The Claws of Mercy

by John Harris

  Jimmy watched him stamp out of sight into the bedroom then he shrugged and followed. After a shower he changed and began to toss swimming trunks and towels into the station wagon. He was whistling as he stuffed cigarettes and matches into his pockets, and he was on the point of climbing into the driver’s seat when an angular shadow in front of him that could belong to no one but Gotto stopped the tune on his lips and set him stuffing the swimming costume behind the seat and bringing the butterfly net into greater prominence.

  “Going somewhere?” Gotto asked.

  “Er – yes,” Jimmy said. “Up to Amama Town.”

  “Out with Stella Swannack?”

  In Gotto’s voice was a plea to be included and for a moment, Jimmy was on the point of inviting him, too, then he panicked at the last instant, appalled at the thought of the awkward silences that would take the place of the laughter that was normally a part of his outings with Stella, and he decided to put off the invitation to another day.

  “No,” he lied, hating himself for his selfishness. “Just going up to see old Swannack about some butterflies he’s caught. Thought I might just look in. That’s all.”

  That lonely glance of Gotto’s showed he didn’t believe him and Jimmy drove off between the palms, conscious of a pair of eyes burning a hole in his back…

  The narrow arc of burnished sand at Mansumana was picked out by the sun into a dazzling crescent against which the metallic sheet of the sea nibbled in wavelets too small even to cause a splash as they broke. Behind it and about it, the tall grey boles of the palms curved gently out of the shadows cast by their own crests and into the sunshine where the great green leaves trembled in the breeze like tattered fans.

  Beneath them in the shade the native children tumbled about, playing shrilly round the canoes upturned on trestles to dry. The chatter of women as they pounded the dirt out of their clothes on the smooth round stones of the stream, and the flat screech of a scrawny cockerel as it ruffled its feathers in the dust seemed to make the day lazier.

  “This is when I begin to like Sierra Leone,” Jimmy commented, blinking at the palm-crested spit of land that curved out into the bright sea. “You’d almost imagine it was Hawaii–”

  “Or Palm Beach,” Stella put in.

  “Apart from the smell of the mangroves.” Jimmy indicated the unhealthy green of the foliage where the swamp area in the distance encroached almost to the sand.

  “And the absence of juke boxes and hot-dog stalls and soda fountains and convertibles. I could just do a coke now.”

  Jimmy rolled over on to his stomach and was about to kiss her when she drew back sharply.

  “Jimmy! There’s someone watching us.”

  “An African, I expect,” Jimmy said easily. “Nothing to worry about.”

  They turned to each other again, engrossed in themselves, then Stella turned round once more.

  “Jimmy!” Her voice rose. “It’s a white man!”

  “By God, it is, too!” Jimmy had started to his feet. “It’s Gotto, I think,” he said. “What’s he want? Perhaps he came for a swim, too,” he added with a feeling of shame at his own lack of charity. “I’ll fetch him over, poor old bloke. He’ll be glad of company.”

  “Jimmy,” Stella whispered to him, laying her hand on his arm. “I think he’s spying on us.”

  “Spying on us?”

  “I thought I saw him once before but I didn’t say anything in case I was wrong.”

  Jimmy looked at her, his face suddenly grim, then he stared towards the bush again. “He’s gone now, anyway. Must have seen us looking.”

  “Jimmy, he gives me the creeps. Why should he follow us about?”

  “Lord knows. Lonely probably. People like Gotto always follow the bright lights back home. They get a sort of cosy feeling from seeing other people enjoying themselves. A sort of reflected glow, I suppose you’d call it. Haven’t you ever seen ’em, walking round the shops looking lost and hoping someone will be matey to them?”

  Jimmy dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand. “He’s quite cracked, you know. He imagines he’s in love with some half-baked kid in Birmingham or somewhere who writes chatty notes to him and never mentions the word. Then, when he gets one of her dreary little letters, he sits brooding over it for a week or so, trying to read affection into it when there isn’t any.”

  “He frightens me, Jimmy. He stares at me as though he’d like to get his hands on me.”

  “He probably would,” Jimmy grinned.

  “Suppose he’s thinking of attacking us?”

