Hold My Hand I'm Dying

by John Gordon Davis

  When the sun was getting high in the late morning, and it was time for the bar to open, and the women were getting languid and salty in the seaside palm-slung sun, it wasn’t so hard. But on the morning before the ship Suzie might be on was to dock in Mombasa, a hundred jungled miles away to the south, it was very bad. I started drinking early that morning, but I could not bring myself to be hard-arsed and brittle and charming, I just sat on the hotel verandah and stared at the sea, and drank beer and just cried inside for Suzie, my Suzie, Suzie, Suzie, my mate, my lover, my love, my sweetheart, my darling, my dearest person, and I felt that I was torn and bleeding and would never be the same again, nothing, the whole world, the air, the sun and the snow, a bottle of wine, the mornings, the sunset, a million things would never be the same again.

  I drank all that morning, and all that afternoon and late into the night, but I did not get drunk, and after midnight I walked up the bush path at the back of the hotel to the servants’ compound and I beat on the door of the headwaiter’s hut, who I knew owned a motorcar, and I gave him ten pounds to drive me then and there to Mombasa. I knew I should not do it, I didn’t even know what I was going to do when I saw her ship. I didn’t even know for sure if she was on the ship, perhaps she had changed her plans, she may already be engaged, and she may even have slept with him already, she may even be married already – I didn’t know what I was going to do, I knew I should not go to Mombasa, but I am an emotional man whose heart rules his head.

  Ezekiel, the headwaiter, dropped me off at the dock gates just before dawn, very pleased with his ten quid. It was warm and it was sleepy and it was very African at the docks, and the crickets were still chirping among the palms and the jungle. I walked down to the quay where the Eden Roc would dock, and I sat down on the dirty concrete and hung my legs over the side and I sat there trying to think straight in the silence. After a long time the sun came up over the jungle coast, very red and very beautiful. When the red was gone and the sun was bright on the early morning sea, and the black stevedores were coming into the docks, the Eden Roc appeared on the horizon and I gave up all the thinking I had been trying to do, and I gave myself over to a tired nervous sad excitement. When the tugs went out and hitched up with her the harbour was alive and I got up off the quay and I went round to the side of the warehouse where nobody aboard would notice me. I leaned against the corner of the warehouse with my hat pulled down low over my eyes and chain-smoked and I was very excited, though I did not know what I was going to do, except that I just had to be there, and I peered at the faces lining the rails of the ship. There were hundreds of faces. I ran my sandy eyes over them again and again, over the same rails. My heart contracted as I came upon a face. But I could not be sure. I noted the position of the face and I moved my sandy eyes on. And my heart contracted again. I went back to the first face to compare it, and it would be gone, lost as people moved about and waved and shouted hullo. And I found third and fourth and fifth and even more faces. I could not recognise the dresses of any. I searched through all the faces and then more came and many moved and went away. Then many people left the rails.

  It was now breakfast time and people went and others came. There was a long delay before people began coming ashore down the gangway to see the sights of Mombasa. As they came down, in ones and twos I grew excited and moved a little closer, round the corner of the warehouse to make sure I could see each face. They collected round the bottom of the gangway, then they moved off down the quay towards the taxis and the buses, they walked past within twenty paces of my corner of the building. I was in a good position. At nine o’clock more passengers came down. My heart skipped many times as people came to the top of the gangway into the sunlight. By ten o’clock the flow had turned to a drip. I waited until half-past ten, trying to think what I should do. Then I thought: if you go aboard and you find her it will break your heart and hers all over again, it will do no good because nothing can come of it, she has made a new life and you are making a new life – and if you find she is not on the ship, it will break your heart because you will be sure she has decided to marry the man – it is best to go away not knowing. And I turned away from the quay and I walked back out of the docks, and I went to the first hotel and I walked into the bar.

  ‘Give me a cold beer, please.’

  ‘What kind of beer?’

  ‘Any kind of beer is all right.’

  He was an old white man with a kind lined face. He poured the cold Tusker very carefully. The beer purged my mouth and throat clean, like cold acid, and it made the cigarette taste good for a change, like food.

  ‘You off the ship?’ he asked kindly. There were only two of us in the old colonial-style bar. The ceiling was high and there was a big overhead fan and there were palms growing outside the big old windows.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m waiting for a ship to America.’

  ‘You don’t sound like an American,’ he said.

  ‘I’m Rhodesian,’ I said.

  He looked at me. ‘You emigrating there?’ he said, and the word got me right here.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He nodded and looked at me.

