‘What’s your book actually about?’ and Mahoney sighed and said: ‘Oh, it’s a collection of thoughts’ and when pressed he said: ‘I don’t know. It’s a garbage can.’
‘What’s it called?’ and Mahoney said ‘The Birth of a Bum’ and people thought that was pretty good, is it full of sex?’ and Mahoney had to admit it was pretty full of sex. In fact, when Mahoney considered it, it was in parts the dirtiest book going because life is dirty. Then for a hundred pages the reader was transported through a jungle of aesthetic musings and scenes as sexless and turbulent as thunderclouds. In parts it was unintelligible to anybody but Mahoney, and sometimes when he went back five hundred pages it was unintelligible even to him. At times Mahoney thought it was good, good, brilliant. And at times he wanted to burn the whole bloody thing in shame.
Jackie understood when he showed parts of it to her. She pored over the pages with her executive-secretary concentration, her hand buried in her long red straight hair, her heavy-lidded green-brown eyes devouring the words he had written. ‘Oh yes, Joe! Oh yes! I understand exactly what you’re driving at. Thank God somebody else feels about things the same as I do!’ Sometimes she laughed out loud and sometimes she almost cried. ‘Do keep at it, Joe. It’ll knock Ulysses into a cocked hat. Palinurus too. Oh, I wish I could write!’
Solly Berger was allowed to read bits when he came to town and visited him. He sat with his lower lip jutting out and he pulled on his long Jew nose while Mahoney fidgeted.
‘It’s a load of crap, isn’t it?’ he said, and Solly looked up with his shrewed creased eyes half-closed.
‘No,’ he said, it’s good. Parts of it are bloody good. But I’ll tell you something: it won’t be published. You’ve got to be James Joyce or Dylan Thomas or Albert Schweitzer or somebody before you’ll get any airy-fairy mess like this published.’
‘I couldn’t care if it’s never published. I just want to get the damn thing finished and off my back.’
Then Cynthia wheedled a few chapters out of him. She sat on the floor in her shorts with her strong shapely legs tucked under her and her pretty pug face screwed up in a frown, her jaws working on the gum. She was not an intellectual like Jackie and Solly, she was only an office typist, but she was intelligent. Mahoney watched her out of the corner of his eye nervously. Why should he worry what she thought, she was only an office typist. At first she plodded carefully through the scrawled pages, then she began to skim over the pages and then flick one or two. Then she said: ‘I’ll make some tea’ and later: ‘Look – who’m I to judge, I’m not a highbrow. To be quite honest I don’t understand it, so who am I to judge? I like a story, that’s what I read a book for—’
Just as Suzie had said.
‘Don’t spoil it by trying to put more story into it,’ Jackie said. ‘What does it matter if it’s not published? It’s for you.’
‘It’s not, you know,’ Mahoney said.
He went back to the beginning and began to thread a story through the morass.
Chapter Twenty-Four
October in Matabeleland is called Suicide Month, and September is just as bad.
From the flats you look out on to the hot dry streets and the hot shimmering red roof-tops of the little houses and their dusty broken back yards and on to the hot rough sanitary lanes where the garbage cans sit and the African servants squat in the sun talking and picking their noses. In the offices the men sweat in their suits and the typists perspire between their legs and when you touch the cars in the streets you get burned. In the courtroom there is a stink of African sweat and the lawyers and the magistrates and the judges sweat under their gowns. You drink more in October and every day you look up at the hot blue-white sky and say: Wish it would rain. But still the rain does not come. It does not come until the earth is dead, in November.
It was the first day of October when Suzanna de Villiers came back. She knew as the plane bent down over the flashing brown bush that she was doing the wrong thing. Not because she didn’t like Bulawayo – it was home now. She was making a mistake because she was coming back to see Joseph Mahoney.
Bored, the town bored her. Why? That was Joseph. Joseph and his brooding. Joseph and his explosions. Joseph and his frustrations and his theories. Suburbia, his pet horror. Suburbia, she had never thought of it before as anything but the normal place you go to, like heaven or hell when you die. Joseph and his musings and his desire to talk about things.
