Michael Adonis turned into the little Indian cafe and saw the boy, Joe, sitting at one of the baize- covered tables, eating. Michael Adonis had seen the cafe as he came into the short, grey, yellow-lamp-lighted street with its scarred walls and cracked pavements, and had headed towards it because he had been walking about for an hour and wanted to sit down. He saw the pale glow of the cafe light behind the greasy window piled with curry- balls and Indian sweetmeats and headed for it like a lost ship sighting a point of land for the first time after a long and hopeless voyage.
He parted the sparse wooden-bead curtains and saw Joe at the table. Behind a glass case full of stale rolls an old, bearded Indian dozed, his betel-stained mouth half-open and his beard stirring as he breathed. There was nobody else in the cafe.
Joe looked up as Michael Adonis came over, and smiled. He was eating curried peas and rice with one hand, arranging the food skilfully into a little mound and then shovelling it into his mouth with his grouped fingers. Some of the food had spilled onto his disreputable old raincoat, adding fresh stains to many others.
He said: ‘Hey, Mikey. You out late.’
Michael Adonis sat down opposite him and said, scowling: ‘Same with you. Where in hell do you live?’
Joe smiled, shrugging, and waved his free hand. The nails were rimmed with black, and the smell of fish still clung to him. ‘Anywhere,’ he said.
Then he added, still smiling, but a little shyly: ‘Bought the curry with the shilling what you gave me. The old Moor sells shilling’s worth.’
‘I had supper,’ Michael Adonis told him and lighted a cigarette. He smoked silently, brooding.
‘What you walking about for, Mikey? You look sick, too.’
‘I’m not sick. I got troubles.’
Just then the old Indian woke up and saw him, and came over, wiping his hands on his stained and greasy apron. ‘You want eat?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Michael Adonis said. ‘Bring me some coffee.’
‘No coffee. Tea.’
‘Awright.’
The old Indian went over to the hatchway in the back wall and called through into the kitchen.
Michael Adonis got out his cigarettes and lit one, watching Joe eating the curry. Joe scooped some of the food into his mouth, chewed, the yellow gravy staining the outer corners of his lips. He said, philosophically: ‘We have all got troubles. Don’t I say?’
‘You. Troubles,’ Michael Adonis said, looking at him with some derision. ‘What troubles you got?’
He was suddenly pleased and proud of his own predicament. He felt as if he was the only man who had ever killed another and thought himself a curiosity at which people should wonder. He longed to be questioned about it, about the way he had felt when he had done it, about the impulse that had caused him to take the life of another. But the difficulty was that to reveal his secret was dangerous, so he had to carry it with him for all time or accept the consequences. The rights and wrongs of the matter did not occur to him then. It was just something that, to himself, placed him above others, like a poor beggar who suddenly found himself the heir to vast riches. And the fact that he dared not declare his newly acquired status irritated him, too, so that now he felt a prick of jealousy for this nondescript boy who was in a position to disclose his own problems with ease if he wished to.
He said, surlily: ‘Where the hell you get troubles from?’
But at that moment the bead curtains over the doorway of the cafe parted and Foxy and the two youths in their smart tropical suits came in. They saw Michael Adonis and Joe at the table and came over.
They looked with some disgust at the ragged boy and then immediately ignored him, and Foxy turned to Michael Adonis, saying: ‘We still looking for that bastard Sockies. Did you see him yet?’
‘No, man.’
The boy with the scarface spat on the floor and said: ‘We walking around all night looking for that hound. We ought to find another look-out.’
‘You feel like doing something with us?’ Foxy asked Michael Adonis.
‘What?’
‘Leave him alone,’ the boy with the skull-and-crossbones ring growled.
‘We need a man to hold candle at a job,’ Foxy replied, ignoring the youth. ‘We’ll give you a cut.’
‘Who the hell is he?’ the boy asked, looking at Michael Adonis scornfully.
I wonder how many people you killed, Michael Adonis thought with his distorted pride, staring back at the boy with the ring, a thin smile on his lips, and said: ‘What do you know about me?’
The one with the scarface then said: ‘Maybe he’s okay.’
Foxy asked: ‘You want to come in, Mikey?’
Michael Adonis looked again at the boy with the ring. ‘What about him?’
‘He’s okay,’ Foxy told him, grinning. ‘He’s just a little hardcase, that’s all. But he’s awright.’
‘Well,’ Michael Adonis considered, rubbing the faint stubble on his chin. ‘Well, maybe. I don’t know yet.’ He felt a stir of pleasure at being approached, but he was still hesitant.
Foxy shrugged and said: ‘We going down to the Club now. We not going to bogger around looking for Sockies no more. We’ll be down at the Club, so get us there when you make up your mind.’ He added: ‘You could make some chink now you haven’t got a job no more. Maybe you can come with us always.’ To the other he said: ‘I know Mikey a long time. He’s awright, man.’
The old Indian came back with the cup of tea Michael Adonis had ordered and put it down on the table. Some of the tea had slopped over into the saucer. He looked at the three who had come in, chewing his betel nut. The boy with the scarface looked around at him and said: ‘Okay, baas, we going. We want nothing.’
He looked at Michael Adonis again, while the old Indian went away. Then he said: ‘We saw some law going into your place. Heard a rooker got chopped or something.’
‘And we seen you come out the side lane, too,’ the boy with the skull-and-crossbones ring said, with smiling malice.
