by Owen Sheers
As he walked towards the group he could hear the language opposing the Somali: harsh, Hispanic, but not Spanish. He glanced to his right. There was the dock, and there was Africa. Black bodies worked everywhere, carrying, pushing, lifting. A few Europeans stood among them. Not carrying, not pushing, not lifting. They pointed. They shouted. And they all wore khaki like he did.
It was the first shot that snapped his attention back to the deck. It cracked and echoed through the air, leaving a sense of sound displaced. He didn’t think it was a shot until he heard the second, then the third. He began to run towards the group. But then came the fourth and the fifth in quick succession, each ear-jarring crack chasing the tail of the other. The Somalis had broken on the first, and were now fanning, spreading, melting towards him as he ran towards them. They hit him like a wave, a riptide of feet rolling him, pulling him under. He saw the flash of a blade swipe through the corner of his eye, more feet, more legs and arms, then a body falling, its black chest unfurling a sheet of blood to the floor. More shots. Six, seven, eight. He was clear of the feet and legs now, but he remained lying on the deck, his arms over his head, the same words repeating again and again in his mind. Why don’t they stop? Why don’t they stop? And then they did.
Suddenly, as suddenly as it had begun, it all stopped, and for a few seconds silence came ebbing back into the vacuum. But it was not long until more noise arrived, the sound of aftermath rising to the occasion. More shouts, the German of the crew, an undertone of groaning, the sea’s slap and clap against the hull, his own breath, short and close in his ear, the winch and pulley of a crane that had worked throughout. One woman’s scream, long on the morning.
The whole incident had passed in seconds, and already it was over, it had happened. But Arthur’s mind had not caught up, and as he lay there on the deck, his eyes closed, he was still trying to register it, to adjust himself to the sudden disturbance, the violent brevity of it. The whole, sight, sound and smell of it. He opened his eyes. From where he lay he could see the legs of the remaining Somalis, thick together like a copse of closely planted saplings. Looking up their bodies he saw they were being rounded up, collected, gathered by men in uniform. Policemen. Two held drawn swords, one held a revolver, clumsy and smoking in his hand. Then there, closer to him, were the bodies. Two, no, three of them. The man closest to him lay on his back, his head thrown back, exposing his neck, his pointed Adam’s apple jutting from his throat. His mouth was open, and leaked blood from the commissure of his lips which trailed down his tilted face to his open eyes, where it collected in an eyelid. A red tear, ready to drop.
He was still staring at the dead man when he felt the pressure of hands on his body. He was being picked to his feet. Hands under his arms, pulling him up. A face swam into view, one of the young German crew, speaking in faltering English.
‘You are hurt, Voter?
No, he was not hurt. His body was fine. He gently pulled his arms away from theirs and waved a hand in front of his face, making it clear they should leave him. Behind them other members of the crew were clearing the bodies. He watched, still stunned, as the man with the blood in his eyes was hauled over a broad shoulder, and carried off the ship, like one of the thousands of sacks being carried back and forth on the dock below him. He felt the bitter taste of bile rise in his throat, the swelling of nausea in his stomach and, thinking he was going to vomit, he turned again to the ship’s railings, resting his hands on them, his head bowed, breathing deeply. The urge to be sick passed and he raised his head once more to look down on the dock, which was teeming again with work. In fact, it looked like it had never stopped. It was all energy. Energy and sweat. The essential ingredients for empire building, for the building of new countries, new lives. New dreams. But energy and sweat would never be enough on their own. As he had just witnessed, there was always blood too.
One of the Europeans standing on the harbour side, a stocky man in khaki, had spotted him looking out over the dock. Arthur saw him now, squinting up at him, one hand shielding his eyes beneath his solar hat, the other raised above his face, waving. He seemed to be smiling, but it was hard to tell. Arthur raised his own arm in reply, and waved back, not sure in himself if he was waving a greeting to this man or waving goodbye.