He was not good for her. She was not good for him. She irritated him because she was not a high-powered intellectual. She made the town emptier and flatter for him. He was not good for her because she was afraid of him.
Suzanna de Villiers walked through the quiet concourse of Bulawayo airport. Nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. There were a few people standing at the glass doors to meet the dozen passengers. The plane had been two-thirds empty, more than. She recognised a few of the waiting faces but she walked past. Quiet and hot. She waited to get her baggage and the black porter put it in the back of the blue and white Central African Airways bus. She climbed into the bus and sat down in the first seat in the front. She was the only passenger into town. The black driver waited until all the people were out of the concourse and then he came to her for the fare. Suzanna opened her bag. She had six pounds and some silver and a few hundred Congolese francs and in the bank she must have about twenty pounds. She paid her half-crown and the bus driver took a last look round then ground the engine into life. She sat back as she was vibrated into town. She looked at the hot dry gardens of suburbia.
Well, I’m not afraid of him now. I’ve got Frank. Frank is clever too and he finds me good enough. But then she realised that Frank was the very reason she was coming back to Mahoney, even though Mahoney had never really asked her to marry him, not of his own accord. He had only asked her in panic. Frank had asked her properly. And when his contract was up they would go back to Hartford, Connecticut, and have a nice house in Chestnut Street and Frank would go into private practice and they would have a fine life together. Frank’s people had money, too, and they would get a week-end log cabin up in the lakes. It was a fine country for kids to grow up in. And Suzanna was going to say Yes.
And then the Belgian girl had come in to have her baby, the only white baby ever bom at the hospital. And as it slid out into the African midnight with the sound of crickets and the warm night noises of the jungle, Suzanna picked it up and smacked it and it cried and she wrapped it up and held it. And then Suzanna de Villiers knew that she first had to go home to see Mahoney.
The bus took her to the city air terminal and stood vibrating outside waiting for her to get off. She climbed out into the white sun. All was dead quiet in Abercorn Street. There was her old flat, up in Tregar House. There were different curtains in the windows. There was one tired ground hostess behind the quiet polished counter, amongst the beautiful photo-posters of the Greek Isles and Naples and the Riviera and the green English countryside.
‘Can I leave my bags here for a while, please?’
The girl had slightly red eyes and she was pale under the chic make-up. She had had one hell of a party last night. She smiled professionally.
‘I’m afraid we’re closing now that the morning flight’s in. We won’t open again until six tonight.’
So that was it, that was another step in the wrong direction. She did not want to arrive at Joseph’s flat with her luggage, because then it was so easy to stay. She had wanted to leave her baggage at the terminal and find a room in a boarding-house and then collect her baggage and then find Joseph. Then he could not insist on her staying in his flat.
‘May I use your phone if I pay for it?’
She phoned the Russel. Sorry madam, no accommodation, fully booked with regulars. She telephoned the Gables, that mausoleum. It rang a long time. She could imagine it echoing down the long green desolate Sunday passages. At last a tired old lady answered it. Sorry, the Gables had a waiting list.
The ground hostess was standing behind
the counter, patting papers straight and looking politely impatient to close up.
‘Can I get you a taxi, madam, to one of the licensed hotels?’
‘Yes, please.’
But that was silly, to pay two pounds ten a day, when she only had twenty-six pounds in the wide world, when all she needed was a place to dump her bags for a few hours while she found something reasonable. She would handle Joe.
‘Fortwell Court, Fort Street,’ she said to the taxi driver. But as she climbed the familiar red steps of Fortwell Court up to the fourth floor with the taxi driver carrying her two cases behind her, she felt her heart pounding with delicious excitement and she knew she could not handle Joe.
She pulled her hand mirror out and glanced quickly at herself. She patted her hair and ran the tip of her tongue over her lips and she smoothed the blouse over her bosom. She knocked.
