by Adam Thorpe
‘Everything,’ came the reply, with that rather lunatic look in the eyes again, exaggerated perhaps by the glow of the Tilley lamp and all its flickering beasties. I puffed on my cigarette, feeling rather nervous.
‘He lived, you see,’ murmured the fellow.
‘Trickery,’ said James.
Hargreaves smiled.
‘No. Saw it myself.’ He indicated his eyes. Personally, I wouldn’t take them as reliable witnesses. ‘Arterial blood and all. The spear went through and stuck out the other side, about an inch to the left of the vertebrae. It was a jolly hard thrust.’
‘Ugh,’ was my contribution.
‘Oldest trick in the book,’ said James, tapping his cigar in the ashtray. I do respect his phlegm.
‘I know, Arkwright, when a man is pierced through and when he isn’t.’
Mr Hargreaves had gone rather hoarse.
‘Go on,’ James said.
‘It’s the seventh, and final, test. I am not permitted to tell you the first six, each advancing in degree of severity and risk to life. Only the seventh is not a secret. Once passed, only old age can claim you. You are immune. Not even the tsetse fly dares bite.’
He was staring straight into the lamp, as if he was blind. I had the feeling he was considering telling us something more: his eyes flitted for a moment between us. But then he sighed, and leaned back, his face relaxing, saying we would find out for ourselves. I’m sure I won’t, unless I go deranged!
He started snoring a few minutes later, falling insensible again, and James and I made a two-handed seat and carried him back. He is not heavy, and I am not weak. War does teach you some useful things, apart from how to kill people. On subsequent occasions, we made sure he sat in the same chair, which was easy to slip a couple of brooms through and use as a carrying chair (you know, like a sedan). He never asked how we returned him to his bed each time. Thank goodness the servants never saw us!
If there was ever any further discussion of the local superstitions, it got Hargreaves terribly excited. A few nights later he didn’t go to sleep in the chair, but paced about the compound, smoking furiously and muttering to himself. We watched him before going to bed, standing in the veranda’s shadows in our nightgowns. The fireflies were fantastic, and the frogs very loud indeed, and the forest full of whoops and shrieks and chatterings. The night air was freshened by the day’s rain – that is, the world didn’t feel like one great vapour bath or a giant steam inhaler. Although he was muttering to himself, we couldn’t catch his words. He simply splashed right through the puddles, and we were afraid he might fall down the steps.
James murmured that he’d be eaten alive by various little beasts, and wondered if he was taking his quinine. I told him that I was adding the grains to his water. James told me that I was a wonderful nurse. I told him that, in my capacity as a wonderful nurse, I thought his daily intake of Gilbey’s to be medically ill advised.
I’m afraid, Edward, that he stormed off, as if I had said something very rude.
As a man, how do you advise I proceed? I thought perhaps that the presence of Hargreaves was partly responsible, but now I realise that it is an old African habit, masked in Buea by his being beholden to his superiors there and quite frequently out of my presence, hobnobbing at the Club. Also, something in the loneliness of this place, and the terrific difficulties of matching his ambitions with their realisation, has triggered it, I think. He has nightmares in which he again sees poor Bailey in that tent with black bile pouring from his mouth and screaming with pain – which turns into himself, licking the last of the calomel from the bottle before plunging into a coma. Into wakefulness, in reality. I reiterate that yellow fever can never be caught twice, and read him the passage in my copy of Tropical Medicine. Bailey was a first-tourer, by the way, also from Merton. But James drowns the apparition with another dose of his wretched gin.
If I had the courage, I would throw every bottle into the river and send the crocs to sleep instead.
Everything about Africa touches one so – the body, then the mind. Do you remember when you read me Dracula, all those years ago, and I said that I would like to dissolve into mist, like those awful red-lipped vampires? Well, here one nearly does. I have been too used to crisp sheets, carbolic, boric lint and spica bandages. My little bush hospital looks helpless against the enormous weight of vegetation behind it, which insists on creeping forward while one’s back is turned. I dream of jumping into the river to get out of the tendrils – only to be gobbled up by a crocodile. I’m not sure if the Big Beef is a big croc, or hippo, or something sinister and unknown. I lie awake at night and stare at the ceiling: the lathes have apparently warped, and the plaster is cracked and has smoky patches of damp. Nothing will persuade me that it won’t fall on my head in one of these storms.
