The Male Response

by Brian Aldiss

  The negro fell in beside him, cutting off the mumble with a long account of his own which he interspersed with frequent laughter, rather to Soames’ irritation.

  ‘What’s the good of going on, old boy, when you know I don’t understand a word?’ he enquired, but the negro was still laughing and talking when they reached the river bank. Pushing his way forward, keeping his bicycle miraculously free from entanglements with bushes, he came to where Deal Jimpo was lying.

  The latter uttered a few curt sentences, evidently announcing who he was, for at once the newcomer lay down beside him and clutched his hand; he broke into what sounded like an incoherent address of welcome to Jimpo. While they were talking together, Timpleton reappeared, grimy and hot, having set fire to the grass according to Jimpo’s instructions. Soames rapidly explained to him what had happened.

  ‘We have fortune in some things at least,’ Jimpo said, rising with the newcomer’s aid and leaning on his crutch. ‘This good man, Tanuana Motijala, tells us we are less than a day’s journey – even with my slow progress – from Umbalathorp itself. He will escort us along the trail and we can leave at once.’

  This was indeed good news. Both Soames and Timpleton had had private dreams of spending a week by the surly river, beating off crocodiles, rhinoceros and water snakes with fragments of girder from the plane.

  ‘Thank him very much indeed and ask him where the hell he got his push bike,’ Timpleton said.

  A brief exchange between the two black men followed and then Jimpo explained, ‘He won it in a raffle.’

  Once more they did the journey to the plane under the blazing sun. Jimpo assured them that directly he reached the capital of Goya an expedition would be despatched to bring back everything from the wreck, including their luggage, and on this understanding they set off light-handed, Timpleton and Soames bearing haversacks containing water and food.

  Tanuana’s trail lay some distance beyond the plane. It was a relief to find themselves in the shadow of the jungle, but this benefit was short-lived, for soon the trail was winding uphill fairly steeply. Both white men began to blow hard, and Jimpo’s face was grim with effort; Tanuana, noticing nothing, chattered and laughed in the same cheery way he had done when Soames first met him.

  ‘Whatever is he talking about?’ Soames enquired irritably at last, when the trail momentarily levelled out.

  ‘Saying he explore wreck of flying plane before you appear,’ Jimpo said. ‘Saying he kill four vulture birds in nose of flying plane. Saying they eat too much, too fat to get out hole they come in by. Saying he got four good beaks in saddle-bag.’

  Thereafter they lapsed into silence. Gloom rose in Soames. He disliked the way Jimpo’s English was growing worse; it might be only the pain he was suffering; or it might be that the eighteen-year-old ex-Etonian was reverting to type. Now that Umbalathorp actually lay ahead, it no longer seemed the inviting haven it had a few hours earlier. Obviously the first thing to be done was to get a radio message through to Unilateral, asking for rescue at once. Primitivism cast no spell over Soames; he was a Guardian man.

  Gradually the distances between the figures grew. Ahead was Tanuana, sometimes uttering a brief snatch of song. A short way behind him came Jimpo, with Soames following close and Timpleton much in the rear. The jungle, moody and fascinating at first, soon became, like an expanse of moody and fascinating contemporary wallpaper, something to pass with averted eyes.

  The morning drew on, the trail widened, every step became a burden. After a long time, when there was no sign of Tanuana ahead, nor had been for some while, Jimpo halted, leaning against a tree until Soames caught up with him.

  ‘You look bad, Jimpo,’ Soames exclaimed, seeing his haggard look and grey face. Sweat sprayed from both their foreheads.

  ‘Is nothing. We will stop here for rest. Bloody man Tanuana go too fast for me. Wait for Ted to bring us water.’

  They both lay down and rested. Ten minutes later, Timpleton appeared, trudging with his head down, his thumbs hooked into his haversack straps.

  ‘Don’t they have any ruddy buses on this route?’ he asked, sitting down beside them and swinging his haversack off his back. His morale was so good that Soames’ also improved.

  As they ate canned peaches and cheese biscuits, Jimpo announced that they were near a village; he ‘could tell’, he explained. He thought that Tanuana might soon return with villagers to help them.

