Fatboy and the Dancing Ladies

by Michael Holman

  Conference then considered whether it would be in good taste to run the picture at all in the week ahead. Christmas, after all, was approaching.

  Traditionalists spoke up in favour of using the page-three girl, Phoebe, prompting an angry response from the news editor.

  “Punters,” he observed, “do not want tits with their turkey.”

  “Nor,” retorted Geoffrey, who enjoyed picking fights, “do they want a stiff with their stuffing.”

  After further debate, a compromise was reached.

  A photo of the body, covered by a sheet except for the head, would be run on the front page. There would be a warning to readers of a delicate disposition that more photos were to be seen on inside pages. Phoebe would continue to occupy her usual position on page three, but dressed in the traditional attire of an African maiden.

  A debate got under way over just what constituted “traditional attire”. It was resolved by the foreign editor, who, after all, had been on a beach holiday to Gambia.

  “They wear bugger all,” he said authoritatively. “Poor sods cannot afford it. Just a little grass thingy over their fannies.”

  A file photo of Phoebe, scantily clad, was passed round conference.

  “Not enough there to line the hutch of a hamster,” said the pictures editor approvingly.

  Geoffrey Japer could not resist it: “In fact, barely enough to cover her hamster.”

  Various ways in which Phoebe would be displayed to the readers were considered, including dressed as Santa Claus, and surrounded by gifts to the children of Kireba which the Clarion and its readers could donate.

  “We could call the campaign Toys for African Tots,” said the women’s editor. “Phoebe could help, dishing out the prezzies. Next to one of those sweet rhinos we’ve been reading about. All being poached, poor things. Our readers can adopt one.”

  She looked across the room.

  “And send him.” She nodded in Japer’s direction. “With Phoebe. They can visit the rhino place I read about in The Guardian last week. And that should produce some decent pics: ‘Phoebe gets the horn for Geoffrey’. Wonderful.”

  For a moment the editor was tempted to agree. He began biting his nails as he was wont to do when the pressure of his office bore down on him.

  Japer certainly should go. Who better than the cynical, caustic columnist and up-and-coming controversial TV celebrity, to cover a story of Christmas compassion? But Phoebe . . . ? She was needed in London for page-three duties. Then he had an idea.

  “We’ll keep Phoebe here. But let’s cover her in stamps, and each stamp will be worth £500. And for every £500 contributed by the readers to the fund, Phoebe will remove a stamp. We’ll have a competition. The winner has to guess how many days it takes until all but the last two stamps are left. By then she will be down to her nipples . . .”

  “What’s the prize?” someone at the back of the room asked.

  “If you cannot work that out, you shouldn’t be working here,” the editor snapped. “The lucky winner gets the chance to peel ’em off.”

  It did not take long for conference to agree that the Clarion would use part of the money contributed by readers to sponsor a rhino; and the balance would be donated to Britain’s annual charity appeal, run by NoseAid, whose twenty-four-hour, nationally televised “fundfest” featuring the UK’s best-loved TV newsreaders, was due to take place soon.

  Since the organisers had already decided that children would be the focus, and conservation of the world’s wild life would be one of the themes, the timing of the Clarion story could not have been better.

  And by a happy coincidence of concerns, Kuwisha was an ideal beneficiary: it had an abundance of street children, and a diminishing number of rhinos.

  Just before conference broke up, the editor made a final inspired suggestion. The Clarion would sponsor the visit of a Kuwisha street boy to London, where he could appear live on the NoseAid fundfest, accompanied by Japer. Both would be wearing a Clarion T-shirt, emblazoned with whatever slogan the subs came up with.

  “Save a rhino, help a child!” seemed a winner, until it was pointed out by the chief sub that it could as well be: “Help a child, save a rhino!”

  “Whatever,” said the editor. “You sort it.”

  The wheels of a mighty newspaper rolled into action, and the next day’s Clarion displayed the flair for which it was famous.

  On the front page, above the red masthead, appeared the slogan: “The paper with a heart as big as Africa”.

