Six

 

Gotto’s threats and the growing certainty that he was living with a troublemaker stayed in Jimmy’s mind for some time and, hard as he tried to avoid thinking of them, he could not thrust them aside. And, with each day that ended in its flare of gold among the palm trees, he found life being complicated further by a series of trivial incidents concerning Gotto and the African labourers. To be true, these were more wordy than important for the most part but, in the end, while Gotto was disinterestedly rattling the out-of-date newspapers after dinner, he found an excuse for leaving and made his way up to Earnshaw’s.

Earnshaw’s house was like Earnshaw himself. Even outside, it looked untidy and none too clean. The path to the front door was edged by buried and up-ended beer bottles and at the side the bush encroached too closely for health. But, oddly, at the front, mixed up with old shoes and a dirty shirt and giving it a homely, lived-in look, were half a dozen white-painted petrol tins containing geraniums whose blood-red blooms looked purple in the moonlight. Suri, Earnshaw’s coxswain, and another African were sitting on the veranda, playing a native game similar to five-stones, noisy and excited and laughing.

Unwashed and unshaven and still in his oil-stained shorts, his damp shirt on the chair back despite the darkness and the pinging of the mosquitoes round his bare flesh, Earnshaw sprawled under a lamp at the table, playing patience, in front of him a glass of water and a jar of stomach powder. His iron-grey hair stood straight up, uncombed and unbrushed, like the stubble in a newly-cut wheatfield. Behind him, balanced precariously on the old sewing machine Suri used to patch his shorts, his gramophone screeched barbarically across the room.

He looked up as Jimmy entered and gave him a crafty grin.

“Just keeping it on the run, old lad,” he said. He shoved the gin bottle across the untidy table and signed to Jimmy to find a seat.

Jimmy removed a plate, a tin mug and a rifle and cleaning rags from a sagging basket chair and sat down.

“I’d like–” he began but the music roaring across the room drowned the rest of his words.

Earnshaw saw the glance he gave the gramophone and, becoming, conscious of the noise for the first time, snatched the needle off with an indigestive ‘brrrrp’. “Gawd, what a bloody row,” he commented.

“Thanks,” Jimmy said heavily.

“What’s up, old lad?” Earnshaw pushed his chair back and swung round. “You look proper in the dripping. Old How-To-Win-Friends-And-Influence-People been upsetting you?”

Jimmy nodded. “I’d like a bit of advice,” he said.

“Let it rip, kid. You got the deck.”

Brushing occasionally at a too-venturesome mosquito, Earnshaw listened to Jimmy in silence, then suggested calling on Romney.

“Old Doc’ll know,” he said. “There’s a bloke what wasn’t born yesterday. He don’t know what to do after thirty years out here, well, it’s time I ett my granny’s hat. He seen it all. He’s on the second time round now.”

They found Romney sitting in the shabby little closet he used as a surgery, beneath an oil lamp that crowded the room with shadows. He was facing the doorway so that his view in daylight had contained the expanse of the hills in all their varying tints.

The place was empty except for a bright native rug on the floor and a case full of books which were pockmarked with mildew. It was as bare as a prison cell – as bare as Romney could get it of trivialities – and it smelled of the hospital odour of antiseptics.

Romney slowly dabbed at the perspiration on his forehead with a handkerchief and waited patiently, a little resentful at the intrusion into his leisure, as Jimmy laid out his facts. He looked comfortable and elderly with his book on his knees and his spectacles on the end of his nose. An insecticide spray gun was on the floor alongside with a glass in which a beetle was quietly drowning in the last drop of gin. He had had his evening swim in the pool behind his house that had been dammed from the clear mountain stream which ran into the river – the usual three times up and three times down – and he had a feeling of languor in his limbs. The evenings were the time of the day that Romney liked best. It was in the evenings when the night scents rose from the crowding undergrowth and the darkness turned the harshness of the day to the velvet of the night, and Romney didn’t welcome any interference with his enjoyment of them.

He looked up over his spectacles as Jimmy spoke in an explosive indignation, odds and ends of law and order and the rights of man rattling round in his head like an armoured cavalcade.

“Good heavens, son,” he said when he had finished. “What people say about me doesn’t worry me any more. You stop worrying about those things long before you reach seventy. In any case, he’s quite right. There was a little trouble with the Medical Council.”

