‘Noon … we’ll leave tomorrow. I know I’ve said that before …’
I let the raft run aground on the shingle. Noon fell sideways in the water, and only with an effort forced herself on to her knees. Fearing that she might drown herself in her fever, I tried to catch the stern of the skiff, but she pushed away from me. Blood fell from her mouth and formed thin streamers in the water, like the ribbons of a decoy.
From the mist-veiled hills to the east came the rumble of mortar fire. Sections of the forest canopy were burning, and the jade-green smoke drifted through the valleys, the threat of an approaching storm. Captain Kagwa’s reconnaissance patrol had pushed forward to the next ridge-line, capturing the conveyor system of the mining company. Somewhere among the rock slopes Harare would be trying to rally his men, one eye closed by the boil on his cheek.
Out of these sounds of discontent came a steadier noise, the deepening drone of an aircraft engine. Hidden behind its orange floats, the fuselage of Kagwa’s helicopter rode across the cliffs above the eastern bank of the Mallory. It hovered over the centre of the channel and then settled towards the surface, its fans throwing up a violent spray. Captain Kagwa leaned from the observer’s seat beside the French pilot, a heavy flak jacket around his thick neck. Both he and the pilot watched Noon punting her craft away from them, this half-naked guerilla in a camouflage jacket, a rifle between her feet.
The helicopter crept behind her, soon blinded by its own spray. The pilot sheered sideways, and the spray fell in a wet cloud that drenched me as I ran through the shallow water. Kagwa racked back his seat, sitting diagonally behind the pilot and giving himself ample room to aim his carbine at the young woman. Driven frantic by this threatening machine, Noon dropped her punt pole and raised the unloaded Lee-Enfield, hopelessly pointing it at the confused air.
A signal shell rose into the afternoon sky, fired from an observer’s post in the lift house of the mining conveyor. A cerise star lit the sombre hills, a medallion of light that dripped slowly from its mushy wake into the forest canopy below.
Without waiting for Kagwa, the pilot broke off his pursuit of Noon. He inclined his machine and accelerated along the line of cliffs. The spray fell like lost rain on to the silver surface of the river. Noon stowed her rifle and punted with one arm, eager to return to the safety of the barrage. Unable to start the outboard, I pushed the raft into the shallows and paddled across the water, following the ribbons of her blood that trailed below the surface of that mortuary stream.
30
The Arcade Peep-Show
At dusk I found myself leaning against the helm in the wheelhouse of the Salammbo, the feverish captain of this landlocked ferry foundering in the garbage heap of the barrage. The last of the gunfire had subsided, but the echoes sounded in my throbbing head. Captain Kagwa’s patrol had captured the mining conveyor, and the final ridge above the river valley. There they would dig in for the night, waiting for the arrival of the main force in the landing-craft. The evening mist seeped along the slopes of the surrounding hills, hunting out the narrow defiles in the forest where Harare’s demoralized men waited for reinforcement. The smoke from their kitchen fires rose through the dripping trees and seemed to exchange secret signals of the coming attack, as if the unseen powers of the Massif which concealed the Mallory were about to come down on to the plain and avenge the river’s death.
Through the tilting windows of the wheelhouse I watched the curling fog that followed the river on its southward course, and the steam-cloud from Kagwa’s landing-craft, moored barely a mile downstream.
The tracer of a rifle bullet crossed the ridge-lines, fired by one of Harare’s snipers on the defensive perimeter which the guerilla leader had drawn around both banks of the river. As the sound faded into the forest, I listened to the water seeping through the barrage, and to the rattle of my cheekbone against the bullet-marked helm.
An hour earlier, at the floating field hospital, I had injected Harare with the last dose of sulphonamide. All of us were now infected by the same fever, carried by the flies and mosquitos from the noxious waters of the river. I knew that I should rescue Noon, and move her up-river from the final battle which would soon overwhelm Harare and his desert settlement. But the higher reaches of the Mallory frightened me with their blue beaches and dead snakes, and the palpable presence of the poison which its waters had leached from my head.