  Below this ran a front-page editorial on the subject of African children who lost their lives in doomed efforts to reach Europe, which gave the campaign a substance and a gravitas that might otherwise have been lacking.

  The tragedy of the street children of East Africa was made sadder, the Clarion noted, by the fact that the body had gone unclaimed; and not even was there a name for the lad, the “unknown victim”, as the paper dubbed him. The boy would be buried under a gravestone thus marked, readers were advised, after a service in St Bride’s, the journalists’ church off Fleet Street. But in the midst of the pain and sorrow, the editorial concluded, there was one source of comfort for distressed readers: “With your support, the Clarion can promise that this child – Africa’s child, our child – will not have died in vain.”

  5

  “When in doubt, dust.”

  This advice, passed on to Didymus Kigali by his father, who had been in domestic service before him, had proved sound and sensible.

  It certainly served him well. Kigali soon discovered that brandishing his yellow duster, with its faint whiff of Brasso that remained no matter how thoroughly he washed it, brought some important benefits.

  For a start, if you were polishing the brass fittings on the windows, your employer was unlikely to accuse you of being a “loafer”, or even worse, a “lazy loafer”, which was as serious an accusation as could be levelled at a house steward in Kuwisha.

  It was not a guarantee against an accusation of being “cheeky”. But that was “politics”, and Kigali steered clear of politics.

  What was more, dusting was an activity that induced a sense of order in the universe. “All is well when you dust well,” and once again his father’s observation had proven true over the years, passing the test of time.

  And finally it seemed to make you invisible to the settlers who employed you, something Kigali was at a loss to explain. But many were the times he had been a witness to, or within earshot of, a row between madam and master, both apparently oblivious to the presence of a black man as they traded insults or exchanged blows.

  To these three reasons for dusting, all evidence of his late father’s wisdom, Kigali had added a fourth – albeit with some diffidence, for he was far from certain that his father would have approved.

  Dusting and polishing gave him the chance to reflect on Life, and compose his weekly Admonition, or sermon, as other churches called it. Indeed his maiden Admonition, which had been widely praised by his fellow elders, had been composed while dusting the books that occupied one complete wall in Furniver’s flat.

  The theme had been a controversial one. Members of the sect had been increasingly subject to taunts, particularly from the youth who were loyal to traditional faiths. They scoffed at the absence of any material manifestations of the Lamb’s presence, much to the anger of militants in the sect who were becoming increasingly hard to restrain in the face of provocative chants.

  “No church, never naked, No home, nothing sacred”, ran the latest sally.

  After much dusting and a great deal of deliberation, Didymus Kigali chose his maiden Admonition to speak out.

  Standing on a termite mound, surrounded by tens of thousands of Lambs, Kigali gently mocked the materialism of other faiths.

  “They ask where are our churches? Where are the big houses for our leaders? Where are our altars?”

  “Admonish,” some in the huge open-air congregation in the city park called out.

  “Adm
onish!” The call was taken up as the spirit of the people responded to Kigali’s theme.

  “They must look around.”

  “Admonish!” they cried.

  “The very world, created for His people by our Blessed Lord, is the meeting place of the followers of the Lamb.”

  “Admonish!”

  “The hills around us are our altar, the trees are our canopies, and our home is in the hearts of our people!”

  As one, the congregation raised the index finger of their left hand and thrust their fingers towards the blue sky:

  “Admonished! Admonished! Admonished!”

  It had been a triumph, and Kigali’s only regret was that his father had not been alive to attend his subsequent induction as an elder. The old man, who had witnessed the arrival of the white settlers with their bibles and bullets, had died a staunch animist.

  The next day, as he polished Furniver’s life-size bronze cast of a lion’s paw print, Kigali pondered the question he regularly asked himself: would his father have taken up the faith of the Church of the Blessed Lamb? It seemed unlikely. But of one thing Kigali was sure: his father would have been proud of him.

