The Migration of Ghosts

by Pauline Melville

  When the house was quiet, Margot slipped out and sorted out new clothing for them both. In the organised maelstrom of the house, no one really noticed the vanishing articles, or if they did, they relied on the fact that whatever vanished usually re-appeared later, that there was a floating sequence of possessions, a dance of objects and articles around the house.

  One night while she was exploring, Margot went silently to the top floor where she discovered and pocketed a little bottle of perfume, some amber ear-rings and two combs. She procured a tablet of green-apple soap, some shampoo, a box of pale face powder and some brightly coloured plastic hair rollers. Becoming increasingly bold, the devoted servant took to exploring parts of the house she had never seen. She went silently, her heart thudding, through the large rooms where swimming patterns of moonlight shifted across the shining wooden floors. On one of her nocturnal outings, she discovered the gallery.

  The gallery had once been used for dances. Slender columns linked by a tracery of fretwork supported a ceiling with a painted cupola. Margot glided through. The massive oak sideboard groaned with the weight of silver platters, dusty and unpolished. Ornately carved wooden footstools were scattered around and unvarnished wooden plant-holders had been placed at intervals against the walls. On a marble-topped table stood a glass tray and on the tray sat soft, transparent, miniature purple-and-orange balls of gelatine, some round, some bell-shaped, and some in the shape of fish, full of tiny globules of scented oil. She sniffed the faint, intriguing odours and then pocketed them for her mistress who loved all sorts of perfumes and scents.

  Near the door was a large costume box. From the box she pulled out a long red velvet cloak, coronets and tiaras, lorgnettes, pantaloons and all the other paraphernalia of theatre. As she had anticipated, when she returned to their room Shallow-Grave was delighted with these. Margot wanted to dress her in the velvet cloak, but Shallow-Grave dressed herself in a straw hat and a black silk T-shirt, crimson boxer shorts, and then performed karate figures in slow motion in front of the mirror.

  Later she allowed Margot to drape the cloak around her and serve her food from the china Staffordshire plates she had found, richly coloured with pink, black-edged flowers, decorated with deep-blue and apple-green leaves.

  Despite the exhausting nature of her vocational servitude, when she slept at night, Margot breathed peacefully, as if at last she had found a consoling mother.

  By now Margot had come to love these night-wanderings. She discovered that the door panels leading to the gallery were painted with scenes of lakes surrounded by dark, tropical vegetation. Downstairs in another part of the house, she found an unoccupied bedroom and lay for a while on the canopied bed, feeling as if the mosquito net was the fine sail of a ship, a gauze of voyaging dreams, and she was a queen from Egypt. She examined the carvings on the legs of chairs. She explored every nook and cranny of the building.

  During the daytime, in their sequestered room, Margot and Shallow-Grave heard all sorts of fragments of life and snatched conversation from the rest of the house.

  They heard Adèle the housekeeper panting up the stairs to tell Rita Jenkins, ‘I gat de videos, Mistress Jenkins. I gat King-Kong, Return of the Dragon, White Nights and Kiss of the Spider Woman.’

  And they heard Armand Jenkins on the phone, trying to reassure his daughter in Canada.

  ‘Of course I want to protect the environment, honey. I care about it just as much as you do.’ And then they heard him hang up and laugh with a colleague. ‘Hell, if she only knew. I daren’t tell her I’m flying off to the Brazilian border on Thursday to inspect the possibility of a new site near Kato where we’ll cause twice as much damage.’

  Sometimes the sweet voice and American rhythms of Stevie Wonder filled the house with ‘Part-time Paradise’.

  And so it was not surprising that both Margot, whose hearing had fully recovered, and Shallow-Grave overheard the telephone ringing in the Jenkinses’ bedroom in the early hours of one August morning.

  Armand Jenkins fumbled to reach the noisy instrument in the dark. Three minutes later he was fully awake, trying to absorb the implications of what he was hearing.

