; and when he swam around to take his place, they made way
58 for him. He felt he was accepted and he dived again, carefully, proud of himself.
59 Soon the biggest of the boys poised himself, shot down into the water, and did not come
60 up. The others stood about, watching. Jerry, after waiting for the sleek brown head to
61 appear, let out a yell of warning; they looked at him idly and turned their eyes back toward
62 the water. After a long time, the boy came up on the other side of a big dark rock, letting
63 the air out of his lungs in a sputtering gasp and a shout of triumph. Immediately the rest of
64 them dived in. One moment, the morning seemed full of chattering boys; the next, the air
65 and surface of the water were empty. But through the heavy blue, dark shapes could be
66 seen moving and groping.
67 Jerry dived, shot past the school of underwater swimmers, saw a black wall of rock
68 looming at him, touched it, and bobbed up at once to the surface, where the wall was a low
69 barrier he could see across. There was no one visible; under him, in the water, the dim
70 shapes of the swimmers had disappeared. Then one, and then another of the boys came
71 up on the far side of the barrier of rock, and he understood that they had swum through
72 some gap or hole in it. He plunged down again. He could see nothing through the stinging
73 salt water but the blank rock. When he came up the boys were all on the diving rock,
74 preparing to attempt the feat again. And now, in a panic of failure, he yelled up, in English,
75 “Look at me! Look!” and he began splashing and kicking in the water like a foolish dog.
76 They looked down gravely, frowning. He knew the frown. At moments of failure, when he
77 clowned to claim his mother’s attention, it was with just this grave, embarrassed inspection
78 that she rewarded him. Through his hot shame, feeling the pleading grin on his face like a
79 scar that he could never remove, he looked up at the group of big brown boys on the rock
46
80 and shouted, “Bonjour! Merci! Au revoir! Monsieur, monsieur !” while he hooked his fingers
81 round his ears and waggled them.
82 Water surged into his mouth; he choked, sank, came up. The rock, lately weighted with
83 boys, seemed to rear up out of the water as their weight was removed. They were flying
84 down past him, now, into the water; the air was full of falling bodies. Then the rock was
85 empty in the hot sunlight. He counted one, two, three ...
86 At fifty, he was terrified. They must all be drowning beneath him, in the watery caves of the
87 rock! At a hundred, he stared around him at the empty hillside, wondering if he should yell
88 for help. He counted faster, faster, to hurry them up, to bring them to the surface quickly –
89 anything rather than the terror of counting on and on into the blue
90 emptiness of the morning. And then, at a hundred and sixty, the water beyond the rock
91 was full of boys blowing like brown whales. They swam back to the shore without a look at
92 him.
93 He climbed back to the diving rock and sat down, feeling the hot roughness of it under his
94 thighs. The boys were gathering up their bits of clothing and running off along the shore to
95 another promontory. They were leaving to get away from him. He cried openly, fists in his
96 eyes. There was no one to see him, and he cried himself out.
97 It seemed to him that a long time had passed, and he swam out to where he could see his
98 mother. Yes, she was still there, a yellow spot under an orange umbrella. He swam back to
99 the big rock, climbed up, and dived into the blue pool among the fanged and angry
100 boulders. Down he went, until he touched the wall of rock again. But the salt was so
101 painful in his eyes that he could not see.
102 He came to the surface, swam to shore and went back to the villa to wait for his mother.
103 Soon she walked slowly up the path, swinging her striped bag, the flushed, naked arm
104 dangling beside her. “I want some swimming goggles,” he panted, defiant and beseeching.
105 She gave him a patient, inquisitive look as she said casually, “Well, of course, darling.”
106 But now, now, now! He must have them this minute, and no other time. He nagged and
107 pestered until she went with him to a shop. As soon as she had bought the goggles, he
108 grabbed them from her hand as if she were going to claim them for herself, and was off,
109 running down the steep path to the bay.
110 Jerry swam out to the big barrier rock, adjusted the goggles, and dived. The impact of the
111 water broke the rubber-enclosed vacuum, and the goggles came loose. He understood
112 that he must swim down to the base of the rock from the surface of the water. He fixed the
113 goggles tight and firm, filled his lungs, and floated, face down, on the water. Now, he could
114 see. It was as if he had eyes of a different kind – fish eyes that showed everything clear and
115 delicate and wavering in the bright water.
116 Under him, six or seven feet down, was a floor of perfectly clean, shining white sand,
117 rippled firm and hard by the tides. Two grayish shapes steered there, like long, rounded
118 pieces of wood or slate. They were fish. He saw them nose toward each other, poise
119 motionless, make a dart forward, swerve off, and come around again. It was like a water
47
120 dance. A few inches above them the water sparkled as if sequins were dropping through it.
121 Fish again – myriads of minute fish, the length of his fingernail, were drifting through the
122 water, and in a moment he could feel the innumerable tiny touches of them against his
