Hold My Hand I'm Dying

by John Gordon Davis

  Don’t be unhappy, beautiful girl, leave him and come live with me and be my love—

  Mahoney sat slumped in his chair on the verandah of the empty womanless Residency; he stood up, embarrassed at his own foolishness. Unstable, you get unstable in the bush. He started pacing off down the verandah again. Forget about it, he told himself, stop thinking about a girl with long yellow hair and sad blue eyes or about any other woman, if you’re going to brood try to brood constructively. Why are you restless, apart from your goddam hormones? I am unhappy – he stopped and looked out into the night – I am unhappy because I consider that there are more important things for me to do in this country, this landlocked country which our leaders are trying to preserve by reform, to preserve by the new ideal, Partnership. Partnership between the Races. Equal Rights for All Civilised Men. Trying to stop it going black like Ghana, trying to stop it going berserk and bloodstained like Kenya, by timeous reform, Partnership. Okay, it’s probably a good plan. I don’t know what chance it’s got, what chance a mere three hundred thousand whites have got trying to civilise up to eight million savages in a jungle ten times the size of England – but if it’s got to be done there is so much to be done, so much work, a handful of whites trying to spoon-feed eight million wogs, for Christsake, and most of them don’t want to be civilised, they want to sit on their backsides in the sun drinking beer, and then there are going to be the wide boys, the black politicians stirring them up like they’re doing in Kenya, murder and rape, and genocide, like those wide political boys from the Black North are doing right now down in the Zambezi Valley, telling the Batonka to refuse to move, that the story of a flood is a white man’s trick; and there’re going to be the long-haired gentlemen overseas shouting the odds – Christ knows it’s going to be difficult, so bloody heartbreaking, that—well, that I get sick of sitting on my backside in the bush being the local king, presiding as magistrate over the case of Regina versus Tickey, charged with the crime of being drunk in charge of a bicycle, for God’s sake. Do something, teach them something – I should be a missionary, he thought. Yes, a missionary, an agnostic one so it doesn’t interfere with my sex life, be a missionary and teach them cricket so they grow up black Englishmen, like the Jamaicans. Black Englishmen – Christ. What a tragedy it all is. No more jungle, no more lions’ roar, no more thatch villages with tendrils of smoke rising in the sunset, no more elders holding their indabas – just civilisation, progress, neat rows of concrete semis with galvanised iron roofs.

  Oh God, the heartbreak. That is why I am restless – the heartbreak of Africa, the bewilderment of change, of civilisation, of progress, of partnership. Of Africa dying. Yes, dying. Africa, my Africa is dying, like that Zambezi Valley down there, that mighty magnificent violent valley. It’s dying. It’s going to be drowned by progress. By partnership. And not only is the hot soil and that feel and that smell of the valley going to be drowned, but so are the animals, the lion and the elephant and the buck. There’ll be no more lions roaring in the valley, no more trumpet of elephant, no more calves hanging on to their mothers’ tails with their trunks, Solly, in the valley. There’s going to be no more sunset silhouettes as the animals come down to the mighty river to drink, no more stamp of hooves and clouds of dust and the smell of dung. There’s going to be no more deathscreams in the night as a leopard catches its prey. There’s only going to be the screams of the animals drowning. And there’s going to be no more sounds of the drum being beaten in the valley. There’s going to be no more Batonka living in their mud and thatch villages and worshipping their ancestral spirits and smiling all over their black faces and clapping their hands when they see you, in fact there’s going to be no more Batonka tribe. They’re going to be taken far away out of the valley, and they’re going to be scattered far and wide so they’ll probably never see each other again, in nice new neat little concrete townships with shiny new tin roofs and running water in their kitchens and flush latrines. There’s going to be no more river god for them, no more Nyamayimini, no more Sikatongas to make the rain for them, no more ancestral graves to worship at because the ancestral graves will be drowned along with the valley and the animals and their villages. The people from one village may never see the people from the next village again, friends and relatives and even lovers. There will be no more Batonka. They will just become bewildered Rhodesians. That’s why it’s sad, why progress is sad. That’s why Africa is dying, because the same sort of thing is going to happen everywhere.

  Mahoney sat alone on the verandah in the dark, smoking. There was the pad of bare feet in the house and then the old skinny form of the cookboy appeared in the French doorway. ‘Mambo?’

  Mahoney did not look around. ‘Why are you not asleep, old gentleman?’

