by John Harris
“I won’t half show you a good time when we get settled down a bit,” he said with a wink. “Have a day out in Freetown, me and you, we will. I can introduce you to a girl or two. Nice bit of milk chocolate. Pale-’ands-I-loved-beside- the-Shalimar. Nice and clean. Plenty of scent. Most of ’em pong like billy-o – talk about the sweet breath of murder – but not the ones I know.”
The river, the old route of the slavers and the breeding ground for the fevers that stretched through the Coast’s grim history, was a winding brown flood that twisted its way between the trees from where the turbulent mountain streams rushed into it over rocky falls, down to the port which clustered, ramshackle and beautiful, along the water’s edge; down to the beaches where the blue Portuguese men- o’-war trailed their vicious stings along the surface of the waves, and where the wide mouth broke into a maze of tufted islands on which ancient cannon, erected against the French, rusted in decaying fortresses. And in every yard of its glittering surface there was some new point of interest that Earnshaw pointed out to them – the tumultuous wild life, the fishing villages where women sat outside their daubed huts weaving baskets, and men, balancing incredibly upright in their pencil-slim canoes, flung circular nets touched into meshes of gold by the sun; the scenes of old disasters and older pagan ceremonies, and of Earnshaw’s own raffish adventures.
For Gotto’s benefit he took the boat close in under the trees that overhung the water and showed him the grey parrots that shrieked among the branches, and once, a long green mamba that coiled whip-like among the leaves.
“Them’s the boys what make no noise,” he observed cheerfully. “They get their fangs in you, kid, you drop down dead immediate. I seen it. You ’ave to be careful out ’ere, with spiders and scorpions and one thing nor another.
“There’s lizards and spiders and snakes green and black,” he sang, “and bloody great scorpions that fall down yer back.”
As the sun rose higher, Gotto, infected by Jimmy’s enthusiasm and Earnshaw’s hilarity, began to lose his suspicious expression and to show an interest in the things he saw about him – the big basking iguanas under the tortured arcs of the mangrove roots; the oysters that clung to the bottommost branches as they dipped the water at high tide; and the two-legged mud-hoppers that flipped and jumped with the land-crabs on the mud strips of the shallows.
“Oysters on trees and fishes that walk,” Earnshaw pointed out in the manner of a Thames boatman indicating the places of interest. “That’s what Livingstone said about this joint, ain’t it? Spent years round here, I’m told.”
“God, why?” Gotto said. “No wonder he snuffed it. Probably died of boredom.”
Earnshaw laughed – a little forcedly – and they leaned towards each other like a couple of old cronies.
“Once saw a sea serpent in this ’ere river, I did,” Earnshaw continued. “Twice, in fact. Then it disappeared.”
“Perhaps that died of boredom, too,” Gotto sniggered.
“Perhaps it did.” Earnshaw winked conspiratorially at Jimmy.
“Perhaps that’s why there are so many kids about,” Gotto went on, developing his theme with more enthusiasm than judgement. “Nothing else to do of a night. A way to dodge the boredom.”
“A way to dodge the boredom!” Earnshaw slapped him on the back. “I never heard it called that before. You aren’t half a card.”
He turned to the steering wheel with a look towards Jimmy that indicated he was suffering nobly in a good cause.
“No wonder they’re allowed to have more than one wife,” Gotto sniggered. “It gets dark early and the nights are long.”
Earnshaw’s grin was dying now and, unseen to Gotto, he glanced at Jimmy and tapped his temple.
But Jimmy laughed. If Gotto’s jokes were not good, at least his temper was, and his humour was an indication of a barrier broken down. Jimmy had been on edge all day for some acid remark he would have to gloss over, some narrow opinion that might offend. But sharp words had been remarkably few and even they had dwindled and disappeared as the day wore on.
Gotto even seemed to enjoy the manoeuvring round the mud banks as Earnshaw found his way with boat-hook and lead-line, even taking his turn at the wheel, passing over the bottles of beer he had brought with him and joking over the cold chicken Amadu had packed for them.
