One Big Damn Puzzler

by John Harding

  ‘Well, among other things, yes.’

  ‘What is be they other things?’

  ‘Managua, I can’t tell you just yet. Call the meeting, will you, and all will be revealed.’

  Now William faced his audience with a certain amount of anxiety. It was not going to be easy, explaining an alien concept to an audience of savages. On the other hand, he was used to having to explain alien concepts of justice, fair play and responsibility to bunches of corporate lawyers. How much harder could this be?

  He cleared his throat. ‘Thank you for coming, everyone. My name is William Hardt. I am a lawyer from New York City, in America. I have come here to bring you justice, for the injuries you have suffered as a result of US military ordnance, a justice that will punish the people who did this to you and help you to make the best of your lives in spite of it. I have come to bring you compensation.’

  There was an immediate renewal of conversation, everyone talking to his neighbour, all of them jabbering at once. Finally Managua held up his hand. A man in the front row, sporting one black boot, continued talking. ‘Silence!’ barked Managua.

  The man recoiled as though struck by a blow, then recovered and stared defiantly at Managua. ‘I is not understand,’ he said. ‘What is be this compensation. Is be thing we is eat?’

  Managua stared back, a look you might imagine him giving to an insect crawling on a piece of dung. But even that didn’t shut the man up. ‘Well, you is know?’

  Managua shook his head. ‘You is be one plenty big fool, N’roa,’ he said. ‘I is have enough sense for keep quiet. Is let gwanga talk.’

  William resumed. ‘It’s a good question.’ N’roa glared triumphantly at Managua. ‘In the United States we have laws to protect people from the actions of other people, from large corporations and even from the government itself, and of course its agencies, which includes the military.’

  N’roa turned to his neighbour and said loudly, ‘What language he is speak now?’

  William ignored him. ‘If someone causes you injury then they have to compensate you. They have to make amends, to pay you for the loss, suffering, hardship and inconvenience they have caused. It helps you get on with your life; it makes them less likely to do it again to someone else. I am here to try to get this compensation for all of you who have been damaged by the actions of the US military.’

  N’roa raised his arm exactly like a child in class, although he could have had no example of that, William mused.

  ‘I is must be stupid,’ he said, which was greeted by a large chorus of agreement from the rest of the crowd. ‘But I is still not understand. What we is go get?’

  William had decided that jumping straight on in and mentioning money would get him nowhere. He had already established that the natives had no concept of it. But he had learned that they had a currency of their own, yams.

  ‘It’s like this,’ he said. ‘Suppose I break your arm. I would give you some yams to make up for it.’

  N’roa looked puzzled. ‘What for you is want for do that? Is be better you is not break arm in first place. Keep yams.’

  ‘I don’t mean I would break your arm deliberately,’ William said.

  ‘Ah, so is be accident?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘But if is be accident, what for you is give me yams?’

  ‘Well,’ said William, trying to think how to explain, ‘it’s not as straightforward as that. I may not have intended to hurt you, but I did something that damaged you because I was careless.’

  ‘Ah, like G’woa here. He canoe is hit mine because he is not look where he is go. I is fall out, is bang head on outrigger.’

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ said William. ‘He didn’t mean to do it, but it wouldn’t have happened if he had been more careful.’

  N’roa turned to the man next to him. ‘G’woa, you is give me yams,’ he said.

  ‘What for is I give you yams? You is paddle you canoe straight across my bow. How is I suppose not hit you? You is smash front end of my boat. You is give me yams.’ He turned to William. ‘Is not be so, gwanga?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure,’ said William. ‘I’d rather not get into this right now.’ He didn’t want to get sidetracked. He was heartened by the fact that they were getting the idea. They’d already grasped the concept of claim and counterclaim.

  N’roa turned back to William. ‘How many yams America is give for my leg?’

  ‘Well, they won’t be giving you yams. They’ll pay money. US dollars.’

  He tried to say something more but it was drowned out by the loud laughter of everyone else present. Only Managua, he noticed, was not joining in.

