Hold My Hand I'm Dying

by John Gordon Davis

  ‘Suzie.’

  She turned and looked at me, holding the two pieces of fishing rod. ‘Yes?’

  I looked at the rod and I looked at her.

  ‘It was good, wasn’t it? Fishing at Inyanga?’

  She nodded. ‘And the pools,’ she said, ‘that deep pool where we swam.’

  ‘And the wine.’

  ‘Yes. And the wine.’

  I nodded. ‘And the Zambezi,’ I said.

  ‘And the Victoria Falls,’ she said, ‘and that place we saw the elephant crossing the river with her baby hanging on to her tail.’

  ‘Yes, the baby.’

  I looked at her standing there, tall and shapely and sad.

  ‘And Sundays,’ I said, ‘in the sun.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Yes. It was all wonderful. It’s been a very good two years, Joe.’

  And she turned and laid the rod in the trunk. And I thought of the summer coming, the long hot summer and the tall green grass and the wetness in the earth and the sun shining on the trout streams and the sun setting on the Zambezi and fire flickering outside the tent. And I thought of the next winter, the warm woman smell of Suzie in the room and sitting up in bed having tea and the brisk sound of her nyloned thighs as she walked around the room getting dressed and I thought: Nothing will be the same. Summer and winter will never be the same without Suzie. And no wine in the sun on Sundays.

  Then she started on her little things. Off the walls came her pictures and her knick-knacks, her poster of the bullfight in Villa de Manica and her bottle opener from Inyanga and her wooden masks and carvings from Wankie and the Victoria Falls, her chunk of twisted wood from the valley, her postcards of the places we had been to, her this and her that. Off the mantelpiece and the window-sills came her collection of swizzle sticks she had hijacked from every bar we had patronised, her collection of matches, her champagne corks from memorable occasions, her collection of hotel menus, off the dressing-table came her tins of hair-clips and her bottles of lotions and her perfumes and creams, her ribbons and her nail polishes, and all the things women collect. Before my eyes she stripped the flat of everything that was hers, and the walls and the mantelpiece and the window-sills and the dressing-table stood bare and the flat and I became desolate and heartbroken.

  On Saturday some of the crowd came to the flat for midday drinks to say good-bye to Suzie. The flat was rather bare and we just put two cases of beer in the middle of the floor and we helped ourselves. Two o’clock came and nobody showed signs of moving, so I sent Samson downtown to the Greek for six barbecued chickens and I went down to the Cecil Hotel and got four more crates of beer and I broke out the last demijohn of wine. Suzie was the centre of conversation and she moved about from clump to clump, passing beers and directing Samson to fill wine glasses and joking and laughing at reminiscences and promising to send postcards. She was beautiful in her going away gear. I looked at her legs moving inside her skirt and pressing against the cloth. I saw the soft fold of her legs as she sat and crossed them, the nylons making a brisk soft woman sound, I looked at her slim ankles, I thought of the soft part of her legs where the stockings ended and the garters clipped on, that smooth soft secret olive skin of that part of her thighs. I thought of her small belly, firm and soft, just a little bulge, just the right amount, with a dull line where the remnants of her summer tan began. And despair clutched at my guts. I thought: you may never make love to this woman again, last night was probably the last time you will make love to her. She will meet someone else in England or Europe or the States and she will make love to him in some strange bed in some strange town, take off her clothes and lie down with some man who has the courage to marry. And you will be stuck here in Matabeleland, going to Court every day and coming home to an empty flat, hot in summer, and cold in winter, no wine in the sun on Sundays, everything will be as dull but without Suzie and you will cry out: Why—oh why didn’t I do it? And I didn’t know what to do I was so unhappy. She looked at me from time to time through the hubbub and the smoke and she smiled her bright sad secret smile to say: Cheer up, darling. Twice she left the people she was talking to and went to the crate and opened a bottle of beer and gave it to me. ‘Here you are, darling.’