  “Not Gotty. He hasn’t the spirit.”

  “All the same, I don’t like him.”

  “Can’t say I like him a lot myself, Stella.”

  “Listen–” Stella sat up angrily – “if he’s following us about, he’s dangerous. He’s probably nuts.”

  Jimmy laughed out loud, rolling back on the sand and crowing. “Not he, my love. It probably excites him when he sees me kissing you. That’s all. Probably that’s the only warmth he ever gets out of life. Listen, Stella,” he said as he sat up, “there’s craziness and craziness. Gotto’s the second kind of crazy. He does queer things. He broods. He’s as broody as an old hen on a pot egg. He imagines things. Take this non-existent love affair with a kid just out of school for instance – God knows how he’s managed to persuade himself it exists but he has.” He paused, his eyes thoughtful. “To be fair to the poor old duffer,” he went on, “he was blessed with none of the advantages of life and quite a lot of the disadvantages. I mean, that nose of his. If somebody wore it on the stage, it would be enough to make a cat laugh. But it’s not funny for Gotty.

  “He ought never to have come here. He can’t stand himself alone. I reckon he must have had quite a surfeit of himself in his lifetime.”

  Stella looked up quickly. “You think we ought to bring him along with us some afternoon?”

  “What?”

  “Well, sometimes–”

  Jimmy snorted. “No, thanks.”

  “Jimmy, I know how he feels. I’ve been lonely, too. Many a time back in the States when I was at school and my folks were out here. Can’t we do anything for him?”

  Jimmy looked up soberly. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I tried. I asked him once. After the party. For our first date, in fact.”

  Stella looked indignant and Jimmy shrugged. “Well, you haven’t got a monopoly on soft hearts.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he wasn’t going to play gooseberry.”

  Stella considered for a moment. “You think I ought to get him up for tea or something? I will if it will help.”

  “You can try,” Jimmy said slowly. “But I don’t think it would do a scrap of good. He’s got a suspicious nature and he’d probably think you were trying to take the mickey out of him. I suspect he’s suffered quite a bit at the hands of bright young things who thought it was funny to jolly him along and then toss him over just when he was completely gaga. I imagine it doesn’t take long to get him to that state.”

  “I only want to be friendly,” Stella said indignantly.

  Jimmy grinned and kissed her. “If you’d shown the slightest interest in him, you’d have had him hanging round your neck like a feather boa. You’d never have shaken him off. He’d have followed you around looking like a sick spaniel, all eyes and sighs.”

  “And mumbled compliments?”

  Jimmy nodded.

  “Oh dear. And flowers?”

  “Probably. He’d inevitably have fallen over something as he gave them to you and then you’d have spent the rest of the evening trying to make him feel at home again. Friendship with a girl’s a deadly serious thing for Gotty. In fact, I suspect that’s what always frightens ’em away, poor old bloke. Gotty just hasn’t got the technique and unfortunately there aren’t a lot of useful books in the library you can read up on the subject.”

  When Jimmy returned to the bungalow, he was tired and the sight of Gotto’s pathetic letter
from Doris lying on the table reminded him of the spying incident that afternoon and he made up his mind to tax him with it there and then. As he opened the door of Gotto’s room, he was certain he heard a movement but Gotto’s eyes were closed and he was motionless under the mosquito netting. Jimmy stared hard at him for a while, waiting impatiently for the flicker of an eyelid, certain he was feigning sleep and irritated because he couldn’t work off his sudden temper on him. But Gotto didn’t move and Jimmy went out, frustrated and angry.

  The following morning, he rose late, still annoyed with Gotto but, as soon as he arrived at the river edge and the jetty, he became happily involved in one of Earnshaw’s operations and clean forgot about it.

  Earnshaw had collected a team of shovel boys and had dug out a square basin in the mud alongside the jetty where the fishermen from King Tim dried their nets and kept their canoes during the day. In this, he had erected parts of a dismantled cradle on to which he proposed to float his pinnace at spring tide to paint its hull.

  “Now we’ll get a drum of cement,” he said, as he wiped mud off his hands, “and drop it in here. Spread it around a bit and let it harden off overnight, then when the spring tide comes up, Bob’s your uncle and Kate’s your aunt.”

