The View from Mount Dog

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘He does, you know.’ Jhonny’s voice had taken on a faint surprise as if he were listening to his own mouth talk and hearing it say things he hadn’t quite thought of yet. ‘Me. Rubie. You, too. All of us. Not hate, of course. But to despise people is even worse. It’s all those books…. You remember the few times he’s condescended to return home to see if his family were still more or less alive? You remember his conversation – if you can call it that? Lecturing us about phil … phil … philoposopy or something and what was that other thing? About money?’

  ‘Macroeconomic theory,’ said Siyo, whose memory was notoriously excellent when he was drunk even though as in this case his understanding was nil.

  ‘That’s it. My God, how he bored us. We all sat there for hour after hour being lectured. He wouldn’t let Laki sing his songs and he wouldn’t allow the children to sleep…. How could you possibly remember what it was called?’ he asked his friend with sudden admiration. ‘You were wonderful; you saved the day.’

  ‘Did I?’ asked Siyo, pleased.

  ‘You know you did; enough people told you next morning. You just sat in the corner drinking rum in complete silence for an hour or two before suddenly toppling over like a dead ox, out cold, and letting off this gigantic fart. God, how we all laughed. Boyet didn’t, though; not a bit. He was sitting there with a sort of disdainful smile as if to say “Yes. That’s the peasantry for you.” He never did have much sense of humour, the little bugger, especially about himself, but I don’t know how anybody could have kept a straight face. There he was, droning on about books, books, books, and everybody’s in a doze or wanting to pee and suddenly there’s dear old Siyo, flat on his face with a great Prrrrrrrt!’

  Both men were now laughing reminiscently and it was the moment juste for the absent Boyet suddenly to arrive. But he didn’t, and they went on scalding and plucking, each giving private guffaws as the memory struck them afresh.

  He didn’t arrive and he didn’t arrive and by eleven-thirty so many other people had turned up and so many of those were already slightly tipsy it was obvious that in some undeclared way the proceedings had started without the guest of honour. After a certain point in his own hesitancy had been reached Jhonny himself began drinking with the other men, sitting at a small table outside while the women kept them supplied with bowls of snacks. By then Tiger had been transmogrified with all sorts of culinary skill into roast Tiger, boiled Tiger, Tiger stew and Tiger done in coconut milk, very rich and creamy. Tiger’s intestines had been cooked and glazed and were now served on slivers of bamboo to the drinkers. Everyone complimented Jhonny on his late puppy. ‘Good dog,’ they observed. ‘Good dog.’

  Jhonny’s mood had changed once more. He beamed with pleasure, he became expansive, he became drunk. As if by some general agreement Boyet was not mentioned, so that when he came his arrival would bring all the pleasure of a genuine surprise. Inside the house the women stirred pots, tippled and made lewd jokes. Outside the house the men made lewd jokes, tippled and just plain stirred. Now and again a wife or a grandmother would come out and sit with them and the gossiping would merrily take a turn for the worse. In between and all around ran the children. Laki arrived bringing his battered bamboo guitar; Sanso wandered off looking for a wild lime-bush for leaves with which to accompany him; Kedo brought his banjo made of a turtle-shell covered with dogskin. The palm beer which had arrived fresh in thick bamboo containers still sweet and mild became stronger and more acrid. On the table was a large Nescafé jar of it fermenting rapidly, the currents set up by bacterial action bringing to the surface dead palm-flowers and insects before carrying them back down to the bottom in a continuous seethe.

  The songs started, all the old favourites. People joined in or talked over them or fell into light stupor, eating mechanically and tossing inedible fragments to scavenging pigs and chickens and to the dogs who happily crunched away on the bones of their recent playmate. Groups went into the house in relays to eat because there was no table big enough to hold everybody at a single sitting. Huge heaps of rice were consumed and still more came. At two o’clock Jhonny got to his feet and stretched his tough old arms.

  ‘Feeling good,’ he said. Clearly it was a sign, for several people looked up at the swaying paterfamilias.

  ‘Go on,’ Siyo urged him. ‘Do you good.’

  ‘Yes, go on, go on,’ the chorus was taken up. ‘Do it now or you’ll be too drunk.’ ‘It’s ages since you last did it.’ ‘Bet you can’t.’ ‘Too old.’

