Hold My Hand I'm Dying

by John Gordon Davis

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Would I, hell!’

  Samson had it pretty good and he knew it. The Nkosi was, in Samson’s book, an induna, a gentleman, a hunter, a good bloke. The Nkosi did not bother him, did not criticise him, all the Nkosi demanded was a moderately clean floor, no dirty dishes lying around, a bed that was made and clean clothes to put on. The Nkosi ate what was put before him and all he demanded was plenty of it. The Nkosi did not notice whether Samson was there or not. All Samson had to say was, ‘Nkosi, there is no sugar,’ and the Nkosi said, ‘Don’t tell me, go buy it.’

  Samson did not know what hit him. The Nkosi’s new Nkosikazi with the long yellow hair burst into Samson’s indolence like a summer thunderstorm.

  ‘What does the boss eat for breakfast?’

  ‘The Nkosi doesn’t eat breakfast, Nkosikazi.’

  ‘What? No breakfast!’

  Samson blinked at her.

  ‘You don’t give him breakfast? How do you expect him to be strong?’

  ‘The Nkosi say—’

  ‘I don’t care what he says. Now, every morning you cook him porridge and two fried eggs and tomato and bacon—’

  The Nkosikazi had him shelling peas and scraping carrots and seasoning steak and roasting potatoes. She had him polishing floors and cleaning windows and every day he had to bring a grocery list round to her office to vet and he got minute instructions on what the Nkosi was going to eat tonight. She even had him sewing buttons and pressing suits. Samson dearly hoped that the Nkosi would not take it into his head to marry. He hoped that one day the Nkosi would say that they would go away to shoot crocodiles again.

  At four o’clock the telephone rang in Mahoney’s office.

  ‘Joe, can you spare me a minute at half-past four? My car’s in the garage and I need a lift. Can you fetch me at the surgery after work, please?’

  After work Mahoney walked feverishly into the reception room of the surgery. There was only one man in the room, and it was Suzie’s boss leaning on the desk talking to her. Suzie jumped up and closed the door behind Mahoney. The doctor came forward and took Mahoney’s arm firmly.

  ‘Suzie tells me you’re trying to turn night into day and eating benzedrine like they were acid drops. Let’s look at your hands.’

  Mahoney left the surgery with Suzie half an hour later with his arm tingling from the intravenous injection. Suzie clutched the tonic prescription as if it were a prize she had won. Her car was parked outside, not at the garage.

  And then at last, one stinking hot summer afternoon, it was all over. For five consecutive days, three hours in the morning, three hours in the afternoon, sitting alone in a big hall with a solitary invigilator, Mahoney regurgitated his learning. At five o’clock on the fifth day he walked out with ink on his face and hair and his lungs and tongue burning with nicotine, into the first bar and he flooded his jagged system with the balm of beer. Suzie came and joined him at the bar and asked him about the paper and how he thought he had done and he told her all about it and she thought he was very clever and she proposed a toast to Joseph Mahoney, b.a. ll.b., the greatest advocate and legal giant of them all, and she was so cocksure and so pleased it was all over that you would have thought she had written the examinations herself.

  That afternoon the summer broke. The skies were black and there came a crack of thunder and the sky opened and down it came, hot and fat and straight and the dry brown bush was turned into a bog and the gutters of Bulawayo ran so full you could not cross them and at the intersection of Grey Street and Eighth Avenue a man took off his shirt and swam across the road.

  ‘And now that the exams are over, what are you going to do?’

  ‘First,’ he said, ‘i’m going to unwind. When in Rome do as the Romans do. We’re going to go to a few of these parties, like good little Colonials are supposed to do. Bulawayo isn’t such a bad little city if you just accept it and take it for what it is.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s not.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  The year that followed was very successful and very beautiful and very happy and very gay and very passionate. Only in the end was it sad.

