One Big Damn Puzzler

by John Harding

  Always the boy presents the girl with a gift. No girl will consider giving herself to a man unless she is given a reasonable present first. This may sound to Western ears like some primitive kind of prostitution, but it is rather the opposite. The girl is not actually interested in the present for itself, for its material value or usefulness. It is as a mark of respect and affection that she esteems it.

  After the giving of the gift and a little chatting the couple will move on to inspecting one another’s hair for lice. Any that are found are then eaten by the finder. When considered objectively, there is nothing disgusting about this. Anyone who has seen apes performing the same act will have noticed how gentle they are with one another. Here, it becomes an act of great tenderness and intimacy.

  Next the couple will move to stroking and caressing one another and it’s likely that at this time the grass skirt and pubic leaf will be removed. The couple will then admire one another’s bodies, great store being set upon the visual role in arousal. Then they may rub noses gently. They kiss as we do, and as well one will sometimes take the other’s lower lip in his or her mouth and suck on it and then bite it, nearly always drawing blood. Indeed a well-bloodied lip is seen as evidence of successful lovemaking. After this it is customary to move up the face and gently nibble the partner’s eyelashes, a part of the body not considered attractive here, unlike among ourselves, where long eyelashes are thought desirable in both sexes. From there matters proceed much as in any other culture: next comes play with the nipples, caressing of the genitals and, finally, full intercourse.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘WHAT IS HE interested in Pilua for? What is there to know about her that would be so bad if he found it out?’

  It was very early the morning after the kassa house. Managua had stomped his way over to Miss Lucy’s at first light, long before shitting time. She’d taken an age to open the door to his knock and was bleary-eyed when she did. She invited him in with a reluctance that was against all the laws of hospitality for which she normally exhibited the utmost respect. Looking around her hut, Managua could understand why. The place was one plenty big mess. Several empty beer cans were left to roll around on the floor, where they could easily cause an injury, should someone step on one, especially someone with an artificial leg. There were little coloured jars and plastic tubes all over the place, and bits of cloth stained with the stuff Western women wore on their faces. He guessed she’d had a party with the she-boys. He’d already suspected as much from Lintoa’s breath last night; this was the only place on the island you could get beer, which Miss Lucy kept in a gas fridge, and he’d figured they’d been playing with make-up. He’d noticed last night the desecration done to Tigua’s nails. Still this was not the time to think about all that. He turned his attention back to Miss Lucy’s question and sighed.

  ‘If he is find out ’bout Pilua then everything is be change. All we traditions, all we is believe, all way we is live. All is go. All is vanish like smoke in sky.’ His eyes swept the disarray. ‘But mebbe you is not think is matter.’

  Lucy began scurrying round the room, picking up make-up debris. She dumped it into a plastic bin and drew her robe tight around her before facing him. ‘I’ve told you before, I’m sorry about the dresses and the – the—’

  ‘Chest straps.’

  ‘Bras. It was a big mistake and I shouldn’t have done it. I just wanted them to have fun. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I meant to be kind.’

  He held up his hand. ‘Is be OK, they dress is not be big thing. Shoes is break in end and dress is wear out. Is be unfortunate but is not be end of world.’ He limped away from her across the room. At the far wall he turned and there was the glint of moisture in his eyes. ‘But this – this gwanga, this is be end of world. End of we world. All is be destroy. What is I must do?’

  ‘I wish you’d tell me why the American finding Pilua would be such a disaster.’ He shook his head. ‘Well, in that case, does anyone else know she’s still alive?’

  He shook his head again. ‘No, I is only tell you now because I is not know what for do. But people is always be suspicious ’bout way she is suppose for die. And now, gwanga is take me by surprise. I is think he is suspect something.’

  ‘And is it possible for the American to find her without your help?’

  ‘Sure is be possible. That fool Purnu is help he you is can be certain. He is want get plenty thing from America. He is be one greedy fool. But he is be one powerful sorcerer too.’

  They sat in silence for a while.

  ‘So what is I go do?’ Managua said at last.

  ‘Do you know how long the American intends to stay?’

  ‘I is think only one moon, until plane is come again.’

  Lucy was chewing her fingernail and Managua hoped this would help her think, because if it didn’t it sure was one dirty habit. It was almost as bad as what he’d learned at the hospital on the big island, that white people wiped shit off their arses with their hands.

  ‘You must stop showing him your opposition, pretend to help him, but you must make things very difficult for him, so he gets tired and becomes discouraged. He’ll get fed up and stop trying, then he’ll run out of time, the plane will come and he will go.’

  Managua nodded slowly. ‘Is not be bad plan, no is not be bad at all.’

  ‘The she-boys will help you if I ask them to.’

  ‘That is be good. I is need some help.’ He paced around the room again, deep in thought, a painfully slow process on account of his artificial limb. After a few minutes he stopped. The frown he’d brought with him collapsed into a smile. ‘Miss Lucy, you plan, I is already have idea . . .’

  ‘An idea? What is it?’

