Pieces of Light

by Adam Thorpe

  Quiri was delighted; he was sure that Yolobolo had asked the Creator to bring the rains early and stop me leaving. Then it brightened on the fourth morning, and only a light drizzle swept across us. There was a whole day when there was no rain at all: the sun battled through mist, burning my forehead and nose bright red and drying up the smaller puddles. My mother came into the main room, where I was reading on the sofa. She was wielding some scissors. She stood on the leopard-skin rug with the big snarly head. My father had spent a week tanning it in the yard, and Quiri said that its spirit would come back for it one day.

  ‘Time to look smart, Hugh,’ she said.

  I fled the room, knocking a brass tray off the mantelpiece above the fireplace we never used. I heard the clatter behind me as I ran across the yard towards the forest, towards the track to Odoomi.

  My dream was to settle with my parents and Quiri beside the crater lake: to build and thatch a mud-walled hut and swim each day, explore the forest, descend to the nearest village for a game of cricket once a week, take part in feasts and dances and important rituals, to have myself marked as the others were, to marry a fertile and beautiful wife and bring forth a crowd of healthy children, to die an old and wise man, to feel the twine of my life cut and to float away to join the other ancestors, my empty body to be buried in the floor of the hut next to my parents, just as the villagers of those parts buried their dead, in their own homes, under their dreams.

  One of Quiri’s greatest fears was that he would die childless, and roam the forest as an evil spirit. This became my chief fear, too – though if I were to be sacrificed to the gods, as we saw the hens sacrificed in one of the villages, this would not matter, as my spirit would join them as Jesus’s did (He was obviously still a child, the Son on the Cross).

  England, in those last weeks, became a place I associated with this fear of dying childless.

  I wasn’t sure why. When I was about three, I remember asking my mother if I could have a brother or sister. She laughed and said that I was quite enough trouble. Then, soon after, on a return from a bush tour, my father had fallen ill. I went to see him, at some point. He was asleep, but his breathing was funny; I couldn’t keep count, his gasps were so quick. His face gleamed like the enamel bowls we had a lot of in the cookhouse. His mouth was open, with small drops of yellow spittle at each corner. My mother placed a cold wet towel over his forehead; this steamed slightly. When he recovered, he was bad-tempered and old-looking for a long time, his moustache grey and his hair thinned, and he drank more gin after sundown to make himself feel better.

  A year or two later, watching him fiddle about with the Bean, I asked him the same question about brothers and sisters. He wasn’t in a good mood, and told me gruffly that he couldn’t make them. When I asked him why, he blamed Africa, swearing at her and hitting the Bean’s rusted mudguard with his spanner.

  ‘She stops you working, you see.’

  ‘Like the Bean, you mean?’

  ‘Like the blasted Bean, yes.’ He gave a big laugh. ‘Twelve hp, she was. Now she’s zero. Like me.’

  I didn’t ask about brothers and sisters any more. In the last weeks there, I thought quite a lot about my father’s bad illness; I reckoned it had stopped him making children, as a week of thick mist had stopped the Bean’s engine for good.

  That day I ran away from my mother’s scissors, coming to a halt well out of sight up the muddy track, I thought again about what he had said that time, crashing his spanner on the mudguard, and how important it was that I didn’t die and leave my parents to roam around evilly after their own deaths.

  I felt the soft rain on the nape of my neck and covered the scar with my hand. Surrounded by the huge, dripping trees of the forest, my indoor sandals hidden in a warm puddle, I invoked Yolobolo in the way Quiri had taught me: Kan wak, si-pap bobo, bolo yol nga.

  The rains had washed all the animals away; there was a great silence behind the drip-drops of the rain off the big leaves.

  I said the magic words again. I wasn’t saying them properly – and anyway, I was a little white grub, ready for the birds, my skin nude except for the one unsealed mark and some smears of kaolin. I’d asked Quiri how children were made, recently; he’d said something about heads of rats caught in traps, that made them swell their cheeks and spit. The trap was the woman, the rat the man. He’d laughed, and told me I was too young to ask.

