Life and Times of Michael K Read Online Free PDF Page A

And listen to me: you want to stop on the expressway, you pull fifty metres off the roadside. That’s the regulation: fifty metres either side. Anything nearer, you can get shot, no warning, no questions asked. Understand?’
    K nodded. The motorcyclists remounted and roared off after the convoy. K could not meet his mother’s eye. ‘We should have picked a quieter road,’ he said.
    He could have turned back at once; but at the risk of a second humiliation he helped his mother back into the barrow and pushed her as far as the old hangars, where, indeed, there was a jeep parked by the roadside and three soldiers brewing tea over a campstove. His pleas were in vain. ‘Have you got a permit, yes or no?’ demanded the corporal in command. ‘I don’t care who you are, who your mother is, if you haven’t got a permit you can’t leave the area, finished.’ K turned to his mother. From under the black canopy she gazed out expressionlessly at the young soldier. The soldier threw up his hands. ‘Don’t give me a hard time!’ he shouted. ‘Just get the permit, then I’ll let you through!’ He watched while K hoisted the shafts and wheeled the cart through an arc. One of the wheels had begun to wobble.
    Night had already fallen when they passed the traffic lights marking the start of Beach Road. The hulks that had blocked the road during the siege of the apartment blocks had been pushed on to the lawns. The key was still in the door under the stairway. The room was as they had left it, neatly swept for the next occupant. Anna K laid herself down in her coat and slippers on the bare mattress; Michael brought in their belongings. A shower of rain had soaked the cushions. ‘We’ll try again in a day or two, Ma,’ he whispered. She shook her head. ‘Ma, the permit isn’t going to come!’ he said. ‘We’ll try again, but next time we’ll go by the back roads. They can’t block every road out.’ He sat down beside her on the mattress and remained there, his hand on her arm, till she fell asleep; then he went upstairs to sleep on the Buhrmanns’ floor.
    Two days later they set off again, leaving Sea Point a full hour before dawn. The zest of the first venture was gone. K knew now that they might have to spend many nights on the road. Furthermore, his mother had lost all appetite for travel to far places. She complained of pains in her chest and sat stiff and sullen in the box under the plastic apron K pinned across her to keep out the worst of the rain. At a steady trot, with the tyres hissing on the wet tarmac, he followed a new route through the centre of the city, along Sir Lowry Road and the suburban Main Road, over the Mowbray railway bridge, and past the one-time Children’s Hospital on to the old Klipfontein Road. Here, with onlya trampled fence between them and the cardboard-and-iron shanties clustered on the fairways of the golf course, they made their first stop. After they had eaten, K stood at the roadside with his mother clasped to his side, trying to flag down passing vehicles. There was little traffic. Three light trucks sped past nose to tail, wire mesh over their lights and windows. Later came a neat horsecart, the bay horses wearing clusters of bells on their harness, a troop of children in the back jeering and making signs at the pair of them. Then after a long empty interval a lorry stopped, the driver offering them a lift as far as the cement works, even helping K to lift the barrow aboard. Sitting safe and dry in the cab, counting off the kilometres out of the corner of an eye, K nudged his mother and met her prim answering smile.
    That was the end of good luck for the day. For an hour they waited outside the cement works; but though there was a steady stream of pedestrians and cyclists, the only vehicles to pass were sewage department trucks. The sun was declining, the wind beginning to bite, when K hauled his cart on to the road and set off again. Perhaps, he thought, it was better when one