by Tom Sharpe
Verkramp thought for a moment. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he agreed finally. They went down to the cells on the ground floor and injected several African suspects with varying amounts of apomorphine. The results entirely confirmed Sergeant Breitenbach’s worst fears. As the third black went into a coma, Verkramp looked puzzled.
‘Potent stuff,’ he said.
‘Wouldn’t it be better to stick to the electric shock machines?’ the Sergeant asked.
‘I suppose so,’ said Verkramp sadly. He’d been looking forward to sticking needles in the volunteers. Ordering the Sergeant to send for the police surgeon to sign the death certificates, the Luitenant went back to the top floor and reassured the five volunteers who had been selected for apomorphine treatment that they needn’t worry.
‘You’re going to have electric shocks instead,’ he told them and switched on the projector. At the end of the cell a naked black woman appeared on the wall. As each volunteer had an erection, Verkramp shook his head.
‘Disgusting,’ he muttered attaching the terminal of the shock machine to the glans penis with a piece of surgical tape. ‘Now then,’ he told the Sergeant who sat beside the bed, ‘every time you change the slide, give him an electric shock like this.’ Verkramp wound the handle of the generator vigorously and the konstabel on the bed jerked convulsively and screamed. Verkramp examined the man’s penis and was impressed. ‘You can see it works,’ he said and changed the slide.
Going from cell to cell, Luitenant Verkramp explained the technique and supervised the experiment. As erections followed the slides and contractions followed the shocks to be followed by more slides, more erections, more shocks and more contractions, the Luitenant’s enthusiasm grew.
Sergeant Breitenbach, returning from the morgue, was less sanguine.
‘You can hear them screaming in the street,’ he shouted in Verkramp’s ear as the corridor echoed to the shrieks of the volunteers.
‘So what?’ said Verkramp. ‘We’re making history.’
‘Making a horrible din too,’ said the Sergeant.
To Verkramp the screams were like music. It was as though he were conducting some great symphony in which the seasons, spring, summer, autumn and winter, were celebrated in a welter of screams and shocks and slides, erections and contractions, each of which he could summon forth or dismiss at will.
Presently he sent for a camp bed and lay down in the corridor to get some rest. ‘I’m exorcizing the devil,’ he thought and, dreaming of a world cleansed of sexual lust, fell asleep. When he awoke he was surprised how quiet it was. He got up and found the volunteers asleep and the Sergeants smoking in the lavatory.
‘What the hell do you mean by stopping the treatment?’ he shouted. ‘It’s got to be continuous if it’s to work at all. It’s called reinforcement.’
‘You’ll need reinforcements if you want to go on,’ said one Sergeant mutinously.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Verkramp angrily.
The Sergeants looked shamefaced.
‘It’s a delicate matter,’ Sergeant de Kok told him finally.
‘What is?’
‘Well we’ve been in there all night looking at slides of naked ladies …’
‘Coon girls not ladies,’ snarled Verkramp.
‘And …’ the Sergeant hesitated.
‘And what?’
‘We’ve got lover’s balls,’ said the Sergeant bluntly.
Luitenant Verkramp was appalled.
‘Lover’s balls,’ he shouted. ‘You’ve got lover’s balls from looking at naked coon girls? You stand there and admit you …’ Verkramp was speechless with disgust.
‘It’s only natural,’ said the Sergeant.
‘Natural?’ screamed Verkramp. ‘It’s downright unnatural. Where the hell is this country going to if men in your positions of authority can’t control your sexual instincts? Now you listen to me. As Kommandant of this station I’m ordering you to continue the treatment. Any man refusing to do his duty will be put on the list for the next batch of volunteers.’
The Sergeants straightened their uniforms and hobbled back to the cells and a moment later the screams that were proof of their devotion to duty began again. In the morning the shift was changed and fresh non-commissioned officers took their place. Throughout the day Luitenant Verkramp went upstairs to see how they were getting on.
