One Big Damn Puzzler

by John Harding

  ‘I is want love spell,’ he said.

  Managua tried not to smile. He could see the boy was distressed. He looked pitiful in his ridiculous white woman’s dress.

  ‘Who is be lucky person I is put spell on?’ asked Managua. He’d never before been asked for a love spell by a she-boy. Even as he asked the question the complications of the situation were beginning to dawn on him.

  ‘Is be for Kiroa,’ Lintoa replied.

  Purnu’s daughter. Managua understood now why Lintoa had come to him. He could hardly ask the girl’s father to enchant her. It would be like asking for her hand in marriage. Managua couldn’t imagine two people in skirts marrying one another.

  ‘She is sure be one plenty damn pretty girl,’ he said.

  Lintoa’s face brightened, chasing away his customary sullen expression. ‘You is think so?’

  Managua nodded. It was hardly necessary for Lintoa to seek his opinion. Everyone agreed that Kiroa was the most attractive girl on the island. ‘You is know when you is be on boat and is come big storm,’ said Lintoa, ‘and is be black clouds and sky is be dark as night?’

  Again Managua nodded.

  ‘And then sun is make hole in clouds and is be so bright you is be dazzle?’

  A third time the old man nodded.

  Lintoa clutched his knees and rocked from side to side. ‘Is be like when Kiroa is appear.’

  His big face was so illuminated by his joy that Managua was loath to return it to its normal sullen state. But there was nothing for it. He must bring the she-boy back to earth.

  ‘There is be just one problem,’ he said.

  ‘I is know, I is know,’ said Lintoa, any light extinguished in his expression. ‘I is be girl.’

  ‘Exactly. How is can two girls be in love? Where you is go take she for make fug-a-fug? You is be girl. You is not have place in bukumatula house.’

  ‘I is can wait for that. I is can do without fug-a-fug until I is become boy. But is be two years till then. What I is want for you is do for me is be this. I is want for you is make Kiroa is like me. You is make she is love me but because I is be girl she is just think she is like me, you is understand?’

  ‘Is be plenty mix up.’

  ‘Yes, but is stop she is fall in love with somebody else so she is not marry they before I is be boy.’

  Managua sighed again. ‘OK, I is try, but is be one damn tricky spell. I is ask you for plenty yams for this one, Lintoa. How you is go find they?’

  ‘You is just make spell, you is leave me for worry ’bout yams.’

  Lintoa got to his feet, put his fingers through his hair to get it under control and tottered out of the hut on his high heels. He paused to haul up the troublesome straps on his already slumped shoulders. Yams were getting to be a bit of a problem.

  THIRTY-ONE

  AS TWILIGHT GATHERED, Lucy slipped from her house and made her way towards the village. She wore William’s spare chinos and khaki shirt, both identical to those he always wore. He’d given her his slouch hat; it would cover her face so only somebody close up would recognize her. Any of her blonde hair that showed was the same colour as William’s. Only their difference in size might give her away, but the plan was for her to arrive at the kassa house at the very last moment, and duck into the entrance tunnel after the last man, so no-one would get a good look at her. Afterwards, everyone would be so out of their minds on kassa, they wouldn’t notice her.

  Lucy couldn’t help thinking it was ironic that her special friends on the island, aside from Managua, were boys who dressed as girls. Now she was dressed as a man. She wasn’t sure how convincing she was, but William said it was all a question of belief. He cited the celebrated actress, Sarah Bernhardt, who’d apparently played Hamlet with great success. Well, Lucy knew she was no actress; she could imagine herself suffering from stage fright. She’d told William of the strict taboo against women entering the kassa house. She hadn’t said she suspected that the punishment for breaking it would be something dramatic, maybe even death. She imagined it too as an orange fungi kind of way to go, slow and painful. She wondered if the natives would let her have a green shoestring and die like Cleopatra, fast and without suffering.

