Black Bread White Beer by Niven Govinden Page B

and unpleasant. He cannot help it. His back is up, hooked like a junkie in the way his chest has been thumping, hard and sharp, ever since he was asked to follow the young fogey waitress down the back to settle his complaint.
    Even in the thick of it, his ears drumming with a sense of insult, he was aware of how the girl’s lips glistened with stray saliva every time she harrumphed in indignation. The wetness of them, as they pursed out, back and forth, surprisingly full and thick, leading to thoughts of what she looked like out of her food-stained tabard, whether he could screw the hate out of her like he’d done with other girls in his bachelor past.
    He is a disgusting pig, a disgrace, but this feeling something, a deep loathing, lust, is unshakeable and continues to power him. He is alive. These sick perversions confirm it.
    There is also a new animation in Claud. Not to say that the act of shopping has awoken something in her, but some aspect of it has played its part, along with the gritty undrinkable milk skin and the sense of purpose in finding something that will surprise and give pleasure to Liz. Maternal approval: a daughter’s greatest battery charger. He should have realized it. There is nothing that a mother’s love is not capable of untangling and putting right.
    She wants one of two paintings that hang on the wall: close oil studies of the castle rock on largish canvases. The thick, crumbly brick packed tightly around a windowless turret shows how time erodes greater than man-made pollutants, appearing on the precipice of decay. But it has been painted pleasingly for tourists, playing with gold dusk light, referring to an unedifying presence, and a vague promise of morning renewal, like the bar drunk’s motto: everything will be all right tomorrow. The painting is untitled but this is what it should be.
    He understands why it makes a good gift for Liz, and recognizes the space on the stair wall where it should hang as Claud describes it. What he cannot make sense of is the stillness he feels as he looks at it. The sensation of his temper slowly diffusing into the brick, absorbed by centuries of stoicism like a stone shock protector, until the heaviness in his upper chest and around his neck dissipates and finally is no longer there.
    They should be giving something more alive, not this dead thing that has drained all his bad impulses. Is this how it will be from now on, presenting dead gifts, stone, metal, abstract, when previously they looked for flowers, plants, and other items designed to warm the soul rather than extinguish it?
    Claud stands on a footstool and half-pulls half-lifts the canvas from the wall, grunting with effort as if she is taking a slab of castle stone with her. The canvas itself ischeaply backed with balsa, light but cumbersome. Even still, something like panic lodges in his throat. She should not be doing this.
    â€˜Here. Let me.’
    â€˜Get off, ’Mal. I’m fine. Not an invalid yet.’
    They grapple unsurely for a moment, each stubborn to the wishes of the other, standing at either end of the now unhooked canvas fighting for space in the cramped shop – two squabbling removal men. Laurel and Hardy or Morecombe and Wise.
    â€˜Let go, I said! You’re going to knock things over the way you’re carrying on.’
    â€˜I’m only trying to help.’
    â€˜Stop mollycoddling me. I don’t need wrapping up in cotton wool. How many times!’
    Her make-up, all four products of it – powder, lipstick, mascara and blush – have made a warrior of her. They are tired of each other, this dance of stepping lightly running its course, now speaking in their office voices, bossy, impersonal and untouched by tragedy. Everyone in the shop has heard.
    â€˜Why did you discharge yourself before I got a chance to speak to the doctor?’
    He realizes he is still angry from the café. Nothing in these pastoral arts and crafts or