by John Harris
“In fact,” Romney commented slyly, “you’ve unearthed a basic truth that never ceases to surprise people when they discover it for the first time – that there’s nothing to choose between the white and black races.”
Jimmy blushed. “No, there isn’t,” he said, “and there’s no need to chivvy ’em as he does. I wouldn’t mind,” he added with a shrug, “but they’re beginning to associate not only him with the bullying but me too.”
“One of the burdens of the righteous is to be misjudged.”
“You know what’s wrong with Gotto?” Earnshaw offered from the doorway where he sat with his back to the lintel. “He’s nuts. That’s what.”
“On the contrary,” Romney said, “he’s being very normal. Insecure people are often bullies. It’s a sop to their ego, a consolation prize, if you like.”
“Well, he’s quicker off the mark than anyone I’ve ever come across,” Jimmy said. “He’s got the Temne and the Mende at each other’s throats already. There was a fight the other night in the town – just as you said there’d be – a party or something, and too much palm wine and native beer. There were casualties–”
“I know,” Romney said. “I got one here. He’d had his ear half torn off in the scuffle.”
“It was quite a party, I believe.”
“An African crowd enjoys emotions to the full. Even other people’s.”
“I only hope he hasn’t got one of these circuses going when Twigg arrives. That’s all. He’s due to look us over any time now.”
“Don’t worry, kid,” Earnshaw said. “Twiggy’ll dodge Gotto like the plague.”
Jimmy looked puzzled and unhappy. “There’s no warmth in the man anywhere. Ever since I came here, I’ve been trying to find some spark, and apart from a half-hearted effort from him at the start, I can’t.”
“Not surprised,” Earnshaw commented. “He’s as cold as an old fried egg. Perhaps ’e’s congealed. Perhaps ’e’s dead even. They pretty good at embalming these days.”
He turned his head sideways to apply a match to the scorched cigarette end between his lips. “You seen the mammies frightening the kids to bed with his name?” he asked as he blew out a cloud of smoke. “‘Gotto’s coming’,” he squeaked in imitation of a black woman chasing her piccaninny indoors. “‘Gotto’s coming. He eat you up.’ I’ve heard ’em. Honest. They run like there was a crocodile after ’em. Cripes–” he sighed heavily and tossed the burnt match through the door – “if only he’d laugh sometimes.”
“For Gotty,” Jimmy said with a grin, “life is real, life is earnest. Much realer and earnester than for the rest of us.”
Romney didn’t join in the mirth. “I think it is and that’s the whole trouble,” he said quietly so that Jimmy felt vaguely ashamed of his levity.
Romney began to wipe the mistiness of perspiration from his spectacles. Behind him, the yellow light threw his face into darkness as he sat motionless, only his hands moving. Against the dusty wire mesh of the window, a moth beat itself to death with soft flutterings like the hammering of tiny fists.
“I suppose,” he said at last, “it wouldn’t matter half so much if it weren’t that he could be such an asset to Indian Joe.”
“Indian Jo?” Jimmy looked up in alarm. “Where’s he come into it?”
Romney sat back, holding his spectacles on his knees.
“Indian Joe didn’t know sufficient to start a mine here,” he said, “but he’s clever enough to listen to what’s said in his bar and he’d like to buy it – the cheaper the better.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m a doctor – the only one in Amama. Everybody comes to me. And people talk to doctors.” He paused before he went on. “He’d sell it again, of course. He’s no engineer. But he’d make a big profit. Perhaps all this is the reason for the rice shortage. They can still manufacture them. He’s probably trying to make the output drop by stirring up trouble.”
“Trouble!” Jimmy said. “God, that word!”
Romney put his glasses on, hitching them round his ears with care, and placed his finger-tips together to make a pyramid of his hands. Then he looked up, his old eyes distorted by the strong lenses. “I notice Samuel Assissay’s still in Amama,” he pointed out. “That wasn’t what Twigg intended when he sent him up from Ma-Imi. He came to see me this morning with what would be a black eye if he were white. Somebody hit him.”
“What for?”
“The usual.” Romney shrugged his fat stooping shoulders. “Haranguing a crowd. They’re not keen on him in Amama.”
