Guerrillas (19 page)

Meredith said, “You sound worried, Harry.”

“In any other country those guys would be put away. I don’t know how we start the fashion here that the moment a guy get mad he must hook up two big baskets on his arms, put on tennis shoes and start walking about the place, shouting, ‘Nuts, nuts.’ ”

Meredith said, “I will keep an eye on you.”

Jane said, “It sounds the most marvelous therapy.”

Roche said, “It will give a new dimension to swinging London.”

“An overgrown idiot boy lived near my elementary school,” Meredith said. “He was white. A big boy. He couldn’t close his mouth. He used to point at us and say, ‘Bam! Bam!’ That was all he wanted to do, to play cowboys-and-Indians with you. You could make him very happy if you bammed back. But that was committing yourself to a term-long relationship. We called him Bam. That was all. Nobody troubled him. He was just part of the scenery.”

Jane said, “How very humane.”

“Humane?” Harry said. “That is our downfall. We encourage too much slackness.”

Meredith said, “I think we should ask Peter about that.”

“I used to think we had to work with what was there. I don’t know what I think now.”

“We don’t make enough allowance for the madness,” Meredith said. “Read the papers, listen to the radio, read any government report: you will feel that we’re all very logical, rational people and we know where we want to go. I suppose that was my mistake. I
knew about the madness. I knew about it in my bones. I grew up with the damn thing, after all. Like you, Harry. But I pretended it didn’t exist. I don’t know how it happens, but the moment you start thinking or writing or worrying about resources and your five-year plan, you forget the madness. You forget about those people down there on the beach. A good politician should never do that.”

Harry said, “But that’s a hell of a thing you’re telling us, Merry. This place could be a paradise, man, if people really planned. We could have real industries. We don’t have to let the Americans just take away our bauxite.”

“I traveled out with two of the bauxite Americans,” Jane said. “They spent all their time on the plane reading pornography. The hard stuff. Easy Lay and Sucked Dry.”

“We could have real industries,” Harry said, lying down in his hammock, his chest singing asthmatically, creating an effect of accompanying bird song. “Not this nonsense we have. One factory, one rich white businessman, one rich black politician.”

“All this is true,” Meredith said. “But they may not want what you want for them. They want other things. The people down there by the river have other needs.”

“Oh God, man, Merry, you know a lot of those fellers are just damn corrupt. You say so yourself. It make me so damn sad, seeing boys I go to school with going in for this thing. You always try to tell yourself, ‘Oh, this guy is still right. That guy is still okay.’ And then one day you see the feller with his belly hanging over his waistband, and you know he gone the way of all flesh. Jane, you know that? The moment you see one of these fellers getting to the belly-hanging-over-waistband stage you know how his mind working. You know what happen to him. It is the only thing you have to look for. The belly and the waistband. It make me so damn ashamed, man, to see those fellers at parties. Jane, they will take two drinks at the same time. And they will eat as though they’ve never seen food.”

Meredith said, “They’re very hungry.”

He had been looking at Harry with a fixed wounded smile.
This smile, and the way he held his head, drew attention to the wide space between his nose and his mouth. This part of his face looked especially vulnerable: here could still be seen the bullied schoolboy he had perhaps been. And there was about his reply to Harry something of the pertness of the schoolboy.

Harry crossed his legs in the hammock and looked out at the dazzling sea. “Twenty, thirty years ago, everybody was lifting weights. You would see people exercising in every back yard. You remember the body-beautiful craze, Merry? It was a lovely thing, man. It used to make you feel so good. You remember how those boys used to walk?”

“ ‘Wings,’ ” Meredith said, and laughed. He put down his glass and acted out the posture: squaring his shoulders, raising his elbows, and letting his hands hang loose. “The gorilla walk. But those were the needs of those days.”

Harry said, “We’re not talking the same language.”

“You are pretending you don’t understand me,” Meredith said. His smile had vanished, and he spoke precisely, with an edge in his voice. “If those people down on the beach were a little saner, don’t you think they would burn the place down twice a year? Madness keeps the place going.”

Jane said, “It’s very convenient for Mrs. Grandlieu.”