Jimmy’s jaw dropped and Romney waved a fat hand.

“I stopped worrying about that years ago though, too. Don’t trouble yourself about me. Think about the Africans. They’re the ones who’re going to need your help, I suspect.”

“He seems to have a thing about black men,” Jimmy agreed, still a little surprised by Romney’s revelation. “And, hell, they’re not half-wits. They’ve got feelings like he has. There are good ones as well as bad ones.”

“In fact,” Romney commented slyly, “you’ve unearthed a basic truth that never ceases to surprise people when they discover it for the first time – that there’s nothing to choose between the white and black races.”

Jimmy blushed. “No, there isn’t,” he said, “and there’s no need to chivvy ’em as he does. I wouldn’t mind,” he added with a shrug, “but they’re beginning to associate not only him with the bullying but me too.”

“One of the burdens of the righteous is to be misjudged.”

“You know what’s wrong with Gotto?” Earnshaw offered from the doorway where he sat with his back to the lintel. “He’s nuts. That’s what.”

“On the contrary,” Romney said, “he’s being very normal. Insecure people are often bullies. It’s a sop to their ego, a consolation prize, if you like.”

“Well, he’s quicker off the mark than anyone I’ve ever come across,” Jimmy said. “He’s got the Temne and the Mende at each other’s throats already. There was a fight the other night in the town – just as you said there’d be – a party or something, and too much palm wine and native beer. There were casualties–”

“I know,” Romney said. “I got one here. He’d had his ear half torn off in the scuffle.”

“It was quite a party, I believe.”

“An African crowd enjoys emotions to the full. Even other people’s.”

“I only hope he hasn’t got one of these circuses going when Twigg arrives. That’s all. He’s due to look us over any time now.”

“Don’t worry, kid,” Earnshaw said. “Twiggy’ll dodge Gotto like the plague.”

Jimmy looked puzzled and unhappy. “There’s no warmth in the man anywhere. Ever since I came here, I’ve been trying to find some spark, and apart from a half-hearted effort from him at the start, I can’t.”

“Not surprised,” Earnshaw commented. “He’s as cold as an old fried egg. Perhaps ’e’s congealed. Perhaps ’e’s dead even. They pretty good at embalming these days.”

He turned his head sideways to apply a match to the scorched cigarette end between his lips. “You seen the mammies frightening the kids to bed with his name?” he asked as he blew out a cloud of smoke. “‘Gotto’s coming’,” he squeaked in imitation of a black woman chasing her piccaninny indoors. “‘Gotto’s coming. He eat you up.’ I’ve heard ’em. Honest. They run like there was a crocodile after ’em. Cripes–” he sighed heavily and tossed the burnt match through the door – “if only he’d laugh sometimes.”

“For Gotty,” Jimmy said with a grin, “life is real, life is earnest. Much realer and earnester than for the rest of us.”

Romney didn’t join in the mirth. “I think it is and that’s the whole trouble,” he said quietly so that Jimmy felt vaguely ashamed of his levity.

Romney began to wipe the mistiness of perspiration from his spectacles. Behind him, the yellow light threw his face into darkness as he sat motionless, only his hands moving. Against the dusty wire mesh of the window, a moth beat itself to death with soft flutterings like the hammering of tiny fists.

“I suppose,” he said at last, “it wouldn’t matter half so much if it weren’t that he could be such an asset to Indian Joe.”

“Indian Jo?” Jimmy looked up in alarm. “Where’s he come into it?”

Romney sat back, holding his spectacles on his knees.

“Indian Joe didn’t know sufficient to start a mine here,” he said, “but he’s clever enough to listen to what’s said in his bar and he’d like to buy it – the cheaper the better.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m a doctor – the only one in Amama. Everybody comes to me. And people talk to doctors.” He paused before he went on. “He’d sell it again, of course. He’s no engineer. But he’d make a big profit. Perhaps all this is the reason for the rice shortage. They can still manufacture them. He’s probably trying to make the output drop by stirring up trouble.”

“Trouble!” Jimmy said. “God, that word!”

Romney put his glasses on, hitching them round his ears with care, and placed his finger-tips together to make a pyramid of his hands. Then he looked up, his old eyes distorted by the strong lenses. “I notice Samuel Assissay’s still in Amama,” he pointed out. “That wasn’t what Twigg intended when he sent him up from Ma-Imi. He came to see me this morning with what would be a black eye if he were white. Somebody hit him.”

