by Miles Gibson
The little garden, demented by so much rain and sunlight, had become a wilderness of cabbage and maize. They laid Gilbert down on a tangled bed of beans, cut off the harness and arranged his hands upon his heart. When they had finished Boris stood over him and addressed the mourners.
‘I hope he rot in Hell,’ he announced solemnly. ‘He was a mad old bastard. He come out here looking for Sam. Think the sun shine out of his arsehole. He was wrong. He don’t know nothing. But he learn. I hope now he rot in Hell.’
He paused and licked his lips. He couldn’t think of anything to add to this sermon so he hoisted his rifle above his head and fired a military salute. Then he spat, loudly, into the maize and lumbered away to the kitchen. They watched him dissolve in the darkness.
Charlotte bustled impatiently among the cabbages. ‘I must go and attend to my girls,’ she said suddenly. ‘They’ll want to know what happened.’ She stumbled out of the garden and turned, with relief, to the house.
Frank and Veronica sat, huddled by the light of the lantern, and waited for Happy to find a pickaxe and shovel.
‘We ought to read some words over him,’ said Veronica, staring across at Gilbert.
‘Do you know any prayers?’ asked Frank.
Veronica shook her head. ‘I don’t know anything. I don’t know what we’re doing here. I don’t believe this is happening to me.’
‘I know,’ said Frank softly.
He held Veronica while she sat and cried like a child. The tears flooded from her eyes and washed the make-up down her face. Her nose was running. Her little body shook with grief. She was weeping not only for Gilbert, but for Frank too, and herself especially, and for everything they had lost.
A few minutes later Happy trotted back with the tools.
Veronica wiped her eyes and, still sobbing, held up the lantern as Happy started work. Frank took the shovel and slashed at the undergrowth, filling the air with pollen and dust. They worked in silence. Frank cleared the ground. Happy sweated and swung the pickaxe. Gilbert lay back in the beans and patiently stared at the stars.
Beneath the riot of vegetation the earth had baked as hard as slate. They marked out a grave and were barely ready to cut the trench when Charlotte returned from the house. She was carrying a crucifix and the bleeding heart she had made Frank screw to her wardrobe door. She placed the plaster heart carefully in Gilbert’s hands and planted the cross between his feet.
‘He looks lovely,’ she said, as she stood back to admire the effect.
Happy screamed and dropped his pickaxe. He was sinking slowly into the ground. It looked as if the earth had opened its mouth and was trying to swallow him, sucking him down by his legs. He thrashed out wildly, caught Frank’s hands and hauled himself to safety. His cardigan was torn and he had lost one of his winklepickers.
‘Did you hurt yourself?’ asked Frank.
Happy shook his head. ‘Chit!’ he moaned. ‘Chit!’ He crawled into the grass, sweating and fighting for breath.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ barked Charlotte. ‘Don’t you have no respect for the dead?’
‘Lampo,’ gasped Happy, pulling the lantern from Veronica’s hands. He swung the light into the hole and gave a gurgle of horror. They had unearthed Sam Pilchard. At the bottom of the pit lay a broken skeleton dressed in the rags of a shirt and a pair of slimy, leather boots. The skull was tilted, one arm was raised, like a man swimming through a muddy sea.
Veronica stood on the edge of the grave and screamed. She stamped her feet, clenched her fists, threw back her head and howled.
‘Shut your mouth!’ shouted Charlotte. She grabbed Veronica by the shoulders and shook her so hard that she rattled. ‘Shut your mouth!’ But Veronica was seized by terror.
‘Leave her alone!’ yelled Frank, trying to pull Charlotte away.
The noise brought Boris from the kitchen. He staggered into the garden and roughly prised the two women apart.
‘Let me handle it!’ he snorted at Charlotte. ‘I show you. He lifted Veronica up to his face. ‘Boris make you scream,’ he whispered. ‘Boris make you wriggle.’ He grinned and stabbed at her mouth with his tongue. She spat in his face and he roared. He tried to throw her over his shoulder and walk off with her but she managed to wriggle from his grasp and fell sobbing to the ground. Before he could catch her, she crawled into the beans and hid behind Gilbert. She had stopped screaming.
