Free Bitter Eden: A Novel by Tatamkhulu Afrika Page A

confirming without words what he already knows and only then realizing that, for the first time, he has called me by my name.
    ‘You married?’ I shake my head, letting the towel hang. ‘Tough. A man only gets to be his whole self when the old dick finds the right hole.’
    I grab at the irritation that takes me out from under the towel. ‘Come off it! You think I don’t know what it’s for? Maybe I been around more than you before we got in here.’
    ‘Maybe,’ and now he’s doing the shrugging. ‘But you’re not listening. I said the right hole, not any hole. The right hole’s when it’s not just about getting the dick down.’
    He has me by the balls and I know it and reach out to the sparrows, but, like all sparrows, particularly Ite sparrows, they don’t stay in one place for long. Rumour has it that the Ites are so hard up for meat that they hunt even the wild birds and that is why the mornings have no morning sound.
    Then he’s off on another track. Or so it seems. ‘Your mum and dad still around? I told you about mine.’
    I look at him sharply, but nothing stirs. So I give him what I gave Douglas and he does not say anything disbelieving, just stares at me from the black silence of his eyes.
    ‘You left something out,’ he says when I finish, his tone accusatory, and something close to alarm moves in me because I know that I have. Then he adds, his eyes still meeting mine with an almost stubborn openness, ‘I did too.’
    The confessing of a complicity foxes me, and I look it and he says, ‘You hated your dad like I did mine.’
    I try to bluff, rearing back from an again threatening brink. ‘What gives you the right to say that?’
    ‘What you said in your dream.’
    Now I am mortally afraid. ‘ What did I say in that dream? Why must you be so secretive about the fucking thing?’
    ‘I told you why, but maybe I must flash you a card now because it’s getting to be not right for me to know so much about you and you still seeing only my skin.’ For the drawing of a breath, he pauses, then he jumps, ‘In your dream, you were telling your dad to stop doing something to you that mine used to do to me. And you’re hating him for it though he’s dead because he’s mashed you all up inside. OK?’
    An ant is struggling through the grass at my feet and I study it as though it is the most significant sighting of my life, then a wholly alien voice says, ‘OK,’ and I hear a snick as of a bonding leather’s tightening one more notch, and he touches my knee with his hand and I start as at a reaching from another time, another flesh, and am ashamed.
    Glancing aside, I see that his shorts have dried and at once know what I must say. ‘You can take them off if you want.’
    He does not pretend to not understand. ‘You not minding any more?’
    ‘ You said I minded, not me. Maybe it’s my potty training, but it’s just not something I would do. That’s all.’
    ‘But you flash the old gonads every time you get under the tap. What’s the difference then?’
    ‘There is a difference then. It’s like all of us sitting on that long seat over the shit pit. You sit down, maybe whistling a little to show you don’t care, try not to fart too loud, definitely don’t look at what the next guy’s doing, just concentrate on being an animal all on your own.’
    ‘Well, thank you !’ and he grins, but the grin is plainly narked, as plainly pained. ‘So I’m being an animal like I’m in a show just because I want to be brown all the way down?’
    There is a silence in which still unsaid words jostle behind our tongues like surplus passengers trying to cram into an already-crowded train. What do I really want of him? Desperately, racing against the silence, against his quickening drawing away, I fling aside layer after layer of conservatism and pretentiousness, even downright lies, come at last to a kernel of ultimate mass that drags me to it, forces me to face it, though I would not have it so.