by Brian Aldiss
The lawyer translated Soames’ remark into Goyese for the benefit of Ladies Only, who again laughed his dry, monkey laugh, clicking his tongue at Soames.
‘I must not be paid twice,’ Obendsi said. ‘Here is a letter for you explaining how my stipend comes.’
He presented a folded sheet of paper to Soames.
The letter was brief, and read:
Dear Soames,
Whatever have you been up to, has the sun got you or something? Everyone has a different version of what you have been up to, but I hope to get you out of the lockup soon. I am paying this lawyer chap a large sum of doimores I happen to have handy to frame things your way.
Apostle on last lap.
Cheer up.
Ted Timpleton.
Well, thought Soames, the blighter certainly has a good heart. He recalled his first morning in Africa, when he had climbed out of the plane to find the engineer frying eggs, and a wave of nostalgia swept over him.
As the two lawyers prepared to leave the cell, there were handshakes all round. Then Ladies Only opened the door for his superior. As Obendsi’s back was turned, the older man, one finger to his lips, extended a much folded spill of paper to Soames; still with the bored look of a tourist on his face, he winked once and then tailed quickly out after Obendsi.
When the door had clanged shut, Soames opened the spill, carrying it over to the tiny window to read. The schoolgirl scrawl inside said:
Keep hopeful for immediate release sooner or later. I will see you are set free, do not fear. But mind what things you say to lawyer Obendsi who is one of witch doctor’s friends, who has no love of you.
I have,
Cherry.
At least it was good to know that he had friends. Somewhat stunned by a feeling of helplessness, Soames gazed from the window. A ragged man was sticking posters to suitable buildings; on the poster was the legend: JIMPO FOR PRESIDENT, in several languages.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t start this ruddy thing up without Soames,’ Timpleton said decisively, folding his hairy arms across his chest.
Queen Louise, who was acting as interpreter, repeated this remark to the President in Goyese.
‘Tell him he is talking entire nonsense,’ Landor said briskly to the Queen. ‘Say I know that Noyes is only a mouthpiece, and that if the Apostle is now ready to run, he must make it run without Noyes.’
‘The King and President condemns your line of gibberish, insisting you wake the machine now. Noyes is only an official for show, who can be done without,’ the Queen said in English.
‘Avez-vous ever écouté de “protocol”, monsieur Président?’ Timpleton demanded. ‘It’s more than my job’s worth to start this valuable baby without official OK. Get it? Le OK official, n’est- pas? Le monsieur Soames seulement peut le donner. You tell him, Queen.’
‘You are being obscurantist,’ hissed the Queen.
‘The three figures stood before the great dull hulk of the computer. The blood-red matt-surfaced plates which protected its delicate insides had now been clamped into place. It was ready for action. Twenty-five feet long, seven feet high, three feet deep, the Apostle Mk II was a splendid sight, enough to fill a Unilateral man’s heart with pride or send terror into an infidel soul. The long row of dials, one set in each panel, stared out like octopus eyes; they, and the formidable array of indicators on the control block at one end, silently awaited the pulse of life.
‘You are not fulfilling the conditions of your contract,’ Landor told Timpleton through the Queen. ‘I shall cable your firm and tell them so.’
‘What? When I’ve worked like a black – better than a black to put this thing together? Be reasonable now!’ Timpleton said. ‘I can’t get it straight from anyone what Soames is supposed to have done, but I know jolly well he wouldn’t meddle in anything that didn’t concern him. He’s not the type! If you let him go free, we’ll check this thing over and have it going in two shakes.’
The Queen and King argued together in Goyese.
‘The King and President declares it is none of your business,’ Queen Louise finally said, ‘what Noyes has committed. Even he cannot yet comprehend exactly what happened last night; that is why there must be court thrashing out. Valuable public property was destroyed last night.’
‘You mean the railway engine that was busted up? Crikey, Queen, you don’t seriously believe poor old Soames did that, do you? Don’t you know him better than that?’
‘All men in Umbalathorp have anger in their hearts at the destruction of a fine public entertainment,’ Queen Louise said. ‘They demand somebody to be punished.’