  ‘What for we is want that?’ N’roa protested as the laughter subsided. ‘We is already have dollars. Is use for light pipes.’

  ‘But you can buy things with dollars. You can use them just the same way you use yams.’ There was more laughter and much slapping of flesh. Finally it subsided and N’roa said, ‘But you is can eat yams. Unless I is make plenty big mistake, you is not get very big meal from US dollars. Guts is stay plenty empty.’

  ‘You could use your dollars to buy yams. You give the dollars to the man next to you, he gives you some yams.’

  ‘That is be all very well,’ said N’roa, warming to the argument. ‘But then what he is go do with dollars?’

  ‘Well, he could buy more yams and eat them,’ said William. ‘And the man he buys them from can use the dollars to buy more yams from someone else.’

  N’roa let William an exasperated look. ‘Yes, but you is not see problem with this dollar business. Sooner or later someone is go end up with dollars. He is not have any yams.’

  ‘That’s not the way it works,’ said William. ‘The dollars keep going round and round. They stay in circulation. You keep buying yams.’

  N’roa let out a sigh of exasperation. ‘But then what for you is bother with dollars at all? What for is not just use yams?’

  ‘I was using yams for an example. You can buy lots of things with dollars. For example, if you built a fine canoe, I might give you lots of dollars for it. Then you could use the dollars to buy a necklace for your wife maybe.’

  ‘I is can do that with yams. Dollars is be same as yams, ’cept you is can eat yams but you is not can eat dollars and you is can light pipe with dollar but not with yam. Is not be so?’

  ‘But dollars will mean you can buy things from off the island. Lots of things. People will take your dollars and give you things in exchange.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Well, foodstuff, I guess, clothes, medicine.’

  ‘Coca-Cola?’ someone shouted.

  ‘Yes, Coca-Cola,’ William said and everyone laughed and cheered loudly. ‘But more important things. You could build a hospital. You could have an airstrip, run planes to the big island. You could have a road. Vehicles if you wanted. Motorboats to help you fish.’

  ‘America is give we all this?’

  ‘Not give, pay you as compensation to improve your lives to make up for making them worse. To try to put things right.’

  Until now, Managua had kept silent, but William had noticed the old man shaking his head. He struggled to his feet, breathing hard, though whether from the effort or anger, William couldn’t tell. It could have been either. He stood waiting for silence and gradually the talking stopped as the natives realized he was on his feet. He spoke, quietly and with great authority. ‘We is not need dollars, gwanga. We is not need planes and motor cars and boats. We is not need they . . . they . . . things. We is have food, we is have sun, we is have rain. We is not want Coca-Cola.’

  ‘You is speak for youself, Managua,’ someone shouted. Others chorused, ‘We is want Coca-Cola plenty damn much,’ and similar endorsements.

  Again Managua waited for them to be quiet, standing still and dignified as a statue. He was trying to contain himself. He was remembering what Miss Lucy had said about pretending to go along with the white man. But this was too damn much. When h
e spoke it was with barely controlled anger. ‘I is have dollar I is use for light pipe. We is not need dollar for any other thing. We is not need what dollar is buy. You is give me dollar I is not buy airplane. I is use for light pipe.’

  ‘Well, you might be right,’ said William. ‘One dollar alone wouldn’t be much use. You’d need rather more to buy an airplane.’

  ‘How many dollars America is give we?’ called someone.

  ‘Millions,’ replied William. ‘I shall be seeking several million.’

  ‘What is be million?’

  ‘A million is a thousand thousand.’ They all looked baffled. ‘Or to put it another way,’ he said, with a flash of inspiration. ‘A million is plenty damn lot.’

  As William sat taking notes of the names of the injured and details of where and how their injuries had occurred, while at the same time attempting to fight off the crowd of people clustering around him, trying to persuade them to form an orderly queue, he suddenly looked up and saw Managua limping off into the jungle, his back bent, his gait stiff and full of pain. There was something so full of sorrow in the stoop of his shoulders that William wanted to run after him and say, ‘Hey, listen old man, it’s OK. You deserve this. It’s going to make your life a whole lot better. Trust me.’ But then his attention was taken by a man elbowing another out of his way to thrust his face into William’s.

