Hold My Hand I'm Dying

by John Gordon Davis

  ‘Does the accused have any question to put to the witness?’ Mahoney asked drily.

  Samson Ndhlovu stood up. He cleared his throat quietly and looked his judge in the eye. Yes, he had a question, only one.

  ‘Yes,’ Mahoney said. ‘Ask it.’

  Samson Ndhlovu squared himself.

  ‘Am I a duck?’ he asked.

  Mahoney dropped his pen and threw back his head and laughed.

  At four o’clock he discharged Samson Ndhlovu.

  Solomon Otto Berger, Warder in charge of Her Majesty’s Gaol at Nyamanpofu, threw the tennis ball in the air and then hit it over the net. It was a good service but it was not irreturnable.

  Solly leaned on his racquet and looked at the black prisoner peevishly. ‘Now listen to me,’ he said in Sindebele, ‘you should have been able to hit that ball back. You are not doing your best.’

  The prisoner fiddled with his old racquet sheepishly and picked his nose. ‘Sorry, Nkosi,’ he mumbled.

  Solly shook his head. ‘First thing tomorrow morning,’ he ordered, ‘you must go to the garage wall and practise. Especially your backhand, your backhand is very bad.’

  ‘Yes, Nkosi.’

  The prisoner did not like tennis. He would rather dig gardens or roads any time. When a man digs gardens or roads he does not have to work hard but all this running about on the tennis court trying to hit the ball over the net nicely! The white men were very strange people to torment themselves so. But the prisoner was learning. ‘He’s got potential,’ Solly Berger had said to Joseph Mahoney. ‘Pity, he isn’t staying with us longer.’

  Solly looked at his watch. ‘Okay, five o’clock,’ he said in English. ‘Time to knock off.’

  He walked off the home-made tennis court and down the dirt track to his small gaol. Two tame bandits were walking ahead of him, unguarded, carrying sickles, returning from their hard labour in Mahoney’s garden. A black prison corporal in a green uniform stood at the gate. He saluted Solly.

  ‘Is the class ready?’ Solly asked.

  ‘Yes, Nkosi.’

  Solly Berger gave literacy classes to whoever of his prisoners was interested and he paid for their pencils and exercise books himself. It was his contribution towards the new Policy of Partnership Between the Races that was swelling the breasts of the Rhodesian politicians.

  ‘Nkosi?’ the corporal spoke.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The road gang is not back yet, Nkosi.’ Solly jerked his head round.

  ‘Not—? They should have been back an hour ago.’

  ‘Yes, Nkosi.’

  Solly glared at him. ‘Well why didn’t you come and tell me?’

  The black corporal flicked his eyes down and shuffled.

  ‘I was waiting to see if they came back first,’ he murmured.

  ‘You were waiting—!’ Solly cut the sentence with exasperation. He glared and the nostrils of the old Jew nose were dilated. ‘Christ,’ he ended.

  He thought: Munts …

  The road gang were Nyamanpofu’s hard cases. There were eleven of them under First Class Prison Corporal Amos. Every morning they set off down the road into the sunrise, armed to the teeth with picks and pangas and sickles. First Class Prison Corporal Amos guarded them with one pioneer model shotgun.

  Solly turned to a tame bandit.

  ‘Run to the house of the Mambo Native Commissioner and ask him to come. And tell him to bring his gun,’ he snapped.

  The prisoner jumped and started running. Solly turned into the prison office, then turned and shouted after the prisoner: ‘And tell him to bring some beer!’

  Solly hurried into the office and picked up the telephone and whirred the handle twice. A tired African voice answered: ‘African Constable Toby here-ah.’

  ‘Gimme Sergeant Holmes, Toby.’

  ‘Ah!’ Toby beamed into the mouthpiece. ‘Sujenti Holm-is not ini station, sah.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Out-i, sah.’

  ‘Christ!’

  Solly hung up. He whirred the handle again, a long, a short and two longs. On a farm forty miles away a heavy Dutch accent said: ‘Frikkie van der Merwe, here.’

