One Big Damn Puzzler

by John Harding

  As the whine of the plane’s motors ceased and its propellers gradually stopped turning, the hubbub swelled until it seemed to fill all the space in William’s head so that he had no room to think.

  ‘Gwanga! Gwanga! Is make jump!’ He looked down and saw a young man, probably in his late teens, looking back up at him from the large dugout which was now alongside the plane, level with the door, its outrigger perilously close to the plane’s port wing float. The man was holding a hand up to him. Fortunately William had the presence of mind to remember his suitcase. He reached inside the plane and somehow hefted it over the rusty metal lip of the door. He turned and looked at the native.

  ‘Is please chuck bag, gwanga,’ yelled the youth, struggling to make himself heard over the din.

  The dugout was lurching up and down in such a way that William hesitated. He caught himself squeezing the handle of the bag with first one hand and then the other. His anxiety level was high. It would be a disaster if his bag missed the boat and plunged into the sea. Even supposing it was possible for it to be recovered, everything inside, the papers, his books and the tape machine, would be destroyed and his whole mission aborted before it had even begun.

  ‘Just drop it, Mr Hardt,’ said a voice behind him, and he turned to see the Australian pilot who had flown him here. ‘They’ll catch it before it can sink.’

  William let go the case which landed in the outstretched arms of the youth who made a sound like air escaping from a punctured tyre, as it knocked the breath out of him and he collapsed under its weight into the waist of the boat, where he lay flattened beneath it while his fellow boatmen dropped their oars and struggled to lift it from him.

  ‘Come on Mr Hardt, I don’t have all day,’ said the pilot. ‘I got to get back before nightfall. Here, jump!’ And with that, he gave William a firm push between the shoulder blades. William’s arms wheeled through the air as he flew down and he shut his eyes, anticipating the splash as he hit the water, but was pleasantly surprised to feel solid wood beneath his feet. He almost toppled over but several pairs of hands grasped him and a moment later he was sitting in the stern of the boat facing the nodding and smiling faces of the eight oarsmen and feeling stupid as he nodded and smiled back. Somehow the boat was already well stacked with wooden crates and cardboard boxes from the plane and the rowers were pulling for the shore. Behind him, he could hear the aircraft’s engines spluttering once more into life.

  ‘Gwanga,’ said the boy who had caught his case.

  William shook his head and put on a puzzled expression to show he hadn’t understood.

  ‘Gwanga,’ said the boy again, dragging his fingers through his short black hair and nodding at William. He frowned when he saw that William still didn’t get it. He repeated the gesture with hand and hair and William wondered whether this was simply an idle movement or had some relevance to what he was saying.

  ‘Gwanga. Gwanga.’

  Again William shook his head. ‘What is gwanga?’ he asked, not knowing if he would be understood.

  ‘Gwanga?’ said the boy. ‘You is not know? You is be gwanga! You! Ha ha! You is not know gwanga and you is be gwanga!’ He roared with laughter and turned to his comrades. ‘Gwanga is not know what gwanga is. Is you can believe that? He is be gwanga and is not know it!’ They all collapsed laughing over their oars and one man let go of his and had to be held by his legs by his comrades while he stretched out over the rocking side of the boat to reclaim it. After that they settled back into their rowing, but their steady rhythm was none the less punctuated from time to time by many cries of ‘Gwanga!’ and a great deal of laughter during the fifteen minutes it took to row to shore. William laughed too, it seemed only polite, and as they appeared to like this he even ventured to tap himself on the chest a couple of times and say ‘Gwanga!’ which made them all roll about and the boat pitch so violently that had it not been for the outrigger it would have capsized.

  Between bouts of laughter William raised his eyes to look at the place that was to be his home for the next month. After a border of bright yellow sand fringed with the white of the surf, brooding emerald hills rose in the centre. A solitary white cloud hung above the island as if put there to emphasize how blue was the rest of the sky. A travel agent’s paradise, thought William, except it was three hundred miles from anywhere that wasn’t another nowhere, had no landing strip and was reachable only by sea plane and was rumoured to be well short of modern conveniences. Still, at least there was a hotel, as far as William had been able to see from the old British map he’d dug up. Assuming it was still there. He certainly hoped so. After three days of travelling, he was ready to wallow in a long, hot bath.

  As the boat came close to shore William realized that the men had ceased laughing in order to put all their energy into their rowing. He could tell from their strained expressions that the going was getting harder all the time and he deduced that this was because of an undertow. The now fairly big waves broke upon a wall of coral that ringed the shore, and bounced back out from it, so that for every ten feet the men rowed the boat was hurled back five. At times it even seemed as if they were thrown back further than they had rowed since the last time, but this must not have been the case as finally they managed to get past the undertow and were riding on the crest of a huge breaker, the oarsmen paddling frantically to steer the craft through a gap in the coral reef, and surfing in on a cauldron of white spray which finally spat the boat out onto a sickle-shaped sandy beach. For a moment the men rested over their oars, panting.