  ‘I is be call Maboa,’ he said. ‘You is put me down for one new airplane.’

  NINETEEN

  WILLIAM TRUDGED WEARILY along the beach towards the Captain Cook. After his evening in the kassa hut, he’d slept in but still woken exhausted. He’d almost been too late for the shitting beach, arriving as everyone else was leaving and tearing down his trousers in a hurry, like a man with diarrhoea. After his meeting with the people he mentally referred to as ‘the limbless’ – although of course they weren’t, all of them had at least two limbs remaining and most of them three – all he wanted to do was get back to bed. Or table. He hadn’t yet managed to find anywhere more comfortable to sleep than on the hotel’s dining table. No matter, he was too tired to worry about it now.

  Arriving at the hotel, he paused only to slip off his battered loafers, then hauled himself up onto the table. No sooner had his head touched the mahogany than he was fast asleep.

  It could have been ten minutes later, it could have been an hour (he would never know because he was to lose consciousness again before he had chance to check his watch), when he was awoken by a noise above him. A faint sporadic tapping. Then it ceased. He lay perfectly still, holding his breath, waiting for it to begin once more. A minute must have ticked by. Two. Five. He was breathing quietly and was just about to relax and stop listening when he heard it again. This time it continued long enough to coalesce into something recognizable. Footsteps, surely, though very light, a child’s perhaps, or maybe . . . a ghost’s. The idea made him recall what Tigua had told him, that there were spirits in the abandoned building.

  William eased himself slowly off the table and tiptoed across the concrete floor, glad now that he’d found the energy to remove his shoes before lying down. In the lobby outside the dining room, standing at the foot of the decrepit staircase, he again held his breath and once more heard the noise. A drop of sweat fell from his face onto the rotting first tread of the staircase with the sound, it seemed to William, of a kettledrum. Every noise he made was amplified partly by the echoing resonance of the empty old building and partly by his own fear, though in what proportions he could not have said.

  He wiped his face on the bottom of his T-shirt. He didn’t know whether he was sweating more than usual from anxiety or if the humidity was even worse than ever today.

  He set a foot on the first tread of the stair, moving his weight onto it as he lifted his other foot to the second, expecting all the while the first to creak. No noise. He paused. There it was again, those same light steps. But although William was frightened, he wasn’t a coward. He was going up those stairs. For what if Tigua was right? What if this building were a repository for the spirits of the dead? He’d seen his father in the kassa house; what if he were here now? For a whole minute he couldn’t move. The idea had him rooted to this precarious spot. His mouth was dry and his heart palpitated with a peculiar beat; something prickled all along his spine. The very thought of his father being, not alive exactly, you couldn’t say that, but, well, just being . . .

  He took another step and then another. He had to keep close to the wall of the stairwell; as he went higher only the narrowest segment remained of many of the treads, just enough for him to set a foot upon. The centres had long ago given out, eaten through, probably, by dry rot or termites (whatever they were, some kind of monstrous ant, he imagined). The bits of intact step left on the side against the wall seemed fairly solid. He assumed they were supported by something beneath that held the treads to the wall. In places the fragments of stair that were left were so narrow they could only accommodate half the width of his foot. There was no banister for him to grip. He leaned into the wall, trying not to look down. And then, all at once, fear of falling ceased to be a problem, replaced by another that made him all but forget it. When his right foot touched the wall it was with the little toe. With his left, it was the big toe. His anxiety focused upon this lack of symmetry. It seemed the worst thing he had to cope with. Eyelids, fingers, teeth, all were maniacally doing their right-left-left-right thing. Dropping into the abyss beside him would almost be a relief. He took a deep breath and tried to collect himself.

