by John Harris
She laughed heartily for the first time. “Sure is nice of you,” she said. “But I hardly know you.”
“You will before long.”
“You the persistent kind?”
“Not particularly.” Jimmy stubbed out his cigarette in a pot of geraniums and blinked in the sunlight that pierced the leaves in needling shafts of light. “But I’ve been in Amama long enough already to know you’ll see a lot of everybody before you’ve finished. Even Gotto.”
“That’s a queer guy.” She wrinkled her brows in bewilderment.
“Sure is a queer guy,” Jimmy agreed. “Anyway, to come back to this proposal of mine–”
“Take it easy. I’m used to proposals. I once had three in one night at a college party – only one of ’em for marriage, too!”
Jimmy laughed. “Since you don’t know me very well, I’ll tell you all about myself. Name, Francis Theodore St John Agnew–”
“Gosh!”
“Earnshaw was blunter. I think he said ‘Jesus’. Personally, I’ve never believed it but my mother insists it’s true and you can’t argue with a birth certificate.”
Stella held out her hand. “Shake. If the truth were known and my grandfather had his way, mine would be Swanakaczicki.”
“Pretty name,” Jimmy said politely. “To return: I’m domesticated. I help with the washing up. I’m good at fixing things. I do card tricks. I can whistle between my teeth.”
“You sound just the type I’m looking for.”
“You bet I am. I like good music. I save my money and I’m all for Anglo-American relationships – especially in Amama – I’m fond of kids–”
She stared at him, her large grey eyes faintly mocking. “Kids, too? This is too much. Honest?”
“Honest. I’ve got dozens I write to regularly. I don’t drink – at least, not much, and then only when I’m thirsty.”
“You’d better put your application in writing and I’ll consider it with the others.”
Jimmy grinned. “Well, anyway,” he said. “There’s no need to be lonely out here. I’m told there’s always someone willing to look after you.”
Stella laughed again and she seemed suddenly much more at home than she had been when he had found her. “The house-boy’s made me my own private privy already. Mother says it’s quite an honour, only he will insist on asking me if it fits.”
“No, but seriously,” Jimmy persisted, “I’d like to show you around – when someone’s shown me around.”
“Seems we ought to look around together. Be much easier. Be much smarter. Then what we don’t know we can guess at.”
“There’s some good swimming not far away, I believe,” Jimmy went on gaily. “There’s fishing and shooting. Plenty to do if you don’t weaken and the sun doesn’t get you. I believe we’ve even got a gas-lamp in the middle of Amama, which some old chief bought from the London County Council after he’d visited Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, and erected here on a stone plinth. He lost quite a bit of face when it didn’t light up.”
Stella laughed.
“At least, it’s something for a photograph,” Jimmy said. “You’re going to need something with three cameras. I’ll help you take it. How about it?” he concluded with a sweeping enthusiasm. “Tomorrow?”
She held up her hand in protest.
“You mustn’t rush me like this. You’ve got to give me time. My folks will want me around here for a while.”
“Nothing wrong with meeting an eligible young man for a bit of swimming between times though, is there?”
“Maybe not. But give me a day or two. Just a day or two. Say a week. I’m here for the dry season.”
It was late when Jimmy left the Swannacks, and Gotto and the car had long since disappeared. He got a lift with Romney and Earnshaw and stayed talking with them for some time, before walking slowly back to the bungalow through the scented night, occupied with thoughts of Stella Swannack.
The mine bungalow appeared to be deserted when he arrived and he assumed Gotto had gone to bed, though the light was burning and the moths were banging and buzzing round it like a dust storm and the air was full of the smell of singed wings.
The house-boy, who was sitting in the shadows on the veranda playing with a chameleon on a piece of string, greeted him sleepily.
“You wait for me, Amadu?”
“Yassah, boss. See you safe home. I go now.”
Jimmy pulled off his shirt and threw it, wet with sweat, with a plop to the floor. He lit a cigarette and, indifferent to the whine of mosquitoes, went outside to let the cooler night air play on his body.
“That you, Agnew?”
