Guerrillas (24 page)

A metallic hissing from somewhere in the house obliterated Adela’s hymns. Then there was a series of snaps and sighs and a prolonged rattling. The water had come on: open taps ran, tanks were filling up.

Roche said, “I’m glad they’ve remembered. I’m sure that’s all it was, you know. Somebody just forgot. I think I’ll give myself a proper bath. It may be the last one for a long time.”

The water pipes settled down. Adela’s hymn program ended and she turned off her radio. There was silence.

Later, in her room, as she was adjusting the redwood louvers, Jane thought: I am alone. And she was astonished at her calm.

She heard Roche running his bath. She lay in bed, longing for drowsiness and sleep and the morning, playing with images of the day: the brown bush around Jimmy Ahmed’s house, the specks of blood on the globules of sweat on the policeman’s too closely shaved top lip, his curiously dainty run across the empty square,
the lost gray villages in the overgrown cocoa and coffee estates, the bright sea seen though the coconut plantation, the fast drive up to the Ridge, the estuary and the candles and the blindfolded stampers. She thought: I have always been alone since I’ve been here. With that the panic and the wakefulness came. And then the telephone began to ring.

The telephone rang in the sitting room with the nearly empty shelves on the concrete walls, the solid three-piece company suite; and the ringing bounced into the open hall and down the concrete walls and parquet floor of the passage to the plywood of her own door. Roche didn’t leave his bathroom to answer; and the telephone rang and rang. At last she put on her light and got out of bed. She left her bedroom door open, and the light from the bedroom went down the passage, reflected in the hall, and from there cast a diminished glimmer into the sitting room.

She stood beside the ringing telephone. She thought: I’ll let it ring ten times. She caught sight of herself, barely reflected in the picture window that looked out on the front lawn: so solid-looking with the dark outside, that sealed pane of glass, so vulnerable. She lifted the telephone.

“Hello.”

“Jane. Harry.” He pronounced it
Hah-ree
. “You were getting me worried, girl.” His musical voice was always a surprise. “You get through?”

“Yes.”

“I get through too. How you liking the little excitement?”

“There isn’t much up here.”

“Jane, I don’t know whether you and Peter have any plans for going out tonight. But they’re going to declare a state of emergency in a couple of hours. And I think they must know their own business.”

“Do you know what is happening?”

“Nobody knows what the hell is happening. Or what is going to happen. Is the police fault, nuh. They surrender the body of that boy they shoot, without asking anybody anything. They thought the body was going to the mother’s house. But you should know
that man Jimmy Ahmed start walking round the town with the body, picking up one hell of a procession. Everybody washing their foot and jumping in. Everybody carrying a piece of palm branch or coconut branch. The Arrow of Peace. You ever hear of that before? I never hear of that before. Imagine a thing like that happening to your own body: people toting it round the town. Those people crazy like hell, man.”

“Is Marie-Thérèse all right? Have you heard from her?”

“Well, child, Marie-Thérèse telephone just this minute, to find out whether I get through. Is she who tell me about the state of emergency. She talk to Joseph top. He is in one hell of a state. How is Adela? I shouldn’t say too much in front of her, you know.”

“That’s easy. She isn’t talking to us today.”

“Sunday. I remember. Well, Jane, we’ll keep in touch. The telephone is still working, thank God. It may be nothing at all, you know. They’ll probably just chase a few white people and burn down a couple of Chinese shops, that’s all. It’ll be a nice little excitement for you. It isn’t the kind of thing you get in Chelsea or Tottenham.”

She met Roche in the passage, bare-chested and in his pajama trousers.

He said, “Who was that?”

She said, “Jimmy.”

“Jimmy! Why didn’t you call me?”

“I don’t mean Jimmy. It was Harry. He says they’re rioting and there’s a state of emergency.”

“Who’s rioting?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you telephone him and find out?”

Her words came out more impatiently than she intended. As she made to pass him she saw him surprised; she saw his face harden.

He said, in his precise way, “I’ll do just that.”