Michael Adonis stared at them and felt suddenly trapped. On the one hand he would have liked to have proclaimed it to them like a victory over their own petty accomplishments, but on the other hand the mixed feelings of fear and caution gagged him. He did not like the boy with the ring and wanted to tell him that he, Michael Adonis, was a bigger shot now than he was, but he smiled back into the depraved eyes of the boy and said: ‘And then? What the hell it got to do with me?’
Foxy reached out and patted the shoulder of his scuffed leather coat and said: ‘Mikey’s a good boy. He’s not like you jubas. He got class. Don’t I say Mikey?’ Then directly to the two with him: ‘Now let’s muck off.’
They went over towards the doorway, but before he went out Foxy stopped and turned, smiling again at Michael Adonis.
‘You don’t have to worry niks, Mikey. We okay. We don’t give a eff for the law. You come in with us. We okay.’ He waved a hand and then went out through the bead curtains.
Joe had finished his meal now and he looked at Michael Adonis and asked: ‘What they talking about, Mikey? That stuff about the law down at your place.’
‘I don’t know. Ek weet nie,’ Michael Adonis answered, feeling angry. ‘How the hell should I know? I told them, didn’t I?’
‘Listen, Michael,’ Joe said, speaking seriously now, and feeling awkward about it at the same time. ‘Listen, maybe you got big troubles. Bigger than I got.’ He felt somewhat ashamed of the comparison, but he went on. ‘Like I said, we all got troubles. But johns like them don’t help you out of them. They in trouble themselves. You’d only add to the whole heap of troubles. I don’t know how to tell it, but you run away with them and you got another trouble. Like those rookers. They started a small trouble, maybe, and they run away from it and it was another trouble, so they run away all the time, adding up the troubles. Hell, I don’t know.’ He felt desperate and a little sad, and did not know quite what to say.
Michael Adonis scowled at him and asked: ‘What the blerry hell you know? What troubles you got?’
Joe looked down at the plate which he had wiped clean so that the tiniest morsel of food had not escaped his belly. He said, embarrassed: ‘I don’t know. I got nothing. No house, no people, no place. Maybe that’s troubles. Don’t I say?’
‘Where’s your people, then?’ Michael Adonis asked. He tasted his tea, which had gone cold during all the talking.
‘Somewhere. I don’t know. Hear, we used to live in Prince Lane, mos, a long, long time. Me, my old woman and my father and my sister, Mary, and my small brothers, Isaac and Matty. Then one day my father goes out and he never comes back again. He just went out one morning and we never saw him again.’
‘What the hell he do that for?’ Michael Adonis asked. ‘What for he want to do a thing like that?’
‘Don’t know. He never mos told us nothing. He just went out that morning and that was the last we saw of him.’
Joe said, shaking his head and frowning, looking at his plate: ‘I don’t know. Maybe he had troubles, too. He didn’t have no job. He was out of a job for a long time and we didn’t get things to eat often. Me and my brother Matty used to go out mornings and ask from door to door for pieces of stale bread. Sometimes we got some last-night’s cooked food with it from the people. But it was never enough for all of us. My old woman never used to touch the stuff, but shared it out among us lighties. Also the rent of the house wasn’t paid and after a while my old woman gets a letter we got to get out. The landlord sends a lot of letters, saying every time we got to clear out, and afterwards some bastards come with a paper and walks right in and stacks all the furniture on the pavement outside and then locks the door and says if we go back we will all be thrown in the jail.’
Joe wasn’t happy any more. He looked old and very serious. He said:
‘My old woman just sat there by the pile of furniture with Mary and Isaac and Matty and me, and cries. She just sit there and cry. Then after some time she says, Well, we got to go back to the country to stay with my ouma, my grandmother. So she sells the furniture to a secondhand man, and they go away.’
‘They?’ Michael Adonis said. ‘What about you?’
‘Me, I ran away when I heard they was going. I just ran away like my old man.’ Joe looked at Michael Adonis and said: ‘I wasn’t going to the outside. To the country. Man, that would be the same like running away, too. Some bastards come with a piece of paper and tell you to get the hell out because you haven’t got money for the rent, and a shopkeeper tell you you got to have money else you don’t get nothing to eat, and you got to go away somewhere else where it’s going to start all over again. No, man,’ he shook his head again. ‘What’s the use. I rather stay around here and starve on one spot or maybe pick up something here and there to get something in my belly. My old man, he ran away. I didn’t want to run, too.’
Michael Adonis stared at him for a moment. He felt a little embarrassed now in the presence of this boy. He had never heard Joe say anything as lengthy and as serious as this and he wondered whether the boy had spoken the truth or was a little queer. Then he picked up his neglected cup and drank. The tea was quite cold now and a scum of milk had started to form on the surface.
He said, uncomfortably: ‘You like some tea?’
‘No thanks, man. It’s okay.’
Michael Adonis put his cup down and took out his cigarettes. He shoved the packet over to Joe and said gruffly: ‘Well, have a smoke, then.’
Joe shook his head and smiled gently and somewhat shyly. He said: ‘No thanks. I don’t mos smoke.’ Then he added, serious again: ‘You mustn’t go with those gangsters, Mikey. You leave those gangsters alone.’
‘What’s it to you?’ Michael Adonis asked, feeling both angry and embarrassed. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘Nothing. Nothing, I reckon. But they mean boys.’
‘Ah, hell,’ Michael Adonis said and got up. He went over to the counter where the old Indian dozed and got some money out. He paid for his tea, feeling the ragged boy’s eyes on him, and did not look back when he went out.