Hold My Hand I'm Dying

by John Gordon Davis

  ‘Right, sir.’

  ‘Here goes. Inspector, I understand you to testify that in your opinion and experience the motions executed by the accused were the motions of sexual intercourse?’

  ‘Yes, Your Worship.’

  ‘Tell me, Inspector, you are married, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, Your Worship.’

  ‘For how many years have you been married?’

  ‘Nine years come April, Your Worship.’

  ‘Is your wife a passionate woman, Inspector?’

  The inspector grinned. ‘Well, I—er—I’m not sure what you mean, Your Worship.’

  ‘Does she like sexual intercourse, Inspector—’

  ‘Well, really, Your Worship.’

  ‘Answer the question, Inspector. You see I need to know how much you know about sexual intercourse.’

  The inspector put on a straight face. ‘Well—er—Your Worship – yes she does. No more, no less than the average woman, I suppose, Your Worship.’

  ‘Is she, in her sexual habits, an average woman, Inspector?’

  ‘I would say so, yes, Your Worship.’

  ‘You suppose so?’

  ‘Yes, Your Worship.’

  ‘And what, Inspector, is your knowledge and experience of the Average Woman?’

  The inspector rubbed his chin. ‘Tricky,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll turn to your practical experience. Have you made love to many women, Inspector?’

  The inspector burst out laughing. ‘Your Worship, I object.’

  ‘Inspector, we are entitled to know what your experience is, so that we can evaluate your opinion. Now, please, Inspector. How many women have you made love to?’

  ‘I don’t know, Your Worship.’

  ‘Twenty?’

  ‘Possibly. I haven’t exactly kept a list, Your Worship.’

  ‘Of course not, Inspector. No gentlemen ever does. And were they Average Women, Inspector?’

  ‘I would say so.’

  ‘Why would you say so?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘These incidents all took place over nine years ago, I presume, before your marriage, Inspector.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Quite. You remember each incident clearly?’

  ‘Well hardly, Your Worship. I mean some of them.’

  ‘Quite. It is rather a characteristic of sexual intercourse that one is not really aware of the details of what is going on, one is rather more preoccupied with the sensations induced, I believe?’

  ‘That is so, Your Worship.’

  ‘Now tell me, Inspector, how many of these incidents can you remember in detail, clearly?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, Your Worship, I mean …’

  ‘I know it’s difficult. You would really have to sit down and think hard about it first, wouldn’t you, Inspector, in order to be halfway accurate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Quite. So you haven’t thought much about it for the purpose of giving evidence in this case?’

  ‘I didn’t expect to be asked these questions, Your Worship.’

  ‘Right, Inspector. Now let us move on to the details of what you actually saw the accused do. You say she lay down upon the floor.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you say she sought to simulate a woman of sexually passionate disposition, caressing her body in a most sensuous manner?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In your opinion she pretended to be sexually passionate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did any of the fifteen or so women of your experience behave like that, Inspector, without you actually being in contact with them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see. So you are not speaking from experience?’

  ‘I am speaking from my general knowledge of life. I know sexual passion when I see it.’

  ‘I see, what actually did you see her do?’

  ‘She touched her private parts.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘With her hand.’

  ‘Of course it was with her hand, Inspector. It is unlikely that she touched it with her foot. In what manner did she touch her private parts with her hand?’

  ‘She placed her hand against her private parts.’

  ‘Over her private parts?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a woman masturbate, Inspector?’

  ‘No, I have not, unfortunately.’

  ‘So you don’t know what that looks like. Never mind. Perhaps the Crown will be producing somebody as a witness to tell us what that looks like. Perhaps a nice policewoman. In any event, Inspector, what else did she do?’

  ‘She moved her hips up and down. It loses a lot in the telling, Your Worship.’

  ‘I see. Would you then please step out of the witness box and lie down on the floor and go through her motions so we can clearly see what you mean.’

  The policeman threw back his head and laughed.

  ‘You may take your jacket off if you wish, but not your trousers, Inspector. I would also like you to show how she touched herself in a most sensuous manner, to quote you. I’m afraid we can’t provide the orchestration but you may hum to help you get with it.’

  ‘Have another beer,’ the inspector said.