  The success was in Rhodesia, the boom of rich young countries in Partnership, the rattle of pneumatic drills and the bangs and grunts and shouts of buildings going up and the rumble of the steam-rollers and the rattle of railway trucks carrying coal and steel and copper and chrome down to the sea, success was the thick rich ripe stench of tobacco in great golden bales and the singsong and hurly-burly of the auctioneer, success was optimism and energy in the air. ‘Go north young man.’ Success was Partnership between black and white, Equal Rights for All Civilised Men. Success was Joseph Mahoney, b.a., ix.b., Advocate of the High Court of Southern Rhodesia, Assistant Public Prosecutor, Magistrate’s Court, Province of Matabeleland.

  The Attorney General sent me on the High Court Circuit because I was unmarried. The circuit criminal sessions of the High Court were good fun in those days: there were no political crimes, no riots, no political murders, no petrol bombing of another man’s huts because he didn’t belong to the same political party, no burning of a man’s crops or maiming of his cattle because he co-operated with the white man: it was all good clean crime, good wholesome murders and rapes and thefts. Circuit was a kind of busman’s holiday in those days: I drove up in my black Government Rover into the Circuit town a couple of days before session started, and I settled myself into the local pub to get acclimatised and I read my briefs in comfort. The judge arrived the next day in his Government Humber with his police motorcycle escort and the town brass and I were there to meet him outside the hotel and we shook hands all round and went up to his suite for sundowners: the local magistrate was the guest of honour at that party, and etiquette required that we keep working on the sundowners until the magistrate left. Later in the week the magistrate threw his party and the judge was the guest of honour, then at the end of the week the judge threw his formal party and I was the guest of honour, and in between there were parties thrown by the Mayor and the local assistant Commissioner of police and the other brass, and in between, between ten and four, we tried the good wholesome murderers and rape artists and thieves. Then we drove on to the next town on the circuit.

  Happiness was returning home to Bulawayo after a six-week circuit. Driving the Rover straight through town to Suzie’s flat and laughing tense inside with excitement, loving every hot wide dry familiar street of Bulawayo, happy, laughing at the thought of her excitement when she saw me, her eyes going wide and her squeal of welcome and her jumping up and down as she hugged me. Running up the four flights of stairs to her flat. ‘Joey!’

  Her eyes opened and she dropped her hands to her knees and then she ran to me and flung her arms around me. We laughed and I twirled her round to look at her and she laughed and I reached out and squeezed her shoulders, pulled her against me and put my hand down behind her and squeezed her backside.

  ‘Did you warn Samson I was coming home?’

  ‘Yes, he’s waiting and the flat’s all ready and the fridge is full of beer and a big fat cold chicken and a bit fat cold bottle of wine—’

  Wine and Suzie.

  Samson beaming all over his wide black face.

  ‘Welcome Nkosi!’ as he flung open the door and we pumped hands.

  God it was good to come home! The hot ugly flat, the view of the hot red roofs, and the stunted hedges and the brown horizons didn’t matter.

  ‘Fetch my bags from the black car, induna. And here’s five shillings. Go to the beerhalls.’

  ‘Thanks ver’ mush, Nkosi!’ beaming all over his wide black face.

  ‘Now come here,’ I said to Suzie.

  ‘What are we going to do, oh master?’ She came to me and put her arms round my neck and I kissed her. A long and succulent and sucking kiss and she worked her tongue into my mouth. I put both hands on her breasts and then I slid them over her belly and then over her soft shanks and she sucked on my tongue.
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  ‘We’re going out on the town for a few drinks,’ I said into her mouth, ‘and then we’re going to come back and unwrap that chicken and open that bottle of wine—’

  ‘Mmmmmmmm …’ she said into my mouth and she kissed long and sucking again.

  Happiness was leaving the Courthouse at four o’clock in the hot afternoon, flushed with battle and the heat of the day and getting into the old Chev and picking Suzie up outside her office: Let’s go for a drink. And we went to the roof garden on top of the new Carlton and drank cold beer as we watched the sun go down on Matebeleland, shining white and then florid on the new high white concrete buildings that were going up: or we went downstairs to the pink plush Flamingo, or across the road to the dark plush Zambezi or the red Carousel or to the high purple Vic or to the green Sheridan. Contentment was walking into the cool carpeted pinks and greens and inbetweens, the soft twinkle tinkle of the canned music and the cocktail glasses and the murmur of voices, Suzie walking cool and warm and straight and woman beside me after a hard day in Court. Contentment was taking two soft barstools under us, and snapping the fingers at the smiling black barman—

  Two cold ones, Zebediah, it’s been a long hot day.

