Tefuga

by Peter Dickinson

  “What has happened?” I said in Kiti.

  “The ancestors have drunk blood.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All is well,” he said in English.

  “Yes, but …”

  Suddenly, there, under the flare of the torch (I couldn’t see anything beyond it now) stood a woman. One of my women, streaked and blobbed with her dance-paint, her arms spread wide, wriggling to and fro, laughing with the dancing madness that was still in her. Her teeth and the whites of her eyes glistened in the torch-light. She was shocking, terrifying, the African nightmare I used to brood about, lying in our little tent waiting for Ted.

  “Atafa Guni?” I whispered.

  She laughed and rushed at me. I put out my arms to push her away but the madness was much too strong, strong as a man. She came with her arms still spread and flung them round me, grappling me to her. I could feel her breasts against mine with only my blouse and bra between, the hard muscled tum below, and the shudder of dancing jerking through her. She nuzzled her face against mine, nose and nose, mouth and mouth. Then she let go. When I opened my eyes she wasn’t there at all, only Elongo, holding the torch high and looking perfectly dignified and calm. I think seeing him like that stopped me from fainting. I grabbed hold of Beano’s bridle—I’d had to let go—and patted his side and felt his bristly hide for its comfort and ordinariness, but he didn’t really like it. Something about me seemed to make him nervous.

  Ted came back and swung himself down into our island of yellow light.

  “I think that’s going to be …” he began.

  He stared at me.

  “Good God! Are you hurt, Rabbit? Elongo, who …?”

  He had to stop to wrestle with Tan-Tan, who was almost wild by now.

  “Madam is not hurt,” said Elongo in English.

  “But look at you,” said Ted. “You weren’t …”

  I looked down. The whole of the front of my blouse was smeared, and the top of my jodhpurs, as though I’d been rolling in something. My face too, I guessed. I thought it was the dance-paint, but only for a mo. Then I noticed the smell and understood why Beano was so jittery. Horses hate blood.

  They tore him apart, Ted told me. Little Azikofio, I mean. My women did it. Ted didn’t see, ’cos he had his eyes shut for the goat sacrifice. By the time he opened them—only a couple of secs—all he could see was a scrum of women where the Emir’s stool had been and some of the Hausa trying to wrestle them off. He fired his own revolver into the air but no one paid any attention. The spearmen were stabbing into the scrum and Ted was rushing to stop them when the women broke up and went dancing off into the crowd. There were bits Ted wouldn’t tell me. He was too shocked. I can’t help imagining. The Hausa speared quite a few more Kitawa on their way down the hill, but Ted managed to stop them getting on their horses and having a complete massacre. That part can probably be hushed up ’cos of the Kitawa having killed some of each other, trampling on them in the rush to get away from the hill. They didn’t know it was going to happen either, you see. They were shocked and frightened too. It must have been something my women decided, just among themselves. I haven’t told Ted anything about what I said to them, and I’m not going to. I don’t think it matters. They were going to do it anyway.

  I’m not being disloyal, not telling him. Kaduna are going to want someone to blame, and if they can make anything my fault they can blame Ted. They probably will anyway, tho’ he’s warned them all along there might be trouble and he did v. well keeping the Hausa under control when it happened. Well, I don’t suppose it really matters. All I know is that I’m going away to have my baby and I’m not coming back to Africa again, ever.

  I shall tell Ted about the baby tonight.

  Seventeen

  Jackland had been reading but not, evidently, for pleasure. Narrow strips of paper rose in a methodical cockscomb above the spine of his book, marking pages he might need to return to. When the door-bell rang he inserted another before closing the book and adding it to a small pile, similarly ornamented. He opened the door to Miss Tressider and followed her into his living-room.

  “Coffee?”

  “Lovely.”

  He had the makings ready and came back in a couple of minutes with a tray, spinsterly laid with doileys, the biscuits in a pattern on their plate. Miss Tressider snatched one and began to nibble it, tiny mouthfuls, like a rodent barking a sapling. She had curled herself into a corner of the big old sofa, and though the room was warm enough for Jackland to have been working in shirtsleeves she had not removed her grey fox fur coat, only opening it to show a chocolate-brown trouser-suit. She looked decidedly frailer than she had in Kiti, though this, as always with her, might simply have been because she had chosen to do so.

  “How are you?” said Jackland. “I’ve seen your Miss Julie …”

  “You didn’t come round?”

  “Well …”

  They had kissed in the hallway, but only in the off-hand actorly fashion. Jackland’s imprisonment in Nigeria had combined with Miss Tressider’s acting commitments to prevent their meeting since Kiti. Now he spoke with uncharacteristic hesitancy, though she seemed perfectly at ease.

  “What did you think of it?” she said.

  “If you’re not bored of people telling you it was marvellous …”

  “Never. It’s a bit worrying when I think they mean it, but I’ll forgive you.”

  “You pour yourself out till there seems there can’t be anything left.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “Night after night. Don’t you sometimes feel that night there’s not going to be enough to pour?”

  “Every time. I still haven’t got rid of the bloody bug, you know.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “It strikes every five days. That helps the effect. Today’s one. I’m drugged to the tonsils.”