And when she was in her room, and in bed, the light turned off, she heard the ping of the telephone bell as the speaker was taken off the hook.

She thought: It’s out of my hands.

.   .   .

SHE CAME out of sleep to the dark, enclosed room, to that sense of the nightmare journey and of an unstable, dissolving world; and to the half-knowledge of a catastrophe. She was quickened into wakefulness. Her mind cleared; confusion and nightmare receded. She opened the louvers and was startled, as always every morning, by the brightness of the light. Dew was heavy on the brown front lawn. When she opened the folding doors at the back she saw that the metal chairs and table on the brick porch were wet. No smoke on the hills yet; the city lay clear below, and the thick tufted mangrove swamp and the smooth gray sea; and the early sun glinted on the white planes at the airport. The city was silent. This was always the sweetest part of the day.

She walked out to the front gate in her striped sacking dress, the one she had worn to some dinner parties and now used as a dressing gown. The newspaper was in the newspaper box on the gate: it was a second or so before she thought it was strange that life should continue, that newspapers should be printed during the night and delivered in the morning.

The front page showed no hysteria. It preserved its regular format, and the events of the previous day had been reduced to a number of separate and apparently unrelated stories. The main headline announced the state of emergency; the text, in heavy type, was the official proclamation. A single column on the left, with a grotesque old photograph, told of Meredith Herbert’s recall to the government as minister without portfolio. A double-column story at the foot of the page,
Guerrilla Shin in Dawn Shoot-out
, was about the shooting of Stephens and the recovery of banknotes from his mother’s house. Another item reported, more or less in the words of an official communiqué, a “police operation” in the center of the city.

Standard news, a normal day: the items were like items Jane seemed to have been reading in the newspaper ever since she had arrived.

Adela was up. From her room came a tremendous throat-clearing which was probably intended to conceal other noises. And
after this there was her morning radio program,
I Hear the South Land Singing
. Half-past six.

So life was continuing. And when, in her white uniform, Adela started striding through the large rooms, thump, thump, on parquet and terrazzo, the house was like itself again. Clearing away the things from last night’s supper, Adela thrust her fingers down the sides of the beer glasses. She went still for a second, and then had a little frenzy. A tremor ran through her body, she knitted her brow, bunched her lips together and made an angry noise which sounded like stewps. Then, the frenzy over, her protest made, she lifted the glasses and became active again.

At seven o’clock, as always on a weekday, they listened to the BBC news, which was relayed by the local radio station. There was no mention of their own crisis.

After breakfast and the newspaper, Roche said, “So Meredith was a minister when he came among us yesterday. I suppose he liked the idea of keeping it secret. I must say I feel more and more at sea here. I can’t read these people. All these little secrets. I suppose I’m an easy man to fool. Mrs. Stephens certainly fooled me. I never guessed—the idea didn’t even occur to me—that she was hiding all that money for her son.”

Though Jane was listening to what he was saying, and though she was letting her mind play with his words, she was without the energy or will to acknowledge his words. And then it was too late. Her silence became pointed, and his face hardened as it had hardened the previous evening.

He left the kitchen and went to the back door and looked down the hills to the city.

He said, “Jimmy’s big moment. It just goes to show. I never thought that anything like that was possible. The one gesture. Meredith knew what he was talking about.” He paused and then said, as if speaking to himself, “I should have gone to the house. They’ll believe I knew and didn’t go.”

Abruptly he turned and walked with determination back to the kitchen, to the dining area behind the cupboard divider. Jane was drinking coffee out of a heavy earthenware cup, company
issue. She was aware of him walking toward her; she was aware of his sudden rage. She steadied the cup with her left hand and held it against her lips, her elbows on the white formica table. Her eyes were large and moist. He was infuriated by her air of expectation, her posture, her lips on the coffee cup.

He said, “I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about it all night. I’ve heard you talk about your friends. Who are your friends? What do you talk about? What do you offer them? What do you have to offer them?”

He had never spoken to her like that before. And she was not at all dismayed by his anger. She put the cup down. More decisively, then, she took the newspaper, stood up and, lifting the long sacking dress above her ankles, walked out to the porch and sat down in the sun in one of the metal chairs Adela had wiped dry.