  Someone went out and got more beer and another demijohn of wine and later in the afternoon singing broke out, like – My name is Cecil, The West Virginia Skies, Die Alabama and Bokkie Jy Moet Nou Huis-toe Gaan, which was cheerful enough. Some bright soul started a very beery solo of Red Sails in the Sunset, but when Suzie’s lip trembled somebody shut him up. She came up to me through the chatter and whispered: ‘Wish they’d go. I want to be alone with you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked at me and her lip trembled once. ‘The wine and the chicken,’ she said.

  I nodded. ‘Suzie – I love you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I love you too.’

  And squeezed my arm and went to answer some call from the crowd.

  At six-thirty we left the flat for the station. They were all pretty tight, except Suzie and me. Suzie wasn’t drinking much. I had drunk a lot of beer but the glow of it had worn off, and now I was just sad.

  We had taken her trunk to the station the previous night, and all I now carried was her small suitcase. She held my hands as we jostled tipsily down the stairs with a lot of noise. She looked straight ahead of her and her eyes were wet and her face was set. When we got to the entrance of the flats, she stopped suddenly and held out her hand and said: ‘Feel how warm it’s getting.’

  There was a new warmth in the air. We looked at each other and we were both thinking of the same thing, the long hot summer that was breaking, the bush and the rivers and the camps and the Sundays in the sun, but without each other.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I looked at her and there was a catch in my throat, and I took her arm and hurried her on to the car. The others were scattering noisily across the road to their cars. As I held the door open for her she turned back and looked up at our flat windows and the balcony, empty windows and balcony, and her mouth trembled.

  ‘Come on,’ I said gruffly and I turned her round. I started the car quickly.

  I turned down Fourth Avenue, then right into the wide Main Street. The neon lights in Main Street were patchy and the road was almost empty. The Victorian shopfronts squatting amongst the new skyscrapers. We didn’t say anything and as we waited at the traffic lights I looked at her and our eyes were burning. Max hooted cheerfully at us from behind when the lights turned green. As we passed one of our favourite pubs Suzie said:

  ‘There’s the Zambezi Bar,’ and I said, ‘Yes, good joint,’ and we both thought of the nights we had spent in the Zambezi Bar, the good nights and the wasted nights we had spent in the Zambezi.

  It was dark by the time we got to the station. It was crowded mostly with natives. They milled around in shabby clothes, umfazis with their piccanins, squatting on the platform eating a chunk of bread and drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola, suckling babies, carrying big old suitcases, bundles of property on their heads, jabbering. The train to Salisbury, Umtali and Beira was already in. The train smelt and looked exciting, of pastures new. We found Suzie’s compartment. She was sharing it with three white women. There were photographs of the Victoria Falls and the Wankie Game Reserve and Salibury’s new skyscraper skyline on the walls. I pulled open a top bunk and put her suitcase on to it. Our friends were waiting on the platform. I took Suzie’s hand and led her outside into the corridor. We were alone for the first time since noon. I held her waist and looked at her, and then her eyes began to fill with tears and her lower lip curled up and she put her knuckles to them.

  ‘Oh, Suzie—’

  She wouldn’t lean her head against me. She stood rigid with her knuckles to her eyes.

  ‘Suzie,’ I took her head and pulled it against my shoulder, ‘I hate to see you cry.’

  She sobbed against my shoulder.

  ‘Suzie,’ I squeezed her. ‘You’re coming back, aren’t you?
’

  She just sobbed. I pushed her back from me and shook her hips. ‘Suzie! You’ll come back soon.’ She shrugged tearfully.

  ‘Suzie!’

  ‘Excuse us please.’ The corridor was suddenly full of people climbing aboard, carrying suitcases, stepping awkwardly past. We separated to let them through. The second bell rang on the station. Suzie sniffed loudly and dabbed her eyes with a Kleenex. She let a man pass and then stretched out her hand and took mine.

  ‘Darling. I must say good-bye to the others on the platform.’

  We jostled down the corridor. The crowd was gathered at the door, and cheered. I stopped and turned to her.

  ‘Suzie, you’ll come back.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, but we both knew it wasn’t a promise.

  Everybody was talking and laughing and full of beer, and giving Suzie last minute advice. She laughed and smiled brightly, and promised to write. I held my arm round her and we had to join in the banter. The third bell rang and people were milling all down the long platform and waving and kissing good-bye, and shouting. Suzie grabbed hands and gave fleeting kisses all round. I lifted her up on to the train. It gave a jolt and then a long creak.