  Noises from the bathroom indicated that Furniver was going about his daily ablutions. Any minute now he would emerge, trailing that curious smell the steward had recently started noticing, like a bad aftershave. Kigali was starting to fear the worst. He renewed his polishing with especial vigour. His yellow duster snapped and cracked as he turned the brass to gleaming gold, but his heart was not in it, and his mind failed to resolve his predicament.

  Kigali greeted Edward Furniver’s entry into the flat’s kitchen by gently clearing his throat, just one of a repertoire of conversational coughs that was quite remarkable in its range.

  It included the rumble of the alarm cough, the persistency of the drawing attention cough, the murmur of interrogative cough, the reassuringly affirmative cough, and the obedient obsequious cough. Add variations of tone and pitch, and the result was a mini vocabulary, but one in which the context was all-important.

  Didymus Kigali did not cough in a vacuum, however. Edward Furniver, founder, manager and sole employee of the Kireba Cooperative Savings Bank, played his part.

  Just as Kigali used his coughs, Furniver used ums, ers, pauses, rise and fall, and tone, well as a number of all-purpose basic words including thingy, and wotsit.

  Kigali’s opening cough had brought a response from Furniver, who politely produced a modest rumble in his throat.

  Early morning pleasantries over, Kigali coughed again, indicating that he was all ears for whatever Furniver wished to raise.

  “Mr, er, Mr Kigali, um,” Edward Furniver began.

  He could no more call his elderly, grey-haired steward Didymus than Kigali could call Furniver anything other than “sir”.

  “Suh,” said Kigali.

  He gave Furniver time to gather his thoughts, and while he waited reviewed the admirable qualities of his employer. Edward Furniver, Didymus Kigali had no doubt, was a good man. And this was not because of what Furniver had said to Charity, who had passed on an expurgated version to Mildred, who had in turn told her husband.

  “Put my foot down on this one,” Furniver had insisted soon after his arrival in Kireba. “It’s one thing to have a chap old enough to be my dad working for me, who wears an all-white kit that makes him look like a bloody elderly cricketer in shorts, and who keeps count of my underpants. But I’m not letting him live under a couple of plastic bags or two, stretched over a few sticks!”

  Mildred had not been particularly happy at the move to the new house, for it meant a longer walk to Harrods every day, but changed her mind when its corrugated tin roof held up without a single leak during the storms that had left much of the slum under a foot of water.

  In the opinion of Kigali, Furniver had a further virtue.

  “Never has he spoken about having talks behind the kia,” Kigali told Mildred. “Never!”

  He shook his grizzled, peppercorn head.

  “Never.”

  He continued to rub the brass lever on the kitchen window. Then he stopped. Furniver was trying to communicate. Kigali resumed rubbing and dusting while his employer marshalled his thoughts.

  “We need to, um, clear the, er, air. Indeed. Air. Um. Clear.

  “Clear, the, um, air,” Furniver repeated in an attempt to be helpful.

  Kigali thought furiously.

  Air . . . clear . . . insects . . . spray?

  “We already have air clear, suh,” preceding his response with an uncertain cough. Mosquitoes were a menace and Kigali sprayed Doom, the “Fast-kill all insect killer”, every day at dusk. He had checked the night before, and there were at least three unused cans of Doom in the kitchen cupboard.

  Nevertheless, Kigali gave another cough, deferential, yes, but nonetheless the tone indicated that the subject was not closed should Furniver wish to pursue it.

  Furniver provided a conciliatory “um” in return, and tried again: “No, um, no, Mr Kigali . . .” Surely he was making himself plain?

  Kigali coughed, encouragingly.

  Furniver took the initiative.

  “The, er, the, um, Vaseline thingy.”

  That was easy, thought Kigali, mistakenly.

  “In the bathroom cupboard, suh.”

  Too easy. Kigali rebuked himself as the penny dropped.

  He could have kicked himself for failing to recognise Furniver’s concern.

  “For jipu, suh,” he quickly added.

  Surely the poor man didn’t have another one.

