by William Boyd
“Oh.” Is that all? he screamed inwardly at her. Why am I bloody here then? He was about to pursue this line of enquiry with more vigour when he saw Fanshawe climbing the front steps.
“Morgan,” Fanshawe said wearily. “Glad you’re here.” He looked most strange, Morgan thought. He was wearing a green silk Chinese dressing gown with large orange lotus-type blossoms on it. A pair of striped Viyella pyjama bottoms clashed uneasily with this opulence. Fanshawe’s face was pale and his normally sleek grey hair stood up in fine wispy tufts.
“Bloody awful problem we’ve got here,” he admitted, shaking his head sorrowfully. “Thought you’d be the chap to deal with it.” He looked Morgan in the eye. “Can’t understand these Africans at all,” he said hopelessly, like a criminal confessing his guilt. “Just can’t make head nor tail of them, can’t figure out how the Kinjanjan mind works. Closed book to me. Now, if this were the East …” he let the implied comment go unfinished. Morgan wondered why Fanshawe thought he’d be the “chap” to deal with these unfathomable mysteries. Meanwhile Mrs. Fanshawe had risen to her feet and was belting her dressing gown tightly about her waist, thereby crudely accentuating the body-forms which bulked beneath the candlewick shroud. Morgan inwardly remarked on the prodigious humps that defined her chest and how, curiously, they wobbled transversely as she marched over to her husband.
“Come on, Arthur,” she commanded. “Leave it to Morgan. He knows these people better than we.”
“Just a sec,” Morgan interrupted, before Fanshawe could be led off to bed. “I’m afraid I haven’t quite got the full picture yet. Innocence is dead, sure, but I don’t see where I fit in.”
“Sorry,” Fanshawe brushed his forehead absentmindedly with his palm. “Sorry I didn’t explain; it’s all been a bit of a shock. Innocence’s over at the servants’ quarters. She was struck by lightning during the storm, died instantly I believe. I called the police—a constable’s just arrived—but apparently there’s some ghastly mystical—what do they call it?—juju problem. Magical hocus pocus, you know, couldn’t work out what they were talking about. Thought you were the man for that.” He paused. “Can’t tell you anything else, I’m afraid. You’ll have to see if you can make any more sense of it. See if you can get the whole thing sorted out tonight.” The Fanshawes moved to the foot of the stairs. “I think,” said Fanshawe wearily, “it’s something to do with disposing of the body. I don’t know. Anyway, Morgan, do your best, see you in the morning.”
Morgan said goodnight and the Fanshawes went off to their beds. He was about to make for the drinks, feeling sorely in need of one, when Priscilla returned with a cup of coffee for him. He took it from her, their fingertips touching briefly. He wondered what she was wearing under her robe. To his surprise she prodded Morgan’s stomach with a forefinger. “Yes, I thought so,” she said. “Three sugars, no wonder. Must be like drinking syrup.” She didn’t seem too worried about Innocence’s death, Morgan thought; in fact she was being very familiar. Was it a good sign?
“By the way,” Priscilla said. “Did you find that poet chap?”
“Poet?” Morgan’s mind went blank. Then he remembered his excuse from earlier in the evening. “Oh, that poet.”
“Are there some more around?”
“No, oh no. And … ah we never found the other one.” He thought suddenly that he should be taking advantage of their being alone together. “Listen, Priscilla, can I …?”
“Never mind,” she interrupted brightly. “I’m sure he’ll turn up.”
“What? Oh yes … but I …” It was too late, she was already at the stairs.
“Probably won’t see you in the morning,” she said. “Isn’t it too awful about Innocence? ’Night.”
She was gone, a flash of brown legs. This family, Morgan thought grimly, are not treating me right; they’re taking me too much for granted. First I’m Father Christmas, now I’m a bloody undertaker. He poured a slug of brandy into his coffee, stirred it up and drank it down. Right, he said to himself, let’s see what all the fuss is about.
The Commission’s servants’ quarters consisted of two low mud-brick blocks facing each other across a well-trodden patch of laterite, down the middle of which ran a concrete sanitary lane. At one end of the square was a stand pipe and wash-place, a large concrete basin beneath a corrugated-iron roof supported by thick wooden poles. A large cotton tree stood by the wash-place. Around the two dwelling-units were many small lean-tos, traders’ stalls and shelters made from sticks, packing cases and palm fronds. Between the main road and the block farthest away from the Commission a sizeable dump had grown up over the years, on which sat two wheelless car chassis and which provided the main source of nourishment for the various goats, dogs and chickens that roamed about it unhindered.