“What for?”

“The usual.” Romney shrugged his fat stooping shoulders. “Haranguing a crowd. They’re not keen on him in Amama.”

“Well, he doesn’t seem to be doing any harm.”

“He isn’t at the moment, but it hasn’t taken him long to realise our friend Gotto isn’t popular.”

“Oh, Lord! Now I see what you’re getting at.”

“He’s three parts ju-ju, but he could get a crowd moving, and violence spreads like the green bay tree, especially among primitive people. You see, in an isolated place like Amama, an organisation like the mine grows a little out of proportion and tends to become a power it was never intended to be. And so, hence, does the man who runs it – in this case, Gotto.”

Jimmy studied the floor, watching the slow trudge of a centipede along the wainscoting. He was a little overwhelmed by what Romney had said.

“Gotto sacked half a dozen Mende the other day because one of them came to my surgery,” the old man went on, laying facts before them like cards in a game of patience. “He was stupid enough to set on five Temne and only one Mende in their place. He wasn’t to know. They all look alike to a white man – a newcomer, anyway. But he didn’t bother to find out. So Samuel Assissay finds half a dozen followers with a grievance immediately. He’ll find others before long, I suspect.”

Jimmy was staring through the open door now at the clumps of yellow cannas that threw their massive blooms up from among large flat leaves, like gushing fountains. Behind them were brilliant hibiscus bushes, their solitary flowers closed for the night, and on either side of the path that led to the front door, bougainvillaea, white spider lilies and red irises crowded beneath a frangipani tree with orange blossoms. Even in the moonlight, he could see the colour and guess at the splendour of it all.

“Go on, Doc,” he said slowly. He was beginning to suspect that he had become involved in something more complicated than he had imagined.

Romney made himself more comfortable and went on with the air of a lecturer delivering a talk. “Indian Joe’s watching events, Jimmy,” he said. “He has been for some time. He was even when Jarvis was here though he could do nothing then. Now it’s different. He’s given Assissay a job in his store. He doubtless feels he can use his peculiar talents to good effect. Assissay knows how to talk to crowds, even if he can’t sort out ju-ju from white man’s politics, or politics from religion.”

Earnshaw leaned forward. “You want to report that Gotto,” he said to Jimmy. “Let Henry Twigg know. It’s his pigeon. He send him up here to get rid of him. That’s all. But you have him out, kid, before you get yourself some trouble. Slap him down – sharp! They don’t want him down at Ma-Imi, they want to send him home.”

Jimmy had sat up abruptly, a look of unhappiness on his face as a disconcerting thought occurred to him.

“Oh, Lord, no,” he said involuntarily. “You see, this seems to be his last chance. I gather he’s been pushed from one job to another and he was hoping to make a go of this one.”

“Upsetting Alf Momo and all the other blokes won’t ’elp him. Have him out, Jimmy. Tell Twigg when he arrive.”

“Hell, I can’t. He’s got a mother dependent on him. Besides, he’s due to go home soon and surely Twiggy won’t put anything in his way if he knows him. He’s nearly finished his tour.”

“’E ain’t learned much.”

“He probably wouldn’t if he stayed all his life but, God knows, I think he’s tried hard to be friendly with me at least. It won’t be long before he’s gone.”

“It’ll be too long, however long it is.” Earnshaw had a stubborn look on his face. “Leave him to me,” he offered. “I sort him out quicker than that. I’ll set my boys on him and give him a bit o’ clog. I done it afore with blokes I’ve found hanging round Zaidee.” He made the statement with the bland pride of a Borgia announcing the removal of a rival.

Jimmy looked hard at him. “Surely we can put up with him for a month or two. He might never come back. What do you say, Doc?”

“I agree. The man could be a damn nuisance but in view of the fact that he’s due home soon, I think we might cover for him a bit.”

Earnshaw tossed away his cigarette. “I suppose that might make it a bit different,” he said thoughtfully. “Like the parrot what laid square eggs. All the same, I don’t like it. Something might go wrong. It might be longer than you think. Months, in fact. You know ’ow these tickets ’ome get lost.”

“We can chance it,” Jimmy said. “We can stand him a bit longer if necessary.”

