with a red cement floor which was cracked. Small black ants swarmed along the cracks. There were clothes hanging from hooks and in a low bed a long knobbly body under a patched sheet. A shock of black hair protruded from the top of the sheet. The body was heaving with sharp, hard and irregular breath.
‘The Welfare said they would come this day,’ said the woman, looking at the bed. At which the sheet fell back and showed a very thin young man, in a grey shirt, which was open down the front, showing a cage of knobbed ribs. His face was extremely thin, his black eyes fevered and enormous. His skin had a dry greyish look.
‘What do you want?’ he asked Martha angrily.
‘She’s not the Welfare lady,’ said the woman. ‘It’s my son,’ she said to Martha. ‘He’s very sick.’
He said: ‘I told you, I’m not going to hospital.’
‘It’s your sickness makes you talk,’ said his mother. She stood at a short distance from the bed, hands folded before her. Her feet, in canvas shoes, moved irritably on the cement. Martha was reminded of a gesture of her mother’s: the way she would sit smoothing the stuff of her dress on her knee with the flat of her hand, over and over again, in a tired irritable gesture. So did the feet of this woman move on the floor, in a compulsive, pawing way, like a horse which has been standing too long. She said to Martha: ‘It’s his sickness makes him bad. It makes him hard to please.’
A spasm of anger crossed the bony sick face. The boy flung himself down again, his back turned, and again became a heavily-shrouded body breathing hoarsely.
‘Shall I fetch someone for you?’ asked Martha.
‘The Welfare said they would come this day.’
During this conversation the small girl twirled and twiddled her thin black legs as she hung from the doorknob, her eyes fixed relentlessly on Martha’s face. ‘Oh, leave off,’ said her mother, and smacked her lightly across the face, to relieve her own exasperation. The child moved her face sideways, automatically, from the sting of the blow, and continued to dangle from the knob, splaying out her legs over the floor.
Murdoch’s flaming mop of hair appeared on the veranda.
‘What’s up?’ he said.
Martha went to the veranda and the woman followed them. Her eyes moved from Martha’s face to Murdoch’s in a patient undemanding query.
‘A good day to ye,’ said Murdoch to her. ‘How’s the patient?’ His tone struck Martha as facetious, but the woman said, moving nearer to Murdoch, ‘It’s his chest, it’s not doing better.’
‘TB,’ said Murdoch to Martha, and the woman nodded, adding practically: ‘He will die soon, I think.’
Martha was shocked by the directness of this, but Murdoch nodded and said simply: ‘Aye, and he’d be better in hospital, with the right things for him.’
At this moment a large car stopped outside the entrance of the court, and a well-dressed young woman got out of it. Martha recognized Ruth Manners, now a young matron with children: two small girls sat in the back of the car with a native nanny. She came picking her way across the court on large well-polished shoes, and did not raise her eyes to see the group of people until nearly on them. She recognized Martha, and gave her a polite smile, while her pale cautious eyes were animated for the space of a startled second at the sight of Murdoch, before she decided that he, like Martha, was outside her radius of interest. On Murdoch’s face was a wild irreverent grin: ‘The Welfare,’ he said, audibly and derisively.
Ruth Manners ignored him, and said to the woman: ‘How is he?’
‘Very bad, miss.’
‘Has he changed his mind about coming into hospital?’
‘No, miss, sorry to tell you, he hasn’t, the sickness has him unreasonable, miss.’
Ruth Manners looked full of patient distaste for the whole situation. She asked in cold clear tones: ‘Shall I try and make him see reason?’
‘If you like, miss, but he’s not himself.’
Martha and Murdoch stood to one side while the young woman went to the doorway and stood looking down at the long knobbly form under the white sheet.
‘Ronald,’ she said, or rather stated.
The form did not stir.
‘It’s the Welfare,’ said the mother helplessly, but on a note of warning.
There was a growl and a mutter of obscenities from under the sheet. Ruth came back and stood in front of the mother, her expression of distaste even more marked. ‘You must see,’ she said in a high patient voice, ‘that there’s nothing at all we can do. Is he taking his medicines?’
‘Yes, miss, I make him.’
Ruth Manners continued to stand, frowning, looking around the court as from a long distance. Suddenly all her distaste focused: her pale eyes under the black crooked brows moved in a snap towards Murdoch and Martha; her face contracted with hatred, and she said: ‘I suppose you communists have been putting ideas into his head.’
The colour flamed into her thin angry cheeks and she walked stiffly back to her car.
Murdoch grinned and said: ‘It’s the Red Hand again. Man, but we get into everything, we’re under every bed.’
The woman, tugged backwards and forwards out of her stoic and patient stance by the pull of the lively swinging little girl on her hand, said: There was a baas here yesterday talking to Ronald. Ron liked him. Perhaps he could make him go to hospital.’
‘Who was it?’ asked Martha, slowly translating the ‘baas’, in her mind, into who it must be – one of the men from the camp.
The woman, with her eyes on Murdoch’s extraordinary assortment of clothes, said with delicacy: ‘I think he was from the camp too.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘He was selling your newspaper.’
‘We’ll see if we can find out who it was,’ said Martha,
She and Murdoch left the court together, while the patient tired woman and the lively child looked after them, and the woman on the candlebox shouted: ‘You promised me faithfully my room. You promised it.’
‘I don’t see who it can be,’ said Martha, ‘unless Bill’s been doing our street. And by the way, you should have done this court – you forgot it.’
‘I was getting around to it, I was getting around to it,’ said Murdoch instantly, in an aggrieved voice. He had a way of suggesting he was unfairly accused at the slightest suggestion of criticism, but he was, above all, humorous. Now he grinned clowningly at Martha and said: ‘Give me a chance, comrade. I was having a talk to a nice girl in the street behind this one.’
Martha asked: ‘What girl,’ realized that she was thinking ‘white’ – because her first thought had been, there are no girls in this area, meaning white girls, was shocked at herself, and out of her guilty anger said: ‘You know quite well the group has taken a decision you’re not to have