Mahoney came to the door barefoot and in only a pair of shorts. His hair stuck up and he had ink on his face and chest.
‘Suzie!’
She smiled, ‘I haven’t come to stay and I haven’t come to make you marry me—’
‘Suzie!’
In one movement he was over the threshold and he had picked her up. He carried her into the flat. Her only words of protest as he laid her on his unmade bed were: ‘What about Samson?’ and Mahoney said: ‘It’s all right, he’s got the day off,’ and she held out her arms to him.
‘Don’t give me a baby, don’t, don’t give me a baby, not now, don’t kill us forever—’
But Mahoney closed her mouth with his and then they were soaring up up up and higher than the sky and higher and then there was nowhere and everything and completeness and floating and then an explosion and then a tumbling.
She lay half underneath him in the sweaty October Sunday morning and held him to her and stroked his head and his back.
‘But,’ she said, ‘you will leave me.’
Mahoney shook his big head into the pillow. ‘Marry me.’
Go away, Suzanna de Villiers. Go away, get up and get out while there is still a moment. Go far away so that you do not kill him and so that he does not kill you. Go anywhere, to England or South Africa or Hartford. Connecticut with Frank even, but go away before you kill the both of you—
She stroked his back. She lay still half underneath him, thinking and looking up at the ceiling. She turned her head sideways and looked at the white-blue sky through the window, the sky he hated. She frowned and then she sighed and gently lifted her hand to her breast. She ran her hand down over her breast and her flat stomach and her hip and her thigh and she felt tears of reckless happiness in her eyes. She sobbed.
‘Shut up, you,’ she said to herself softly.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I don’t care. I don’t care any more. I’m happy I’ve come back, I feel whole again now. I’ll stay, I’ll even live with him until he’s good and ready to marry me. It used to worry me but it won’t now. And if I go to hell, well that’s just too bad. Anyway, if I go to hell, Joe’ll be there too, so that’s okay. I don’t care as long as old Joe’s there. Old Joe, I bet he’ll talk the Devil into a cocked hat too. He and the Devil’ll get on well, probably. That’s funny. That’s quite funny. You shouldn’t joke about things like that but it is quite funny. And if the old Dominee comes around telling me I’ll burn in hell I’ll just set Joe on to him. I’d like to see that. He’s a bully, Joe. I should know. But I don’t care. So what if he’s a bully. It’s not so much that he’s a bully it’s just that he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. An intellectual. Always reading and writing and pondering. The things he knows. Well so what if I’m not an intellectual. Most men are cleverer than their wives. How many girls are intellectual? And the ones that are look like the back of a bus. How would he like that? A man likes to be always right. How would he like it if I could talk him into a cocked hat? Like that Jackie friend of his. She’s an intellectual, I suppose. Joe wants somebody who gives him peace. So I’m not an intellectual and I’ll never be but it doesn’t matter so long as you’re happy together. I’ll look after him well and keep him happy. I won’t nag him and always be wanting attention and a good time and he’ll be able to get on with his writing. That’s the most important thing for a wife to be. That book. I wish I could help him with it. I’m no writer, I don’t know much about literature and so forth so how can I judge? But it bores me. But it’s his book and it’s all important to him so I’ll give him peace and encourage him and tell him it’s good. Maybe it is good. I don’t know, but I don’t care either – it’s him I care about.