  The tailings pond of the mine at Omai – a huge pit into which were piped cyanide liquids, other chemicals and mill wastes – had developed cracks on two sides, two hundred metres across and six metres deep. Three and a half million cubic metres, over three hundred million gallons of dangerous toxic waste were cascading into the Omai River and then rushing in a massive plume down the country’s main waterway, the River Essequibo.

  Armand Jenkins nearly wet himself with fright. It was possible to conceal most mishaps and leakages at the mine site from the public and the authorities. Omai was far off in the bush. The government could not police it. Normally they could get up to anything. But this news would be impossible to hide.

  He switched on the light and swung into action in his nightshirt. Despite the activity around her, Rita Jenkins lay asleep like a beached dolphin. His voice, magnified by panic, was carried upstairs to the house-guests, of whose presence he remained blissfully ignorant, as he phoned the company chairman in Canada.

  ‘We have a major disaster here. I’ll cover it up as much as I can, but for god’s sake send down the mining engineers who dealt with the company’s same problem in South Carolina. Pronto. And I mean pronto as hell,’ he yelled down the phone. Rita stirred in her sleep.

  Blinking in real panic this time, Armand argued over the phone that, much as he would like to, he could not keep such a massive disaster from the government of Guyana. He had tried that ploy earlier in the year, withholding news of an unauthorised discharge of cyanide for six days. It had not gone down well. He hung up and went and poured himself a neat rum from the cabinet before phoning Cambior’s publicity department.

  ‘There’s been a catastrophe,’ he shouted down the phone.

  ‘You mean an unfortunate incident,’ snapped the public relations man in Montreal, who objected to being woken so early.

  ‘Millions of gallons of cyanide waste is pouring into the main river here.’

  ‘You mean there’s been a spill. Some seepage.’ Even as he came to full consciousness, the yawning man in Montreal tried to instruct Armand in the techniques of damage limitation. ‘Just make sure you control, as far as possible, what is said in the papers. We will put out statements here to mollify the shareholders. If there are any commissions of enquiry, try and ensure that lawyers and businessmen sympathetic to us are on board. Oh yes, and try and plug that leak.’ The man hung up.

  Armand took a deep breath and rang the local newspapers.

  A sleepy sub-editor took down the news and perked up as he did so. A big story. Nothing much had happened since Shallow-Grave’s escape and they had drawn a complete blank on that. She had just vanished. With some satisfaction, he changed the headline which had been going to read ‘A hundred and twenty-nine days to Christmas’ and wrote ‘Omai mine seepage’.

  Margot noticed that her beloved had started to droop. Shallow-Grave said it was merely because she needed to go for a swim. But the day after they overheard Armand on the telephone, her hair lost its healthy spring and her body broke out in a riot of sores that gathered in groups, sent out messengers, erupted in angry outbursts, opened their mouths and yelled. A revolution broke out all over her skin. Margot was horrified. Shallow-Grave explained that a quiet, lengthy bathe in sea or river would do the trick. She also pointed out that it was time for them to leave the house and head for Brazil. They decided it would be safe to leave and fixed next Thursday for their departure.

  Adèle, the Jenkinses’ housekeeper, was a stout, down-to-earth woman who came from a practical family. Her sister Mary lived at Bartica, downriver from Omai. Mary arrived to stay with Adèle for a few days until the worst of the poison had passed by and the river had had a chance to clean itself. Hundreds of dead fish had been found. The government had organised for doctors to take hair samples from the Amerindian villagers who lived in scat
tered communities along the banks, to see if any toxic deposits were detectable. Somehow the samples had been lost on the way back. The Amerindians complained of itching and burning of the skin and blistered mouths. They were too poor to take on the Omai company. In fact, they had no idea of the wealth of the Gold Star people. Later, a few of them were given a handful of dollars for the ruin of their lands and livelihoods, paltry compensation that left the chairman and the board laughing behind their hands in wonder at how they had got away with it.

  Adèle listened uneasily to what her sister was saying. It was not like Mary to be superstitious in any way, but now she was talking about sightings of a boat lit with candles that had been seen moving upriver through the choppy waters of the Essequibo. It was sinking near to water-level with the weight of eleven women seated round a magnificent African woman in a blue dress trimmed with red. Each acolyte held a flickering candle and they were singing, laughing and chattering around the handsome woman who leaned back in the bows of the boat, trailing her hand in the water.

