by John Harris
“Pleased to meet you, son,” he boomed as he shook hands with Jimmy. “Glad to have you join our little flock.”
Mrs Swannack was climbing aboard the boat now, a middle-aged, bony woman with a straight back and a thin mouth, obviously bursting with energy despite the heat that dewed her upper lip and made her hair lank with moisture.
“This him?” she said, staring with bold eyes at Jimmy who felt a little like an exhibit in a sideshow. “Please to meet you, son. You play tennis?”
Swannack flapped a hand in protest. “Give the boy a chance, Mother.”
“Let him answer for himself, Father.” Mrs Swannack’s tones were brisk and authoritative. “He’ll be glad to play tennis before he’s been here very long. Soon get sick of sitting. You play tennis, son? My daughter’s arrived,” she pointed out, as though this were an event of considerable importance – not only to her but to Africa generally. “Father fetched her from the airfield yesterday. Graduated at Morrisonville Academy, Idaho. She’ll want a partner and that Gotto sure is a wet hen. You play tennis, son?”
Her manner was as aggressive as her voice, demanding not only attention, but an immediate answer. Her bright piercing eyes, glowing in the shadow of the bush hat she wore top-dead-centre, were fixed intimidatingly on Jimmy and he said that he did, instantly aware of the aggrieved look that would have appeared on Twigg’s face had he been there.
“That’s good,” Mrs Swannack was saying briskly, obviously having little time for the Christian virtues of patience and resignation. “All I wanted to know. Come to the party tomorrow. After afternoon service. Cup of tea. Home-made wine. A prayer. Meet my daughter.”
Jimmy had begun to think that if Mrs Swannack’s daughter were anything like Mrs Swannack, meeting her might prove a doubtful pleasure. He began to foresee a hard-bitten devil-dodger like her mother with a mouth full of thundering Bible texts and a mind convinced of the sanctity of her mission in life.
Swannack was mildly rebuking his wife.
“Give the boy a chance, Mother,” he was saying again. “Let him land first.”
“While my daughter’s here, I don’t want her to say Africa’s no place for company,” Mrs Swannack retaliated loudly. “We shall need her. Working for the Lord doesn’t bar us from friends. Come on, Father, back to the schoolroom.”
She bustled from the boat, cocking a leg over the rails and climbing from the catamaran to the jetty as easily as if she’d been mounting a staircase in her own home.
Swannack offered Jimmy a cigarette. “You attend church, son?” he asked placidly. “Always pleased to see newcomers at our services. How about tomorrow?”
Jimmy was on the point of finding out Swannack’s religion and, as an excuse, claiming allegiance to a different one, but the ground was cut from under his feet as Swannack went on. “Doesn’t matter whether you’re Baptist, C of E, Methodist, Total Immersionist, Holy Roller or what, son. I cater for ’em all. I cover all denominations, so’s not to miss anybody. Come tomorrow.”
“Father,” Mrs Swannack bawled peremptorily from the end of the jetty. “Back to the schoolroom. Routine, Father, routine.”
Swannack made a moue of disgust which seemed girlish in one of so much bulk. “Women!” he said angrily, and climbed off the boat after his wife.
“Christ!” Earnshaw sighed with relief, and, lifting his hat with its switchback brim, mopped his forehead. “Them Swannacks fair exhaust me. OK, tie ’er up, Suri, you black sinner,” he said. “And don’t go making a muck of it, or I nobble you. By God, I will.”
As they stepped on to the catamaran, a white man came towards them down the jetty and Earnshaw turned quickly back to the boat.
“Oh, Gawd,” he said to Jimmy. “Here it comes. You-too-can-be-the-life-of-the-party hisself. You nip off and have a good laugh with him and I’ll get the boys to bring your luggage up.”
The newcomer was very tall and yellow with mepacrine, and with a large, bony nose like a beak below pale hair and eyes. As he peered forward, he reminded Jimmy for all the world of the herons and cranes they had seen among the mangroves on their trip up the river. His long awkward legs, their skin tinted by the climate, heightened the impression.
“Hallo,” he said in a sharp, high voice without offering his hand. “You’ll be Agnew, I suppose. My name’s Gotto.”
