The Lying Days Read Online Free PDF

kaffir beer or sour milk which his wife’s sister had recommended. And my mother would say, “You must take care of yourself, you must look after yourself.” He would sigh and his false teeth would move loosely in his wide mouth. “But you know how it is, if you not you own boss.…”
    While my mother was absorbed at the counter in one way or another, I wandered off round the shop. Near the door there was a sloping glass showcase displaying varieties of biscuits and in the middle of the shop was a pillar with mirrors all round. The oilcloth round the base was stained and often splattered because all the dogs that were brought into the store strained at their leads to get to it.Occasionally a stray ranged in from the street, wavering bewilderedly round the shop and then sniffing up to the pillar; then one of the assistants would rush out flapping his apron and shout, “Voetsak!” and the startled creature would flatten itself out into the street. At Christmas and Easter there were big packing cases piled up open on the floor at the far end of the shop, filled with boxes of elaborate crackers, or fancy chocolate eggs packed in silver paper and straw, and there was always the “wedding present” showcase, all the year round, with flowery tea sets and Dickens character jugs and cut-crystal violet vases that were to be seen again behind glass in every sitting-room china cabinet on the Mine. Sometimes there were other children whom I knew, waiting for their mothers. Together we stood with our hands and breath pressed against the glass, playing a game that was a child’s earnest and possessive form of window-shopping. “I dabby the pink tea set and the balloon lady and the two dogs. … And the gold dish” was added in triumph, “And I dabby the gold dish!” “No you can’t—I dabbied it first, I said the gold dish the first time!”
    Then quite suddenly there was the waiting face at the door, the hand stretched impatiently. “Come on. Come, Helen, I’ve got a lot to do, you know.”
    Out in the street little boys as old as I was or younger were selling the local paper, which was published every Saturday morning. They were Afrikaans children mostly, with flat businesslike faces, dull brownish, and cropped brownish hair. Their small dry dirty fingers fumbled the pennies seriously; sometimes you gave them a tickey for the tup-penny paper, and the penny was theirs.
    The barefoot boys were soft-footed everywhere, at the market, the railway station, the street corners, outside the bars. And the yellowish paper with its coarse blotting-paper surface on which the black print blurred slightly was rolled up under elbows; stuck out of pockets and baskets; blew at the foot of babies’ prams. My mother would open it in the car, going home, and pass on the news while my father avoided the zigzag of native errand boys, shouting to one another as they rode, and the children waiting bent forward on tiptoe at the curb, ready to run across like startled rabbits at the wrong moment. The Social and Personal columns had the widest possibleapplication and filled two whole pages. Twice I had been mentioned: Congratulations to Helen Shaw, who has passed her Junior Pianoforte examination with 78 marks, and dainty little Helen, daughter of Mrs. G. P. Shaw, who made a charming Alice in Wonderland, and won the Mayoress’s special prize for the best character costume. Each mine had a column to itself, and often “Atherton Mine Notes,” written in a highly playful style by “our special correspondent”—an unidentified but suspected member of the Mine community—mentioned popular or hard-working Mrs. Shaw, wife of our Assistant Secretary. My father’s name was usually in the tennis fixtures for the week, too. I liked to read down the list of names and say out loud my father’s, just as if it were anyone else’s.
    Our life was