by Adam Thorpe
‘A medicine or a fetish?’ came from my aunt.
‘Fetishes are medicines of a sort, dear,’ said my uncle, sounding weary. ‘The Enos of the spirit world.’
His barking laugh, a mumble from my aunt, then my mother’s voice again: ‘Now hold on tight. Here’s the official recipe, known right across equatorial Africa.’
There was then a strange, wavery sound, and I momentarily changed my ear for my eye; in the egg timer shape of the keyhole my mother was waving her hands about, like she did when she danced to her jazz records. I listened again, wincing at the cold of the metal on my ear: ‘. . . point of needle, grain of rice; blood of cockerel, small crow’s feather; dust of trampled ground and cockerel’s crop; skin of human hand and bit of human liver; portion of testicle and strip of cloth from menstruating woman –’
‘Good God!’ came from my aunt.
‘Not finished yet,’ said my mother.
‘Go on, go on,’ cried my uncle. ‘Eye of newt and baby’s wotsit, I suppose.’
There was a little pause.
‘You’ve put me off,’ said my mother, in a normal voice. ‘I can’t think. Have I mentioned the skin? From the palm, the sole of the foot, and the forehead. Then the whole lot is wrapped in leaves and anointed periodically with oil.’
‘Palm oil,’ said my uncle.
‘No,’ said my mother, ‘oil boiled from the fat of a human intestine.’
‘Whose, might we ask?’ said my uncle, jovially.
‘This is the important bit,’ said my mother.
‘Oh crikey,’ said my aunt.
‘You are,’ my mother went on, ‘a handsome boy or pretty maiden strolling back from school, when the bushes stir and out leap what look like leopards. But these leopards have human faces above their spots, and their claws are three-pronged knives. Your only consolation is that none of you will be wasted.’
‘Good grief,’ said my aunt again, after a pause; ‘I mean, how can you bear to live there?’
‘Fascinating,’ said my uncle, ‘quite fascinating.’
‘Borfimas are outlawed, of course,’ my mother went on. ‘As are leopard-skin costumes and three-pronged knives and membership of anything resembling a Leopard Society. About twenty years ago it got particularly out of hand, and a Special Commission was sent out from England. They hung nearly a hundred leopard men.’
There was a long silence, in which I could only hear my own heart beating, exactly as Jim Hawkins’s did behind the apple barrel on the ship.
‘And what is the point of all this savagery, all this awfulness?’ said my aunt.
I heard my uncle murmur something.
‘Vital Force, my foot!’ my aunt cried. ‘It’s superstition and savagery!’
My uncle was very keen on this Vital Force. His excavation was something to do with it. (I had recently shown my uncle an advertisement for rhubarb tonic, in which Vital Force was also promised, but he’d only looked cross.)
‘If you carry the package around with you, it makes you very powerful and rich,’ said my mother. ‘Everyone goes in fear of you, in case you use it against them. However, if the oil goes off, or isn’t replenished, the borfima will turn against the owner and destroy him.’
‘How do you know all this?’ asked my aunt, in a suspicious way.
My mother made a noise that might have been a chuckle. ‘Oh, we keep our ears to the ground. And there are books, Joy. Human Leopards, for instance, by one of the Special Commission chaps. I forget his name. And quite a bit is being done in the field by ethnographers – you know, earnest young men in round glasses with dog-eared copies of the Golden Bough –’
‘No,’ my aunt insisted, ‘I mean why should you need to know all this, my dear Charlotte?’
There was a short pause. The clock in the hallway was tutting at me. My neck was stiff. My ear felt as if it had frozen to the keyhole. But I didn’t want to move an inch until the answer had come.
‘A few months ago,’ my mother said, so quietly that I was hurting my ear to catch her words, ‘I had a patient with a frightfully ripped-up foot, from a village not very far away. When I asked him how he’d come by such a nasty injury, he said that he’d caught it in a trap. What kind of trap? I enquired. A leopard trap, he replied: it caught my paw and when I pulled it out the pad was left dangling, Missus Medicine.’
Another pause. I felt slightly sick, and wanted to go to bed.
‘Lycanthropy, dear,’ said my uncle.