  He walked out of the Rancher’s and got into his car and drove back to town. The city hall clock struck a quarter to twelve. It was high time he went to bed and slept off some of the beer inside him before Court tomorrow, but he didn’t care about Court, he wanted to go to the Victoria. He used to take Suzie to the Victoria. He took the elevator up to the top floor. The cocktail lounge was in darkness, but the light of the city was all there. He walked through the dark cocktail bar to the end, up the spiral staircase to the grill room. It was still open, but there were no couples dining by candlelight and the band was not playing. A wine steward came to him.

  ‘Can I just have a beer in there? I don’t want to eat.’

  The wine steward’s black face widened.

  ‘Mambo!’ he said. ‘How is the Mambo?’

  ‘Goodness me, Amos, you still here?’

  Amos beamed across his black face, and laughed a deep delighted giggle at being remembered. ‘Yes, Mambo! How is the Mambo? Many years we don’t see the Mambo.’

  ‘I’ve been away, Amos.’

  ‘Is the Mambo still big in the Court-i?’

  ‘Enormous, Amos.’

  ‘How isi the Madam?’

  ‘You remember her too, Amos?’

  ‘Too muchi I remember the Mambo and the Madam. Hasi the Mambo got plenty piccanins now?’

  ‘Not yet, Amos, not yet. Listen Amos,’ Mahoney broke into Sindebele, ‘can I have a beer and drink it downstairs in the cocktail bar? I won’t put on any light.’

  ‘Of course yesi, Mambo,’ Amos said in English.

  ‘Bring me two, Amos—’

  Mahoney sat in the dark cocktail lounge at the window looking out on to the hot quiet night lights of Bulawayo. He had sat at these windows, perhaps in this very chair, with Suzie. And with a score of other women in between. A hell of a lot of water had passed down the Zambezi, a hell of a lot in five years. A lot of things had happened to a lot of people. Solly Berger for one. Solly Berger, back in the gutter, a down-and-out alcoholic again, hangman again, executing the sentence of death at Salisbury Central Prison on Fridays so as to keep him in grog. Max, a small-time adulterous suburbanite with a mortgage bond and an overdraft. And himself? Back on the same hot dry itchy bank he had started from. Still feverishly writing his dark thoughts and chewing up the midnight oil and his lungs and his youth trying to write. And drinking himself to death.

  I know an old man, Mahoney thought. I know an old man, once he was young and vibrant and clever and full of frustrations, which was good when he was young. He was a good lawyer when he was young and he loved and laughed and drank and worked and he had a beautiful girl. But the girl was never good enough for him, so he thought, and he worked and drank and worked and drank and after a wh
ile the girl left him and he was not such a good lawyer any more. And he did not know it, or if he knew it he did not care. And all his life he worked on himself and he drank and the world passed him by and he got nowhere, but he didn’t know it, or in the seldom sometimes that he knew it, he did not care. And in the end he became an old man who had thought and written many million of words and they were nothing and the world had passed him by already and his girl was gone now. But still the old man did not know it, or refused to know it, he did not care, or he told himself he did not care and still he kept writing and hoping and figuring. But he became a nothing, nothing but a drunken old man whom the world passed by. And all the time he was lonely.

  I know that old man, Mahoney said, and I fear he is me.

  Oh Suzie – where the hell are you Suzie? Why, why, why did it happen? Where and why was the rot?

  Only in my mind? – or also in fact? In my fanciful conceit, or also in my bones, or hers?

  Oh Christ a thousand memories.

  The evening silence between two armchairs. What happened at the office today already told, grunted at, gone back to where it belongs. Nothing, nothing to talk about, nothing that hadn’t already been talked about a thousand times before. Unhappy eyes. Unhappy silence. Discontented silence of impermanent lovers.

  ‘We would talk about our children,’ she said, ‘that’s what we would talk about. That’s what nature intends two people to talk about.’

  ‘But we don’t make each other happy, do we? We fight.’

  We fought. Oh why, why did we fight? Because we lived only off each other’s love, and off each other’s bodies, having nothing to share, except our bed and our love? Oh why, oh why wasn’t love enough? Because I am a dreamer, and she is not?

