Read Online None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer - Free Book Online Page B

talking to her his anxiety about not having fulfilled that month’s correspondence-course assignments. —He also slept in the living-room, with my other friend. On the floor, but better than nothing, aih? But now the other people are fed up, they say they’re paying for sharing the sitting-room and he’s always there, lying around. And doesn’t pay. So now he stays with me in my room and when I want to study at night he’s talking to me all the time. Man! Till midnight, one o’clock.—
    What could she be expected to say? ‘Tell him to find somewhere else.’ Where else? Weren’t she and the young clerk surrounded by the papers, right there under crumbs from their lunch, of people who had been sent somewhere else, over years, and still had nowhere. She offered what she knew was useless, indignant at exploitation of him by his peers; he could have been her son. —Oupa, you have to be firm. You’re too soft. If he could move in with you, there must be someone else he can goto in the same way. You can’t be expected to live like that. Now you’ve at last got a place—
    The young man swallowed a mouthful and sagged in his chair, blowing out his cheeks. He shook his head, again and again, in denial of the pressure of her attention. —He was with me on the Island.—
    He bit again into his chicken leg and chewed.
    She held her cup in both hands and gulped tea.
    â€”Oh god. Wha’d’we do. What’s his line of work, can’t we find something for him.—
    â€”Worked in a dry cleaner’s, a box factory, I don’t know … he hasn’t got skills.—
    She threw up her hands, then rattled a pen against her cup. —Why do I have to open my big mouth! Why do I have to open my big mouth!—
    Â 
Chapter 4
    Passing.
    Passing down the street. Driven by countless times so that the destination it once meant has been obliterated, layer upon layer, by errands taking that route. At first, for months, halted at a traffic light, staring up at the closed windows of the flat as if into the eyes of someone who gives no sign. Then there was someone else’s washing on a laundry stand on the baleony. A dartboard hung on the wall below where the bathroom fanlight looked out. That was when the letters stopped; or only now did the image seem as signalling that other dispossession; the end of sueh experiences in reality comes much more slowly, the drama of parting, repeated in variation—the end of touching, the end of talking on the telephone, the lengthening gap between letters—it’s over-rehearsed and so the final performance is not recognized.
    An old actress in many positively last appearances.
    Here we are.
    To stop outside the entrance, to hear the name spoken by a stranger to the site, is simply the quiet ripple of a smile: Delville Wood. This is it. Walking along the corridors, same concreteslippery-polished ochre red, a mixture of fascination and a sort of dread. After all, the mail-boxes in the foyer are numbered through six floors, the new kind of tenant could have been leading along another corridor to another number. Even on this floor it surely must be another number. But no, more and more impossible, a coincidence against odds of six floors of flats, One-Twenty-One. The door opening on locked feelings; the coming to life as fascination and dread is the old sexual anticipation of walking along the red-polished corridor to enter One-Twenty-One. Amazing: the sensations are pleasurable, as if the one who had been there at the desk before the window will get up to press himself against her or in the sleepy surprise of an early-morning visit lift back his bedclothes for her to slide in, shivery-naked beside him—as if he were going to be there, was there, in the return of the desire he had created in this living-room where the great eye of the television set sees nothing, in this bedroom where a new, poor young tenant