Hold My Hand I'm Dying

by John Gordon Davis

  I looked at the headlines dazedly while I waited for the lights to change. More trouble in the townships yesterday, more gangs of black thugs of the African National Congress beating up people who didn’t belong to the party, but the news glanced off me. We were getting used to the political thugs, and I felt too bad because of my hangover.

  I got home and had a hot bath to get the beer and smoke off me, and I held my head under the cold tap. I still felt very bad.

  My hand trembled as I opened the first brief on the table. I held my head as I read it. Halfway through I grinned, hangover and all. This would be a walkover. A rape. The facts were that Tickey, villain of the piece, had broken out of jail, and having been inside for a cool eighteen months was feeling pretty sharp. At dawn he was creeping through the undergrowth on the outskirts of town, when he came upon a footpath and who should be walking down said footpath but our Annie, the complainant. Annie was a heavyweight and Tickey got a romantic seizure. He leapt out in front of her brandishing a stone and announced that this day he was going to lay her. But – a smart cookie, our Annie. Instead of crying, ‘Maiwe – Maiwe – Maiwe – today I am being killed at this place by a bad man,’ and putting up a perfunctory struggle, she went all coy and girlish. Tickey thought he had never had it so good. Annie promptly lay down on the side of the path and hitched up her skirts. Tickey beamed all over and dropped the stone. Annie beckoned him down between her legs. Tickey got down on top of her happily. Annie slipped her hand round the side of her buttocks and gently fondled his genitals.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Tickey demanded, suddenly very nervous.

  ‘I’m only helping you.’ Annie cooed.

  Show me the man who objects to that.

  Then, as Tickey was getting all steamed up, Annie slipped her hand down to his testicles and grabbed them and crunched them very hard.

  Tickey howled and leapt off her, but Annie hung on doggedly and gave them a good twist. Tickey hopped around the path clutching his family jewels. Annie let go and picked up the stone and carefully smote him on the brow. Then she tied him up and sat on his chest while she waited for someone to pass by and fetch the police.

  Now – there’s a tip.

  Then I opened the next brief and I stopped grinning. Political arson. I groaned. Some case. Senseless destruction. Politically inspired crimes of violence had become common in the last six months. Black gentlemen in city clothes were taking to the bush, rounding up the tribesmen, and telling them they had to join the Congress and form committees and take action. Burn the dip tanks the Government supplied for keeping their cattle healthy, burn the old school, burn the crops of the tribesmen who wouldn’t join the Congress. Somehow the action was going to bring freedom. Freedom from what? Some case. I groaned. Not because I was thinking of the destruction: the police always caught the boys who did it because they always operated in press-gangs and they bragged about their action before and after. I groaned because I didn’t feel like trying three dumb cocky peasant boys who would drag the trial out and make garbled long-winded political speeches.

  Samson came in.

  ‘Coffee, Nkosi?’

  ‘Bring me a beer.’

  He brought it and waited while I took the first long swallow. It went down like a mountain brook.

  ‘Breakfast, Nkosi?’

  When last had I eaten a meal? Christ, Saturday night.

  ‘I better,’ I said. ‘And bring me another beer.’ My intentions were very good. Monday and Thursday afternoons were usually my afternoons for Sylvia. Sylvia was a big strong girl. She was a filing clerk in one of the Government offices. Sylvia had come up to Rhodesia from Johannesburg to seek her fortune. She wasn’t quite Country Club material, Sylvia, but she had these good strong legs, and thick brown hair and blue eyes and rosy cheeks and full red lips and her skirts were always tight, so she had to take very short steps, and her bottom had a way of jerking inside them, like two pigs struggling in a sack. You sort of wanted to charge Sylvia, and when you feel like that you don’t mind her accent and her chewing gum and her conversation. She bothered the public prosecutors very much when she came up to our offices. Like the rest of the boys, I had had my eye on Sylvia even when Suzie was in town, but, of course, I had kept my hands off.

  Sylvia had not made her fortune in Rhodesia, on account of being so dumb that she had to be a filing clerk, she had not made the Country Club, where all us eligible types hung out. But she had scooped up this young Cockney immigrant who was an apprentice panelbeater. They were going to settle down together and carve a future in this bright big country of Rhodesia, as soon as he had finished his apprenticeship. Meanwhile, every Monday and Thursday he went to his apprenticeship classes at the Technical College, from five to eight o’clock. It had not been very hard to talk her into it.