  Sixpence came out on to the verandah and stood awkwardly, embarrassed, ‘I wish to speak to the Mambo.’

  ‘Speak, then, old gentleman.’

  Sixpence coughed and shifted uncomfortably. ‘Mambo, I wish to go home.’

  Mahoney turned and looked at the old man. ‘Why?’

  Sixpence shuffled. ‘Because, Mambo,’ he said, ‘I hear the white men are going to cause a flood in the valley.’

  Mahoney looked at the dark form and then he nodded. ‘That is right, old man.’

  ‘My heart is troubled, Mambo. I wish to speak to my people in the valley.’

  Mahoney nodded. You poor old bastard.

  ‘Where in the valley is your home, old man?’

  ‘Chipepo, Mambo.’

  ‘Ahah – Chipepo. On the north bank.’

  ‘Yes, Mambo,’ the old man said.

  Mahoney thought. ‘Old gentleman?’

  ‘Mambo?’

  ‘There is trouble in Chipepo’s chiefdom. Have you heard?’

  Sixpence looked down at the cement as if Mahoney could look into his eyes in the dark. ‘I have heard, Mambo, but I have not seen.’

  ‘Old man,’ Mahoney said slowly, ‘the people of Chipepo’s chiefdom refuse to believe the flood is coming. They refuse to leave their villages. This is because strangers from the cities have poisoned their minds by telling them that the story of the flood is a white man’s trick.’

  Sixpence said nothing.

  ‘Old man, many of the people on the southern bank of the great river have already been moved, and the others are preparing to move. But in Chipepo’s chiefdom they think the warning of the flood is a trick to steal their land.’

  The old man kept his head down and looked at the floor. ‘Old man?’

  Sixpence looked up. ‘Mambo?’

  ‘Old man, the story is not a trick. It is the truth that the flood will come. And many of Chipepo’s people will be drowned and their property carried away by the water if they do not move soon.’

  Sixpence looked down again.

  ‘Old man, you may go home to your village, and you must prepare to move so that when the District Commissioner on your side of the river comes for you, you are ready. Do you believe me that the flood will come?’

  Sixpence nodded once. ‘I believe the Mambo, when the Mambo tell me,’ he said sadly, ‘but when I see the valley and the great river, I do not know.’

  Mahoney sighed. ‘When do you wish to leave me, old man?’

  ‘When the sun rises, Mambo.’

  Mahoney was irritated. ‘Tomorrow! You cannot leave until you have found a man to replace you, you cannot leave me without a cookboy!’

  The old man nodded.

  ‘I would not leave the Mambo without a cookboy,’ he said. ‘Already there is a man here who wishes to work for the Mambo.’

  Mahoney was suspicious. ‘Can he cook?’

  Sixpence nodded. ‘I asked him and he says he can do everything and anything,’ he said.

  Mahoney grunted. ‘Who is this witch-doctor?’

  Sixpence was uncomfortable. He wanted to be gone to his home in the Zambezi Valley, for he had heard the war was coming. He was an old man but his spears were ready and he still knew how to throw them.
/>
  ‘He says he knows the Mambo. He says his name is Samson Ndhlovu.’

  That night the rain came to the Zambezi Valley and to Nyamanpofu.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Go north, young man!’ was the saying in those days. ‘It’s a young growing country with wide open spaces, and there’re fortunes to be made.’ It was Federation did it, Partnership, the new hope in rumbling Africa, the grand Federation of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, partnership of the black copper-rich north with the white go-ahead south, political and economic partnership, Equal Rights for All Civilised Men, brainchild of Britain to beat the winds of change. ‘Go north, young man!’ And north they came from South Africa in droves, in trains and cars and lorries and on their thumbs, to the hot bushland of Rhodesia north of the Limpopo, the land of Monomotapa. And there were fortunes to be made: Jesus, you could sell anything. The old five bedroomed houses on five acres five miles from town, with wide red cement verandahs all round, found new two bedroomed houses on half-acre stands pushing out to meet them; the old red respectable houses round Fort and Main streets in town found themselves squeezed between blocks of flats that looked down into their back yards. The old houses were no longer respectable old houses, but poor old houses where only the poor immigrants went to live.