  Having played down the Omai disaster as much as possible, Armand Jenkins said goodbye to a grumpy Rita and flew south to the border town of Lethem to await the small private plane that would fly him on to Kato, the place chosen for the next mining operation. He stood outside the guest-house where he had been obliged to stay overnight in the miserable heat of a stifling cubicle and bleakly surveyed the orange dirt track ahead of him. It opened on to a slightly broader clay road. His skin itched and he wondered if there had been bugs in the guest-house. He surveyed the dismally small adobe houses that stood on either side of the road and one or two half-built concrete ones. He decided to go for a walk. His private plane would not arrive until two in the afternoon.

  It had taken three days for the engineers to stem the poisoned torrent from Omai. Armand had done his best to dismiss worries and allay government fears. He had assured them that the mighty river would cleanse itself. What he had not told them was that the toxic cocktail of heavy metals, chemically bound with cyanide, tends to enter the marine environment and latch on to micro-organisms. Arsenic, copper, cadmium, lead, mercury become more poisonous over time. These heavy metals are ingested by fish and invertebrates and then bio-magnify and bio-accumulate. They travel through the food chain and end up in the human consumer.

  Armand mopped his face with a handkerchief. He walked past the small houses which seemed deserted apart from a few fowls scratching round. He had done his best for the company. He thought he would take a walk by the creek at the back of the main store of the tiny town. It might be cooler there.

  Coming down the road towards him was the figure of a tall black woman who, even to Armand, looked out of place. Silhouetted against the blue sky, she picked her way along the road in high-heeled shoes that made her stumble every now and then. Each time that happened, she paused and stared aggressively up at the huge sky as if to defy savannah country. The frilly pink nylon housecoat that floated over a too-tight shiny green skirt, plus the fact that her head was a multi-coloured bouquet of plastic curlers, made her look like a fugitive from a hair-dressing salon. To one ear she held a small portable radio from which Armand could only hear a buzz. But she must have been able to detect music because she was singing in a melodious voice snatches of ‘Your Cheating Heart’. She nodded flirtatiously at Armand before turning off abruptly and teetering down the slope to one of the unfinished concrete houses, where she ducked into the doorway and disappeared.

  Armand bought himself a beer at the shop and took it with him as he turned down by a bridge at the back of the store and walked along the side of the creek. After about half an hour’s scrambling along the wooded banks, he came to a dead tree that had half fallen in the water, its bare branches sticking up like arthritic fingers. He sat astride the trunk where it leaned out over the water, remembering the days of his boyhood in Canada when he used to go fishing in the great lakes. He finished off his beer and threw the can in the water.

  The sound of a woman singing floated towards him. At the same time, Armand saw the woman that he had encountered earlier. She was naked, dipping herself underwater and standing up. Even in the water, she looked enormous. The breasts of this crooning giantess swung in front of her as she rose from the creek and began to wade towards him, the visible parts of her body shining and gleaming, spangled with drops of water. She did not seem to have seen him sitting astride the tree.

  Embarrassed at the sight, Armand remained stock still, hoping she would not notice him. A line of red ants had made its way along the branch where he sat. All at once they made their way up his trouser leg and started to bite his genitals with a fury. Unable to contain himself and with an exclamation of pain, Armand wriggled and slipped off the branch into the waters of the creek. He came up spluttering. There was no sign of the woman. The singing had stopped.

  He was looking round once more when he felt a crashing blow to the head. Dazed and sickened, he stumbled forward in the water. Just before he went under, another violent blow rendered him unconscious. Margot stood on the bank with a paddle in her hand, panting with the effort of the blows. Shallow-Grave waded forward and put her hands round Armand’s neck. She pulled at the weighty body until it faced upwards, still with the head underwater, and she squeezed her two massive thumbs down on the windpipe, holding the head under until there were no more bubbles.