  ‘Good-bye, darling,’ I said.

  Good-bye, Good-bye Suzie, Good-bye, Happy Landings kid, Cheerio Suzie, Remember to write, See you next year in England Suzie, called the crowd.

  Good-bye, yes, yes, Suzie called.

  She smiled brightly with her wide mouth, but her eyes were wet.

  ‘Good-bye darling.’ I stood on the steps as the train began to ease forward.

  ‘Good-bye Joseph, darling.’

  She bent down to me and her hair fell across her cheeks and on to my face, the smell I knew so well, and she kissed me once, quickly and very warm.

  The train began to roll. ‘Good-bye,’ and I stepped off on to the platform.

  She looked at me, her eyes full of tears, and the corners of her mouth curled up for a weep, then she lifted her eyes to the crowd behind me, and waved and smiled as brightly as she could.

  And she was gone.

  The others went back to the flat to finish off the beer. I said I would join them but I did not want to see the naked flat and I didn’t want their cheerful party talk. And I didn’t want to drink beer. I had been drinking beer for over seven hours. Seven o’clock is a hell of a time to say good-bye to your love when you’ve been drinking beer since noon. You feel sluggish, and dyspeptic and only a little drunk, and you feel that more beer won’t make you any drunker. And there was a big lump in my throat and my eyes burned and I could not face the naked flat.

  I drove downtown to the old Exchange Bar. I sat up at the big old wooden bar under the buffalo and sable heads, where Suzie and I had often sat, and I drank a row of whiskies. I thought of Suzie in her green compartment with the photographs of Victoria Falls and the Wankie Game Reserve, rumbling through Africa in the night down to the faraway sea and the ship and the lovers she would meet, and then I thought of the flat I would go back to, empty and denuded and no Suzie, a lot of empty beer bottles and cigarette stubs, and old smoke, and I cried.

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Beer, cigarettes and sex.

  I woke up with the taste of all three very strong in my mouth. I was pretty used to that taste and that feeling these days, but this morning it was very bad. There was the dry ache behind my forehead, and when I opened my eyes my nerves cringed for sleep. I was in a strange room. Then I felt the girl against my back and I began to remember. The drinking and the strip poker and the girls. But I couldn’t remember which one had her backside against me now.

  It was Monday and I was in Court today, and my nerves cringed again. I got out of bed and looked at her. She looked puffed up too, and her mouth was open a little, and she didn’t look very sexy now. I remembered her, but I still couldn’t remember her name. I looked down at the floor but there were no dead French letters and I cursed.

  I remembered it all pretty clearly now. The usual noon-time drinking at the Club, the hair of the dog that bit you on Saturday night. Beginning to feel human again on your third beer. Then Max arriving with his current doll and her friend who had just been transferred from Salisbury. And then Eddie and his doll. And we drank beer at the Club until the bar closed at two-thirty in the afternoon, by which time we were beginning to get along with the beer. The usual Sunday afternoon in Rhodesia, especially in winter. Going back to Max’s cottage for more beer. Sitting round and drinking and getting bored. Then Max very sensibly suggesting strip poker. Eddie’s girl a bit coy at first, getting the funks when she had to take off her bra, but we bullied her into it. Then we were all in the nude, sitting round the table and we began to play for forfeits, because there was nothing else to play for. Forfeits like doing a belly dance and pretending you’re having a shower. Then we were all playing charades, then we were all dancing together and swapping partners, then we were all doing the limbo in the nude to Harry Belafonte, everybody clapping to the beat of Belafonte, and the broomstick getting lower and lower, and the girls falling on their bums, legs up in the air, and everybody laughing hilariously. Then we were all doing the Conga through the cottage. Max slipped in the kitchen and we all fell in a tangled heap of arms and legs and squeals and guffaws. Then somebody was shaking a beer bottle to make it fizz and then holding his thumb over the top and squirting everybody else with beer, then we were all shaking beer bottles and squirting each other, chasing each other round the lounge, squirting beer over each other, dripping with beer, beer running down our laughing faces. God knows what Max’s furniture must look like now, then Eddie’s girl collapsed, spreadeagled over the table, and Eddie pouring beer over her and lapping it up off her belly and Max jumping up and down on the settee and announcing that he and his doll Ruby were going to show us what really can be done and trying to do it standing on their heads on the settee, their legs waving in the air. Then memory sort of faded out: I remembered it was dark and cold when we got outside, and I remembered stopping at the traffic lights at Selbome and Grey.