“Well, he doesn’t seem to be doing any harm.”
“He isn’t at the moment, but it hasn’t taken him long to realise our friend Gotto isn’t popular.”
“Oh, Lord! Now I see what you’re getting at.”
“He’s three parts ju-ju, but he could get a crowd moving, and violence spreads like the green bay tree, especially among primitive people. You see, in an isolated place like Amama, an organisation like the mine grows a little out of proportion and tends to become a power it was never intended to be. And so, hence, does the man who runs it – in this case, Gotto.”
Jimmy studied the floor, watching the slow trudge of a centipede along the wainscoting. He was a little overwhelmed by what Romney had said.
“Gotto sacked half a dozen Mende the other day because one of them came to my surgery,” the old man went on, laying facts before them like cards in a game of patience. “He was stupid enough to set on five Temne and only one Mende in their place. He wasn’t to know. They all look alike to a white man – a newcomer, anyway. But he didn’t bother to find out. So Samuel Assissay finds half a dozen followers with a grievance immediately. He’ll find others before long, I suspect.”
Jimmy was staring through the open door now at the clumps of yellow cannas that threw their massive blooms up from among large flat leaves, like gushing fountains. Behind them were brilliant hibiscus bushes, their solitary flowers closed for the night, and on either side of the path that led to the front door, bougainvillaea, white spider lilies and red irises crowded beneath a frangipani tree with orange blossoms. Even in the moonlight, he could see the colour and guess at the splendour of it all.
“Go on, Doc,” he said slowly. He was beginning to suspect that he had become involved in something more complicated than he had imagined.
Romney made himself more comfortable and went on with the air of a lecturer delivering a talk. “Indian Joe’s watching events, Jimmy,” he said. “He has been for some time. He was even when Jarvis was here though he could do nothing then. Now it’s different. He’s given Assissay a job in his store. He doubtless feels he can use his peculiar talents to good effect. Assissay knows how to talk to crowds, even if he can’t sort out ju-ju from white man’s politics, or politics from religion.”
Earnshaw leaned forward. “You want to report that Gotto,” he said to Jimmy. “Let Henry Twigg know. It’s his pigeon. He send him up here to get rid of him. That’s all. But you have him out, kid, before you get yourself some trouble. Slap him down – sharp! They don’t want him down at Ma-Imi, they want to send him home.”
Jimmy had sat up abruptly, a look of unhappiness on his face as a disconcerting thought occurred to him.
“Oh, Lord, no,” he said involuntarily. “You see, this seems to be his last chance. I gather he’s been pushed from one job to another and he was hoping to make a go of this one.”
“Upsetting Alf Momo and all the other blokes won’t ’elp him. Have him out, Jimmy. Tell Twigg when he arrive.”
“Hell, I can’t. He’s got a mother dependent on him. Besides, he’s due to go home soon and surely Twiggy won’t put anything in his way if he knows him. He’s nearly finished his tour.”
“’E ain’t learned much.”
“He probably wouldn’t if he stayed all his life but, God knows, I think he’s tried hard to be friendly with me at least. It won’t be long before he’s gone.”
“It’ll be too long,
however long it is.” Earnshaw had a stubborn look on his face. “Leave him to me,” he offered. “I sort him out quicker than that. I’ll set my boys on him and give him a bit o’ clog. I done it afore with blokes I’ve found hanging round Zaidee.” He made the statement with the bland pride of a Borgia announcing the removal of a rival.
Jimmy looked hard at him. “Surely we can put up with him for a month or two. He might never come back. What do you say, Doc?”
“I agree. The man could be a damn nuisance but in view of the fact that he’s due home soon, I think we might cover for him a bit.”
Earnshaw tossed away his cigarette. “I suppose that might make it a bit different,” he said thoughtfully. “Like the parrot what laid square eggs. All the same, I don’t like it. Something might go wrong. It might be longer than you think. Months, in fact. You know ’ow these tickets ’ome get lost.”
“We can chance it,” Jimmy said. “We can stand him a bit longer if necessary.”