  Yassah!

  Contentment was that first long cold sparkling swallow, the feeling Aaarrh and putting the glass down and looking sideways at Suzie, wide red lips on the glass and her eyes half-closed as she took the first cold bitter sip. Contentment was the cool of the air-conditioner beginning to soak through my suit on to my back and Suzie putting her glass down and then putting her hand on to my knee and saying: ‘How did it go today? Did you win?’

  ‘I always win.’

  She squeezed my knee and wrinkled up her nose. ‘You jolly schmart, aren’t you? Always win?’

  ‘Well – almost always.’ She laughed.

  ‘Baby face. You’ve got such a young face, you know that. Sometimes, you don’t look more than twenty not twenty-eight, you make me feel old.’

  ‘You’re only twenty-eight.’

  She stroked my hair off my forehead.

  ‘I sometimes feel old, and sometimes you look so young, like now, you always look young.’

  ‘It’s the good life I lead.’

  ‘You,’ I said. ‘You don’t look more than twenty-two. Twenty-two. Twenty-three, maybe twenty-five at the outside.’

  True. She didn’t look twenty-eight. My friends thought Suzie was twenty-two. She had that fresh blonde look.

  ‘It’s the Libra in you,’ I said. ‘Women bom under Libra always look good.’

  Sometimes she insisted on speaking Afrikaans to me, to improve my Afrikaans; she delighted in being able to teach me something.

  ‘You’re so clever,’ she said, ‘I must show you that I’m better than you at something.’

  ‘I’m not all that clever.’

  ‘Oh yes you are.’

  Happiness was a tall cold beer in an air-conditioned cocktail bar with a soft barstool under my bum and a b.a., ll.b. under my belt and getting known about town as a pretty hot prosecutor and people recognising me in the street. Happiness was dropping in at the Exchange Bar on the way home from Court, that old Exchange Bar with its high old Rhodesian ceiling and its high heavy old Victorian wooden counter with all the names carved on it and all the buffalo and eland and antelope heads on the walls, and shooting the bull with Max and the boys over a few cold Lions: the boys thought it was a pretty good joke on society having me as one of the custodians of the public conscience. ‘The pot calling the kettle black,’ they said down at the Exchange. Happiness was driving on to Suzie’s flat; in Suzie’s soft womanly flat, with all her little knick-knacks and things, her gramophone records, and her Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar magazines and her Reader’s Digest and her flower bowls which she filled every day, her sewing machine in the corner always with a new dress coming together. Contentment was: ‘Hello, my love, go powder your nose, we’re going for a drink.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  ‘What shall I wear?’

  ‘Anything, sexless. You look dreary in anything.’

  Going into her little kitchen and opening the fridge, the fridge that always had something to eat in it, and getting out a cold beer and snapping off the cap and selecting one of her fancy glasses and wandering through with it into her bedroom and flopping down on to her bed with it and watching her get ready. Her bedroom always smelt warm and sweet and clean, of Suzie, and there were her bottles of lotions and perfumes and cosmetics and her hair-clips and her orange sticks and mascara, and when she opened the built-in cupboards there were all her dresses hanging and in the drawers were all her panties and suspender belts and bras that I knew, and it felt good.

  ‘Aren’t you going to shower?’

  She had slipped off her dress and was sitting in front of the dressing-table in her filmy nylon negligée working on her face. She turned around and looked at me.

  ‘Are we just going out for one or two drinks, or are we making a night of it? Because if we’re going to be back early I’d rather bathe then—’

  ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen,’ I said.

  ‘Joe, shouldn’t we have an early night? We’ve been out late every night for ages—’

  ‘Go and shower, darling.’

  She looked at me and gave her knowing smile.

  ‘You just want to watch,’ she said cunningly.

  ‘Go and shower,’ I said.

