August 28
It has happened. I suppose it was inevitable really. Shasta is powerfully seductive and I am a young man with normal appetites. I had some hope of being able to withdraw in time but her arms were tight around my back and her legs wrapped around my hips. It makes no major difference to me. Nothing can delay my departure and if my good luck holds, any baby she conceived last night will miscarry, or die young. As with most primitive peoples the infant mortality here is fairly high. If it survives I hope it won’t be too white. I don’t want the child to be uncomfortable, of course; but more than anything else I don’t want some callow young researcher with no idea what it is like to be out in the field for a whole year to come along and see a half-caste child and start the kind of gossip that would ruin my professional reputation.
I know that they have knowledge of plants that can cause abortions. I patted Shasta’s flat belly and asked her to make sure there was no baby. She laughed delightedly and said, ‘ralende’, ‘it is ordained’, so I suppose that’s that. It’s her decision, so she will have to carry the can. There is certainly nothing I can do. The marriage and the child has been quite beyond my control and no-one could expect me to sacrifice my chance of success and wealth in New York for a voodoo marriage and a half-caste baby.
She has painted her belly with a spiral concentric pattern in a deep orange dye. She looks breathtaking. The ceremony of the rains is obviously one which absorbs her to the exclusion of everything else. She still sleeps in my bed and services my every need but she has an inner restraint which I sense. Can it be that although she refuses to understand the concept of the future she does in fact know that I am going away? Very soon actually. Only another month.
September 23
I have some plastic bags for my precious research papers and this diary and I have packed all but this book and pen carefully away. Shasta sealed them with sap from a tree rather like a rubber tree. She assures me it is waterproof. She is helping me prepare for my departure. She’s in a cheerful optimistic mood. I was dreading this stage, thinking she would be clinging and demanding, so I suppose I should be pleased that she sets about finding my old rucksack and packing my few clothes and souvenirs with such contentment. Actually, I can’t help feeling a bit peeved.
They have set up a large oblong table on a huge wooden trestle for the ceremony of the rains and draped it with flowers and leaves. Shasta, who is now painted from her dark upswinging eyebrows to the very soles of her feet, often walks around the table, humming softly to herself, for all the world like a suburban housewife checking the place mats. I ran up the little ramp to the high table and slapped her warm butt the other day and she led me away and said, ‘Dourane’, ‘Not yet’, very sweetly. Since then I have treated it as the holy of holies and stayed well away.
Shasta’s serenity and quiet joy seems to be reflected in everyone else. Everywhere I go I am greeted with smiles and often little gifts of flowers or fruit. I don’t doubt that I’m being wished bon voyage, and I have taken a thousand photographs of everyone before sealing up my camera and films in waterproof packaging for the long journey downriver. They have no objection to photographs now – though I had to insist when I first arrived. But everything seems to be permitted to me now. I caught myself caressing the smooth thighs of Tharin, Shasta’s younger sister: a girl just deliciously at the brink of womanhood. She smiled and let me touch her and I had the sudden heady sense of being able to do anything in the world that I want here. I took her by the hand and led her down towards the river. If she had hesitated for a moment I swear I would have stopped, but she followed me smiling, trusting like the little girl she is; a little dappled doe in the flickering shadows. I am ashamed to say that I had her, and she was a virgin. I tried to make her promise to say nothing; but she was in pain and bleeding a little and she just waved me away. I only hope that there will not be two Caucasian-Nlokoese babies born to the tribe next year. I shan’t go with her again. It’s too risky.
My only major regret, as I pack, is not being able to record the ceremony of the rains. But to be honest, I can’t bear to miss the launch. It would be another four months wasted for the benefit of recording a drunken all-week hen-party conducted in a language I can only just understand and for a religion which is incomprehensible to the western mind. I suppose if I were a better scientist I would make the sacrifice and stay. As it is, I cannot bring myself to delay. The bright lights are calling me! I could drink a lake of beer! And I really want a woman of my own colour. Shasta’s love and her passion and tenderness have been a great gift. I won’t forget them. I’ll probably dedicate the book to her. But right now (and this is not for publication!) I want a long-legged girl to talk dirty!
September 26
Something very strange and disturbing has happened. I was working at my little table in the doorway of the hut when I dropped my pen top and bent down to pick it up. I then saw, at the foot of the king-pole of the hut, a piece of cloth poking out through the tamped-down earth. I took my penknife and scraped around it and it seemed to be some kind of plastic-wrapped package. I was angry for a moment thinking that it was one of mine which Shasta had stolen as a souvenir, but when I opened it I found it was not my writing, and it had obviously been buried for some time. The most amazing thing is that it is a chapter of anthropological research notes and a couple of grainy photographs of Shasta with a middle-aged, rather unattractive Caucasian male.
My first thought was for my own thesis. It would be hopelessly redundant if this bastard had been here first. I couldn’t understand it. I’d done a total search of all publications and I couldn’t imagine that someone had published work on the Nloko that I had missed. The tribe’s entire attraction for me had been that no-one had lived with them before. I’d get them fresh.