“Convenient for everybody. Convenient for you and me and Harry and Peter and Sablich’s.” But the edge had gone out of Meredith’s voice. And when he spoke again it was with a rallying tone, in a local accent: “But still, eh, Harry? After Israel, Africa.”

“Well, Merry-boy,” Harry said, floundering. “I don’t know. But if it say so in the Bible …”

Roche said, “Does the Bible say anything like that?”

Meredith said, laughing, and in the same rallying tone, “I suppose you have to look hard. But tell me, Jane, how did you get on with Mr. Leung’s son?”

She said, “You mean Jimmy Ahmed?”

He smiled at her. “At school I knew him as Jimmy Leung. Did you look into his eyes and understand the meaning of hate?”

She was puzzled.

“I was just quoting from an interview in one of the English papers. An interview by some woman. When she wrote about Jimmy she became all cunt.”

Harry said, “Merry, man.”

Meredith fixed a smile on Harry and, spacing out the words, said, as if in explanation, “She was all cunt.”

Harry said, “I don’t know what kind of language I’m hearing these days.”

“I was in London when this great Negro leader burst upon the scene. And I must say it was news to me. I had always thought of him as Mr. Leung’s son, trying to get into the Chinese scene over here and talking about going to China to advise Mao Tse-tung.”

Roche laughed. “Is this true?”

“You know people over here. They believe that everybody in China is either like Charlie Chan or Fu-Manchu. I was with the BBC at the time, and they asked me to go and do a little three-minuter with this black rebel. I went to an address in Wimbledon. It turned out to be a bloody big house. I can’t tell you about the architecture or the period—I didn’t have those eyes at the time. You grow up in a place like this, you don’t know anything about architecture. To me a house was just a house. It was old or new, big or small, poor or rich. This was a rich, big house. And this was where the leader was living. With the woman who was managing him. I can see now that she was middle class or upper class or something like that. But all I saw then was a white woman in a big house. She was arranging all the publicity, and I sat down in that big drawing room and watched that man behaving like one of those toys you wind up. And that tall woman with the flat hips was looking on, very, very happy with her little Pekingese black. And he walked up and down yapping away. She was disconcerted by me. A real Negro. But you see how bogus the whole news thing is. That woman was the story. I really should have been interviewing her. But I just recorded the yapping and edited it down to three minutes for the evening program. That was my little contribution to the Jimmy Ahmed story.”

Jane said, “Was she the woman he married?”

Harry said, “You see what I mean about encouragement? Jane, why did people in England give that man so much encouragement? I can’t tell you the amount of nonsense we used to read in the papers.”

Meredith said, “I regard him as one of the more dangerous men in this place.”

Roche said, “He would be very pleased to hear you say that.”

“He’s dangerous because he’s famous, because he has a lot of that English glamour still, and because he’s nothing at all. ‘Daddy, am I Chinese?’ ‘No, my boy. You’re just my child.’ The Chinese don’t have any hangups about that kind of thing at all. No encouragement there at all. And ever since then you can do anything you like with Jimmy Ahmed. Anybody can use that man and create chaos in this place. He can be programed. He’s the most suggestible man I know.”

Roche said, “I’ve never found him so.”

Meredith said, “You offered him the wrong things.”

Harry, laughing before he spoke, said, “You offered him work.”

“I didn’t offer him anything,” Roche said. “I only tried to help him do what he said he wanted to do.”

“I know,” Meredith said quickly, nodding. “Land, the revolution based on land. That was the London programing. But if you think Jimmy was going to come here and bury himself in the bush, you don’t know Jimmy. Jimmy has to go on and on. There’s a kind of—what’s the word? Not dynamism.”

Jane said, “Dynamic.”

“There’s a kind of dynamic about his condition that has to work itself out. In England it ended with rape and indecent assault. The same dynamic will take him to the end here.”

Roche said, “How do you think it will end here?”

“He might be a millionaire. He might be the next prime minister. It all depends on how he’s programed. In the kind of situation we have here anything is possible. One thing I’ll tell you: Jimmy isn’t going to end quietly in the bush buggering a couple of slum boys.”

