Another Country

The life you think you should want,’ said Eric, ‘is always the life that looks safest.

And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow, rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the violence of the deep.

A sign advertised the chewing gum which would help one to relax and keep smiling. An hotel’s enormous neon name challenged the starless sky. So did the names of movie stars and people currently appearing or scheduled to appear on Broadway, along with the mile-high names of the vehicles which would carry them into immortality. The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded

Somewhere in his heart the black boy hated the white boy because he was white.

‘Sweetheart, suffering doesn’t have a colour. Does it? Can’t we step out of this nightmare?

but somewhere along the line he had discovered that he could say it with a saxophone. He had a lot to say.

A nigger, said his father, lives his whole life, lives and dies according to a beat. Shit, he humps to that beat and the baby he throws up in there, well, he jumps to it and comes out nine months later like a goddam tambourine. The beat: hands, feet, tambourines, drums, pianos, laughter, curses, razor

He thought of the white policemen and the money they made on black flesh, the money the whole world made.

kind of restful and protected – and strong

‘I can’t be sure. And yet I must decide.’

‘What must you decide?’

Eric lit a cigarette, drew one foot up, and hugged one knee. ‘I mean, I think you’ve got to be truthful about the life you have. Otherwise, there’s no possibility of achieving the life you want.’ He paused. ‘Or think you want.’