  Mondays and Thursdays, five-thirty to seven-thirty, suited me very well. On Monday you were tired after a heavy week-end, and a quiet lie-in and a few beers and then a moderately early night set you up for the week. Thursday was good too, because you want a quiet sensible night before the week-end. Our arrangement was very straightforward and restful. We had a couple of cold beers and then she stretched up above to her cupboard and brought down her hatbox. She unlocked it and there was a collection of all the contraceptives science had thought up. I think she liked having her secret cache of contraceptives, she felt sophisticated. She swore her apprentice panelbeater didn’t sleep with her, being a very earnest apprentice panelbeater.

  However, my intentions to have an early night were so strong that I had phoned Sylvia and cancelled our appointment. I had phoned Isabel Weston and asked if I could take up her long-standing offer to use her sauna bath. Isabel Weston was a gushing middle-aged, middleweight who fancied me as a son-in-law. She owned a big house with a swimming pool and tennis court and she owned a domestic services and employment agency. And in the apartment above her office, which Isabel used as a sewing room, she had a sauna bath. ‘Awfully good for one,’ Isabel Weston had said, ‘cleanses the whole system. Do try it.’ So this Monday afternoon after Court I was going to cleanse my whole system, which sure as hell needed cleansing.

  As I waited at the traffic lights of Selbome and Main Jacqueline crossed the road and my chest gave a little flutter. Somehow she reminded me of Suzie. It was the eyes, the slanty eyes, and the long hair. But Jackie had thick rich dark red-brown hair. She wore it up on top of her head to her office, but other times down, long and straight. And the breasts, jutting. Her skin was that rarity with redheads, creamy-pale and smooth, which turns golden in the sun. She did some part-time modelling for dress shops. I hooted and she turned and smiled and waved and walked on, very elegant. She was blushing. My chest fluttered again. I thought: Now, that’s the girl you should cultivate, Mahoney, instead of these empty booze-sodden sex-sodden relationships – Jackie is soft and good and clean. There was a rapport between us, Jackie and I, we both knew it and we both chose to do nothing about it. I had taken her out a number of times since Suzie had left me, and we had only kissed, then we had tacitly agreed to go out no more. It was too intense, too fraught with the danger of pain. I guess we both thought: We are so attracted because we both have soft hearts and they are both broken. She had just come through a very unhappy love, we were both very lonely. She was in no fit state to make decisions and I was in no fit state to undertake her affection. It would have been irresponsible. And deceitful. I watched her cross the intersection and I thought: Leaving that girl alone is the only honourable thing you’ve done for a hell of a long time, Mahoney.

  Then the traffic lights changed to green.

  I parked outside Isabel’s office at four-thirty. The stunned feeling had gone, as it usually does about that time, but I still felt very bad.

  ‘Come in, dear boy—’

  She was plumpishly attractive, Isabel, greying hair dyed very blonde and cut very sleek and stylishly. She must have been very good when she was twenty-five, even thirty-five, but at forty-five she had to be stron
gly corseted.

  ‘This is Joseph Mahoney,’ she said to one of her customers, ‘Advocate Mahoney, you must have read his name in the paper, a great friend of the family.’

  ‘A great friend of the family.’ The family consisted of old Herbert Weston, a nice fat old boy who was obviously past it, and Lai, very sweet and young and shy, fresh out of secretarial college, whom Isabel fancied as my mate. Old Herb had made his money out of livestock, starting with nothing, and Isabel’s father had been a fishplate checker on South Africa Railways, though her accent conscientiously covered all that, and she would have liked a real live lawyer in the family.

  She led me out the back door with a brisk no-nonsense smile, up the fire escape to the apartment above the shop. The door had ‘Isabel’s Agencies’ printed on it in small sedate black letters. She opened the door. It was a bachelor apartment, lounge and bedroom combined, with a kitchenette and a bathroom, and a verandah overlooking Rhodes Street. There were two Singer sewing-machines and a tailor’s dummy and there were piles of files lying in the corner, and there was a refrigerator and a table and a bare bed and some armchairs.