123 limbs. It was like swimming in flaked silver. The great rock the big boys had swum through
124 rose sheer out of the white sand, black, tufted lightly with greenish weed. He could see no
125 gap in it. He swam down to its base.
126 Again and again he rose, took a big chestful of air, and went down. Again and again he
127 groped over the surface of the rock, feeling it, almost hugging it in the desperate need to
128 find the entrance. And then, once, while he was clinging to the black wall, his knees came
129 up and shot his feet out forward and they met no obstacle. He had found the hole.
130 He gained the surface, clambered about the stones that littered the barrier rock until he
131 found a big one, and, with this in his arms, let himself down over the side of the rock. He
132 dropped, with the weight, straight to the sandy floor. Clinging tight to the anchor of stone,
133 he lay on his side and looked in under the dark shelf at the place where his feet had gone.
134 He could see the hole. It was an irregular, dark gap; but he could not see deep into it. He
135 let go of his anchor, clung with his hands to the edges of the hole, and tried to push
136 himself in.
137 He got his head in, found his shoulders jammed, moved them in sidewise, and was
138 inside as far as his waist. He could see nothing ahead. Something soft and clammy
139 touched his mouth; he saw a dark frond moving against the grayish rock, and panic filled
140 him. He thought of octopuses, of clinging weed. He pushed himself out backward and
141 caught a glimpse, as he retreated, of a harmless tentacle of seaweed drifting in the mouth of
142 the tunnel. But it was enough. He reached the sunlight, swam to the shore, and lay on the
143 diving rock. He looked down into the blue well of water. He knew he must find his way
144 through that cave, or hole, or tunnel, and out the other side.
145 First, he thought, he must learn to control his breathing. He let himself down into the water
146 with another big stone in his arms, so that he could lie effortlessly on the bottom of the
147 sea. He counted. One, two, three. He counted steadily. He could hear the movement of
148 blood in his chest. Fifty-one, fifty-two ... His chest was hurting. He let go of the rock and
149 went up into the air. He saw that the sun was low. He rushed to the villa and found his
150 mother at her supper. She said only “Did you enjoy yourself?” and he said “Yes.”
151 All night the boy dreamed of the water-filled cave in the rock, and as soon as breakfast
152 was over he went to the bay.
153 That night, his nose bled badly. For hours he had been under water, learning to hold his
154 breath, and now he felt weak and dizzy. His mother said, “I shouldn’t overdo things,
155 darling, if I were you.”
156 That day and the next, Jerry exercised his lungs as if everything, the whole of his life, all
157 that he could become, depended upon it. Again his nose bled at night, and his mother
158 insisted on his coming with her the next day. It was a torment to him to waste a day of his
159 careful self-training, but he stayed with her on that other beach, which now seemed a place for
160 small children, a place where his mother might lie safe in the sun. It was not his beach.
48
161 He did not ask for permission, on the following day, to go to his beach. He went, before his
162 mother could consider the complicated rights and wrongs of the matter. A day’s rest, he
163 discovered, had improved his count by ten. The big boys had made the passage while he
164 counted a hundred and sixty. He had been counting fast, in his fright. Probably now, if he
165 tried, he could get through that long tunnel, but he was not going to try yet. A curious, most
166 unchildlike persistence, a controlled impatience, made him wait. In the meantime, he lay
167 underwater on the white sand, littered now by stones he had brought down from the upper
168 air, and studied the entrance to the tunnel. He knew every jut and corner of it, as far as it
169 was possible to see. It was as if he already felt its sharpness about his shoulders.
170 He sat by the clock in the villa, when his mother was not near, and checked his time. He
171 was incredulous and then proud to find he could hold his breath without strain for two
172 minutes. The words “two minutes,” authorized by the clock, brought close the adventure
173 that was so necessary to him.
174 In another four days, his mother said casually one morning, they must go home. On the
175 day before they left, he would do it. He would do it if it killed him, he said defiantly to
176 himself. But two days before they were to leave, a day of triumph when he increased his
177 count by fifteen – his nose bled so badly that he turned dizzy and had to lie limply over the big
178 rock like a bit of seaweed – watching the thick red blood flow on to the rock and trickle
179 slowly down to the sea. He was frightened. Supposing he turned dizzy in the tunnel?
180 Supposing he died there, trapped? Supposing – his head went around, in the hot sun, and
181 he almost gave up. He thought he would turn to the house and lie down, and next summer,
182 perhaps, when he had another year’s growth in him, then he would go through the hole.
183 But even after he had made the decision, or thought he had, he found himself sitting up on
184 the rock and looking down into the water; and he knew that now, this moment, when his
185 nose had only just stopped bleeding, when his head was still sore and throbbing – this was
186 the moment when he would try. If he did not do it now, he never would. He was trembling
187 with fear that he would not go; and he was trembling with horror at that long, long tunnel
