This Side Jordan (5 page)

And yet, why should he envy him? Victor had never made use of his advantages. He was a journalist on a handset newspaper. He could have been an assistant professor at the university here, or at least a journalist on a more important newspaper. Victor’s paper was small, vituperative and – except for Victor’s copy – largely ungrammatical. Even Victor described it as ‘bush’. But he stayed. Nathaniel could never see why.

Nathaniel decided he could not tell Victor about the Kestoes. He told him instead about Jacob Abraham and the brass plaque. It was almost a reality now. Mensah had drafted a flowery letter to the parents.

‘Fine,’ Victor said. ‘Up with the brass plaque, to show people how good we are. We all say it, so it must be true.’

‘The roof will fall in one of these days,’ Nathaniel said with a grin. ‘The ceiling in my classroom has a crack that a python could hide in.’

‘Who cares? As long as Mr. Mensah can sit on his fat ass behind his nice big “ofram” desk and see the nice big sign on the door that says “Headmaster”.’

‘I don’t know,’ Nathaniel said doubtfully. ‘I think he really wants to be the headmaster of a good school, a proper school. Maybe he wants it so much he convinces himself he’s got it.’

Victor’s coarse face drew into a grimace and his eyes burned with a quick fury.

‘The old dream,’ he said. ‘We’re a race of dreamers. One of these days we’ll wake up and find that the trains have stopped running – no one could fix them. We just hoped they’d keep going by themselves. The farmers will still be using machete and hoe, while the people starve. And we will say in astonishment – “But it’s a rich country – where is the food?” The city will be piled six feet deep with the backwash from the sewers. The spitting cobra and the spider will be happily nesting in the Assembly buildings, and we will be sitting there gabbling about Ghana the Great –’

‘You depress me,’ Nathaniel said.

‘I depress everyone,’ Victor said cheerfully, ‘even my own mother. She told me today if I couldn’t talk about something pleasant, I’d better move out of her house.’

‘So?’

‘So I told her a very funny story. True. About a man at our paper, a typesetter who used to work for a European firm here. I had just pointed out about three hundred errors in a column. Do you know what he said? He said I was just as bad as his European boss, and he hadn’t expected that kind of treatment from a fellow African.’

‘Oh, fine,’ Nathaniel said. ‘And did your mother laugh?’

‘No. She said she wished she’d had a daughter instead of me.’

Nathaniel’s mind went back to Futura Academy.

‘Victor – do you think I should leave? The school, I mean. Sometimes I’m scared that Mensah will give me the sack, and other times I think the school’s no good, and I’m no good there, and I should look for something else. The term ends next week. I could give notice as soon as the exams are over.’

‘He’s got to have somebody to teach in his sweatbox. It’s better that it should be someone like you, who actually does teach them something.’

‘I wonder – if I do.’

Victor looked at him closely.

‘What’s happened now, to make you think that way?’

And so Nathaniel told him, after all, about the Kestoes. Victor nodded.

‘Whatever you’d said, he would have twisted it to make you look like a fool. That is the trick such people use. But you shouldn’t worry about it. He did the same thing with me – yes, that very man – I didn’t tell you? But listen, Nathaniel, that whiteman is going to get a shock one of these days. You can say that for Ghana – these European firms won’t be allowed to carry the whiteman’s burden much longer. You’ll see. As for Mrs. Kestoe –’

He shrugged.

‘She wants to get to know Africa. She likes Africans, I’ve heard. Isn’t that nice of her?’

‘She seemed – sincere,’ Nathaniel said grudgingly.

‘Oh, she’s sincere all right,’ Victor said. ‘These damn amateur anthropologists, they’re all sincere. You couldn’t insult them if you tried. Wait until one of them starts asking you
about native customs, Nathaniel. You know, one of these ladies once asked me in what position Africans made love.’

Nathaniel laughed.

‘What did you tell her?’

‘I told her we generally did it suspended on a rope tied firmly around the neck,’ Victor said. ‘I suggested she try it that way sometime.’

After Nathaniel left the exhibition, Miranda turned on Johnnie.

‘Did you have to be quite so rude to him?’

Johnnie laughed.

‘Did you have to agree with every single thing he said? You wouldn’t have, if he’d been white, would you?’