  “Ought you to be out at all? I mean …”

  “I wanted to see you, darling.”

  Jackland mimed surprise. He too had changed. The folds and wrinkles of his face seemed to have hardened, to have lost some thin inner layer, with the effect that the skin had, as it were, got nearer the bone. His movements too had a touch of caution, as though beginning to practise for the brittleness of age.

  “I thought you might be going to suggest we should start again where we left off,” said Miss Tressider. “I wouldn’t mind. I’ve got no one on at the moment.”

  “Ah,” said Jackland.

  He tilted the coffee to and fro in his cup, staring at the ever-level surface.

  “No ashtrays, I notice,” said Miss Tressider.

  “Jail is a good cure if you’re prepared to take it. The answer, my dear, is, I suppose, that I will do what you want.”

  “Left to yourself, Nigel?”

  “One must stop some time, I suppose. Make one’s peace, if not with the world, at least with the flesh.”

  “Poor old St Antony. Comfy in your desert with just the vultures to chat to, and I come wriggling out from under a rock with my lascivious suggestions. Actually I prefer my lovers to be a bit excited by me. You don’t owe me anything, darling. The other way round, if anything. I just held myself together for that last scene and then I collapsed completely. The helicopter was a godsend. Major Kadu had laid on an army nurse, even. If you’d driven me I wouldn’t have understood a word, and like as not I’d have died on the road. So I’ll leave you with the vultures.”

  “Only one of them.”

  “You look a bit as though there might have been more.”

  “No doubt they’ll come. Have you seen a tape of The Deposition?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Oh, it works, Nigel. It really does. I’m not saying that just because it’s one of my best, but it is. I’m glad to have been in it, even at the cost of pickin
g up this bloody bug.”

  “You’re taking that seriously, aren’t you? I mean you aren’t just relying on macrobiotics and mantras and that sort of crap?”

  “I am a prize exhibit at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases. It makes a change being asked to autograph slides of my blood samples, but not a nice change. Do you want me to watch The Deposition again? Now?”

  “If you can stand it.”

  “Of course I can.”

  Jackland got up and adjusted the Venetian blind to cut out the thin April sunlight. He settled into his arm-chair with the TV control on the table beside him. As with the coffee-tray he had everything ready. Miss Tressider snuggled herself round to watch as the screen cleared and the long curve of the river glimmered into view. The fisherman flung his net. The picture froze with the net floating in air while the titles went by.

  “Is this your vulture, Nigel?”

  “In a sense.”

  “You really needn’t worry. It’s good—very original—different. Not mass-audience, but it ought to walk off with a lot of prizes. Don’t you think?”

  “That’s not what I’m interested in.”

  “The flesh and the devil!”

  “I want you to tell me if you think it’s true.”

  “Darling, I’m the last person. Everything’s true for me while I’m in it. After, it’s just a story.”

  Jackland said nothing. The net fell and the camera swung to take in the image of Jackland, standing in the foreground.

  “This, literally, is where I began,” said the image.

  Jackland pressed the fast-forward button, making the image gibber in silence. The camera whipped to the ramshackle remains of the hut with Sarkin Elongo in the doorway, streaky with the rush of the tape.

  “Too sad about the old goat,” said Miss Tressider. “I rather went for him.”

  “Oh? He’s not done too badly,” said Jackland, stopping the tape.

  “What do you mean? I thought he was killed by a lion or something.”

  “Kadu’s men tracked him to the dry river where they found a bloodstained blanket. The river bed is mostly boulders. You could walk for miles along it without leaving tracks, until you reached a regular crossing-place with plenty of other foot-prints.”

  “Isn’t that a bit devious?”

  “Yes, but not to my mind out of character. My latest information is that he’s in Switzerland—Annie implied there was a family home there.”

  “And living the life of Riley?”

  “Comfortable, I should think, but not excessive. He’ll have put a bit away.”

  “You sound let down, Nigel.”

  “Can’t help it. I tell myself that he regarded himself as under an obligation to achieve and retain power in order to protect the Kitawa from a return of the successors of Kama Boi, and that he couldn’t do that within the Northern Nigerian system without using the system. I tell myself that the Kiti Highway Project was a symbolic national scandal, and the Sarkin a safe scapegoat for arrest, because the younger Kitawa had become urbanized and the older ones no longer seemed likely to cause trouble. I tell myself that the inherent contradictions of our policy of indirect rule led to a backwardness in Northern Nigerian political sophistication. I tell myself that his behaviour was moderate compared to many of the big boys, some of whom are probably still operating under the present government. I tell myself that it would in any case have been understood and condoned by the vast majority of his constituents. But yes, I do feel let down. And he might perhaps have sent me a postcard of the Jungfrau.”

  He started the tape again. The camera flipped to the river with the canoes whizzing into sight and Jackland’s image fading in quick jerks from solid to ghost to nothing. He kept the tape speeding until the first canoe slid alongside the landing-stage, then took his finger off the button. The sound came up, river-ripple and insect creak and the vague mutter of voices.