188 under the rock, under the sea. Even in the open sunlight, the barrier rock seemed very
189 wide and very heavy; tons of rock pressed down on where he would go. If he died there,
190 he would lie until one day, perhaps not before next year, those big boys would swim into it
191 and find it blocked.
192 He put on his goggles, fitted them tight, tested the vacuum. His hands were shaking. Then
193 he chose the biggest stone he could carry and slipped over the edge of the rock until half
194 of him was in the cool, enclosing water and half in the hot sun. He looked up once at the
195 empty sky, filled his lungs once, twice, and then sank fast to the bottom with the stone. He
196 let it go and began to count. He took the edges of the hole in his hands and drew himself
197 into it, wriggling his shoulders in sidewise as he remembered he must, kicking himself
198 along with his feet.
199 Soon he was clear inside. He was in a small rock-bound hole filled with yellowish-gray
200 water. The water was pushing him up against the roof. The roof was sharp and pained his
201 back. He pulled himself along with his hands – fast, fast – and used his legs as levers. His
202 head knocked against something; a sharp pain dizzied him. Fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two ... He
203 was without light, and the water seemed to press upon him with the weight of the rock.
49
204 Seventy-one, seventy-two ... There was no strain on his lungs. He felt like an inflated
205 balloon, his lungs were so light and easy, but his head was pulsing.
206 He was being continually pressed against the sharp roof, which felt slimy as well as sharp.
207 Again he thought of octopuses, and wondered if the tunnel might be filled with weed that
208 could tangle him. He gave himself a panicky, convulsive kick forward, ducked his head,
209 and swam. His feet and hands moved freely, as if in open water. The hole must have
210 widened out. He thought he must be swimming fast, and he was frightened of banging his
211 head if the tunnel narrowed.
212 A hundred, a hundred and one ... The water paled. Victory filled him. His lungs were
213 beginning to hurt. A few more strokes and he would be out. He was counting wildly; he
214 said a hundred and fifteen, and then a long time later, a hundred and fifteen again. The
215 water was jewel-green all around him. Then he saw, above his head, a crack running up
216 through the rock. Sunlight was falling through it, showing the clean, dark rock of the tunnel,
217 a single mussel shell, and darkness ahead.
218 He was at the end of what he could do. He looked up at the crack as if it were filled with air
219 and not water, as if he could put his mouth to it to draw in air. A hundred and fifteen, he
220 heard himself say inside his head – but he had said that long ago. He must go on into the
221 blackness ahead, or he would drown. His head was swelling, his lungs cracking. A
222 hundred and fifteen, a hundred and fifteen pounded through his head, and he feebly
223 clutched at rocks in the dark, pulling himself forward, leaving the brief space of sunlit water
224 behind. He felt he was dying. He was no longer quite conscious. He struggled on in the
225 darkness between lapses into unconsciousness. An immense, swelling pain filled his head,
226 and then the darkness cracked with an explosion of green light. His hands, groping forward,
227 met nothing; and his feet, kicking back, propelled him out into the open sea.
228 He drifted to the surface, his face turned up to the air. He was gasping like a fish. He felt
229 he would sink now and drown; he could not swim the few feet back to the rock. Then he
230 was clutching it and pulling himself up on to it. He lay face down, gasping. He could see
231 nothing but a red-veined, clotted dark. His eyes must have burst, he thought; they were full
232 of blood. He tore off his goggles and a gout of blood went into the sea. His nose was
233 bleeding, and the blood had filled the goggles.
234 He scooped up handfuls of water from the cool, salty sea, to splash on his face, and did
235 not know whether it was blood or salt water he tasted. After a time, his heart quieted, his
236 eyes cleared, and he sat up. He could see the local boys diving and playing half a mile
237 away. He did not want them. He wanted nothing but to get back home and lie down.
238 In a short while, Jerry swam to the shore and climbed slowly up the path to the villa. He
239 flung himself on his bed and slept, waking at the sound of feet on the path outside. His
240 mother was coming back. He rushed to the bathroom, thinking she must not see his face
241 with bloodstains, or tearstains, on it. He came out of the bathroom and met her as she
242 walked into the villa, smiling, her eyes lighting up.
243 “Have a nice morning?” she asked, laying her hand on his warm brown shoulder a moment.
244 “Oh, yes, thank you,” he said.
50
245 “You look a bit pale.” And then, sharp and anxious, “How did you bang your head?”
246 “Oh, just banged it,” he told her.
247 She looked at him closely. He was strained; his eyes were glazed-looking. She was
248 worried. And then she said to herself, Oh, don’t fuss! Nothing can happen. He can swim
249 like a fish.
250 They sat down to lunch together.
251 “Mummy,” he said, “I can stay under water for two minutes – three minutes, at least.” It
252 came bursting out of him.
253 “Can you, darling?” she said. “Well, I shouldn’t overdo it. I don’t think you ought to swim
254 any more today.”
255 She was ready for a battle of wills, but he gave in at once. It was no longer of the least
256 importance to go to the bay.
51
MRS VADNIE MARLENE SEVLON