As Morgan approached the quarter he became aware of the sounds of muted commotion. He could hear the babble of excited voices and a soft chanting wail of lamenting women. He began to feel a little nervous, considering for the first time what exactly he was going to meet. He was about to come up against death, after all, something he hadn’t done before. The death of Innocence. The improbable symbolic portentousness of this did not bring a smile to his lips. He walked round the corner of the nearest block and dimly made out a crowd of approximately thirty people gathered around the far end of the laterite compound near the base of the cotton tree. He walked across the compound, carefully stepping over the sanitary ditch. He felt a slight twinge of alarm. He noticed some mothers with younger children sitting around lanterns on the small verandahs that ran the length of the blocks. As he approached the large group by the tree a figure detached itself from it and came towards him. It was, he soon saw, the policeman, dressed in immaculately starched khaki uniform of shirt, shorts and knee socks. In the star-light Morgan could see his black boots gleaming. He carried a torch and there was a long truncheon slung at his belt.
“Evening, constable,” Morgan said, all calm authority. “I’m Mr. Leafy from the Commission. What exactly’s going on?”
“Ah. The woman is dead, sah. Lightning done kill her one time.” He turned and shone his torch. The crowd was not clustered around the body as Morgan had thought but was standing in appalled silence a safe ten yards away. The torch beam flicked across the black mass of Innocence’s body and there were appreciative gasps from the onlookers. Innocence had been struck down in the gap between the end of one of the blocks and the rough concrete base of the wash-place.
Morgan swallowed. “I suppose we’d better have a closer look.” He didn’t know why he supposed this, but it was all he could think of doing. “May I?” He took the constable’s torch and advanced towards the body. There was a collective intake of breath and much shifting about from the crowd as he did so. Morgan realised, with some alarm, as he approached that this—Innocence—was the first dead person he had ever encountered and he wasn’t quite sure what precisely he was expecting to see or how he would react.
Before he could get close enough, however, someone ran out of the crowd and tugged at his sleeve. It was Isaac, Morgan saw on turning round, one of the Commission’s doormen and general factotum. He was a solemn-looking man with a Hitlerian toothbrush moustache.
“Mr. Leafy sah,” he said. “I go beg you, sah. Don’t totch her. Make you nevah totch her, sah.” His voice was serious.
Morgan looked at him in surprise. “Don’t worry, Isaac,” he said. “I’ve no intention of touching her.”
“Be careful, sah, I beg you.” Isaac’s eyes were wide with warning. “Dis he be Shango killing. Nevah totch the body.”
“Sorry?” Morgan said, keeping his torch beam well away from the inert dark lump that was Innocence’s body. “A Shango killing? Who the hell is Shango?”
Isaac pointed skywards. Morgan looked up at the stars. “Shango is God,” Isaac said piously. “Shango is God for lightning.” He illustrated this with a jagged sweep of his arm. “Shango done kill this woman. You cannot totch her. No person can totch her.”
>
Oh my sweet bloody Christ, Morgan thought sourly to himself, no wonder that sly bastard Fanshawe backed out of this one. Sweet effing Jesus. “OK, Isaac,” he said resignedly. “I won’t touch, but I have to look.” He walked up to Innocence’s body and squatted on his haunches about three feet away. Clenching his jaw muscles he brought the torch beam up to play on Innocence’s face. He remembered her well, a fat jolly woman who was always in attendance at the Fanshawes’ functions. Now she lay dead on her side, the top half of her body twisted round so that her face blankly contemplated the sky whence the fatal lightning shaft had come. Not far from her body lay a galvanized steel bucket and scattered wrung bundles of washed clothes. Morgan imagined what must have happened. Washing some clothes when the storm broke, throw them into the bucket, prop bucket on head or shoulder and waddle-dash across the short distance from the wash-place to the shelter of the verandah. But she’d never made it. Morgan found himself wondering if lightning made a whooshing noise, if there was a crack, smoke.…
He was quite emotionless as the beam hit Innocence’s face, only a taut, stretched feeling in his body. Her eyes and mouth were wide open, as if frozen in mid-yell. On her right shoulder and down the right side of her face was a curious scorch or burn mark, an oozing weal purple against her chocolaty skin. The rest of her body appeared quite untouched and solid in its ungainly repose. Her clothes were sodden—a cheap nylon short-sleeved blouse, a native cloth wrapper-skirt—drenched by the downpour. Her right hand was held out along the still damp ground, pale palm uppermost, fingers slightly curled.