He had just visited one cell and was about to leave when he become aware that there was something vaguely wrong with the picture projected on the wall. He looked at it and saw it was a view of the Kruger National Park.
‘Like it?’ asked the Sergeant. Luitenant Verkramp stared dumbfounded at the slide. ‘The next one is even better.’
The Sergeant pressed the switch and the slide changed to a close-up of a giraffe. On the bed the volunteer jerked convulsively from the electric shock. Luitenant Verkramp couldn’t believe his eyes.
‘Where the hell did you get those slides?’ he demanded. The Sergeant looked up brightly.
‘They’re my holiday shots from last summer. We went to the game reserve.’ He changed the slide and a herd of zebra appeared on the wall. The patient jerked with them too.
‘You’re supposed to be showing slides of naked black women,’ Verkramp yelled, ‘not fucking animals in the game reserve!’
The Sergeant was unabashed.
‘I just thought they’d make a change,’ he explained, ‘and besides it’s the first time I’ve had a chance to show them. We haven’t got a slide projector at home.’
On the bed the patient was screaming that he couldn’t stand any more.
‘No more hippos, please,’ he moaned. ‘Dear God no more hippos. I swear I’ll never touch another hippo again.’
‘See what you’ve been and done,’ said Verkramp frantically to the Sergeant. ‘Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve conditioned him to loathe animals. He won’t be able to take his kids to the Zoo without becoming a nervous wreck.’
‘Oh dear,’ said the Sergeant, ‘I am sorry. He’ll have to give up fishing too in that case.’
Verkramp confiscated all the slides of the game reserve and the Durban Aquarium and told the Sergeant to show only slides of naked black women. After that he made a point of checking the slides in each cell and came across one other discrepancy. Sergeant Bischoff had included a slide of an unattractive white woman in a bathing costume among the naked blacks.
‘Who the hell is this old bag?’ Verkramp asked when he found the slide.
‘You shouldn’t have said that,’ said Sergeant Bischoff looking hurt.
‘Why not?’ yelled Verkramp.
‘That’s my wife,’ said the Sergeant. Verkramp could see that he had made a mistake.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s not nice to put her in with a whole lot of kaffir girls.’
‘I know that,’ said the Sergeant, ‘I just thought it might help.’
‘Help?’
‘Help my marriage,’ the Sergeant explained. ‘She’s a bit … well, a bit flirtatious and I just thought I’d make sure one man didn’t look at her again.’
Verkramp looked at the slide. ‘I shouldn’t have thought you need have bothered,’ he said and gave orders that Mrs Bischoff wasn’t to appear at a mixed gathering again.
Finally having ensured that everything was proceeding according to plan, he went down to the Kommandant’s office and tried to think what else he could do to make his tenure of office a memorable one. The next step, as far as he could see, would come in the evening when his agents began work in the field.
7
By the time he had driven into Weezen after lunch and found it was early closing day, the Kommandant had begun to think that he was never going to find the Heathcote-Kilkoons’ house. His earlier impression that time stood still in the little town was entirely reinforced by the absence of anyone in the streets in the afternoon. He wandered round looking for the Post Office only to find it shut, tried the store he had been to in the morning with e
qual lack of success and finally sat down in the shadow of Queen Victoria and contemplated the dusty cannas in the ornamental garden. A thin yellow dog sitting on the verandah of the store scratched itself lethargically and recalled the Kommandant to his new role. ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun,’ he thought to cheer himself up and wondered what a genuine Englishman who found himself in a strange town at this time of the day would have done. ‘Gone fishing,’ he imagined and with the uneasy feeling that he was being observed rather critically which resulted subliminally from the great Queen above him, he got up and drove back to the hotel.