Downstream lay Captain Kagwa, with a long inventory of scores to settle. Even if we evaded his advancing force, there lay the papyrus swamps where Mrs Warrender and her women had hunted, and might hunt again.
The widows’ ship was now berthed only fifty yards away, among the village of small craft which had taken refuge against the barrage. Earlier, as the sounds of gunfire drew nearer, the fishing rafts and waterborne shacks had abandoned their anchorages in the centre of the pool. The soldiers guarding the barrage had ordered them away, cutting their mooring lines when they tried to tie up beside the leaking rampart of earth and scrap metal.
Then the Diana had upped anchor and moved slowly across the pool, its white timbers more than ever resembling a marquetry of bones. The ghostly vapour of its slowly beating engine rose into the air like the smoke from a floating crematorium. Mrs Warrender stood on the bridge, her small face, like a sinister child’s, lit by the lanterns of the dance floor.
Remembering the papyrus swamps, I distrusted Mrs Warrender and her women, and protested to the sergeant in charge. But the guerillas had spent too many hours on the old brothel-ship, beguiled by these passive and welcoming women, by the endless supplies of cheap beer and, above all, by the primitive closed-circuit television system. Lounging around the dance floor, their rifles leaning against the restaurant tables, they watched themselves on the screen above the bar, filmed by the camera which Sanger, fumbling about like a blind Merlin, had set up on a tripod between the animal cages.
Unable to resist the promise of stardom, the soldiers allowed Mrs Warrender to moor the Diana against the barrage. Followed by a flotilla of small craft, the white liner of the night lay securely against the creaking dam, a veiled assassin pressing herself to her victim’s breast.
*
Light-headed with hunger, I listened to the water rush through the secret veins of the barrage. The noise was magnified by the metal debris and sounded like the sighing of a frozen sea. Through the ceaseless din I could hear the soft strains of old dance-band records coming from the deck of the Diana. Unable to sleep on the sloping bunk – feet pressed against the wall, I felt like a corpse in a bullet-riddled coffin – I left the wheelhouse and stepped from the creaking deck on to the earth embankment.
A hundred jets of water spurted between the restraining nets of the barrage and fell into the pool. Below my feet a small cave-mouth had opened within the compacted metal rubbish, a cloacal vent from which leaked a stream of phosphorescent bile. I walked along the barrage towards the Diana. A wooden gangway led down to the starboard rail, reached by a path from the western bank of the pool.
The lanterns glowed over the dance floor, their eerie light reflected in the empty bottles that lay on the deck among the broken glasses and cigarette packets. Floating on the pools of beer were the loose pages of a pornographic magazine with which the soldiers had tried to light a fire in one of the amber lanterns. The bar was deserted, the untended television set recording a last party of soldiers who sat at the tables. They were trying to strike a bargain with the hostesses, two local young women whom Louise and Poupée had recruited from the widows and abandoned wives in the nearby allotments.
Mrs Warrender stood on the bridge of the Diana, whose rails in the darkness were like bars separating her from the shabby revels below. She had at last discarded the bath-robe, and now wore the brocaded evening gown I had see her lifting from the suitcase on the beach at Port-la-Nouvelle. This lavish but formal garment made her seem a young woman again, as if she were deliberately returning to the naive world before her marriage. Hands folded, she watched the drunken
scene like a Victorian spinster gazing down at the unlicensed behaviour of animals on the floor of a cage.
I disliked the way in which Mrs Warrender had recruited these illiterate village girls as her whores, using them as bait in whatever trap she was setting, and knew that she might well have tried to enrol Noon had I not escaped with her. For reasons I chose not to examine, the calm but threatening presence of this unrevenged woman always set off an immediate surge in my fever. Unslaked by the papyrus marshes, Nora Warrender had pursued me along the upper reaches of the Mallory, but had seemed to lose interest in me as soon as she reached the pool. Watching her from the Salammbo, I found it difficult to read any clear motive into her eccentric behaviour. Harare and his men had forgotten their earlier encounter with the women at the breeding station, and passed to and fro within easy rifle shot of the Diana. But the women had made no move.
