African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [152]
And now we were in Banket itself, grown to a little town, with the old Banket, ‘the Station’ visible only to the eye of History–mine. Then the centre of ‘the Station’ was a long low narrow strip of building like a shed with verandahs, called Dardagan’s, the Greek who owned the hotel, the butcher’s, the grocery, the kaffir truck store. A little room at the north end of the brick line was the butcher’s, with its zinc counter and the great metal hooks behind it where the bloody joints dangled. Outside, under the tree at the back, they cut up an ox or a cow, with its four stomachs spilling out sweet-smelling cud. A fly-covered carcass might be hanging from a tree. After the butchery, came the store, the next along the verandah, with its tinned fruits, its bully beef and its biscuits, and too, the bolts of cotton stuff. Sacks of sugar, flour, mealie meal, stood about on the cement floor, and trickles of tiny black ants had to be swept up by the store ‘boy’, always vigilant for these foragers. Next to the store on the same verandah, was the hotel, which consisted of the bar and the half dozen tables to provide meals for the commercial travellers or people going north to Northern Rhodesia. The bar, like all country hotels, was the moneymaker, with people in it, mostly men, every night. There were a couple of bedrooms. The kaffir truck store was separated from this building by a few yards.
Here, on the verandah a half-grown girl dusty from having walked in the seven miles from the farm stood and looked through the fly-wire-screened door at a commercial traveller all long burned legs and burned arms and throat and in the khaki shorts and shirt worn by the farmers he visited selling cattle dip and wire and creosote and paint. He was sitting extended, legs out, so the chair under him was like a tilting temporary prop while he ate his way seriously and fast through a whole packet of Marie biscuits, and gulped the orange-red tea, strong enough to rip the lining off any stomach, and often wiped the sweat off his face: it was hot under that corrugated iron. The girl from the farm stood staring at a world of unattainable sophistication: a man who appeared on this verandah and then jumped back into his car and sped to stations further along the line, or to Lusaka, or back to Salisbury, a man who moved, just as he liked, and–it was necessary for the adolescent to believe this–chose a woman to share his bed when he did stop for the night. The fact was, since it was the 1930s, and the Slump, the traveller had grabbed hold of a job he was lucky to get, and he had a wife working somewhere as matron or housekeeper–anywhere she could have the children during school holidays. The traveller felt the pressure of that hungry stare, looked up and was just able to discern through the glare against the screen, the shape of a girl. Looking more closely, adjusting his gaze to the dazzle on the wire gauze, he saw she had long burned legs ending in ‘veldschoen’–those ancestors of the shoes known as hush puppies, and bare burned arms; a .22 rifle dangled from her hand, and her dress, incongruously, was a neat little number smart enough for town. For she had brought into the butcher six guineafowl, shot from the vast flocks that covered the farm with their clinking and their movement, running like dark shadows through the bush until they lifted themselves into the air to settle in the trees away from that pursuer, the .22. For the six guineafowl she