by John Harris
“Don’t worry about him, Doc. Just leave it to me,” Earnshaw said in his rasping crusty voice and Romney saw with a feeling of guilt that he was relishing the task. “He won’t know whether to laugh or sing hisself to sleep the time I’ve finish with ’im. I’ll play it big and use both ’ands. He’ll be up here with half the Protectorate Police Force. It’s all over bar the shouting.”
They stared at Romney again, the surgery tense in the silence. Outside, the steady roar of the rain was interspersed with the drip drip drip from the eaves into the puddles.
Romney sighed and turned back to the window. It was done now. The decision was made. It was out of his hands. Probably it was better, he thought, but he still could not divorce himself from a feeling of ruthlessness. He felt like a judge who has just pronounced sentence.
Part Three
One
Amama was quiet as evening approached. Romney, busy in his surgery, failed to notice the arrival of darkness. Earnshaw, as was his occasional habit when he was drunk – and he was drunk now because his sour thoughts on Zaidee had encouraged him to be so – occupied himself with teaching Suri and two or three other members of his crews the intricacies of housey-housey, something they never managed to master. Gotto was shaving himself to see Zaidee and, at the other side of the bungalow, unspeaking, hugging his secret to himself like the guilt of murder, Jimmy was preparing for his usual visit to Stella Swannack.
In the early evening before dark a storm of particular intensity broke over the town. For an hour or more, there were violent electrical disturbances, with purple flashes and great squalls of wind that set the palm tops tossing. Then the thunderstorm stopped abruptly and the rain died away, leaving only the weeping leaves. The atmosphere was heavy, humid and depressing.
With the thunderstorm, however, everyone felt a little happier for thunderstorms usually meant the approach of the end of the wet season, a relief from the inexorable descent of the rain, and everyone took it to be the first sign of the long-awaited break in the weather.
It was this feeling of relief after the cheerlessness of the heavy downpours that first started the celebrations. Someone, happier than the rest, decided to get drunk and from his solitary beginning, the excitement spread. The first drum started shortly after dark. Pay day, coinciding with one or two other local celebrations and a wedding caused people to bring out their palm wine and home-brewed beer. Fires were lit, kerosene lanterns and torches appeared, and as the rain gave way to a bright sky with stars pricking their way through the palm fronds in the first clear evening for several weeks, one or two more people joined the few drinkers in premature parties. The biscuit-tin zithers began their flat plink-plonking. A juggler started his act and a snake-charmer brought out his ugly performers. Another drum, the shape of a long cylinder, joined the one at the central fire, then another like an hourglass, and another, until eventually there were more than half a dozen, and black hands were fluttering over them and the bom-bom-be-bom-bom could he heard as far away as King Tim where the fishermen, scenting excitement and dances, got out their own instruments and set off to join in.
Then some lean-flanked labourer from the mine started a dance. He was joined by a big man with an umbilical hernia and in no time there were thirty or forty of them shuffling and stamping and clapping and chanting in front of the fire, a swaying mass of black figures silhouetted against the flames, their flat feet stamping down the wet earth into a hard-packed, concrete-like platform.
Women began to join the crowd and palm wine and beer were passed round more often while forgotten children dropped asleep in the nearest doorways. Before long, the whole of Amama Town had joined in among the native huts.
Clerk Smith, unable to join the tribal celebrations by virtue of the starched suit, spectacles and sun hat which put him in a race apart, bought beer, palm wine and a bottle or two of gin from Indian Joe with the money Zaidee had given him and, with it, enticed a drummer away from the main dance to start a party of his own with his family and relations. Since he was doing most of the talking and not keeping an eye on the drink, several hangers-on joined in and started a smaller party of their own outside the hut and eventually, as Smith became a little more noisy, the two parties merged into one, a xylophone of split bamboo was produced, and a song started.
On de banks of Moa River,
On de banks of Moa River,
On de banks of Moa River,
Dat whar I make ma home.
Suddenly, Smith remembered his newly acquired gramophone and held up his hands in the doorway for silence, a skinny figure in the firelight, his spectacles glistening importantly, his face shining with perspiration.