He’d been working, predictably enough, on rites and ritual. There was a whole load of notes on primitive fertility rites – I’ve no time for that sort of thing. It seems to me to be hardly worth the paper it’s written on. Who cares if they crush fruit to make the rains come, or kill fish, or cut the throats of monkeys? What difference does it make? My kind of research is immediately applicable to social science in the US. Puberty, how to manage it. What are adolescents like in a natural world? That kind of stuff. Solid research in its own right and very, very sellable.
I blundered out of the hut with the notes and snapshot in my hand and bumped into Shasta’s aunt, who was shelling beans at the foot of the feast table. I waved the photo under her nose and asked her, ‘Who is this man?’
I was surprised by her reaction. She jerked back at once and I could see, under the painted spirals and the dark skin, that she had gone pale. She muttered something very softly and then she tried to take the photos and the papers away from me. I tugged back, and then finally I pushed her hard, so that she had to let go. She sat down with a bump and I asked her again, while I had the upper hand, ‘Who is this man?’
She said that word again – previous husband. The word I had heard before. Previous husband. But she said nothing more. Neither my shouts nor, I’m ashamed to admit, a threatening fist, got another word out of her.
I stamped back to my hut to sit on the sleeping board and think. There had been another anthropologist here, and he had lived in this hut, my hut. And he had probably slept with Shasta. And then he had gone. But why hadn’t he published? And why hadn’t he taken his research notes? I knew that I would never be parted from my research notes. So maybe something had happened to him, in the forest or on the river. Maybe he had gone out one day, taking a break from work, and had an accident, and now he would never publish and never make money and never sit in an attractive office at a good college with a sexy secretary to make the coffee.
I shivered. I looked out of the open door of the hut to the dancing ground in the centre of the village and the ramp and the big trestle table covered with flowers and fruit. I suddenly wanted to be safely away, with my feet up on the rail of the launch and a can of cold beer in my hand an
d all the well-kept secrets of the Nloko tribe, worth a fortune to me, safely in a briefcase in my cabin.
September 29
They are giving me a tremendous sending-off party. I am officially recognised as the father of Shasta’s child and a man of great potency and a prince in my own right. ‘Prince Rainbringer’. All the women have made flower chains for my neck and I am required to strut around the village while they throw petals at me and sprinkle perfumed oil wherever I walk. I am consenting to do this to oblige Shasta. She has made it unusually clear that if I do not play my part then there will be no canoe to take me downriver. I feel manipulated and resentful towards her. But she is at the peak of her beauty and confidence and she does not seem to notice. If I were staying then we would have words and I would give her a timely introduction to patriarchy. But since I am going I might as well leave graciously. After all, I have not done at all badly out of this. I am taking away the work which is going to make my fortune, I have escaped infection and, although I have made her pregnant and possibly her little sister too, I seem to have got off scot-free without any payment or punishment.
They keep giving me the strong drink that I had at the wedding feast and it’s going to my legs. I’ve had to sit down at my little table and I’m writing this while the women dance. Before my eyes they’re just whirling colours. It’s a most wonderful sight: exotic, barbaric. If my things were not all safely packed I’d take another photo, except I don’t think I can see straight. I have a vague idea of bringing a camera crew back here and making a documentary. I’d be good on television. I’ve got those sort of looks. That’s probably a good career plan for me. A wider audience, and a bit of glamour to go with the academic work.
I’ll have the lot. As soon as I can get out of here. I went to Shasta just now and asked her about the canoe and she gave me her sweetest smile and showed, by the wave of her hand, that when the sun starts going down I will set off. The boatmen prefer travelling at night, despite rapids and crocodiles and piranha fish and water snakes. Still, I’ll have to trust them. Anyway, since the princess is all dressed up in her ceremonial gear, and I am pissed out of my brain, I can’t argue.
It is growing velvety slowly dark. I have danced, I have drunk. I have been kissed by a thousand women. I had two, roughly, greedily, one after another in my hut where Shasta and I used to love like angels. Everything seems to be permitted to me. I slapped the second one around a bit and found that I adored seeing her flinch even while I was lying on her. So I guess that’s something else new that I have learned during this trip – and also not for publication! My legs have totally gone now. They have laid me on the table and heaped me with flowers. Actually all my muscles have gone, except my hands. I’ve never been so drunk in my life. Shasta, as some funny joke, has laid my diary on my chest. I’m still scrawling while they dance around me but now my fingers are getting numb. She leans over me, she asks me if I wish to ride down the river in the canoe? Do I, Prince Rainbringer, consent to go to the water? I say, ‘Do I hell? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s skip the ceremony and go.’
The women danced around the table until the huge mango moon came swiftly up over the dark canopy of the forest. The man was slipping from sleep into coma when they lifted the cover from the table. The trestle was a beautifully carved canoe. The princess helped them to lay him in the canoe and then took up her knife. She slit the spine of the diary and slashed the pages into ribbons of white which she sprinkled gently all around him. Then she leaned over him once more, and kissed his cold lips. Then she drew her knife slowly across his throat.