As for Hargreaves’s spearing business: I had to read Professor Clifford’s books before nursing shell-shock patients, and he would call this an eject – a thing thrown out of one’s own consciousness. Not quite trickery, but not quite ju-ju, either. Do you know what Dr Symons used to say to us, in his lectures? No broken crockery, however skilfully mended, ever looks quite the same. The most hairline of cracks can come apart, quite suddenly, when heated.
A thought that bothers me, I don’t know why: the river here will never, ever freeze – not in a million years.
I am a little girl in a big wood. I’m not sure how Northcott finished himself off, but I prefer not to ask. Perhaps he did it in this very room (the sitting-cum-dining-room). I need not have ended up here. I refused Dr Symons, Edward. I might have carried on in Hampshire, risen to Sister, helped him with his lectures, even giving my own. He was popular, good-looking: the junior nurses giggled in his presence. But I fell for a patient. We were warned about that. James enthralled me with his stories, as I wheeled him about those big, soft, velvet lawns. His neck was thin and yellow, like a fluted column. It has fattened up, now.
As long as we boil and filter the water, wash vegetables in potassium permanganate, and take our quinine, I do not expect to succumb to anything more than the odd dose of malarial fever. The point is – I don’t regret a thing. I am in a perpetual state of excitement and wonder, only now and again I feel myself stiffening into depression, as if my skin is made of plaster of Paris.
Please write more frequently, Edward. My love to Joy. I am glad her cuttings have taken. Here, everything takes and all the time. Apparently it is cooler between November and February, but the forest does not stop growing as it does not stop dying. I think of it seething, sometimes. Its floor is a sort of rich molasses, full of decaying matter. There are fungi the size of my head, and the oddest sort of tubular flowers stuck to tree-trunks. It will help when James has the ‘road’ that goes into it properly cleared. I can only venture in about a hundred yards (though my patients find a way in and out). After that it is a struggle, but in the odd dry moments he has Baluti the laundry boy and Quiri the handyman – or handylad, as he is all of twelve or thirteen – cutting and advancing by a few more lianas. He plans to do the whole thing when the rains slow up, in November, with a large team of the Chiefs fellows from Ikasa. Jolly good. A few miles in, the road is said to fork – one way Ikasa, the other way the forest interior and some villages Hargreaves claimed he had visited, where they go without a stitch.
Head Office have promised James a fleet of clerical assistants, but I think they alighted at the wrong bank. I’m sure Northcott and you-know-who were promised the same thing. Maybe the lost fleets will found a city, full of typewriters and ink pads and refusals-to-sign-papers-until.
I will tell you more about Hargreaves in the next letter, only when I have received something from you. It is better than Dracula.
With all my love and affection,
Your sister, Charlotte
Bamakum, July 18th, 1921
Dearest Edward,
It has just arrived. Your letter, I mean. I would like less of your ‘grand scheme’ and more of gossip. Maybe Joy should a
lso write. She notices the little things. There is quite enough ‘grand scheming’ here to keep me happy for eternity. I’m talking of the natural order, from ant to gorilla. You would say that I have understood you, in that case.
Here is our gossip. Our servants are called Baluti, Mawangu, Joseph, Mr Henry (the houseboy), Mr John, Augustina and Quiri. Mawangu is the second houseboy. Remember his name.
No Tarbuck or Grace on the expected day. Not surprising: Africa does not run to timetables and clocks. We were only as worried as one is when anyone is late. However, Hargreaves moved out of his room into the guest bungalow, as planned. The guest bungalow is a hut a little separated from the servants’ huts. James had it cleaned up and kitted, I hung a sign on it saying Mon Repos, James took it down (a Position and a sense of humour do not go together).