  She paused at the edge of the village to get herself into character. She tried to imagine she was William. It wasn’t easy to put yourself into the shoes of this shy, diffident man. It took more than wearing the same clothes as he. She tried doing the winking thing he always did, but the action contained no clue as to its motive, or to what went on behind those blinking eyes.

  In the outer ring of huts, the dwelling places, people were sitting around the fires outside their doorways. Lucy strode boldly through, eyes straight ahead. Every step she was waiting for the cry that would expose her but none came; if any of the natives had bothered to look up at her, it seemed they hadn’t noticed anything odd and she reached the comparative safety of the inner circle. So far, so good. She positioned herself at the corner of one of the storehouses so she could peep around it for a good view of the kassa house.

  She was much too early! The centre of the village was full of men standing around talking. There was William, identically dressed, but carrying a briefcase, chatting to Managua who was sitting cross-legged outside the kassa house with his spectacles on and an open book in his hand. William was there because if everyone saw him clearly just before they went into the kassa hut, they’d be unlikely to suspect an impostor inside. To this end he was being very sociable. He was like a politician glad-handing people at a cocktail party. He exchanged a pleasantry with Purnu, who laughed, and spoke to one or two of the men with prosthetic limbs whom he’d been interviewing the past few days. Lucy looked around anxiously. Come on, she begged that unknown god she always prayed to at such times, not that there had ever been such a time before, but at, well, tricky moments when only some supernatural intervention could assist her, Come on, make them get a move on!

  Eventually one of the men got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the kassa house tunnel. Others followed. Soon half the men in the village centre had entered. Managua stood, put an arm around William and steered him towards the tunnel. But the American stopped and shrugged the old man off. He nodded across the clearing. Tigua, Lintoa and Sussua were approaching.

  Christ, thought Lucy, if Managua had gone in and I’d made my dash they’d have caught me. She knew the people she definitely couldn’t fool into believing she was William were the she-boys. They were, after all, experts on cross-dressing.

  William walked over to them and the four of them walked towards the far side of the clearing. William called something back to Managua and the old man waved and sat down again with his book. He pushed his spectacles further up the bridge of his nose and resumed his reading. Lucy’s heart was in her mouth. She could taste it there. Time was running out. The number of men left outside the hut was fast diminishing, no more than a dozen or so now. William was still in the clearing. He spoke animatedly to the she-boys and handed them his briefcase. This was all according to plan. Part of his role was to make sure the she-boys were out of the way by sending them on an errand to collect eggs and minoa bread for his breakfast and leave them in the briefcase outside the kassa house for him. The she-boys were always so delighted to be able to do you any service that they wouldn’t suspect trickery. Managua looked up from his book, watching the four of them walk away. When they disappeared behind the huts he looked anxiously at the tunnel, as the last couple of men entered. He closed his book and began the heavy process of rolling over into a crawling position.

  Lucy braced herself. If Managua entered the tunnel, even if she ran she wouldn’t get through the tunnel before the stone was rolled across the inner opening and she’d have lost her chance. On the other hand if she appeared before Managua went in and he waited for her, all would be lost. She took a deep breath, pulled the hat further over her face and stepped into the clearing.

  Managua had just got onto his knees when he saw her. The sight stop
ped him dead. There was the gwanga, but how could this be? Hadn’t he just seen the American leave the other side of the clearing? How could he have got round to this side so quickly? Even stranger, a moment ago the gwanga hadn’t been wearing his hat, and now he was. Managua was pretty sure he hadn’t been carrying it either, so where had it come from? This was all plenty strange. Then he remembered the bag. That was it! The gwanga must have had it in there. But then, why put the hat on now, when the sun had all but disappeared and he was going into the kassa house anyway? There was something odd here. Even the way the white man was walking didn’t look right.

  Lucy’s confident stride was eating up the space between her and Managua. ‘Hurry!’ he called out to her. ‘Is be almost time for begin!’