  ‘Frikkie, Solly Berger here. It looks as if some of my prisoners have done a bunk. Tell your natives to watch out for strangers. And will you stand by for a manhunt? I’ll phone you back later. Meantime can you please get on the phone and ring up your neighbours, Johnny and Klaus and Steve and the boys and tell them to do the same and to stand by—’

  The three black prison corporals and the three black police constables squatted round the front gates of the prison, awkwardly, holding for the first time in their lives the prison shotguns that Solly Berger had issued for the first time in his prison service career. The prison was quiet, all the prisoners were locked up. Solly Berger and Joseph Mahoney sat in the front seat of Mahoney’s old Chevrolet parked outside the prison, their rifles leaning against the seat beside them. They were quiet. They drank beer out of bottles and they stared pensively through the windscreen into the gloom down the road the prisoners had gone. Solly shifted his buttocks.

  ‘Give them ten minutes,’ Mahoney said, without moving his eyes. ‘Then you better press the panic button.’

  Solly grunted. ‘If they’ve done a bunk they’re sure as hell not going to walk down the road. They’ll have melted into the bush and we sure as hell won’t catch up with them tonight.’

  Mahoney grunted. ‘Good thing Tennis wasn’t with them. What would we have done for a fourth?’

  Solly opened his door, climbed out, faced the direction of his house and shouted: ‘Joshuah!’

  From Solly’s kitchen: ‘Nkosi?’

  ‘Beer please.’

  ‘Nkosi.’

  The cook came trotting through the gloom with two cold bottles of beer. Solly and Mahoney sat silently drinking and waiting.

  ‘God, I’m sick of this,’ Mahoney said suddenly.

  Solly looked at him. ‘Sick of what?’

  ‘This life. This life of Native Commissioner,’ Mahoney said tonelessly to the windscreen.

  Solly’s eyebrows went up. ‘I thought you liked it?’

  ‘I do.’ Mahoney did not seem about to expand on his contradiction.

  ‘But?’ Solly prompted.

  Mahoney sighed and took a slug out of his bottle, opened his mouth and then said nothing.

  ‘You’ve done well,’ Solly said slowly. ‘You’re your own boss at twenty-five, boss of this whole district.’

  Mahoney shook his head. ‘Boss of the natives, chum. Big deal.’

  Solly nodded wisely. ‘You’re just bushwhacked,’ he said. ‘You need another trip to the liquorish lights of Bulawayo.’

  Mahoney snorted softly. ‘Two hundred and fifty miles,’ he said, ‘over hell’s own roads. You get there and what happens? You spend the week-end frantically combing the bars looking for something to screw, fail, and then come Sunday you drive the two-fifty miles back.’

  Solly nodded. ‘I know.’ He paused. ‘What you need is to get married,’ he said.

  ‘And how does a nice guy like me find a wife stuck in the bush?’

  ‘Advertise,’ Solly said.

  Mahoney snorted softly again. He leaned over and looked at Solly’s watch. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t see your bandits.’

  Solly nodded. He climbed out of the car, looking worried. ‘I’ll call Frikkie again and ask him to get his pals together.’

  Solly walked into the prison office and picked up the telephone. Mahoney climbed out of the car and looked at the black men.

  ‘Now then, you men—’

  He stopped. He turned his head and listened. He peered down the road into the dusk and held up his hand and listened again. Then he jerked round and hurried to the office window and rapped on it and motioned Solly outside. The black corporals and constables were saying ah! ah! and listening.

  ‘D’you hear it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Solly whispered.

  ‘Do you recognise it
?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘It’s a Matabele Warrior marching song.’

  Ah! Ah! from the blacks.

  Mahoney turned to them.

  ‘Get into riot drill formation,’ he hissed.

  The black men scrambled into a line. Mahoney wished Sheerluck Holmes were there. This was his department. Solly and Mahoney cocked their rifles and stood poised, peering down the road.

  The chanting was drawing closer but they could only see a hundred yards in the last dark twilight. Mahoney suddenly turned to the nearest policeman.

