Hold My Hand I'm Dying

by John Gordon Davis

  ‘British Overseas Airways Corporation announce the arrival of their flight B.A. 248 from Johannesburg,’ said the soft-hard female voice of the loudspeaker.

  Suzanna stiffened. ‘Well, here it is,’ she said in a tiny voice.

  Quarter past eleven.

  ‘It’s got to refuel and so forth yet,’ he said.

  ‘Dad, I’m going on to the verandah to see it come in.’

  ‘All right, Helen.’ He turned back to Suzie and took her hand again. ‘Relax. This is the beginning of a new life together.’

  ‘Jake, it’s so sad,’ tears back in her eyes, ‘and I feel such a cheat.’

  ‘Well look,’ he wanted to pour forth self-justification again, as much to console himself as convince Suzanna. He checked himself: ‘Suzie, you’re not cheating anyone, you’re simply doing what I’ve considered best. If there’s been any cheating, I’m the one who’s been cheated for years. Now relax, look on the happy side.’

  She closed her eyes and nodded and sniffed.

  ‘I could do some relaxing myself,’ he breathed. ‘Let’s have another drink.’

  The bar was full now. There was a long low gathering whine and the big jet came screaming in. It ran the whole runway, then laboriously turned and came crawling back over the tarmac with a high-pitched scream. It crawled up in front of the building and then the screaming suddenly descended through a dying whine into ringing silence. The people on the verandah began to mill and then wave. Jake came back with the drinks.

  ‘Our last together for three months,’ he said trying to sound cheerful. ‘The next time it will be champagne in the smartest damn hotel in Hong Kong!’

  ‘It won’t,’ Suzie smiled tearfully, ‘the next’ll be in the taxi cab from Hong Kong airport. I’m bringing a big bottle in an ice-bucket to meet you!’

  They laughed.

  ‘On the way to the Magistrate’s Court to get married,’ Jake amended, ‘straight from the airport to the Courthouse—’

  ‘This is the first call for British Overseas Airways Corporation’s flight BA 248 …’

  Suzanna looked at Jake. ‘Hadn’t we better go to the Departure Lounge?’

  ‘Relax and finish your drink. There’ll be two more calls yet.’

  Helen came threading her way back from the verandah. ‘Daddy—’

  ‘Yes, I heard it, my love.’ He put his arm around his daughter’s shoulders.

  ‘Now you two look after yourselves.’

  ‘You too, Jake. You look like death warmed up—’

  ‘I’m fine. And if there’s anything you need just cable. And for godsake don’t skimp on food, we’re not that hard-up.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Helen, take those tablets I gave you – Suzie, see she takes her tablets. I want you both blooming when I get there—’

  ‘Yes, Daddy.’

  ‘This is the second call for British Overseas Airways Corporation’s flight BA—’

  ‘Well, we’d better go.’

  People were moving out of the lounge, down the passage and then down the stairs to the Departure Lounge. It was a relief to move, to merge with the others. He had forgotten his worries in the last minute advice, now he was worrying again, looking around for stationary people who were looking around. There were none. They moved down the stairs in single file and in the concourse he saw a young policeman, and his pulse tripped. God, he thought, I would make a hopeless criminal. They moved through the concourse, it was full of people. The clock showed a quarter to midnight. Suzie squeezed his arm. The crocodile of people were making for the Lounge, bottlenecking now at the glass doorway, kissing and taking farewells, then thinning out as the passengers went through the door. There was a ground hostess at the doorway, nodding and smiling and checking on a list. Jake pulled Suzanna and Helen to one side, against the wall.

  ‘I can’t go in, it’s passengers only.’

  They looked up at him.

  ‘Well, this is it. Good-bye, my two loves. No, it’s only au revoir—’

  There were people milling round the glass doorway, standing back, waving and signalling through the glass doors. Jake Jefferson’s eyes were burning. Suzanna’s eyes were bright with tears but her chin and her smile were firm.