He turned as Gotto’s voice came sharply from his bedroom. He was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, his yellow face shining with perspiration. There was a half-written letter on the bed and an ash-tray full of crushed cigarette ends on the chair alongside.
“Hallo,” Jimmy said from the door. “Thought you were asleep. What have you been doing?”
“Lying here.”
“Staring at the ceiling?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a poor way to pass the time.”
“Is it?” Gotto turned his head slowly and stared at Jimmy. “Enjoy yourself?” he asked.
“Not half,” Jimmy said enthusiastically. “Nice kid, Stella, don’t you think? More than made up for the home-made wine.” He grinned at Gotto. “I’d have passed out if Earnshaw hadn’t told me about the case of beer he had round the back. Did you get one?”
“Nobody tells me things like that.”
Jimmy laughed. “Hard luck. How about you? Did you enjoy yourself?”
Gotto shrugged. “Might have, if you hadn’t hogged the girl all day. Nobody else got a chance.”
Jimmy grinned. “Modern girls like speed,” he said. “This is the jet age, you know.”
“We’re not all lady-killers,” Gotto replied. ‘All of us haven’t had your chances. Some of us have had to look after their families. Like I have with my old mother. I wasn’t always able to get out and run around like you.”
“Hm.” Jimmy began to suspect that Gotto wasn’t joking and he was a little flattened by the realisation. “Rotten hard luck,” he commented heavily.
“I had to stay back and fetch and carry. And I didn’t always get much thanks for it when I’d done, either.”
The resentful tone creeping into Gotto’s voice depressed Jimmy.
“Well,” he said in a weightily cheerful tone. “Now’s your chance. You’re your own master now. You can go in for riotous living as much as you like.”
“I need all my money,” Gotto said pointedly. “I haven’t got a father who owns a business. Besides, I wasn’t born as lucky as you. Being able to get people falling on my neck – just talking like that, shooting a line.”
“I’ll give you lessons if you like,” Jimmy said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “It’s quite easy.”
“Not for me. They just turn their backs on me when I talk and find there’s something they’ve forgotten to do.” Gotto paused for a moment and lit a cigarette before continuing, casually – almost too casually. “What did she say about me?”
“Say about you? Nothing as far as I know. What should she say?”
“What they all say. That’s a queer-looking clod, with a snout like a prize sow.”
“Don’t be silly, man.” Jimmy was beginning to feel irritated by the acid self-sympathy, all the more so as Gotto’s guess was so nearly right. “As far as I know,” he lied, “she never even mentioned your name.”
“She didn’t like me all the same. I can always tell by their looks.”
Jimmy was on the point of losing his temper when he pulled himself up short. He had to live with Gotto for a considerable time yet, he remembered, and arguing wasn’t going to help either of them.
“Listen, Gotty,” he said as calmly as he could. “I think you’re quite wrong. Stella’s not that kind of girl. I’m sure she’s not, in fact. I’ve arranged to see
her again–”
Gotto smiled, like an advocate who has caught out a witness in a lie. “Hogging the women,” he commented. “See what I mean?”
Jimmy ignored him. “I’ve arranged to see her again,” he repeated. “But if you feel you want to know her better there’s nothing to stop you seeing her, too.”
“Only a great ugly snout!” Gotto laughed harshly. “Besides, I can imagine your face if you arrived at the Mission and found she was out with me.” The eager chumminess of the morning was swamped by obvious jealousy, and as it suddenly occurred to Jimmy that Gotto lived in a cheerless little world of his own to which he clung unwillingly as a defence against the rebuffs his humourlessness brought him, he began at last to understand Twigg’s warnings.
“Look, Gotty,” he said. “Don’t let’s quarrel about it.”
“I’m not quarrelling.” Gotto spoke with a patient, too reasonable smile that made Jimmy grit his teeth. “You’re the one who’s getting upset.”
“Am I?” Jimmy forced a grin. “Well, it isn’t worth it, anyway, is it? Nothing to stop us sharing the lady. Why not come with us when I see her again? We’re only going swimming or something.”