♦
Bishop William Gaul had been waiting in Beira Bay since the previous day, and on the dockside since dawn. He was, he knew, by nature an impatient man, but this delay, he felt, would have tried the patience of even the most saintly of constitutions. The Boer War grinding on in the south didn’t help, cutting off all supply routes from Cape Town, making Beira Bay the main point of entry for anything and anyone from Europe (and from where he was standing it seemed as if Europe was sending most of herself to Africa). The port was impossibly busy. The ship he had been told was carrying Cripps had stayed stubbornly anchored far out all yesterday evening, and was still there earlier this morning. Now, at last, it had been allowed in. But he was still waiting, and the sun was rising, and the heat of the day was finding itself, flat and harsh on his skin. So he stood there, at the back of the docks, stock still among the hundreds of moving bodies and voices, looking up at the high sides of the ship. Anyone standing close enough would have heard him muttering frequently under his breath, damning the Boers for their stubborn persistence in this war, and even occasionally the British too, for theirs.
Like the other Europeans on the quayside the Bishop wore khaki. Both his drill apron and his clerical coat were of this colour. He was small, only five feet tall in his boots, but stocky with it. His face was clean-shaven, and his skin a sun-burnt brown, taut across his cheekbones despite his age. He was fifty-five. The only discernible lines on his face were about his eyes, deep crow’s feet, developed by years of squinting through the sun’s glare. His cheeks were lean, and beneath his helmet, which was tipped back from his forehead, was the suggestion of closely cropped grey hair, receding above the temples. His eyes were blue, and made all the brighter in contrast to the bloodshot whites about them.
Bishop Gaul had been stationed in Rhodesia for seven years now as Bishop of Mashonaland, and on meeting people had taken to introducing himself as ‘the smallest bishop with the largest diocese in Christendom’. His listeners often found it hard to distinguish with which of these feats he was most proud, but he liked it as a line. He liked people to know where he stood, of the scale of things here. And he liked to be the first to mention his height, denying anyone else the chance of an early jibe or comment.
The Bishop had lasted a long time, much longer than most. A total of nineteen years of service, starting off in the south, far south, in the diamond town of Kimberley, then migrating north, into Mashonaland and the sudden violence of the native uprising of 1896. A widower, he’d arrived in Southern Rhodesia seven years ago a hollow man, a husk blown north on little more than the wind of his wife’s death and his own song lines of grief. He’d come to replace Bishop Knight Bruce, looking for more of the pioneering work he’d done in Kimberley, where he had risen to the challenge of that town to become both rector and archdeacon. It was a hard town, hard as the diamonds at its core, where the prospectors spent the days flogging their bodies in the mines and the nights dreaming of the future happiness their riches would bring them. They mined the earth for the elusive diamonds, while he mined their souls for an equally elusive faith. It seemed like an agreement, a contract, and over time he’d gained a respect in the town, and not just when he was needed, to marry, bury, christen. He also won the respect of the miners for who he was—a man doing his job just like them. And diamonds and God, he’d come to decide, had a lot in common. They both held promises for men, and were received either by those who worked hard, who went looking, or more often than not, by those who just stumbled upon them. No logic. Gems, hidden in the dirt. Soul prospecting.
He’d had some success with this prospecting in Kimberley. Not much, but enough to keep his belief lit, enough for him to feel he was touching the edge of something, here on
this wild continent. But that was a long time ago, and more recently he’d begun to feel his energy dwindle, his eye wander more towards what was to come, rather than where he was now. Towards the end, and where that might be. Natural, maybe, for a man of his age, away from home for so long. Not that he was sure where home was any more. When he was married it had been anywhere with her, his wife. Now, however, it was often bush camps, ramshackle churches, one-horse towns. Would he return to England? Perhaps. Or would he end in Africa? He’d often thought about this, ending it in an African way, not an English. Waking one night in his camp to the sound of the old elephants, swinging their huge weight through the bush on their way to their mausoleums of bone. How he’d walk out of his tent and watch their ink-dark shapes pass before him, and how he’d follow in their giant footsteps, walking with them to the secret place where he would take one last look at the veld stars before lying down with them. To end. To disintegrate and subside into the country which had for so long been calling out for his body, which had for so long craved this union. Dust to dust, bone to stone, his blood seeping into the soil.