  Still humming, Shallow-Grave pulled the body to the side of the creek. Then she set about scraping at the earth with Margot’s paddle to make one of the hollows in the ground that were her trademark and namesake. The two women did not exchange a word. Margot helped, bending her brawny shoulders to dig and scrape as best she could, gazing at her beloved mistress with undisguised admiration as she dragged the body towards the depression in the ground and covered it lightly with earth and leaves.

  Hardly anyone witnessed two women departing for Brazil. The shorter of the two held a red-and-blue umbrella over the taller one and would hurry to execute the most menial request. They took the boat across the Takatu, the larger woman holding on to her straw hat against the Rupununi winds. At Bonfim, few people paid attention to Margot and Shallow-Grave waiting at the side of the road for the bus to Boa Vista. Eventually it arrived covered in white dust and they squeezed themselves on board, in between passengers with live chickens in bags and sacks of provisions.

  The last that was heard of them was a report from Boa Vista. They had taken a small room over an electrical goods store in a street near the market that smelled of goat-dung, dried fish, sarsaparilla and turtle-egg oil as well as the steam of washing. Margot had purchased a tin tub which she carried home on her head and had been seen scouring the market for the herbs to make the ‘banho de cheiro’. The blue bath, as she called it.

  On their first night in Brazil, Shallow-Grave luxuriated in the hip bath, blue waters lapping at the sides, that Margot had prepared with rue, rosemary, basil, rose-mallow, white-mallow, marjoram and broom-weed. The oily leaves of rue, both stimulant and narcotic, gave the water its blue colour. A strong smell, bitter and exhilarating, rose up with the steam from the bath, pouring through the holes in the roof and scenting the whole neighbourhood, bewitching it into an unusual and welcome tranquillity.

  The aroma, combined with the melodious voice that mingled with the steam and issued from the scabby window on that hypnotically warm evening, stuck in the memories of local people. It was an evening when peace unexpectedly burst over the poorest quarter of Boa Vista. Quarrelsome couples were soothed, fractious babies stopped screaming, shopkeepers refrained from beating the children who begged from their customers. The dwarf woman who washed laundry with manly vigour in the stinking alley outside the electrical goods store joined in the singing as she scrubbed clothes on the dolly-board.

  Margot took a chipped enamel bowl with roses on it and poured the waters between the glistening breasts of her mistress as tenderly as if she were watering a transplanted cucumber. After the bath, Margot gave her a quick rub down with bay rum
. That, combined with the blue bath, was supposed to ward off evil-doers.

  Most extraordinary of all, the butcher, the meanest man in Boa Vista, smiled and threw bones and meat to the endlessly disappointed, starving dogs that hung around his shop. It was the first time that anyone had seen in him a sentiment close to pity.

  Rita Jenkins stood in the front room, the telephone in her hand, her bags packed. There had been no sign of Armand for ten weeks. He had disappeared without trace. Tearfully and surrounded by friends on whom she liberally showered small gifts, Rita had waited for news of her husband. Now her shredded nerves demanded that she return to her daughter in Canada. In her worst moments, she feared that he had gone off with another woman. She was on the phone to her lawyer.

  ‘How long would I have to wait before it could be assumed he was dead?’ she asked, with an eye to her future circumstances. ‘That long?’ she squeaked in disbelief. The lawyer consoled her with the news that she would receive a huge sum in compensation from the company who would look after her well for the rest of her life. Rita sniffed and hung up.

  ‘Go and call me a taxi to the airport,’ she ordered Adèle. ‘Coming back here has done me no good at all at all.’

  Provenance of a Face

  They said he was the greatest white-face mime in Europe. His trademarks were a broken top hat, caved in on one side like a bent accordion, and a white vest with one large red diamond on it that dripped blood-red tears. And, of course, a face painted white as the bones of the dead. He had been around for years.

  Despite all this, I felt disappointed when my editor at the quarterly English Theatre journal asked me to interview him. It felt like demotion.

  ‘He’s had it. No one wants to know. Comedians make jokes about mime artists these days. Why do a feature on a man whose career slumped twenty years ago? There’s more interesting stuff in any fringe theatre in London.’