  ‘Get into the car, when I shout, switch the lights on bright.’

  The only sound in the blanket of evening was the deep chant. It was a thrilling, frightening noise. Mahoney had not heard it since he was a boy. It was a song indunas had sung as they loped into battle, a savage virile old old sound of battles long ago. It gave Mahoney gooseflesh, he loved the sound, the sound of Africa, and he feared it.

  Then they saw in the gloom, sixty yards away, a blur of movement. The blur began to take shape. A body of men marching. Mahoney and Solly lifted their rifles to their hips.

  The group took better shape. They were marching close together, beating their feet on the ground hard, chanting. ‘Zhee – Zhee – Zhee—’ Mahoney lifted his rifle higher.

  ‘Lights!’

  The headlights flashed bright.

  Two lines of prisoners were marching, squinting into the headlights, marching side by side. Next to the column marched a prisoner, carrying a rifle. He carried the rifle on his shoulder, and they were all in step. They swung their arms to shoulder height and looked straight in front of them. First Class Corporal Amos was conspicuous by his absence. The column of marchers was carrying something between them. It was a home-made litter. And lying in the litter, very drunk and incapable, was First Class Prison Corporal Amos.

  ‘Skw-a-a-a-a-i—Ha!’

  They came to a smart halt in front of the headlights.

  Mahoney and Solly slid their rifles to their sides. The riot squad lowered their batons.

  The rifle carrier, one Shadrek Kumalo, presently doing a three-year stretch for six counts of Assault with Intent to do Grievous Bodily Harm – Shadrek had sorted the men from the boys with a knobstick at a beerdrink – Shadrek Kumalo marched forward to Solly Berger, ordered himself to halt at the top of his lungs and saluted. On behalf of the gang he apologised for being late, Nkosi, and expressed the hope that they were not too late for supper. It had, he explained, taken them a long time to find the corporal in the bush, because very many people were holding beerdrinks today to appease the ancestral spirits and to exhort them to make the rain to come.

  Joseph Mahoney was a little drunk. He paced slowly up and down the long red cement verandah of the Residency in the dark holding a glass of beer, smoking.