Singing quietly, the women lifted the canoe and slid it down the bank into the river. They waded out beside it, Shasta with them. Singing, with their beads chinking quietly, they thrust the canoe out into main channel of the river where it spun once, like a compass needle seeking direction, and then the water took it and it moved swiftly, smoothly down river.
Shasta waded back to the bank and raised her arms out wide to the river to thank it for the gift of the man and his seed, and for their chance to make another truly noble sacrifice for the rains. As she threw back her head and raised her voice there was a deep echoing thunder from the dark skies above her.
The rains began to fall.
The Other Woman
I did not know that Andrew was having an affair until I found the note from her to him in his jacket pocket. And then I knew almost everything, all at once.
I knew that she worked in his law company, because she had written to him on the company memo pad. I knew that she was stylish, because she used a fountain pen and a special pale blue ink. I knew she was confident and well-educated, because her handwriting was bold and large, with a little dash over the i’s rather than a dot. My own writing is small and spiky and shows that I am anxious about putting pen to paper. I don’t always know what to say, I am afraid I will write incorrectly.
She wears a perfume I don’t recognise. I put the note to my nose and had a little sniff. It smelled musky and expensive. I imagined that it came in a dark green box with a bottle of real glass, twisted like a barleystick. I even nibbled a corner of the paper as if I would learn something about the taste of her. Then I spat it out, feeling stupid.
I knew that she was fairly senior in the company – the casual use of the memo pad and the fountain pen told me that. I guessed that she was single – the company isn’t too keen on married women at senior levels. I thought that she would be beautiful. Andrew has never dated any girl who was not strikingly attractive; except me. I was only ever pretty, seven years younger than him, pale-skinned, blue-eyed, fair-haired. Our families are neighbours in Scotland. I was in love with him when I was five and he was an infinitely superior twelve. Everyone had always thought that we would marry. When he came home from London, qualified and with a good job, we did. I had just failed my A levels. It was what I had longed for all my life.
I imagined that this woman would never have married the first and only love of her life. I imagined that she would have gone to university, like Andrew, and trained, like Andrew, and now she would command a good salary and have freedom and independence. She could have anything she wanted.
Maybe she wanted my husband.
I reread the note. It said:
Darling,
Bruised but happy.
What about dinner at my place? 8pm tonight.
Just us.
V
I listed in my head the number of things I knew from the note. She was confident enough to call him ‘Darling’ – unless of course she was one of those gushing women who call everybody darling. But I didn’t think so, not if she were senior in Andrew’s formal traditional law company.
She was ‘bruised but happy’ so their lovemaking must be rough and joyous. As I thought of this, I had to go to the toilet and throw up. Then I had a glass of water and went on thinking.
‘Dinner at my place’ indicated that she was single, or at any rate had a place of her own where she could entertain a lover. ‘8 pm tonight’ confirmed her efficiency, and also showed her command of Andrew. He couldn’t just drop in at her place after work. He had to go when he was bidden, at a proper time for dinner. This was not the note of a woman who was being used in a casual affair. It was the note of a woman who was secure.
‘Just us’ made me feel, if possible, worse than ‘bruised but happy’. ‘Just us’ indicated that there could have been others. That V and Andrew were a recognised couple. That they entertained other people at her place. This was not a hurried hidden liaison. They were public. They were confident. They were ‘us’.
And if Andrew is a half of ‘us’ …
What am I?
That question kept me thinking all the time from lunch, when I drank another glass of water, until it was time to collect George from school. I walked through the park to the school gates and waited outside in the sunshine with the other mums. A friend said I looked a bit peaky and I smiled and said I had been overdoing it in the garden: the weeds. Then George
came out and I could go. While he watched children’s programmes, bouncing on the sofa in the sitting room, I spread the note out on the kitchen table and read it again.
I wondered what the V stood for. Verena? Victoria? Surely not Violet? I remembered that Andrew had a company phone directory by his desk in the workroom where I do my sewing and George has his Scalectrix laid out on the floor. I went into the room, stepping over the race track carefully, and looked through the directory. There were a lot of names, it took me half an hour to look all the way through. But I found her. Valentina D’Arby, corporate tax specialist.
Valentina.
I thought of what it must be like to have been christened Valentina. It’s as if she started her life with a promise of glamour. My name is Heather. They could not have chosen a more ordinary name for me unless they had called me Grass.
D’Arby. I wondered if she really was D’Arby, or if she had the nerve to rewrite her name from Darby to D’A. I thought Valentina would have the wit and the guts to do that. And the D’A was very stylish.
Corporate tax specialist.
I closed the directory and went and made George’s tea. I could not even speculate about what Valentina D’Arby did as her work. She was as far beyond reach of my imagination as if she had been head of MI5. I simply could not think what she would do in the office. I could imagine her clothes easily enough: dark business suit, cream shirt, maybe a brilliant flowered silk scarf thrown over one shoulder and pinned with a brooch. I could imagine her desk: dark wood, and two phones on it – I was sure she would have two phones. A plant in the window, perhaps an orchid which would never go brown at the leaves because someone had forgotten to water it. Cream carpet. Bendy-legged steel chairs. A book case with big corporate tax books in it.
Bread and Chocolate Page 15