Suzanna de Villiers had a spring in her step although it was as hot as hell in Eighth Avenue with the sun melting the tar and beating white off the Victorian façades of the shops and vibrating thick through the tin roofs of the shop verandah fronts. Her legs were fatter than before, and brown and smooth and she did not wear stockings and her sandals had highish heels and her hips swung a little as she walked and her cotton frock was fresh and crisp and her long straight hair jounced and you could tell her bosom was all her own from the way it vibrated a little with each step. Samson walked behind her in his white uniform, which he did not like wearing, particularly in public, and which the Nkosi had never suggested that he wear but which she had insisted on buying that very morning at the Indian store below Fortwell Mansions, as a surprise for Joseph. It would be nice for Joseph to come home from Court and find Samson all smart and the flat all jacked up with those bits and pieces that men never get round to and couldn’t manage even if they thought about it, which they don’t. Everybody has their boy in a nice white uniform. Joe isn’t rich but that’s no reason for him to live like a pig like he does. No curtains, no carpets, no ironing board, that sort of thing, Joe. Joe’s not hard-up, I don’t know how much he’s got, but he’s not all that hard-up. He probably doesn’t know himself how much he’s got. I bet he doesn’t. I bet he doesn’t know what it costs him to run that flat and how much he spends on beer and poker and the horses and on his girls. I don’t care how much he spends, it’s not my business but I want the flat to look nice and he’ll like it okay and it won’t cost more than a few quid. A few flowers and a couple of cheap vases from the O.K. and a few bits of crockery, and an ironing board, that sort of thing. He needs another suit but I won’t mention that until he’s got over the shock of the ironing board. He’s got a thing about clothes, a suit is a good suit until he’s coming through the pants. And shirts – why have more than three white shirts, he says, when you’ve got a boy to wash every day? Those shirts are terrible, only one is not shabby. But oh no, they’re all good shirts still, he says. Maybe I’ll sneak in a shirt, a drip-dry. Socks, he’s all right for socks. Shoes, he needs another pair of shoes. I could get Cuthberts or Bata to send some up on approval. He’ll squeal like a stuck pig but it’s worth a try. He can only send them back. Why do men hate so to spend money on clothes? Or is it just Joe? I think it’s just Joe. All the other chaps are smartly turned out. You’ve got to take a chap like Joe in hand, otherwise he’ll walk around quite happily like a munt and think there’s nothing wrong. Joe doesn’t realise that people notice these things and they talk. He thinks everybody’s as dozy as he is. That’s my job, to see he’s well turned out and well fed and so on. That’s where I help him, where I can put my foot down and be right. And he’ll take it. He’ll accept it. He likes things the way they always were before but he’ll get used to it. He doesn’t think about things like that long enough to keep up a resistance for long. I’ll get that flat nice and cheerful. And some planks and some bricks for bookshelves. All his thousands of books on window-sills and heaped all over the floor! He says that he knows where everything is now and it’ll get his filing system all out of order if I start packing them in shelves. How he can find a thing now I don’t know, but he can always put his hand on the book he wants. Anybody would think he’s as mean as hell the way he refuses to make himself comfortable. Well that’s my job, I’ll make him comfortable. He’ll like it sure enough. I s
uppose I’ll have to take a room in a boarding-house until we can get married but I’m going to jack up that flat. And then when we get married everything will be in apple-pie order. He’ll like it when he sees it all ready. That’s half his trouble, that’s why he thinks Bulawayo is such an awful dump – because he lives like a pig and he’s got no comforts and he works like a slave and he doesn’t eat properly and so he’s a bag of nerves and irritations. I’ll stand between him and all those irritations and his life will work smoothly like clockwork. Of course Bulawayo is a dreadful dump when you live like he does. What can you expect? He’ll be fine when we’re married and he’s properly looked after. Sure, it’ll work out.
Samson followed behind her carrying the big basket half-full of groceries. He walked with a spring too, head up, waving to friends and winking at the black girls more cavalierly to cover his embarrassment at wearing the white uniform. What did it really matter this once? The Nkosi would say he needn’t wear the white uniform in town. In the flat, all right, but not in town. The Nkosi would understand, he was a man, he was his friend. They had hunted crocodiles together which is a man’s work. A Matabele’s work.
Suzanna walked into the supermarket with Samson behind carrying the basket. He followed her from stand to stand as she ruminated and plucked off tins.
‘How much beer has the Nkosi got?’
‘Four bottles only, Nkosikazi,’ Samson said promptly.
‘Well we better lay some in. Give me a dozen pints of Lion, please.’
Samson plucked at her short sleeve.
‘Nkosikazi?’
‘Yes?’
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