Life and Times of Michael K Read Online Free PDF

did not have to rely on other people. Since the first trip he had moved the axle two inches forward; now, once he got it going, the cart was as light as a feather. At a trot he overtook a man pushing a barrow loaded with brushwood, nodding in greeting as he passed. In her dark little cabin, pinned upright between the high sides, his mother sat with her eyes closed and her head drooping forward.
    A hazy moon was coming through the clouds when, half a mile short of the arterial road, K drew up, helped his mother out, and plunged into the dense Port Jackson scrub to seek out a stopping-place for the night. In this half-world of straggling roots and damp earth and subtle rotten smells no site seemed more sheltered from the elements than any other. He returned to the roadside shivering. ‘It is not very nice,’ he told his mother, ‘but for one night we will have to put up with it.’ He concealed thecart as best he could; supporting her on one arm, carrying the suitcase, he groped his way back into the bush.
    They ate cold food and settled down on a bed of leaves through which the damp palpably seeped into their clothes. At midnight a gentle rain began to fall. They huddled together as close as they could under a scrub-tree while the rain dripped on the blanket they held over their heads. When the blanket became soaked Michael crept on hands and knees back to the cart and fetched the plastic apron. He cradled his mother’s head on his shoulder and heard the laboured shallowness of her breathing. For the first time it occurred to him that the reason she had ceased complaining might be that she was too exhausted, or no longer cared.
    His intention had been to set off so early as to reach the turnoff to Stellenbosch and Paarl before it grew light. But at dawn his mother was still asleep against his side and he was loath to wake her. The air grew warmer, he found it harder not to nod himself. Thus it was mid-morning before he helped her out of the bush back to the road. Here, as they were packing their sodden bedding into the cart, they were accosted by a pair of passers-by who, coming upon a man of meagre build and an old woman in a lonely place, concluded that they might strip them of their possessions with impunity. As a sign of this intention one of the strangers displayed to K (allowing the blade to slip from his sleeve into his palm) a carving knife, while the other laid hands on the suitcase. In the instant of the flash of the blade, K saw before him the prospect of being humiliated again while his mother watched, of trudging back behind the cart to the room in Sea Point, of sitting on the floormat with his hands over his ears enduring day after day the burden of her silence. He reached into the cart and brought out his sole weapon, the fifteen-inch length he had sawn from the axlerod. Brandishing this, lifting his left arm to guard his face, he advanced on the youth with the knife, who circled away from him towards his companion while Anna K filled the air with shrieks. The strangers backed off. Wordlessly, still glaring,still menacing with the bar, K recovered the suitcase and helped his quaking mother into the cart with the robbers hovering not twenty paces away. Then he hauled the cart out backwards on to the road and slowly drew her away from them. For a while they trailed behind, the one with the knife miming obscenities and threats to K’s life with elaborate play of lips and tongue. Then as suddenly as they had appeared they slipped into the bush.
    There were no vehicles on the expressway, but people, many people, walking where none had walked before, in the middle of the highway, in their Sunday best. By the roadside a tangle of weeds grew as high as a man’s chest; the road surface was cracked, and grass sprouted in the cracks. K caught up with three children, sisters dressed in identical pink frocks on their way to church. They peered into Mrs K’s little cabin and chatted to her. For the last stretch, before