Tefuga

by Peter Dickinson

  Instantly the two old women went rigid. Miss Tressider had been facing away from them, but with an actor’s sense of audience she knew at once that something had gone wrong, and turned. She smiled. They backed away. Their eyes wavered between her and the space of air to which she seemed to have spoken. Jackland, standing nearest, could barely have heard the name, so most of the others could not have known what had happened, but still the infection spread fast. All the villagers broke off the attempt to communicate, leaving the visitors gesticulating and mouthing at emptiness. They too fell silent. Miss Boyaba was probably the most bewildered.

  “God,” said Burn. “Who’s put their wee foot in it now? Jalo?”

  “Hold it,” said Jackland. “Better leave it to Mary.”

  Without any obvious decision visitors and villagers had separated, moving into a rough circle on the arena of bare earth in front of the huts. Miss Tressider stood near the middle of it, facing the two old women. There was nothing to prevent them stepping further back to join the circle and become, as it were, just two anonymous villagers, but they doubtfully stood their ground as her accusers.

  “I’m sorry,” said Miss Tressider. “That was pretty stupid of me.”

  She half spread her arms, palms forward, the universal signal of openness and innocence. The women did not respond.

  “I seem to have raised a ghost, you see,” she said. “What can I do? Oh, yes. Look serious, everyone. Lend me your penknife, will you, Sally?”

  She was wearing a yellow blouse, blue Bermuda shorts, track shoes, gamine-style short-peaked cap. Beneath the dust of the journey her bare smooth skin was golden with pricey lotions. She moved tentatively, as though feeling her way by faintly perceived electric discharges, towards the area to which she had addressed her greeting.

  “About here, wasn’t she?” she said.

  She knelt and with a single wide sweep, three-fingered, outlined an invisible circle on the earth. She rubbed dust from the circle, pinching it up into her other palm until she had enough to dribble it over the back of her bowed head. She opened the knife, tested its point and slid it into the round of her thumb. She pressed a glistening bead of blood from the slit.

  She spat into her palm, picked up the bead on her fingernail and mixed it in with the spittle. She added fresh dust from the circle, making a paste, which she rolled with her fingertips into a pellet.

  All so far in silence. Now, as she held the pellet—about the size of a pea—between finger and thumb over the centre of the circle, she started a low humming noise, very like a cat’s purr, deep in her throat. The hum seemed to have no centre, but to be located in the air around her. She took the pellet back into her palm to breathe on it, then, humming again, placed it in the centre of the circle. She took dust, from outside the circle this time, and dribbled it over the pellet till its shape was lost. With one hand spread wide she pressed the small mound fiat, moving the hand in an outward spiral until it reached the edge of the circle. She stopped humming and rose to her feet.

  “Show’s over, folks,” she said.

  The tone of release after the focused intensity of the improvised ritual was so obvious that one or two of the villagers laughed. When Miss Tressider turned towards the two old women with her previous spread-hand gesture they replied with only slightly troubled smiles. An old man came over and joined them.

  “That was terrific,” said Miss Boyaba. “How did you think of it? Gosh, it really did the trick, didn’t it?”

  Miss Tressider grinned at her, teasingly uncommunicative. Burn and Pittapoulos began to discuss possible shots. Jackland joined them.

  “Don’t want to waste much time here,” he said. “The hill’s the thing.”

  “Won’t be able to do anything with it this light,” said Pittapoulos. “Much better wait and get the sun behind it.”

  “That’ll mean going home in the dark,” said Burn.

  “Just leave me with one good truck. You lot can push off soon as we’ve done the village.”

  “All right, Nigel?” said Burn.

  “I suppose so. I’ll take Mary out to look at the hill now, while you get on here. You won’t need us. Stupid to come this far without seeing it.”

  “Nothing to see, Trevor says,” said Burn.

  “Still, it’s where it happened. What’ll you do here?”

  They had hardly begun to discuss this when Miss Tressider came and touched his arm. He turned.