  He climbed out of the basin and disappeared to steal one of the drums of cement from under the nose of the foreman in charge of the pile-driver.

  Leaning on the cradle, gulping at a cigarette and wiping his streaming face, Jimmy looked up as he heard Gotto above him on the edge of the basin.

  “Fraternising with Earnshaw, I see,” he commented.

  Jimmy tossed his cigarette aside abruptly, ready to join battle with a few of the things he had had to leave unsaid the night before, but Earnshaw’s return, rolling the drum of cement, interrupted the angry reply that rose to his lips.

  Earnshaw poised the drum on the edge of the basin and proceeded to hack off the end with a spade.

  “OK, that’s it,” he said after a while. “Here it come. Keep your ’eads down unless you want a mud barf.”

  Jimmy dodged behind one of the cradles.

  “Here,” Gotto shouted. “That’s our cement. Where did you get it?”

  “Borrowed it, old lad. Tuck your head in.”

  “You’ve no damn’ right to borrow our cement.”

  “No, I haven’t. And you’ve no damn’ right to come shoving your nose in what don’t concern you. Keep your ’ead down.”

  Earnshaw thrust at the drum with his foot and as it dropped into the thin slime at the bottom of the basin with the wet slap of a whipped dishcloth, Gotto, still protesting on the edge, got the wave of mud and water full in his face.

  For a complete minute, Earnshaw and Jimmy stared in horror at the black, glistening figure struck motionless with shock on the bank, then one of the shovel boys behind them choked and sniggered explosively. Immediately, another one laughed out loud in a deep rich chuckle and within seconds three or four dozen black men were rolling on the ground weeping and shaking with noisy laughter while others came running along the concrete to see the cause of all the merriment.

  Gotto stood still for a moment longer, gouging two clear white spots round his eyes as he dug out the mud.

  “You did that on purpose,” he choked.

  Earnshaw was laughing too, now. “Oh, my aching back,” he said. “Sorry, old lad. I never meant – but, honest, you should of kept your ’ead down like I said.”

  Gotto blew black bubbles of rage, then he turned on his heel and stalked away, dripping slime, followed by the shouts and shrieks of laughter from the helpless shovel boys.

  Earnshaw suddenly became sober as he stared after him. “It was the nigs laughing what done it,” he said. “Somebody going to catch it now.”

  That afternoon, Gotto announced the removal of all canoes from the mud near the concrete wharf and the rickety wooden jetty. The announcement took the form of a typed slip of paper, well marked by Clerk Smith’s grubby thumb, which was pinned to the side of the foreman’s hut.

  “All fissermen” – Clerk Smith’s adventures in the art of spelling were hesitant and none too sure – “from King Tim,” it read, “will remove their canoes from mine property by tomorrow morning or they will be” – here Clerk Smith had had three attempts to spell ‘confiscated’ before he had persuaded Gotto to substitute the final words – “taken over.”

  “Well, I’m a monkey’s uncle,” Earnshaw said loudly. “They been using that bit of mud since before this jetty was thought of. Jarvis never bothered ’em. Why he got to?”

  Jimmy’s first reaction was also one of anger but the more he studied the notice the less important it seemed.

  “I shouldn’t waste your breath on it,” he said. “Nobody will worry. They can’t read anyway.”

  But if the fishermen from King Tim couldn’t read, it was inevitable that the edict would be seen by someone who could, and as the news spread during the afternoon, there was a noticeably noisy agitation round the jetty.

  Even so, Jimmy regarded it lightly enough to forget all about it when he returned to the bungalow for the evening meal and even, remembering Gotto’s humiliation that morning, to manage to be friendly with him – a labouring effort, however, which brought little response from the other side of the table.