  ‘Things are bad in Rhodesia,’ he said. ‘They’re bad here too. They’re bad all over Africa. But what I always say is: what chance has the country got of staying stable, if all the young people go?’

  ‘Give me another Tusker here,’ I said loudly, and he gave it to me and then he moved down the bar and read the newspaper. And I sat and looked out of the window on to the palms and the sea, and I drank lots of cold Tusker and I tried to think straight. I tried to think about the beauty and prosperity of North America, about the money I was going to make, and the holidays in Miami, and Bermuda and living happily ever after as a good successful corporation man. I tried to think straight for a long time, I shouted at myself, but I could not really think, I could not feel like an American, I felt like an African. And I did not want to go back to North America, all I wanted to do was walk out of the bar on to the ship and sail down the coast and throw myself down on the shores of Africa, and stretch my arms and legs out into the sand of Africa, and cry my pain and unhappiness and tiredness out into her warm familiar soil. ‘What chance has the country got if all the young people go?’ the man had said. I drank the beer and it flooded my system like a balm, and slowly a laugh built up in my chest, then into my throat, a bubble of happiness, then a smile across my face. And I realised that the most important thing in these three score years and ten is to do what you feel is good, good for your heart, to live and sweat and feel and love and die where you belong. And I threw my last beer down my throat and I picked up my haversack and I waved to the barman and I walked out into the sun. I swung down the road back to the docks and there was a spring in my step and a laugh in my throat, and I looked at the blacks in the street and I smiled at them and my happiness was infectious and they smiled and waved to me. ‘Jambo!’ I laughed and they laughed, white teeth flashing in black chubby faces: ‘Jambo, Bwana!’

  I walked up the gangplank of the ship into the Bureau Square, and I went to the Purser’s Office.

  ‘Any berths to Beira?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’

  ‘You’re hired,’ I said, ‘to take me to Beira—’

  ‘Sir—?’ the Purser’s Mate said.

  I pulled out my traveller’s cheques. Only then did I hesitate, and only for a moment: Maybe Suzie is married, how could you live in Africa without Suzie—

  ‘Have you a passenger list?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Have you a Miss—?’

  He waited. ‘Miss who, sir?’

  Christ oh Christ, Jesus Christ in a tea kettle, you can’t go on eating your heart out forever, you have made your decision independent of Suzie, and that is the best way.

  ‘Nobody,’ I said, and reached out for his pen.

  ‘All I want to do is sleep,’ I said, and the Purser’s Mate looked at me curiously.

  I went to my cabin and fell down on
the bunk. When I woke up it was dark, and the ship was rolling and we were far out to sea.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  I showered and shaved and asked a steward for the time. Eight o’clock. I put on my crumpled suit and made my way aloft to find the bar.

  I sat in a corner of the bar, where I could see everybody who came and went. I scanned all the faces. No joy. I waited until the second dinner sitting had come up, until the bar was full, but still no joy. At nine-thirty the band struck up and people started dancing. At ten o’clock I went aft to the bar lounge. I went to the smoking room and to the library. I went to the sundeck and along the promenade and I disturbed many couples as I walked along. Each deck, each corner, each figure brought a surge of excitement, then disappointment again. At eleven o’clock I sat down in a deckchair and acknowledged that Suzie was not aboard.

  I sat in the deckchair and I looked at the sea, silver in the moonlight, and at the long black jungle coast, vast and dark and pregnant between the silver sea and the starry sky, and I thought: Suzie is still in Durban, a thousand miles away from Rhodesia and she is in love with the man and she is going to marry him, she has slept with him already, and you will have to forget about her as she has forgotten about you. Even now she is lying in his arms, naked and loving and she does not care about you any more, she is no longer your woman. And I wanted to jump up and shout and shake the ship apart. I sat in the deckchair a long time, and then I wiped my sleeve across my eyes and I got up and walked back to the bar.

  I found her in the shadow of a lifeboat davit, leaning over the rails and watching the silver sea and the black coast, and her long gold hair was blowing wispy in the wind. I stopped and stood looking at her and my heart was knocking and I could feel the tears behind my eyes again and I was very happy. She did not turn around. I put my hand upon her shoulder and she turned with a small cry and she had tears in her eyes.

  ‘Why are you crying, Suzie?’

  Her eyes opened wide and she stared at me. Then she dropped her head against my chest and pressed herself against me and wept: ‘Oh no! Oh no no no for Christ’s sake!’

  I took her hands as she wept against me and on her left hand I felt the ring. She sobbed and put her arms round me and squeezed me. Then she ran her hands up my chest and held my face. She looked up at me with tears running down her face and she shook me between her hands and she said: ‘Oh God, Joe, whatever is going to become of us?’

