July's People Read Online Free PDF Page B

thick legs slow to a stop—old age. The black woman chews gum, too; her woollen cap is over one ear and she carries on her head a school case amateurishly stencilled in blue, MAUREEN HETHERINGTON . When the black woman makes to move against the traffic light suddenly gone red, the white girl grabs her hand to stop her, and they continue to hold hands, loosely and easily, while waiting for the light to change. Then they caper across together. Lydia scarcely needs to put up the other hand to steady the heavy case; she does so as one jaunties the set of a hat.
    The pair are to be seen going like this, over the intersection at the local shops and the short-cut through the open veld (later there was an industrial area established there, the metal box factory and the potato crisps plant) to the mine married quarters. The shift bosses’ houses are behind the recreation centre where ballet classes are held. Lydia has the back-door key of the house—shift boss My Jim’s wife works in an estate agent’s office and is out all day. Our Jim cleans the shoes and digs in the garden. Lydia has her time to herself, her housework is varied by frequent saunters to the shops where she goes to pick up a loaf, starch for the washing, or simply to meet and talk to other black people on similar errands. Maureen often bumps into her there, on her way home from school. Lydia expects her; maybe she sets out to do some shopping at the time she knows Maureen will be coming off the school bus. Once met, they are in no hurry; it is a hot time of day. Lydia sits on Maureen’s case, continuing the long conversations she was engaged in before the girl was sighted, and Maureen goes into the Greek shop to get a Coke, which they share, mouth-about, and—if she has the cash—some gum or chocolate. Lydia swings the case—it contains a blazer, gym shoes as well as a load of books—onto her head. Sometimes they giggle and are in cahoots —Don’t tell you saw, hey Lydia—(When she has come from school on the back of a boy’s bicycle instead of safely by bus.)—Darling, how can I tell? You are my true friend, isn’t it?—At other times Lydia is in a chastising, critical mood. It is directed first at ‘those people’: anyone with whom she has been wrangling over Fah-Fee bets or the complicated ethics of the ‘club’ to which she belongs, into whose funds each member pays part of her wages every month so that each in turn may have a bonus month when she is the recipient of the sum of all the others’ contributions. —That woman! The sister-in-law of Gladys, she’s holding the money, but I’m telling her, why if you holding you not paying in like everybody? Why you must get your month, but I’m short—Then the mood is turned on the girl, brooding over buried misdemeanours. —Maureen, you know your father he’s getting cross if you going lose that thing again like last time—(The battery lantern, from the camping kit in his garage workshop; she promised it as a spotlight for the school nativity play.)—Maureen, why you take the pillows from your bed, let your friends make them dirty on the grass? Then your mother she’s going shout me when she sees those marks in the washing, the dog with his feet and everything—
    —Lovey, don’t worry. I’ll tell ma the dog came in and jumped on my bed. I’ll put everything back, I promise you—Hanging wheedlingly round her neck, that was lighter than the rest of her (but how was she, naked; she was very prudish about the body and the functions of the body, had never revealed herself in a stage of undress further than her nylon bloomers and bare, lifted underarms, dingy purplish). The neck smelled of clean ironing, fish-frying, and the whiffs that came up from her feet that walked and sweated in plastic-soled slippers. The plump neck had three ‘strings of pearls’, the graceful lines of a young woman; she must have been only in her late twenties or early thirties.
    One afternoon a photographer