  The following day, though, when he arrived at the jetty, he was startled to find a dozen brawny labourers from the workings already engaged in a noisy tug-of-war with the fishermen over the nets that had been strung up to dry. There was a milling crowd swirling round the canoes, and the first loud argument as the order was put into force had become a shoving match and the shoving match had become a brawl so that now half the labourers employed round the pile-driver seemed to be as much involved as the fishermen, all shouting and waving their arms and quarrelling with anyone within reach, no matter which side they belonged to. Even as Jimmy drew near, hurrying across the concrete apron, he saw fists start flying where one corner of the uproar exploded into a fight and the whole crowd began to surge backwards and forwards along the water’s edge, breaking up and re-forming in a vast concertina-like movement.

  “My God,” he said, “This is getting serious.”

  Storming into the foreman’s hut, he found Gotto watching with interest, but white-faced and agitated at the resistance, while Earnshaw raved at him from the doorway.

  “You’re nuts. You’re barmy. You’re off your rocker,” he was saying in his harsh, rasping voice. “You must be proper sawny if you think they’ll stand for this.”

  Jimmy pushed him out of the way and stood in front of Gotto. “Have you gone off your chump?” he demanded. “What the hell’s the idea?”

  “You know what the idea is,” Gotto said tautly.

  “It’s a crazy one, whatever it is.”

  “It’s made ’em think, though.” Gotto’s lips stretched in a cheerless smile that died again immediately. “They’re not supposed to be on mine property.”

  “They been there ever since the mine come,” Earnshaw growled.

  “I’m clearing away dead wood. They’re not necessary here, so I’m getting rid of them.”

  “They’re doing no harm,” Jimmy’s voice reached a high pitch of indignation. “You’re not serious, are you?”

  “Yes, I am. They’re in the way. I’m going to use that stretch of mud.”

  “What for?”

  “He going to scrape it up and use it for a beauty treatment,” Earnshaw said cruelly. “He need it.”

  Gotto went white, but Jimmy went on without sympathy.

  “Go on,” he insisted. “What for? Let’s have it?”

  Obviously Gotto had no idea but before he could reply, the crowd, sorting out its grievances and making up its mind about the identity of the enemy, split up and streamed across the mud to re-form outside the foreman’s hut, creating a high-pitched hubbub so that the doorway was filled with black faces and the hut rocked violently as it seemed for a while that they would push it over.

  J
immy turned spitefully to Gotto.

  “What are you going to do when you want to go up for a meal, Gotty?” he asked. “You’ll never make your way through that lot.”

  “They wouldn’t dare lay hands on me.”

  “Wouldn’t they? What do you think they’re waiting for? – for you to sign autographs?”

  Just when the situation was looking awkward, the crowd parted for Alf Momo who had been fetched, as he always was in times of crisis. As he entered the hut, the noise subsided a little until it murmured with the uneasy fits and starts of a damp firework.

  “Boss,” Momo said earnestly, very conscious of the responsibility he bore and the esteem with which his wisdom was held. “Always these men leave their boats there. All white bosses let them.”

  “Well, this white boss has stopped them,” Gotto said.

  “He’s going to stop something else, too, one of these nights,” Earnshaw hinted darkly. “These blokes won’t take it lying down.”

  “They’d better not try anything with me,” Gotto said. “I’d have ’em down to the calaboose one-time.”

  “Boss–” Momo made another effort – “for many years these men leave their boats here. Many years,” he stressed.

  “Well, now they’d better find somewhere else.”

  “Boss, there is nowhere else. Farther up the creek, there is no mud. Only mangroves. They bring boats here to sell fish to the shovel boys. Plenty trade. If they leave their canoes at King Tim, they muss walk through Amama Town. No good, Boss. Too far.”

  “Do ’em good.” Gotto turned his back on Momo and stared through the window. “Anyway, they shouldn’t be selling their damned fish here. They should sell it in the market in Amama.”

  “Boss, always they sell it here.”

  “Well, now they’ve stopped.”

  “Boss, black men buy fish because rice is short.”

  “Listen–” Goaded to fury by Momo’s persistence, Gotto whirled round on him, pointing a skinny forefinger – “don’t bring that nonsense up again. It’s nothing to do with me. If they want to complain, they can complain away. There’s nothing they can do about those damn’ boats. This is mine property and I’m in charge of it and what I say goes. Savvy? If they’re not off it in an hour, I’ll have the police down from Amama Town to shift ’em.”