‘That’s enough!’ snapped Charlotte. She pulled Veronica from the corpse, dusted her down and scolded her like a child.
Boris grunted and tried to embrace her again.
‘Help them finish the burial,’ Charlotte told him. ‘I’ll take this one and put her to bed.’
‘You make her ready,’ said Boris. ‘I come and sort her out.’
Charlotte took Veronica by the wrist and led her away. Boris grinned at Frank. He grinned at Happy. He lurched about the garden and stopped, astonished, beside Sam’s open grave.
‘Waste of a good pair of boots,’ he muttered to himself, peering down at the skeleton. He swayed dangerously on his feet. ‘We drop the old bastard down here,’ he said, turning to Frank. ‘Big hole. Plenty of room. Sam look ready for him.’
‘I’ve told you,’ said Frank. ‘I don’t want you to touch him.’
But Boris had already removed his rifle and was pulling off his shirt, ready to conduct Gilbert on his last, brief journey across Africa. ‘You keep him and the sun cook him. Next thing. Rats come out and eat him. What you want? You got no strength to dig no grave. We all drop dead before you finish scratching.’ He gestured towards their own attempts at grave digging, turned on Happy and snatched the pickaxe from his hands. They watched him hurl the pickaxe into the darkness. It cartwheeled against the sky and fell into the bushes beyond the compound wall. Then he pushed past Frank with a grunt of disgust and trampled his way to Gilbert. He knelt down beside him and plucked the crucifix from between his feet.
‘Leave him alone,’ said Frank softly.
Boris hesitated. He stood up slowly and turned around. ‘You think you scare me?’ he growled.
Frank looked at Boris, standing there, swaying, with the crucifix held like a knife in his hand. He glanced down at Gilbert, cold as the moon, waiting patiently in the bed of beans. He squeezed the trigger.
Boris bellowed. The force of the explosion wrenched Frank’s shoulder, whipped the rifle from his hands and knocked him into the cabbages. When he recovered his senses and opened his eyes nothing seemed to have changed. Boris took a step towards Frank and then paused, raised his foot slightly and gave it a little shake. He looked puzzled. His shoe had disintegrated. The foot was a broken pudding of blood.
‘You bastard try to kill me!’ he gasped. He was so surprised that he laughed. He took another step forward and fell to his knees. Happy cracked his head with the shovel.
‘Holi Gost!’ shouted Happy. He dropped the shovel and farted.
Boris lay sprawled on the edge of the grave. His head was the wrong colour and his foot was pumping blood. Happy retrieved his lantern, scrambled from the cemetery and ran for his life.
24
The days were hot and filled with dust. The old hotel, grown fat with sunlight, settled deeper into the forest. Vines invaded the walls, clutching at crevices, sprouting from gutters, hanging in curtains over the windows. Frank restored the cemetery fence and planted the ground with jungle flowers. It was a quiet and private place, a garden in the wilderness, where Gilbert slept secure with Sam. In the months that followed Frank repaired the veranda and painted the grey wooden boards. He patched the holes in the zinc roof and tinkered with the generator.
Veronica spent her time in the kitchen, wrapped around in a giant apron, endlessly baking sugar biscuits or boiling thick, ferocious stews. She had grown tired of dancing with Comfort and Easy. While Frank repaired the buildings she built her own kingdom from buckets and barrels, baskets of fruit and smoked fish.
Happy took charge of the motor wagon and resumed the daily taxi
service. He was soon a popular man about town. Everyone knew and trusted him. He had a knack of promoting Comfort and Easy with such astonishing hesitation, so many farts and grimaces, that he had men fighting to ride in the wagon. Charlotte bought him a new set of clothes and gave him a beer allowance. He strutted about the place in a big, blue suit and a pair of black rubber sandals. Frank found him a hat. Veronica donated her own sunglasses.