“I think we ought to do more than that,” Romney pointed out. “Standing him isn’t enough. We ought to try and bring him round. Nobody else has ever bothered. That’s probably the trouble. We might even show him there’s more to this place than the heat and the dust.”
“Pull the plug on it and let it run out by itself,” Earnshaw said. “That’s what I say. Blow having tea-parties.”
“He should be taken up-river and shown the sights.”
“In my boats, I suppose?”
Romney nodded and Jimmy sat up delightedly, his uneasy conscience salved.
“Let him stew in his own juice,” Earnshaw said heavily.
“It’s only for a while,” Jimmy said. “Otherwise, I’d go to Twigg. You don’t think I’d put up with a clot like him indefinitely, do you?”
“I’ll put up with him, but to hell with kiss-and-be- friends.”
“Oh, come on, man,” Jimmy said eagerly. “It’s all in a good cause.”
“OK, OK,” Earnshaw said wearily. “If that’s what you want. So long as he’s not staying, I’ll kill the bastard with kindness. I’m going up-river tomorrer. Bring him along. You want to see a bloke be nice to him, you just watch me. I’m dead ’ot on friendship.”
When Jimmy returned to the mine bungalow, Gotto was sprawled on his bed, still in the dusty khaki he had used in the workings. Outside, the sound of the bull-frogs, the crickets and the mosquitoes made music with the cheep of a bat or the screech of an owl. From time to time he heard the rats making love under the bungalow and the noise of a beetle roaring round the room like a flying bomb. The thermometer on the wall registered eighty-nine and the heat stood in the room with the menace of an assassin.
He was suffering from a sweat rash and he felt the discomfort was a personal imposition not inflicted on Romney or Earnshaw or Jimmy.
He was just pondering a miracle, the miracle of the boat crews’ affection for Earnshaw – Earnshaw, the dishonest, the immoral, the uneducated, the crafty, the vulgar and the sly – an affection which was obvious and always had been obvious in the wide delighted grins that split their black faces at his crusty shouts, an affection which, to Gotto, seemed to draw sustenance only from kicks, insults and bad language, but an affection which to his amazement existed nevertheless. He had that morning watched Earnshaw’s coxswain, Suri, wriggling with shyness, hand over as a birthday gift on behalf of the other boat crews a handkerchief full of limes for Earnshaw’s gins. There had been no word of thanks, not a word, but the explosive “Why, you old black bastard, I’ll bet you pinched ’em,” brought only broad smiles to the faces of the Africans. Gotto was still trying to work it out.
His own arrival in the workings or down at the jetty was heralded only with silence, a brooding silence and eyes that followed him disapprovingly wherever he moved, while behind his back the jesters among the shovel boys, with their African gift for mimicry, mocked his slow walk for their comrades, prancing and caracoling with a fist before their faces as a symbol of his bony nose.
Even Jimmy, in his short stay in Amama, had found no difficulty in recruiting friends among the workmen who shook with laughter as he tormented them about their lady friends or their nagging wives, and among the small black boys who had taken to hanging round the bungalow. The children he organised into football teams and gave them a green West African orange for a ball, joining in their laughter when someone finally trod on it and it burst and they all rolled, naked and dusty, on the ground convulsed with mirth. From among them he could always get an assistant for his butterfly hunting forays and, in spite of his careless indifference to whether he was liked or not, could hardly move away from the mine without being surrounded by a dozen screaming black children all eager to carry his net or his jam jar or begging a ride in the station wagon.
To Gotto, crucified by his loneliness, that Jimmy could be just Jimmy and still, without effort, be of as much interest to the illiterate labourers and the small black boys who thronged round him as he was to Stella Swannack, was also in the nature of a miracle.
He had never found it easy being Ivor Gotto – never, from the first stricken silences when his mother had taken him out visiting, or the pathetic embarrassment of children’s parties; from the first awkwardness at school where his thin limbs and bony nose made him the perfect butt for the bullies; from the first hopeless attempts to get to know the opposite sex. Gotto’s secret mind – that elusive, shut-off, shuttered place behind his anger that hid like a deformity the pain of frustration and unhappiness, the nagging misery of being Ivor Gotto and the crawling worms of faint-heartedness – it had never contained much that Gotto could bring himself to like but he had never realised just how much until now when he had nothing else to do but study it.