  ‘Jake, when you’re miserable, just think of those week-ends on our junk and that big fish striking and that salt air in your handsome old face—’

  ‘Old!’ It was a relief to find something to pick on. They laughed brittlely.

  ‘And you two girls lounging on the deck in your bikinis feeding me beer!’

  They laughed again. The tears were hot behind their eyes.

  ‘This is the third and final call for passengers on British Overseas Airways—’ the loudspeaker said emotionlessly.

  ‘Dad, I think we’re the last ones!’

  There were no more people going through the doorway. The crowd around the glass doors was stationary, in a horse shoe, waving and smiling and signalling and chattering. The ground hostess was looking at them, cool, benign, businesslike.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Good-bye—’

  Suzanna stood on tiptoe and kissed him quickly on his mouth. ‘Keep a stout heart, Jake.’

  ‘Suzanna.’

  She was gone through the doorway with tears welling, pretending to be engrossed in a broken fingernail. There was a man standing inside the doorway, waiting to pass through; she bumped into him. ‘Sorry.’ She skipped around once to wave again, then she disappeared round the corner of the Lounge. Jake watched her go. Then he turned to his daughter. The girl had tears in her eyes unashamedly.

  ‘Good-bye, Daddy.’

  He took her in his arms. ‘Now, what’s all this nonsense?’ he said. ‘We’re going to be grand, all of us, and just you look after Miss de Villiers.’

  ‘Excuse me, sir.’

  It was the fat man trying to get through the doorway.

  ‘Sorry.’ Jake moved Helen aside: ‘We’re going to be the best three people in the world.’

  ‘Excuse me, sir!’

  It was the fat man again, out of the doorway now. Jake glanced at him irritably.

  ‘Excuse me, sir – are you Jackson Jefferson of …’

  There was a ringing in his ears, a ringing that started up from his stomach and flooded his chest, his arms and shoulders and his head, then a dropping sensation. He looked down at the short fat man.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I am.’

  The fat man looked relieved and hastily unfolded a paper in his hand.

  ‘I’m a deputy Sheriff of the High Court,’ he said fatly, apologetically, ‘and I hereby now serve upon you an order of the High Court duly signed by the Registrar of the High Court. This here is called an Interdict and it says: “It is ordered: that Jackson Brian Jefferson be and is hereby interdicted from removing from the jurisdiction of this Honourable Court the person of Helen Stephanie—”’

  The concourse was blurred, the faces of the crowd round the doorway a mass of jeering pink, the fat apologetic voice of the sheriff reading the Order. Jake Jefferson moved forward, the weight of Helen on his arm, he took the sheriff by the elbow and pulled them off behind a pillar.

  ‘Now do you understand that?’ the sheriff was saying kindly. ‘If you don’t I’ll go over it all again.’

  Blindly Jake took the paper. He focused on the official document, stumbled through it and read the date. It was dated today! Why, the bitch had known all along, the bitch, the filthy cruel bloody bitch. Of course, the bloody bitch had smelt a rat and checked.

  The Sheriff looked very sorry. ‘Now sir …’

  An arm pushed the Sheriff aside. ‘Jake!’ Suzanna said. ‘What is it, what is it—?’

  ‘Sheila—’

  Suzanna turned on the sheriff like a shrew. He stepped back from her.

  ‘Get away, you!’ she hissed. ‘Leave him alone!’

  The loudspeaker said: ‘British Overseas Airways Corporation announce the departure of their flight …’

 
Jake straightened up. ‘Get aboard, Suzie—’

  ‘Will I, hell!’