  Bushwhacked and sex-starved, maybe, he thought – certainly I’m sex-starved. Maybe Solly is right, maybe that is my only trouble. Bushwhacked and sex-starved – you get unstable in the bush. Woman, you cry out for the softness of woman, the love of woman. You feel you could go crazy for the soft sweet secret sticky slimy hot beautiful depths of woman, the in and out and the suckiness of woman, you keep thinking of those thighs, the marvellous round soft warm smoothness of thighs, the feel of the flesh of her buttocks in your hands as you ride her, the softness under your chest, and you feel you will go mad if you don’t have a woman. When you get that feeling after too long in the bush you get that seethe in your loins, that pressing tingling hotness, that pressing, and you feel you must walk out of the bush, get up and walk out of Court and jump into your car and drive the two hundred and fifty miles to town and bloody well find yourself a woman, as is your right. And you feel you would love that woman, adore her, fight fiercely for her, because she answers that hot pressing feeling, you feel that you would never be unhappy again just so long as you always had her, you would never get tired of her. Unstable, you get unstable in the bush. Like that girl, that nurse, Jean Whatshername. She was nothing much, nothing much to look at, why else did she come out with him on a blind date, only the desperadoes go out on blind dates. She had very little breasts and she was plump and her legs were too fat although they looked all right in high heels; but she was a woman, she looked at him with woman eyes from woman body, and her mouth was warm and wet inside and she had moaned in her throat and pushed her tongue into his mouth when his hand went up her skirt, up between her smooth warm plump thighs, that smooth flesh – and he had felt that he loved her, there and then he felt he was crazily in love with her, he felt he would never be unhappy again just so long as he had her always, her soft smooth warm thighs to have as his own, to splay them and mount her and ride her, he had almost told her there and then that he loved her. They had been unable to do anything in the front seat of the old Chev, parked outside the Nurses’ Home, and he had not had her, and for nights afterwards back in the bush at Nyamanpofu he had thought of her and thought he loved her. Unstable, he realised – a man gets unstable in the bush. And you have these dreams, these women who come to your bed in your dreams, Marilyn Monroe had come and Lauren Bacall and this girl Jean and the faceless ones too, the ones only with stockinged thighs and crotches, and you made love to Marilyn and Lauren and Jean and the faceless ones, sometimes it was very good and sometimes it was spoilt because you finished before you had gone inside her, and sometimes you wake up too soon and then she never comes back that night, no matter how hard you try. And in the morning you wake up and you think: I must get out of the bush, I must get a job in town, what kind of life is this, I’m not a full man like this. And you get to hate your job in the bush and you say to yourself: What good am I doing anyway, playing white chieftain over a few thousand munts, sorting out their miserable little problems and disputes, you’re worth more than that, you could do more for the country and more for yourself doing a more important job in town, a real job, where you come to grips with real problems, real life, not this artificial kingship in the bush, you aren’t in competition in the bush, you aren’t proving yourself in society, you’re just a tin god, a puppet of the Head Office. And you thought of all the exotic things and places too, London and Paris and New York and Tokyo and Hong Kong, crawling with women and you thought of all the adventures you’d missed, all the beautiful sights you hadn’t seen and the experiences you hadn’t experienced and the thoughts you hadn’t thought and the feelings you hadn’t felt, and you thought: I must get out, life passes you by in the bush, one part of you can’t develop in isolation like this, I must get out. And then you thought of the actual leaving, leaving behind the only work you knew, the only people you really knew, and you thought of the land husbandry scheme you were developing and the indabas and the black faces turned up to you and waving to you from the fields and saluting you from the roadside and you knew their latest problems, whose daughter had given birth to twins, who was paying lobola for his bride, who had gone off to the mines, who was seeking a divorce and why, whose crops were endangered by elephant, you thought of the drums in the sunset and the smell of the woodfires and the elephant crossing the road, you thought of all these things, and you felt you could not leave, because they were your people and the land was your land and … And you thought: I must get a wife to come to live with me in my house in the bush. A wife.

  And Joseph Mahoney sat down in a chair on the verandah and pulled deep on his beer and breathed into the glass so it made a sad lonely tired sound, and he thought about how much he wanted a wife, and he thought of the girl with the thick, long golden hair and wide mouth and the jutting breasts and the sad, slanty eyes.

  ‘Here comes Jake Jefferson and his tart,’ Mrs. Smithers had said.

  Sitting on a barstool in the Salisbury Country Club last week-end, having his eighth beer, wondering where to try for his blind date seeing the Nurses’ Home had not been forthcoming, a girl with long gold hair coming in with a man a good bit older: the girl caught at his heart, a beautiful unhappy girl, a girl of myst
ery and secrets, he had thought he was in love with her then and there. Jake Jefferson’s tart? On her back in some secret flat: it could break your heart, a smashing girl like that, break your heart, she belonged in his house here in Nyamanpofu.

  ‘Why is she a tart, Mrs. Smithers?’ too loudly.

  ‘Hush, dear boy!’ leaning close, her aging hand on his arm, lingering there. ‘Jake Jefferson is married, you see. To such a sweet woman, and Jake and this girl have been mooning around together for years – Hello Jake, hello Suzie, so nice to see you’ – Mrs. Smithers twiddling her fingers.

  Jake Jefferson and his tart pausing to say hello, Mahoney’s heart beating wildly.

  ‘Joseph Mahoney, he’s a Native Commissioner near the Zambezi Valley somewhere.’

  ‘The Kariba Valley?’ Jake Jefferson, tired-looking, good-looking, speaking. ‘I’m going down there myself next month.’

  ‘There’s trouble on the north bank—’

  Keep the man talking.

  But they had moved on, preoccupied with each other, and she had not said anything except How do you do, an unhappy beautiful girl with jutting breasts and long gold hair. Wanting to put out his hand and hold her: