The Setting Sun and the Rolling World by Charles Mungoshi

Author:Charles Mungoshi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1988-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

10

The Lift

When they were tired of going round the factories and shops in search of jobs, the boys went to the tall buildings at the heart of the city for their daily free ride in the lifts. It was the only fun they had and it made them forget a little their burning bellies and tired feet.

There were lots of clouds flung about the sky like cotton balls in a field. It was rather chilly and the boys felt sharply the pleasant warmth of the sun when it came out of the clouds, and both of them unconsciously looked up irritably when it darted behind another cloud.

At present, their minds, usually the colour of the changing streets and just as desolate, were fixed on the ride in the lifts.

Pearl Assurance Building, one of the tallest buildings in the city, had a guard at the wide entrance.

“Can I help you?” the guard asked.

“We would like to go up.”

“Floor?”

“Tenth.”

“What for?”

The boys looked at each other and hazarded an answer.

“We are doing correspondence courses.”

The guard looked at them suspiciously and then dismissed them with a flick of the hand.

“You are not allowed up there.”

The boys looked at the guard as if they had not heard him. Then their eyes turned to gaze at the wall above the lift where numbers went on and off in amber to show the lift coming down.

“There has been much stealing up there lately,” the guard said.

“We are not thieves.”

The guard’s eyes swept over their heads and he dismissed them from his attention.

“Go away, boys.”

The boys turned to go. They passed two European boys of their own age. Looking back, the boys saw the guard take off his cap to the Europeans who did not answer him and quickly entered the lift and disappeared.

“Why did you allow those two to go up?”

“You are not allowed up there.”

The boys went out on to the street. It was not yet noon and they had nowhere to go and nothing to do to kill the time until night when they would go home to sleep.

“Wish I had kept that shilling after all,” one of them, thinner than the other, said.

“We had to have something to eat.”

“All the same, we could have used it now. It’s so much nicer to have something to eat when you don’t have anything to do.”

They were moving towards Salisbury Park. They had not talked of the park yet both of them knew that that was the only place left to go and rest.

“I was a fool to use that shilling,” the thin one said again.

His friend didn’t answer because he always felt irritated by his companion’s mourning for things that could have been. He felt like shouting at him to stop it but he controlled himself. He didn’t care for words when he was tired. They made him even more tired than he really was.

“This is unbearable,” the thin one said once more.

But his friend kept quiet. He was hungry and there was nowhere to get money from.

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