  Chapter Six

  Every day Jake Jefferson used to fetch Suzanna de Villiers at her flat in time to drive her to work, and almost every evening he used to fetch her from work, parking outside the tall building in Main Street and waiting for her, giving a short toot on his hooter when she emerged to attract her attention. She used to come smiling over to his car and hop into the front seat and they would drive happily back to her flat for tea and maybe for a drink and supper. Sometimes they went straight for a drink in a bar when he picked her up from work, to the roof garden where they sat high in the open and watched the homeward bound traffic and watched the sunset while they drank cold beer; sometimes to the cool air-conditioned Long Bar which pretended to be nothing but a pleasant bar, sometimes to the Can Can Room, which was all colours and pretended to be in Paris with murals of girls kicking their legs all over the place; and sometimes he took her to the Club where they played golf or tennis before having their sundowner. If Jake Jefferson could not fetch Suzanna at her doctor’s rooms he used to telephone her. On Sundays he fetched her from her flat too, particularly on Sundays, and sometimes with Helen, they used to go for picnics into the bush, to Lake Mcllwaine and cook sausages and chips and potatoes in their jackets in the live coals and drink beer and he used to fish, and sometimes they spent the day on the farms of his friends around Salisbury. There had to be a riot to keep Jake Jefferson away on a Sunday.

  But on her third day back at her employer’s consulting rooms Suzanna de Villiers emerged from the tall building on Main Street at five o’clock and she looked up and down the parking bays and she waited again for the toot but none came. She waited for a while, looking at books in a shop window, and then set off back to the private hotel where she had a room. And she asked at the gloomy reception desk if there were any messages for her, and there were none, and she went upstairs and let herself into her small room. She was too late for the hotel tea, so she took her small kettle out from her suitcase on top of the wardrobe and filled it in the handbasin and plugged it in and she sat down on her bed and lit a cigarette and tried to read a magazine story and she waited for the sound of his footsteps or the knock of the hotel boy on her door telling her there was a boss on the phone for her. She drank her coffee and smoked her cigarettes and looked at the same magazine page for two hours and chewed her fingers and her knuckles, but there came neither the footsteps nor the hotel boy. And at seven o’clock she went downstairs and tried to pick through a mean boarding-house meal at a table by herself in the centre of the dining-room, and afterwards she went upstairs and made more coffee and turned the radio on loud to fill the poky room and she smoked cigarettes and waited, but nobody came. Nobody came the next night, nor the next, nor the next, nor the next and Suzanna de Villiers seemed to grow old and thin and shaky.

  On the thirtieth day Suzanna de Villiers succumbed to a nervous breakdown and the doctor who employed her put her on a train to the faraway seaside to recuperate. Then she went to live in Bulawayo, in the flat hot dry cattle country of Matabeleland, where she was a stranger to everyone.

  Chapter Seven

  Spring is a hot ripe virgin moaning out loud, summer is a whore.

  In spring you cannot bear to wait for it. In spring you lie awake wishing it, the plunge that will blast the heat from your body in her wet loins, the wet pounding that will make your frustrations burst out free. She will wash it all away when at last she comes to you, and renders you soft again, and calm and content.

  Then at last she does come to you in all her tempestuous beauty. She throws herself wildly down upon you, she pounds you with all her fulsome wetness, you open your arms and your mouth and your whole body to her, and she makes you burst.

  But when you wake up, she is still there with you. You grow accustomed to her, you no longer need her, and then you begin to dislike her, then to hate her.

  It rained for ten days, without ceasing, warm and fat and straight down.

  Joseph Mahoney sat on the verandah of the Residency every afternoon and drank beer and watched the curtains of water.

  ‘I’m bushwhacked,’ he said aloud – ‘bushwhacked.’

  The telephone lines were washed down on the Nyamanpofu Road, and atmospherics drowned any ordinary radio. The only communication with the outside world was the two-way radio in the sergeant’s police station. If there were any messages for the Assistant Native Commissioner, the sergeant relayed them to him in the morning at the office. Otherwise the Assistant Native Commissioner and the sergeant seldom spoke to each other.

  Mahoney sat on his verandah and looked at the garden.

  ‘Looks like a paddy-field,’ he said aloud.

  He tossed his empty beer can as far as he could into the garden and he picked up his .22 rifle. He sat in his deckchair and sniped at the can. Every evening he sat in the deckchair drinking beer and sniping at the empty cans. He became very accurate. He put his bare feet on the low verandah wall and cradled the barrel of the rifle between his big and second toes, and he could hit the can every time.