  Lucy almost called out, Go ahead, I’ll catch you up! But she stopped herself just in time. Instead she made a shooing motion with her hands, hoping against hope that it conveyed the same message here and not, say, wait for me a moment, would you, then you’ll be able to see I’m a woman dressed as a man. She recalled the taboo against cross-dressing except for she-boys and wondered if she’d already done enough to be force-fed orange fungi.

  Managua saw the gesture, nodded and bent his head into the tunnel entrance. As he crawled along he was still puzzled. The gwanga had sure looked plenty different, as though he had shrunk, maybe. How could this be, unless someone had performed a shrinking spell against him? But why would anyone want to do that? He was just deciding he’d have a closer look at the gwanga when they were both in the hut when something slipped down his face and hit his hand. His spectacles! Why of course, he’d been reading and he’d forgotten to take them off! No wonder the gwanga had looked different. And smaller, too! He used the spectacles for reading only. With them on he couldn’t see clearly anything more than a few feet away. Chuckling at his foolishness, he emerged into the kassa house.

  As soon as Managua was out of sight, Lucy broke into a run and was at the entrance to the hut in seconds. She paused to adjust her hat once more.

  ‘Hey, gwanga!’ It came from behind her. It made her head spin. Her legs seemed to lose the power of movement. She suspected they might not be able to hold her up more than a second or two. The village swayed before her eyes. She was going to faint. Hold on, Lucy, hold on! she told herself. Slowly she turned around. She found herself face to face with Lintoa. He stared at her and did a double take you’d have sworn was over-the-top in a comic movie.

  ‘Miss Lucy?’

  She could think of nothing to do or say. She either went into the kassa hut or she stayed out. She might never get another chance. Everything about tonight had gone so well. Until now. She stared into Lintoa’s eyes for the briefest of moments. There was no need to tell him to keep quiet, to not tell anyone; they both knew what would happen if he spoke out. He would either remain silent or he wouldn’t. It would be down to him. Without a word or gesture to him, Lucy dropped to her hands and knees and crawled into the tunnel.

  What was keeping the gwanga? wondered Managua. He was a nice man, all right, but he sure had one plenty big problem with being in the right place at the right time. He was always on the last minute for shitting. Managua had given up waiting for him now and went on his own as he always used to. He didn’t want to get there after everyone was gone and miss out on the daily gossip and exchange of news and opinions that were so integral to the morning ritual. Ah! Here was the American at last, coming in through the entrance, looking all hurried and flustered, like a worried girl almost, late again! With no small gleam of satisfaction in his eye, Managua shook his head to indicate there was no space near him and the gwanga sat down by the entrance.

  This is it, thought Lucy, sitting there cross-legged on the dirt floor of this primitive hut on the other side of the world from where her centre felt to be. The male animal. Around her were some couple of hundred all-but-naked men, smelling their own particular male sweaty smell. This is the club from which I have been excluded all my life. This is the kind of thing they get up to, the kassa house, the stag night, the rugby club; things they do without women.

  The darkness inside the hut was grateful to her. She watched Purnu and another man go through the ritual of mixing the kassa. William had told her about his experience inside the kassa house, of course, so she knew what to expect. As the two men began to circle the room dishing out the kassa she could feel her heart drumming fit to burst her chest, beating faster and faster and so loudly she was tempted to hiss at it, Quieten down! Everyone will hear us and then the game will be up! And it would be up, she knew that. Although she was right by the entrance, if she was discovered, even if she could move the stone and get through it before anyone could catch her, where would she go? There was nowhere she could hide on the island, no way she could survive on her own.

  She was relieved when it was the other man and not Purnu who approached her with the spoon bearing her glob of kassa. That old fox Purnu would have rumbled her, for sure.

  She took the kassa into her mouth and let it slide, sweet and gentle, down her throat. A minute or so later she felt a tingling in her toes that spread quickly and deliciously through her body. She lay there helpless, unable to move anything, other than her eyes and tongue, and she guessed she must be imagining the tingling along her spine as mist began to rise from the fire and dim figures to appear. She heard their plaintive calling for their loved ones and had an urgent need to swallow the lump swelling in her throat.

