Read Online Jump and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer - Free Book Online Page B

who likely had been turned away from other vacancies posted on a board at the supermarket. He was cleanand tidy enough; and he didn’t hang around the kitchen, hoping to be asked to eat with the family, the way one of their own kind would. He didn’t eye Vera.
    Vera was seventeen, and a filing clerk with prospects of advancement; her father had got her started in an important firm through the kindness of one of his gentlemen at the club. A word in the right place; and now it was up to her to become a secretary, maybe one day even a private secretary to someone like the members of the club, and travel to the Continent, America—anywhere.
    â€”You have to dress decently for a firm like that. Let others show their backsides.—
    â€”Dad!—The flat was small, the walls thin—suppose the lodger heard him. Her pupils dilated with a blush, half shyness, half annoyance. On Friday and Saturday nights she wore T-shirts with spangled graffiti across her breasts and went with girl-friends to the discothèque, although she’d had to let the pink side of her hair grow out. On Sundays they sat on wooden benches outside the pub with teasing local boys, drinking beer shandies. Once it was straight beer laced with something and they made her drunk, but her father had been engaged as doorman for a private party and her mother had taken the Upstairs children to the zoo, so nobody heard her vomiting in the bathroom.
    So she thought.
    He
was in the kitchen when she went, wiping the slime from her panting mouth, to drink water. He always addressed her as ‘miss’—Good afternoon, miss.—He was himself filling a glass.
    She stopped where she was; sourness was in her mouth and nose, oozing towards the foreign stranger, she mustn’tgo a step nearer. Shame tingled over nausea and tears. Shame heaved in her stomach, her throat opened, and she just reached the sink in time to disgorge the final remains of a pizza minced by her teeth and digestive juices, floating in beer.—Go away. Go away!—her hand flung in rejection behind her. She opened both taps to blast her shame down the drain.—Get out!—
    He was there beside her, in the disgusting stink of her, and he had wetted a dish-towel and was wiping her face, her dirty mouth, her tears. He was steadying her by the arm and sitting her down at the kitchen table. And she knew that his kind didn’t even drink, he probably never had smelled alcohol before. If it had been one of her own crowd it would have been different.
    She began to cry again. Very quietly, slowly, he put his hand on hers, taking charge of the wrist like a doctor preparing to follow the measure of a heart in a pulse-beat. Slowly—the pace was his—she quietened; she looked down, without moving her head, at the hand. Slowly, she drew her own hand from underneath, in parting.
    As she left the kitchen a few meaningless echoes of what had happened to her went back and forth—are you all right yes I’m all right are you sure yes I’m all right.
    She slept through her parents’ return and next morning said she’d had flu.
    He could no longer be an unnoticed presence in the house, outside her occupation with her work and the friends she made among the other junior employees, and her preoccupation, in her leisure, with the discothèque and cinema where the hand-holding and sex-tussles with local boys took place. He said, Good afternoon, as they saw each other approaching in the passage between the family’s quartersand his room, or couldn’t avoid coinciding at the gate of the tiny area garden where her mother’s geraniums bloomed and the empty milk bottles were set out. He didn’t say ‘miss’; it was as if the omission were assuring, Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone,
although I know all about what you do,
everything, I won’t talk about you among my friends—did he even have any friends? Her mother told