♦
As he stood there, waiting, the bishop absent-mindedly flexed his right hand, and rubbed it with his left where it still ached and blushed across the knuckles. A punch. An upper cut, yesterday, clean between the man’s arms, cracking on his chin. A hard chin, he thought now, as he opened and closed his hand and felt the soreness of the bone under the skin. He hadn’t wanted to hit the man, but as was so often the case in this country, it happened almost naturally, violence evolving like a strange flower out of the barest of provocations. Like yesterday. A hot, cramped train shunting along, stopping for long moments of time under the midday heat. Flies in the carriage, the boring veld outside. And inside, a furnace, where he sat, sharing his hard seat with a bunch of railway workers, Irish navvies, work-dirtied hands and week-old stubble darkening their faces. The close space was filled with their smell, stale and new sweat pungent on their clothes. They were eating and drinking, swigging beer from the large brown bottles favoured by the working men. He didn’t mind this, the drinking. That was something else that happened here, and he understood why it did. But their language, he minded. It was coarse and blasphemous. The Bishop liked language, he liked words, and to hear them denied was for him like watching someone take a sledgehammer to a beautiful gold watch. Sitting there, his eyes glancing off the dull yellow and browns of the view, it got to him, the insult on his ear. So he asked them to stop. Once politely, then, when they did not, a second time more forcefully, hoping his clerical dress might at least induce a sense of propriety in them. It did not, and the loudest of them let him know this. A fat man, his shirt open to his navel, revealing whorls of matted hair across his chest and overblown stomach. He leaned over to the Bishop and spoke close to his face.
‘If yooze weren’t a fecking sky-pilot I’d knock you down for that. We’ll talk haws we want, won’we, lads?’
The smell of the beer, sweet on his tongue, his friends’ drunken agreement. The Bishop felt his anger rise and the adrenalin rush in his body, making his hands sweat and his balls tingle. He stood up, to the inevitable response.
‘Jeezez Christ, e’s a bloody dwarf!’
‘Are yooze still sitting there, Father?’
‘Feck me if it isn’t a pigmy we’ve got here!’
The man stood up opposite him, again to the laughter of his mates. He looked down on the Bishop, enjoying the height difference. The Bishop, however, held his stare while he removed his collar and drill apron, throwing them on the seat behind him. His heart beat fast, pumping his anger around his body, but his mind was calm. Still.
‘There lies Bishop William Gaul of Mashonaland. Here stands’—more laughter—‘Billy Gaul.’
The veld rubbing by outside, the sun, brash through the open window.
‘Now you can knock me down.’
An awkward pause, in which the man put down his beer bottle on the bench behind him, then turned slowly to the others, who were all looking at him, quiet with expectation. He met their gaze, then a smile opened across his tobacco-stained teeth. He laughed, and they responded. That laughter pulled at the Bishop’s nerves, tugged them tight, and it was as the man was turning back to him, still smiling, as he was raising his hands, clenched, that he hit him. Clean on the chin. And he went down. With the weight of a shot horse, he went down, and with him went the Bishop’s heart, sinking at the sight of this man folding to his knees.
♦
He looked up from his knuckles to the ship again. Apparently violence had risen its head there this morning too. From what he could gather from the rumours and reports doing the rounds of the port, the German crew had told a group of Somalis brought from Aden they would be used as slaves, not workers on the railways. It was the young Portuguese policeman who came to collect them this morning who bore the consequences of this information. Badly beaten by all accounts. Which of course had brought his colleagues with their swords and pistols. He’d heard the shots. He sighed. Thick-skinned as he was, the indifference with which life was treated here still got to him.
In the past ten years the Universities Mission to Central Africa had already lost fifty-seven men from the two hundred missionaries sent to them. Blackwater fever, diarrhoea, animals, uprisings. The country could find a hundred ways to kill a man, and the Bishop was all too aware that they were taking its soul with their graves. The new missionaries knew it too and were now even told to write their will before making the journey. And choose their epitaph. From what he could gather though, Cripps was a harder man than most. A boxing and cross-country blue. Quite a runner apparently. Still, you can never tell, he’d seen good men go under before. And apparently Cripps was also a poet.
