The World Beneath Read Online Free PDF Page A

gently over the swellings, grazes, and bruises on his arms; her fingers hovered near the cuts on his lip and beside his swollen eye.
    “Joshua, run quick now and get a basin with hot water and some towels, and the Dettol.” She did not look at him. “Make sure the Madam doesn’t see you.”

I t was unbearably hot, and the top of the stable door was open to the night. Every now and then, a brown shiny rose beetle flew into the room at great speed, buzzing and banging against the walls and the bare lightbulb that hung from the ceiling before whizzing out again into the dark.
    Across the dirt yard, a light was on in the kitchen; Mrs. Malherbe was making herself a cup of tea. In the corner of the big room, he knew, was a pantry, with shelves packed to the ceiling with biscuits and tea and rusks and flour and sugar and jam and preserves; there were also a fat-bellied fridge and a huge chest freezer, into which the Madam would lean on Saturdays to pull out a lamb roast to defrost for Sunday.
    There was a big fireplace, though there was never a fire in it — fires were reserved for the living room — and there was plenty of room to slide around the polished red-tiled floor in his socks, if the Malherbes were out.
    “Mama, why is Tsumalo in trouble?” Joshua was sitting on the bed with his exercise book balanced on his knee, frowning at the letters he was carefully forming.
    Beauty looked up and stopped the knitting machine for a moment. “It is very difficult to explain,” she said.
    She didn’t want to, he could see.
    “Why did they hurt him like that?” he asked.
    It had upset him to see how Tsumalo had winced silently as his mother had sponged the wounds and dressed them with the scarlet Mercurochrome, which was all he could find in the downstairs bathroom cabinet, and which somehow made them look much worse.
    She had made him take his shirt off, and they had both gasped at what it revealed: a burn mark the size of a hand, blistered and suppurating, on his back.
    His mother’s face had set like stone, and her mouth had gone into the hard straight line that told him she was angry.
    “I will need a proper dressing for this,” she had said quietly.
    The back of Beauty’s hand had once looked like that, when the iron had slipped out of her grasp. She had screamed, and Mrs. Malherbe had run in from the living room and taken her straight to the hospital.
    Joshua ran for the big first-aid kit under the kitchen sink. When he got back, gasping for breath, he could see that his mother had been crying. Her eyes were red. She and Tsumalo were speaking quietly, but stopped when they saw him.
    When she had finished dressing the wound, she stood and gently fed the shirt back over his head as he sat on the camp stool and put his arms through the sleeves as if he were a child. “Now the leg,” she said. Quickly she knelt and cut the ragged trouser leg. Joshua saw that Tsumalo’s leg was swollen and bruised from thigh to calf. Beauty frowned at it and looked up at the man sitting awkwardly on the camp stool. “Do you think it is broken?”
    “I had to jump,” he said. “It was a long way down. I fell when I landed. I can put my weight on it, but it hurts.”
    “Then you cannot go from here. You will have to rest your leg until it is better.”
    She stood slowly and looked down at him.
    “I will send the boy with food and clothing,” she said formally.
    “Thank you, sister.
Hamba kahle
. Go well,” he said.
    Joshua half raised his hand in a salute and turned to follow his mother. He didn’t feel like speaking. He could sense her anger, but he knew it was not for him. He wanted to catch her up and hold her hand, but he somehow knew she would shake it off.
    At suppertime he took Tsumalo a plate of
tamatie-bredie
, lamb stewed with tomatoes, on a big pile of mashed potatoes and spinach; an old walking stick he found under the stairs; and, over his arm, neatly ironed and darned, some trousers and a shirt of Mr.