  ‘What, a lift?’ Timpleton asked. ‘Litters or elephants?’

  ‘Possibly a handcart,’ Jimpo said. ‘Now we will press on again. We must remain on our legs.’

  ‘If you will stay here with Ted, I will go on and hurry them up,’ Soames said. ‘I don’t think you are in a fit state to walk any further.’

  ‘It will not be fit state for my father’s people to find me lying down,’ Jimpo said. ‘Help me to stand.’

  They had been on the move again only another ten minutes when they came into a clearing. From the other side of it, a reception committee was approaching. Ten men, among whom were Tanuana with his green bicycle, several women, and a flock of naked children, jostled round a large barrow loaded with flowers. The three from the plane were rapidly surrounded by people and voices.

  With a splendid show of patience, Soames and Timpleton stood for a long while listening to speeches all round.

  ‘What’s it all about?’ Soames asked.

  Jimpo eyed him rather superciliously.

  ‘They made delay to decorate my triumphal cart appropriately,’ he said, as willing hands bore him up on to the bed of flowers. The procession then gradually moved off, the two white men following behind the main crowd.

  Some hours later, when shadows lengthened over patchily cultivated land, they entered, the capital of Goya, and an old man of benevolent aspect came forward with pineapple ice cream, smearing it ceremoniously over their faces and hands.

  Chapter Three

  ‘… And full-grown lambs loud bleat …’

  Without putting too philosophical a shine on the matter, we may say that cities are places where men gather. It follows therefore that, as no man is perfect, no city he builds is without fault. Hong Kong has its overcrowding, Peking its interminable walls, London its traffic, New York its pavements, Bombay its hideous buildings, Paris its foreigners, Buenos Aires its residents. Umbalathorp has its biting things. It was a peevish Soames Noyes who climbed from his rush bed next morning and cursed all the nocturnally feeding species who had banquetted upon him.

  ‘We’d have done better to stay in the plane,’ Timpleton said, running a thumb-sized bug to earth in his arm pit.

  ‘Jimpo said we’d be moved to the palace today. It should be slightly less inhabited there.’

  ‘Soames … Do you reckon those black women’ll come and bath us again like they did last night? That was a queer stunt, if you like.’

  Soames emitted a giggle. He had yet to orient his feelings with regard to that ceremony.

  ‘They did you all over,’ Timpleton said musing. ‘Christ, I ask you, Soames, if they’ll wash your crutch what else won’t they do?!’

  ‘The same thought occurred to me, Ted,’ Soames admitted solemnly and was surprised when Timpleton burst into laughter.

  The bathing ceremony had occurred at dusk last night, shortly after the weary travellers had arrived. By then, Jimpo had already left them to be carried to his father, informing them they would be well looked after. That they certainly had been, and the three girls apiece who scrubbed Timpleton and Soames, despite their coy protests, in ceremonial concrete baths, had not lacked ardour. Soames had to admit that the only offensive note in this covertly erotic ceremony had been the emptying of an entire carton of detergent into their water.

  While they were still being dried by their handmaids with wads of cotton waste, an English-speaking native appeared. He escorted them, when they were ready, to a brick building where an excellent meal was served. Then he took them through the strange-smelling darkness to this beehive-s
haped hut in which they had served as nourishment all night.

  ‘All Umbalathorp men make to you much apologise for this dead-end-kid mansion,’ he told Soames and Timpleton. ‘Better you to sleep here one night while room for you in President palace not sweep. Tomorrow room in palace be much sweep for you. Be nice for you. Be clean like England hospital tomorrow. Only tonight not sweep.’

  ‘I suppose it never occurred to the blighter that this place wasn’t sweep either,’ Soames grumbled, when the man had gone, after producing – or so it had seemed – a lighted candle for them from his pocket.

  ‘This must be where they usually keep the palace tigers,’ Timpleton said, sniffing suspiciously.

  ‘Subtle effluence of cat,’ agreed Soames.

  ‘Subtle? Have you got cotton wool up your nose?’