He stared at the ceiling in silence until he heard Jimmy outside talking to Amadu, the house-boy.
“Boss, mammy get piccaninny,” Amadu was saying. “Boy piccin. Amadu Komorra got son.”
“Nice work, Amadu,” came Jimmy’s voice. “What are you going to call him? Amadu, after you?”
“No, Boss Jimmy.” Gotto could hear the black man laughing delightedly. “Boss, I call ’um Jimmy after you. Jimmy Komorra. You like?”
“Well, that’s jolly nice of you, Amadu.” Jimmy sounded surprised and touched.
Gotto sat up abruptly and went outside, brushing aside the bunch of bananas that had been hung in the doorway out of the way of the ants only to become instead the haunt of a million tiny fruit flies. Amadu stopped in mid-sentence as he appeared, his grin fading, then he melted away into the darkness beyond the veranda.
“This bloody place,” Gotto said heavily, flicking his cigarette away so that it curved, a vermilion arc, and landed in a shower of sparks. He stared into the darkness for a while at the distant sparkle of a village fire, and listened to the slow thump of a drum. “Don’t you ever get fed up here?” he ended.
Jimmy’s eyebrows rose. “No, of course not,” he said. It came as a surprise to him to find that he liked the unhurried life of Amama and every lazy sound of the place – the thump of the grain pestles and the sharp chatter of the women wielding them, the flat barking of a village dog or the honk of a hornbill, to say nothing of the rich, unquenchable laughter of the African labourers.
Gotto watched him, clearly puzzled by the fact that Jimmy could find pleasure in the absence of civilisation. “I mean” – he endeavoured to explain – “nothing ever happens.”
“What could happen here in Amama?”
Gotto looked desperate as he tried to explain. “Well, I mean – same old mountains. Same old sun. Same old palm trees.” The familiar petulant irritation was creeping back into his voice. “Same bloody wogs. Christ,” he said feelingly, as he thought of the half-naked black girls he watched with a thin, bitter lust as they went about their business on the dusty road that ran past the mine. “What I’d give to talk to a girl.”
For a while, Jimmy listened to him working himself up to the same old rigmarole of resentment, then he hastily outlined Romn
ey’s plan for a trip up-river, with the obvious reservations about the reason for it.
“It’s not much,” he explained. “Just up beyond the mud banks. That’s all. We might see some wild life.”
To his surprise his offer was accepted, and the alacrity with which Gotto snatched at the opportunity to get away from Amama indicated how bored with himself he was. Immediately the weak appeal for friendship, the wretchedness of loneliness and the awful inability to do anything about it began to show again through the façade of harshness.
“What about Earnshaw, though?” Gotto asked doubtfully. “I always thought he didn’t like me.”
“Hell, man, it was Earnshaw’s idea,” Jimmy lied vigorously. “He thought you’d be interested.”
“Did he?” Gotto was pathetically pleased by what he took to be evidence of comradeship. “Did he honestly?”
The ghost of a smile crossed his features and for the first time Jimmy heard him whistling – in a tuneless monotone as he prepared for bed.
After several weeks in Amama, Jimmy was still entranced by what he saw every time they moved into the quieter creeks up-stream where the dainty terns splashed like dive-bombers into the river after fish, and pelicans took off and landed like clumsy grey flying-boats. From the bank, crocodiles slithered without a ripple into the water, watched from the mangroves above by cranes and herons, beautiful and incredibly frail-looking, and by the bright kingfishers hunting among the clouds of flies in the shallows. Between the trees as the boat moved up-river the air was alive with the screech of monkeys and birds, and the occasional eruptions on the surface of the muddy water indicated the teeming life below where a shoal of small fish fought to avoid the jaws of a barracuda. To the enchanted Jimmy, Africa was breathtaking in its overcrowded life, and since the trip made no demands on his energy, even Gotto’s frown disappeared and Earnshaw, grey and dusty-looking, his smile the essence of immorality and slyness, began to be weightily friendly.