  The thwart tap-tapped against the staging as Piers Smith climbed stiffly out, then bent to help Miss Tressider. The canoe lurched as she rose. She balanced for a second, then stepped up and stood beside him, clutching his hand as though the landing-stage were as uncertain to her footing as the canoe had been. As she raised her eyes towards the mound her face came into close-up. Jackland froze the picture. Under the big brim of her helmet her cheek was faintly barred with the waver of ripple-reflected light. Even in the stilled picture the slight quiver of her lower lip was somehow perceptible, the outward vulnerability, but also the inner will, the determination that as she had made her bed so she must now lie on it.

  “I hoped you might be able to tell me whether it is true for her,” said Jackland. “Whatever that may mean.”

  They watched for the most part in silence. Jackland didn’t interfere with the flow again until they came to a shot of the actor who played the young Elongo crossing the red sandy space that supposedly lay between the Jacklands’ hut and the boys’ compound. Jackland stopped him in mid-stride. Pittapoulos had used filters that largely eliminated the normal slight vague haze of Nigerian sunlight, and had produced instead a sharp-edged glare, a generalized idea of tropic light, an Africa clearly perceptible to northern eyes. In this light the actor stood in his housecoat, a study in black and white, wearing the permanent puzzled frown of Kiti facial scars—grease-paint in his case.

  “About being devious,” said Jackland, “he was, of course, a spy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Femora Feng sent him to find out about the White Man. My mother taught him English. Of course, she knew he could understand what my parents were saying to each other, and so did I when I wrote the script, but I assumed they didn’t think about it. The diary’s full of bits about how quietly he moves. They talked shop over their meals, but from something he told me I think he used to go and listen outside their bedroom at night. He must have had peep-holes, too. You notice how as soon as she needed to know anything somebody told her? De Lancey says in Elongo’s hearing that the only way the British will depose Kama Boi is catching him out in a major peculation over taxes. Next thing my mother is taken to a fake village where a woman blurts out that exactly such a scheme is in operation.”

  “It’s not the sort of thing I think about.”

  “It was Femora Feng, by the way.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who called herself Atafa Guni. That’s a name she took from a folk-tale. The Sarkin spoke as if it had been Femora Feng and when I put him right he laughed and said he’d forgotten. I misread him at the time. I thought he meant he had forgotten who had told me, but that can’t be true. Femora Feng must have been a very remarkable woman, a Luther, a Lenin. She contrived the revolt almost single-handed, using any tool she chanced on, including my mother. The improvisation of a fictitious village seems to me in the context of a primitive African people an astonishing concept. You don’t forget what a woman like that does and says—the Sarkin had merely forgotten that she had used an assumed name, partly to protect herself and her own village, but mainly to avoid the question what she was doing so far from home. What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

  Miss Tressider’s face had changed, become alien, mask-like, the cheek muscles rigid, the eyes round and wide. She shook her head, at the same time shaking her features back to their norm, and smiled.

  “I think I could do her,” she said. “When I was delirious, in the helicopter, I was convinced she was there too. Then I went through a stage of thinking she sent the tick and she was inside me now. Don’t worry, darling, I’ve got over that. Only bad days, just when I’m waking up … Anyway it’s not what you want to know, is it? Shall we go on?”

  They watched in silence almost to the end.

  The canoe jiggled at the landing-stage as Miss Tressider stepped down, still clinging to Piers Smith’s hand. Without letting go he crouched to allow her to sit. Her mouth was smiling and her eye
s wide and dry, but a muscle in her left cheek twitched and twitched.

  “Four months,” he said. “Not too bad, Rabbit. Snowdrops will be out now. I’ll be home before the roses are.”

  “Home,” she said.

  Her eyes left his and looked past him up the mound. Somehow their hands parted. The paddles stirred stiffly at the slack water and the canoe curled into the stream to join the two waiting there, loaded with baggage. Miss Tressider waved, twisting her body to a gawky tension. She maintained the pose, cross-cut once with Smith filling his pipe with a fumbling thumb, until the river-bend took her out of sight.

  Jackland sighed and stopped the film.

  “All that’s phooey, I’m afraid,” he said. “A hundred to one he’d have gone down river with her, at least as far as Fajujo.”

  “It doesn’t matter if he did. You have to show people the inside by showing them the outside, and leaving The Warren was saying good-bye. What happened to her after? You were going to tell me.”

  “Nothing. She went to my father’s sister in Sheen. They didn’t get on. By the time I was born she had his pension, not enough to live on. She moved to Eastbourne, scraped in lodgings, got a job in a local prep school, pretty low-grade. They gave her a pittance but said they’d pay my fees eventually. Her father died before the need arose, and she could have afforded to leave, but she stayed on—for the rest of her life in fact. More than thirty years.”

  “No other men, of course.”

  “I don’t think so. Doubt if I’d have noticed. But she was so obviously spinster material that people used to assume I was her nephew. Me too. I mean I felt that sort of distance between us. She had a knack for teaching. The boys liked her.”

  “But no more painting?”

  “She used to copy out of books for practice. Drawings for the School Play programme. That sort of thing.”