A Ripple From the Storm (21 page)

Jimmy let his back slide down the rough wall, and he sat as the Africans did, on his haunches, his arms resting loose on his knees, listening. He did not know music and he did not know what they were playing.

The white dance bands in the city played many kinds of jazz, but when they played wild it was fast, Chicago-style, white man’s jazz – there were no Africans in the white town’s bands. Here they played wild too, what these boys had heard from listening outside walls, outside windows while white people danced inside to the jazz born in the head of Chicago, the city on the river up from New Orleans. Sometimes, when the trumpet had time and space to sing, it sang slowly, more sorrowful; and sometimes the drums beat, not from the memory of what the white man’s drums did at the dances in the town, but because drums had beaten through the childhood of all these dark boys, city boys now, but bred in the villages of a country where drums were seldom silent. In this small damp room now, and it was one of a couple of dozen similar rooms in this location, stood the hide-covered wooden drum from the villages, and it stood beside the metal-shining drums bought second-hand from a white man’s band, and often, late at night, the two kinds of drum spoke together against each other, as if talking each other out in argument.

Sometimes, late at night, because it was long past the time for music, it was time for sleep, the sleep that feeds conscientious and reliable work – sometimes, because of the necessity for caution and secrecy, a soft music came into life that sang and questioned and hesitated, music born out of secrecy, double-talk and the brotherhood of oppression.

Jimmy sat loose, humped against the wall, breathing easy, listening like the others for the sounds of official steps outside, listening to the soft beat of the music, and thought: I feel at home here. This is the only place in this bloody country I’ve felt at home.

The mouth organs and the guitar fell silent. The drums competed for a moment. The trumpeter lifted his trumpet and let out one dark defiant note, and then clapped his hand over its mouth as if to shut it up, shutting himself up. Now there was silence and the young man who had let Jimmy in sang out, as if continuing the music: ‘Comrade Jimmy, Jimmy man, and what you doing here, so late, Jimmy man, but you’ll get us all into fine trouble, man.’

Jimmy blurted, breaking the rhythm, ‘I got fed up with that camp.’

‘It’s the high jump for you, man, if they catch you,’ said the trumpeter.

Jimmy saw it was not enough to say, simply, that he wanted to be here, he saw, now that the music was finished, their eyes held a look which said he must prove himself.

He said nervously: ‘I wanted to talk to Elias.’ He added quickly, seeing that eyes met each other and quickly withdrew: ‘I need to ask him something.’

‘Elias Phiri?’ said the drummer, and beat out a dozen thudding notes on the tom-tom, ending with a double thud on the cymbals, silencing the cymbals with a snatch of his hand.

‘The government interpreter?’ said the trumpeter.

‘He’s all right,’ said Jimmy.

‘Ya, man, government officials are all right,’ said a youth with a mouth organ. He blew a discordant noise, and let it groan out, in derision.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Jimmy, looking hotly from one to another. ‘Isn’t he OK then?’

‘OK, he’s OK,’ said the youth who had let him in. He wore a bright yellow shirt and a purple flowing tie, and he now stood up, hunching on a sharp-shouldered jacket. The trumpeter stood up, hiding the trumpet under a jacket folded over his arm. The man with the tom-tom wrapped it in brown paper like a store parcel.

Jimmy rose, repeating: ‘What’s wrong? What’s the matter?’

The man who sat behind the set of drums was lifting it into a large packing-case and fitting down the lid. The packing-case had stencilled on it in black paint: Heinz Baked Beans and Tomato Sauce. He sang out, softly, with a rollingeyed smile at the others: ‘We Kaffirs are an unreliable lot, an unreliable lot, we Kaffirs yes, man.’ Two of the young men sharply opened the door, stood listening, listening, glancing fast around the empty moon-shadowed space in the court of the building, then ran out on silent feet towards the opening in front. They vanished. The trumpeter and the tom-tom player stood like divers on the edge of a pool, and dived out into the moonlight and disappeared. Jimmy said to the remaining young men: ‘What’ve I done wrong, I don’t get it.’

‘Nothing, boy, nothing,’ said the young man who had admitted him. He was grinning. He laid his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder, and rocked him back and forth a moment. ‘Nothing, boy,’ he repeated. Then he looked at the door. Jimmy went out. The three young men worked on locking and fixing the door. Then, without another look at Jimmy they ran hard through the court and swung out of sight into the road.