  Later she unbuttoned her coat and unbuttoned my suit jacket and put her arms around me, and pressed herself flat against me.

  ‘I’m trying to graft on to you,’ she said, ‘to become part of you. Maybe then I’ll be happy as a nonentity.’

  She pushed the ring round and round with her thumb. ‘For a while,’ she said, ‘I knew such peace. Ordinary surburban honest-to-goodness happiness. Not trying to keep up with him, not needing to keep up with him, I didn’t have to. I didn’t feel I needed to be better or different, just me. He wasn’t smouldering to be any better or different, and it didn’t cross his mind that I should be. He was complete and mature, a nice ordinary man and he made me so too!’

  ‘Why were you weeping?’

  ‘I was weeping at the deathbed of my soul, although I wanted it to die. My soul was with you, behind the hinterland of Africa, wherever you were, sleeping in the bush, trudging north through the jungle up out of Africa to America, every day getting further and further from me. My soul was stretching out between you and me, wherever you were, stretching thinner and thinner, like an elastic band with each turn of the propellers. And it was about to snap, and my soul would die, and then I would be free.’

  Later she said: ‘I knew you would come back to Africa. You were doing very well in America, but I knew you would come back, you would never be happy as a corporation man, no matter how much money you made.’

  Later I said: ‘Private practice in Salisbury. That’s what’s going to become of us. We’ll buy some land, and put down some roots, and we’ll bloody well stay, come hell or high water. The country needs all the young men of goodwill it can get.’

  Part Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  It was a hot night. There was a high moon shining big and bright and still and there was no wind at all, the only sound was the muffled whoosh of the bicycle’s slow tyres on the tarmac road and the creak of the pedals and the noise of the night insects singing in the bush. There were no lights but the bicycle’s rickety lamp weaving as African Police Reservist Tambudza pedalled slowly along in his blue uniform to report for his night duty, but you could see him coming from a long way because of the moon. He had only a truncheon and a police whistle and a pair of handcuffs upon him.

  ‘Here comes one.’

  The young men lay flat in the grass in the wide ditch alongside the road. They held sticks in the grass, and stones that they had picked up at the side of the road. They lifted their heads to look down the road and the moon shone on their black sweating faces and on the white of their eyes. They lowered their heads and waited and the black police reservist came cycling along.

  ‘Tshombe!’ The black policeman swerved and braked and put his foot to the ground and his hand went for his tmncheon.

  ‘Tshombe – Tshombe – sell-out’ and the gang was upon him and the rocks hurtled through the air and the policeman ducked and threw his arms over his face. The stones pounded on his head and his shoulders and his chest and he reeled away from the bicycle, crouching, and his arms were over his head and the rocks smashed into him. One hand went to his truncheon again, but before he could get it off his belt they were on to him with their sticks. ‘Tshombe—’ They beat him from all sides with their sticks, on his head and on his neck and on his shoulders and his legs, and they swiped and hit each other they were so thick about him.

  ‘Sell-out—!’ and African Police Reservist Tambudza went down unconscious. His scalp was broken open and his nose crushed and his teeth were broken. He lay spread out bleeding onto the tarmac and the youths jumped about him and lifted up their sticks and swiped down at him and they kicked him in the head and the chest and the face and in the guts.

  The tall man turned from the body and he trotted down into the ditch. He picked up a gallon can from the grass and he trotted back to the body. His gang was still beating the body and he shoved them aside. The African Police Reservist was making frothy sucking noises in his throat. The tall man unscrewed the cap off the petrol can and he tilted it over the body and splashed the petrol all over it. The gang stood back. They were panting hard from the exertion and the excitement. The tall man took a box of matches from his pocket. He struck one and he stepped back and the gang stepped back also. Then the tall man threw the match on to African Police Reservist Tambudza. There was a whoosh of flame five feet into the air and the petrol burned on the tarmac also and it threw a big light and long jumping shadows in the bush and it lit up the black grinning faces and flickered white on their teeth and on the whites of their eyes. African Police Reservist Tambudza came to, and he rolled over in the flames and he tried to get up and he clawed his face with his burning hands and he screamed. The youths turned and scattered and ran away into the night.

  They ran through the bush and down a dirt path. From a long way away they could see the flames on the tarmac. They ran until they came to a dirt road and then they walked into the African township to the branch office of the Party. They sat round a fire in the backyard and ate porridge with their fingers and they laughed as they told the boss of the Party branch what they had done. And the boss said they had done good work, for Police Reservists were Tshombes, and he gave them each a shilling.