  ‘It’s very kind of you to let me use your sauna bath, Mrs. Weston.’

  She led me into the bathroom: there was an asbestos barrel beside the tub. She bent and switched on a wallplug.

  ‘There, give it five minutes to warm up then get undressed and get in. You zip this cover up to your neck – so. Hang your suit over a chair next door. I’ll come up again in about half an hour, and tell you to get out – you mustn’t overdo it the first time.’

  She twiddled her fingers at me and was gone.

  I got undressed and climbed into the barrel and zipped the cover up to my neck. I felt shagged out. In two minutes I was wet. The sweat was running off me. I rubbed my arms across my chest and it was slippery. It felt as if all the beer and the cigarettes and the bar air of the last week, the last six months, was running out of. me. It was very hot and I wanted to get out, but I stuck to it, and the sweat poured off my face and matted my hair to my forehead.

  Isabel Weston came clicking briskly in the flat twenty-five minutes later.

  ‘My you are perspiring!’

  She dabbed my face with a wet cloth and switched the machine off. She was holding a big white towel.

  ‘Now get into that cold shower, my boy, and then rub yourself down, and you’ll feel a new man! You must lie down for fifteen minutes afterwards. And, by the way, I’ve put an ice-cold beer on the table in there for you!’ She twiddled her fingers at me again and was gone.

  The cold water stung. I rubbed myself down with the towel and my body glowed red. I looked at myself in the mirror and decided I was putting on too much weight. It’s the beer that does it. I felt good, good and clean and limp and tired. I decided I was going to taper off the beer. I draped the towel round my waist and opened the bathroom door and stopped. Isabel Weston was sitting in the armchair looking at accounts and she was wearing cats-eye spectacles and a seamstress smock with an T embroidered on the pocket.

  ‘Well!’ she said, very bright and businesslike. ‘How do you feel now?’

  ‘Marvellous.’

  ‘Do call me Isabel, dear boy. Now,’ she got up, ‘you must have a fifteen-minute rest, most important. Here’s your beer.’ She had it standing ready on a little tray. I was very thirsty. I swallowed deeply and it seemed to spread itself out into my arms and legs.

  ‘Now lie down on yonder bed.’

  ‘Thanks, Isabel.’

  ‘And I’ll give you a little rub down, and a little astringent lotion to tighten you up again. I did a bit of Phys. Ed. at college.

  ‘On your stomach and relax completely.’

  I lay down with my eyes closed. I heard her push her sleeves up, puff on her cigarette and blow the smoke to the ceiling, then put the cigarette down on the ashtray. She began to knead my shoulders. It was very relaxing, and I was exhausted: I began to float, only half awake.

  She squeezed my shoulder.

  ‘Now turn over.’

  I turned over and she draped a damp Kleenex over my eyes. ‘Joseph.’

  She lifted the Kleenex. I looked into the shadowed face of Isabel Weston and her naked aging breasts and belly, poised astride me. Her smock lay on the floor.

  Well, my intentions had been good. And I made a habit of avoiding involvements with married women.

  Whenever possible. But it wasn’t possible now. Quite apart from the fact that Isabel Weston tipped the scales at a hundred and forty-five and had me pinned to the mattress, it would have been impolite. And it was very pleasant, Isabel doing all the work. Then just as she was getting down to the short strokes – it hadn’t taken her more than three minutes – there came this knock on the door. Isabel crouched poised on top of me like a sprinter at marks. Who is it?’

  ‘It’s me,’ the old fat voice said, ‘Herbert.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ she breathed.

  She jumped off me and tugged me off the bed. She tugged me across the room to the built-in cupboard. ‘Half a moment, Herbert,’ she called, very cool. She pushed me into the cupboard, and flung my jacket in after me. She kicked my shirt and socks and tie under the bed and slammed the door and locked it. ‘Hey,’ I wanted to shout, ‘what about my pants?’ But it was too late. I stood panting in the darkness amongst dresses and smocks.

