Turning Back the Sun(43)
“I thought it was my period pains. It”s nothing much.”
His hands alighted on her waist, then gently, consciously, slid up to caress her under her shoulders. He wanted to kiss the rash, to involve his fate in hers, in spite of everything. But she suddenly lifted her arms in an impertinent dance. She cried almost angrily, “Christ, what”s the fuss about? Nobody”s died of this damn thing, have they?” She peered at it over her shoulder. “And I can cover it up when I dance.” She made light of it with a harsh, impetuous gaiety. “I expect I”m in the majority by now! We”ll all have it in a minute. Why haven”t you got it? It”ll be the town”s trademark! People who don”t have it will be considered ill …”
But later that night Rayner fell victim to the panic of his most ignorant patients, wondering about her over and over, lying awake through silence in a sweat of apprehension.
CHAPTER
18
All day before the natives left, the tension of their concealment and of his betrayal began to lift from him. They were blameless: yet he longed for them to be gone. That evening he found them still crouched in their grass and shadows, but when he sat beside the old man, there seemed nothing left to say. The girl did not look at him. And he perceived her differently now. He was uneasily conscious of her every movement, of her body”s weight under the torn dress, even the shifting of her woman”s hands. Neither he nor the old man spoke of her.
Rayner reminded him of his pill regimen: the bromide tablets were in the girl”s bag. It was futile to pretend that the native might return for treatment. Then at dusk, just before she left for the nightclub, Zo? brought out a coral bracelet which the girl had liked, and fastened it round her wrist. The girl gave a little cry, and flickered her arm back and forth in delight. Almost for the first time, she laughed: a soft, high sound like a bird trilling.
Beyond the gate, as Rayner went out, a man was reading a broadsheet under the street lamp. But by the time Rayner returned from reconnoitering the road, he had gone, and the last light had drained from the sky. It was time to leave.
The car which Rayner shared with Leszek was a sturdy, anonymous saloon, whose improvised blinds shadowed its interior even by day. Seated side by side in the back, and obscured by straw hats, the two natives looked indistinguishable from farmers. But the girl sat bolt upright, paralyzed. She had not travelled in a car since their days on the stock farm, the old man said. As they started, she gazed transfixed. The needles wavered over the dashboard; the headlights threw weak blobs into the dark, and the streets began to unfurl in a placeless network of bungalows. There was no one to be seen; and no car followed. A few lit windows hung up in the dark. Once or twice a guard dog rose snarling from a garden.
Then, as they neared the town center, stucco walls reared up and narrowed into alleys. The car”s engine roared and echoed. Its headlights wobbled over flaking fa?ades violent with graffiti. But the natives could not read. Once they steered down a gauntlet of farmers” wagons where lights and singing rose from makeshift tents and whole families sprawled asleep among their salvaged clothes and trussed poultry. A man lurched drunk from his cart into the headlights, jolting the car to a standstill. His face came up angry against the glass close to the natives, then dropped away uncomprehending.
“I”ve locked the doors,” Rayner said. “They can”t get in.” He could not tell if the natives” immobility and silence were due to fear.
They emerged into open space and skirted the Municipality, where a pasteboard clock face announced the times for public water use, then they crossed at last to the town”s far side. Only two cars passed them, and a military jeep; and once the flashlights of a patrol overlapped the pavement as if to flag them down, but withdrew.
The street lamps petered out. Beyond the roofs a profile of foothills showed blacker than the sky. The old man looked up and murmured. For the first time Rayner felt confident they would leave the town unscathed. They entered a district of warehouses: compounds of barbed wire whose gates were padlocked and barricaded. A posse of vigilantes spilled from a side road and stared at them in confusion. They branched down an inconspicuous street then moved forward without lights. A few minutes later the buildings stopped dead and the tarmac turned to dust. They heard nothing. The place was too obscure to be overseen by an army post. On one side was a gentle swell of hills, on the other lay wilderness, and above them there opened up an uneven furnace of stars, which faintly lit the track ahead.
Rayner switched on the headlights again. “You”ll tell me where to stop?”
“I know the place. Is not far.”
The track could not have been used for months. The wheels purled along an artery of sand and tiny, reddish stones, and rustled over dying thorns. But in the wilderness ahead of them flickered a horizon of broken fires, so distant that their flaring and dimming seemed indistinguishable from stars. How did people live out here? There seemed to be nothing but saltbush and acacia, and sometimes the white trunks of eucalyptus trees glimmered like planted bones.
But Rayner sensed the natives quicken behind him. They were coming home. Their straw hats were gone and their faces, each shadowed in its canopy of coarse hair, had come alive, and were watching. They exchanged short, quick sentences. Whatever happened in the old man”s body, Rayner thought, he would feel better here.
By now they seemed to have been travelling a long time, and the path had almost faded. Sometimes the headlights scattered groups of gazelles, and once they came upon a file of long-horned cattle standing asleep across the track. A kilometer beyond, the blackened shell of a farmhouse appeared. And beyond that, nothing.