  “They want an encore,” she said. “Somewhere else. The old boy will show me. Jalo says he’s her son.”

  She nodded to where the interpreter was talking to the old man, while the two old women watched. All three of the villagers glanced frequently towards Miss Tressider.

  “You want me to tag along?”

  “If you can tear yourself away.”

  “I’d like to. My sort of thing, this.”

  It turned out that only the old man was to go with them. He led them along a barely perceptible path that wound between the tree-clumps. Small irregular patches of “garden”, fenced with mats of cane, lay on either side of the path wherever there were workable pockets of soil, but in places the fences sagged or gaped and the area inside had evidently not been worked this year. The old man seemed to have something wrong with his hip, but hobbled purposefully along in silence.

  “Did you really make that up on the spur?” said Jackland. “It was decidedly impressive.”

  “Good. It was fun. I don’t want to do it again, really, but I suppose I’ll have to. Ages ago when I was in rep in Liverpool I went out to that beach. I was mooning round wondering whether to drown myself—not me, of course, just the girl I was playing next week—when I came across a grimy little kid all by herself, crying. She wouldn’t tell me what the problem was but she let me watch her magic. I lent her a pin for the blood. She didn’t hum. That’s one of my exercises.”

  “It gives a new meaning to the phrase ‘White Man’s magic.’”

  “It doesn’t need to be white. It wasn’t man’s.”

  Jackland laughed, perhaps not so much at her remark as at the fizz of her company, the shared euphoria of a successful performance. At this moment their guide stopped and spoke, pointing down a long grassless glade to their left. Well over a mile away, and so little more than a hummock in the heat-haze, rose a small hill crowned with a fuzz of trees.

  “That’s where it happened,” said Jackland. “I thought we might drive out there as soon as we’ve done whatever this chap wants. All right?”

  “We could look at where she met Femora Feng first time, too. You’d have liked to shoot the whole thing here and on the river, wouldn’t you?”

  “If they’d have let me have the cash. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Not specially. You think that way you’d get nearer to letting people see what really happened?”

  “If the words have any meaning.”

  “It’s no good. The only way you can know things like that is by imagining them. You can’t ever know what Betty was like but you can imagine what it was like to be Betty. That’s what I’m for, to help people imagine. If you keep packing in things because they’re real—real places, real clothes—they start to clog the pipes up. All you need is scraps. A couple of things to get started. The diary was … I was going to say it was perfect, but I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have had only a few pages saved from a bonfire.”

  “You must ask Annie about …”

  “Did Betty know?”

  “That’s the point. If she had …”

  “Then I don’t want to. Not yet.”

  “We’re almost through. It can’t make any difference.”

  “It does.”

  Tefuga Hill had vanished behind scrub but could be glimpsed once or twice as the path wound on and only came properly into view again when they reached their goal, a clear space too large for a garden, unfe
nced, randomly dotted with mounds that might have been ant-hills or termite nests, but were on inspection graves. Presumably so small a village as Tefuga did not supply more than one or two burials a year, so either the bodies of Kitawa were brought in from elsewhere or the graveyard was centuries old, judging by its hundreds of mounds, many of them no more than faint undulations, discernible only by the context of their more recent neighbours. Between the mounds, and sometimes on them, grew tussocks of spiky grass. Nowhere was there any sign of the graves being attended to or cared for, no small fetishes such as are usually found in the cemeteries of animists. It was not guessable whether the clearing was accidental or whether the trees were deliberately prevented from growing there, so that the long suns and brief rains could beat straight down on the graves.

  The old man hobbled between the mounds. At a place no different from any other he stopped, pointed and spoke.

  “Femora Feng?” said Miss Tressider.

  He nodded, apparently unperturbed by the name.

  “I really don’t feel like it,” said Miss Tressider. “And I gave Sally’s knife back. Have you got anything?”

  Jackland patted his pockets.

  “Find you a thorn, I should think.”