“I’d look fine playing gooseberry. No, thank you.”
Jimmy stood by the bed, lost for words, anxious to break off a difficult conversation that led him into greater confusion with every reply, and eventually Gotto waved his hand, and he seemed a little more cheerful.
“Don’t forget we’re meeting Momo at the office tomorrow,” he said. “Talk things over.”
“Yes. I’d better get some sleep.”
Jimmy left the room thankfully. He had a sudden uncomfortable feeling that perhaps Earnshaw’s first estimate of life with Gotto had been more right than he had thought. Whether his stay in Amama was to be one of weeks or months, he decided, it was going to seem an awfully long time.
Four
The bright blinding sun roused Jimmy early the next morning. As it rose behind the hills, a shaft of flame touched the misty blueness of the early daylight, then the sun itself appeared, a yellow eye staring clear across the curve of the earth, its orb curtained by the dark palm fronds that intervened.
The empty sky was lit by its glow and the tips of the hills were tinted gold. As it rose higher, Amama blazed with its daylight brassiness and the new cycle began to burn its way to its zenith.
Jimmy woke slowly, after a drugged sleep in the airless night that was broken only by the whirr of a faulty fan and the croak of the gaudy little toads that hid under the doorstep. His mouth was dry and his body was already moist with perspiration.
He sat up and, reaching for a towel, mopped his face, then hurried naked for the shower. Recovering his wits under the splashing water, he began to sing loudly until he remembered his conversation with Gotto the previous night, and his song stopped abruptly as he became obsessed with a feeling of depression. Then he began to sing again, louder and faster that ever, combating the thoughts that had turned off his happiness as though with a tap.
There must be no depression in this house, he decided as he set off for the office, whistling defiantly. There must be no thought of defeat. With Amama as small as it was and with Gotto constantly treading on his heels, there could be no room for cheerlessness.
He thrust his foot down on the accelerator of the rattling old station wagon that had been assigned to him and skidded it in the dust round a corner just for the fun of the thing.
The chatter of the diggers and the grinding roar of lorries in low gear penetrated through the bush as he approached the workings. The bright foliage on either side of the road was dulled with the dust that the Euclids’ wheels had churned up, and the bite out of the hillside seemed to glow like blood in the hot morning sunshine, a rich semi-circle in the flat quarry-face, like a slice out of the red flesh of a paw-paw. The whole complicated operation of getting iron out of the earth to feed the furnaces of the world was in progress. Fringing the workings and along the top of the great arc were the giant trees – baobab, cotton, palm – in a solid mass as though huddling together in fear of the steel machines that carved into their midst. Even as Jimmy watched, he saw a towering eucalyptus topple to make way for a new road and heard the muffled thump of an explosion as rock was blasted on one of the lower levels.
The mine office was in a wooden hut that looked as though it had had its origin in an army dump. It was a plain concrete-floored room filled with sparse furniture, the only decoration being a calendar on which Jimmy noticed someone – he presumed Gotto – had started to tick off the days. From next door, the sound of a typewriter beat unsteadily as Smith, the black clerk, started work.
Jimmy sat down and, for lack of anything better to do until Gotto arrived, loudly shuffled the papers and plans on the desk which were gritty with the dust that had settled everywhere. Then he studied the rock samples which were used as paper-weights when the Harmattan, the cold wind off the Sahara, blew across from the north, and examined the surveyor’s tripod in a corner of the office with a paper of compass bearings and distances attached to it by an elastic band. For ten minutes, he glanced through the geological survey memoirs of the area, and studied a drawing of a Mather and Platt pump, while all the time the office shook to the rhythmic thump of a digger’s bucket on the earth not far away.
After a while. as no one appeared, he lifted a drilling bit from a chair to the table and sat down. “Smith,” he shouted through to the other office. “Clerk Smith. What’s the time? This clock doesn’t seem to work.”
“No, Boss.” Smith’s grape-dark countenance appeared round the door and beamed. “No work. All rusted up. De rains fix ’um.”
“Oh!” Jimmy stared at the damp-spotted face of the clock. “Can’t it be mended?”