JACKIE KAY (B. 1961)
1 On the way home from a long and final day in Sunnyside Home for the Elderly, Mrs Vadnie
2 Marlene Sevlon was relieved to notice a little breeze. Much better than yesterday when the
3 weather was close, so close she felt the low pressure in the air. As long as there is a little
4 breeze, a person can cope with most things - even if she is in the wrong place. It’s the
5 days when there is no breeze at all when Vadnie is convinced she made a mistake. But it
6 wasn’t like there ever seemed much choice. It wasn’t like she could just take her pick. Only
7 people with money have choice; only rich people can take their pick; everyone else must
8 stumble from pillar to post, from hope to promise, and believe in luck and God, or maybe
9 just God, or maybe just luck, depending on the day and the breeze. Vadnie Marlene
10 Sevlon often said her own name, her whole name, to herself when she was alone.
11 Perhaps because it reminded her of back home, her mother shouting Vadnie Marlene
12 Sevlon, come and get your dinner, or maybe because it made her feel less lonely or
13 maybe even just to remind herself of who she was. Time for you to get up, Vadnie Marlene
14 Sevlon, she would say in the morning; bed for you now, Vadnie Marlene Sevlon, she would
15 say at night. And in between the morning and the night sometimes not a single living soul
16 said her name out loud.
17 Vadnie walked past the College for Boys, past the Brondesbury Park Rail Station and the
18 Islamia Primary School, past Willesden Lane Cemetery where sometimes if she had a little
19 time on her hands she would sit on a bench and contemplate the differences between the
20 living and the dead. She liked to read the gravestones and imagine the lives of the
21 fascinating names she read, and work out the ages, practising her mental arithmetic. Some
22 people find graveyards gloomy, but not Vadnie Marlene; she felt as if she was being kept
23 company by the peaceful dead. There was an atmosphere in Willesden Lane Cemetery
24 that you never found in Kilburn High Street or at work or even at home. Intense
25 contemplation! Vadnie sometimes envisaged her own headstone, though she knew
26 nobody in her family could afford one, and anyway they wouldn’t want her buried in
27 England, and anyway she was too young to be thinking such thoughts. (She was fifty-two,
28 hardly a spring chicken, but then not likely to be at death’s door any time soon, please
29 God. Her father was dead long time back now, but her mother was still around and living in
30 Darling Spring, Jamaica, with three of her sisters who all wanted Vadnie to come back
31 home. ‘South of here is Grateful Hill, South West, Lucky Valley, further south then,
32 Prospect,’ her mother used to say often, ‘I’m hoping our prospects improve soon.’) But
33 even so her mind would wander off, as it often did, to imagining her own death, and she’d
34 envisage her whole name and her dates and the inscription beloved daughter of Gladstone
35 and Hyacinth Sevlon, Rest in Peace, Darling. It wasn’t perhaps what people usually did in
36 their lunch hours, dream up their own headstones, but Vadnie found it quite entertaining
37 and it passed away the time. Should it say passed away or should it say fell asleep, what
38 should the exact wording be? She continued down Salusbury Road, stopped to buy a new
39 plug in the DIY shop and a new packet of fuses, past the artisan bakery, where the bread
40 and cakes looked lovely, like little works of art, the beauty of those breads, some so
41 threaded they looked like fancy hair-dos, or wiring, but cost a small fortune, so she only
42 ever looked in the window; past a fancy florist where they even had birds of paradise,
52
43 which looked out of place, but cost a small fortune so she only ever went in to the florist’s
44 to take a deep sniff; past Queen’s Park Underground Station and right into Kilburn Lane,
45 down Fifth Avenue, which always made Vadnie think of New York, where she might have
46 gone for her contemplation, Central Park, watching people skateboard, rollerblade, jog,
47 meditate, dance and all the things she heard say people do in Central Park from her
48 cousin Eldece who went over there fifteen years ago and sometimes wrote a letter with all
49 her news. Eldece was maybe the lucky one. But the strange thing about life was that you
50 could only live the one of them; you couldn’t live the other one, the one where you went to