Two
His head buzzing as much from the implied warnings about Gotto as from Twigg’s last-minute instructions, Jimmy felt vaguely let down.
For two days, from the scraps of conversation he had heard, the odd impressions and opinions he had gleaned from other people, he had been building up a mental picture of him quite out of proportion to the real thing. This weedy yellow young man with his pale hair and eyes and his bony nose, and the ill-fitting bush jacket that hung on his skinny body, was far removed from the swart-browed, ugly-tempered individual he had expected.
In point of fact, Gotto seemed tediously dull and boringly ordinary. He was long-windedly talkative about trivialities and awkwardly laconic about everything else.
He drove Jimmy up the dusty road to the bungalow they were to share close to the Amama mine, his eyes fixed on the red ribbon cut out of the mangroves, his attitude one of nervous affability.
“You any good at cricket?” he asked, as they reached the top of the hill where the bush started abruptly with the firm soil, and Jimmy cast him a trapped look over his shoulder.
Oh, God, he thought. Another one!
He decided to be honest this time, even if it ruined his career. Honesty, even in disfavour, seemed better than the nightly bouts of cricket Twigg was reputed to inflict on the juniors at Ma-Imi.
“Not very,” he admitted with an apologetic smile.
“Well, that’s all right,” Gotto said with obvious relief. “I got sick of hearing cricket down at Ma-Imi.” He leaned back in his seat, apparently satisfied to have settled a long-standing worry, and stared ahead again where the dying sun drew long straight shadows across the ground from the base of the palms and the eucalyptus trees. Without waiting for him to continue, Jimmy took it upon himself to ask the obvious first questions that would break the ice.
“Been out here long?” he began.
“Nearly finished my time. I was mostly at Ma-Imi.” Gotto gave him a sidelong smile and, remembering Twigg’s obvious pleasure at getting rid of him, Jimmy found himself wondering what was wrong with him. He seemed depressingly unexciting and so excruciatingly ordinary that Jimmy was quite certain he’d seen him somewhere before. He wore provincial England on him like a stiff Sunday suit.
“I’ve fixed it with the houseboy for you to have the room on the river side of the bungalow,” he was saying. “That’s the best side. It gets less sun and it’s cooler – or rather, it’s not so hot. He’ll have moved my stuff out by the time we get back.”
“Don’t let me take your room,” Jimmy protested.
“That’s all right,” Gotto said quickly. “I don’t mind. Trying to make you comfortable, that’s all. You can keep my drawers. They stick a bit but they’re bigger than the others. It’s a nice room,” he went on eagerly, obviously more than anxious to be friendly. “As nice as you can get in this hole, anyway. The bush doesn’t come so close on that side so you don’t hear the frogs and crickets and you don’t get so much wild life – bugs and things.”
“It’s jolly decent of you to move out,” Jimmy said, as willing as Gotto to be co-operative – especially in view of the assorted warnings he’d received during the past two days.
“I’ve got bags of khaki you can borrow if you’re short,” Gotto went on. “And I’ve got a camera you can have if you’ve not got one. I’ve taken a lot of pictures myself – to show the people back home. Girls, you know. They’ll never believe how little they wear and the village girls will always pose for you – without clothes if you give ’em a couple of bob. I’ve got quite a collection. I’ll show ’em to you some time if you like.”
Jimmy smiled feebly and decided to chan
ge the subject.
“Do this job back home?” he asked.
“Yes. Lincolnshire. At least, that’s where I worked before I came to this dump.”
“My old man’s in this line in Lincolnshire. He helped me get this job. Experience, you know, before I go into the family outfit. I suppose you decided to have a look round the world, too?”
“Not really. Got fed up hanging about.”
“Hanging about?”
Gotto gave him a sad sidelong smile, and stroked his large nose in an involuntary effort to hide it that drew Jimmy’s attention to it immediately. “Got the push,” he said. “The manager had his knife into me. Like the chap where I worked opencast coal. Staff alterations, they called it, but it was the sack all the same.”
“Oh.” There was an awkward pause. “Didn’t you fancy coming out here, then?”
“Nowhere else.”
“What about Northamptonshire?”
“I went from Northamptonshire to Lincolnshire.”