  ‘Bugger off, the lot of you,’ said Jhonny good-naturedly and crossed to the nearest palm-tree, a venerable sixty-foot giant which must have been well over half a century old and thus nearing the end of its productive life. Chairs were pushed back and children gathered round the bulbous roots. Without more ado Jhonny did a handstand against the base of the tree, turned round so that his nose appeared to be sniffing the bark and, gripping with the sides of his horny feet, began to climb upside down.

  It was a famous trick. Many youngsters proud of their strength had tried, but only Jhonny could do it: forty-year-old Jhonny, apparently burned up with endless work and drink and cigarettes, turned out – upside down at least – to be nothing of the sort. And now the strain on his immense arms could be seen; gasps of effort floated down to the onlookers as the inside edges of his soles groped for the staggered slots long ago cut into the trunk to aid the regular ascent of more conventional climbers. The backs of his polished legs bulged and writhed. A forgotten box of matches fell out of the pocket of his shorts and bounced off the head of a child. Everyone laughed and, seeing that Jhonny had nearly reached the crown, began encouraging him: ‘Only a metre and a half, Jhon-boy; go on, lad, you’re there.’ For everybody knew the extreme effort, how the agony in the back and arms was only half over for him: the descent was just as bad with arms quaking with fatigue, the head-first fall of sixty feet down the curving trunk ever more likely. His wife turned away. She hated his doing it while at the same time feeling a pride which made her eyes prickle, especially when a bit drunk as she now was. There was nobody else who could do it. People had heard of only one other man able to do it and he had lived ten miles away and died twenty years ago. She risked a quick glance. Her husband was halfway down now, and she knew that once more he was going to finish safely, drink or no drink, forty years old or not.

  When Jhonny’s hands reached the roots the waiting onlookers gave a great cheer and lifted him bodily off the trunk, turning him up the right way. His eyes were closed, his face was black, his legs were gone, so they carried him to the house and laid him in the shade and stood over him until he had stopped panting and opened his eyes.

  ‘Ahh,’ he sighed, half-lost for faintness. ‘That calls for a drink.’

  This was the sign for another great cheer and a general rush to offer glasses, bottles, containers of drink. Jhonny seized the Nescafé jar and gulped down its contents, dead bees and all.

  ‘Unbelievable.’ ‘The man’s ageless.’ ‘It’s not quite human.’

  The pride, the affection, the solidarity engendered by Jhonny’s feat, which had brought alcoholic tears to the eyes of many more than his wife, if the truth be told, had so concentrated their attention that the presence of a bystander had gone unnoticed. Standing somewhat apart in brilliant white trousers and holding an attaché case, he was watching with cool gaze.

  ‘Father up to his monkey tricks again,’ he said. An awful silence fell.

  ‘Ah,’ said Jhonny again, sitting up now and wiping his mouth on his stained T-shirt. ‘Boyet. Good of you to come, son.’

  ‘I fear too late to catch the whole of your performance,’ said Boyet. ‘I’m sorry about that. The stupid boat broke down, can you believe it?’ He looked round at the faces he’d known since infancy, at Laki with his guitar and Kedo with his turtle-banjo and the whole familiar, endlessly repeating pattern of relentless parochialism. ‘I had to stand in the sun on deck for two whole hours while those
idiots did their usual trick of trying to repair a prehistoric engine with hammers and string. Bodging; absolutely typical. It really is high time people in this country got their act together. Anyway, I’m sorry to be late,’ he said again, as if to offset any gracelessness his rufflement might have caused. ‘Now I am here I can see I’d better change.’

  He went into the house, keeping his shoes on, his mother following him with the gleaming attaché case.

  ‘“Monkey-tricks”,’ Siyo heard Jhonny mutter.

  ‘Joke only,’ he told his friend earnestly, but the phrase undermined everything. Nobody else was paying any attention, however, being busy with expressing pleasure at the son of the house’s sudden return and the confirmatory power of his father’s prowess.

  ‘Happy birthday!’ they shouted towards the house. ‘Drink, Jhonny; relax now. Everything’s OK. You’ve earned it.’