“I think we ought to do more than that,” Romney pointed out. “Standing him isn’t enough. We ought to try and bring him round. Nobody else has ever bothered. That’s probably the trouble. We might even show him there’s more to this place than the heat and the dust.”

“Pull the plug on it and let it run out by itself,” Earnshaw said. “That’s what I say. Blow having tea-parties.”

“He should be taken up-river and shown the sights.”

“In my boats, I suppose?”

Romney nodded and Jimmy sat up delightedly, his uneasy conscience salved.

“Let him stew in his own juice,” Earnshaw said heavily.

“It’s only for a while,” Jimmy said. “Otherwise, I’d go to Twigg. You don’t think I’d put up with a clot like him indefinitely, do you?”

“I’ll put up with him, but to hell with kiss-and-be- friends.”

“Oh, come on, man,” Jimmy said eagerly. “It’s all in a good cause.”

“OK, OK,” Earnshaw said wearily. “If that’s what you want. So long as he’s not staying, I’ll kill the bastard with kindness. I’m going up-river tomorrer. Bring him along. You want to see a bloke be nice to him, you just watch me. I’m dead ’ot on friendship.”

 

When Jimmy returned to the mine bungalow, Gotto was sprawled on his bed, still in the dusty khaki he had used in the workings. Outside, the sound of the bull-frogs, the crickets and the mosquitoes made music with the cheep of a bat or the screech of an owl. From time to time he heard the rats making love under the bungalow and the noise of a beetle roaring round the room like a flying bomb. The thermometer on the wall registered eighty-nine and the heat stood in the room with the menace of an assassin.

He was suffering from a sweat rash and he felt the discomfort was a personal imposition not inflicted on Romney or Earnshaw or Jimmy.

He was just pondering a miracle, the miracle of the boat crews’ affection for Earnshaw – Earnshaw, the dishonest, the immoral, the uneducated, the crafty, the vulgar and the sly – an affection which was obvious and always had been obvious in the wide delighted grins that split their black faces at his crusty shouts, an affection which, to Gotto, seemed to draw sustenance only from kicks, insults and bad language, but an affection which to his amazement existed nevertheless. He had that morning watched Earnshaw’s coxswain, Suri, wriggling with shyness, hand over as a birthday gift on behalf of the other boat crews a handkerchief full of limes for Earnshaw’s gins. There had been no word of thanks, not a word, but the explosive “Why, you old black bastard, I’ll bet you pinched ’em,” brought only broad smiles to the faces of the Africans. Gotto was still trying to work it out.

His own arrival in the workings or down at the jetty was heralded only with silence, a brooding silence and eyes that followed him disapprovingly wherever he moved, while behind his back the jesters among the shovel boys, with their African gift for mimicry, mocked his slow walk for their comrades, prancing and caracoling with a fist before their faces as a symbol of his bony nose.

Even Jimmy, in his short stay in Amama, had found no difficulty in recruiting friends among the workmen who shook with laughter as he tormented them about their lady friends or their nagging wives, and among the small black boys who had taken to hanging round the bungalow. The children he organised into football teams and gave them a green West African orange for a ball, joining in their laughter when someone finally trod on it and it burst and they all rolled, naked and dusty, on the ground convulsed with mirth. From among them he could always get an assistant for his butterfly hunting forays and, in spite of his careless indifference to whether he was liked or not, could hardly move away from the mine without being surrounded by a dozen screaming black children all eager to carry his net or his jam jar or begging a ride in the station wagon.

To Gotto, crucified by his loneliness, that Jimmy could be just Jimmy and still, without effort, be of as much interest to the illiterate labourers and the small black boys who thronged round him as he was to Stella Swannack, was also in the nature of a miracle.

He had never found it easy being Ivor Gotto – never, from the first stricken silences when his mother had taken him out visiting, or the pathetic embarrassment of children’s parties; from the first awkwardness at school where his thin limbs and bony nose made him the perfect butt for the bullies; from the first hopeless attempts to get to know the opposite sex. Gotto’s secret mind – that elusive, shut-off, shuttered place behind his anger that hid like a deformity the pain of frustration and unhappiness, the nagging misery of being Ivor Gotto and the crawling worms of faint-heartedness – it had never contained much that Gotto could bring himself to like but he had never realised just how much until now when he had nothing else to do but study it.

