Another Country

The life you think you should want,’ said Eric, ‘is always the life that looks safest.

And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow, rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the violence of the deep.

A sign advertised the chewing gum which would help one to relax and keep smiling. An hotel’s enormous neon name challenged the starless sky. So did the names of movie stars and people currently appearing or scheduled to appear on Broadway, along with the mile-high names of the vehicles which would carry them into immortality. The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded

Somewhere in his heart the black boy hated the white boy because he was white.

‘Sweetheart, suffering doesn’t have a colour. Does it? Can’t we step out of this nightmare?

‘I don’t know how to answer that,’ he said. ‘Yes – yes and no. But, just the same, I love you, Eric, I always will, I hope you know that.’ He was astonished to hear how his voice shook. ‘Do you love me? Tell me that you do.’

‘You know I do,’ said Eric. He stared into Vivaldo’s worn, white face and raised one hand to stroke the stubble which began just below the cheekbone. ‘I love you very much, I’d do anything for you. You must have known it, no? somewhere, for a very long time. Because I must have loved you for a very long time.’

Cass and Ida stared at him. ‘Where are you from?’ Cass demanded.

He smiled at her from a great, tolerant distance. ‘Belfast,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ cried Ida, ‘I have a friend whose father was born in Dublin! Do you know Dublin! Is it very far from Belfast?’

‘Geographically? Yes, some distance. Otherwise, the distance is negligible – though the population of either city would hang me if they heard me say so.’ And he laughed his cheerful, lubricated laugh.

‘What have you got against us?’ Cass asked.

They keep you here because you’re black, while they go around jerking themselves off with all the jazz about the land of the free and the home of the brave. And they want you to jerk yourself off with the same music, too, only keep your distance. Some days, honey, I wish I could turn myself into one big fist and grind this miserable country to powder.

and clung to it as though she were a child

He’s a carpenter’s son,’ she said, ‘the fifth son of a carpenter who came from Poland. Maybe that’s why it’s so important. A hundred years ago he’d have been like his father and opened a carpenter’s shop. But now he’s got to be a writer and help Steve Ellis sell convictions and soap.’