By the late afternoon, when the red heat of midday had vanished and the golden glow was rising from the sinking sun, Jimmy was beginning to congratulate himself on the success of their scheme. Gotto, relaxed and almost smiling in the stern, was watching the passing of a great Susu canoe as it roared downstream under its bellying sail, bound for the market at Freetown the following day.
“Hegg, Boss?” roared the helmsman, holding up a wicker basket of eggs as he leaned on the great steering oar on the poop. “You want hegg? You want chicken for cook? You want fiss?”
From among the mangoes and paw-paws and bananas and oranges that weighed the boat down until the water lapped over the scuppers, he brought out a bundle of the dried mullet with which fishermen tempted to a stop the drivers of the narrow-gauge railway train that ran from Freetown to Pendembu as it passed their riverside halts.
“Urtcher, you pudden-headed ole git,” Earnshaw shouted back. “I can smell ’em from ’ere. If you’re selling anything, I’d rather have the dark lady in the middle.”
The ribald reply brought a shout of delighted laughter from the black crew and grins split the faces of the piccaninnies and the gaudily-dressed mammies who crouched in the well of the vessel.
They watched as the boat swooped past, the sun touching the sail with gold as it passed the panorama of the shore where the banner-like leaves of the palms drooped in the heat. Gotto’s eyes were alive with interest and he seemed to be won over at last.
It was while Jimmy was planning the next move towards his reclamation that they ran aground on one of the mud banks that the swiftly-flowing waters threw up in unexpected angles of the creeks, and as the boat began to shudder they came to a dead stop.
Gotto sat up abruptly. “What’s happened?” he asked quickly, the smiles gone from his face.
Earnshaw listened to the labouring engine and studied the muddy foam that the screw was churning up. Then he rose and poked all round the vessel with the boat-hook, staring silently at the brown swirls he stirred to the surface. He tried the engine again without effect, then finally switched off and sat down.
The others had been watching him in silence.
“That’s it,” he said, scratching his head with a rasping sound. “We stuck. Tide’s falling, too.”
“Stuck!” Gotto’s face was suddenly thunderous, the calm wiped off like a shadow when the sun fades. “Does that mean we’re going to be here all night? The place’ll be alive with mosquitoes.”
“That’s OK,” Earnshaw reassured him, still in a cheerful mood. “Malaria ain’t one of the diseases in season just now.”
“Can’t we push her off?”
“We can try.”
Leaning on the boat-hook, they swore and thrust at the unresisting mud until their arms ached, and jumped up and down on the stern while Earnshaw raced the engine until they were wet with sweat. Finally, gasping in the still hot sun that beat low across the water into their aching eyes, they collapsed again into their seats, exhausted, limp and dispirited.
“This is a fine thing,” Gotto said between his teeth. “Marooned.”
“Just like Robinson Crusoe,” Earnshaw said with maddening cheerfulness. “What a lark!”
“I can’t see anything to laugh at.”
“Neither can I, come to think of it. Still, hold your water a minute. There’s some canoes over there. They fetch us off.”
Putting two fingers in the corners of his mouth, Earnshaw gave a piercing whistle which echoed flatly across the water to the mangroves, and the fishermen turned and waved.
As the canoes drew alongside, Earnshaw tossed the anchor overboard. “That’ll hold her for the night,” he said. “
OK, old lad,” he went on with a grin at Gotto. “This is where you ’ave your first trip in a wog canoe. Ain’t you seeing the sights today? Tourists would pay thousands for this. Give your fare to the driver. Ten bob fine for spitting. And, for Gawd’s sake, sit still, else you’ll both be in the dripping.”
Gotto’s face was livid under its saffron colour as he climbed gingerly into the frail boat and sat amidships, his bony knees under his chin.
From the foredeck of the dinghy, Earnshaw watched Jimmy climbing into the next canoe, and indicated Gotto already moving away across the water to the village on a spit of sun-baked land. “Son,” he commented. “I think summat’s gone wrong. He looks as happy as a load of mad dogs.”
Gotto, who was on the sandbank waiting for them when they stepped ashore, refused to eat any of the scrawny roast chicken Earnshaw conjured up from the headman. His manner was suddenly unfriendly again.
“No, thanks,” he said coldly. “I’d rather die of starvation than food poisoning.”