He stared at the ceiling in silence until he heard Jimmy outside talking to Amadu, the house-boy.

“Boss, mammy get piccaninny,” Amadu was saying. “Boy piccin. Amadu Komorra got son.”

“Nice work, Amadu,” came Jimmy’s voice. “What are you going to call him? Amadu, after you?”

“No, Boss Jimmy.” Gotto could hear the black man laughing delightedly. “Boss, I call ’um Jimmy after you. Jimmy Komorra. You like?”

“Well, that’s jolly nice of you, Amadu.” Jimmy sounded surprised and touched.

Gotto sat up abruptly and went outside, brushing aside the bunch of bananas that had been hung in the doorway out of the way of the ants only to become instead the haunt of a million tiny fruit flies. Amadu stopped in mid-sentence as he appeared, his grin fading, then he melted away into the darkness beyond the veranda.

“This bloody place,” Gotto said heavily, flicking his cigarette away so that it curved, a vermilion arc, and landed in a shower of sparks. He stared into the darkness for a while at the distant sparkle of a village fire, and listened to the slow thump of a drum. “Don’t you ever get fed up here?” he ended.

Jimmy’s eyebrows rose. “No, of course not,” he said. It came as a surprise to him to find that he liked the unhurried life of Amama and every lazy sound of the place – the thump of the grain pestles and the sharp chatter of the women wielding them, the flat barking of a village dog or the honk of a hornbill, to say nothing of the rich, unquenchable laughter of the African labourers.

Gotto watched him, clearly puzzled by the fact that Jimmy could find pleasure in the absence of civilisation. “I mean” – he endeavoured to explain – “nothing ever happens.”

“What could happen here in Amama?”

Gotto looked desperate as he tried to explain. “Well, I mean – same old mountains. Same old sun. Same old palm trees.” The familiar petulant irritation was creeping back into his voice. “Same bloody wogs. Christ,” he said feelingly, as he thought of the half-naked black girls he watched with a thin, bitter lust as they went about their business on the dusty road that ran past the mine. “What I’d give to talk to a girl.”

For a while, Jimmy listened to him working himself up to the same old rigmarole of resentment, then he hastily outlined Romney’s plan for a trip up-river, with the obvious reservations about the reason for it.

“It’s not much,” he explained. “Just up beyond the mud banks. That’s all. We might see some wild life.”

To his surprise his offer was accepted, and the alacrity with which Gotto snatched at the opportunity to get away from Amama indicated how bored with himself he was. Immediately the weak appeal for friendship, the wretchedness of loneliness and the awful inability to do anything about it began to show again through the façade of harshness.

“What about Earnshaw, though?” Gotto asked doubtfully. “I always thought he didn’t like me.”

“Hell, man, it was Earnshaw’s idea,” Jimmy lied vigorously. “He thought you’d be interested.”

“Did he?” Gotto was pathetically pleased by what he took to be evidence of comradeship. “Did he honestly?”

The ghost of a smile crossed his features and for the first time Jimmy heard him whistling – in a tuneless monotone as he prepared for bed.

 

After several weeks in Amama, Jimmy was still entranced by what he saw every time they moved into the quieter creeks up-stream where the dainty terns splashed like dive-bombers into the river after fish, and pelicans took off and landed like clumsy grey flying-boats. From the bank, crocodiles slithered without a ripple into the water, watched from the mangroves above by cranes and herons, beautiful and incredibly frail-looking, and by the bright kingfishers hunting among the clouds of flies in the shallows. Between the trees as the boat moved up-river the air was alive with the screech of monkeys and birds, and the occasional eruptions on the surface of the muddy water indicated the teeming life below where a shoal of small fish fought to avoid the jaws of a barracuda. To the enchanted Jimmy, Africa was breathtaking in its overcrowded life, and since the trip made no demands on his energy, even Gotto’s frown disappeared and Earnshaw, grey and dusty-looking, his smile the essence of immorality and slyness, began to be weightily friendly.

“I won’t half show you a good time when we get settled down a bit,” he said with a wink. “Have a day out in Freetown, me and you, we will. I can introduce you to a girl or two. Nice bit of milk chocolate. Pale-’ands-I-loved-beside- the-Shalimar. Nice and clean. Plenty of scent. Most of ’em pong like billy-o – talk about the sweet breath of murder – but not the ones I know.”