“All come,” he shouted joyfully, enjoying his new role of a man of wealth. “All muss come to my party. Personal Assistant Smith famed along de whole Coast for de size of his parties. Personal Assistant Smith de mos’ famous man on de Coast. He read. He write. He type better dan de Queen England. He dance better. He make better music.”
The small boy he dispatched for the gramophone returned with it on his head, followed by another carrying the solitary badly scratched record of Carmen Miranda with a reverence which would have been fitting for the Crown Jewels. Smith placed the record on the turntable with due ceremony and started it for the enthusiastic members of his party.
“–yi yi I like you vairy much,” came the sudden thin screech of a female voice in the middle of a sentence, competing none too successfully with the various scrapes, scratches and roars which made it sound more like two bush-cats mating in the hills. “I yi yi yi yi I theenk you’re grand–”
“White mammy,” Smith pointed out gaily. “Finest singer in de whole worl’.”
He signed to the drummers to take up the tune and the two different rhythms competed in a cacophony which was not allowed to stop, for as soon as the record had ground its way to its end Smith started it again.
“Come,” he said, when the party was well enough under way for him to be able to direct its destinies as he pleased. “We go see my friend, Boss Gotto. Boss Gotto welcome us. Boss Gotto my good friend. He go sleep my udder friend, Zaidee Soloman, who buy me de gramophone.”
The noise of the party passing penetrated to Romney’s surgery but he had heard it hundreds of times before, at Christmas, public holidays, births, deaths and marriages, and the celebrations of the various secret societies which existed round Amama. His mind still occupied with his conscience, he hardly lifted his head, for he knew the Sierra Leonean as a happy soul by nature who was always seeking something to celebrate in his noisy fashion. In his own untidy bungalow, Earnshaw – Zaidee completely forgotten by this time – never even heard it. As with the doctor, the noise had been his background for so long it was as familiar to him as the sound of his own breathing, and, for the same reason, just as unnoticeable. And, besides, having instructed his boys in the use of the housey-housey counters, he was now beginning to play the game for money.
“OK,” he was saying. “Eyes down for the count. Clickety-click. Sixty-six. You’ll soon learn. That’s two sixes together like this ’ere. Legs eleven.” He paused to glare at Suri. “Two ones, you soft clot. Don’t you know yet? You’re a proper sawny, you are. Bed and breakfast. That’s a two and a six. No, you great soft donkey, you can’t ’ave won yet. I’ve only called three numbers. Use your swede a bit, can’t you?”
Half a dozen black brows were contorted in an endeavour to understand.
At the Swannacks, Jimmy and Stella listened to the noise with something like awe.
“It’s like this for weddings,” Jimmy pointed out, glancing hopefully at Stella.
“Don’t let’s talk about that, Jimmy,” she said. “Let’s just enjoy the moment.”
“No two normal people,” Jimmy said very deliberately, “in full possession of their faculties and the normal amount of hot red blood in their veins, can go on like this. After a while, you get to thinking more of what you ought to be thinking about – marriage and the things that go w
ith it – and less about what the other’s saying. It’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s like the hen following the egg.”
Stella looked stubborn, though there were tears in her eyes, and ten minutes later they were clinging to each other in a kiss which only served to make Jimmy more doggedly sure of himself.
Gotto, leaving a sleepy-eyed Zaidee Soloman to hurry back to where he had left his car with its new tyres in the shadow of a group of cotton trees on the road to the mine, listened to the drumming and the shouts and was not reassured by her claim that it was all noise and palm wine and no danger.
He had heard drumming and noise before but nothing quite so intense as this, and he looked uneasily at Zaidee’s black maid who was to show him the way, wondering if he could trust her. The slashed tyres and the stoning of the previous day had unnerved him, but he hadn’t had it in him to withstand Zaidee’s command and he had arrived at her bungalow as usual after dark.
As he set off for home, the series of events which were to become known in the official records as the Amama Incident were set in motion.
