Cain’s Book Read Online Free PDF Page B

decayed teeth. Fay is forty-two. She has lived all her life in this city.
    Tom Tear leant forward and threw more wood on the fire. Wood is plentiful. We gather it, when we can be bothered, on the streets.
    “He went on tiptoe about the hall for nine years,” I said. “In tennis shoes and without his teeth. The hall was no-man’s-land.”
    Tom Tear nodded as he leant back again away from the fire. His right cheek, which was all I saw from where I sat, was impassive, long and smooth.
    “If someone came to the front door he came flying back into the kitchen for his teeth. He came in puffing and blowing with his hand on his paunch. He wore a collarless shirt with a stud in
it and he went round in his shirtsleeves and this old grey, sleeveless pullover.” I paused. A white stick darkened and burst into flame. “When he grew older he became less frantic about
the teeth,” I said, smiling. “He slipped them into his mouth furtively in front of the visitor as though he suddenly remembered and didn’t want to give offence. Perhaps he no
longer needed defences.”
    “He’d given up by that time,” Fay said. She looked straight into the fire.
    We were all silent for a moment. I felt I had to go on. I said: “I’ll tell you a story...”
    The others smiled. Fay touched the back of my hand with her fingertips. I remember noticing she had prominent eye-teeth.
    “It’s not really a story,” I said. “It’s something I read somewhere, about a river bushman. This man wanted to track down some bushmen and he went to a place called
Serongo in the swamps. One day he caught sight of a bushman paddling alone in a boat and he asked his head bearer if he would speak to him and get him to lead them to his tribe. The bearer told him
he had known the bushman for thirty years, that he lived alone on a termite mound in the middle of the swamps, and he was deaf and dumb as well.”
    The others looked at me. I moved my clasped hands forward and stared at the thumbs. They were dirty at the knuckles and at the nails.
    We were all silent.
    “It’s necessary to give up first,” I began tentatively, “but it should be a beginning...” I sensed an ambiguity, something not quite authentic, and stopped
speaking.
    “Go on,” Tom said after a moment.
    But the inauthenticity was in the words, clinging to them like barnacles to a ship’s hull, a growing impediment. I shook my head, closed my eyes.
    Again we were all silent. The smoke from the burning wood wound its way towards the chimney, some of it spilling outwards into the room where it clung to the low ceiling.
    “Does anyone want to go out?” Fay said.
    When neither of us answered she made the motion of snuggling inside her warm fur coat. “It’s cold outside, too cold,” she said.
    I was sitting hunched forward with my eyes closed, my chin deep in the high woollen collar. The phrase “
ex nihilo nihil fit
” 3 had
just come to me. It seemed to me that nothing would be beginning, ever.
    Tom Tear, who a moment before had moved to a stool at the side of the fireplace, was leaning backwards against the wall and his soft black eyelashes stirred like a clot of moving insects at his
eyes. His face had the look of smoke and ashes, like a bombed city. It was at rest, outwardly.
    There is a bed in the room, a low double bed on which three dirty grey army blankets are stretched. On the wall between the two square windows – they are uncurtained and at night the four
panes of glass in each are black and glossy – is a faded engraving, unframed. It curls away from the wall at one corner where the Scotch tape has come away. There are two similar engravings
on two other walls, both of them warped and one of them with a tear at the corner. On the fourth wall there is an unskilful pencil sketch of some trees and a watercolour of a woman’s face,
vague and pink, and painted on flimsy paper. This is the work of Tom Tear’s girlfriend. A self-portrait. He talks of her now and again,