  When I heard the water splashing I climbed off the bed and went into the bathroom. There she was standing under the shower with her honey hair piled up high on her head and the water was running down her golden skin and her breasts and her belly were white against her gold. Soap on her face, and her eyes screwed up.

  ‘God, Suzie you’re lovely.’

  She splashed the soap off her face and stood there to be admired and she smiled at me with the soap still running down her face and her slender neck. I lifted her chin and she leaned forward and kissed me, soft and gentle, water on her lips. I cupped her breast and it was cool and soft and wet.

  I liked watching her dress. She was quite unashamed now, she liked me watching her, because she knew I liked it. She even flaunted herself a little, pretending she wasn’t, because she knew I liked to watch her. She always put her bra on last, even after her suspenders and stockings because she knew her breasts were perfect, and whenever I said: ‘Come here, Suzie,’ she came and kissed me and petted me.

  And she always put on her lipstick and mascara before her dress, so I could watch her leaning close to the mirror.

  ‘Come here, Suzie.’

  And she stopped her work and she sat poised leaning forward against the mirror with her chin stuck out and her golden hair hanging long down her golden back, one hand poised up in front of her eyelid holding the little mascara brush and she looked at me in the mirror with her good eye expressionless and then she opened the other eye and grinned at me.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Come here, lover.’

  And she always looked at me in the mirror for a moment more, dead serious again, still with the hand holding the brush up, then she lowered it and turned around on her little dressing-table bench on her pantied bottom and came stepping across the room on her high heels, her stockinged legs making that crisp shiny womanly brushing sound as they brushed each other and her breasts wobbled a little with each clip clip of her high heels and her eyes were loving and she stopped in front of me with her arms at her sides like a little girl waiting for inspection, playing the fool now. ‘Come here—’

  And she dropped the little girl foolery and she bent down over me and kissed me long and soft and sucking and her straight long hair brushed against my neck and her breasts in her lacy bra were full in front of me, cool and full and sweet in front of me, just the nipples under the lacy cups and I put my hand up whilst she kissed me, and I trailed the back of my fingers across the smooth fragrant bulges and she still kissed me and I put my hand down bet
ween her legs and trailed my hand up and down the soft secret place of her thighs between her stockings and panties, the soft olive smooth part. She kissed me while I did this, long and female, and then sometimes she pushed harder against me and I reached up and pulled her down beside me into a heap on the bed, her nose against mine and she said softly, into my mouth: ‘Are we going for this drink or aren’t we? This is for afters—’

  Happiness was wine in the sun on Sundays.

  So the summer passed and a winter, and a spring and then it was October again.

  Chapter Twenty

  Unhappiness came at the end of the second summer. The wetness had gone out of the earth and the bush and the grass were dull and there was dry whiteness in the blue of the sky.

  I woke up and realised it was Sunday. My head ached and my eyes were scratchy and my nerves cringed for sleep but I was wide awake. I looked up out of the window and the sky sat on the earth like a big dull blue belljar. Suzie felt me move and she woke up. I swung my legs off the bed and sat up and looked at the floor. I could feel her looking at me.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Okay.’

  She looked at me. ‘You look all puffed up.’

  ‘I feel it a bit.’ ‘Damn parties.’

  I rubbed my tongue over my teeth and looked at the floor. I got up off the bed and pulled on a pair of shorts. I stood at the window and looked out. The street below was quiet and hot and the sun was glinting on the hoods of the cars. A little girl with dirty knees was sitting on the swing made out of an old motor tyre and a black man was pushing her back and forth. A white woman in a dressing-gown and haircurlers came out the back door and shouted ‘Enoch!’ and there was a shout from the servants’ kia next to the sanitary lane and Enoch came out into the dusty backyard. Across the road a white man was sitting in a singlet on the verandah reading the newspaper and a black boy was polishing the Buick. And over the red roof-tops of Fort Street were the jacaranda trees of Sauerstown. Those new three-bedroomed houses on one-third-of-an-acre stands with the diapers hanging on the clothesline and the nannies pushing the prams; and beyond the long flat horizon of Matabeleland, brown now, stretching on to the end of the world.