Tefuga by Peter Dickinson Page B

said Ted, “but I think you’d find it hard to get more than a handful of natives, rulers or ruled, to accept it. They might tell you they accepted it, but that’s just another aspect of the same thing. Rulers get told what they wish to hear.”
    â€œThat still doesn’t stop it being disgusting.”
    â€œShall we change the subject? What about a dancing lesson?”
    â€œAll right. You needn’t put your pipe out.”
    It’s really extraordinary, this business of s**. I don’t understand myself at all. I didn’t really feel like dancing but I felt guilty about arguing with the poor man and sounding snappy and cross when I’m supposed to be jolly, especially with his poor arm hurting, so I felt I had to. I don’t like myself when I’m snappy, either. Ted’s a rotten dancer but I’m doing my best with him. I tell him I’m going to make him a real lady-killer by the time we go on leave next spring. (Next spring!) So we turned the lamps down and cleared the chairs aside and wound up the gramophone and fox-trotted round on the smoothest patch of floor with the moon yellow along the river and Ted sucking at his pipe over my shoulder. ’Cos of his sling he had to hold me closer than’s really right—for a lesson, anyway—and then by the time we’d wound the gramophone up once or twice Ted had put his pipe down so that we could have some baccy-ey kisses and I could feel the hardness growing under his trousers which made me remember KB’s horrible plank but it didn’t seem to matter—in fact ’cos of the shadows from the lamps or something I could see how Ted’s dear face and the devil-mask really were the same thing and that was rather exciting—very exciting, so that I stopped dancing while the gramophone still had plenty of wind in it and told Ted to count slowly to fifty (just time to put my thingy in) and scampered off to the bedroom.
    And then you change again. I’m not saying it ’cos of doing it—in fact, that was lovely—we really are getting cleverer, both of us!—but I woke up in the middle of the night and found I was thinking about KB and his plank and his wives, and how Daddy treated Mummy, and Ted—not my dear own Ted but someone else in the same body, breathing thickly beside me—one of them . They’ve made the whole world the shape they want it and we’ve got to fit in the corners they’ve left, and I’m simply not going to stand for it! I’m going to do something about it. I’m going to start by doing something about KB and his wives. I don’t know what, yet, but I really am. And then I went to sleep.
    The funny thing is that usually that kind of night idea turns out complete nonsense in the morning, but this one didn’t. I still feel like that, or at least part of me does. It’s real. You’ve made yourself a promise, Bets, and you’re going to keep it.

Five
    T he road to Kiti was appalling. Though in the fairly recent past it had been surfaced with tarmac, this had apparently been done with no other preparation than a levelling of the old earth surface, and the quality of the tarmac itself may well have been dubious. At one point the truck passed, rusting in a small clearing, one of the machines which had been imported to do the work and then had never been reclaimed, it being in no one’s interest to do so. Indeed it could be said that since this section of road led almost nowhere the real function of the machine had been completed before it had ever crossed the river. K.H.P., the Kiti Highway Project, of which the machine and this road were only a minuscule fragment, had allowed a large number of people in London, Lagos, Birnin Soko and elsewhere to make a great deal of money for themselves. The actual laying of the tarmac on the ground had been little more than a concluding ritual, gone through to propitiate the eventual