their cooking fires dowsed, their cardboard suitcases spoiled and their bundles and blankets and Sunday clothes now sodden. Tomorrow, she thought, we will tackle everything. Nothing can be done tonight, nothing can be done while this rain is still falling. She shivered. Ralph put into her hand a glass half full of Cape brandy. She stood sipping it, still at the window; behind her the paraffin lamp guttered and flared. The coarse spirit warmed her. “Fetch Potluck,” she said to Ralph. “Carry him in. We could put him by the fire, it would do him good. I know he doesn’t like to be inside but he might like the fire. Besides, if the wind veers round, that stoep will be awash within a minute.”
Ralph went out, a torch in his hand, down the passage to the back of the house. No respite; still the wind howled, the rain slashed in its rhythm against roof and wall and window. He heard the dog lift his head and whimper. Ralph clicked his tongue at him. “Come on, Potluck.”
Potluck tried to get to his feet, his paws scraping on the polished floor. But the effort was beyond him; he fell back and lay miserably on his side. Ralph put down his torch, squatted by him, heaved him into his arms; his legs thrust out stiffly, Potluck grunted, half in indignation and half in relief.
It was dark in the house’s central corridor, and Ralph guided himself by letting his shoulder brush the wall; he was on his way back to the sitting room, to Anna standing by the fire with her brandy. Now Potluck kicked his legs, as if he would like to make efforts for himself—so outside the kitchen Ralph lowered him gently onto his feet. Wagging his tail feebly, the dog crawled away under the kitchen table. “Come to the fire,” Ralph said to him. “Come on with me, Potluck.”
From outside the back door, Ralph heard a little noise, a scrape, a cry. It was a woman’s voice, very small:
And so, without more thought, he made his choice; he turned the key, stepped back, and drew the stiff bolt. As he swung open the broad, heavy back door, he felt it pushed, smashed back into his face; and he was not then surprised that Enock stood there, his face mild, curious, composed. Enock reached inside his jacket. As calmly as a man takes out his wallet—as calmly as a man in a grocer’s shop, offering to pay—Enock took from inside his coat a small hatchet.
At once, Ralph smashed it from his hand. He had time to think, and he thought at once of his superior strength; so many years of full-cream milk, of lean beef, of muscle-building protein, and beneath his hand this poor felon, whose cloth jacket tore under his hand, ripping at the seam. Enock slid along the wall, his hands thrown up in front of his face.
Ralph smashed his fist into the man’s jaw. He felt the intricate resistance of tooth and bone, felt pain in his own hand; and as he closed in on the man to throttle him he felt the slithering resistance of his sinews, of his stringy muscles and green bones. He had ripped away not just the jacket but the familiar sweat-soaked, third-hand shirt, and he pushed against the wall clammy hairless flesh, pounding his fist above the man’s heart as if that would stop it, adding this rhythm, thump, thump, to the drumming of the rain. He wanted nothing but death, nothing but to feel Enock wilt and stagger, droop, retch, fall, and then his feet would do the rest; and already in a kind of red- out of thought, a bloody dream, he saw his booted foot kicking in the delicate skull, splintering bone, scattering teeth, thudding and rebounding, thudding and rebounding like a machine, until the creature was dead.
He saw this in his mind; yet at the same time sensed movement in the darkness behind him. He heard the dog stir, try to get to his feet, fall back. Then a dull blow, very hard, between his shoulder blades. He believed he had been hit with some huge, blunt object, like a fence pole. His mind filled with a picture of damage, of a huge bruise like a black sun. He turned around on this presence behind him, moving more slowly than before, and put the palm of his hand against a looming face, and shoved it away. It was a stranger’s face, and though later he would think and think about it he would never be able to identify it. He also wondered, later, at how long it had taken him to realize that he was bleeding. The dull blow was a knife wound, a wound between his ribs; and as his blood began to flow, he fell against the kitchen wall.
The next moments were lost, would always be lost. He had a vague consciousness of his own heart, an organ he had given no thought before. Unregarded, unpraised, heart beats and beats: but heart jibs now.
He lay down, passively, curiously tired. He was waiting to die. Let me die, his mind said, dying is not too bad. It is too much trouble to stay alive. I am warm now. This easy emission of blood is to be desired; flow on, and on. I am warm now, and soon I will be safe.
When the stranger entered the room where she stood by the fireplace, her drink in her hand, Anna did not scream, because she found she had no voice; she knew the essence of fear, which is like a kind of orgasm, and she was numb and white and still as she listened to the man’s demand for money, as she took the keys from the top drawer of the sideboard, opened up the mission cashbox and gave him what was inside. Without looking at them, the man thrust the notes into his pockets with his free hand. He spilled some coins; he did not seem to care about them, and yet those coins too were money, a lot of money. She watched them roll away, under the furniture. The man kept his eyes on her face. So, she thought, have they come here to kill us?
She saw a torn shape creep into the room. “Enock!” she said. The strange man closed in on her, took her by the arm. But rage made her strong enough to tear her arm from his grip—to pick up the bottle of brandy from which Ralph had poured her drink, to smash it against the sideboard, that ghastly piece of furniture the Instows had so loved. Let them turn it on me, she thought, let them take it out of my hand, let them blind me, but let me blind them first.
A moment later she was alone. They had gone. The alcohol fumes rose into the room. Shattered glass lay about her feet. The neck of the bottle was sealed in her palm, as if it were fused to the bone. She was alone, the storm still battering the house; within her was a small dangerous silence, like a chip of ice in her heart.
She must move from the spot, and find out what hideous thing had occurred; the splintered bottle in one hand, the lamp held high in the other. She must walk from the room to the kitchen, see her husband slumped in death’s narcotic embrace; she must walk from the kitchen to the room where her children were left sleeping. In that room she will receive her own deathblow; the one that will leave no mark on her skin, but will peel and scalp her, part the flesh of joy from the bone of grief. Let her move from this room, and she will be impaled to suffer slowly, to suffer as much when she is a woman of eighty as she will suffer now—a little pale English girl with black hair, footsteps pattering down a black corridor, running into an abandoned, empty room.
Dawn came late. Felicia had gone, and taken everything from her hut, all her possessions; she had packed and flitted, in an orderly and premeditated way. There was blood on the kitchen walls, and less noticeable blood, dark and slippery, on the red cement floors. Ralph, white as a bandage, lay cocooned in other bandages. The light was splintered, refracted, full of water; the grass moved, the bush moved, the earth seemed to shiver and shift.
Anna walked, tottering, between Salome and an Englishman who appeared to be an official, perhaps a kind of policeman. Everything will be done, she was told; for, Mrs. Eldred, this is unprecedented, we have never before in the history of this country recorded the abduction of a white child, of two white babies, and from their family’s compound at night—no, Mrs. Eldred, there has been nothing like it.
She thought, because there is no precedent, they wish to believe it cannot be true. They wish me to say that,