51 New York instead of London, and then compare and contrast. You couldn’t compare the
52 life you had with the life you might have had though sometimes Vadnie Marlene Sevlon
53 would have liked to be able to shout Stop and after the requisite minutes Start, and then
54 catch the other life, live it for a bit, and if it was not as agreeable as the one in her
55 imagination, well then she’d be able to return to the old life and appreciate it better by
56 simply shouting Stop and Start again. As Vadnie turned into her own street, Oliphant
57 Street, she wondered if it was luck or fate or God that made the decisions in your life. Or
58 was it just a moment plucked from the ordinary that made you stick with mistakes already
59 made? For instance, once, years ago, on the telephone, a man who was going to be
60 coming to fix her electric sockets said, ‘Is you Miss or Mrs?’ And Vadnie answered Mrs.
61 That was twenty years ago, when she was thirty, and was still thinking that the right man
62 might come along. He never did but Vadnie kept the Mrs anyway. She put Mrs on her bank
63 cards and Mrs on anything she had to sign. Mrs on her direct debits and Mrs on her
64 television licence, Mrs on her water bill and Mrs on her gas and electric. It was Mrs Vadnie
65 Sevlon, and she felt she got more respect that way. Strange thing was, after a number of
66 years, she believed it herself. She was no longer surprised at the amount of post that
67 arrived with her whole name on it. The Mrs by then didn’t give her the thrill of the early
68 days; she took it quite for granted. So might she look back on the electric man and call that
69 fate or luck or God? Did God want her to call herself Mrs to keep herself safe from men of
70 disrepute? When people asked her what her husband did, she would tell them he was an
71 electrician. She would picture him vividly, combining features of the electrician with the
72 features of a man she once sat next to on a bus to the Lake District. She made a kind of
73 composite husband out of the two, took the hair from one and gave it to the other so he
74 wasn’t balding, just receding, took two inches of height from one and gave it to her
75 husband, made his skin a rich dark brown. Her husband had lovely neat nails which you
76 might not expect for an electrician. ‘Oh, he works long hours; he’s an electrician you see.
77 You have to be very well qualified to be an electrician, you know. You have to know your
78 wires, your blue and brown and black and yellow. And you need to know that blue used to
79 be neutral, but black also used to be neutral,’ Vadnie would say, whenever she got a
80 chance, to whoever would listen, even strangers, knowledgeably quoting the most recent
81 electrician who stood explaining his job to her for some time on the last visit to Oliphant
82 Street. Vadnie didn’t quite know what it was that made boiler men and electricity men and
83 plumbing men always like to explain to her the exact ins and outs of what they were doing
84 in a supremely technical way, but when an electrician came around, Vadnie listened
85 intently. (In fact, she had found herself sometimes putting in extra plugs she didn’t exactly
86 need and could ill afford, just to be sure she was up to date.) She had to have her husband
87 keep up with the changing times and colour codes, she couldn’t have him caught short, her
88 husband, dear Preston, Preston Sherwin Audley Sevlon; she felt such a tenderness for
89 him. Preston: a quiet man, a man of few words, but kind deeds, whose parents were also
90 from Jamaica but had come to England once and worked in Preston before returning to
53
91 Montego Bay - well this was the story Vadnie first of all made up and later believed. When
92 she got home from work, Preston would say, ‘Put your feet up, Mrs Sevlon, and I’ll make
93 you a cup of tea.’ He never raised his voice or his hand to her. He was the kind of man that
94 is a father to daughters rather than sons, a gentle kind man, intense and protective. And of
95 course their daughters, Ladyblossom, Marsha and Grace, were all daddy’s girls. If you’d
96 had a son, Preston would say, he would have been a mummy’s boy. What would we have
97 called a son? she heard herself asking Preston. A name after an English place, he’d say,
98 like me, chuckling, enjoying himself, Carlisle or Kendal or Lancaster. I couldn’t call a little
99 boy Lancaster, she’d find herself saying out loud in the kitchen – then startle herself with his
100 absence. Was it luck that got her the job as a care home orderly at Sunnyside Home for