The bedroom was thoroughly cleaned and aired (if that’s the word) the same night, before we moved in. Mawangu found the whip under the bed. It’s a bulala – a big thing of hippopotamus hide, used by the police. The wooden handle had termite holes. Hargreaves was not in his hut – or anywhere. Joseph, our white-haired cook, pointed at ‘dat big wildnis dere’ (he was cook’s mate in the days of the Germans!) and said, ‘Massa Hargreaves, he gone aus for small-small time with panga.’ The man had left a note: Dear Mr and Mrs Arkwright, I will be back for dinner. Ever yrs, John S. Hargreaves. SL to be applied, of course!
SL is ‘in-house’ code; it stands for ‘Sumptuary Laws’. These once prevented court extravagance, back home. In the colonial circuit out here it means Dress Informally and Don’t Put Out the Silver, and so forth. Rather cheeky of the man, we thought.
I was very glad to have our bed at last. It is a solid PWD affair with added ends of fancy brass (poor Northcott’s touch, apparently). The room was filthy. There were dirty dishes the ants had not tackled, and lots of screwed-up papers and scraps in the wardrobe and under the dressing table. The bulala was a shock. The other side of Hargreaves! David Tall had found far nastier things rusting in the old German headquarters at Buea, but the whip disturbed even James. He said it might be the chap’s fetish.
‘Are you serious?’ (That is me talking, by the way.)
‘Well, you either guard against the evil eye with magic or you take it out with this.’
‘How horrid.’
‘But he’s taken himself off this morning, without it,’ James noted.
We looked out of the window. The wire-netting across the glass is just about eaten away by rust, this side. We could see the beginning of the path: the fellow had slashed it a little wider. A very beautiful bird was picking about in the debris: not large by African standards – about the size of a jay. Jet-blue head, yellow wings, and a tail of malachite green that splits into a curve, like a swallow’s. I asked James if he knew its name. He thought it quite likely that it didn’t have a European one – or even a taxonomie one in Latin. Isn’t that extraordinary? We might be the first white people to have seen it. I’ll play Adam – no, Eve – and name it. Edwardia Joy.
Baluti came out of the cookhouse with a bucket and the bird flew off, absolutely brilliant against the trees, which are mostly a sort of coppery-green. Baluti didn’t seem to notice it – or if he did, ignored it. I wondered if James, looking out, holding that horrible whip, saw the forest as his own, as a king does. Of course, Cameroons is a sort of halfway house, a mandate from the League of Nations – though not yet officially ratified, James has just said, when I asked him for further details. Even His Majesty wouldn’t go so far as to say it was part of his Empire, quite in the way he might of Nigeria. There is a resentment felt by the Cameroons officers towards their counterparts in Nigeria, from where the mandate is exercised. One does feel second class, here. First Lagos, then London. It is somehow crushing. But the forest is neutral. At least, it is itself.
Being not at all nosy, I couldn’t help glancing at some framed photographs of Hargreaves’s family, face-down on the bedside table: a matronly Mama in a flowery hat, a timid-looking Papa hiding behind a beard, and either a very pretty sister or a romantic attachment. The climate had spoiled the faces. They all looked drowned. I’m quite sure he gazed on them every night, in his befuddled way. I never noticed them out, though.
We asked the servants about the whip, but they were awfully evasive. However, Joseph showed us his back. It was covered in long scars. For a horrible moment we thought this was Hargreaves’s work, but it was not. Joseph had worked here for the Germans, and the Germans had savagely whipped him for various minor misdemeanours. Far worse went on, apparently: there were many hangings here, and shootings, and a lot of deaths from starvation and disease among the African workers. It all seems like very ancient history, but it is only a few years ago. However, I do think things have changed so much since the war, everywhere. Feeling young and thoroughly modern is not easy here, but I intend to stick to it. I have brought out some jazz records and the station gramophone has been scaring the wildlife. James shuts himself away while I have a little dance – I do the Vampire and the Shimmy very well, and perspire no more than one does in a London night-club. Before you groan, Edward, I’ll have you know our Nurses’ All-Night Jazz Dance Marathon raised £125 towards the War Memorial Fund, two years ago!