“That’s what Jimmy feels too,” Roche said. “I think you’re both exaggerating.”

Harry said, “I don’t think so.”

“Tomorrow,” Meredith said, “that man might say something or make some gesture or stumble into some kind of incident, and overnight he could be a hero. The white-woman rape, running away from England, the hater of the Chinese: he can touch many chords. I know. I just have to study myself. I don’t have to try too hard to remember how I used to feel when I was a child about the Chinese shops. Jimmy always talks about being born in the back room of a Chinese shop. And in England that sounded nice and deprived. But I used to envy Jimmy. And most boys were like me, eh. A shop—how could a thing like that ever go bust? A shop had everything. It was a place where your mother sometimes sent you to get things on trust. I used to pass the Leung shop four times a day. It was on the way to school. Jimmy’s mother was a very pretty woman. Brown skin, lovely features, Spanish type, with a mass of black hair under her arms. I can’t tell you how that hair excited me. Long before I could do anything about it. I never went through that queer phase you read about. I was always straight. I used to envy old Leung, and I used to think: You can get a woman like that only if you have money, if you have a shop. To me that was just a fact of life, that our women went to live with Chinese shopkeepers. There was nothing you could do about it. Nobody had to tell me anything: I knew that that side of life was closed to me.”

Childhood, Roche thought: it was odd here how people spoke about their childhoods, as of a period only just discovered and understood. But Meredith had never spoken like this before, and Roche wondered whether Meredith knew how much he was revealing of himself.

Harry said, “I can’t believe that, Meredith.”

“And it wasn’t even what we call a grocery,” Meredith said. “A grocery was something else. Nice concrete blocks, solid, properly built, with a proper sign.”

Harry said, “You can sell liquor in a grocery.”

“The Leung shop was just a little shack, with a rusty galvanized roof and a broken-up floor and crooked walls coming down to the pavement. But it took me a long time to see it for what it was. I don’t believe I saw that place as it was until I came back from England. We’re all born as blind as kittens in this place. All of us. We can see nothing, and we remain like that even when we are educated, even when we go abroad. Look at me, working for the BBC and going to that house in Wimbledon with the tape recorder on my shoulder, and not understanding anything about the house or the woman. Just seeing a white woman and a half-Chinese man in a big house. It can take a long time to start seeing. And then you can see and see and see. You can go on seeing, but you must stop. You can start forgetting what you felt when you were a child. You can start forgetting who you are. If you see too much, you can end up living by yourself in a house on a hill. That was beginning to happen to me.”

“I never thought that was true about you, Merry,” Harry said. “Everything you said made a lot of sense to me. But if a man like you start talking like this, then this place has no future.”

“You were never blind, Harry,” Meredith said. “The one man in the country.”

“If you think we should all start jigging up to the reggae, not me, eh. If I had my way I would ban music here.”

“What do you mean by the future? What do you want? Different people want different things. Jane doesn’t want what you want. If you had one wish, Jane, what would you ask for? Shall we play that game?”

From the beach there came the sound of chatter again, and they all listened: the group returning, walking as briskly, their voices more animated now, and one voice—hard to tell whether it belonged to a man or woman—breaking into a shriek of laughter just below the house.

Harry said, “Joseph will be wanting to go and have his dip. You are staying for lunch, Merry?”

“No, man. Pamela.”

Jane said, “Let’s play the game. Ask me my one wish.”

Meredith said, “Tell us.”

Jane said, “I want lots and lots of money.”

Meredith said, “I thought you would say that.”

“You took the words out of my mouth,” Roche said. “You never miss an occasion, my dear.”

Meredith said, “Harry?”

“Occasion?” Jane said.

“To tell us how privileged you think you are,” Roche said.

Harry said, “My one wish? Well, Merry-boy, I think a lot about this one. And I suppose the truthful answer is that I want nothing. At the moment all I want is to get Marie-Thérèse back.”

Meredith said, “You mean you want to be in a position where you want nothing?”

“Merry, you putting words in my mouth. I know what you driving at. No, man, I mean nothing. I don’t want to want anything.”

Roche said, “You want to be a vegetable.”