101 the Elderly? Or was she being deliberately led down the wrong path? It was only two days
102 a week but it seemed like a beginning in the beginning. And she well remembered the first
103 day all that time ago, why, it must be fifteen years at least, walking down the driveway and
104 glimpsing the garden with the bench, the table with the green umbrella, thinking the place
105 was really something quite, quite special. The grounds were grand and made her feel she
106 was definitely in England. They were a people that knew how to make a garden, the
107 English! And during the first few weeks Vadnie would eat her Coronation chicken sandwich
108 in the palatial garden with the blossom on the trees and the green grass under her feet and
109 feel almost content; at least, the worry about money and the future would lift and she
110 would be in the unusual position of just being able to sit and eat her sandwich and watch
111 the birds flit about in the trees. She always kept her eye out for a Barbuda warbler even
112 though she didn’t think they ever came to this country. But if birds of paradise could be in
113 the florist then Barbuda warblers could be in the garden. It would have lifted her heart to
114 see a bird from back home in the garden of Sunnyside Home for the Elderly. She didn’t
115 much like the two women who ran Sunnyside, and they didn’t get any better over time. For
116 a start they had no sense of humour, which was quite a problem. Vadnie had never
117 realised how big a problem this could be until she first ran into the two sad Sunnyside
118 women. All the good conversation has to have a little light-ness! Well, the first thing Vadnie
119 said to the matron was, ‘The garden is quite something. What lovely borders! You do all
120 the weeding yourself?’ (Of course she was joking, and was going to go on to mention the
121 beautiful garden design, but the matron - she didn’t get it.) She replied seriously, snooty-
122 like, ‘No, no. We have a gardener.’ Just like that. And Vadnie nodded, undaunted, and said,
123 ‘Handsome man is he, this gardener? About my age do you think’ Matron stared and
124 said, ‘He’s Irish,’ as if that might be something that would put Vadnie off. ‘And he’s in his
125 seventies.’ That would be the clincher, then. So after that Vadnie never joked with Matron,
126 which meant there was no basis for conversation; there was only a way of receiving
127 instructions. And the head nurse was even worse. She had something nasty about her,
128 that woman, and no mistake. She was always picking fault. She’d say to Vadnie, ‘Did you
129 say you had washed the kitchen floor?’ when the floor was gleaming, gleaming, so shiny
130 Vadnie could see her face in it, which was the test her mother had given her when she was
131 a little girl. She would say, Have you polished so bright you can see your reflection?
132 Whenever Vadnie did see her reflection in some domestic surface, it never looked like her,
133 and she’d have to pause for a minute and say, Is that me, is that really me? Sometimes
134 she loomed in things. She appeared all out of proportion.
135 Still it is not an absolute necessity to get on with the people you work for, especially not
136 when they are your boss. When you do get on with them, they can let you down even
137 more. Vadnie remembered the woman she cleaned for in St Elizabeth in Jamaica saying,
138 ‘Very sorry, Vads, but you’re no longer needed. You did such an excellent job and have
54
139 been like family to us, but ... ‘ And what was the real reason? The details of the thing had
140 gone, but the hurt was still there. That was the interesting thing about hurt. All the
141 vocabulary can go, all the words said and heard, and yet the pain persists in your heart,
142 slow and heavy. The worst hurts were wordless, or at least they became wordless. A lot of
143 the old people in Sunnyside Home for the Elderly didn’t speak, or if they did speak they
144 didn’t make that much sense. They seemed in their own world, a lost world, a vanquished
145 world. They didn’t have many places like this back home. The family took the elderly in and
146 that was that. Imagine the planning: building these big houses to incarcerate all the old
147 mummies and daddies, imagine the spreadsheets and architectural blueprints, to hide
148 away all the old grandparents. Imagine inventing these places for them. Even if Sunnyside
149 did have a nice garden, it was still a kind of hell. All of the grandmas and grandpas lined up