There too the sense of inanition with which the old building was so imbued was even more marked now. The two flies were still trapped in the revolving door but they no longer buzzed. Kommandant van Heerden went down the corridor to his room and collected his rod. Then after some confusion in the revolving door, which refused to take both his rod and his basket at the same time, he was out and threading his way down the weedy paths to the river. At the foot of the enormous drainpipe he hesitated, looked to see which way the river flowed, and went upstream on the grounds that he didn’t want to catch fish that had grown fat on its discharge. He had some difficulty in finding a spot which wasn’t encumbered with branches and presently settled down to casting his most promising-looking fly, a large red-winged affair, onto the water. Nothing stirred beneath the surface of the river but the Kommandant was well content. He was doing what an English gentleman would do on a hot summer afternoon, and knowing how ineffectual Englishmen were in other matters he doubted if they caught anything when fishing. As time slowly passed the Kommandant’s mind, somnolent in the heat, pondered gently. With something remotely akin to insight he saw himself, a plump middle-aged man standing in unfamiliar clothes on the bank of an unknown river fishing for nothing in particular. It seemed a strange thing to do yet restful and in some curious way fulfilling. Piemburg and the police station seemed very far away and insignificant. He no longer cared what happened there. He was away from it, away in the mountains, being, if not himself, at least something equivalent and he was just considering what this admiration for things English meant when a voice interrupted him.
‘Oh, never fly conceals a hook!’ said the voice and the Kommandant turned to find the salesman with flatulence standing watching him.
‘It does as a matter of fact,’ said the Kommandant who thought the remark was rather foolish.
‘A quote, a quote,’ said the man. ‘I’m afraid I’m rather given to them. It’s not a particularly sociable habit but one that arises from my profession.’
‘Really,’ said the Kommandant non-committally, not being sure what a quote was. He wound in his line and was disconcerted to find that his fly had disappeared.
‘I see I was right after all,’ said the man. ‘Squamous, omnipotent and kind.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Kommandant.
‘Just another quote,’ said the man. ‘Perhaps I ought to introduce myself. Mulpurgo. I lecture in English at the University of Zululand.’
‘Van Heerden, Kommandant South African Police, Piemburg,’ said the Kommandant and was startled by the effect his announcement had on Mr Mulpurgo. He had gone quite pale and was looking decidedly alarmed.
‘Is anything wrong?’ asked the Kommandant.
‘No,’ said Mr Mulpurgo shakily. ‘Nothing at all. It’s just that … well I had no idea you were … well … Kommandant van Heerden.’
‘You’ve heard about me then?’ the Kommandant asked.
Mr Mulpurgo nodded. It was perfectly clear that he had. The Kommandant dismantled his rod.
‘I don’t suppose I’ll catch anything now,’ he said. ‘Too late.’
‘Evening is the best time,’ said Mr Mulpurgo looking at him curiously.
‘Is it? That’s interesting,’ the Kommandant said as they strolled back along the river bank. ‘This is my first try at fishing. Are you a keen fisherman? You seem to know a lot about it.’
‘My associations are purely literary,’ Mr Mulpurgo confessed, ‘I’m doing my thesis on “Heaven”.’
Kommandant van Heerden was astonished.
‘Isn’t that a very difficult subject?’ he asked.
Mr Mulpurgo smiled. ‘It’s a poem about fish by Rupert Brooke,’ he explained.
‘Oh is that what it is?’ said the Kommandant who, while he’d never heard of Rupert Brooke, was always interested in hearing about English literature. ‘This man Brooke is an English poet?’
Mr Mulpurgo said he was.
‘He died in the First World War,’ he explained and the Kommandant said he was sorry to hear it. ‘The thing is,’ continued the English lecturer, ‘that I believe that while it’s possible to interpret the poem quite simply as an allegory of the human condition, la condition humaine, if you understand me, it has also a deeper relevance in terms of the psycho-alchemical process of transformation as discovered by Jung.’
The Kommandant nodded. He didn’t understand a word that Mr Mulpurgo was saying but he felt privileged to hear it all the same. Encouraged by this acquiescence the lecturer warmed to his task.
‘For instance the lines “One may not doubt that, somehow, good, Shall come of water and of mud” clearly indicate that the poet’s intention is to introduce the concept of the philosopher’s stone and its origin in the prima materia without in any way diverting the reader’s attention from the poem’s superficially humorous tone.’