‘Did I do that?’ Miranda said in a low voice. ‘I suppose one does tend to agree too much, to prove sympathy. To me that’s the real meaning of whiteman’s burden – the accumulated guilt, something we’ve inherited –’

Johnnie looked at her incredulously. Guilt – it was a word she used virginally, not really knowing its meaning. Miranda hated her inexperience, that was all. She had viewed almost all of life from the old-watercolour world of Branscombe Vicarage, but she burned to have been born dockside. Marrying him, he supposed, was the closest she had come to it so far. But now she had discovered another opportunity for vicarious strife.

‘Listen, Manda,’ he said patiently, ‘I was damned lucky to get this job, and I don’t want to risk it now. Do you want every European in the place to be talking about you?’

‘I don’t understand you,’ she said. ‘I would have thought that you, of all people, would want to do whatever you could, as far as Africans are concerned –’

‘Why the hell should I?’

She hesitated.

‘A few people helped you – to go ahead.’

‘Did they? I don’t think so.’

‘What about that old man in the furniture store? Janowicz.’

‘You’re fascinated by him, aren’t you? I wish I’d never told you.’

‘You haven’t told me very much,’ Miranda said. ‘Only that you went to work for Janowicz when you were fourteen, toward the end of the war, and that he taught you a lot – gave you books, made you practise proper speech, started you off at night school –’

‘I don’t owe Jano anything – he’d be the first to admit it. Why, he was such an old soak, he was glad to find a kid willing to work for him. Anything he taught me, I’d have learned by myself, anyway.’

‘You have to feel that, don’t you?’

Johnnie tensed.

‘That’s right, Manda – get everything tidily analysed, and then you can read me like a report. I may turn out to be really weird – is that what you want?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Miranda said humbly. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

‘Hurt me?’ he cried. ‘Don’t talk bloody nonsense.’

It was true, what he had told her. He owed Janowicz nothing, unless you counted the cockeyed advice that flowed out of Jano’s mouth as freely as the wine flowed in.

‘Play it smart, Johnnie –’ the Pole’s asiatic face would twist into an imitation of a film gangster, ‘play it smart, cockerel. I will tell you the secret of success – yes, I, Janowicz, seller of broken chairs, the man they say is as cracked as the china
chamber-pots he sells. The greatest luxury in this life is not champagne or caviar, my friend, it is principles. Ideals. When you are really rich, you can afford them. Not before.’

More wine. Then Janowicz would fling himself into the heavy oak rocker at the back of the Anastasia Furniture Mart, and rock furiously to and fro, weeping and bellowing that he was the Devil’s Advocate, and how could Johnnie stand there and listen to him without argument.

‘For sweet Mary’s sake,’ Johnnie would say, laughing until he ached, ‘do you want to ruin the only decent piece of furniture you’ve got for sale?’

Well, it had been the first good laughter he’d ever known, and they’d got drunk, the two of them, many a time, and cursed the world for its parsimony. But neither owed the other anything. For Johnnie, the shop had been a refuge from the grudging charity of Aunt Rose’s child-infested house. As for Janowicz, only through constant talk could he maintain the sacred belief that his failure was on a grand scale. Two-fingered hand that hoisted the sour crock of cheap red wine; prophetbeard bristling with shed food snippets; stale shirt and rancid armpit; all verses in an epic poem, like the fall of Lucifer. Johnnie had been an obliging listener. It had been a fair exchange.

Johnnie and Miranda did not go out that night, and all evening there was a silence between them that neither tried to breach.

They went to bed early and lay side by side for a long time, still and quiet in the sweat-drawing night.

Johnnie’s body was tight and hard, and deep inside him his need throbbed, like the tickling tic of an anarchical nerve, like a misplaced heartbeat. That was the worst – the absurdity of it.

‘You asleep, Manda?’

‘No. I can’t sleep.’

‘Cigarette?’

‘All right.’

In the distance, the drums sounded. They would keep on all night. These were not the drums of highlife, slicked-up, sophisticated. These were the old drums, played out under some frayed casuarina tree, or beside shanties of mudbrick and tin, in any open space, where the sun and feet of centuries had packed the red earth hard as stone. There would be dancing – the pumpkin hips of women swaying, the muscles of men perfectly controlled even in frenzy.

‘Blasted drums,’ Johnnie said irritably. ‘They never stop.’

He crushed out his cigarette.