Earnshaw looked hard at him for a long time, while Jimmy racked his brains for some means of retrieving what appeared to be a deteriorating situation. The tautness had returned to Gotto’s figure as he stared disapprovingly at the gaunt chickens that scratched the dirt, the lean dogs and the dark, mosquito-haunted huts among the trees where the food had come from. The interest he had shown in Africans during the afternoon was choked with dislike again as they jostled round him, grinning and interested, smelling of perspiration and charcoal, the bare black breasts of the mammies rubbing against his arm as they crowded closer to hear Earnshaw chivvying the headman with sly smutty jests to produce the paw-paws and bananas that grew about them.
And, as a small boy, eager both to please and to make money for himself, edged up to him and whispered, “You want lady, boss. My sister very clean,” he seemed to draw back with the revolted horror of a maidenly spinster accosted by a drunk.
“Get away,” he said in a high strangled voice as he tried, blushing furiously, to push his way through the naked women around him who had taken up the small boy’s chant and were tossing it in delighted shrieks from one to another.
“But, Boss–” the small boy’s voice rose to a thin wail – “she school-teacher.”
Unable to get away, Gotto gave the boy a push and, as he fell in the dust, a murmur of protest ran through the crowd, silencing the laughter. Earnshaw quickly yanked the boy to his feet, gave him a coin and pushed him aside.
“’Op it, Joe,” he said.
“Boss–”
“’Op it, I said, or I’ll give you one acrost the ear’ole.” Earnshaw turned to Gotto, his tired eyes angry. “That was a bright bloody thing to do,” he snorted, “when I’m trying to get ’em to ’elp.”
“You heard what he was saying, didn’t you?”
“Sure I did. But you’re a big boy now. You oughta know about them things. And you oughta know ’ow to behave when you’re out visiting.”
“I didn’t ask to be dragged up here into this hole.”
“Well, of all the nerve!” Earnshaw slammed the banana he was eating to the dusty earth. “Gawd, I didn’t ask to bring you.”
Hours later, after a seemingly endless argument conducted entirely in shouts between Earnshaw and the headman and the passing over of money, they were paddled down-stream beneath the gaudy stars, sitting among the dirty water and fish guts and rotten oranges in the bottom of a fruit canoe.
The mangroves that brushed against them had lost their daytime silence and had come alive with sound. Even above the chatter of water under the boat, they could hear the grunts of strange creatures in the shadows, the splashes of jumping fish, the peculiar whirr of crabs and the queer creaking and groaning sounds from the trees themselves. Now and again the strong musty smell that meant a crocodile close by came to them through the acid scent of the water and the mud, and as Earnshaw flashed his torch round they saw the gleam of bulging eyes and then the swift slither of a heavy body and the faint splash as it hit the water.
In spite of his anxiety, Jimmy felt awed by the vastness of the swamp forests but Earnshaw in front was a little drunk on native wine and was boasting loudly of his prowess at organising things.
“Ten bob it cost and cheap at half the price,” he was saying. “You want something fixing, leave it to yours truly. Just mention my name and it’s all yours. I’ll send Suri up for the dinghy tomorrow. Better than staying there half the night waiting for the tide.”
He was cut short as Gotto interrupted in an angry voice from which all traces of friendliness had disappeared. “You might have thought of that before,” he snapped. “Saved us coming home like a lot of wogs. Like a lot of wogs,” he repeated bitterly. “Just like a lot of wogs.”
Earnshaw turned round in his seat and tossed his fag-end overboard. “I didn’t know there was a mud bank there,” he retorted, suddenly incensed. “They come up in different positions every rainy season and nobody charts ’em.”
“Then why take us up there?” Gotto said with the icy, infuriating reasonableness of a Torquemada.
Earnshaw glared, his humanity forgotten, his friendliness withered. “Always the chance you’ll fall overboard,” he snorted.
He sat in silence for a while and Jimmy could hear his heavy muttering in the darkness, then he leaned over, breathing his bad breath and old fag-ends over him.
“That’s it, old lad,” he said. “That finish it. I’ve tried just to oblige you and Old Doc. I’ve tried heavens hard to be matey with him and against me own better nature. That’s it, though. I’ve had a gutser of him.”
