The Conservationist (32 page)

— Yes, I’m on this road a lot. I could drive it blindfold. —

She’s laughing, giggling - Ooh, don’t do that, I’m scared stiff in cars. Once I grabbed the wheel when I was with someone and I thought we was going to crash — and I can’t even drive. I’m terrible that way; nervous in a car. And specially today, I left home so late for work this morning without even a cup of tea. It’s unfair having to go to work Saturday morning, I wish I could find me a five-day week job. —

— Learn to drive, you won’t be nervous anymore. —

She babbles like a schoolgirl but now answers with the bridling hardness that sort of girl acquires young. — What’s the use without a car. —

It is this tone that makes him glance sideways, at last, and she’s busy in her big shabby white bag stained pinkish with handling, so there’s an opportunity. No no. He would never have known he had seen her before with that old commissionaire. But she couldn’t have invented the tale; how could she have known it. It’s the same little girl. Not little at all, in the sense of the word one means it. She could be twenty-five or late twenties; there’s something about the odours and small sounds that come from the bag — cigarette tobacco from crumpled fags, the strong whiff of cheap cosmetics, a jingling of objects and the fussy clicks of the bracelets colliding on a capable-looking sunburned hand — that suggests perhaps a divorcee looking out for herself.

She catches him, suddenly full into his glance. Really not bad; large brown eyes of the kind that seem to have no whites, all painted up, of course, coated eyelashes and lids, a brown oval face with a mole between upper lip and nose, a high shiny forehead under a rather tortured mop of dull dark hair. A cheap mass-production of the original bare tanned face he likes in a woman.

His attention is back to the road but on the margin of his vision there is her head on one side — Oh man, couldn’t you p’raps just stop a minute by the roadhouse, I really need a snack or something —

God no.

He flicks the indicator to signal the left turn and she’s folded her hands together and looks to the front, immediately satisfied, like a child given a promise of sweets. Turning his head to make sure no bicycle will come up on the left, the glance doesn’t encounter the face but takes in, in passing, a tiny gold cross tipped iop-sided by its position between pushed-up breasts - yes, she’s one of those, dangling them for the boys on Saturday night and down on your knees at the Dutch Reformed Church on Sunday. It really isn’t necessary to get out of the car for her, she won’t expect it: he’s not a fumbler, he produces money as easily as he makes it, and from nowhere has two rand notes in his hand, gesturing them as she opens the door.

— And what for you? —

— No, nothing. —

— You sure? —

— Nothing for me. You go ahead. —

Standing at the window of the roadhouse where the black waiters come to pick up orders they serve to cars she plumps the back of that hair with one hand while she waits, and turns a foot on the heel of one of those clogs, like orthopaedic shoes, the women are wearing these days. He has only just in check a confused impatience ready to rise if she keeps him waiting for her bloody hot dog - why stop, anyway, there must be plenty of buses for these people. He never would have got into this if he had been thinking what he was doing. But she’s been given a packet almost at once, and she’s coming hobbling over the fine grey stones that surface the court of the roadhouse, smiling, though not looking at her benefactor. The smile is for any man who may be watching her progress. He sighs to release the tension of cold impatience it has not proved necessary to summon.

She gets in beside him and arranges herself and slams the door and the car turns to the road and waits to insert itself into the nearest lane of traffic again, here where the mine-dumps and the remains of the old eucalyptus plantations create a sort of industrial rusticity on either side of the road. She has not opened the packet that has brought into the car a whiff of warmth and grease, but leans forward to put it into the open glove shelf and as part of the same movement puts her hand on his thigh as she settles back again. He is waiting for the opportunity to regain the road. The hand is on his leg. His eyes flicker regularly in reaction to the unbroken passing of cars. When he sees his chance and sidles swiftly into the line the woman’s hand is still on him.