I walked down the springing gangplank towards the dance floor, so giddy that I almost lost my footing. Nora Warrender treated me to a tolerant smile, and then withdrew into the bridgehouse. For all my derelict condition, my power over the river still worked its authority.
In the darkness by the port rail of the restaurant deck Sanger sat with his camera and tripod, the diamante sunglasses hiding his eyes. He had perched himself out of the soldiers’ way on a small stool, his back in a niche between the animal cages. The distant gunfire of the afternoon had unsettled the nervous creatures, and Sanger leaned his left ear to a chittering marmoset, as if this frightened monkey now provided him with his entire view of the world, a faint echo of Mr Pal’s commentaries. He cocked his other ear as I stumbled from the gangplank, and his sore-covered hands moved protectively around his camera. For a few seconds his face emerged from the niche, and the lantern light played over his white hair and eroded features. Sitting there in the shadows, he resembled a blind beggar on the steps of a waterfront hotel, displaying his television screen like a wound.
A lantern fell to the deck beside the soldiers’ table, and the flaming paraffin floated towards me through a swill of beer. The soldiers shouted and pointed, not to the flames leaping at their feet, but to the image on the television screen above the bar.
I stood in the harsh light among the empty bottles. Sensing the patterns of my feet, Sanger fidgeted in his dark hole, waiting for the marmoset to give him a description of this late visitor to the Diana.
‘Mallory …’ He clutched at my wrist. ‘You’ve come for me … I’ve been sick, doctor. We can still make the film, Mallory.’
I pushed his hand away. ‘There’s no time left for films. Sanger, I wish I could help you … look at yourself.’
‘You look, too, doctor … it’s a good picture.’ He gesticulated in the direction of the screen above the bar, still hawking his shabby illusions to every passing patron of this floating brothel. ‘See yourself in the film, doctor. Then we’ll go back to Port-la-Nouvelle … can you find Mr Pal …?’
‘Mr Pal? He’s waiting for you in the papyrus swamps. Ask Mrs Warrender.’
‘Good … our new film … I want to tell Mr Pal.’
I left him muttering to himself, and swayed away through the tables. I pressed the white planks under my heels, trying to shake off the fever. The soldiers ignored me, but one of the hostesses sitting on the corporal’s knee slipped through his hands and approached me.
‘Come for beer? Good time …?’
‘Is Noon here?’
‘Noon …?’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘Noon busy … busy time …’
‘Where is she?’
‘Oh … where …?’
Expertly she looked me up and down. Barely more than fourteen, she already had the style of a seasoned beer-hall trouper. She sidled around me in a haze of perfume and cheap spirit, searching for a gold watch or bracelet. When I pushed her away she gave a grimace of disgust, exposing her broken teeth, assuming that the wound on my scalp was an infectious eczema.
‘Ugh …’ She turned back to her corporal. ‘Dirty man … see Noon …’
Avoiding her, I stepped back unsteadily, almost burning my feet in the last of the paraffin flames. A roar of music came from the soldiers’ cassette player, setting off my fever again. The pain drummed at my head, a fierce frontal migraine. In the television screen I saw myself clutching at the rail, swinging on the bars like a deranged orang in a zoo. My chin bobbed at the air, the mechanical gesture of a desperate mammal trying to reopen the sores on its scalp.
Watching this apparition, I felt curiously detached from my own body with its pains and fevers, and closer to the abstract and stylized image on the small screen. The pearly rectangle, scarcely larger than a light-bulb, shrank me down to size, like everything else on which the camera turned its eye, and stripped away the irrelevancies of emotion, pain, and motive. Only my obsession endured, a great dream made small by failures of nerve, but a great dream nevertheless.
I shuffled towards the bar, looking up at the screen as over the years I had peered dispassionately at so many X-ray plates. I reached to the control panel, trying to turn up the brightness, to bathe us all in that white dispassionate glow.