  ‘Rhodesia is Lion Country,’ said the adverts; ‘Always Drink Lion Beer,’ and there’s the picture of the lion licking its chops. And the young men forgot about the lions and drank the beer. ‘Rhodesia is a man’s country’ and the men lived like gentlemen, and the women liked it that way and they left the kids to the nannies and the house to the houseboy and the cooking to the cookboy and the garden to the gardenboy and went into town to the offices to keep it up. And in the evenings they sat on their lawns and drank gin-slings or went to the Club and drank gin-slings and looked around.

  And Rhodesia is Club country. You really should belong to the Club. It is the Club which sets the social pace and standard, it is through the Club that you get invited to the sundowner parties and the dinner parties and the bridge parties and the tennis parties and the swimming parties and the sundowner parties and the dinner parties and the bridge parties and the tennis and the swimming and the dinner and the bridge.

  ‘And the occasional wife-swapping party,’ Jake Jefferson said drily.

  The Club is a very pleasant place. Many green acres, big Dutch-gabled clubhouse, red cement verandahs, cocktail bar, sedate dining-room.

  Saturday night at the Club. Jake Jefferson stood with his back against the bar, holding his sixth Scotch. He looked at his company. Twelve people in his party. His party. Sundowners at his house, adjournment for sundowners at the Club, dinner at his expense for the whole damn lot of them at the Club.

  ‘It won’t hurt you irreparably to put on a façade of domestic felicity for one night, Superintendent,’ Sheila had said.

  ‘It’ll hurt like hell,’ Jake Jefferson had replied. ‘Who are these people I’ve got to entertain, anyway?’

  ‘We’ve got to entertain, sir,’ Sheila had said. ‘They’re people to whom as Superintendent and Mrs. Jefferson we are socially indebted. You mightn’t have noticed, in the rosy glow you succeed in walking about in, but we have, as Superintendent and Mrs. Jefferson, been to their homes and eaten their dinners from time to time over the last six months.’

  ‘Well, why the hell must we dine at the Club?’ he had said. ‘Isn’t it more suitable, and less expensive incidentally, just incidentally, to eat at home?’

  Sheila Jefferson had shrugged. ‘It’s easier.’

  Jake Jefferson had got angry. ‘Easier! What do I employ a cookboy and a houseboy for!’

  So Jake Jefferson stood against the bar playing host as amiably as he could. He tuned in to the conversation, and he took a long suck out of his glass. God! did he have to choose this in preference to Suzie?

  ‘There’s Iris. Loves her pink gin, doesn’t she?’ Nancy Smithers said.

  ‘Don’t we all, Nancy?’

  ‘Hello, Iris!’ Nancy’s face crinkled up in bright greeting and she twiddled her fingers in a wave across the verandah.

  ‘Of course, we do, Jake. I simply said she loves her gin.’ Nancy Smithers on the defensive. ‘She does knock them back rather. Were you here the other night when she got a bit tight?’

  ‘If I was, I didn’t notice.’

  ‘Well, she did. And she was dancing cheek to cheek with Mike.’

  ‘So?’

  Nancy blinked at him. ‘Well, it’s hardly done.’

  Jake Jefferson lifted his glass. ‘My dear Nancy, it is all too frequently done. If I cast my mind back I remember you doing it. With me.’

  Nancy Smithers fluttering her aging eyelids. ‘Well really, Jake!’

  ‘Well really what, Nancy?’

  ‘Hardly a thing to say to a friend!’

  ‘Isn’t Iris your friend?’

  ‘Of course she is! I think Iris is a dear sweet girl. But for you to stand there and remind me that once upon a time five years ago you and I had a little flutter on the dance floor—’

  ‘Two years ago, Nancy.’

  ‘Two years ago then! At least I didn’t have an affair with you!’

  ‘Only, Nancy,’ Jefferson said quietly, ‘only because you couldn’t find your car keys and Sheila had mine.’ If you go to the Club you get to know everything. ‘Have you heard about Cynthia and Paul?’

  ‘No, do tell me!’

  ‘Well,’ cigarette lit, puffing it up into the night air, ‘they’re separating.’

  Disappointment.

  ‘Oh, that again! They’ve been separating for years and never done it. Paul tells me they haven’t slept in the same room for years.’

  ‘Not surprised, Paul’s never home!’

  ‘Oh, really! Not a nice thing to say about poor old Paul. He’s such an old sweetie.’

  Cultured giggles.

  ‘Anyway. No, this time I hear it’s the real thing. He’s officially moving out and taking a flat in town.’

  ‘No!’

  Something new.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How d’you know?’ Another puff of the cigarette.