Jimmy went after them, stumbling over cabbage stalks and maize cobs. By the time he reached the opening, there was not a soul in sight. He stood in the shadow of a wall, a shadow six inches deep, and waited. At the end of the road, two native policemen came into sight, swinging their clubs, They strolled down the moon-filled space between the brickrows, not seeing him. Whey they had gone Jimmy went up towards Elias’s house, his heart swollen into a hot and angry and pounding fist that seemed to fill all his chest. He was thinking, poisoned by a sense of injustice: They were scared of me. They don’t trust me. They were frightened.

It hurt him so much he wanted to cry out, explain himself to them. But it hurt too much to sustain, and a hot pity took the place of the hot anger, and he felt protectiveness, a need to shelter them. He thought: I’ll get to Elias, we’ll work out something. He wanted to destroy and to punish: to protect and to save.

Elias’s house was one of the best houses, since Elias was a government employee. It stood in a short road of such houses. They all had two small rooms and a sentry-box-like lavatory standing at the back. They were all quite dark. It was about three in the morning.

Jimmy found the house, and stood for a while under a mango tree that grew close against the wooden steps. He was getting back his breath. He then climbed noiselessly on to the veranda and knocked on a dark window-pane.

After some time, Elias’s face appeared, dark against darkness, frightened, ready to duck.

Jimmy said: ‘Elias, it’s me.’

Elias said: ‘But baas, but baas …’

‘It’s me,’ said Jimmy, in appeal against the ‘baas’.

‘Wait,’ said Elias, after a moment’s silence.

He disappeared from the window and the door opened. Elias was wearing his shirt and his legs were long and bare. He stood just inside the door dragging on his trousers.

‘I want to talk to you,’ said Jimmy.

Elias said: ‘Baas, you shouldn’t be here. I told you, you should not come here.’ A strong smell filled the tiny stuffy room. A light went on in the next room. The sound of a woman’s voice and then a child crying. Of course he has kids, Jimmy remembered, remembering how last time he had been here, early one evening, the place had been full of small children.

He said: ‘Elias, I must talk to you.’ He smelled the sharp smell again. He understood it was Elias, sweating. He thought, understanding slowly, Elias is so frightened that he’s sweating.

The idea that Elias was frightened because of him, Jimmy, made him angry, though not with Elias.

‘Listen, mate,’ he said, in soft and urgent appeal, ‘I’m not doing any harm. I must talk. I’ve come to talk.’ Elias, now fully dressed, stood close by the door, waiting, his hand on the knob.

‘What is it?’ said Elias resentfully, his eyes continually returning to the square of the window.

‘I want to discuss plans.’

‘Plans?’

‘We’re socialists, Elias. We’re comrades. I want to talk to you about the future. I’ve got an all-night pass. I thought we’d spend the night talking.’

At the word comrades, Elias’s body gave a sharp tug of fear. ‘You should not be here,’ he said, now sharp and angry.

The next room was dark again, and silent, but there was a soft movement beyond the door. Jimmy thought: His wife is listening on the other side of the door. For the first time it struck him that he should not have come: After all, he thought, it’s common enough for a wife not to agree with a man’s politics. Perhaps she doesn’t know.

‘But, Comrade Elias, I want to discuss with you how we can work to deliver your people from their bondage.’

Elias was silent. Jimmy realized he had used the words: deliver from bondage. They struck him as inaccurate unpolitical. But they filled him again with a warm and protective emotion, and he laid his hand on Elias’s shoulder and said: ‘We must help each other, comrade.’

Elias’s voice rose in a wail of angry fear: ‘You must go now, baas, you must not be here. Go now.’ He shifted his shoulder away from under Jimmy’s hand, and opened the door, pushing Jimmy out. ‘Go now, baas. Please go now.’ His voice was high on the
please.
Jimmy said: ‘I’ve got free time tomorrow afternoon. Can I come and talk then?’