  ‘Are you all right?’ William ventured, as after a couple of minutes not a single one of them had moved from this posture of exhaustion. ‘That seems to have been an exceptionally hard row.’

  ‘Hard row?’ gasped his youth. ‘Not bloody damn likely. Too much damn kassa last night.’

  As William disembarked into the foaming water swirling around the boat he cursed himself for wearing his loafers. His white tropical suit too. Anyone with any sense would have known to have worn something waterproof. Sea boots or plastic flip-flops most likely. He went to reach his bag out of the boat but the boy said to him, ‘No gwanga, I is fetch!’

  While the oarsmen unloaded the boat, putting the contents higher up the beach where the sand was dry, then pushing the vessel’s lightened keel out of reach of the waves, William was surrounded by natives. The crowd parted to allow a trio of smiling young women, each wearing an exotic lei around her neck, to step forward. Once in front of him they removed the leis and placed them over William’s head. He peered over multicoloured petals at six bare, brown-nippled breasts. He was conscious that he ought not to stare at them, but on the other hand, breasts seemed to be everywhere he looked. Fortunately the problem was solved by the crowd closing up and engulfing him again. Now he felt bare breasts pressed against him, but at least they were too close for him to be caught looking at them.

  ‘Gwanga! Gwanga!’ the people were calling. ‘Welcome, gwanga!’

  The air was close and oppressive and William was starting to feel claustrophobic when the pressure of bodies against his own eased and the crowd parted once more, forming two lines facing one another and making a kind of walkway – rather like crowds of people waiting outside a film premiere, William couldn’t help thinking – and he found himself staring at two people at its opposite end.

  They were a bizarre couple. One was an old man, maybe around sixty, wearing only the ubiquitous pubic leaf and sporting below his right thigh an artificial limb attached by leather straps that ran all the way up to a belt around his waist. Beside him, breasts covered by a proper dress, a smart, pale green, Western cocktail dress – and, it appeared from their shape, encased in a bra underneath – was the strangest-looking woman. She had big bushy eyebrows and a five o’clock shadow. William presumed he was looking at the island’s chief and his wife.

  He decided the proper thing to do would be to walk towards them, but when he lifted his suitcase he remembered how heavy it was. He had to use both hands a
nd shuffle along the gauntlet of smiling natives, the bag banging against his shins. The chief and his wife walked towards him. William was about to speak but the chief held up his hand in the manner of a policeman stopping traffic. Strange, thought William, how some gestures are universal to the human race, wherever we live, whatever our culture. Then again, it occurred to him, he was just assuming that the guy was telling him not to speak. What if the gesture didn’t have the same meaning here? What if, for example, it meant, Hey everybody, give it half a minute then grab this gwanga and cut his dick off? But wait, the old guy was clearing his throat and starting to say something.

  ‘Sir, I invite your Highness and your train to my poor cell, where you shall take your rest for this one night; which part of it, I’ll waste with such discourse as, I not doubt, shall make it go quick away.’

  William knew immediately that his dick was safe. This was definitely a welcome speech, and more than that, even though he could make neither head nor tail of it, it had a certain elegance about it that suggested the old guy was intelligent and cultured. Had William been more cultured himself he would have recognized it as Prospero’s offer of hospitality to the shipwrecked Alonso in The Tempest, but he wasn’t and he didn’t and so was confused by the look of puzzled disappointment that flickered across the old guy’s face. Instead of replying with an apt titbit of Jacobean verse, then, William did things the American way: he stretched out his hand to shake. This had the effect of making the old man appear even more puzzled. He studied the hand for a moment, as though it were an object divorced from the rest of William and then looked him in the face and smiled.

  ‘Come!’ he said imperiously.

  William went to pick up his case but before he could do so, the chief’s wife beat him to it and grabbed the handle. Although she was only young – William would have guessed, seeing her close up now, that she was no more than sixteen or seventeen – only a girl really and of slight build, her shoulders were surprisingly muscular. She hefted the heavy bag as though it weighed nothing at all.

  ‘I is take,’ she said in a gruff voice.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked William. ‘It’s very heavy.’

  ‘For you, gwanga, mebbe, not for me. I is carry fish catch.’

  William considered this for a few steps. Interesting that the chief’s wife engaged in menial labour. It was hard figuring out the pecking order here.

  The chief watched his wife struggling with the case for a moment then said to William, ‘Bag is be plenty heavy.’

  ‘Yes,’ said William.

  ‘What you is have in there?’ asked the old man. William didn’t know quite how to reply to this. On the one hand he didn’t want to be rude. On the other, he didn’t want to divulge too much too soon of his reason for being here.

  He shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Oh, this and that.’

  ‘This and that,’ murmured the old man slowly, as though chewing it over. ‘Is must be heavy this and that.’ And then suddenly, ‘Books is be heavy. You is have books?’

  William wondered for a moment if they had somehow got wind of his visit, but then dismissed the thought as absurd. ‘Yes, one or two,’ he said.