  I looked at the girl in the bed. I still couldn’t remember her name. It didn’t seem very funny now, with my head thumping and my hands shaking and the prospect of Court. I couldn’t even remember what cases I was doing. The sun was just coming up and it was cold. I was in a flat somewhere in town. I got up off the bed and looked for my shirt. The room stank of beer and cigarettes. My skin and my hair were sticky with beer. She woke up.

  ‘Where’re you going?’

  ‘I must go home. I’m in Court and I haven’t read my cases.’

  She looked at me. ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘About six-thirty.’ I said. ‘The sun’s coming up.’ I put on my shirt, it smelt of tobacco smoke.

  ‘Don’t you want some coffee?’

  ‘No time,’ I said.

  There was a noise of the kitchen door being opened and somebody moving around.

  ‘That’s the cookboy,’ she said. She got out of bed and walked naked across the room to the door holding her head. She opened the door and poked her head round.

  ‘Kefasi!’ she called. ‘Bring some black coffee, quickly, please.’

  ‘I haven’t got time,’ I said. ‘Have you got any Alka-Seltzer?’

  ‘Aspirin and Alka-Seltzer.’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Will you have a beer, a regmaker? It’s the only thing.’

  I shook my head, she was right but it was a treacherous remedy.

  She brought me a glass and three aspirins. I chewed the aspirins and drank the fizzing Alka-Seltzer, swallowing the pieces.

  ‘That was quite a party,’ she said.

  ‘Um.’

  She counted on her fingers. ‘Six and a half hours.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘My cap. I have got to wait eight hours before I take it out.’ Thank God for that.

  ‘Keep it in till lunchtime,’ I said. ‘Wear it to the office.’

  There was a knock a
t the door. ‘Leave it outside, Kefasi,’ she called. There was the sound of a tray being set down. Another girl’s voice called from the other end of the flat: ‘Kefasi, tea please.’

  ‘I must go,’ I said.

  She shuffled across and put her arms around my neck and nuzzled me. It was the last thing I wanted. She smelt of beer and cigarettes. Her back was plump and her breasts were too big. Then she asked the usual: ‘When am I going to see you again?’

  ‘I’ll call you tomorrow, just give me your number.’

  She wrote it down on my cigarette box, but she didn’t give me her name.

  ‘How did you say your name is spelt?’

  ‘Lilly,’ she said. ‘L-i-l-l-y.’

  ‘Okay, Lilly,’ I said.

  ‘Mary,’ she said. ‘And you spell that M-a-r-y, in case you have trouble with it.’

  ‘Miss Lilly,’ I said. ‘I was trying to be funny.’

  ‘Mrs. Lilly,’ she said, ‘I told you that too.’

  I don’t like it when they announce afterwards that they’ve got husbands. I wanted to find out whether he was alive or dead, divorced or what, whether I was likely to find myself cited as co-respondent, but I couldn’t let on I didn’t remember anything, could I?

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘I must be going.’

  ‘All right, Joe.’ She smiled a little thickly.

  I had to kiss her good-bye. I tried to make it one on the cheek, but she wriggled it round to the lips. Her breath wasn’t very good and her lipstick was caked and dry and her mouth felt a bit rubbery.

  I got outside into the cold dry sunrise. I was in Borrow Street, a pleasant avenue in summer but now it was dead and dry. We had had very little rain the summer after Suzie left. The cattle were thin and the dams were drying. I found my car and noted with relief that there were no new dents. I drove up Borrow Street into Selborne Avenue. There were lots of blacks coming into town from the locations on bicycles to work, but otherwise the streets were still quiet. A piccanin in tatters was selling newspapers. I stopped and bought one.