  ‘Because you are a dreamer,’ she said, ‘and I am not. I do not understand your dreams – what it is you want. I can only be patient with them and be available to you when you awake to humour you. That’s my role in life, to humour you. It was always the same, in Bulawayo, in London, in the States.’

  The barefoot days. I telephoned her from a girlie bar in Buenos Aires on Christmas Eve – five years ago. A whore was rubbing her breasts against my shoulder and her crotch against my hip, and the atmospherics were very bad. I had not seen Suzie for one year. ‘Come to England, Suzie,’ I shouted, ‘I am going to be back there in six weeks, and I love you’, – and when I hung up I laid the whore. Suzie was in London when I got back. It was winter and it was snowing and cold and Suzie was plump and silky and lovely and all muffled up in her sweaters and duffle coat. Sitting in those glorious steamy London pubs drinking bitter and cider and eating bangers and pies and singing bawdy English drinking songs. We were very happy. And afterwards, going back to her crummy digs, tiptoeing up the stairs so her landlady wouldn’t catch us, her little room warm with the gas fire and the smell of her and her things, and the warm narrow bed, and her eager excited laughing surrender to me, arms and mouth and legs open to me: and waking up in the morning nourished to the marrow by having lain warm and close to her all night, and the snow on the window sill and the bustle on the streets, and the warm sounds and smells of breakfast and Suzie getting dressed, and all her familiar things hanging in the cupboards and on her dressing-table – Oh God.

  We bought an old car, and drove to Scotland. Suzie sitting muffled in the front seat, lighting my cigarettes and passing me chocolate. Wayside inns at lunchtime, bitter and bangers, the country brisk in thawing snow, the buds coming out, the brooks and streams tumbling, frothy and good, snow fights in the fields. Nights warm and snug before the fire in little inns, fire flickering on our faces rosy from the cold and the landlord all cheery and the locals making a great fuss of Suzie because she was beautiful and laughed with them, they all fell in love with Suzie: and afterwards, climbing the rickety stairs to bed with bellies full of hot food and beer, into the low-beamed chamber, shivering into the double bed with its warm patch of hot water bottle, warming each other enough to take off her nightie and make love. And in the morning the heather of Scotland, the lochs and the sea and the mountains and the sheep and the woolly cattle and the road map at the breakfast table, and coaxing the old car to start.

  But – London again. Holiday over, the old car’s battery going flat in the dismal sleet outside our windows. Suzie and I going off to the office in the morning, coming home cold and late to the bedsitter. Going down to the corner pub for a pint of bitter, then back to the bedsitter. The long silence between the two armchairs. Pen to paper again, the scratching of my pen, the desultory sounds of the woman’s magazine pages turning.

  For Chrissake don’t leave me, Suzie.

  Let’s go to America – get out of these crummy digs and live like white men and make our fortunes.

  A new purpose. Visits to travel agents, to the American Embassy, medicals, advice booklets, leaflets.

  Subterfuge.

  Winter week-ends in America, the forest thick with white, the sun glinting in a million spectrums off the ice-glassed trees, streaming across the lakes on skates, long blonde hair flying, her nose red and her eyes sparkling, muffled up against the cold; whooping down the snowy hills on skis, then rum and beer and a log fire, and roast chicken, faces glowing in the fire warmth. Summer week-ends on the lakes, the morning mist sitting on the water, the soft sound of the paddles of the canoe, the soft plop of the lines in the water, the breathless grunts and wriggles and struggles of the strike; then the gathering heat of the noon, lying on a hot rock, cold beer and fried trout, and Suzie’s orange-coloured panties and black bra in a heap, skins glistening in suntan oil, love with the grass crushed green underneath us, the smell of grass and Suzie, and fried trout and the sweet clean taste of her wide mouth, long golden hair lying in the green grass, rounded brown thighs, white belly on the green grass.

  ‘A baby a baby Oh give me a baby—’

  But – New York. The long winter evenings, the world muffled by snow, home from the office, a bath, a beer and two armchairs again. The silences. The desultory sounds of the library books and magazine pages turning, then the scratching of the pen trying to scratch-capture dreams, the frustration, the agony. The sad faraway eyes staring at the window. Why haven’t I got a baby? I’ve tried hard enough. So – the television set.