  He might have stayed like that for hours but then, there they were again, the footsteps. It was enough to drive him on. Gritting his grinding teeth to push the lack of symmetry from his thoughts he forced himself to put foot in front of foot and took the remainder of the stairs in a crazy, near-suicidal run. He was blinking so fast that instead of offering any calm it was making him dizzy, would have made him dizzy even without the drop to help it. But no matter, his mad dash carried him up and seconds later, with a sense of relief and triumph he placed his foot upon the final step, which was more or less intact. It creaked! Not only that, it creaked loud enough to wake the dead, except, William thought, that they seemed to be awake already here. He listened. There was a skittering sound like a quick scamper of feet and then silence. So total and absolute, save of course for the ever-present jungle sounds, parrots and insects from outside, that William knew any movement he made must shatter it and announce his presence. He sensed that whoever – whatever – it was, was waiting and listening, trying to tell if he or she or it had heard something.

  He decided to wait it out. A minute went by. Five. Ten. There was no sound. There were two possibilities. Whatever it was had somehow fled. Perhaps it had jumped. The hotel was a low building and the upper floor wasn’t that high from the ground. Presumably ghosts could fling themselves from great heights without any great harm coming to them. Maybe it had been no more than a monkey. Or maybe it was still there and listening for him as he was listening for it. If that were so, decided William, he would take it by surprise. He stepped briskly into the room facing the top of the stairs. An empty concrete shell. He turned out of it and into the upstairs corridor. He marched swiftly along it, bare feet silent on the concrete floor. He looked into the first room on the right. Empty. He peered through the opposite doorway on his left and found nothing. Not just nothing in the room, but nothing at all. No room. It was simply an empty door frame opening on to the jungle. Of course! The builders had never finished the front of the hotel.

  William peered out at the mass of greenery below considering whether anyone might have jumped down. Too late he heard a jingling sound behind him. Too late he began to turn his head. All he saw was a blur of movement and then something came crashing down on his head and he was falling through the air. ‘I’m flying!’ he had time to think. ‘Just like Superboy!’ Before he hit the ground, even as he was crashing through the lower branches of a tree, everything went black.

  TWENTY

&n
bsp; WHILE IT WAS true that obsessive compulsive disorder brought Lola to William – she noticed his alternate eye blinking at a party, mistakenly assumed he was winking at her and thought this an intriguing come-on – it also took her away. She left him soon after the incident with his boss’s wife and after her loss he realized it was time he did something about his condition.

  Like many OCD sufferers William was burdened with an exaggerated sense of responsibility. When bad things happened in the world he felt he ought to have done something to prevent them. Even if the event were a major disaster, such as a train wreck or a terrorist outrage, something there was never any possibility of his averting.

  Faced with this helplessness and the guilt it engendered, William had compensated by choosing a caring profession. In his case it was natural to follow his father in seeking reparation for poor people injured by multinational organizations or the US government. OCD had shaped William’s life: he was successful at what he did because OCD made him careful and meticulous; he did what he did because it had made him a carer.

  So it was natural that when William decided to fight the condition, the effect of it upon him would influence the way he went about tackling it. It was not in his nature to selfishly seek help for himself alone. He wanted his own salvation to be achieved through that of other people and theirs through his. He decided to start a self-help group.

  He advertised in the New York Times for other sufferers to join him in an introductory weekend at a house on the Long Island shore he rented for the purpose. It was a stone’s throw from his parents’ weekend cottage. It had five bedrooms, and, with some doubling up, William reckoned it would do for the group of seven people, including himself, whom he selected as the group’s founder members.

  He’d reluctantly rejected several hundred applicants, some because they had problems that would make their attendance at the introductory weekend impossible – a woman who had been unable to leave her house for twenty-three years, a man who spent all his weekends clearing litter from subway platforms, a girl who could not travel in anything with wheels – and others simply because they wrote in block capitals and angry green ink, and arrived at six other people whom he thought capable of being helped and who seemed from their letters to be intelligent and insightful enough to help him and the rest of the group.