Two years ago? It seems like ten. This place is so very good at covering tracks. I hope I don’t grow old and decrepit as quickly as everything else does. According to African beliefs, let alone English ones, Bamakum must be teeming with ghosts. Joseph has a particularly large fetish hanging around his neck and several more round each wrist. Frankly, I’m not surprised. My own fetish is a Bible – old-fashioned, I know, for a modern girl, but it reminds me of my room at home. I read from it each night, and murmur one of those little prayers Mother taught us, while James is having his last cigar and ‘nightcap’ on the veranda. That should keep any stubbled rascals away, phantasmal or otherwise.
We were having lunch at the table (where else?) the same day when Hargreaves appeared at the door. He was stripped to the waist and holding the panga (like a machete, Edward). It was all gleamy with sap.
‘Not dressed for luncheon, old boy?’ said James. (Calm as a cucumber, of course. The perfect DO.)
‘Tinned sausages, plenty of them,’ I added. My voice was a little shaky, which was hardly surprising since I honestly believed the fellow was about to carve us up. He had the most filthy, torn shorts on, his legs were scratched and dirty, and his boots were clogs of mud.
‘Look, I’m awfully sorry to interrupt,’ he said, ‘but do you have any honey, or treacle, on you?’
I summoned my thoughts. His eyes were hidden behind his dirty lenses, so I couldn’t gauge the extent of his derangement.
‘Would Lyle’s Golden Syrup do?’ I asked.
‘Perfectly,’ he said. He then drew a chair towards him and sat, a little way from the table. He looked immensely relieved. The panga had dropped to the floor with a clatter, just missing his foot. He’d already ruined the rug, but it was a dull one.
There was an awkward silence. It needed our big clock to fill it, but our big clock had already decided that the equator was not to its liking. My face was sweltering. I felt terribly irritated.
‘Is the condiments crate open, James?’ I asked. ‘If so, Mr Hargreaves can have his golden syrup straight away. On bread, Mr Hargreaves?’
‘Just as it is, Mrs Arkwright. Just the tin, and a big spoon.’
James commented that he must have got dashed bored with millet cake and plantains, when the stock ran out. Hargreaves replied that he didn’t eat. (Almost true, I suppose.) I told him that there’s nothing to be proud of in that.
Mawangu took the plates away and brought clean ones for the mangoes. In Africa, so the old Coasters say, chatter is not a prerogative, and silence a blessing. Anyway, mangoes are too messy to allow talking. (They grow by the ton, and I love them as much as the monkeys do.) I told Mawangu to bring the tin of golden syrup and a big spoon. I wanted to make sure that Mr Hargreaves didn’t use it all up, but h
e followed the servant out. That was the last we saw of the fellow for two days, and the very last we saw of one of our precious golden syrup tins. I have never been sure whether the lion on the label, with the bees around its head, is dead, or sleeping. We felt the same way about our difficult guest, during those two days. But I found myself filling up with sloth, when I began to worry about him. Isn’t that awful, for a nurse?
I will take this interval in my narrative (from Hargreaves, I mean), to tell you about my Typical Day. This might encourage you to describe the little things in life.
First thing, I might take a little stroll to the river’s edge. The river is terribly brown and sombre, as if permanently in uniform, or smeared in mustard when the sun shines, but I’m fond of it. James wants three decent canoes – two large, one small – chained to the jetty, available at all times. There is so much to do! I have seen only one crocodile here but that is quite enough. It was in the middle of the ‘bay’ and rolled its eyeball at me. They are very toothy – the teeth stick out like an Oxford aesthete’s. Otherwise there is no comparison. I hope. It would be awful to come all the way here and find oneself suffering that.
I am kept very busy telling the servants what not to do. The wash-house is a tin hut by the water tank, and Baluti the laundry boy leaves the laundry on the line after dusk. This is much-much bad-bad, or ‘nyama-nyama’: there’s a fussy fly that lays its eggs only in clean linen after sunset. Then you don this clean linen and the eggs use your flesh as a nest, popping up as worms out of your thigh, or somewhere equally unexpected. As it is not raining for a minute, Baluti is hanging out the washing this morning: my elaborate gestures exhaust me. I know that tonight, if the rain holds off, the washing will still be there. One day, I will master pidgin.