Earnshaw was deep in a noisy argument over the housey-housey. He had been drinking gin all evening and Suri had had more than one with him, a treat Earnshaw allowed him from time to time when he was feeling mellow. The others had all been drinking native beer.
“Listen, you stupid black clown,” Earnshaw was bawling at the top of his voice as he pounded his fist on a housey-housey card. “I keep telling you you don’t shout ‘House’ until you’ve filled your bloody card up!”
“Boss, I filled ’um,” Suri was shouting back, equally indignant.
“Yes, you silly old fool, and with all the wrong numbers. You’re the barmiest old duck I ever see in all me pull. There’s one ’ere, for instance, what you’ve filled in and it ain’t been shouted yet.”
“Shouted?” Suri and the others stared, baffled by the white man’s bewildering games. “I muss shout it, Boss?”
“Oh, Christ!” Earnshaw took a flying kick at the housey-housey card and counters and sent them across the room where they rolled clattering under the table to join those left from the last violent argument. “Let’s ’ave another drink. Pass the bottle, Suri, you ugly bastard, and ’ave one yerself. It’s enough to make a man go mental.”
He rose with his glass of neat gin and walked towards the veranda to get some of the hot still air of the evening, and as he opened the door, he almost fell over the flying figure of the small black boy he employed to sweep the decks of his boats and make tea.
“Boss! Boss!” The boy’s thin voice shrieked a warning. “De jetty done go bust!”
“What?” Earnshaw slammed his glass down with such force that it shattered. He swore and crammed a cut hand into his mouth. “What’s that?” he mumbled through his fingers. “Let’s have it again.”
“Boss, big tree come. Jetty go bust.”
“Jetty’s bust? Oh, Christ, just like I say! That bloody Gotto! Suri! Bryma! You, there, Sam! Off you go! Sharp now!” Earnshaw flung out a hand and pointed, dripping blood. “Get down there and rescue them boats. Go on, Shorty,” he said to the boy as the others tumbled out of the room, sending chairs and bottles flying. “What else?”
“Boats go get plenty mix with piles, Boss. Boats go get on mud.”
“OK, Shorty. That’ll do. That’s enough for any man.” Earnshaw was already moving purposefully about the room, pushing a knife into his belt, reaching for his battered bush hat. “You stay ’ere. You savvy Boss Jimmy?”
“Yissah, Boss.” The boy’s face split in a grin.
“Well–” Earnshaw paused to suck his cut hand again – “you nip around between ’ere and the mine bungalow and Missis Swannack’s and Old Doc’s. When you find Boss Jimmy, tell ’im the jetty’s gorn and we want more help – more black boys. OK?”
“OK Boss.”
“Right. Off you go.”
As the boy slipped away in the darkness, Earnshaw set off at a heavy trot after Suri and the others, stumbling and falling more than once in the deep ruts made by the Euclids. The sky was still clear and the air less stifling now that the grey clouds had rolled away, but as he staggered towards the jetty, his shirt was sticking to his back with the heat, his face running with perspiration. He was already stone cold sober.
At the jetty he saw the glimmer of hurricane lamps and the flash of Suri’s torch. Where the loader had stood was a wreckage of twisted iron and palm-tree logs, some of them splintered and broken, with the conveyor belt half submerged in the brown water that swept about it. Occasionally, a piece of drift-wood broke surface, heaving round in the creamy foam, then submerged again and disappeared.
Of the jetty there was nothing left beyond one or two uprights and the huge tree which had wrought the damage, grey-green and slimy, its branches shattered, its roots worn to stumps. The rest of the jetty had brought up farther downstream against the few piles that had been driven into the mud as the foundation for the new concrete loading station. The whole trot of boats appeared to have been wrecked. Two were jammed inextricably between the concrete piles and a third stood half on its end between them, grinding and groaning in the pressure of the swollen river. About them were the remains of the hut where passengers waited on the jetty in the rainy season, the grey-brown planks and the poles, and the bent corrugated-iron sheeting.
