The Pickup

Chapter 5

There follows a space of time that she, and perhaps he, are going to return to in examination — now remembering this aspect of it, then that, for the past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight — all their lives.

What gave it its particular character? He put on the mechanic’s overalls and went to the garage every day. She went much later to the tenth-floor suite of offices and occupied her custom-designed chair (gift of one of the clients) at a modular desk with a splendid view of the city given a foreground of computer, communication console, and subtropical pot plants supplied monthly on contract, or she met the current arrival of a pop group at the airport. They left their bed and parted knowing that at the end of each working day they would be back in it again, unknown to and unreachable by anything and anyone who claimed him. Apart during those days, at weekends they often drove into ‘the veld’, as he became accustomed to hear her calling the countryside, whether it was grassland or mountains. There they walked, lay watching the clouds, the swoop of birds, were amused, as lovers are, by the difference in their exchanged perceptions of what each took for granted. They were never far enough away not to have the surf of some highway they’d turned from, sounding under the sough of air and the passing calls of the birds that ignored them in contrast with the inescapable inclusion calling upon them, at The Table in her haunt, the EL-AY Café. She laid a slack hand on his smooth throat and marvelled, to him: To hear silence. We never do.

To him this was not silence, this lullaby of distant traffic she took for it! Silence is desolation; the desert.

Round the village?

Everywhere. As soon as you walk some steps, some few yards from your house.

Your house?

Of course.

And you used to go and play there, with your friends?

No, no — not out there, never. In the street.

What’d you play — football? What were the games, oh, when you weren’t learning about the guts of cars!

Then they can laugh at the impostor mechanic, and she smooths the straight thickness of his moustache shining in the sun, and kisses follow. She brings along books as well as food to these hours when they double the disappearance of his identity, they disappear together, this time, in the veld, but the writers she favours are generally not those known to him from his courses in English at that university (in the desert? in a postcard oasis? — there are no photographs). He is a reader of newspapers; he buys, from the last street vendor as they leave the city, all the weekend papers, and they billow and crackle about them, sails in the wind, as they lie on an old groundsheet she keeps in the car. He reads the newspapers with an intense concentration and a discipline of disbelief as first principle in testing the facts. Sometimes he asks her for the meaning of an unfamiliar term or word. She surreptitiously watches him while he is unaware of her — it’s one of the tranquil pastimes of loving: he reads as if his life depends on what is there. The book she has been reading lies on her breasts, open face-down at a page where she has come upon a sentence, a statement, that seems to have been written for her long before she came into existence and came to this space in the time of her life. She has read it over again and again, so that it is written, read, on the air around her, around him and her, on the sky looking down upon them. ‘I decided to postpone our future as long as possible, leaving everything in its present state.’

Sometimes there is something quite different, in the veld. An expedition, no less, of the EL-AY Table. Once a camping weekend, all the friends and the usual changing roster of hangers-on. She enjoyed herself immensely, that was obvious, everybody drank a lot of wine and beer and exchanged stories of past weekends together that sent the battle for attention by excited voices, laughter, mock jeers resounding across the veld, a pack in full cry. He worked with practical matters, breaking wood and tending the fire, bringing water from the river; he had not been one of the company on those previous adventures, sleeping out on the beach in KwaZulu, being ordered off a bushveld farm by a sjambok-wielding farmer, and had no anecdotes to add to these. He was listening, or was not listening at all; absent in his own thoughts. Now and then in a moment to catch breath, they noticed, and felt him, they thought, studying them. Then she went over, torn between the familiar warmth of her place among the friends and the presence of her other, private intimacy, to draw him into that warmth by making some sort of show of the love affair, hanging on him, whispering in and nibbling at his ear. He restrained her gently, as if she were an over-affectionate pet. The friends were accustomed to sex-play among them on these weekend transportations from The Table at the EL-AY, no-one would have thought anything of it; it was his — his unfamiliar response that disquieted. There was talk: That relationship’s getting heavy, our girl’s really gone on that oriental prince of hers. Where was it she picked him up, again?