The river, the old route of the slavers and the breeding ground for the fevers that stretched through the Coast’s grim history, was a winding brown flood that twisted its way between the trees from where the turbulent mountain streams rushed into it over rocky falls, down to the port which clustered, ramshackle and beautiful, along the water’s edge; down to the beaches where the blue Portuguese men- o’-war trailed their vicious stings along the surface of the waves, and where the wide mouth broke into a maze of tufted islands on which ancient cannon, erected against the French, rusted in decaying fortresses. And in every yard of its glittering surface there was some new point of interest that Earnshaw pointed out to them – the tumultuous wild life, the fishing villages where women sat outside their daubed huts weaving baskets, and men, balancing incredibly upright in their pencil-slim canoes, flung circular nets touched into meshes of gold by the sun; the scenes of old disasters and older pagan ceremonies, and of Earnshaw’s own raffish adventures.

For Gotto’s benefit he took the boat close in under the trees that overhung the water and showed him the grey parrots that shrieked among the branches, and once, a long green mamba that coiled whip-like among the leaves.

“Them’s the boys what make no noise,” he observed cheerfully. “They get their fangs in you, kid, you drop down dead immediate. I seen it. You ’ave to be careful out ’ere, with spiders and scorpions and one thing nor another.

“There’s lizards and spiders and snakes green and black,” he sang, “and bloody great scorpions that fall down yer back.”

As the sun rose higher, Gotto, infected by Jimmy’s enthusiasm and Earnshaw’s hilarity, began to lose his suspicious expression and to show an interest in the things he saw about him – the big basking iguanas under the tortured arcs of the mangrove roots; the oysters that clung to the bottommost branches as they dipped the water at high tide; and the two-legged mud-hoppers that flipped and jumped with the land-crabs on the mud strips of the shallows.

“Oysters on trees and fishes that walk,” Earnshaw pointed out in the manner of a Thames boatman indicating the places of interest. “That’s what Livingstone said about this joint, ain’t it? Spent years round here, I’m told.”

“God, why?” Gotto said. “No wonder he snuffed it. Probably died of boredom.”

Earnshaw laughed – a little forcedly – and they leaned towards each other like a couple of old cronies.

“Once saw a sea serpent in this ’ere river, I did,” Earnshaw continued. “Twice, in fact. Then it disappeared.”

“Perhaps that died of boredom, too,” Gotto sniggered.

“Perhaps it did.” Earnshaw winked conspiratorially at Jimmy.

“Perhaps that’s why there are so many kids about,” Gotto went on, developing his theme with more enthusiasm than judgement. “Nothing else to do of a night. A way to dodge the boredom.”

“A way to dodge the boredom!” Earnshaw slapped him on the back. “I never heard it called that before. You aren’t half a card.”

He turned to the steering wheel with a look towards Jimmy that indicated he was suffering nobly in a good cause.

“No wonder they’re allowed to have more than one wife,” Gotto sniggered. “It gets dark early and the nights are long.”

Earnshaw’s grin was dying now and, unseen to Gotto, he glanced at Jimmy and tapped his temple.

But Jimmy laughed. If Gotto’s jokes were not good, at least his temper was, and his humour was an indication of a barrier broken down. Jimmy had been on edge all day for some acid remark he would have to gloss over, some narrow opinion that might offend. But sharp words had been remarkably few and even they had dwindled and disappeared as the day wore on.

Gotto even seemed to enjoy the manoeuvring round the mud banks as Earnshaw found his way with boat-hook and lead-line, even taking his turn at the wheel, passing over the bottles of beer he had brought with him and joking over the cold chicken Amadu had packed for them.

By the late afternoon, when the red heat of midday had vanished and the golden glow was rising from the sinking sun, Jimmy was beginning to congratulate himself on the success of their scheme. Gotto, relaxed and almost smiling in the stern, was watching the passing of a great Susu canoe as it roared downstream under its bellying sail, bound for the market at Freetown the following day.

“Hegg, Boss?” roared the helmsman, holding up a wicker basket of eggs as he leaned on the great steering oar on the poop. “You want hegg? You want chicken for cook? You want fiss?”