— By the old mine-dumps. The trees are nice, there, you can just take that little road down —

He has seen it. No, no. Jacobus can’t be stopped. Shoot him down in his tracks; still he comes on. He has flipped the indicator to signal and she’s still talking — Yes, it’s quite all right, go ahead; even with the rain and that. You can go, you won’t get stuck, it’s all right, all sand, not mud. — As the sound and sensation beneath the car’s wheels change as it leaves the ridge that ends the tarmac and begins to impress the mixture of red earth and yellow sand that is the dirt track, she is making encouraging remarks — Okay. Okay. That’s fine ay, that’s fine. —

The arty blonde who sells stuffed toys from her station-wagon sees it: a black Mercedes with a man and woman turning off the main road just before the freeway and driving down into the old plantation. He saw the elbow crooked from the hip and took, beyond the flashing emblem whose prism is always there the bonnet’s length before his vision, the stare of sunglasses. Oh no. There is no sound but chatter beside him and the soothing swish of tyres over wet sand where they fit smoothly into the worn hollows on either side of a spine of grass. The eucalyptus are not thick — they have suffered many successive fellings to provide timber props underground in the mine and the present growth consists of thin trunks growing out of the sides of the original boles - but there has been so much rain that their tough, clean wintergreen smell comes in very strongly through the window. The track is just a hundred yards or so below the freeway; from that point, the city is not more than ten minutes away, that’s all. The track must date from the old days when these mines were still in production; what is the purpose of it now? It can’t lead anywhere, but it has remained open. From here, not too far in, where he has not exactly come to a halt but paused, foot on the clutch, because where is he going? where does it lead to? — from here you could be in town in ten minutes. A silent place. It might be deep in the country, in a real forest with real mountains enclosing it. A boy could people it with Red Indians or cops and robbers, it looks like a place to run and hide; but four lanes of traffic and a freeway are just over the trees, and behind the yellow mountain a scrapyard, a brickfield, foundries. No no. That’s enough. Once let them near you — the old man had his gold-braided cap in the car window and his hand on the door that time before he could say no - there’s no limit to what they want. With your money, what is there that they dream they could not do and what is there they do not expect of you. Damn it all, no.

— There’s nice. —

Two words stay the movement that will put the Mercedes into reverse gear.

— Why don’t you eat. — They beg on street-corners and spend the money in the next bar; that’s what they’d do with it if they had it. No no.

— I nearly forgot. — The hand is lifted from him and rakes into the shelf for the packet, displacing at the same time something hard that rolls out onto the floor of the car. — Look at that! - She’s dived for it. A glass marble. It has been lying there as it lay in the dust and fluff (smell of cat) where I found it for you; it lies in the stranger’s hand that was on my thigh but did not touch me, an egg stolen from a nest, as you showed a brown agate egg in a stranger’s adolescent hand, a whole clutch of pale, freckled eggs that will never hatch. The car door is standing open on the passenger side. Hampered by her shoes, she is strolling a little way ahead.

— Come — she says — Come and look. —

She has half-turned, the face beckoning, the white packet of food in the hand that holds the white bag. She stays like that while there is a moment when neither moves, she half-turned among trees and he seen through the open door of the car, and while he gets out on his side and slowly closes his door softly, with no more than a click - distinct - between the two of them. No no no. But nothing stops Jacobus running or rather trying to run, like that. What for? What need of haste when everything is over long ago, dead when it was found. Violence is a red blossom for you to put behind your gipsy-ringed ear, a kaffir-boom flower you wear in London as your souvenir of foreign parts, like those Americans who leave Hawaii with hibiscus around their necks. But violence has flowered after seven years’ drought, violence as fecundity, weathering as humus, rising as sap. If it had not been for the flood, the best year for seven years. No no no. The scent of the trees is light and cool. Their narrow leaves browned by wet cover the earth like the shed wings of a horde of insects. They do not crackle underfoot because of the damp. She has taken off the coat (raincoat? people have got used to expecting rain every day) that she wore unfastened in the car, and spread it on the ground, the thing is spread-eagled with its arms out, only a head seems missing.

— This’s nice. —

He has no idea what he is going to say. — You could eat in the car. —

— Toasted bacon and egg - she says appreciatively. She has wrapped the white paper genteelly round the lower half of the sandwich, whose fatty smell is sickening against the freshness of the eucalyptus, but she speaks with her mouth full, showing bits of egg on good teeth, inoffensively. She’s young. She pats the raincoat she is sitting on; she’s kicked off, or perhaps it’s simply fallen off - one of her clumsy fashionable shoes.