‘Turn over,’ he said, ‘with your back to me. Then at least you’ll look like my wife.’

Almost meekly, she did so. But it was no use. He couldn’t forget, even momentarily, how she looked from the other side, belly swollen nearly to her breasts. Like a cow’s udder, blue-veined, heavy, drawn drum-tight with its contents.

‘I know it’s miserable for you,’ she said. ‘But – you could have kept on longer –’

‘We’ve talked over all this before,’ he said tiredly. ‘I couldn’t. I’m sorry. I can’t explain, but there it is.’

‘Johnnie – you do want this baby, don’t you?’

‘You were dead keen to have it,’ he said, ‘and you’re having it. Isn’t that enough?’

‘Perhaps I was wrong.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Of course you weren’t wrong. You needed it, I suppose. You can’t help the way you are, any more than I can. Now let’s get some sleep before it’s morning.’

Johnnie lay limp as seaweed.

In the limbo between reality and sleep, thoughts merged and melted and changed. Magic symbols – a rune, a spell, a charm – the thing that made him different from any other man on earth. His name. John Kestoe. What proved identity more than a name? If you had a name, you must exist. I am identified; therefore, I am. If they say ‘who are you?’, you know what to reply. It makes for convenience. It might as well be a number, but numbers are harder to remember.

Kilburn, London N.W. The room was dark in day, cold as a corpse. The squeaking stairs wound, up and up and up, tiring the legs off you, and the bits of untacked lino were traps to trip the unwary. He remembered how scared he always was of running into that nameless man-tenant who used to finger him, cursing sweetly into his ear all the while with breath that stank of sugared violets. The hallways smelled of boiled swedes and shop-fried fish and the harsh soap that was the women’s last defence against chaos. The room was up so close to the top of the building that you knew the choking winter fog would still be with you after it had lifted from the street.

That was the room his mother died in, while he sat by and watched. Strange, how dim kids are about things. The red stain spread and spread on the quilt, and it was quite a while before he realized it was her blood doing it. His father watched, too, sitting empty-faced while she cursed and prayed by turns. The Irish had good lungs – you could say that for them, those who didn’t have T.B. No feeble last gasps for them. People must have heard his mother dying all the way up Kilburn High Road.

Most of what she screamed you couldn’t understand. The sacred and profane words tangled together in a raw hoarse
cry. One phrase stood out stark – ‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph, assist me in my last agony –’. In later years he realized that the words came from ‘A Prayer For A Happy Death’.

His father, the halfman, gutless as always, kept repeating over and over to his son that they didn’t have money for a doctor, and he was afraid to call the priest because ‘she done it herself’. It was some weeks before Johnnie realized what it was that she had done, and why. His aunt Rose took pains to tell him his mother had been a sinful woman, and at first Johnnie had believed her sin to be suicide. It came as a surprise to him when he found out that she had not meant to kill herself but only the little blind humanworm in her.

For a while, after he discovered the truth, he had felt himself in some way tainted. The thought of himself issuing from that body – it had made him sick with disgust, as though he could never be anything more than a clot of blood on a dirty quilt.

At last, in desperation, Dennis Kestoe had shambled out to find the priest, leaving the boy to sit beside her in the evening-filled room, where the one weak ceiling bulb, far up and faint, only nibbled at the yellow-grey fog and the shadows.

He had watched and watched, terrified lest she realize he was there and cry out to him, to him who had nothing to give her in her need, not even his love.

So Mary Kestoe died, her black hair tumbling wild around her neck, her eyes open wide, as hard and bitter as they’d been in life, and staring her frantic fear of hell. And the high cold attic room grew silent at last.

‘Heart of Jesus, once in agony, pity the dying!’

Father Duggan had hurried in, lisping, spraying spit through yellow teeth. The boy knew the prayer wasn’t right, but he left the priest to discover that the dying was now the dead.

They questioned him, then, the priest and Aunt Rose, who, phone-summoned, had flurried in wielding a black umbrella as though Michael the holy standard-bearer had sent her in his stead.

Had Mary Kestoe made an Act of Contrition? Think carefully, Johnnie – did she say these exact words? Did she say ‘O my God, I am sorry for having offended Thee, because I love Thee’? I don’t know – I don’t remember – she was yelling and yelling and then it was quiet. I don’t know.