From among the mangoes and paw-paws and bananas and oranges that weighed the boat down until the water lapped over the scuppers, he brought out a bundle of the dried mullet with which fishermen tempted to a stop the drivers of the narrow-gauge railway train that ran from Freetown to Pendembu as it passed their riverside halts.

“Urtcher, you pudden-headed ole git,” Earnshaw shouted back. “I can smell ’em from ’ere. If you’re selling anything, I’d rather have the dark lady in the middle.”

The ribald reply brought a shout of delighted laughter from the black crew and grins split the faces of the piccaninnies and the gaudily-dressed mammies who crouched in the well of the vessel.

They watched as the boat swooped past, the sun touching the sail with gold as it passed the panorama of the shore where the banner-like leaves of the palms drooped in the heat. Gotto’s eyes were alive with interest and he seemed to be won over at last.

It was while Jimmy was planning the next move towards his reclamation that they ran aground on one of the mud banks that the swiftly-flowing waters threw up in unexpected angles of the creeks, and as the boat began to shudder they came to a dead stop.

Gotto sat up abruptly. “What’s happened?” he asked quickly, the smiles gone from his face.

Earnshaw listened to the labouring engine and studied the muddy foam that the screw was churning up. Then he rose and poked all round the vessel with the boat-hook, staring silently at the brown swirls he stirred to the surface. He tried the engine again without effect, then finally switched off and sat down.

The others had been watching him in silence.

“That’s it,” he said, scratching his head with a rasping sound. “We stuck. Tide’s falling, too.”

“Stuck!” Gotto’s face was suddenly thunderous, the calm wiped off like a shadow when the sun fades. “Does that mean we’re going to be here all night? The place’ll be alive with mosquitoes.”

“That’s OK,” Earnshaw reassured him, still in a cheerful mood. “Malaria ain’t one of the diseases in season just now.”

“Can’t we push her off?”

“We can try.”

Leaning on the boat-hook, they swore and thrust at the unresisting mud until their arms ached, and jumped up and down on the stern while Earnshaw raced the engine until they were wet with sweat. Finally, gasping in the still hot sun that beat low across the water into their aching eyes, they collapsed again into their seats, exhausted, limp and dispirited.

“This is a fine thing,” Gotto said between his teeth. “Marooned.”

“Just like Robinson Crusoe,” Earnshaw said with maddening cheerfulness. “What a lark!”

“I can’t see anything to laugh at.”

“Neither can I, come to think of it. Still, hold your water a minute. There’s some canoes over there. They fetch us off.”

Putting two fingers in the corners of his mouth, Earnshaw gave a piercing whistle which echoed flatly across the water to the mangroves, and the fishermen turned and waved.

As the canoes drew alongside, Earnshaw tossed the anchor overboard. “That’ll hold her for the night,” he said. “OK, old lad,” he went on with a grin at Gotto. “This is where you ’ave your first trip in a wog canoe. Ain’t you seeing the sights today? Tourists would pay thousands for this. Give your fare to the driver. Ten bob fine for spitting. And, for Gawd’s sake, sit still, else you’ll both be in the dripping.”

Gotto’s face was livid under its saffron colour as he climbed gingerly into the frail boat and sat amidships, his bony knees under his chin.

From the foredeck of the dinghy, Earnshaw watched Jimmy climbing into the next canoe, and indicated Gotto already moving away across the water to the village on a spit of sun-baked land. “Son,” he commented. “I think summat’s gone wrong. He looks as happy as a load of mad dogs.”

Gotto, who was on the sandbank waiting for them when they stepped ashore, refused to eat any of the scrawny roast chicken Earnshaw conjured up from the headman. His manner was suddenly unfriendly again.

“No, thanks,” he said coldly. “I’d rather die of starvation than food poisoning.”

Earnshaw looked hard at him for a long time, while Jimmy racked his brains for some means of retrieving what appeared to be a deteriorating situation. The tautness had returned to Gotto’s figure as he stared disapprovingly at the gaunt chickens that scratched the dirt, the lean dogs and the dark, mosquito-haunted huts among the trees where the food had come from. The interest he had shown in Africans during the afternoon was choked with dislike again as they jostled round him, grinning and interested, smelling of perspiration and charcoal, the bare black breasts of the mammies rubbing against his arm as they crowded closer to hear Earnshaw chivvying the headman with sly smutty jests to produce the paw-paws and bananas that grew about them.