  ‘Well my dear – my cookboy. You know what servants are, see everything. Anyway, my old Moses is great pals with Cynthia’s cookboy. And Moses told me this morning – he’s such a sweet old thing is my Moses, but honestly he’s got no brains—’

  ‘None of them have, my dear …’

  ‘No. Well, old Moses told me there was a hell-fire row the other night at dinner and he was accusing her of all sorts of things—’

  ‘Probably quite accurate, if I know Cynthia.’

  ‘And old Paul packed a suitcase and stormed out and drove off.’

  Reflection.

  ‘Well, he’s done that before.’

  Disappointment.

  ‘But has he come back yet?’

  ‘Moses says not.’

  A point to ponder then: ‘Shame, poor Cynthia. I must look her up.’

  ‘Poor Paul, I say. She’s led him a hell of a dance.’

  ‘Yes, Paul’s a sweetie.’

  ‘But a bit of a lad with the ladies.’

  Savouring it, rolling round the tongue kindly.

  Jesus, thought Jake Jefferson.

  The oak-panelled bar was full. Women still in tweed golfing skirts, women in tennis frocks, women in cocktail dresses, men in suits, in white bowling flannels and blazers, men in plus-fours, tanding in groups talking and joking and laughing and putting up drinks. Michael Fox-Smith, the real estate man was there, telling how good business is. Property values sky-high and still you can sell anything. You could even sell the sewage farm, ha ha ha. Houses, Jesus, he just couldn’t get enough houses. Rent, buy, anything. Immigrants pouring in. And flats? He had waiting lists a mile long for flats, high rentals too. One month’s rent key money – quite a thing. I tell you, Hamish, real estate’s the thing. The country’s booming, spreading like a bloody epidemic, old boy. Buy, if you can get
it – anywhere. In two years you’ll treble your money. Hamish is nodding his fat grey head and thinking it’s time he put up a round of drinks and figuring out how he can avoid it. He has no intention of buying any land. He’s busy mortgaging sections of his present property to pay for the maintenance of his house, his wife and his liquor account. Sundowner parties, tennis parties that turn into sundowner parties, people dropping round for drinks at midday – hell of an expense. But what can you do, you’ve got to do it.

  At the other end of the bar Monica Pryce was saying to Winnie Constance: ‘There’s Jake and Sheila. Must’ve got a late pass from his mistress.’

  ‘Jake’s making an ass of himself.’

  Jake Jefferson looked at James Forsythe. What the hell was he doing in his party? He didn’t suppose he had exchanged a dozen words with the young V.I.P. from England since he arrived two years ago. What did V.I.P. stand for – Very Indifferent Prick? Forsythe was coming over to be sociable.

  ‘Well, Jefferson, how’s tricks in the police state?’

  The policeman took a long sip out of his ninth Scotch. ‘Regimented,’ he said.

  Forsythe laughed.

  ‘Sheila tells me you’re due for a promotion to Assistant Commissioner, congratulations.’

  Jake Jefferson looked at Forsythe sharply, then glanced at his wife. What did the woman think she was doing? And why tell this slob, of all people?

  ‘Sheila jumps to conclusions,’ was all he could think of saying. Then, ‘Excuse me a moment,’ and he left the bar.

  He walked down the passage and into the door marked Gentlemen. He turned the light on. The noise from the cocktail bar was mercifully cut off. He leaned his back against the door and sighed.

  Did he have to choose this for the rest of his life instead of Suzie? That aimless, soulless bunch instead of sweet genuine Suzie?

  He left the door and walked heavily over to the wash-basin and splashed cold water up into his face. He looked at himself in the mirror.

  It was definitely a forty-year-old face that looked back at him. ‘You’re old, Jefferson,’ he said aloud, ‘you’ve almost had it.’ Weight, he could see the weight in his face. ‘Whisky, Jefferson, too much bloody whisky.’ Lines round his eyes. No longer the light handsome lines of eyes that smile a great deal, but webs now. And on his brow, permanent lines. At his temples, turning grey. Forty. ‘The great Jake Jefferson – what’s happened to you, you stupid bastard?’ Forty. And what have you got to show for it? A wife who lives it up and runs up accounts all round town. A monthly liquor bill two feet long. Dress accounts at Meikle’s and Greaterman’s. Dinner parties you don’t want and can’t afford. Debt. But worse than all that, you’re gutless.