  Now Soames emerged into the open air, nervously rubbing his hands together. He wore, with an uneasy air, the European clothes the handmaids had given him the night before, in exchange for his own sweat-stained garments. The clothes did not fit properly, hence his nervousness; to a casual observer he might have been taken for a repentant amateur clothes thief, or an ex-jailbird without the strength of his previous convictions.

  Directly Timpleton joined him, similarly disguised, their guide of the night before appeared and escorted them to breakfast.

  ‘After this foregoing meal you are have a shave in the barber’s and next then go to palace,’ he told them.

  When they left the barber’s shop, a large hut with a number of smelly charms for sale on the walls, a rickshaw was waiting to take them to the palace. This ride gave them their first good chance of seeing Umbalathorp. The capital, although small, was dispersed over uneven ground broken by several streams and bounded on the one side by a hill they later knew as Stranger’s Hill and on the other by the Uiui River, whose opposite bank rose in places to become almost unscaleable cliff. In the town itself, streets and roads, with few exceptions, were sketchily marked, huts, bungalows and larger buildings facing this way or that according to the whim of their owners. Patches of cultivation or strips of jungle stood even in the heart of the town, giving Umbalathorp a desultory air. The total effect was as if Bideford had suddenly been elected capital of England, whereupon everyone’s garden had grown eaves high, and the town council, to celebrate, had planted thousands of giant straw beehives in the streets as far as Northam and Buckland Brewer.

  Many people were about, mostly negro, the variety of their features suggesting that several races mingled here; a number of Indians could be seen, carrying umbrellas and looking important. Once Soames thought he saw a European, but the man vanished into a shop. A few American cars were in evidence, outnumbered by pariah dogs by ten to one.

  The rickshaw made its way slowly through the market place, its owner adding his voice to the babble of the crowd; they swerved down a wide road and came unexpectedly on the Presidential palace, from which a crimson, scarlet and black flag flew. Guards at the gate waved to the vehicle as it passed them and turned up the drive.

  The palace looked like one of those great grey barracks the British used to build with such tedious frequency in Central India, but its gauntness was relieved by a riot of creeper which attempted to swarm up every balustrade and into every window – something never permissible in Central India, for fear the local women took advantage of this unorthodox staircase to accost the troops. From the tessellations which crowned the building floated a great brown banner bearing a word that, in these unexpected surroundings, took on a resonant ambiguity: DUNLOP. On the wide steps below, flecked by the droppings of a thousand brightly coloured birds which flitted ceaselessly in and out of the creeper, ten black soldiers in white uniforms stood with rifles at the slope, open umbrellas attached to the rifles in place of bayonets, lest they should become flecked like the steps on which they stood.

  This impressive scene was marred only by a discarded bath full of Coca-Cola bottles and rainwater lying by the drive, from which a dog drank in insolent disregard of the nearby soldiery.

  When Soames and Timpleton dismounted from their chariot, their guide paid off the owner and led them quickly up the steps. They proceeded through an archway and down a corridor to a small room, the door of which the guide opened for them.

  ‘Please wait here; someone else come see you soon, gentlemen.’

  ‘This is like a dentist’s waiting room only more so,’ Timpleton remarked, as the guide left.

  On the benches round the room two men were already sitting, as far apart from each other as possible; Soames and Timpleton selected an intermediate position and eyed the magazines piled on a central table. The only English language offerings were two copies of Drum and a Radio Times for week ending 5th March 1955.

  Soames had no sooner settled down to scratch a cluster of tiny, red-hot tents erected close to his navel by an exploring insect party the previous night, when one of the two waiting men shuffled over and addressed him.

  ‘Is it my pleasure and fortune to be soliciting the two flying British who are transporting the magical scientific box hitherwards?’ he enquired, in an English so elaborately broken that the two flying British were left rather in the air. ‘Possibility that it can be no others makes a double delight.’

  Always anxious not to make an inadequate response, Soames rose, bowed awkwardly, and said, ‘How do you do? This is my colleague Mr Edward Timpleton: my name is Soames Noyes.’

  The stranger received these names with relish, repeating them to himself with his fingers on his lips, as if to get the feel as well as the sound of them.