  ‘You work,’ she said, ‘at your desk, like a man possessed. You shut me out of that part of your life, you don’t try to tell me what you’re doing, what you’re thinking, you live unto yourself, you’re self-sufficient. Then you come up for air, but you’re still in your dream world, I try to enter it, but I can’t, and in the end I don’t even try any more.’

  Sitting in our apartment in New York, icicles on the window, snow deep in the streets, the trees in our avenue heavy with snow and ice; an essay: ‘Advantageous Aspects of Apartheid,’ another: ‘Problems of Partnership,’ another: ‘Estate Taxation and Life Insurance,’ the frustrated quest for creation, expression, the rejection slips pasted on the wall to mock me: the television murmuring in the next room, Suzie’s head coming round the door.

  ‘The Late Movie’s on—’

  ‘I’m busy, Suzie.’

  Too busy. Always too busy. Too busy to let her invade, to take the time to take her hand and explain the process, the reasons, the need, the result. The only way she could get in was to demand and fight her way in, but Suzie was no fighter. ‘Come here, Suzie,’ I should have said. ‘You come here now, and sit down and damn well listen to me. I’m going to tell you what it feels like, what I want, what I’m trying to do, and you must think about it and feel it too, and read what I do, share it with me Suzie, help me Suzie, you must try Suzie, for God’s sake try to be my soulmate—’ But I did not. Because it wasn’t even very clear to me, in those days. And Suzie was no fighter. She was a waiter. She was scared of me. The long silence and no baby, no matter how hard she tried.

  One day Suzie coming home from office, sad face, sad eyes, Suzie saying: ‘I am leaving you Joseph, I am going home. I have been tried and found wanting
—’

  Suzie don’t leave!

  But I did not stop her going.

  Would that I had.

  Then why do you come back to me? Because I love you.

  Then why do you say you won’t marry me? Because you’ll never accept me into your dream world.

  Then why don’t you try to force your way in? I can’t, I don’t know how to. You’ve got to try. I have tried.

  You haven’t, you’re idle, you just let me get on with it.

  How can I try when you won’t accept me? We know each other too well, we’re too used to each other’s habits, I know you won’t accept me, you know I won’t try. If only you could accept me and marry me for what I am, you’ve got a built-in resistance to me—

  Back together again on the farm in Salisbury, the garden overtaken by jungle, creeper growing in the windows, the tattered lounge suite I got for thirty bob at the auction, only one window curtained. Another trial period. ‘Let’s try to get on, let’s try to be soulmates.’ Impermanence again. No carpets on the huge floors, no curtains in the big windows, rattling around the big house, echoes echoing impermanence. The table in the big lounge with its pile of papers dominating our lives, scribbles, stories begun and unended, new stories begun. The long silences, the pen scratching, Suzie curled up in the armchair reading, Suzie staring out the uncurtained window at night.

  Why aren’t we married, Joseph?

  The brown horizons. The long dry infinite horizons, the hot dry feeling of sameness, for ever, silences for ever. But I am free now, I can seek, I can try, there are such things as soulmates.

  Guilt.

  The escapes. Wine in the sun on Sundays. Suzie lying in her bikini in the tall grass, her little transistor singing, me sitting in the shade, writing, beer and wine in the sun. Sitting in the sun sipping chilled wine, flesh getting warm and soaked with sun and wine, flesh warm and brown and full, long gold hair down over her shoulders, long legs, wide mouth moist with wine, sun’s warmth sitting on flesh glistening on her brown belly, on her breasts. Sipping cold wine, chill glass to warm lips, the smell of the warm grass, happy together, pleased with each other, talking of love, of London, New York, steamy English pubs and Scottish lochs in the early morning, frozen lakes and fishing trips. Talking about my book, my stories, thoughts warm and sweet and flowing clear with the wine and the sun, thoughts thick with colour and action and emotion. Looking at Suzie, chill amber glass to wide red lips, glistening, talking happily, laughing, remembering, feeling, hoping. God, Suzie, you’re beautiful, stroking her warm brown flesh; her arms, her legs, her breasts, full and soft and perfect under my fingers.