Jimmy was on the point of asking why when it occurred to him that Gotto had probably got the push from there, too, and that Africa was the last chapter in a long history of sudden changes, and the conversation halted once more as he sought a change of subject. “You married?” he asked at last.
Gotto’s bony face brightened for the first time and his expression softened almost to wistfulness. It was a sudden warm shyness that fleetingly transformed his features, and he seemed to get his teeth into the conversation at last, as though the trivialities of home towns were desperately important to him. He seemed to be grasping for something familiar in a strange land.
“Not yet,” he said with a smile. “But I’m engaged – or nearly.” His eyes still on the road, he fished one-handed in the breast pocket of his bush jacket and produced a photograph case containing the conventional snapshot of a girl against a garden wall.
“That’s my girl. Doris is her name.”
Jimmy affected to be interested and Gotto went on enthusiastically.
“You married?” he asked, tucking the case back again.
“No.” Jimmy grinned. “But all my old girlfriends promised to write. They all swore they’d try and miss me.”
“All? How many have you got?”
“There must be at least six of ’em jockeying for position.”
“Six!” The expression on Gotto’s face was suddenly one of resentment. “You ought to have been born with a nose like mine. They don’t jockey round me much.”
Jimmy smiled. “What’s this Swannack girl like?” he asked.
“I’ve got an invite round there tomorrow. I expect it includes you too.” Gotto spoke as if it were a triumph of diplomacy on his part, though having met Mrs Swannack, Jimmy was quite certain it wasn’t.
Gotto looked over his shoulder, beginning to show something like warmth again. “Stella’s her name. She’s nineteen.”
“Bit young.”
“They’re best young. When they get older, they start talking to you as though you don’t know the score. Nineteen’s a nice age. I’m looking forward to meeting her. Doris is nineteen.” Gotto mopped his moist face with the handkerchief that lay on his lap as he drove. “Pity there’s nowhere to take a girl round here,” he concluded, the resentful tone returning to his voice.
“There’s shooting, I’m told–”
“Catch me carrying a rifle round all day in this heat!”
“Well, fishing then–”
“From a wog canoe?”
“Well, there’s a beach not far away, isn’t there?”
“Get jigger worms in your toes if you run round without shoes on out here. You’ll soon find out. I’ve had a bit.”
“Well–” Jimmy was still wondering what it was about Gotto that so upset everyone and had privately arrived at the conclusion that the only effect he could possibly have on anyone would be a slow death from boredom. “Well–” he said again – ‘Earnshaw’s offered to take me in one of his boats up the creeks after crocodiles.”
“Earnshaw!’ Gotto laughed sarcastically. The sky was beginning to turn jade green now as the sun began to sink but his eyes were as blank as marbles and his face showed no sign of interest.
“What’s wrong with him?” Jimmy asked the question cautiously. In spite of Earnshaw’s obvious immorality and the fact that he was none too clean and probably not very honest, he had taken rather a liking to his spicy conversation and his sly, croaking voice.
“Well–” Gotto made his reply slowly. “That gramophone of his for a start. And ‘Old lad’ this and ‘Old lad’ that. And he obviously doesn’t wash very often. He’s got a woman in tow – that Zaidee–”
“One of coffee, two of milk.”
“That’s her. And he’s friendly with the Syrians. He gambles with his crews. He – well, he sets a pretty low sort of example, that’s all, and you can’t get on out here when you’re familiar with the Africans.”
“Oh, can’t you?” It had seemed to Jimmy that Earnshaw’s relations with his crews were very good, despite his insults and familiarity.
“Funny thing–” Gotto looked puzzled – “he seems to get on with the Swannacks. He often goes up there. They asked me once when I was up with Jarvis. They didn’t rush to ask me again. Not till now and they couldn’t very well avoid it this time. Everybody’ll be there.”
Gotto stopped the car at the little bungalow and when Earnshaw arrived in a lorry shortly afterwards, he began to direct the off-loading of supplies, shouting orders in a harsh high voice that seemed like a whiplash to the black boys who were scurrying in and out of the bungalow with boxes and cases.