‘Why pick on Soames! Even if he was hanging about there, I’m damn sure it wasn’t to jigger up your mouldy little railway.’
‘The King and President – and I too – declare you to be a man without understanding. We command you to start the machine to work.’
‘The three of you can go to hell in a bucket,’ Timpleton said, dashing down the cigarette he was smoking and grinding it underfoot. Without waiting to hear any more, he strode out of the room.
At first he wandered aimlessly about the grounds in the rear of the palace. Then, reaching a decision, he set off along the river bank, walking upstream. If it was no good appealing to the head of state (using, at the same time, a little leverage), he would appeal to the biggest crook in the state, with whom he had already had dealings: José Blencimonti Soares. For Timpleton had misgivings already about the efficiency of the black lawyer, Obendsi, whom he had hired directly he learnt that Soames was under arrest.
Timpleton had never thought deeply on any matter outside his own profession, for which he cared passionately; he regarded anyone who sought to impose an intellectual pattern upon their life as a crank, a fool; his own – totally unconscious – modes of behaviour were dictated, like those of many of his social level, by a wish to project the irrationality of adolescence as far into middle age as possible. He had no love for Soames: their natures were totally dissimilar. What he did have (and what Soames, in his place, would have tended to despise) was an urge to help out a fellow countryman in a tough spot. To do this would be to assist Timpleton as well as Soames, for his simple, unchangeable, irrational creed was that he was superior to anyone with a coloured skin – just as he was superior to anyone born in Italy, Spain or Germany.
He had gone only a short way down the riverside track when the rain began. Sprinting, Timpleton ran for shelter in a small hut he had passed before on his way to Soares. He dived into its dark cover, to glare morosely out at the sudden shower, cursing the climate. In thick jungle, this rain would scarcely have reached the ground, being absorbed by the mat of foliage overhead, but here it soaked down in random leaks, as if the heavens were a giant colander.
To Timpleton’s pleased surprise, the downpour began to slow after five minutes. He did not know it, but this final errant douche represented the end of a brief wet season; the skies would now be cloudless for several weeks. As quiet fell again, he heard a sound behind him; turning, he found two pairs of eyes regarding him intently from the rear of the hut, one pair belonging to a man stretched on a skin bed, one to an old woman who squatted naked beside him, tending him.
The man on the skins had evidently been wounded. His body was smeared with dung and a white, chalky substance, and dotted with omens of recovery: a lion’s hair, a tiger’s tooth, a festering wing of a bird, berries. By the feet of this much decorated invalid lay a bowler hat.
‘My crikey, they’re crazy, these people,’ said Timpleton, noting this last incongruity as he plunged out of the shelter. Turning up his collar, he trudged doggedly on to Soares’ place.
A wrought-iron gate set in a white wall gave access to the white-walled Soares home. The half-caste gatekeeper recognised Timpleton and let him in. Soares himself sat morosely on the verandah, talking to three Goyese in suits; he looked up and saw the engineer, waving without rising as he generally did.
‘Ah, great pleasure and honour as always to
seeing you,’ he called, as Timpleton mounted the steps. ‘Maybe you hear today I become Number One Ruined Man, all my hard work gone for a wind. Just now I consult, but please to go in and make free with my house and daughter while they are here. Tomorrow, all may be swept right away with debt.’
He turned and said something in the native tongue at which his three companions laughed.
‘I’m sorry to hear the bad news, but I didn’t come to see Maria, José,’ Timpleton said, not pleased by laughter he could not comprehend. ‘I came to see you. You seem to be able to swing most things in this town; I want you to get my pal Soames out of jail.’
‘Wha-a-at that you saying?’ the Portuguese asked, his plump face slowly turning dark red. ‘You come to me and talk about your friend Soames? Your friend! Madre dios! You give me too much insult. Are you not know this scab-devouring, double-deal-addict Soames run down my first, Number One warehouse in just this last night? If they fling him in the jail house, don’t I want anything else in the whole world except maybe shoot him? Now you come for ask me let him out? You crazy? You got touch from the sun? Or maybe you take too much bad palm wine? Which it is?’