An increase in activity on board and around the ship’s gangway caught his drifting attention. The first passengers were disembarking. A bustling stream of hats, leather trunks, dresses and parasols. Women and children first. The Bishop scanned the people behind the women, the men, for Cripps, wondering as he did what kind of epitaph a poet chooses for his grave. He thought he knew who he was looking for as he was sure he’d seen him earlier, shortly after he’d heard the shots on board. A tall figure silhouetted against the morning glare, resting his hands on the railings of the deck. He’d waved, and the figure had waved back. Disorientedly slowly. His arm delicate against the sky.
Half an hour passed before the Bishop finally caught a glimpse of Cripps coming down the steep gangway. Yes, it was the same man. Head and shoulders above his fellow passengers. He was walking beside a younger, pale-faced man and looking about him, his long, thin frame making him resemble a curious heron. As he neared, the Bishop took stock. An awkwardness about him. Sun-blushed skin, the tops of his ears blistered and burnt by the voyage. His safari suit far too small. Thin wrists. Not those of a boxer really. Striking eyes, not a stare as such, but certainly a deeper gaze than most. The Bishop took this all in, his own practised eyes skimming over Cripps once more before passing judgement. He gave him five years at the most. Five years before the fever, the sickness, the home-1 ust, the whole truck and trial of this country buckled him. He was close now, and the Bishop walked towards him, revealing himself from the crowd, his sore right hand outstretched.
‘Father Cripps, I presume? Welcome to Mozambique. Bishop Gaul. The smallest Bishop with the largest diocese in Christendom.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The smallest Bishop with…’
Cripps’ eyes were on him; in his, studying him from below a frown. The Bishop petered out. ‘…the largest…oh, never mind.’ Then, indicating the one small suitcase he carried, ‘Is this all your luggage?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, let’s get you out of here. This way.’
Indicating to an African boy to take Cripps’ suitcase from him, the Bishop turned and began to make his way through the moving crowd to where his car and driver were waiting, thinking as he went that he’d never trusted poets anywa
y, but also, that he may have been wrong about Cripps lasting only five years. His handshake had been that of a physical man, and his body, though slim, seemed taut with muscle. And those eyes too, they promised more.
♦
That evening Arthur took a walk along the beach that laced the shore to the north of the harbour. The sand was pale in the dusky light, and the remaining threads of a sunset lay across the horizon. He was relieved to be walking on the beach, out of the quarters where he and the Bishop were billeted for the night at the Universities Mission to Central Africa. They were comfortable, very comfortable compared to his weeks at sea, but he found the place somewhat oppressive. The talk after dinner had been mainly about the war in the south, or of other matters of which he knew little. Unlike the other men there he had not spent his recent years on the African continent and he found the discussion alien and awkward. The Bishop, too, he was finding difficult. He was hard to connect with and Arthur felt he had failed to win his trust, though he couldn’t think why. ‘A peppery fellow, who I hope to be great friends within the future’ is how he had described him to his mother when he’d retired to his room after dinner to write to her. And he did hope they would grow to be friends. There was the potential, he was sure, somewhere beneath their awkwardness, for a genuine connection.
Though he knew his mother would want to know every detail of his first impressions, he’d played down the incident on board the ship that morning. He could not, however, disregard it completely in the letter, and had slipped in a few lines about it in the closing paragraph, hoping it wouldn’t register too strongly there. He told her what he knew of the events leading up to what he had witnessed, then brushed over the actual confrontation as a ‘bit of a set-to on board’. The platitudes of the phrase jarred in him as he remembered the man with blood in his eyes, and they were, he feared, betrayed anyway by the sentence he wrote immediately afterwards. ‘I fear, ’ he told his mother ‘that it may be an all toocharacteristic introduction to this dark continent’ Perhaps he would try and write the letter again. She knew him well and he knew her. That line would ring back through the letter like a plague bell at dawn, transfiguring every other phrase it met until she would see nothing but danger and death in his writing. And maybe she would be right. The shooting did after all hang heavy on his mind, especially since the Bishop had told him the pathetic chain of events leading up to what he saw.