She sat there and was confirmed in the feeling of solitude that had come to her the evening before. And, unexpectedly, from this feeling of solitariness she found that she had begun to draw strength.

She sat out in the sun, steadily less pleasant, until she was dazed. This she did on most mornings, until the heat, increasing together with the noise of the working city, drove her inside: the individual noises of horns and motorcycles, children’s cries, bicycle bells, trucks and buses in low gear, gradually multiplying and becoming a steady rhythmic throb which, mingled with the noise of a thousand radios tuned to the same station, turned into what the ear could take for a reggae beat, a creation of sun and heat. But the city remained silent this morning. Sun and heat awakened no life and seemed instead to deaden the city. The sun dried out the wet clumps of long Bermuda grass that grew against the retaining wall of the back garden; obliterated the beads of dew on hibiscus leaves and flowers; dried out the lawn around the porch. Threads of smoke began to rise here and there from the hills and, far away, from the great plain. Mangrove and sea blurred together in the heat haze.

Just after noon she saw the first fire in the city below. Not the thin white smoke of bush fires, or the brown-gray spread of
the burning rubbish dump; but a small inky eruption of the densest black, erupting and erupting and not becoming less dense or less black, with little spurts and streaks of red that then fell back into the blackness. Explosions, but the sound didn’t carry up to the Ridge. From the Ridge the sunlit city continued to be silent. Then two other fires could be seen: two little leaks of dense black smoke.

Harry telephoned. Jane answered.

Harry said, “They’re burning a few liquor shops. They take out another procession this morning. That man Jimmy Ahmed, nuh. You know, I hear they chase Meredith. The police too damn frighten now to shoot. Look, Jane, I think we should telephone at regular intervals. Just in case, nuh. I hear the government about to resign. One or two of the guys fly out already.”

Jane said, “But I haven’t seen any planes leave.”

“Me neither. But that’s what they say. Truck after truck just taking furniture and china and things like that to the airport. China! You see those people! Anybody would think that Wedgwood and Spode close down. It would be pathetic if it wasn’t so damn frightening. But, look, we must telephone, eh. Just to keep in touch, nuh. While the telephone still going. What is the food situation like by you? You have enough?”

“I don’t know. But I think so.”

The fires continued to burn in the silent city. Adela came out and stood on the porch and looked down at the city. But she never mentioned the fires to Jane or Roche; and neither of them spoke of the fires.

Between one and five Adela was free. But when Jane went to the kitchen in the middle of the afternoon to get a glass of water she saw Adela there, in her uniform, buttering sliced bread: two or three stacks of buttered slices on one side, unbuttered slices on the other. Around the bread stacks were dishes of mashed tuna and salmon, bowls of chopped chicken, sliced cucumber, and sliced eggs. Adela didn’t acknowledge Jane’s presence; she went on buttering bread.

Jane said, “Sandwiches?”

Adela bunched her lips and knitted her brow, buttering now with the air of someone too busy to waste time on idle talk.

Jane recognized Adela’s explosive mood and said no more. She drank a tumbler of cold water—there were four bottles in the refrigerator to see them through the waterless afternoon—and went back to her shuttered room. There she began to think. The electricity might fail. No electricity, no water, no refrigerator, no lights, no cooking: sandwiches for the long siege. Would they eat all those sandwiches? Would the sandwiches keep? She remembered what Harry had said about food, and she became dismayed. She went out into the passage and saw Roche. He had been to the kitchen and had seen what Jane had seen; he too was dismayed.

He said, “It looks as though we’re losing some of our rations.”

Jane went to the kitchen and said, “You’ve made a lot of sandwiches, Adela.”

Adela said, “I taking it down to the station.”

The station: the police station. Jane could say nothing. She stood by, watching and not interfering, while Adela, still with knitted brow, and still with deft hands, lined two wickerwork shopping baskets with a damp cloth, packed the sandwiches in, covered them with another damp cloth, and then knotted the bundle within each basket.