“Christ Almighty,” Earnshaw breathed. “OK, you boys,” he shouted. “Lay ’old of some crow-bars and ropes. Bryma, get aboard there and see what you can do. Suri, get a ’andy billy from the store. We might be able to ’aul it off between us.”
As he finished speaking, he waded down the slipway and stood waist-deep in the swirling water, his shoulder against the outermost of the three boats, trying to assist the scrambling black man above him. Suri came running back with the handy billy and Earnshaw made one end fast to the bow of the outer boat and the other end fast round one of the inshore piles.
“Now, you black sinners, pull! ’Eave!”
While Earnshaw and his boys were sweating by the ruined jetty, Gotto was approaching the spot where he had parked his car.
As always when he had left Zaidee, he was anxious to be home and in the familiar surroundings of the mine bungalow. He had never fitted into Zaidee’s background of gaudy shawls and bead curtains and the antimacassar atmosphere of Amama, of pictures on the walls cut from the Illustrated London News and the Tatler; and now, as always when he had put her behind him, he was eager to be back among the things he knew, the dusty area of the mine and the scarred trees, the rutted roads, the foliage broken by turning Euclids. The fires behind him were synonymous of evil and in the thump of the drums were all the mysteries of Africa.
He crept along the dark paths between the tall grass and the banana plants, and round the backs of the houses, following the black girl who trotted along just ahead of him. Once he had to back deep into the undergrowth as he heard a group of men approaching, noisy, laughing and clearly in a high good humour. His pulse throbbing in his throat, he realised that a month or so before he would never have dared to walk along this path in the dark either with a guide or alone, but Zaidee’s passion and, even more, his loneliness, had driven him to do things he would never normally have contemplated.
Stumbling against a couple of figures in the dark, he stifled a yelp of fear and hurried past as he realised it was a young man and his girl darting away from the firelight and the noise, as anxious to avoid being seen as he was, and he burst thankfully out of the wet head-high grass on to the road alongside the cotton trees where his car was hidden. Zaidee’s maid halted alongside it and smiled with a flash of white teeth. A mosquito whined near her and she smeared it down her arm without even looking at it – instinctively, as though she had been doing it all her life.
Gotto dropped a few washer coins into her hand and started the engine of the car. Then, thankfully, he rolled and bumped along the last few hundred yards of the uneven road towards the mine, splashing in and out of the unseen poth
oles in the dark. Several times, he saw fires burning at the roadside and heard laughter and even had to avoid groups of white-clad figures standing in his path. But the mood of the crowd seemed to be good and one or two of them even waved to him.
His fear had dropped away from him as he turned the car into the clearing in front of the mine bungalow, and he frowned as he saw the lights were on. He had expected to be first back and had hoped to avoid the chilly silence with which Jimmy would be bound to greet him. Their furious argument that morning over Momo had not yet gone from his memory and the temper that had risen in him still left a sour taste in his mouth.
As he climbed out of the car, he heard the sound of laughter and singing and even drumming from inside the bungalow and he stopped dead.
“My God, a party,” he said aloud. “At this time of night.”
The thought of facing Jimmy and a hilarious Earnshaw, both of them ready to torment him with private jokes and quicker wits than he could muster, made him seethe with anger. For a moment, he debated whether to walk boldly through or go to his room via the house-boy’s quarters, then he recognised in the voices the peculiar high-pitched note of excited Africans.
Red rage surged over him as he stormed towards the bungalow steps. Inside, the living-room was a wreck. There were twenty or thirty black men and women in there. Bottles littered the floor and at least two unconscious people were lying in corners. Chairs and tables had been pushed back and in the centre of the room Gotto recognised Earnshaw’s ancient portable gramophone, screeching out its tune at tremendous speed.
“IyiyiyiyiIlikeyouvairymuch,
IyiyiyiyiItheenkyou’regrand.”
The words, with the speed regulator advanced to its limit, came out only as a gabble and the group of drummers in the corner sweated and rolled their eyes in their efforts to keep up with it as the tinny tune scraped across the room with the sharpness of a chalk dragged across a slate.