  It takes a few moments to adjust to these circumstances. At first there is only the panic, the self-preservation instinct and you can’t think of anything except the scramble for escape. Then, in hiding, the solid fear sets in. Indignity, acute embarrassment, divorce, civil action. Oh Christ. Then you start scratching desperately for excuses: Who could blame me, I hadn’t looked for it? Then hope: Herbert was a silly old bugger. Rumour had it that he had been cuckolded for years. Perhaps he wouldn’t even mind. And the desperate hope that he wouldn’t find out, wouldn’t even suspect, faith in the cool businesslike Isabel Weston, it was her trouble not mine, she would get me out of it. But: Oh Christ.

  I decided to put on my suit jacket, for all the good it would do. I heard Isabel open the door. Oh Jesus.

  I crouched down and looked through the keyhole. I could see the front door and the end of the bed. Isabel was dressed in her smock and high heels. Herbert was big and fat and he was looking bulbously over her head into the flat.

  ‘Herbert,’ she was saying briskly, ‘what brings you here?’

  ‘Passing on the way home,’ he said in his soft fat voice, ‘and saw your lights on. What’re you doing working at this hour?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said carelessly, a little shrilly, ‘you know how things pile up.’ She suddenly had a brain wave. She waved her hand at her own dress lying on the chair: ‘Altering my own dress, actually.’

  My legal ear picked up the contradiction but fat Herbert didn’t seem to catch it.

  ‘I had a sauna bath and I was altering my dress while I cooled off—’

  Christ, three different stories, Isabel – but if he hadn’t picked up the first contradiction, it was a good embellishment, it accounted for her being naked under that smock – ‘I’m ready to go now actually, how about driving on to the Club, I’ll meet you there. I’m dying for a drink after that sweat—’

  She was still standing in the doorway, busily, coolly, barring his way. Christ, she had done so well, shouldn’t she let him in before he got suspicious – I was glad she was barring his way – get him away Isabel, tell him the house is on fire—

  ‘I see you’ve already had a drink—’ he quavered.

  Oh God, my glass of beer half finished—

  Herbert was looking bulbously over her head into the room, his rosebud mouth pursed. His big fat chest looked as if it was beginning to heave.

  ‘Oh,’ Isabel flicked her head and waved her hand, ‘that’s an old one I had lying in the fridge since the office Christmas party!’ She giggled as if it was funny. She was beginning to crack.

  ‘Since when do you drink beer?’ He didn’t look at her, his eyes
were roving round the flat over her head. My chest felt hollow.

  ‘I had to drink something after that sweat—’ she insisted, a touch of indignation in her voice, getting back in control. Then she had another flash of brilliance – ‘That’s why I said I was dying for a drink, because I don’t like beer—’ It was good, but she said it too quickly. For God’s sake stop blocking his path. She decided attack was the best defence: ‘What’s the meaning of all this cross-examination anyway—’ She was brittle, she was used to using this on Herbert.

  But Herbert looked as if for once in his life he didn’t care.

  ‘Working, you said,’ he said in a high voice, ‘working on things that had piled up—’

  My heart was knocking in my ears. The silly old bugger wasn’t such a silly old bugger. That’s how he made all his money out of livestock, I thought irrelevantly, by not being a silly old bugger—

  ‘I’ll get dressed—’ Isabel began.

  Herbert’s fat chest was heaving. He had a flushed excitement on his fat face, a twitch to his rosebud mouth.

  ‘Working?’

  He lumbered past her, into the room, puffing, towards the bed. He looked very big, through the keyhole. Isabel hurried beside him. He bent down at the bed and pulled out my trousers and held them up. They looked a very guilty pair of trousers, dangling there.

  ‘What’s this?’

  Isabel snatched them from him. She was cracking again. Her voice was tight and giggly, not querulous.

  ‘Oh. There they are! I’ve been looking for them! They’re a customer’s. You know I run a bachelors’ service. They need repairing …’ She made to toss them aside. Herbert snatched them from her and she tried to snatch them back. He held them up high.

  ‘Repairing? They look perfectly good to me.’

  Isabel laughed.

  ‘Repairing, altering, it’s all the same to me. They need letting out, he’s put on a bit of weight – like all of us, aha ha ha,’ – she snatched my pants back. She sat down on the bed, and took up a pair of scissors. ‘I’ve just got to let them out down the seam at the back here, you see—’ She started snipping feverishly at my trousers. They were a good pair of trousers before she started on them.