Tefuga (13 page)

But am I? Going to stop worrying, I mean. Am I going to
do
anything? What
can
I do? She said, “We speak to
you
, Betty Jackland.” She thought I could, 'cos if she'd been me she'd have been able to.

You know, suppose it had been a man who'd come to Ted with what I told him—no more, same kind of muddle and not being certain. He'd have taken it a bit more seriously, wouldn't he? Even a man he barely knew, when he knows me so well. Or does he? At all? I wonder. What does it mean, knowing someone? But I think I
understand
Ted much, much better than he'll ever understand me. He doesn't have to, you see. It's his world, so it's the shape he makes it, and I have to fit into the bits left over, so I've got to understand where that is. It was the same with Daddy. I hated him, but I had to watch him and think about him a lot so I'd know how I could go on living my own secret life without him noticing. I hated Daddy and I love Ted, but in a funny way that doesn't make much difference.

Anyway, I
am
going to do something for those women. I haven't got much to work with, only Ted. For instance, I could stop being nice to him till he did something himself. Dangerous. He's got such a strong sense of honour. If he thought I was trying to blackmail him with that … Not much fun for me, anyway. And too soon. I do see there's precious little he can do at the mo, till we find out more. Better the other way. If he thinks he needs me so much he doesn't mind what else happens … he's half way there already.

You know, I ought to feel sneaky and horrid and disloyal thinking like this, but I don't. You have to have a life of your own, and the way things are that means it's got to be a secret life.

And anyway, it's more interesting.

Seven

T
he trucks boomed north along the great K.H.P. road for thirty miles, then took a spur westwards. The tarmac surface ended suddenly, not in any chosen geographical location but at the point where the money had run out. A rough track continued westward. Where the bush was open enough to allow it the trucks drove in wedge formation to avoid the heavy reddish dust-trail churned up by the leader. Occasionally the one carrying Pittapoulos would surge ahead so that he could film the other two coming past. They had no need for these sequences in the film, though possibly they might find a place later in Jackland's series, but it is apparently ordained that where two or three trucks are going through bush together one must stop to film the others. And conceivably the shots, with those taken at Tefuga itself, might mollify some accountant fretting over the cost of the unbudgeted expedition. It was early afternoon by the time they reached Tefuga, the heaviest heat of the day in this supposedly cool season, but that had to be endured if they were to make the round trip before nightfall.

The drivers were steering directly for the huts when Miss Tressider, who had been conducting her interview with Miss Boyaba in the back of the lead car, leaned forward and said, “Don't let them go right in, Nigel.”

Jackland spoke to the driver, who pulled aside into the shade of a clump of flat-topped trees, their trunks gnarled with annual grass-burnings­. The other cars followed. The technicians, so calloused by the long delays of their trade that no arrival on location could now excite them, certainly not another bunch of grass-roofed huts in flat bush, climbed down, lit cigarettes, picked desultorily over their equipment. The petrol feed on one truck had been playing up; the three drivers gathered round the open bonnet and discussed the mystery without enthusiasm. The others, nine in all, walked towards the village through the heavy, hazed sunlight. Black people wearing only grass belts, and in the case of the women plaited grass collars, had appeared in front of the huts to stare at the visitors.

“Hold it,” said Burn. “We don't want a great gang crashing in on them. Jalo, you go ahead and sort it out. They'll know what we're up to—Trevor was out here last month. All we want is some long-distance shots of the hill. One or two of the village too, maybe.”

“Perhaps Miss Boyaba might go too,” said Jackland. “She speaks Kiti.”

“Oh, no! I've forgotten it all, almost. But I'd love to go.”

The white group watched their two black emissaries cross the thirty-yard gap. The villagers, all elderly, had the look of genuine primitives. There was no hint that they had dressed up, or rather down, for their visitors, or that crumbs from the table of consumer civilization (a radio, an old bike, an aluminium cooking-pot) had been brushed out of sight into the huts. The gap between them and Miss Boyaba seemed vastly greater than that between Miss Boyaba and, say, Miss Tressider.

“Nice sexy walk, that,” said Pittapoulos.

The comment caused a faint alteration in the currents that existed between the members of the group, easing some because it gave voice to what most of the men were probably thinking, heightening others because Miss Boyaba had arrived as Jackland's protégé and Jackland already generated certain currents because of his relationship with Miss Tressider, inevitably the focus of the group's interest in matters sexual. Miss Tressider actually glanced at Jackland, but he seemed not to have heard. He was watching intently as Miss Boyaba said her first words to the villagers. They smiled and answered. She laughed. Miss Tressider pinched Jackland's forearm, using her nails to make it hurt. He looked down.

“I've got something else in common with your mum,” she said.

“Oh?”

“We've got the same ideas about harems.”

She made no show of keeping her voice down.

“I will endeavour to respect your prejudices,” said Jackland. “Did Annie tell you what happened after my mother left Kama Boi's palace, that day she painted his wives?”

