Some Here Among Us Read Online Free PDF Page B

could have said exactly why. He was quite well-off; his father was a wealthy dentist. Chadwick had been sent out to New Zealand when his parents decided that the US was a dangerous country for a young black man, even one whose father was a wealthy orthodontist, to grow up in. What safer place than distant New Zealand? He had been at school in Pasadena. Pasadena! At dusk in Pasadena, according to Chadwick, you could see not one, or two, but three great rivers of headlights and tail lights, the tail lights all glowing red, stretching away in different directions into the LA penumbrae. It sounded like the future, it was the future – rivers of red tail lights flowing away to the horizon. Chadwick had been at school in Pasadena during the Cuban crisis.
    ‘We really thought we were going to die,’ he told Race. ‘We were at school and the air-raid sirens went off. It was only a drill, but what did we know? Nuclear war was looming and then the sirens start. We’re under our desks! Then someone saw these missile silos opening on the hill-tops. We didn’t even know they were there! And everyone started running around screaming, “ It’s really happening! ”’
    Race liked this story. He saw the kids under the desks, and he thought of the desks in the American school system – thin, plywood veneer, maybe kidney-shaped? And he liked the way that Chadwick did the kids running round screaming: he put both of his hands in front of him and waved them like Mickey Mouse, his eyes and mouth opened wide.
    ‘And all for what?’ said Chadwick. ‘Cuba, obviously, but what was the real reason? Economic theory. Who should own the means of production? Nuclear Armageddon – maybe the end of the world – over that. Thanks, guys.’
    Chadwick looked into Race’s eyes with his clear grey gaze.
    ‘We were fourteen then,’ he said, ‘and now we’re twenty, and we’re not going to let ’em do it again. Fuck them. That’s what’s happening now. All the rest of it – the long hair and sex and drugs and all – they’re just bonus extras, you know, thrown in for fun.’
    They were coming through the manuka wood into the Dell where, in summer, Shakespeare was put on – Midsummer Night’s Dream, Two Gentlemen of Verona – but now the Dell was cold and dark. Chadwick and Race followed the others down the slope and then along the gravelled path at the side of the rose gardens. The rose gardens were also cold and in shadow, but the fountain was playing and the roses were in bloom. There were some people walking around, bending here and there to sniff at a flower, their hands behind their backs.
    ‘That’s what they do,’ said Race. ‘They put their hands behind their backs to show they’re not going to steal the roses. But all it shows is that they’ve thought of stealing them. It shows they have mens rea , a guilty mind.’
    He had picked up this phrase from Tolerton and Rod Orr who were law students.
    ‘No. You haven’t grasped it at all,’ said Chadwick, who was also a law student and who disapproved of Race’s use of legal terminology. Race was studying biology. ‘In any case, it’s nothing to do with your state of mind,’ Chadwick said. ‘When you’re bending over you keep your balance better with your hands behind your back.’
    He stopped and bowed deeply over a rose, his hands behind his back like a royal male, to prove the point. Then they walked on. Ahead of them on the path was a long black car with government plates. Race glanced in as he went past. Three Asian men in suits were in the back. All three were gazing impassively at the rose gardens through the closed window. Race guessed they were official visitors who had been sent on a tour of the city’s sights. The chauffeur, a little turkey-cock of a man, ex-army by the look of him, wearing a red tie and black blazer, stared straight ahead with an angry expression. Race and Chadwick walked past, and then they paused at the end of the drive where a set of