Beyond the swaying image of my wounded head and the soldiers arguing at their table, I saw that another figure had appeared among the ghostly lanterns. One of Mrs Warrender’s youngest girls, some consumptive child-widow wearing a cheap dance-hall gown several sizes too large for her, leaned against the stern rail and breathed in the night air as if trying to free herself of the taste of her last client. She gripped the flagstaff, about to retch over the rail, when she caught sight of me standing by the bar. She raised her chin, recognizing another customer, but then paused to stare at me. Through the garish rouge and lipstick that masked her childlike face was an expression of sudden concern.
‘Noon …? Is that—?’
Blinded by the white light, I switched off the screen. There was a shout from the corporal but when I turned I saw that the young woman had gone. Had Noon dressed up in this garish costume, unable to resist the lure of the closed-circuit television system? Perhaps she knew that she would only survive Captain Kagwa’s arrival as a hostess in Mrs Warrender’s menage.
Beside the bar was the open hatchway to the cabins below. I crossed the dance floor and stepped on to the wooden rung of the ladder. A beer bottle rolled across the deck, kicked at my head by one of the soldiers, and shattered against the brass step guard.
I fumbled in the darkness for the corridor rail. Slivers of light slipped through the planking, and swayed like funeral torches seen through the lid of a coffin. In the darkness I was alone with my fever, engulfed by the scents of perfume, semen and mucus that hung in the corridor, for ever fused in my mind with the nymphs that decorated the cabin ceilings. I thought of the young whore I had seen by the stern rail, dressed like a mock-child in an oversized gown, pretending to be some prepubertal bride …
The ship swayed slightly, crowded by the small craft huddled against it. From the cracks in the barrage a hundred jets of foetid water played on the Diana’s hull, as if all its clients were urinating on to this floating brothel in an attempt to cool its overheated decks.
Stumbling over my own feet, I fell against the door of the cubicle which had served as Mrs Warrender’s armoury. The store of weapons had gone, hidden away from Harare’s men. The light flickered across the bed, as the jets of water cascaded against the window shutters, transforming the interior of this sweaty boudoir into a scene from an ancient silent film glimpsed in a pierside booth.
I stepped into the small cell, inhaling the stale air filled with the tang of rifle oil and flaking plaster. In the trembling darkness I leaned over the washbasin, and let the sweat drip from my face and chest. Too exhausted to search the remaining cabins, I lay across the mattress, my forehead against the brass bars of the headpiece, watching the light reflected in the peeling gilt. Above me, the nymphs leapt from their foamy deep, ready to carry me away to a more serene sky.
Soon after, I wok
e from a troubled sleep to find my legs slipping from the mattress on to the floor. I reached to the bars behind me, about to pull myself on to the bed, and felt an arm force me away. A slim-shouldered young woman sat in the darkness at the head of the bed, her narrow thighs pointing away from me towards the shuttered window. The sequins stitched to her cheap gown and the glass jewellery across her small breasts seemed to conceal her within the metal bars behind my head, an erotic child penned inside a cage of peeling gilt. In her hand she held a gauze cloth, with which she had been wiping my chest.
The light stuttered, the silver flicker of old arcade peepshows. I could feel the feverish heat of the girl’s skin. The bony thighs that kept my hands away streamed with a malarial sweat. In the trembling glimmer of the water jetting against the hull I saw the young whore’s alarmed eyes as she struggled to free herself from this diseased man. I tried to reassure her, and pressed my hands between her legs, hoping to calm this disturbed patient nursing me on my own sickness bed.
My teeth tore a strip of sequins from the bodice of her gown, and the glass jewels beaded the nipples of her miniature breasts. For a moment, through the haze of perfume and the stench of the poisoned river I could smell a familiar skin, the sharp, sweet odour of the twelve-year-old who had sailed the Salammbo with me, down the far reaches of the Mallory. But then this adolescent I embraced became some other child of the night. I felt the loose sequins against my lips, the flat of a small hand against my forehead releasing its pressure. The stuttering light transformed us into players in a clandestine film. The silver streamers of jetting water seemed to caress the young woman’s naked body. I clasped my hands behind her head and held her small face within my forearms. Her hands were trapped against my chest, but I felt her palms embrace me as our shared fevers came together in the trembling night.
The Day of Creation Page 23