  The smile widened from ear to ear. ‘Miss Lucy,’ he said, ‘is you ever read The Tempest?’

  SEVENTEEN

  ALL NORMAL FAMILIES are alike but every abnormal family is abnormal in its own way. Sandy Beach’s family was overrun by stuff. And William’s included a too-tidy mother, a sister who was terrified of spermatozoa and William himself, of course, who walked around in the shadow of death blinking alternately.

  No-one should be surprised at Lucy’s willingness to indulge in a little skulduggery with Managua, because at the age of eleven Lucy had murdered her mother.

  It happened like this. The person who made Lucy’s family abnormal was her mother. When William sought advice from a psychotherapist in a last-ditch attempt to save his doomed marriage to Lola, he was told that in selecting a partner we are often searching for what we feel to be the missing piece of ourselves. That might have been a load of hogwash, but if not, then it explains the seeming incompatibility of Lucy’s parents.

  Her father was relentlessly sociable. He struck up conversations with total strangers in the street; he knew everyone in the small fenland village where they lived; when Lucy went to the nearest town, Ely, with him, he seemed to be acquainted with everyone there too.

  Her mother, on the other hand, was fearful not only of strangers but also of people she knew. Even her friends, if you can be said to have friends when you never let anyone inside your house. She exhibited some symptoms of agoraphobia, a condition that is often mistakenly described as a fear of wide-open spaces, an erroneous attribution of the classical root of the word to ager, the Latin for field, when actually it derives from the Greek agora, the market place, making agoraphobia a fear of crowds. In truth, Lucy never noticed her mother being too concerned about crowds or market places if there were bargains to be had. She never missed the Ely bus on Thursdays, enduring greetings from fellow passengers to elbow her way into the thick of the action with the rest of them, pushing and barging in the hunt for a snip.

  No, Lucy’s mother’s particular fear wasn’t of people per se, but of people coming to the house. She lived in terror of unexpected visitors, well, all visitors really. There were no expected ones because she never invited anybody round. Her reaction to them reminded Lucy of an old film she’d seen on TV, a Clark Gable war
film set in a submarine entitled Run Silent Run Deep. When Lucy and her two older sisters heard the crunch of a footstep upon the gravel front path of their small council house, or were surprised by the sudden shock of a fist upon the front door, it was as though their mother had screamed, ‘Dive! Dive! Dive!’ Indeed Lucy, always the most audacious of the three, once uttered those very words only to earn from her mother a quicksilver slap on the cheek. Not for her levity, you understand, but purely because of the practical risk of her tipping off the caller that the family was in.

  Lucy’s mother never shouted ‘Dive! Dive! Dive!’ because she would never have shouted anything. What she did was hiss, sotto voce, ‘Get down!’ The effect was the same. As soon as she spoke, Lucy and her sisters hit the floor. Their mother was not long in following, pausing only to close the curtains, switch off the radio and kill any lights that were on. She lived in fear not only that the family might be heard, but that a person so intrusive as to go calling on people would have no compunction about trolling around outside the house, peering into the windows and listening for the radio, refusing to accept the family’s apparent absence.

  In some cases, Lucy’s mother’s fears were only too well realized. This might occur when someone really did need to see her or her husband urgently.

  Or it might be that someone felt annoyed by Lucy’s mother’s perceived rudeness (as opposed to psychological disorder) and was determined to catch her out. Or rather, in.

  Take the Reverend Mr Diggle, the local minister, when he came collecting for various manifestations of the poor. You could always tell it was him. He was over six feet tall and his silhouette through the upper frosted-glass half of the front door was enough to block the light. The Reverend Mr Diggle had an uncompromising, Come out, come out, wherever you are! knock that made the door shake in its frame. This was the signal for Mum to order, ‘Get down,’ and they’d all hit the deck as though someone had hurled in a hand grenade.

  If the TV was on, the person nearest was expected to crawl across the floor and turn the off switch. And then, as the set was visible to someone peering through the front window – but only someone over six feet and standing on tiptoe (as well as on the pansies in the flower-bed beneath the window) – the same person would have to roll three or four times across the floor to the sheltering safety of the settee, as though evading enemy gunfire.

  That is the prelude to how Lucy came to kill her mother. The actual event took place one afternoon in Cambridge when the eleven-year-old Lucy was waiting for the bus home from the girls’ high school. She was the only girl in the village who attended the high school because she was the only one to have passed the 11-plus. Everyone else, including her sisters, went to the comprehensive.

  Lucy had only been at the school for a term, a short enough time for her to still feel awe and terror at the sight of a prefect. So when she saw Christine Bexley approaching her, she tried her best to make herself small in the hope that Bexley wouldn’t see her. Bexley was the worst prefect in the school, bar none. If you caught her attention you were certain to get a punishment from her.

  Lucy looked at her feet, knowing that, as with a dangerous dog, eye contact was the last thing you wanted. After a minute or so of staring down she raised her eyes and found Bexley standing over her.

  ‘Put your beret on straight, you little tart,’ snapped Bexley.