  “No. Anyway they say don’t give blood more than once a week.”

  She knelt in a space between two tussocks that grew by the flattened mound and drew her circle, visible in this looser earth. Her movements had no drama, no intensity. She dragged her hand along the back of her neck as if to remove a smear of the dust she had poured there at the earlier ceremony, and so link it with this later one. She spat, took earth from the grave and tried to roll a pellet, but the paste would not cohere. Her hum seemed no more than a hum in her throat. She scraped the messy crumbs from her hand into the centre of the circle, smothered them with more dust, erased them in an outward spiral. The old man made no sign that he thought the ritual inadequate. Miss Tressider rose and bent to brush the dust from her knees.

  “God! Nigel!” she whispered. “What’s that?”

  Half way up her right calf was a dark purple hemispherical growth, about the size of a hazelnut but visibly still swelling. She touched it with a fingertip, then shaped her nails into pincer-formation to pluck it away.

  “Hold it,” said Jackland. “Not like that.”

  He had a cigarette out and was lighting it. He squatted beside her, puffing the cigarette to a bright glow. When he pressed the tip against the creature it loosed its hold and dropped. He scuffed the thing clear of Miss Tressider’s foot and stamped on it, smearing it on to the grave-mound.

  Miss Tressider gave a sighing shudder.

  “We didn’t need the knife,” she said. “It’s like that horrible bit in the Bible. God will provide the sacrifice. Oh, well.”

  She bent, scooped up earth and dribbled it on to the smear. The old man spoke, not in Hausa but in Kiti. He looked pleased.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No. But it’s not hurting. Yes, it is. Ow. What was it?”

  “Tick of some kind. Extraordinary life-cycle. They can go dormant for years …”

  “I don’t want to know. Ow. Do you think there’s anything left in?”

  “Not supposed to be if you use a cigarette. Of course, they inject a bit of fluid … Stand still.”

  Jackland put on his spectacles and squatted again to look. The place was clearly visible, a pale circle in the golden skin, with a small bright blotch at its centre. He squeezed at it with careful thumbs. A bead of watery blood emerged. Miss Tressider muttered with pain. Jackland wiped the blood away, put his lips to the place and sucked hard. He rose and spat.

  “Best I can do for the moment. How does it feel?”

  “Better, thanks.”

  “Shall I go and get one of the cars?”

  “No, I’ll walk.”

  She limped only slightly as they made their way back. Sounds of enjoyment could be heard from the village, and when they came out of the screening scrub they saw that all the small crowd visitors and villagers could muster was gathered round some spectacle, from which rose an erratically rhythmic thud. Craning over the shoulders of the spectators Jackland saw that Miss Boyaba was being given a lesson in the use of a pestle and mortar. She was wearing only a grass girdle and lace-like grass collar, as was the older woman who was teaching her. Despite their shared nakedness and shared laughter they could not have seemed more different. Miss Boyaba was still completely out of place, with her paler skin and her urban hair-style, her youth, her pointed up-turned breasts on the long and lissom torso which swayed like a dancer’s as she tried to master the to-and-fro rhythm of the big pestle. She was a child dressing up in grandmother’s ball-gown and tiara, which she herself would never wear as an adult because society no longer went in for that sort of party. That was the joke she and the spectators were so enjoying. Pittapoulos from behind his purring camera waved a V-sign at Jackland, who laughed in answer.

  “Nigel, my leg is hurting.”

  “I take it you don’t feel like the trip out to the hill now?”

  “If you don’t mind. I’ll wait.”

  “The hill can wait. I’ll have a word with Malcolm. We’ll have to take at least two of the others. It’d better be the good car—they can come home in convoy when Fred’s got his sunset. What about Annie? Do you think she’s green enough not to grasp she’s got a story? We can’t have the insurers taking fright.”

  “Get Malcolm to tell her I threw a tantrum seeing someone else in the limelight … Nigel, you know she asked me about my love-life—I’ll make it true if you stand there goggling any longer.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I said I fancied Major Kadu.”