Timpleton climbed slowly on to the second verandah step. Anger in others always infected him with anger, as simply as we yawn because we see others yawn.
‘Shut your greasy trap,’ he said. ‘I asked you a civil question and I expect a civil bloody answer.’
‘Then go elsewhere!’ Soares shouted. ‘I am finished man through this fellow Soames. All my assets destructed! So you can clear out; our deal is finished and no more business to make. Go on, hop off!’
‘OK, you stinking little …’ Timpleton said. Jumping up the steps, he kicked the bamboo table aside and grabbed Soares by the fat bundles of breast under his shirt. Ignoring the Portuguese’s struggles, Timpleton brought one fist back – and then the three Goyese gentlemen, hitherto sitting politely in their places, joined the exchange. They were big and bony, with disinterested attitudes towards pain. In a confused fashion, Timpleton was aware of being lumped and battered towards the garden wall; next minute, he was tossed over it, to sprawl hard in the tall grasses outside.
If the most typical English smell is the refreshing tang of wet pavements, the most typical central African one is a sharp-sweet spicy aroma, as of cardamom inhaled from a mighty armpit. Timpleton lay idly savouring this odour for some while, until the sound of a car engine roused him enough to make him sit up.
The car drew level with him and stopped. When the dust had settled, much of it over him, Timpleton perceived that the driver was Assidawa Obendsi, the lawyer; beside him slumped his assistant, Ladies Only.
‘Do you wait for anyone, ceteris paribus?’ enquired the lawyer politely, fitting his wide shoulders into the wide window and leaning out to inspect the Englishman.
‘Gimme a hand, will you?’ Timpleton said thickly, pulling a lump of mud off his ear.
Obendsi gestured to his assistant. At once, the little monkey-faced man scuttled round the battered bonnet of the vehicle. With much grunting and clicking of the tongue, his mouth hanging open, Ladies Only managed to help Timpleton into the back seat of the car. There he sat, cradling the engineer’s tousled head in his lap, muttering words of comfort to him in Afrikaans.
‘Wisest course is to take you into the hospital for treatment,’ Obendsi said, looking round contemptuously at Timpleton. Taking silence for confirmation, he started bowling down the dusty track again.
‘Any news of Soames? Did he send anybody any notes?’ Timpleton managed to ask, as they finally slowed down in the market place to get past three home-going bullocks.
‘No notes, no nothing,’ said Obendsi positively. ‘My client is very low in spirit, but I cheer him up. Here is the hospital. Here they give you a really thorough treatment and make you never wish to visit there again.’
Ladies Only helped Timpleton into the foyer, where white-clad negroes took over; he produced a sad, simian smile of farewell and returned to the car. Timpleton was then as thoroughly, as efficiently, manhandled as he had been at Soares’ home. For half an hour he was probed, X-rayed, massaged, plastered and disinfected; he had his eyeballs examined, his chest thumped, his knees tapped, and the cavities between his toes examined for foot rot. It was dark when they released him with no more serious an injury than a wounded pride.
As Timpleton lingered on the gritty hospital steps, staring out at a hundred tiny lights, the palace lorry drew up outside. Cushioned benches in the back seated five personages who now disembarked in the sort of profusion one usually associates with three times that number: President M’Grassi Landor, Mrs President Tunna, Queen Louise, Princess Cherry and Princeling Shappy. Timpleton stepped uneasily back into the foyer, uncertain of his reception, but the President gave a friendly nod as he passed; had the engineer but known it, M’Grassi tolerated anger and insult almost cheerfully; the people he disliked were those who perpetually showed him an imperturbable front; he had long ago realised that self-control is a prerequisite of the assassin.
Princess Cherry stopped and seized Timpleton’s sleeve.
‘You have been here to see Deal Jimpo?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Timpleton admitted. ‘I tripped up and had to have a bit of plaster on my knee.’
‘Then come with us to see him; we go to his room now. If he is conscious, he will welcome. In fact, the more the merrier.’