‘No,’ said Elias. ‘No. Go away now, please, baas.’ He shut the door. Jimmy stood, feeling the blood pour up over his face. He was shaking with the heat of his body, a dry pounding heat which shook him like hands. Then he, too, was in a drench of sweat and felt cold. He turned slowly from the house and walked past the mango tree, whose leaves shone hard, almost green, the size of moons, all over the branches. Careless of police, he stumbled off across sharp dusty ruts. He was careless from tiredness and from sorrow. The sharp reflecting moonlight on leaves, stone, windows was like eyes mocking him. He found himself on a lot of empty rutted earth where the food-stalls were. A dozen little vans with shutters that could be let down to make selling counters stood untidily in the lot. He leaned against one of them. It had painted roughly on its side:
MRS SMARTS HOT DOG STORE. BEST HOT DOGS. BEST FANCY CAKES. BEST TEA IN TOWN. WE HAVE THE BEST IN THE WORLD! COCA-COLA. FRIED FISH. BOILED MEALIES.

Jimmy thought: If I go back to camp across country I’ll have to go through all that dirty grass, and then those beetles or whatever they are. The river too – his trousers still flapped heavy and wet around his ankles. A mile up town was the Coloured Quarter. He would go and sleep on the floor in Ron’s room.

He turned out of the Location gates into the main road which ran south, here a narrow hump of tarmac that gave off a grey glitter of cold light. Soon he passed the white cemetery, its trees and monuments all a pale gleam of light above black jagged shadows. Then came the railway lines, a double line of whitely-glittering steel. He stopped. The power station beyond raised cooling towers against the shoulder of a steep hill. The white towers curved finely inwards under clouds of dark smoke that were solidified by the surrounding clarity of chill white light. Across the lines, arising out of a mess of soiled grass, railway sleepers, old tin cans, was a small tree, white-stemmed, a cloud of fine leaves rising into the moonlight like the spray of a fountain. The swollen sore place inside Jimmy slowly cooled and soothed. He was conscious of a feeling of emptiness. He stared at the proud young tree, the squat shapes of the cooling towers, the great masses of dark smoke carved like thunder clouds by star-light and moonlight, and understood that ever since that afternoon he had been driven from action to crazy action, not knowing what he was doing, not responsible for himself.

I’m a silly sod, he said aloud to himself, standing alone on the Location side of the railway lines, shivering with cold. Yet it was not quite enough to say it: it still hurt, what had happened between him and the jazz-players, between himself and Elias.

He’ll see things different in the morning, he decided, refusing to believe that Elias did not trust him, and that he was really rejected by the jazz-players. He set himself to walk on, down into the Coloured Quarter. When he came to the court where Ronald lived, it was silent and dark. He moved quietly along the veranda and knocked. He had to knock several times. He expected Ronald to come to the door – recently he had been better, apparently over his fever, and able to walk and talk to his RAF visitors. Now he remembered Ronald’s mother. It was odd he had forgotten her, for when he had told Martha that he had ‘found a better woman, a fine working-class lass like his own kind,’ he had meant Mrs Spikes, Ronald’s mother. Yet he had done no more than talk to her in Ronald’s presence and dreamed wildy of inviting her to England when the war was over.

After a long wait, and repeated soft knocking, the door opened to show Mrs Spikes. She had flung an old coat over the petticoat she had been sleeping in. She blinked at him, sleepily – too sleepy to be frightened.

‘Mrs Spikes,’ said Jimmy in a low confidential tone, ‘I came to ask Ron if I could sleep on the floor until morning.’

Mrs Spikes clung to the door-frame for steadiness, because she was so weary, and said: ‘Ron went to the hospital this afternoon in the ambulance. He’s bad, and they came in the ambulance. He will die, the doctor says.’

A child started to cry in the room behind. He had forgotten the little girl, Ronald’s sister.

Mrs Spikes said into the dark room: ‘Hush there. Hush and be quiet.’ She shut the door and leaned against it, yawning. It was quite bright on the veranda, because of the moonlight in the court. Jimmy gazed at the half-clad woman and thought she looked young and pitiful. A thin coil of dark hair had come undone and lay on her thin neck. Jimmy looked at the shadow under the hair, and wanted to dive into it and be forgotten. She was still vague from tiredness. Her eyes were not on Jimmy, but on the doors ranged along the wall opposite. She returned her eyes to him, from politeness, and said: ‘In this place everybody knows everyone’s business.’

He saw he was embarrassing her. He could not sleep here with Ronald gone. He thought bitterly that even while he was consumed by a passion to protect her, even while he yearned to sink into the comfort of the shadow which was her hair and her arms, he was embarrassing her and making things hard for her. This thought came out of the sober self that had been revived in the cool mood that had come on him while he stood by the railway lines.