  Eight

  Monday March 24

  Back home. Something really amazing! Must write about it. Didn’t write any more during the tour—fact, after Tefuga I almost thought I’d give up doing this. It brings things out of me I’m a bit frightened of, you see. I mean like what I said while I was waiting at Tefuga for Ted to come and take me riding. When I looked at it next day I felt perfectly horrid. I wonder if I’d had a touch of the sun (’tho I did see the women and they did tell me those things, far as I could understand, and so on) but really I’m not like that. I know I’m not. I’m an ordinary loyal little wife. It’s just something that sort of spills out of the pencil while I’m scribbling away, and it’s none of my business how Ted runs his show. My job is to back him up.

  Well, just to join the story up—we did ten days’ more tour, and I was v. good and didn’t complain any more about the women refusing to talk while I was doctoring, or even keep telling Ted how frightened I was sure they were. Or how disappointed I was not getting much chance to practise my Kiti. I painted quite a bit. At first Z. always made sure I had a spearman watching, but after a bit he gave that up, but even then the women wouldn’t come near me. They didn’t like me painting them, either. I could have insisted, but that’s no fun. All a bit sad, but it couldn’t be helped.

  We did a wide circuit and got back yesterday, Sunday. We’d been held up an extra day ’cos of a muddle about bearers—the old lot had gone home and the new lot didn’t show up. So it was almost evening when we reached the river, a bit south of here—just a barrier of trees running each way far as you could see. Surprising how green they looked after the fawny, ashy, strawy bush—real leaves, with proper sap in them, tho’ when we’ve been back a couple of days they’ll get that dark, stodgy look again. Z.’s men cheered up no end. They don’t like tours—much rather leave it to their agents, pet slaves really, to squeeze the taxes out of the villagers. They forked off towards Kiti Town and left us with only our bearers. We were just going into the trees when I saw a man, a Bakiti, standing by the track. It was only wide enough for one here and I was leading. I didn’t recognize who it was till he held up his hand to stop me. He looked so different wit
hout his housecoat, grown-up, not a boy any more. (Of course we call all our servants boys, even when they’re grandfathers!)

  “A strong spirit in Elongo Sisefonge,” I said.

  He didn’t look at all surprised at me knowing his whole name, tho’ he’d never told me.

  “A strong spirit in Betty Jackland.” (Not cheek at all, absolutely right!) “A white man has come. Dlanzi. He came two days ago.”

  He turned and ran off down the path. I explained to Ted.

  “Oh lor,” said Ted. “de Lancey’s not supposed to be here till Tuesday.”

  “It’s all right, darling,” I said. “Old Kama Boi asked me to go at the last minute. There wasn’t time to tell him.”

  “We don’t exactly see eye to eye over Kama Boi.”

  “It’ll be all right. I’ll wheedle him.”

  “You’ll do no such thing. He’s not that type.”

  He was quite right about that, anyway. We found Mr de Lancey in the dining-room smoking a Turkish cigarette and reading Homer in Greek(!) He is a small, round-faced man with pale blue eyes. Rather bald, blotchy brown over the top. What’s left is silvery blond. He wears a monocle to read with. He’s always dressed, right in the middle of Africa, as tho’ his clothes were fresh from the shop. He has a special boy to wash and iron them—Ted says he pays him more than his cook! And he’s got enough boiled shirts to be able to post them home to London two dozen at a time to be washed and starched and posted back! He talks in a drawly, bored way and gives a little nod when he’s finished to show it’s your turn but you’d better not say too much. I thought, ’cos of the nod and the name, he might be half French but Ted (who can’t stand him—I hadn’t properly realized till I saw them together) says he isn’t. He says Mr de Lancey likes people to know his family have lived in the same house in Derbyshire since the twelfth century and his mother is one of the Norfolk Dudleys. (That means something, I gather.)