Earnshaw watched him for a while, his hands in the pockets of his dirty shorts, his eyes heavy and disinterested. Then he glanced at Jimmy and saw the startled expression on his face.
“’Ot, ain’t it?” he asked.
“Gets hotter,” Jimmy replied and Earnshaw grinned.
“Makes you wonder if you hadn’t best stayed at home,” he observed. “Me, I coulda taken over the old man’s business but I couldn’t see meself behind a counter. He was a herbalist. Sarsaparilla and hot drinks. ’Ead and neuralgia ’erbs. Backache and kidney stuff. All the nonsense. The war finished him.”
“A bomb?” Jimmy asked, squinting into the glare of the sun.
“No, old lad.” Earnshaw gave his slow tired smile. “Tobacco shortage. He find they was coming for his herbs to fill their pipes with.”
As he finished speaking, he halted one of the Africans hurrying from the bungalow towards the lorry for the last of Jimmy’s baggage.
“This here is Amadu Komorra, your boy,” he said over his shoulder. “Biggest liar, biggest thief in Amama. Aintcha, Amadu, old cock?”
The black man’s face split in a wide grin as he stared back at Earnshaw’s bored blank face.
“No, sah. Not Amadu, sah.”
“Go on, you bloody old rogue. Who pinches the sugar and tea to give to the mammies? Who bribes the girls with flour?”
“Not Amadu, sah.”
“I’ve seed you with me own eyes. Keep ’alf the blackies in Amama with what you swipe, dontcha? Who used to tell Boss Jarvis his clothes was all wore out and then took ’em up town and flogged ’em to his pals?”
“Not me, sah. Not Amadu.”
The black man was wriggling with delighted embarrassment.
“You want to watch him, old lad,” Earnshaw said to Jimmy, cocking a thumb in the direction of the African. “He pinch the smell of a goat if he could.”
“No boss.” Amadu crowed with mirth. “Not me, boss.”
“Why, you’re the biggest rogue, mammy-chaser and wangler in the whole of Amama. You know you are. What are you?”
“Boss” – Amadu almost collapsed with merriment – “I de biggest rogue, mammy-chaser and wangler in de whole Amama.”
“That’s right,” Earnshaw agreed. “Glad you know it. Watch him, old lad, or you’ve had it. He’s pretty smart for a darkey.”
Amadu’s
grin faded as Gotto reappeared.
“OK,” he was told brusquely. “Get moving! What about a meal?”
“Yessah, boss! I get!” Amadu hurried nervously away and Gotto stared after him, his eyes narrow and suspicious.
“Brassy-faced little swine, that,” he commented. “Too much cheek for an African.”
As he disappeared inside the bungalow again, Earnshaw turned towards Jimmy and shook hands solemnly.
“Goodbye, old lad,” he said heavily. “Enjoy yourself. I’ll see you get a decent burial.”
“I heard the mortality was high out here.” Jimmy was peering into the bungalow, his eyes puzzled.
“It got ’igher since His Lordship arrived,” Earnshaw commented.
Jimmy closed the last of his suitcases and, kicking it out of his way, turned towards a damp-warped chest of drawers in the corner of his bedroom.
Gotto was lounging on the bed and as Jimmy turned, a pile of clothes in his hand, he sat up. The conversation had found its way round to work and Gotto was suddenly animated in an aggressive, eager way.
“Listen,” he was saying as he explained his plans. “I don’t know about you, but this job here means a lot to me. A damned lot. I’ve sent a message to Amama Town where the shift boss lives. I’ve told him to meet us at the office first thing on Monday morning. We’ll talk this lot over with him, tell him we expect him to pull with us, let him know straight away just where he stands. What say?’
“Good!” Jimmy slapped the clothes into a drawer and pushed it to with a squeak of tortured woodwork.
“After all, he’s only an African. He’s got to be told. They’re loyal enough if you let ’em see you’re not standing any damn’ nonsense.” Gotto paused to let his opinion sink in before continuing. “I’ve got to make a good show of this place,” he said. “I’ve a mother to keep. She can’t do much for herself and she’s dependent on me absolutely. Got a bad heart. Makes her a bit difficult at times. You see,” he went on with a trace of spite in his voice. “My old man didn’t own some firm I could take over when I left school.”