Bitter Eden: A Novel by Tatamkhulu Afrika Read Free Book Online

I do not doubt, his eyes almost tangibly travelling my body’s length, and I ready myself to slap away any further violations of my private space. But he merely grins, not nastily or mockingly, but good-naturedly, almost approvingly, as though he applauded me for so stoutly carrying on lying in the face of truth.
    ‘OK, have it your own way,’ he says with no suggestion of petulance or spite, and links his hands behind his neck, his elbow nagging my shoulder, and stares up at a small, slow cloud forming and dissolving in an otherwise empty sky, his face distant and inward as though I am no longer there.
    But now I am intrigued by his unexpectedly conceding me victory, even though the issue could not have been a more niggling one. Or am I wrong? Is this, in fact, a gesture of some grace on his part? Is he not so much conceding me victory as respecting my wish – macho adult male that supposedly I am – to not be caught snivelling, even in my sleep, like some little kid who still thinks it’s just for pissing through?
    Covertly, I study him, slewing only my eyes. His hair is black, springy, tightly curled, capping his head like a Renaissance cherub’s or an old Greek bust of a beautiful boy. Blessedly, though, his face is neither beautiful nor a boy’s. The nose is pug, the chin a shade pushy, the lips yielding and mobile, yet wholly male, the brow low – which last, I have long since learned, has nothing to do with intelligence or the lack of it, is merely the reverse of high.
    Lower down is the body of a man who works at it – the breasts at the apex before masculinity becomes womanishness, the nipples pert and clear, the hair in the armpits tufting and lush, as lush a body-hair flowing with the flat belly down into the generous crotch, the tautly powerful thighs.
    It is only then that I articulate it to myself that he has been lying beside me in the nude. Christ! I think, wanker No 2; and think it again with a quite puzzling and personal disappointment when he reaches down and scratches in the thick thatch of the pubic hair. But, seeming to sense what I am thinking, he suddenly turns his head, catching me unawares, and asks, ‘Is this worrying you?’
    I play it dumb. ‘Is what worrying me?’
    ‘Me lying here with nothing on.’
    Now I turn my earlier answer round. ‘What’s it to me what you wear or don’t?’
    His lips twist, but tolerantly as though he has been through it all before. ‘OK. So it worries you,’ and he gropes beneath his buttocks and drags out a quite astonishingly clean pair of underpants and wriggles himself in. Then he turns to me and his eyes seem blacker than when first seen, and brighter, and yet impenetrable as shades. ‘Don’t get any wrong ideas. I’m married though no kid yet. But lots of time still, me reckoning I’m about your age. I was a boxer and I was good and I aim to go on being good when I get home. So I got a nice body – got to have – so I got to keep it nice. Even in a shit dump like this. Run, do P.T., get the sun on me – all of me. Sun’s good for the body. But I don’t walk around like I just been born, and nobody gets to touch me down there,’ and he gestures at his crotch. ‘Only my wife.’
    I say to myself that I don’t believe this; then I explode. ‘Who the hell are you to talk to me about getting wrong ideas? Why don’t you say straight out what you mean? Just now you just about called my mate a queer because he’s funny with his hands, and he a married man like you and with a kid, if you please! Maybe it’s you that’s the queer – you with your body that turns you on like it’s your whore and don’t touch it there or … What makes you think I want to touch it anywhere? Why don’t you haul your fucking body some place else and have it off with it where it’s all yours?’ And nearly I add, ‘And I hate poms,’ but somehow I just don’t get that far.
    There is a long silence then in which I wait – a tension in me that I am