‘Well, thanks, Princess, but … it’s none of my business to tag along with you.’
‘No? I think it is business. This I must say to you, that though you do not feel a friend inside, you must act in friendship with me. You are a recessive man, Timpleton, I tell you; but here is no staying neutral. Not even trees stay neutral in Umbalathorp. You must be on one side or the other. Why not be on the winning side?’
‘It’s not a question of sides,’ Timpleton said uneasily.
‘I am saying it is so,’ Princess Cherry insisted. ‘Come on. If you stand for your friend Soames as I do, you stand for Jimpo. Therefore you come to see him. Just follow me.’
Shrugging his shoulders, Timpleton allowed himself to be dragged on by the young princess. Walking rapidly, they caught up with the rest of the royal party on the stairs. Thus they were in time to see, as Jimpo’s ward door was opened by a curtsying matron, that Dumayami squatted on the bed, crouching over the prone body of the prince.
Chapter Eleven
‘While thy hook spares …’
The witch doctor adheres to a rule followed instinctively by the practitioners of all schools of physical and mental healing: he strives through visual display for mental domination of his patient. The ornate robes of the High Anglican church, the frock coat and top hat of the market-side quack, the faultless tailoring of your psychiatrist, right down perhaps to the anxiously hurried air of the average GP, all strive to strike awe in the beholder through his optic nerve. Dumayami went one – or rather, two – better: he also attacked through the aural and olfactory nerves, by rattling bones and burning bat dung at the bedside.
He squatted astride the blanketed body of Jimpo, leaning forward to insert pellets into the prince’s nostrils, with his great haunches rising on either side of his arched body like wings. The electric light had been switched off; in its stead rush lights by the bedside cast great devil shadows on the ceiling, transforming a hospital ward into a cave. Timpleton gasped involuntarily at the sight. For a moment, something inside him communed with ancient European memories of vampirism, black mass and the joyless junketings of Walpurgis Night; then the President turned the electric light on.
In a flash, Dumayami was just a dirty old man in cassock, Ike button and grey flannels, with painted face and bloody hands. He was also an angry dirty old man. With ferocious agility, he jumped from the bed and confronted the royal party.
M’Grassi Landor was no less angry.
It is a distressing trait in human nature that we tend to underestimate the good in others when circumstances are against them; if we int
ercept a couple creeping out of a single bedroom in a hotel, we are more prone to suspect them of having indulged in the emptiness of lust, than to reflect that they may have found that beauty and goodness which we ourselves have previously discovered in a similar situation. It never occurred to M’Grassi now that Dumayami was merely doing his best to succour a sick man.
‘This is damned interference,’ he said thickly. ‘Since when have you been on the hospital staff, Dumayami? Who allowed you to come into this room?’
‘I ask no permission of anyone where I go,’ Dumayami replied; ‘I go where the need for me exists.’
‘You dare to carry out your beastly rites here!’ M’Grassi exclaimed. He seized the bag of pebbles, the green bones, the dung pouch, the carved horn, from the bed, and flung them out into the corridor. ‘Get your insanitary relics away from here, Dumayami, and take yourself with them. I don’t want you near Jimpo again.’
‘You offend every tabu in Umbalathorp!’ the witch doctor screamed. His face twitched like a mask, the wearer of which is convulsed by sneezing. ‘By this deed, you have roused your father from his grave; your grandfather and great-grandfather also wake to curse you. Now the lines of the dust will rise and trip you, and the grey grains of shadow fill your eyes with sand. When the hands of the dead come for you in the night-time, your screams shall curdle in your belly. When the horse-headed gods – Arghhh!’
He drew back with a withered hand raised to his cheek. M’Grassi had struck him across the face. For a second, the two men looked at each other with mutual fear; both knew that the long, uneasy peace they had kept was broken, both feared the unknown future.
‘I regret doing that,’ M’Grassi said, half in a whisper.
Dumayami gave no sign of having heard. Hand still raised, he skirted the party, who shrank back from him, and went quietly through the door. Little Prince Shappy burst into tears.