And, as a small boy, eager both to please and to make money for himself, edged up to him and whispered, “You want lady, boss. My sister very clean,” he seemed to draw back with the revolted horror of a maidenly spinster accosted by a drunk.

“Get away,” he said in a high strangled voice as he tried, blushing furiously, to push his way through the naked women around him who had taken up the small boy’s chant and were tossing it in delighted shrieks from one to another.

“But, Boss–” the small boy’s voice rose to a thin wail – “she school-teacher.”

Unable to get away, Gotto gave the boy a push and, as he fell in the dust, a murmur of protest ran through the crowd, silencing the laughter. Earnshaw quickly yanked the boy to his feet, gave him a coin and pushed him aside.

“’Op it, Joe,” he said.

“Boss–”

“’Op it, I said, or I’ll give you one acrost the ear’ole.” Earnshaw turned to Gotto, his tired eyes angry. “That was a bright bloody thing to do,” he snorted, “when I’m trying to get ’em to ’elp.”

“You heard what he was saying, didn’t you?”

“Sure I did. But you’re a big boy now. You oughta know about them things. And you oughta know ’ow to behave when you’re out visiting.”

“I didn’t ask to be dragged up here into this hole.”

“Well, of all the nerve!” Earnshaw slammed the banana he was eating to the dusty earth. “Gawd, I didn’t ask to bring you.”

 

Hours later, after a seemingly endless argument conducted entirely in shouts between Earnshaw and the headman and the passing over of money, they were paddled down-stream beneath the gaudy stars, sitting among the dirty water and fish guts and rotten oranges in the bottom of a fruit canoe.

The mangroves that brushed against them had lost their daytime silence and had come alive with sound. Even above the chatter of water under the boat, they could hear the grunts of strange creatures in the shadows, the splashes of jumping fish, the peculiar whirr of crabs and the queer creaking and groaning sounds from the trees themselves. Now and again the strong musty smell that meant a crocodile close by came to them through the acid scent of the water and the mud, and as Earnshaw flashed his torch round they saw the gleam of bulging eyes and then the swift slither of a heavy body and the faint splash as it hit the water.

In spite of his anxiety, Jimmy felt awed by the vastness of the swamp forests but Earnshaw in front was a little drunk on native wine and was boasting loudly of his prowess at organising things.

“Ten bob it cost and cheap at half the price,” he was saying. “You want something fixing, leave it to yours truly. Just mention my name and it’s all yours. I’ll send Suri up for the dinghy tomorrow. Better than staying there half the night waiting for the tide.”

He was cut short as Gotto interrupted in an angry voice from which all traces of friendliness had disappeared. “You might have thought of that before,” he snapped. “Saved us coming home like a lot of wogs. Like a lot of wogs,” he repeated bitterly. “Just like a lot of wogs.”

Earnshaw turned round in his seat and tossed his fag-end overboard. “I didn’t know there was a mud bank there,” he retorted, suddenly incensed. “They come up in different positions every rainy season and nobody charts ’em.”

“Then why take us up there?” Gotto said with the icy, infuriating reasonableness of a Torquemada.

Earnshaw glared, his humanity forgotten, his friendliness withered. “Always the chance you’ll fall overboard,” he snorted.

He sat in silence for a while and Jimmy could hear his heavy muttering in the darkness, then he leaned over, breathing his bad breath and old fag-ends over him.

“That’s it, old lad,” he said. “That finish it. I’ve tried just to oblige you and Old Doc. I’ve tried heavens hard to be matey with him and against me own better nature. That’s it, though. I’ve had a gutser of him.”

“Oh, Lord, man,” Jimmy pleaded. “Give him another chance. It was rotten luck the boat running aground like that. We might have pulled it off otherwise.”

“Yes, you might. And tomorrow he’d ’a’ got up all smiles and brisk as a kipper – and probably slipped on a banana skin and broke his bloody neck. And then ’e’d ’a’ been in a rare ole temper, wun’t ’e? What’s the good of trying with a bloke like him? No, mate, he’s had it. He was drowning, I wun’t give him deck space. Not if he went down on his knees and begged of me, I wouldn’t. It’s bad for me ulcers to get meself worked up like this ’ere. He’s finished now as far as Archibald Earnshaw’s concerned.”