  That was it, I thought: my father had lost his rat, as I had lost my galago and a tiny lizard I’d caught last week, which had left behind only its tail in my room.

  I felt the mark on my neck with my finger; it was bumpy, and smooth, though still a little sore. I didn’t feel like running away to Odoomi, and then the crater lake, without my fetishes. It was in weather like this that Sir Steggie woke up, because he thought it was night. And a little further on the angry gorilla spirit was waiting. I thought of all the childless men and women who had left their spirits behind, ready to do mischief, and remembered what Mr Moore had said about the heap of bodies here in the German times. They would not have been prayed for; their spirits were scattered through the air, moaning. The shreds of mist in the trees might be them – headless, like the slaves of Benin. The air was clamping itself to my back. Because I had run, my shirt was wet with sweat as much as rain. Anyway, it wasn’t raining: the droplets in the air were mist. Now and again they stuck together and you could see them.

  I loved this heat, this moisture, this warm mist. I loved the smell thickening from the ground, that the first heavy rains brought in their wake, sweeter than any other time. I feared England’s cold, suddenly. I pictured it as a sharp blade, like my father’s cut-throat razor. How was I going to survive a season when everything died, when the branches were stripped of leaves and nothing grew at all? The pictures of winter in my books reminded me of my worst dreams of skeletons and ghosts.

  I cried, helplessly, alone on the track, when I thought of that. Hard edges and points would squeeze and prick me from every angle. My blood would stiffen as the hen’s had on the stone in the courtyard of the village. I would miss these trees; the other servants agreed with Quiri that the trees protect you. Their roots suckle the ancestors, the trunks suckle us, the leafy tops remind the gods to send us rain. Did England have such trees? The thin track was wide to me, at that age; it had cut through these gigantic, protecting creatures and left a tangle at each side difficult to penetrate or to see into.

  It was my father’s great achievement, and I felt it was also mine.

  The sun burned again through the mist. Pieces of light appeared in the gloom, as if they were solid bits of a puzzle. As I heard my mother running through them, towards me, shouting my name, I looked northwards, towards the Crater Lake, and made the picture – the track, the tangle each side, the huge trees and the spotted gloom under them – enter my head for good.

  ‘Heavens above, they can take you as you are,’ said my mother, hugging me tight. ‘Little urchin.’

  She cradled my head in her hands and looked at me. I didn’t think she was going to take my head off this time.

  ‘Grace,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Grace. Just that word. Will you always remember that?’

  ‘Like the Reverend Tarbuck’s boat?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, like the boat.’

  I can’t remember what it means, I thought, apart from saying grace. I’ll have to look it up. I saw the steamer with its black funnel, surrounded by smoke.

  She was searching my face for something. For grace, perhaps. It was something holy, I knew that much. Was grace the same thing as graceful, which my father kept saying African women were, when they walked around with pots on their heads? I tried to put on a graceful expression. But she frowned and said in a small voice that there was something wrong with my eye again. This time she wasn’t squashing my face with her hands, just holding it. I knew there was something wrong with my eye, but I hadn’t told anyone. Just recently it had bothered me even more with its blurry sp
ots. Crying must have brought its yellowness out.

  ‘When I had my fever,’ I said. ‘It did something to my eyeball.’

  Then I was suddenly seized with the idea that this might stop me going to England. I exaggerated the condition immediately.

  ‘I mean, I can’t really see through it.’

  My mother’s slight frown dropped into a look of utter horror.

  I was so surprised that I backed away, my face slipping from her hands. She was now clasping them together, with that horrified stare fixed on her face. Because I honestly thought that going blind in one eye meant that I could stay, I couldn’t stop myself beaming from ear to ear.

  This broke her stare, but turned it into something cross. She seized my hand and almost dragged me to the house, where my father had a look at my eye and grunted a bit. Then she disappeared, to lie down, and I was told not to disturb her. I could hear them muttering together for a while, but no change was made to the plans.

  The next day, I looked up the word ‘grace’, and found so many meanings for it that it blurred into a simple sound, like a charm in Quiri’s language. (I used it in the same way, therefore.)