My aunt must have been looking puzzled. I heard a glass being set down on the table and the scrape of a chair. Looking through the keyhole, I saw the big buckle on my aunt’s skirt. I made for the nearest door, which led down to the cellar. The kitchen door opened as I was closing the cellar door, and I stood trembling in the darkness for a few minutes, until the stairs had finished thumping and creaking.
The darkness behind me, down the stone steps, was terrible. Leopard men crouched with iron claws, waiting for me to move, while Herbert E. Standing glimmered only fitfully between, like the faulty electric lamp by the bus-stop on the lane. I knew, then, as one does know these things, that Sir Steggie was in England, making for this house. I had no fetish packet in my pocket; its crumbling form was under my pillow, where I most needed it. But when I thought of my fetish packet, I could only see the nightmarish stuff of a borfima – as I could only think, looking at the cross in the village church, of Benin’s slaves hanging headless in a stink of blood. The cellar’s invisible stairs were very steep, I knew that; I was not allowed on them for that very reason. There was a maid in the Vicarage who had died falling down the same sort of stairs. Cecil had told me, and he had seen her ghost in its pinny many times, moaning between the cobwebs and bottles of wine. She was there among the leopard men, now, holding a three-clawed knife and grinning. (Cellars were all the same, to her.)
I scrabbled for the latch and lifted it rather hastily.
‘Wawa,’ came from my mother through the unfastened kitchen door, as I tiptoed past it, ‘wawa, wawa!’
She sounded as if she was conducting a voice exercise, which she did before singing along to the jazz records at home. Either that, or she was turning feverish and slightly mad. At least my uncle was laughing.
I crept up the stairs, using the edges. Safely in my own room, I realised that it was the same word my father would use when something bad happened, usually to his road. When the Bean ‘packed up’, he stood next to it and shouted, ‘Wawa, bloody wawa!’ – which made the servants grin. I’d asked him one day why he said ‘wawa’, like a baby crying.
‘It’s an acronym, Hugh.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s when you only say the first letters of words. Look.’ He wrote it out for me.
W A W A, or: West Africa Wins Again.
Why was my mother saying it, now? Why was she imitating my father like that? For she had caught his voice, the exact way in which he said it, like the foghorn on the Elder Dempster liner. I lay on my bed and flipped the torn piece of wallpaper next to my pillow, as I usually did when thinking. I desperately wanted my father here, suddenly. (He was to come in a fortnight’s time.) I didn’t like my uncle laughing with my mother, like that. It was queer, thinking of them as brother and sister, running and laughing across the lawn in a time so long ago it was before the war.
I fished under the pillow for my fetish packet and gingerly brought it out on to the sheet. I had, just before leaving, replaced the grease-paper with banana leaves. These were now yellow. Tarbuck’s wafer, the green feather, the crocodile-shaped river pebble, the tiny bone, the palm leaf, and the penny stamp wiped against the chain of one of the BSA motorcycles – lacking human flesh or oil or blood, they seemed suddenly weak. I chewed some nail off my thumb and spat it in, then pondered on how best to draw blood. I had a wobbly front tooth: I could tie it by a thread to the door handle and yank it out, then spit bloodily on to the ‘bits and bobs’ that still smelt of home. Either that, or I would prick my finger – but that reminde
d me of the Wicked Queen in Snow White, and any decent amount would hurt. I covered up the fetishes again and held the packet in my hand, closing my eyelids and bringing back the picture I had taken on the track a year before, down to the last blot of shade and spot of light on leaf.
I had to be careful not to drop off and grip the packet tight in my dreams. Only the rubber band kept it from falling apart completely, the leaves were so brittle.
I ran out of the house when the horn blared. There was a strange man alighting from the car. He waved at me.
‘Hello, Hugh!’
My mother was looking at him in the same way as I was, but holding his hands as if she was about to be swung round. ‘Goodness gracious!’ she was saying.
‘It’s your Pop!’ cried the man. ‘It’s your dear Pa done come!’
It was my father, but he was thinner, and his moustache had vanished. Where his moustache had been was a shadow of grey skin and a boil just under the nose. When he kissed me, I missed the bristling hairs and their smell of pipe tobacco. My uncle pretended to be frightened and my aunt said how like Douglas Byng he looked, which made everyone laugh except my father.