  ‘Tr’boa, Tr’boa’, ‘Lisuo, Lisuo’, ‘Namabua, Namabua’, pleaded the voices as they searched for those who had summoned them. One after another they stepped from the flames, their shapes putting on flesh, filling out all the time.

  She peered anxiously into the mist. She hadn’t been completely honest with William. Although research was her prime motive for risking her life to be here, there was something else too.

  After the wraiths that emerged from the fire had dispersed about the hut, one remained. A white woman of around sixty, frail beyond her years, in a faded floral dress. Lucy caught her breath. The old lady looked about her anxiously, clearly disturbed by the presence of so many other people when this was obviously not a Thursday market day with bargains to be had by way of compensation for the crowd. Lucy wanted to call out to her, but was fearful her voice would give her away. She could only wait until the woman’s searching gaze finally lighted upon her. Her mother smiled and shuffled across the hut.

  ‘Mum! I – I thought you’d never see me.’

  Her mother looked about her. ‘Where is this place? Who are these people?’

  ‘It’s a hut, Mum, on a little island on the other side of the world.’

  ‘I’m glad it’s not my hut. I wouldn’t like having all these people in it. There’s nowhere to hide.’

  ‘Mum, I wanted to see you. I’ve wanted to ever since you – you—’

  ‘Died?’

  ‘Yes. I needed to tell you something. How I killed you.’

  Her mother smiled. She brushed her thinning hair from her eyes. ‘It wasn’t you, love, it was the cancer. You mustn’t go blaming yourself for that. There wasn’t anything anybody could have done.’

  Before Lucy could explain how she had erased her mother from her life a couple of decades before her actual death, the ghost of an old man walked through her mother, followed by a middle-aged woman. As another old man walked towards her, her mother neatly stepped out of his path. ‘Get out of it!’ she snapped at him. ‘What do they think they’re doing, walking through someone else’s body uninvited? I don’t want them in my body!’

  Satisfied that no-one else was approaching and the invasions were over she turned back to Lucy and smiled. ‘Don’t fret about me, my love. I felt the same when my mum went, so I know what it’s like. It’s just guilt because they’ve been taken and you haven’t. It’ll go, you’ll see. Life goes on. It has to.’

  Lucy made no further attempt to confess or explain. Maybe the idea that if you could only resurrect your loved ones you wou
ld say all the things you hadn’t been able to before was a delusion. She managed to swallow and to say instead, ‘Loved you, Mum.’

  Too late she realized she’d used the wrong tense; her mother was starting to fade. ‘Lucy,’ the old woman said, her voice no more than a whisper, now, ‘do you remember that teacher who tried it on with you? Do you remember my growl? I saw him off, didn’t I?’ She suddenly laughed. ‘I liked being that dog and seeing off a stranger. I liked being that dog.’

  A moment later her features were as faded as her old dress and a moment after that, she was gone.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I IT WAS one plenty damn nuisance, the two missing pages. and not just any old pages either. What for is must be two such important pages? Managua asked himself. But then he reminded himself that there were no unimportant pages in Hamlet. Every word counted. You couldn’t take away a single one without diminishing the whole. Still, these were two exceptionally busy pages; plenty things happened in them. The bottom of page 618 had Claudius instructing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to take Hamlet off to England. Then his deficient copy of the Complete Shakespeare skipped to page 621 and Polonius was dead! How had this happened? Not only that, Hamlet had killed him! He admitted as much to the Queen. ‘For this same lord,/I do repent . . .’ But then he went on to say, ‘I will bestow him, and will answer well/The death I gave him.’

  This was one big puzzler for Managua. He wasn’t entirely convinced by the Queen’s explanation of the killing as an accident. According to her, Hamlet heard something moving behind the arras, whatever that was, a wall, perhaps, probably made of loosely woven fibre rather than bamboo since Hamlet’s sword was easily able to penetrate it. Be that as it might, Hamlet called out, ‘A rat! A rat!’, thrust his sword through the wall and killed Polonius.