They came to the enormous drain and Mr Mulpurgo helped the Kommandant with his basket. The evident alarm with which he had greeted the Kommandant’s introduction had given way to nervous garrulity in the face of his friendly if uncomprehending interest.
‘It’s the individuation motif without a doubt,’ he went on as they walked up the path to the hotel. ‘“Paradisal grubs”, “Unfading moths”, “And the worm that never dies” all clearly point to that.’
‘I suppose they must do,’ said the Kommandant as they parted in the foyer. He went down the corridor to Colonic Irrigation No 6 feeling vaguely elated. He had spent the afternoon in an authentic English fashion, fishing and engaged in intellectual conversation. It was an auspicious start to his holiday and went some way to compensate for the disappointment he had felt on his arrival at the hotel. To celebrate the occasion he decided on a bath before dinner and spent some time searching for a bathroom before returning to his room and washing himself all over in the basin that looked most suited to that purpose and least likely to have been used for any other. As the old man had warned, the cold water was hot. The Kommandant tried the hot tap but that was just as hot and in the end he sprayed himself with warm water from a tube that was clearly too large to have been used as an enema but which left him smelling distinctly odd all the same. Then he sat on the bed and read a chapter of Berry & Co. before going to dinner. He found it difficult to concentrate because whichever way he sat he was still faced by his stained reflection in the wardrobe mirror which made him feel that there was someone with him in the room all the time. To avoid the compulsive introspection this induced he lay back on the bed and tried to imagine what Mr Mulpurgo had been talking about. It had meant nothing at the time and even less now but the phrase ‘And the worm that never dies’ stuck in his mind relentlessly. It seemed unlikely somehow but remembering that worms could break in half and still go on living separate existences, he supposed it was possible that when one end was mortally ill, the other end could dissociate itself from its partner’s death and go on living. Perhaps that was what was meant by terminal. It was a word he’d never understood. He’d have to ask Mr Mulpurgo, who was evidently a highly educated man.
But when he went to the Pump Room for dinner, Mr Mulpurgo wasn’t there. The two ladies at the far end of the room were his only companions and since their whispered conversation was made inaudible by the gurgling of the marble fountain the Kommandant ate his dinner in what amounted to silence and watched the sky darken behind the Aardvarkberg. Tomorrow he would find
the address of the Heathcote-Kilkoons and let them know he had arrived.
*
Seventy miles away in Piemburg the evening which had begun so uneventfully took on a new animation towards midnight. The twelve violent explosions that rocked the city within minutes of one another at eleven-thirty were so strategically placed that they confirmed entirely Luitenant Verkramp’s contention that a well-organized conspiracy of sabotage and subversion existed. As the last bomb brightened the horizon, Piemburg retreated still further into that obscurity for which it was so famous. Bereft of electricity, telephones, radio mast, and with road and rail links to the outside world severed by the explosive zeal of his secret agents, the tiny metropolis’ tenuous hold on the twentieth century petered out.
From the roof of the police station where he was taking the air, Verkramp found the transformation quite spectacular. One moment Piemburg had been a delicate web of street lights and neon signs, the next it had merged indistinguishably with the rolling hills of Zululand. As the distant rumble from Empire View announced that the radio tower had ceased to be such a large blot on the landscape, Verkramp left the roof and hurried down the stairs to the cells where the only people in the city who would have actively canvassed for electricity cuts were still receiving their jolts from the hand-cranked generators in the darkness. The only consolation for the volunteers was the disappearance of the naked black women as the projectors went out.
In the confusion Luitenant Verkramp remained disconcertingly calm.
‘It’s all right,’ he shouted. ‘There is nothing to be alarmed about, just continue the experiment using ordinary photographs.’ He went from cell to cell distributing torches which he had kept handy for just such an eventuality as this. Sergeant Breitenbach was as usual less unperturbed.
‘Don’t you think it’s more important to investigate the cause of the power failure?’ he asked. ‘It sounded to me like there were a whole lot of explosions.’