LESSING
361
He walked away from his family, left them for ever, and the pain he
felt cooled his anger. He felt wet damping his beard, and then running
through it on his chin. He was so hungry again. He must be careful:
night people were different from in the day. Better not risk sitting down
at a table....He went to a McDonald's, bought a fat juicy lump of
meat, threw away the salad and the bun, and ate quickly as he walked.
Then he was out of the town, and his face was set for London, for the old
woman. He had four pounds left and it was not likely he would have luck
again with a motorbike. He was so sad, so lonely, but the dark was his
home, night was his place, and people did not look at you so dangerously
at night-not, that is, if you weren't in the same room with them. Now
he was on a country road, and the sky over him was blurred and soft with
stars that had thin cloud running across them. Near him was a little clump
of trees, not a wood, but enough to shelter him. He found a bush, settled
himself in it, and slept. Once he woke to hear a hedgehog puffing and
snuffling near his feet. He could catch it as he sat. What stopped him was
not the fear of the prickles in his palms, but a knowledge of prickles on
his tongue: you could not bite into a hedgehog as you would a bird. He
woke with the first cool breath of dawn. No birds: this was only a thin
straggle of trees, and he could see that the houses began quite soon, he
could hear traffic. He would reach his part of London about midday.
Ahead were hours of his careful, wary walking-and his stomach, oh his
stomach, how it begged for food. His hunger hurt and threatened him.
It
was not an easy hunger: the thin taste of bread or a bun could not satisfy
it.
It
was a need for meat, and he smelled the rawness of blood, the reek
of it: yet this hunger was dangerous to him. Sometimes, when he had gone
into a butcher's shop, pulled there by the smell, his body had seemed to
engorge with wanting, and his arms stretched out of their own accord
towards the meat. Once he had grabbed up a handful of chops, and stood
gnawing them, the butcher's back being turned, and then the sounds of
crunching had made the man whip around-but Ben had run, run-and
after that he did not go into these shops. Now he was thinking as he
walked of how he could get his hands on meat without spending the four
pounds.
His feet were taking him to-he stood outside the tall wire of a
building site, looking down into the scene of piled wet earth, machines,
men in hard hats. He had worked there for some days, taken on
because of those shoulders and arms that could support girders and
beams needing two or three men to lift them. The others had stood
watching as he shoved and shouldered and lifted. He had wanted to
join with them, their jokes, their talk, but did not know how to. He had