“Oh, Lord, man,” Jimmy pleaded. “Give him another chance. It was rotten luck the boat running aground like that. We might have pulled it off otherwise.”
“Yes, you might. And tomorrow he’d ’a’ got up all smiles and brisk as a kipper – and probably slipped on a banana skin and broke his bloody neck. And then ’e’d ’a’ been in a rare ole temper, wun’t ’e? What’s the good of trying with a bloke like him? No, mate, he’s had it. He was drowning, I wun’t give him deck space. Not if he went down on his knees and begged of me, I wouldn’t. It’s bad for me ulcers to get meself worked up like this ’ere. He’s finished now as far as Archibald Earnshaw’s concerned.”
Seven
Earnshaw’s defection from the scheme to amuse Gotto might not have resulted in its complete and utter collapse, but another blow towards it occurred the following week which completely destroyed all their hopes of making friends.
The arrival of the mail at the weekend was probably the beginning of the failure. It was another bright brassy day like all the hundreds of others but this one was marked by an atmosphere of excitement. Both Jimmy and Gotto had heard by the intangible but very real bush telegraph that existed from village to village that mail had arrived in the port down-river, and they both went about their work hardly able to restrain their excitement until it arrived in Ma-Imi and finally in Amama.
Earnshaw had gone down overnight to fetch the letters up and tossed the packet – a disappointingly small one after the rumours – into the mine bungalow as they were sitting down for the midday meal.
“There y’are, me old china,” he croaked, very pointedly only to Jimmy. “If I was a postman and that’s all I had to fetch, I’d be out on me uppers in a week. Right honest I would.”
Gotto snatched the package from the floor and took it to the old-fashioned settee where he began to sort the letters. His manner was bright and eager and he was obviously as yet as unaware of any scheme to help him habilitate himself in Amama as he was of Earnshaw’s growing opposition to it.
Jimmy pushed his chair back and stood impatiently along-side him as he unfastened the string with shaking fingers.
“One for you,” Gotto said brightly, throwing down the first letter. “Another for you. And another–”
His voice died away and he began to flip through the packets in silence.
“One for me,” he said at last, showing Jimmy the envel
ope. “From my mother.” His voice seemed to droop with disappointment as he tossed it down.
“Some people have all the luck,” he commented with a thin acid bitterness.
“I write a lot of letters,” Jimmy pointed out in an attempt at light-heartedness which only made him feel guilty in front of Gotto’s unhappiness.
Gotto glanced at the bundle of letters in Jimmy’s hand and turned over the last few in his own hand cautiously, as though afraid to read the addresses.
“Here’s one from Doris,” he said quickly, an obvious delight in his voice. Then the joy went out of his tones again immediately. “It’s a thin one,” he added sharply.
Jimmy had taken his letters to the table and was reading them as he crammed paw-paw into his mouth.
“All my old girlfriends missing me. Just as they promised,” he announced. “Anything in yours, Gotty?”
“The usual.” Gotto’s voice was dull and disinterested. “One page from my mother in pencil. She’s got rheumatism again and the Vicar’s not been to see her. Complaints as usual.”
Jimmy studied his wry face as he stared at the scrawled piece of notepaper.
“What about Doris?” he asked.
Gotto was opening the other letter gingerly, as though afraid of the contents, then he took out a single sheet of paper and turned it over slowly, staring at both sides. His eyes showed the disappointment he felt.
Jimmy watched him as he read it. His features showed no pleasure and when he came to the end of it, he lowered it slowly.
“Still love you?” Jimmy asked gaily, though his bright expression had faded.
“She says she’s going out with another bloke.” Gotto spoke in an uneven voice. “She say’s there’s nothing to it – not yet, anyway. And she says she’ll be glad to see me any time I go home on leave.”
“Is that all?” Jimmy felt almost as disappointed as Gotto.
“That’s all.” Gotto threw the letter aside savagely. He had the manner of one who is always disappointed and yet has never learned to expect anything but gratification. “God,” he exploded. “She might have taken the trouble to write a bit more. She knows I’m stuck in this blasted hole!”