  My mother’s strange reaction still strikes me as a watershed; after that moment on the path, we were never quite as close. Sometimes, in England, during those few years that remained to us, I had the strange impression that she was looking at me with a slight shudder. This, far from making me distance myself from her, made me try to please her all the more. I wanted to win back whatever I had lost on that hot, misty afternoon in the forest, on my father’s ‘road’ (of which there is now no sign on any map I can find).

  The picture I took in my head there is still very clear, however. As it turned out, and unknown to me at the time, it records the very last moment of what I sometimes think of as my golden age, before the Fall.

  2

  THE WAVE ROSE very big behind the ship, then broke its crest just under the keel so that foam tumbled over the hull until only the mast showed. The mast rocked and righted itself and showed the prow waiting for the next crash. I crouched and let the wave splash against my face and then waded in until I towered over the boat, a single vein running through my bronze body from neck to ankle. I rained stones upon the Argo until the crew begged for mercy. The next wave tumbled it over and over and knocked even me to my knees – the harsh water suddenly over my head and sucking me under until it decided to push me up the black sand instead, where it was more interesting to be Robinson Crusoe than Talos.

  I stayed lying on my tummy with my feet in the foam. The coconut shell was thrown up next to me, bereft of its bamboo mast and leaf sail. Mr Allinson appeared in the distance, waving his cane and calling. I saw through one eye (my bad one), that he had started to run. He came up puffing and panting through the spots, holding on to his pith helmet.

  ‘Hugh!’ he shouted.

  I didn’t move; I had only just been washed up. I had many years of solitude before Friday came.

  ‘Oh God,’ he groaned.

  He sat on my back and started to squash my ribs against the ribs of the sand.

  ‘Ow, ow,’ I said.

  ‘Never ever do that again, Hugh,’ said my mother, afterwards. ‘You know Mr Allinson has a weak heart.’

  There was a real storm that night, which kept me awake. I watched it from the bedroom window with my mother. As usual, we could only see anything when there was a sheet of lightning. She thought the palms looked lunatic. The breakers had broken away from their usual positions and kept moving on towards us, but they always gave up at the last moment, smashing to pieces and being dragged back only inches from the sterns of the dugouts lined up on the beach. The land was just stronger than the sea, thank goodness. The night sky boomed and cracked and made the floors judder. My mother held on to my hand and kept talking about the sea as if it was a patient with a high fever. I saw it as healthy, sinking all the ships that were to take me away from Africa. I put my other hand in my pocket and held my fetish tight and asked for this to happen, but saving those in peril on the sea when the decks disappeared under them.

  The Elder Dempster liner appeared like a white palace around the edge of the bay in the morning. It crept past the calm palms and hooted. Black smoke sank down behind it and stayed in a long lumpy line. It had a giant bayonet sticking up in front, as if it was on parade. I watched it from the dripping veranda and thought: that ship is stronger than anything else.

  ‘Thar she blows,’ said Mr Allinson. ‘The SS Abinsi.’

  He had his hands on Lucy Allinson’s shoulders. She was thirteen, and hadn’t been out to Africa since she was four. She kept saying to me, ‘We’re going back together,’ but I was only going, not going back.

  Well, England might be exciting, I thought. I’m not going to be sacrificed. I’ll make pals, like in the books. And play cricket and laugh. You get used to the cold. I’ll carry around Yolobolo’s mark and feel safe. School worried me, because – eager to know what it was – I’d read Tom Brown’s Schooldays the previous month. I didn’t want to be held in front of a fire or be someone’s slave.

  ‘I’m no one’s slave,’ my father would say, when he was cross with HQ.

  When he’d waved goodbye with the servants from the station jetty, he’d looked as if someone had pinched his nose very hard. Halfway across the bay, with its water chuckling past the canoe’s hull a few inches from my elbow, my mother had said, ‘Look, Hugh!’

  She was pointing at my father; my father was saluting. Quiri and Mr Henry and Joseph were also saluting. Augustina and Ndala and Baluti and Big Baldie were not waving any more. For some reason, my father had brought out the gramophone player with the huge horn. It was now playing the National Anthem, blown across to us over the forest’s shrieks and whistlings.