‘Was it because of the boil?’ I said, showing him my room.
My father laughed.
‘It’s not a boil,’ he said. ‘It’s a family heirloom. A minor defect in the perfect model.’
He winked at my mother, who stood in the door.
‘Then it can’t be perfect,’ I pointed out.
My father tugged the knees of his trousers and rested his elbows on them, bending down to look at the thing I had made out of my uncle’s old wooden bricks.
‘It’s the Maharajah’s palace,’ I explained. ‘It’s the biggest palace in the world.’
‘Yes,’ said my father, straightening up, ‘your grandfather had just the same, or so I believe, somewhere under his enormous beard.’
‘Then why haven’t I got one?’
‘Count yourself lucky, old boy,’ said my father, gazing out of the window.
‘Did you know about it, Mother?’
My mother grimaced. ‘If I had, I would have run away screaming,’ she said.
I turned to my father. He was grinning, so she couldn’t have meant it.
‘So why did you shave it all off?’
‘Did you want me to leave half?’
I stamped my foot and a tower fell off the palace. ‘Oh, you know what I mean!’
‘Sometimes,’ smiled my father, tousling my head, ‘you feel like getting rid of things.’
I couldn’t get used to him without his moustache, especially as he would scratch his top lip as if the itchiness was still there. Also, the photograph I had on my bedside table, taken in Victoria on one of our trips, was more familiar to me than the real face.
After a week at my uncle’s, we drove off in the hired Riley to Bexhill, with a green fishing net sticking out of the rear window. We had a small suite of rooms in a large hotel overlooking the beach. The hotel smelt of warm rubber and gravy and was full of shrivelled-up little palm trees and pictures of aeroplanes. It had an alcove full of ‘reading matter’ and jigsaw puzzles, where I liked to sit on rainy days (there were many that summer) and devour numbers sometimes older than I was of the Magnet, Tiger Tim’s Weekly and even True Detective Mysteries, while my mother helped me with a 500-piece of Scott on the Terra Nova, though half his face was missing.
On certain evenings my parents left me in order to ‘jig about’ downstairs. My mother would stand at the door of my boxroom in a long black dress and say, ‘Don’t run away, darling,’ with a little wave, her green malachites swinging from her ears like bell-pulls, filling the room with her scent so that it stayed after she had gone.
The band’s music came up as a tinny drone, over which the sea washed and the plumbing gurgled. I made the best of the disappointing shells and pebbles, as I did of the several occasions we drove off to a sandy beach. I was happy, but sad underneath; I wanted my parents as they were in Africa. Here, they were smaller and neater, with dry-looking skin, and had a lot of what my mother called ‘silly ding-dongs’ over my head. These were about things I could never find interesting enough to follow and therefore understand. Sometimes I felt, looking at them both in their deckchairs on the crowded beach, that they were as real as the straw-stuffed figures one saw on the edges of fields at home that made the yams grow well. Those stretched-out bodies under their beach hats held the spirits of my mother and father, but the real gods were far away. As for the other people on the beach, I found them unpleasant looking and loud. Their red faces and scrawny legs poked from striped costumes as tight as the skin on a snake. I wanted the sea to wash the beach clean, and leave me alone with my parents, as I was on the beach at Victoria in what seemed like another life, where the ocean chased you across the black sand like a friend until the sun dropped, its round red ball lost again for a night in the furthest and deepest waters.
Sometimes, out there, we had done as the natives did, and stayed on the beach after dark. They lit candles in jam jars and tins, that flickered here and there as far as the eye could see; I thought of them as firefly kings, and the circle of natives their subjects. Ours was a bright paraffin lamp, its flame shivering in certain warm gusts that never quite put it out, and we had rugs to sit on.
We’d eat chicken legs with the Allinsons and watch the ocean showing its foam here and there when the moon came up. The rest of the sea was a gleam, or a solid darkness. Low moans of songs would waft from the scattered groups of natives, whose silhouettes crouched or waved their arms about or walked on the spot, as if they were cold. My mother said they were pagan services, but my father agreed with Mr Allinson that they were palm-wine ‘binges’ because he’d seen them still there at dawn, with empty bottles all around them, fast asleep.