  Kedo began strumming on the banjo, someone took up a song, and Sanso held his leaf edge-on to his bottom lip and began a piercing, wavering accompaniment. The high, doleful whistle cut through the din with its reassuring familiarity, reminding everyone of countless evenings’ home-made conviviality in countless huts dotted among the coconut-groves, the sound so perfectly redolent of palm beer turned sour with its own vinegar, with raising and killing, with the sharpness of tears falling impotently on thin and wiry forearms grasping a variety of crude everyday implements. People began to be very drunk indeed, Jhonny most of all, swallowing great draughts of anything he could lay his hands on with a kind of single-minded recklessness. The morning’s sunlight had given way to cloud; a light rain fell, driving everybody into the house, cramming it so full that they were jammed thigh to thigh on the bamboo floor, their sandals in a great jumbled heap down below in the mud at the foot of the steps. Boyet was off in one of the cubicles; his voice could be heard rising above the woven partition, protesting to his mother and sisters. It went on and on.

  Suddenly Jhonny stood unsteadily up and reached down the plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol from the shelf. In a strange and clear voice he said: ‘I can climb any palm. I can drink any drink.’ He sat down again.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Jhon,’ said Siyo, weaving his head blurrily. ‘Can’t drink rubbing alcohol. Wrong sort of alcohol. Got menth … menthol in it. It’ll make you sick.’

  ‘Nah, not Jhonny it wouldn’t,’ said someone.

  ‘No,’ said Jhonny, ‘not me.’ Without hesitation he unscrewed the cap and drank the contents. Then he put the bottle down, looked at it for a moment, closed his eyes and jerked both knees violently into his chest. He made a weird sound, ‘Idzizz … sizz … sizz,’ before falling backwards and hitting his head on the door-jamb.

  ‘Whad I tell you?’ Siyo asked him rhetorically. ‘Serves you right. By God you’ll have a headache tomorrow.’

  But Jhonny was not sick; he was stone dead.

  *

  That night Siyo, utterly sober, wept and wept and would not be stopped.

  ‘We’re all to blame,’ said his wife. ‘He was too drunk to know what he was doing.’

  ‘That isn’t the point, woman,’ said Siyo in a miserable, quiet scream. ‘The point is he must have known, I must have known. For God’s sake, we’d been out fishing often enough for me to know he kept his poison in that bottle. You don’t just forget you’ve put cyanide and tubli root into a rubbing-alcohol bottle, do you?’

  ‘You might quite easily when you’re as drunk as he was. One bottle of rubbing alcohol looks much like any other; they’re common enough. I expect what he thought was, “Aha, rubbing alcohol. I’ll drink that – that’ll amaze them,” because he was still high, he was still on top of it all after his climb, wasn’t he? Go on, Siyo, wasn’t he?’

  But Siyo wouldn’t be consoled, and it was many days before his attacks of crying stopped and many months before he could pass an entire day without that hollow ache of loss, and he never again in his life went fishing illegally with poison.

  As for poor Boyet, he acted the part of head of the family with perfect decorum for as long as was needed over the period of the obsequies. Then one morning he sat on the river-bank opposite the wallow with his godfather, awkwardly, at times aggressively, telling Siyo things about himself which were profoundly shocking. For Jhonny had been right: there was something wrong, Boyet was not like the other sons with whom he had always been so unfavourably compared; there never would be hospitality girls in crimson jeeps. Siyo, whose own grief had now made him better able to sense it in others, was shocked far less by what the boy confessed to than by his isolate misery. That inveterate difference which he had always felt would drive him out of his village and which had made him repudiate it together with his family, his origins, his very intellect: he hated it all and in so doing hated what he had become.

  Shortly afterwards he left, seemingly for good. They expected to see him at least for the death anniversary, his own birthday, but Boyet never came. Siyo often longed to send him a letter telling him funny village news, that his family were well, that he was loved, that he understood. But, alas, he was unable to write and he could not bring himself to lay bare to some gossipy amanuensis confidences stumblingly expressed.

  So that was that. And ever afterwards his eyes would fill with tears when passing that spot on the river-bank, as at the least mention of his friend Jhonny and the terrible accident.