Poor Innocence, he thought, what a way to go.
He rose to his feet and walked back towards Isaac, who had been joined by the constable. Morgan returned the torch to him.
“Look, Isaac,” Morgan said. “We have to move her.” He felt a little unsteady on his feet. “We can’t just leave her lying there, for Christ’s sake. Where’s her house?” Isaac indicated a doorway in the middle of the block. “Has she any family?” Morgan asked.
“There is one daughter, Maria,” Isaac told him. Morgan remembered her too, a slim teenage girl who also worked for the Fanshawes. She was only fourteen or fifteen. He sighed.
“Right,” he said. “Isaac, will you and Ezekiel”—he mentioned the Commission porter—“help me move her into her house until we can get an undertaker to come. Ezekiel?” he called into the crowd and Ezekiel emerged, a large bow-legged man with a pot-belly. He joined them a little unwillingly.
“Constable,” Morgan instructed, “if you take the arms with me, and you—Isaac—with Ezekiel take the legs. OK? Come on then.”
Nobody moved. There followed a brief impassioned burst of conversation in native dialect. Then Isaac spoke:
“We cannot totch her, sah. Please, I beg you once more. Ifin you totch her before, you will bring yourself trouble. Bringing everyone wahallah. You no go die well,” he finished up solemnly.
Ezekiel nodded in glum agreement. “Plenty wahallah, sah, for every people.”
The constable drew Morgan to one side. “Excuse, sah. This people are believing for Shango. They think that ifin they move this dead woman, they go die themselves one time.” The constable smiled condescendingly. “They think Shango is angry with them. They have to make big juju here. Bring one fetish priest before.”
Wahallah, juju, fetish priest, lightning gods.… Morgan stood in the dark compound, smelling the damp warm night, listening to its noises all around him, his eyes fixed on the body of the dead woman, wondering if it was all some frightful dream he was having. He massaged his temples with both hands. “Constable,” he said conspiratorially, “will you help me move her—get her out of the way at least. The two of us should manage.”
“Ah.” The constable spread his hands. “I cannot. If I move the body before they make juju they will think I make Shango angry. They will not like it.” He shrugged his shoulders in apology. “I must go. I will make my report.” He saluted, turned and walked out of the compound.
Morgan felt waves of panic break in his mind. He thought hard. The crowd showed no signs of dispersing; they stood patiently in their group beneath the cotton tree, as though awaiting the arrival of some VIP, obsessed by this sign of Shango’s displeasure that the god had dropped in their back yard. Morgan called Isaac over. “Isaac,” he said gently. “It is against the law to leave a body in the open like this. I have to call an undertaker. Now, will you let them remove the body?”
“They will not,” Isaac said equably.
“Pardon?”
“When they see that Shango has strock this woman. They will nevah lift her.”
Morgan smiled. “Well,” he said. “We’ll just have to take our chances on that.”
An hour later Morgan sat disconsolately on the concrete surround of the wash-place. Innocence still lay untouched half a dozen yards from his feet. He had phoned the police who claimed that as no crime had been committed it was nothing to do with them. Then he had phoned a firm of undertakers in Nkongsamba who said they would be out within the hour.
They had just left. Isaac and Ezekiel had spoken to them and the two undertakers, lugubriously dressed exactly like their European counterparts, had flatly refused to disturb the body until the fetish had been done. They even became quite angry for a while, accusing Morgan of trying to hoodwink them into offending Shango.