‘Maybe it’s both,’ I said.
The adults laughed: I count that as my first joke, though it was accidental (they didn’t usually laugh when it wasn’t).
My mother had bought me a little drum in the market; to her surprise, I took it with me wherever we went that holiday. Because the natives around their candles generally had a drum or two, and played it, so did I. I was quite good, I think, using all my fingers and the side of my thumb as I had seen the others do, weaving rhythms by ear.
Mr Allinson, who kept his Bombay bowler on even under the stars, said, ‘Goodness gracious, he’s gone bush.’
After he had drunk a lot, he told me to start drumming again and ordered Mrs Allinson to dance. She had also drunk quite a lot, but told him to shut up. I carried on drumming and Mr Allinson tried to drag Mrs Allinson into the middle. She started shrieking.
‘Dance, woman, dance, blast you,’ Mr Allinson was shouting.
My mother told me to stop drumming.
‘Shall we go home?’ said my father.
Mr Allinson’s Bombay bowler rolled across the sand towards the sea and I ran after it. Looking back from the glimmering surf, I saw Mr and Mrs Allinson scuffling silently together like shadow puppets in front of the paraffin lamp. They might have been dancing, if there had been more than the surf booming.
The following morning, my drum’s taut skin had a tear in it, as if someone had tried to poke around inside it. My mother said she would buy me another one, but she didn’t. I continued to drum on any hard surface to hand, but I was banned from doing so at table, and the habit wore off. In Bexhill my mother bought me a tin whistle from a stall which sold buckets and spades and rubber balls whose bright colours came off on your hands on hot days. The tin whistle was very loud and piercing in the room, and someone in the hotel complained. I imagined this person as a tall, thin shadow at the end of a corridor, waving an arm.
Everybody else seemed to go back by train; we sped home, as we had come, in the hired Riley, because my father wanted to ‘taste’ the decent English roads. I had to sit very straight, with my head up, to see out of the window. The clouds of dust prickled my eyes. My parents were ‘bickering’ in the front.
Flytings loomed after the weekend like an illness and was already invading my tummy.
However, I had a big plan for tonight: I would first of all beg my parents, on my knees in their bedroom, to take me home with them, on the steamer. I would work at my lessons very hard, By Correspondence (I had read advertisements about this in the paper). If they refused, then I’d become a stowaway. This was not yet more than a blurred idea, with the darkness of a big trunk in it and one picture of me popping up on deck, smiling sweetly, past the Canaries, the warm ocean wind blowing my hair into wild shapes.
As the countryside made my eyes flicker, leaning forward in the Riley, I gripped the seat’s leather in front and thought about Captain E.R.G.R. Evans. I had just read his chapter in my Heroes of Modern Adventure, a big fat book my mother had tried to dissuade me from bringing on holiday. He and his two companions had marched fifteen hundred miles across the Antarctic through fierce blizzards, over endless ice, in freezing temperatures, pulling a four-hundred-pound sledge. Evans had scurvy, Lashly and Crean were at the limit of their endurance, they ate biscuits soaked in paraffin. I turned the rolling Hampshire hills into a wilderness of crevasses and broken ice, narrowing my eyes against its glare. Crean had left sick Evans with Lashly in the tent, walking the last leg alone to seek help. Eighteen hours without a halt, on the very edge of the world, after a march of hundreds of days, all alone with the endless horizon.
My parents’ bickering turned into the far cries of penguins, and then into silence, as I slogged on, step by step, with only my shadow and the groan of my snowshoes in the ice to accompany me, towards whatever relief might lie in the midst of that mighty, frozen land. Something brushed my cheek: a sandwich, in my mother’s fingers, at the end of my mother’s arching arm, passed back without looking (to look back made her feel sick).
‘Hugh? Are you there? Huggins?’
It was ham, which I detested. As I was taking it, the world moved backwards and the seat socked my face, tumbling me into the tight gully between the front and back. I was upset by the fact that the sandwich had fallen on to the carpet and opened, the ham slice flopping out next to my nose. Blood spotted the bread’s whiteness. Blood was falling from my face. Some sort of pig had squealed – the sound had stopped, but I was only hearing it now.