  Vanishment

  Leaving her mother to rest back at the hotel she wandered out into the blinding sunlight once again. Eventually, because she did not want more coffee or more ice-cream, she went into a church and sat down. One could do that in Italy with the excuse that one wished to look at something: there was generally a minor painting, a flaking fresco, an altarpiece. In this particular church there was nothing, however; just gloom and stale incense and soft cooing overhead.

  How vivacious her mother must have been then! Still was, for that matter, nearly eighty and amused by so much. So many memories, so many people. She had come here all those years ago in her mid-twenties with Dorothy, the famous Dorothy. A composite image here came to Janet’s inward eye of faces from the pictures in her mother’s photograph-album, a document she had thought was as utterly familiar as anything else she had grown up with. Yet now the album with its images was retreating strangely and acquiring a deeper unknowableness. There had been a moment that morning in the Piazza delle Tre Marie when she had recognised absolutely the fountain in the middle with its circular cobbled surround. She had shut her eyes and the photograph became vivid near the bottom of a right-hand page of her mother – snapped presumably by Dorothy – perched on that thick iron railing, her fingers on the crown of the stanchion maintaining her balance, smiling right out of the picture with a spout of water coming from the top of her head.

  ‘The fountain!’ Janet had exclaimed.

  ‘Oh, pretty. I like the little lion.’

  ‘But you must remember it. You were here before with Dorothy.’

  ‘Was I? Well, I dare say we were, but it was a long time ago. Also, it’s not the most distinguished piazza, is it?’

  ‘But, Mumbo, it’s all in your album at home. Look at this railing, up at the end here. Now put your hand on it. Go on…. There. Exactly fifty-three years ago you sat on that precise bit of iron and smiled.’

  ‘I doubt if I should do so again; it looks uncommonly sharp to me. I always wondered why when they have a rail that is square they should set it on edge like a diamond so only a bird could enjoy perching on it.’

  How was it, Janet wondered, that she herself should be more touched and made more aghast by the passage of time than her mother? Were the old so used to seeing places and thinking of themselves there in younger days they were no longer affected? How did one acquire resistance to making the obvious equation: that girl in the photograph equals this old woman here, now probably half a head shorter? They were not the same person; of course they were the same person. But the upshot of it all was that a certain kind of validity which she had always ascribed
to her mother’s photograph-album was now thrown into doubt. If the places, why not the faces, too? Girls with bobbed hair and the look of having been good sports; heavy black bicycles, thick wood raquets, boxy cars with running-boards. And smiling through those missed years when Janet did not exist the face of her future mother’s especial friend Dorothy. ‘D in Verona’, ‘D in Lowry’s Morris’, ‘D coaching St C’s hockey XI’, and later on ‘D convalescing’. None, though, of D’s funeral.

  ‘Oh, she was such fun,’ her mother would say from as far back as Janet could remember. ‘We had such lovely times. We used to laugh so much we would choke. She was one of those special people; I think everybody loved Dorothy.’

  When she was quite little these words used to fill Janet with a deep pity for her mother as if Dorothy’s death had left her for ever friendless; and she would cry on her mother’s behalf and at her own inability to comfort and protect her. Later the formula ‘everybody loved Dorothy’ would induce a less sympathetic feeling amounting almost to a grudge. It was unjust. How could she help comparing herself to this unknown friend? How could she not ransack her mind for a single schoolmate of her own who might conceivably say such things about her in twenty, forty, sixty years? She would sit with her chin on her knees, long grey woollen stockings concertina’d round her ankles like any boy’s, wondering why her white shins were so pronounced and bruised and shiny. How did one acquire friends, anyway? The people with friends like Dorothy seemed always to have had them, like blonde hair or athletic ability, never to have acquired them suddenly. Also there was about those kinds of friendship a suggestion of a golden age which had existed before her own creation: sunnier times which lay somewhere between the demise of the dinosaur and the institution of compulsory games at school. Then it had come to her how absolutely peculiar it was for one’s own mother to have existed at all before one was born, more still that she could carry forward memories into modern times of extreme happiness with someone who – as far as one’s own chronology was concerned – had only ever lived on this earth as a chemically imaged shadow on squares of glossy, dog-eared paper.