  ‘That is most unfortunate,’ said my mother, almost to herself. She gripped the two sides of the canoe and seemed either anxious or cross. ‘If that is your father’s idea of a joke –’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to stand up,’ I said.

  She looked at me as if surprised, and then laughed. But I was being serious. The long dug-out was crammed with our cases: we had to be careful. At the other end, after the rowers, stood Mawangu, with a gun. He was a very good shot. He knew exactly where to hit both a hippo and a croc. He had to be standing so that he could see if a croc or a hippo was on its way. I studied my mother for a moment. That same cloud had come down over her face. I had the oddest feeling that I wasn’t ever going to see our home again; I had not asked any questions about this. The trees were already sliding between here and there. The river was brown and full, and carrying us quite quickly, and the rowers had barely to row.

  I turned and lifted, myself up a bit, forgetting.

  ‘Hugh, sit down!’

  I think she thought I was about to jump in and swim back, but I needed to see the forest beyond the buildings, to burn it into my mind so I would never forget it. I sat down and screwed my eyes shut. I had taken a sort of photograph again: I could see it down to the trees sliding across, shutting it off. I wish I had taken one of Quiri. I settled down again.

  Then: ‘We are coming back, aren’t we, Mother?’

  Her eyes flickered to the water and back again to my face. ‘Of course, Hugh,’ she lied. ‘Eventually. We’ll plan things later. It’s going to be so exciting for you, darling.’

  The two days in the Mission Station were strange. The Reverend Tarbuck, who was rather ill and out of sorts, kept coming up to me and tousling my hair, staring at me with tears in his eyes. At other times he would be talking quietly to my mother under the big acacia, turning round as I approached and giving me a look that was not so pleasant. This again awoke my suspicion that I was to be sacrificed.

  ‘Come into the cemetery with me,’ he said, on the second morning. ‘I want to show you something.’

  ‘No,’ said my mother. She looked either anxious or cross, again.

  Anyway, I ran off and hid. After that, he stayed most
of the time in his house.

  I thought about this as I waved goodbye from the big ship, very high up, standing on a box so that I could see over the side. Why hadn’t I hidden like that in Victoria, even on the wharf with all its huge crates and logs and bales? I was told that this ship was a mail steamer, but she carried much more than letters. Lucy was waving next to me, and my mother was blowing her nose behind me. Lucy’s parents had pecked her on the face like hens, saying goodbye. Mr Allinson had pumped my hand.

  ‘So long, Mr Crusoe!’ he’d boomed.

  Now everyone was growing smaller and smaller, until we couldn’t even see their hands above their heads. The hooter groaned, as if leaving was a big effort. I had never seen so much metal in my life, and it was only rusty around the bolts, the million bolts that kept it all together. When the sun shone, the ship was almost too hot to touch.

  I tried to spot the Ndian estuary, or even the Mission Station, but we were too distant, a long way past the creamy breakers. Only Mount Cameroon stayed recognisable for a while, with a head of grey cloud like a toadstool. Then it dwindled into the mist. This mist shut us off from the solid world half of the time, letting us see land only in glimpses, or when we pulled in at a port.

  Lucy was very happy when the wind no longer brought the smell of my home, a few days later.

  ‘I can jolly well breathe now,’ she said, leaning back in her deckchair.

  I studied Lucy’s face.

  ‘What are you staring at?’ she snapped.

  ‘You,’ I said. ‘You were crying. What you done cry for?’

  She repeated my last sentence and laughed. ‘Golly, you’re a native!’

  ‘I know why you’re crying,’ I replied; ‘you’re missing your parents.’

  She snorted, and wiped the tear from her cheek with a fling of her hand. Then, looking out on the water, she said, ‘I don’t miss them at all. I don’t miss anyone. So there.’

  I looked at my hands, noticing how delicate hers were. My fingers were marked with tiny cuts and scratches, and the skin was rough. Quiri had said that all these marks, if they stayed, meant things; the thin red scar above my eyebrow, where I had fallen against a stone aged two, meant that my secret eye had woken up. The adhesive bandage on my second finger had come off, leaving a paler band like a ring.