  ‘So!’ he said. ‘No meeting for me can be more too delightful,’ and he announced himself with a flourish as José Blencimonti Soares. This done, he shook hands warmly and protractedly with both Soames and Timpleton, producing a bandana after the operation, on which he thoroughly mopped his podgy hands.

  He was a dumpy man in his fifties, dressed in a tropical suit, from the starched lapels of which burst a large flower like a geranium, its brightness in striking contrast to the grey jowls which brushed it during excessive outbursts of expressiveness.

  ‘I am for long resident in Umbalathorp, sirs,’ he said, ‘and delighted to show you its attractions, if of convenience. I have the pleasure and fortune to be leader of local Portuguese community. We see few Europeans here: last one was an American called Mr John Gunther, and brand-new faces like yours always welcome, also pleasantness of visit very much agreeable. My residence, my wife, my food and my beautiful daughter Maria are open to you eternally.’

  Ignoring the sly kick this last remark prompted Timpleton to give him, Soames offered his thanks and enquired innocently if there were any Englishmen in the town. At this Soares’ pudgy face clouded like a peke’s with toothache, and he said, ‘Only one outcast family, señor, the Pickets, at whom you should be advised to steer clearly.’

  Timpleton waved him nearer with two beckoning fingers.

  ‘Here, Mr Soares, give us the lowdown on this dump. Never mind the English – what we want to know is, how about the women?’

  The Portuguese laughed. Soames recognised that laugh; it had frequently been described in the literature of his boyhood as ‘a greasy chuckle’.

  ‘So you are what you call an old dirty man,’ he said, nodding approvingly. ‘In all the world is women to be had, and in Goya many good variety, what colour or size to fit the individual whimsy. Only one thing to be warned is of dreaded akkabaksi pox.’

  ‘What the deuce is akkabaksi pox?’ inquired Soames, alarmed and interested.

  Soares rolled yellow eyeballs and puffed out yellow-grey cheeks expressively.

  ‘Akkabaksi pox is very nasty local disease, misters, I telling you, cause much misery in the bazaar.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Is caught from dirty woman, pfafft, just like that. After two days catching it, the victim finds hugest black scabs of matter at point of contact. Then he will pack up three days ration for food and water and will march off int
o the jungle.’

  ‘What for?’ Timpleton asked. He had turned an unsuitable shade of grey round the jowls.

  ‘Is finished, sir,’ Soares replied simply. ‘Has no cure. Not Western medicine or witch doctor Dumayami can cure dreaded akkabaksi pox. In three four days, all the bones turn to jelly, the stomach will explode. Pfafft! Is finish!’

  ‘Good God!’ the two Englishmen exclaimed in chorus.

  Switching his mood and expression from supreme dejection to extreme elation, Soares leant over and smacked them on the knee.

  ‘But is no need for worry for you. Trust to me who can be your friend. Always I sell you good clean girl. Come to old Soares for priceless virgin flesh. Guaranteed no disease. Fresh as a sea smell.’

  Changing this subject abruptly, he asked, ‘Now you have an auditorium with President Landor, yes?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Soames said. ‘The arrangements seem a bit vague. We only got here last night, you know.’

  ‘Any difficulties, come at a run to me, I insist,’ Soares said, smiling winningly. ‘Because I do much trade in Goya. I have pleasure and honour to hold ear of President.’ He tapped his heart impressively as if he kept this presidential appendage in his breast-pocket.

  ‘We’re going to live in the palace,’ said Timpleton. ‘Is it OK here? Give us the lowdown.’

  ‘Hunky dory,’ Soares told him unexpectedly. ‘All plumbing throughout by courtesy of José Soares and his company. All business here, my business.’

  A palace guard entered and spoke briefly in Goyese to Soares.

  ‘Now is time for my auditorium,’ Soares said. ‘Gentlemen, we are bounders to meet again.’ Bowing, smiling, nodding, wagging one finger above his head, he left with the guard.

  Half an hour later, the same guard appeared and beckoned to the two Englishmen. As they left, Soames glanced back at the other occupant of the waiting room. He was an ancient, white-haired negro with a battered cardboard box on his knee. Not once had he stirred since Soames had been there. Perhaps, like the 1955 Radio Times, he went with the room.