150 to look out of the window! They were never allowed out to take a little stroll. Once Vadnie
151 asked Matron if she could take a stroll with one of the women, Margaret, and Matron said,
152 We are not insured to allow them to walk about in the garden. Would you pay if she fell
153 over? Would you pay all the damages? Something like that. Vadnie said, Yes, it’ll be fine,
154 she won’t fall over, she is quite steady on her feet. But Matron shook her head and said,
155 So you think I’m paying you to go strolling around the garden? You must think I was born
156 yesterday. Vadnie stopped to consider this seriously for a moment, the idea that the
157 matron could be born yesterday and then grow in such a short space of time into such a
158 nasty old woman. Not possible! Nastiness needs time to build up.
159 Today the morning had started with Vadnie saying to herself, Time to get up, Vadnie
160 Marlene Sevlon. Preston was up and out and had not brought her the usual cup of hot tea.
161 The girls had already grown up and left home. Grace was the first in the family at
162 university. Sometimes, she’d find herself doing a big shop and telling people the family was
163 coming home, that’s why her trolley was suddenly loaded. Today nobody was there and
164 nobody was coming home and she felt suddenly tired. Odd times at the Sunnyside Home
165 for the Elderly, she’d found herself having to take a ten-pound note or two to help her get
166 by because they didn’t pay her enough and because the old people were not going
167 anywhere anyway and none of them would miss it and because she was the only one in
168 the place who was kind so deserved it and because she tried to do good things with it,
169 often buying them little treats, and sometimes even buying them clothes. But today the day
170 didn’t feel right from the word go. When she arrived in Sunnyside, Margaret, her favourite
171 of the old people and the most with-it and the one who took the most interest in Preston
172 and the girls, implored her to buy her a cherry red cardigan. She was in some distress.
173 ‘Would you manage to buy me a red cardigan,’ she asked, her voice shrill, anxious. ‘I’ll try
174 my best,’ Vadnie found herself saying. ‘Tell me your size.’ And Margaret looked happy,
175 happy as she’d ever seen her. She was sure that the matron and the other one didn’t treat
176 them well; Vadnie thought they might even be abusive but she never saw anything with her
177 own eyes. Recently, though, she had made heavy hints about the authorities, and she had
178 sat at home glued to a documentary about a whistleblower. (She had never heard the
179 term before.) ‘I might blow the whistle,’ Vadnie had thought to herself. ‘Tell me,’ Vadnie
180 said to Margaret quietly, ‘won’t you tell me if they ever lay a finger on you?’ Maybe one of
181 them overheard; Vadnie didn’t know how it had all started. But at the end of the day that
182 had started strangely, Vadnie found herself dismissed. After twenty years: dismissed. And
183 the thing that distressed her most was that she wouldn’t be able to return with Margaret’s
184 cherry red cardigan. She wouldn’t be able to tell Margaret how Preston was, how
185 Ladyblossom, Grace and Marsha were doing. They might as well all be dead.
55
186 On the way home Vadnie felt the breeze on her face and the strange feeling turning into
187 Oliphant Street that violence was in the air. She walked slowly, heavily. She had a tight
188 feeling across her chest. She was sweating. She stopped in the DIY shop and bought a
189 new plug and a new packet of fuses. ‘My husband used to be an electrician,’ she told the
190 woman, ‘yet could I get him to fix a plug?’ The woman in the shop laughed. ‘Mine is a
191 carpenter - ditto!’ She paused. ‘You said “used to’’, ‘the woman said. Vadnie nodded
192 slowly, ‘Yes, he passed away a few weeks ago. He’s buried up the road there in Willesden
193 Cemetery.’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ the woman said. Mrs Vadnie Marlene Sevlon dabbed at the
194 sudden tears falling down her face. ‘He was a good man, a terribly good man,’ she said.
56
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
From Complete Collected Stories by V. S. Pritchett. Copyright © 1990 by V. S. Pritchett.
Used by permission of Random House, Inc.
The Rain Horse by Ted Hughes, published Faber and Faber Ltd.
Sandpiper by Ahdaf Soueif. Copyright © Ahdaf Soueif 1994, used by permission of