“No.”

“There's a level of irony I'd missed. Good thing, probably. You can't get it all in, ever. I've promised to show her the diary.”

“Haven't you got a typescript?”

Jackland didn't answer. He seemed absorbed by the encounter in front of the huts. The interpreter, Jalo, who despite his claims had turned out to speak no Kiti at all, was evidently trying to negotiate in Hausa. Three old men were listening; their tribal scars made it impossible to tell whether they were as bewildered as they looked. Miss Boyaba had moved slightly apart and was engaged with a mixed group, using as much body-language as speech. A sense of surprise and cheerfulness emerged strongly from around her. Suddenly she broke off and ran back—an absurd, incompetent, high-kneed gait dictated by the heels of her shoes. She snatched Jackland by the hand.

“Come and meet them,” she said. “I think I've found a cousin. I told you I could still say hello.”

“A strong spirit in Annie Boyaba.”

“And a strong spirit in Nigel Jackland.”

She repeated the sentence in what was evidently Kiti, musical syllables that seemed to slur into each other, making the shape of each individual sound very hard to pick out. Her intense, unforced excitement at this twenty-five-per-cent homecoming—her other three-quarters belonging genetically elsewhere in Nigeria—was easy to share, seeming almost to colour the oppressive pale light around her. Prattling away she dragged Jackland off to be introduced to the villagers. Burn and Pittapoulos went to join Jalo—the three old men, it turned out, spoke perfectly adequate Hausa. The others followed Jackland, and Miss Tressider found herself included in the introductions in a marginal fashion. She showed no resentment, and may well have been pleased and amused to find herself in a community where her name, though repeated several times, meant nothing whatsoever.

After the first two or three introductions she made an attempt at Kiti, but despite her gifts and training must have managed to say something else, happily inappropriate. The villagers laughed, and laughed again as she repeated or perhaps compounded the error. She mimed stupidity and shame, clowning precisely enough to let her audience realize that she was as amused as they were and they could continue to laugh without offence.

“I will teach you,” said Miss Boyaba.

“No. You stay and help Nigel make friends.”

Miss Tressider beckoned to two old women and drew them aside for a lesson. In the main group Miss Boyaba continued to unearth shards of her childhood vocabulary. Jackland, characteristically, moved outside the group to watch. Pittapoulos came up to him.

“We've got a problem,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Notice something? It's a geriatric community.”

“That's what tends to happen. The younger ones head off for the towns.”

“You don't have to tell me. Seen it again and again. Only you can usually find one or two who've not been bright enough to clear out. Can't see 'em here.”

“We'll do without. It'll be ten seconds' screen-time, if that.”

“Unless we can persuade yon dusky charmer to strip off.”

“Wrong colour. She's supposed to be dark brown.”

“I'll use a filter. Do you mind asking her, Nige?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”

Pittapoulos raised a bushy eyebrow and glanced with deliberate lack of tact at Miss Tressider, intent on her Kiti lesson. Though he had worked successfully with Jackland before, they could not be said to have liked each other. It might have seemed that this was simply because Pittapoulos thought Jackland a snob, and Jackland thought Pittapoulos a vulgarian. Though this was probably true, other tensions arose in their attitude to their work, Pittapoulos being uninterested in ideas of any kind that could not find expression in a visual image, and also being prepared to fake that image to any extent he needed. To him the picture shown on the screen was in itself the truth, or at least a truth, whereas Jackland was invariably dissatisfied by its failures, distortions and omissions. To use one of his own favourite images, the world was a fish that invariably got away; all he could do was come home and stretch his arms across the screen to show the size of it.

This time there was a further mild cause of tension. Pittapoulos's hobby was the compilation of a tape, already several hours long, of naked women, filmed by himself, the subjects being unaware of the event. He was not interested in professional models, but was as it were a visual rapist, adept at manoeuvring events to suit his purpose, using both the patience and the ingenuity of the wildlife photographer. He did not only pursue his hobby in remote areas where nakedness was the norm. His tape was said to include a brief clip from a royal event in the English shires.

He had early expressed disappointment at the way Jackland's script respected the superficial reticence of the diaries, with its asterisks and circumlocutions. Not that Pittapoulos would have included in his tape anything shot for public viewing, but there would have been moments in the preparation for such scenes when a camera would somehow have been left running. Miss Tressider would hardly have minded, but Jackland probably would. Perhaps the fact that Jackland was currently enjoying an actuality to which even Pittapoulos would not have claimed the screen image was preferable added to the desire to needle.

Jackland followed his glance, apparently unruffled. Miss Tressider seemed by now to have mastered the sentence. Her tutors' giggles had changed to clucks of approval. They swapped greetings a couple of times more, and then Miss Tressider turned. Her face became her version of Betty Jackland. She spoke the brief phrase, experimentally, to empty air. The final syllables were the name “Femora Feng”.

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.”