In the east the tree tops were silhouetted against a thin gash of pale lemon. It was ten to four. Innocence would be stiffening up now, he thought queasily, her eyes and mouth for ever open, her body permanently twisted round. He had tried to appeal to the servants’ Christianity—they were all Christians, this was no pocket of paganism—but their polite and unconcerned references to tribal protocol, the required summoning of the fetish priest, the various necessary rites, the obligatory slaughter of a goat, only confirmed to Morgan what he’d always expected: that they could shed their Christianity as easily as a pair of trousers. He stood up and went over to stare down at Innocence. Her death stirred nothing in him now. The fact that he was standing looking down at a dead person, someone whom he had known, raised no emotions in him. She wasn’t a person anymore, she was an object—a thing—effectively deified by that lightning bolt—a thing, moreover, that was turning into a bloody great problem.
He felt very tired and rubbed his jaw, rasping the bristles on his face. It was still quite dark but through the nim trees he could see the corner of Fanshawe’s house. He pictured the family: father, mother and daughter sleeping soundly in their beds. While he stalked about this gloomy compound like some demon insisting on the body that was due to him. It made him sick, he hated every fucking one of them, their stinking bourgeois affectations, their ghastly fake chinoiserie, their prim enclosed little minds.… He felt his face going hot. This was no good, he told himself; there was no point inveighing against the Fanshawes now. Calm down, he advised, calm down. He walked over to the cotton tree. Only half a dozen maintained their vigil now, sitting on the high tangled roots that spread out from the base of the trunk like grotesque varicose veins.
“Isaac?” Morgan said hopefully.
A tall, stooped figure rose up. “I am Joseph, sah. Joseph the cleaner. Isaac ’e done go for sleep.”
Wise man, Morgan thought. “OK, Joseph,” he said firmly—it was like dealing with a gang of Old Testament prophets. “You savvy dis fetish thing?”
Joseph nodded. He had a shaven skull and was very black, almost Nubian in appearance. In the crepuscular light he looked two-dimensional, a hole cut out of the environment. “Yes, sah,” he said. “I go savvy am.”
“Fine,” Morgan said, maintaining his businesslike tone. “Great. Go and get the juju man and we’ll do the fetish.”
“Please, sah. I no fit do it,” Joseph said simply. “The family of this dead woman must do it.”
Oh bloody hell, swore Morgan despairingly, there’s always another hitch. “Alright, you’d better get Maria,” he said. Maybe there would be some way of ending this morbid far
ce after all. Soon Maria was brought, weeping and swollen-eyed and supported by two women. She was clutching a rosary in her hands. If it wasn’t so serious, Morgan thought to himself, it would be bloody funny.
“Maria,” he began gently, acutely conscious of his terminal fatigue, his frayed nerves and the massed forces of frustration hemming him in. “Maria, you know that before anyone will … move your mother, we have to get a fetish priest along?” She weakly nodded her assent. “Well,” he continued, “it seems that only you can make this possible. You have to get the priest.” At this point Maria let out a great wail of dismay and collapsed into the arms of the two women. Morgan backed off in alarm. “Joseph,” he called out. “Go and see what the matter is.”
Joseph returned shortly with the necessary information. “She is weeping, sah, because she says she has no money.”
“Money?” Morgan said in astonishment. “What does she want money for?”
“To pay for the priest,” Joseph said.
“Well, for Christ’s sake, I’ll lend her a few bob,” Morgan offered impatiently, reaching into his pockets. “How much does she need?”
Joseph did some mental calculations. “She need forty pound. No, but then she must purchase one goat and some beer.” He shrugged, “I think fifty pound, maybe sixty. But there is funeral as well. For Shango killing you must have special funeral. She is crying because she only has fifteen pounds about.”
Morgan’s heart sank at this latest setback. Fifteen pounds was a reasonable monthly wage by Kinjanjan standards. He turned away and roamed the compound wildly, trying to coax his tired brain to come up with more alternatives. A faint greyness of coming dawn now charged the atmosphere. Time was running out for him. Fanshawe would be expecting some results after a night’s work, where in fact things hadn’t advanced one bit; he might as well have ignored Fanshawe’s summons for all the good he’d done. It wasn’t just what Fanshawe would say, though; there was the more serious problem of the effect of the African sun on Innocence’s body.… He felt like tearing his hair out. What he needed was an organisation not staffed with frigging Shango worshippers, some normal, ordinary people who did an efficient, orthodox job, who’d pick her up and stow her in a morgue somewhere until a funeral could be arranged. He’d done enough pussyfooting around pagan sensibilities, he decided; the time had surely come for some forthright energetic roughshod-riding.