  After a week he was hitting the can every time holding the rifle like a pistol with only one hand. Then he had Samson drag his dressing-table which had a mirror on to the verandah. He sat in the deckchair facing the dressing-table. He pointed the rifle backwards over his shoulder and sighted down the barrel through the mirror. After a while he could hit the can every time that way too.

  He wondered what else he could do with the rifle. ‘Short of taking a pot-shot at Sheerluck for kicks or blowing my brains out.’

  Down in the valley it was very bad.

  The rain fell in a blue-grey curtain and turned the hot dry jungle into a bog. The water ran down the sides of the escarpment in tumbling rivers into the huge trough of the valley and the great river swelled and surged and roared and climbed up its banks. And from the hydrological stations up north in Angola and the far northern parts of Northern Rhodesia there came reports to the engineers building the wall at the faraway gorge called Kariba that more rain was falling there than ever before, that the water was tumbling into the Zambezi’s tributaries, that the tributaries roared and were swollen as never before, and that soon a great wall of water would hit the valley and swamp it and tear away the beginning of the dam wall.

  At Kariba hundreds of Italians and black men worked in a frenzy in the steep gorge to reinforce and heighten the coffer dam in which the foundations of the wall were being laid. Night and day the trucks slithered and ground through the rain down the sides of the gorge, night and day the drills hammered at the rock and at the concrete, through the night and the day the shifts worked pouring concrete into the gorge. The great Zambezi leapt and tore through the gorge in black and brown fury. It mounted higher and higher up its steep rock sides, higher and higher up and round the walls of the puny coffer dam. Each day a new high water mark went under. But the flood waters from the north had not yet arrived. And even the Italian engineers began to believe in Nyamayimini, the furious river god.

  Down in the valley only Chipepo’s people refused to move. They refused to believe in the floods, either the temporary one they were told was coming because of the faraway rains, or the great flood that would come next year when the white man’s wall was finished.

  It took the old man a long time to walk through the Zambezi Valley, because his bones and sinews were no longer as strong as a lion, as they had once Leen, and his cardboard suitcase was heavy for him, and the ground was very wet. It rained all the time – Ah! Never had he seen such rain! It was very troublesome for a man to make a long journey in such rain. But it was good, the Sikatongas had done their work very well and next year the crops would be very big and green and his cattle and his goats would be very fat and his wives and his children and all the people would be fat and happy.

  His old black wet brow scowled as he thought about the people and his gardens and his cattle and his goats.

  Ah! but what were t
hese bad things the white men were telling him? Even the Mambo Joseph-i was telling him these bad things and the Mambo had never told him a bad thing before, he had never even been cross with him except maybe sometimes when the Mambo’s head was sore from the beer and he wanted a wife. Ah! the Mambo drank plenty beer sometimes. And then he would sit on the verandah of his house and look straight ahead for a long time and sometimes he would sit at the table and write many words on paper while he drank too much beer. And then in the morning he would screw up the paper and throw it away. Ah! he was a strange one, the Mambo Joseph-i.

  But the Mambo had never told him a bad thing before. Maybe if the Mambo says the flood is coming it is a true thing.

  Then the old man shook his head as he walked through the wet jungle.

  Ah! that was foolishness to think like that! How can any man stop the river? Not even the white men who are very rich and clever can stop Nyamayimini. Nyamayimini was very fierce and strong. Nyamayimini was there, real, like the valley itself, like the sun itself, like the night, the thunder and the rain. No man can stop the sun from rising, nor the night from coming, nor the thunder, and likewise no man can stop Nyamayimini. And the valley, the valley was real and it had always been here. The valley was like Nyamayimini.

  The old man scowled angrily. No, it cannot be a true thing. The wise men from the city said it was a trick. The Mambo Joseph-i had never told him a bad thing, but the Mambo was young, maybe he also had been tricked. Only the young and the foolish would believe a story like that.