The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.
The Destructors by Graham Greene from Complete Short Stories, published Penguin Classics.
Jhumpa Lahiri, A Real Durwan, 2000, reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers Ltd.
Doris Lessing, Through the Tunnel © 2007, reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers Ltd.
Mrs Vadnie Marlene Sevron from REALITY, REALITY by Jackie Kay. Copyright © Jackie Kay 2012,
used by permission of The Wyle Agency (UK) Limited.
57
58
59
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SHORT STORIES ANTHOLOGY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COPYRIGHT-HOLDERS AND PUBLISHERS

TED HUGHES THE RAIN HORSE 11

AHDAF SOUEIF SANDPIPER 17

GRAHAM GREENE THE DESTRUCTORS 24

JHUMPA LAHIRI A REAL DURWAN 37

DORIS LESSING THROUGH THE TUNNEL 45

JACKIE KAY MRS VADNIE MARLENE SEVLON 52

THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT

59 “You’ve had your tea? Go on. Why not have another?”

60 “No really, thanks,” said the son. “You drink it.”

72 “Bad luck?” said the old man sternly.

79 “It must have been worrying,” the son said.

82 “Well, you always were an optimist,” smiled his son.

157 The old man pulled a duster out of a drawer.

168 “Excuse me,” he said again, looking up at the ceiling.

173 “I don’t like them,” the old man said.

181 “Lean on me.”

185 “You all right?” his son asked.

213 The son was appalled.

222 “Money,” the father said, “isn’t necessary at all.”

THE RAIN HORSE

162 thing loose.

140 I look, and watch, and wait for Lucy.

186 ‘Where?’ I asked, as we drove through Gabalaya Street.

187 ‘In heaven.’

188 ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘And what’s it like?’

209 ‘You only think you see it,’ he said.

246 amounted to.

30 “The man who built St. Paul’s.”

31 “Who cares?” Blackie said. “It’s only Old Misery’s.”

71 “No. I rang the bell.”

72 “And what did you say?”

73 “I said I wanted to see his house.”

74 “What did he do?”

75 “He showed it me.”

78 “What did you do it for then?”

82 “What do you mean, a beautiful house?” Blackie asked with scorn.

84 “What do you mean, nothing holds it up. Does it float?”

85 “It’s to do with opposite forces, Old Misery said.”

88 “Like in the Blue Boar?”

89 “Two hundred years old.”

90 “Is Old Misery two hundred years old?”

104 “What things?”

107 “And pinch things?” somebody asked.

111 “What is it?”

120 “We’d go to jug,” Blackie said.

125 “There are twelve of us,” T said. “We’d organize.”

126 “None of us know how...”

128 “Today,” Mike said tactlessly, “we’re pinching free rides...”

130 “The gang’s got to vote.”

131 “Put it up then.”

134 “Here, here,” said a fat boy called Joe.

135 “Who’s in favour?”

136 T said, “It’s carried.”

137 “How do we start?” Summers asked.

156 “I can,” Mike said.

157 “Not a child’s saw,” T said. “A real saw.”

160 “What’s a hacksaw?” someone asked.

161 “You can get ’em at Woolworth’s,” Summers said.

167 “I’ve got to go to church,” Mike said.