  Lucy reached up and made the necessary adjustment. Bexley walked around her like a sergeant major inspecting a new recruit.

  ‘Your blazer is undone, do it up.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Lucy miserably. ‘The button came off.’

  ‘Then you’d better get your mummy to sew it back on,’ sneered Bexley. The way she said mummy made it an insult implying that Lucy was a little kid who would still call her mum that. The high school was posher than the comprehensive, but not so posh that the girls called their mothers mummy instead of mum.

  This was what induced Lucy to matricide. Even as the words slipped from her mouth, she sensed that the ambiguity in them was not an accident. At some deep and mysterious level, she meant them to be misconstrued. ‘I haven’t got one,’ she said in a tiny voice.

  Bexley coloured. ‘Oh, I’m . . . er, well, sorry. I um didn’t know.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Lucy magnanimously. She didn’t feel dishonest, well, not totally. Technically, they could still be talking about the button, although it would probably be stretching it to suggest that Bexley would be so apologetic about a missing button.

  ‘Well, just get one put back on by . . . uh . . . someone,’ said Bexley. ‘We don’t want you catching cold now, do we?’ This was followed by a smile. It was the first time in recorded history that Bexley had ever smiled. You could tell from the awkwardness of how the smile looked on her face, the way that it was conscious it didn’t really belong there, that she wasn’t used to doing it.

  At that point Lucy’s bus came. She boarded it grateful that its intervention had prevented any interrogation as to the circumstances of her mother’s passing. She was also thankful that she had escaped punishment. But that night, lying in bed, she felt the guilt and fear of detection that all murderers, except for psychopaths, experience. From this time on, she began to dread a knock on the door almost as much as her mother ever did.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE LITTLE GIRL’S leg sparkled in the morning light. Quite a bit of the flesh-pink paint had got itself rubbed off and the bright sunshine picked out silver grazes. The kid couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. She’d had the leg some time, William could see that by the way in which she walked on it. She was fast and competent, running into the clearing at the centre of the village which indicated she’d long become used to it, but for all its speed her gait showed a pronounced limp, meaning she’d already all but outgrown the prosthetic limb. It wasn’t her big round eyes that brought the lump to William’s face, as he watched her lower herself awkwardly to the ground, suddenly ungainly, the way a swan loses all its grace when it leaves the water and tries to get airborne. It was the big smile, her easy acceptance of the blow fate, or rather his murderous countrymen, had dealt her. You don’t have to just take it, he said to her silently. We can do something about this.

  William counted thirty-seven of them. They ranged from the small girl to an old man who looked all of eighty. What they had in common was that most of them had lost a limb, or part of a limb. The little girl was missing all of her right leg. It was understandable. The blast from a landmine would do more damage to a smaller person. A boy next to her, maybe seven years old, had lost his left arm from the elbow down. He didn’t have an artificial limb. His arm just came to a stop in a neat round stump. The old man was missing his left leg below the knee. The stump of his thigh was encased in a white plastic sheath that slotted into his artificial knee, which comprised a small wheel connecting to the metal stick that made up his tibia which ended in a large black leather boot. A couple of other men had lost whole arms. One man appeared to be blinded. Only two people were uninjured: Purnu and another man, who were there because their wives had bled to death after being injured by mines. The most common injury as far as William could see, and it was exactly what he’d expected to encounter because he’d done his research on anti-personnel landmines, was a missing foot or foot and lower leg.

  What made the whole thing so grotesque was the natives’ lack of clothes, the men wearing only the pubic leaf and the women their short grass skirts. This exposed the plastic and metal prosthetic limbs they had been fitted with. Those with artificial limbs which had a close resemblance to human flesh looked odd because the fake skin of their prosthetics was either a pale pink, meant to ape a white person’s, or deep black, probably designed for Afro-Americans in the US and just as incongruous as white next to the natives’ honey-coloured skin.

  The older prosthetics displayed chunks of shiny metal – hinge mechanisms to replace knees or elbows – that made the wearer look like some robot in a sci-fi movie whose plastic sk
in covering has been partially destroyed. Where only a foot had been lost the artificial one that replaced it took the form of a boot. This looked ludicrous at the end of a bare leg, reminding William of the clumpy shoes that terminated Mickey Mouse’s stick-like legs, only here rendered even more incongruous by being partnered by a naked foot.

  Everywhere the harnesses that attached the artificial limbs, which in a Westerner would have been hidden beneath clothes, were exposed. It somehow made the degradation of their condition that much worse, symbolizing as it did what had happened to them, the purity and innocence of their naked flesh perverted by technology.

  There was a hum of excited chatter as William bent over his notebook, waiting for a couple of stragglers to limp over to the others and sit down.

  When everyone was seated, Managua clapped his hands as a signal for silence. It was he who had called the people together at William’s behest. When William had asked for his assistance, Managua had immediately bristled with suspicion, which, William decided, was a vital part of his make-up. But William had refused to be drawn by his questions. ‘It’s to help them,’ was all he would say.

  ‘Help?’ said Managua. ‘You is mean we is get better new legs and arms?’