The Pickup Read Online Free PDF Page A

common to the friends around their table, and took her contraceptive pill daily with her vitamins. Yet he must be equally experienced; they made love beautifully; she so roused and fulfilled that tears came with all that flooded her and she hoped he did not see them magnifying her open eyes.
    He did not spend the night, that weekend. When he had gone—took her car, she wanted that, he would bring it back in the morning—to fetch your shirt and give me mine, she said, head on one side—when he had gone she wandered about the room in the echoing of their presence together. She had made love so many times before. But she squatted at the bookshelves and found what she vaguely knew she was lookingfor. In an anthology of poetry were the lines that expressed what she was aware of in herself:
Whoever embraces a woman is Adam. The woman is Eve. Everything happens for the first time…. Praise be the love wherein there is no possessor and no possessed, but both surrender…. Everything happens for the first time but in a way that is eternal.
    He drove back to the locked and deserted garage, the room redolent of fuel and grease, in the calm and passing content that follows love-making as it does not, he recognizes, what her friends round The Table call a fuck. That’s the word that comes to him although there’s its equivalent in his own language. He knows that at least he gave complete satisfaction. He resists residue feelings of tenderness towards this girl. That temptation.

Chapter 4
    It was taken for granted that any event or diversion in the lives of the friends would include the presence of the latest live-in preoccupation of one of their number: girl and her guy, gay and his gay—whatever combination currently had something going between them. This Abdu was at gigs with her which began in night clubs, so called, that were rooms in run-down houses of the quarter turned cheerfully into bars with ikon posters BOB MARLEY LIVES HUGH MASEKELA BRENDA FASSIE IS BACK stuck to the walls; some served pap and
morogo
spinach along with beer and whisky (high-priced), as the oysters and champagne of what the friends’ political guru termed unalienated values. All night the friends decamped from one to the other of these modest houses that had once been built by white small-fry speculators aspiring to become affluent, and paid off monthly by working-class whites with genteel aspirations, all fallen into dilapidation as gentility at this humbly snobbish level became part of lost white privilege. There were arguments about which joint was cool, with much lobbying from those friends who had a special connection with or weakness for one rather than another, because the woman who ran it was an incredible personalityfrom West Africa, a singer had a voice that could take the roof off, some guy played the marimba like you never heard, or tonight there might be two bands jamming together. Some of the bars, opened one month and gone dark the next—Paris du Sud, Montmartre Mon Amour, a one-act of enterprise—were run by French-speaking Congolese, Senegalese, Cote d’lvoireans who perhaps also had disappeared under their own names, and were living as he did—but with more style. Maybe with the hand (not in self-exculpatory surrender, her palms thrown up) of those who could pay into the open-hand gesture he had demonstrated. On these intimate pub-crawls drugs were on sale and there could be some rowdy punch-ups that didn’t have anything to do with the friends, they might get a little high on drink or (certainly the poet, tagging along, and the Buddhist convert who had shaved her head) on what—marijuana—went under all the names, local and known to the varied clients, grass, dagga, pot, but they took care of one another and everyone had a good time. Except him, apparently, Julie’s find. Sometimes he would sit in the shadows, drink nothing; at others he would suddenly swallow alcohol with