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

loath to admit – for him to do what I ill-temperedly certainly would, but he at last merely turns his head to me and says with a directness that disarms, ‘I’m sorry about your mate. I was wrong.’
    Again I am nonplussed by a yielding I did not expect, and I mumble an awkward something and turn my back on him, seeking refuge in a withdrawal of sorts. But there is still a question that has to be asked and answered and I ask it, feeling more than a little guilty and defensively annoyed: ‘What did I say in my sleep?’
    ‘Enough,’ he says, the one word neither taunting nor amused, and I wait for more, but nothing comes.
    ‘Well, what was it?’ I prod, getting edgy now at having to so beg.
    For a moment I think he has not heard me, then he thrashes round to face my back and says, his voice low, ‘Not saying.’
    ‘But why?’ I burst out. ‘Don’t I have a right to my own words?’
    ‘Not saying,’ he repeats. Then adds, ‘Not saying because what you said is why I am still lying here after you bad-mouthed me like you did; so now if I tell you what it is, I’ll be telling you more about myself than I’d like.’
    His tone leaves me in no doubt that, this time, he will not yield, and I am perversely pleased by that and, indeed, suddenly and startlingly aware that if he had again given way, he would now have confronted more than my merely physical spine. However, I cannot resist still saying, ‘You are weird,’ but the words hold no barb and, with the intuitiveness of the dead gypsy in my genes, I sense that he knows that and is drawn.
    ‘No weirder than you,’ he retorts, then, switching tracks, adds, ‘They call me Danny. What do they grab you by?’ and I tell him and he says ‘Tom’ as though savouring it, then asks where I’m from, and I tell him, and he says he’s from a village that’s a nothing and he and his wife and his mum live in an on-its-last-legs cottage that was all that his dad left when he died.
    ‘How long you been in this dump?’ I tell him six months and forestall him by saying that he must be one of the rookie prisoners they sent up from down south last week.
    He looks at me like I’m clairvoyant and, for the first time, I laugh. ‘It’s easy. Your hair needs trimming but it’s still not a nest and your beard’s only begun.’
    ‘Now wait a minute! You bulling me now? OK, so your mate looks like he’s a guru come down from his squat, but you look like my kind. That’s why I came to lie by you. The rest of them here look like all the granddads I ever seen. Real creepy, them.’
    ‘Watch it! You will be just as creepy soon. Anyway, Douglas – that’s my mate – wants to grow a beard.’ Abruptly – and with an acuteness that disturbs – I am asking myself why? He one of the funnies? The words resonate in me as though I am hearing them for the first time. Does he think a beard will make him look more of a man? Determinedly I wrestle the thought away. ‘But I feel like you. I don’t want to look like a granddad before my time.’
    ‘You got a razor then?’
    ‘Hell, no. This is just like any fucking jail. You die how, when, they want you to. Not by you cutting your – or someone else’s – throat. So once a week I go to the shed alongside the gate where you come in and get the worst of it taken off. The theatre crowd hang out there. Stage musicals, plays. The Ites smaak musicals and plays. Opening nights, all the front seats must be reserved for the commandant and the other Ite brass. They get almost human then. Shout, clap, carry on like little kids. So when the producer asks for the cutthroat and shears, the commandant lets him have them because he understands all the actors on the stage can’t have beards or heads that look like that old guy’s that slept a hundred years,’ and I’m about to add – big joke, this! – what about the guys that must shave their legs and arms and truss up their balls so’s they can play the parts of the women we do not