A Walk in the Night by Alex La Guma

Author:Alex La Guma [La Guma, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781803288918
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Chapter Fourteen

Night crouched over the city. The glow of street lamps and electric signs formed a yellow haze, giving it a pale underbelly that did not reach far enough upwards to absorb the stars that spotted its purple hide. Under it the city was a patchwork of greys, whites and reds threaded with thick ropes of black where the darkness held the scattered pattern together. Along the sea front the tall shadows of masts and spars and cranes towered like tangled bones of prehistoric monsters.

Willieboy came up a street that was flanked on one side by the great blank wall of a warehouse, and on the other by a row of single-storied houses fronted by wooden fences. Lights burned in some of the windows and in one of the houses a radio was playing. He went up the street, his hands deep in the pockets of his trousers, pushing the sides of the trousers outwards so that they looked like riding breeches. He was feeling muzzy and his head ached. And felt angry and humiliated by the manhandling he had received at Gipsy’s shebeen. He clenched his fists in his pockets and thought, They can’t treat a man like that, where can they treat a juba like that? Hell, I’m a shot, too. I’ll show those sonsabitches.

He was also aware of his inferiority. All his youthful life he had cherished dreams of becoming a big shot. He had seen others rise to some sort of power in the confined underworld of this district and found himself left behind. He had looked with envy at the flashy desperadoes who quivered across the screen in front of the eightpenny gallery and had dreamed of being transported where-ever he wished in great black motorcars and issuing orders for the execution of enemies. And when the picture faded and he emerged from the vast smoke-laden cinema mingling with the noisy crowd he was always aware of his inadequacy, moving unnoticed in the mob. He had affected a slouch, wore gaudy shirts and peg-bottomed trousers, brushed his hair into a flamboyant peak. He had been thinking of piercing one ear and decorating it with a gold ring. But even with these things he continued to remain something less than nondescript, part of the blurred face of the crowd, inconspicuous as a smudge on a grimy wall.

He turned from the street into another equally as gloomy and quiet and up ahead he saw the dark form of somebody approaching along the pavement. It was a man and he was walking with a lurch that sent him from side to side as he came on.

It was with a sense of shock that he came face to face with Willieboy. He pulled up with a hiccough, his mouth dropping open, drooling, and his bloodshot eyes widening with fright. He tried to turn away and run, but his drunken legs would not allow him to, and he lurched awkwardly. Then Willieboy had hold of him by the front of his coat and he wailed in terror.

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