“No, Boss. Plenty too much damn’ rust.”
“I see. Anything else that doesn’t work?”
“Yassah, Boss.” Smith nodded enthusiastically. “De drawers all stick. De typewriter no good. De keys of de safe done get lost. And, Boss, de telephone to de workings–”
“What happened to that?”
“De rains, Boss. Or de ants get in de works. Eat de wire. I t’ink de rains.”
“How do you get in touch, then?”
“Go down, Boss. Send boy on bicycle. Boss Earnshaw fix ’um mebbe. Boss–” Smith’s cheerful countenance became gloomy and confiding. “Boss Earnshaw – you see de gramophone? He play ’um for you some time?”
“Not half.” Jimmy was disinterestedly trying to make head or tail of the tangle of dusty papers left unsorted on the desk by the departed Jarvis before his dose of malaria. “On the boat coming up. About five million times. Why?”
“Boss–” Smith smiled sadly – “gramophone good for black man. Plenty dance. No cost money for drums when he give party.”
“I suppose you’re right.” Jimmy looked up, beginning to wonder what the other was getting at.
“Plenty times I ask Boss Earnshaw give me gramophone. He got wireless. Why he want both?” The African’s black face was suddenly indignant, as though he’d been cheated.
“I suppose he likes to hear his record,” Jimmy said. “He’s only got one–”
“Yassah. Carmen Mirandy.”
“Well, I think he likes Carmen Miranda a bit. So he probably wants to hang on to her.” Jimmy dismissed the subject and prepared to return to the papers in front of him.
“Boss–” Jimmy looked up this time with an expression as near irritable as his face could get – “I go buy gramophone from Boss Earnshaw. Only I not get paid enough money. He want ten pounds.” Smith’s face was outraged. “Ten pounds, Boss!”
“Well, work hard, old son, and study in your spare time,” Jimmy said hastily, repeating a well-worn formula which had been flung at him times without number. “And then you’ll earn more money and you’ll be able to buy a gramophone and a Carmen Miranda of your own.”
“Boss–”
“Oh, God,” Jimmy said under his breath.
Jimmy was sitting with his head on one hand now, staring sightlessly at the papers in front of him, trying to battle with the baking heat and Smith’s droning voice.
“Clerk Smith very important black man in Amama. All mammies like Clerk Smith. Boss, I get gramophone, plenty girls come to my party, mebbe. Make dance. Boss, why Boss Earnshaw no give me gramophone?”
“Listen–” The sweat was beginning to run into Jimmy’s eyes now and make him blink – “Be a good chap and go and boil your head, will you?”
Smith drooped sadly back to the other room where he began to pound an ancient typewriter that seemed to shake the hut as he thumped laboriously on its keys.
Alf Momo, the shift boss, and Gotto arrived almost together, Gotto more like a crane or a heron than ever with his bony knees and a yellow face that was moist with the heat. He went straight to the water container and, filling a tin mug, swallowed it quickly. “Chloride!” he snorted, pulling a face. “Chloride of lime.”
He sat down at the table, mopping his face and ignoring Momo. Jimmy, at the other side, watching him, was a picture of brisk energy and efficiency.
“Right!” Gotto smacked the table with encouraging enthusiasm. “Let’s get on. I’ve got the gen on everything from Twigg. It’s a piece of cake.”
Momo was still standing by the door and Jimmy indicated a chair. “Sit down,” he suggested and Gotto looked up quickly. Momo caught the glance, hesitated, then pulled up a chair and sat uncomfortably on the edge of it.
“Right,” Gotto said again, even more heartily than before. He moved the papers in front of him briskly and a cloud of dust rose and the expression of distaste that appeared as he waved it aside chased away his look of bright alertness as though a blind had been drawn across his features.
“That’s one thing,” he said sharply, staring at the dust motes in the sunshine that streamed into the room. “Too much damn’ dirt around here for comfort.” He looked aggressively at Momo, almost as though it were his fault. “Down at Ma-Imi we had sprinklers to lay the dust. Can’t we do something like that here?”