  ‘One or two,’ said the chief, nodding to himself. Beside him the butch girl clutching the case had broken into a sweat and was looking daggers at the old guy, obviously willing him to get a move on. The chief suddenly stuck his face into William’s. ‘Any Shakespeare? Complete Works by any chance?’

  William shook his head.

  ‘Not even Hamlet? Not even Hamlet on he own?’

  ‘Sorry, not even Hamlet.’

  ‘Bugger!’ said the old boy and turned and limped off. The girl panted after him. William felt abashed at his own lack of gallantry and tried to grasp the case’s handle to take it from her, but she pushed him off with such a surprisingly strong arm that he realized she was better equipped to carry it than he. Maybe I should try hauling fishing nets as a method of body-building when I get back to the States, he thought.

  They moved slowly, following a pace behind the old man’s laboured limp, William assumed as a matter of protocol (although actually it was because Tigua found the case a good deal heavier than he’d let on). The gaggle of islanders surrounded them every step of the way, some of them reaching out occasionally to touch William, as if he were a religious statue perhaps, tentatively, as though full of awe.

  It struck William as strange that, given the island boasted all the desirable young women who had waggled their breasts at him, the chief should have chosen this butch specimen as his partner. Unless of course William had got it wrong and she wasn’t his wife, but perhaps his daughter. That would make more sense, given their relative ages. William decided he had to get a handle on things. He remembered the travelling salesman’s line when a housewife opened the door to him in the old days: ‘Excuse me, miss, is your mother home?’ and decided to go at the matter from the same angle.

  ‘Forgive me asking, but are you the chief’s daughter?’

  Tigua burst out laughing.

  ‘What?’ said William. ‘Have I said something funny? You’re not his daughter, you’re the chief’s—’

  Before he could get any further the old man turned and said. ‘I is be Managua. I is not be chief.’

  ‘You’re not the chief?’ repeated William. ‘I’m sorry, I assumed . . .’

  ‘We is have no nobles here,’ said Managua in a stately voice.

  ‘Nobles?’ said William.

  ‘Chiefs,’ explained Managua. ‘We is have no chiefs. I is come meet you because I is speak English good. Most good of anyone on island. I is speak language of Shakespeare. Now I is take you village.’

  As Managua resumed walking, William went beside him to take full advantage of the opportunity for conversation that had opened up, leaving Tigua lugging the suitcase a pace behind still.

  ‘On the subject of language,’ he said, ‘perhaps you can tell me. What does it mean, gwanga?’

  Managua stopped again and turned to face him, eyes twinkling. ‘Gwanga? Is mean white man with yellow hair who is drop from sky with heavy bag,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what gwanga means? Just one word means all that?’

  Managua resumed walking. ‘Is be one of things gwanga is mean. Is mean many other things too. Is be very thrifty language we is have here. Is not waste words with they is mean just one thing.’

  THREE

  WHILE ALL THIS was going on there was one islander who hadn’t joined in the bustle to meet the plane and the procession back with William Hardt. As soon as Lamua saw Managua hurrying off with Tigua (if that man could ever be said to hurry anywhere. Come to think of it, she’d heard tell he hadn’t been exactly fast even before his right leg was blown off), she decided to pass up the chance to go to meet the plane. This was not an easy decision to make. The plane came once a month to collect the various things the islanders produced: mainly fruit, fresh fish and wood carvings, for the agent on the big island; and to bring the things they had requested in return, chiefly cloth and tools, plus whatever the agent saw fit to throw in of his own accord. Sometimes there would be a case of Coca-Cola, which meant twenty-four cans. It was the nature of the islanders to share such bounty, but their sharing was indiscriminate: someone would break open the cardboard box and toss cans into the waiting crowd. If you weren’t there to catch it, the Coke wouldn’t be around by the time you were. So Lamua was passing up the possibility of Coke – although twenty-four into five hundred meant that it wasn’t that much of a forfeit – and whatever else might turn up. But then she had good reason. Managua’s rare absence from the hut and his damn Shakespeare, and even rarer absence from the village, gave her the perfect opportunity to search for the pig.

  She figured she had at least an hour. It would take the old bastard that long to hobble along to the landing beach and back again, not to mention what time it might take to deal with whatever it was that had occasioned Tigua’s urgent request for him. Thinking about that, her curiosity as to wh
at could have needed Managua’s presence so urgently almost got the better of her, but only for a moment. There was nothing she wanted more than to find the pig.

  Lamua hated herself for being jealous of something as despicable as a pig. Someone with experience of ordinary pigs might have added especially a black bantam pig, but Lamua knew no other kind and therefore had no idea just how insulted she should feel. But the pig had somehow come to embody all her feelings about how Managua had ceased caring for her, how distant he had become as a result of his obsession with Shakespeare. Even when you spoke to him he replied as if in a trance, not hearing what you said, like a man after an evening in the kassa hut, seeing still only the dreams and visions he had experienced there.