  There had been an embarrassing misunderstanding when he had encountered Furniver, naked, inspecting an excruciatingly itchy bump in the cleft of his posterior. It was the result of an egg, laid by a fly known as a jipu, in a pair of underpants hung in the sun to dry, which had burrowed into Furniver’s pink flesh.

  Years of experience had taught Kuwisha settlers and their servants that the best way to deal with the menace of the jipu was to ensure that one’s steward, or “boy” as they were known in pre-independence days, ironed one’s underwear with a very hot iron – and failure to do this was, understandably, a sackable offence.

  But if by ill-chance, or neglect, a jipu egg survived this preemptive hot iron, there was only one course of action: a dollop of Vaseline petroleum jelly smeared over the itchy bump soon overwhelmed the maggot and forced it to emerge for air.

  It was while Furniver was preparing to tackle his affliction that Kigali had entered his employer’s bedroom with a cup of tea. To say he was shocked by what he saw does not do justice to the steward’s trauma.

  “Even baboons,” a distraught Kigali had told his wife Mildred, “even baboons, I have never seen doing that thing with finger – and Vaseline.”

  Ever since that unfortunate episode, happily resolved when Charity took Furniver to Cousin Mercy’s clinic to have the jipu seen to, Kigali had watched Furniver’s underpants like a hawk circling the veld.

  Kigali coughed again. Not so much a cough as a gentle conciliatory clearing of the throat.

  “Quite. My fault. Hot iron. Chap at the club warned me. Didn’t check. Jipu, er.”

  Furniver had completed his confession.

  There was no more to say, really.

  Mr Kigali coughed appreciatively in turn, and both men averted their eyes.

  The matter was closed.

  But Furniver’s decency did nothing to help Kigali resolve the other delicate matter that disturbed him so deeply. Indeed it made it all the more difficult. The more he thought about it, the more he was inclined to blame Charity. A wise madam never asked her steward to report on her man’s drinking habits.

  His father’s words came back to him: “Do not take sides, Didymus, never. No-one can say who will win in a battle between madam and master. One thing I tell you – the house boy who interferes will always lose. That is for sure.”

  6

  “What a little prick!”

  Geoffrey Japer toss
ed the newspaper aside and stretched out in his business class seat on the BA flight to Kuwisha. It was the third time Japer had read the critical review of his latest TV series in The Guardian.

  The snide comments left him all the more determined to make a success of the project that he had taken on. Normally Japer would have dismissed out of hand a request from the Clarion, NoseAid or anyone else for that matter, that he fly to Kuwisha to make a short documentary on the country’s growing army of street kids and dwindling number of rhinos.

  He did not care about the fate of rhinos in Kuwisha, nor was he bothered about the country’s children or about children in general, for that matter. What was more, he would have been hard-pressed to locate Kuwisha on a map of Africa. Nor, to be frank, did he feel it was his role in life to raise money for the country’s street kids who, it seemed from the briefing notes prepared for him by NoseAid, were roaming the streets in their hundreds, molesting tourists.

  Finally, he was baffled by the slogan devised by the Clarion, which he could never get right.

  Was it: Save a rhino, help a child.

  Or was it: Help a rhino, save a child.

  Or: Save a child! Help a rhino!

  Or even: Help a child save a rhino!

  And there was no guarantee that the project would be successful. His agent had been promised that the documentary would be shown at peak time on NoseNight, the annual televised fund-raising event; but it could as well disappear into the viewing graveyard after midnight.

  Japer looked down at his briefing papers, given to him before he left London. Across the front of the folder was written a “mission statement”: “Africa’s children are its most precious asset. And the continent’s wild life is one of the children’s most important inheritances. If we can help, we must.”

  But the link between the fate of Kuwisha’s street children, the plight of the country’s rhino, and a NoseAid campaign to write off external debt, was no clearer.

  He read on. The rhino-debt relief proposal, first made in a World Bank study, was now gaining credibility, it seemed, and was expected to be endorsed at a bank conference due to take place while Japer was in Kuwisha.