— I don’t want to sit. — What he desperately needs to convey is that she is presumptuous, that he is being held up on his way to wherever it is she, living in another milieu, cannot know he is going.

— It’s nice here — She has stretched out, she’s making a wood of the place, a picnic out of it. She lies back, both shoes off, ankles crossed, propped up on one elbow and eating the messy sandwich, lazily smiling and enjoying the air.

— You should have eaten while I drove. —

She pats the raincoat beside her.

He sits, turned slightly away from her. The green of the trees, the suède-yellow mountains, the clean air are deceptive: this is a dirty place, an overgrown rubbish dump between mounds of cyanide waste, that’s all. There are bits of rusty tin and an old enamel pot lying near by. A porridge of old papers splattered against the trunk of one of the trees. He hears her licking her fingers.

— My, I was starving, man. You saved my life. —

— Come on. I must go. —

She lies there lazily, flat on her back now. She is wearing a tight pink cotton sweater with long sleeves and a round low neck. She pulls down her mouth, warm and relaxed and glistening with the business of eating, and squints, frowning, over her cheeks at her body, brushing crumbs from her breasts. She smiles again, making a play of sleepy, half-closed eyes.

— Get up. —

She puts out an arm to be pulled, then, he cannot ignore it; and on her feet completes the movement (as when her hand came to his leg in the car) by leaning her whole body against him, belly to belly, breast to chest. The mouth tastes of bacon and the contact of tongues and lips and opposition of teeth becomes, as always, the inhabiting of a place unlike any other place, a sliding and kneading between smooth resilient walls of pleasure that open ahead and close behind without room for anything else, without thought, without identity. Then he puts her away from him, let her fall if she will. He’s going back to the car, the road, the freeway.

— Oh just a sec — she begs — I must find somewhere. You know: I’ve got to go. Just wait one moment for me. —

The raincoat’s still on the ground. He has the impulse to lie there, exhausted, to flop down with his head hidden on his arms, and the leaves would be near his eyes. Not a pleasant place. The car looks abandoned. He does sit down again, but more or less on his hunkers, elbows on knees, and sees the car as it would appear to someone coming upon it, in this place. The toy-woman knows, she sees cars turn off into the plantation with couples in them. Others: that mess of wet paper, cigarette packs. No one knows who the people are who come here; the short journey, the destination, are unrecorded in the pattern or documentation of their lives. It doesn’t count. A stretch of waste ground that no longer serves its original purpose and for which a new one has not yet been decided, apparently; most of the mining ground round about has been surveyed and declared as townships of one kind or another, quite a profitable operation. No one knows and one goes away and never comes back to this place again although it is not more than a mile from the freeway. Unless something happens; it is the sort of place people might dump a body. One could be murdered here.
We think something is happen
. The Mercedes swept over the road into the culvert, and everything was kept in order, everything was maintained more or less as usual, as far as they know how. They were ready for the next white man. If it were not to be me, it would have been someone else. The next buyer. Perhaps they thought I was dead; they know another one will always come. They would take off their hats at the graveside as they’d take them off to greet the new one. — We think something is happen. — But it can only happen to me. They have been there all the time and they will continue to be there. They have nothing and they have nothing to lose. She’s come back and she’s lying beside him, pulling with propriety at her clothes. She’s a woman like all the other women, no better and no worse than the smooth, clear olive-coloured face, the dark hair and the Romany eyes she suggests as she lies quite quietly and intimately, sidled against him where he has stretched out on his spine. Without a cushion his head drops back too far for comfort and he has both hands folded under it. - It’s nice here. It’s nice here. - She giggles and murmurs, because that’s the way she thinks she will please; she’s taken her pants off in the bushes of course. No no. She’s opened her whole mouth over his, taking his lips entirely into the wet membrane inside hers, and his eyes staring up close like a jeweller’s loupe brought to her face show that the hairline isn’t clean at all, it’s a fake, it’s not the same at all, there are short rough curly hairs interspersed with blemishes and pimples that encroach on the face as sideburns —