The Hotel Plenti prospered.
Sometimes a customer would ask after Boris and then Charlotte would growl and wave her hand and tell them Boris had gone away. No one spoke of that terrible night when they had carried him into the kitchen and laid him out on the butcher’s block. Frank had managed to cut off his boot and stared at the wound with his hands dripping blood. The tarsal bones had been smashed and some of the toes were missing. They turned up the lamps and sterilised knives while Boris moaned and cried for whisky. Charlotte amputated at the ankle-joint and fed the foot to the pot-bellied stove. She disinfected and strapped the stump, but she couldn’t stop the haemorrhage. It took him three days to bleed to death. They had buried him at first light on the fourth day beneath a great tree beyond the compound wall. No one marked the grave.
For weeks Frank was sick with horror and guilt. He laboured in silence and could not eat. It was Charlotte who set out to rescue him. In the heat of the afternoons she would take him into the shade of her room, sit in her chair to smoke a cigar and talk to him of all that had happened. She spoke of her journey from Batuta, the hardships and disappointments, the long trek through the flooded forest, the plans she had made for the business, the love she had held for Gilbert.
‘He had dreams,’ she said proudly. ‘He was a lovely man. He could see into the future.’
‘He wanted everything to be different.’
‘He had plans. So many wonderful things in his head. He told me how he saw the future. He would close his eyes sometimes and reach out to touch it.’
‘He was old,’ said Frank. ‘He waited too long.’
‘But he had his dream,’ said Charlotte, smiling.
‘Yes,’ said Frank. ‘He had his dream.’ He saw, with surprise, that she felt Gilbert’s death as sharply as anyone; but she had no tears to waste on Boris.
‘You’re not to blame,’ she insisted. ‘He was mad with the drink.’
Frank would listen but shake his head. ‘I had the rifle,’ he whispered.
‘I used the knives,’ she argued, sucking peacefully on her cigar.
‘But you tried to save him,’ Frank protested. ‘I tried to kill him.’
‘It was an accident.’
Frank watched the ceiling fan chopping at smoke rings. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘It wasn’t like that. I took the rifle and shot him.’
‘Somebody had to shoot him,’ shrugged Charlotte. ‘That man had something wrong with his brains.’
She seemed so convinced that he came to believe it. She nursed him and coaxed him into her bed. It was a sensible economy since, as he often remarked, they needed the rooms for paying guests. And her bed proved a comfort to him. He would sit among the threadbare pillows, face flushed, eyes shining, as Charlotte pulled at her bulging skirts and struggled loose from her corsets. She billowed from her clothes like a genie from a bottle, unfurled and spread, her shadow swollen by lamplight. He closed his eyes. Her skin smelt of musk and heliotrope. Then he sank between her big, soft arms and let her breasts engulf him.
Veronica kept her original room and papered the walls with coloured pictures cut from the labels she found on canned fruit. She made a frieze of fancy plums and strings of Del Monte pineapple chunks. Unsettled by her work in the kitchen, the new order and the stink of bleach, Happy abandoned his barrel and built a nest in the motor wagon. Comfort and Easy moved from room to room, leaving a trail of underwear. They continued to squabble and sulk. But they had grown to be a family.
Sometimes, late at night, when Frank found it too hot to sleep, he would slip from Charlotte’s embrace, collect a few beers from the kitchen and, calling softly in the darkness, bring Happy to the veranda where he told him stories of rain in the city, Gilbert singing, frying pans blazing, his life and times at the Hercules Cafe. And Happy, who took these stories with a good pinch of salt, would gently sip at his beer and smile, watching the moon rise over the jungle.
First published in Great Britain in 1987 by William Heinemann Ltd
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
57 Shepherds Lane
Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU
United Kingdom
Copyright © Miles Gibson, 1987
The moral right of Miles Gibson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781911591177
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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