Homesickness (3 page)

‘Never mind. We're not living long.'

‘Don't you get constipated travelling?' Sheila asked, leaning forward. ‘I find I do.'

‘Thanks, chief,' said Doug to the waiter. Plates were now being served.

‘I simply love the French language,' Louisa Hofmann was saying. ‘I could just sit and listen to it all day.'

Her husband turned to her. ‘You don't know a word of French.'

She was about to protest when the film crew trooped in and sat at the other long table, talking loudly.

For Borelli's benefit Garry Atlas pointed with his forehead, ‘That's the crew there.'

It was the last mention of the film.

‘I can't eat this,' Cathcart pushed his plate away. It's yams or something. How are you people finding it?' he called down the table.

‘Right!' Atlas nodded with his mouth full. ‘A T-bone anyday. But I'm wading through. When in Rome, you know…'

‘I'll eat anything,' Sasha murmured to Violet. ‘A horse or anything. Gosh, I'm hungry.'

‘But you always are,' said her friend looking away.

Garry was going on, ‘The beer's pissy too. It's not within a bull's roar of ours. Have you had any yet?'

‘You're a vegetarian?' Mrs Kaddok asked.

North nodded.

‘We too,' she smiled.

North cleared his throat. ‘Yes, the diet of harmless beasts with slow reactions.'

‘I hadn't thought of it that way.' And again Gwen showed her teeth. She turned, ‘Did you hear that, Leon?'

North frowned. He hadn't exactly meant it like that.

‘Elephants,' Kaddok confirmed, ‘eat eight hundred to a thousand pounds of grass a day. They weigh up to seven and a half tons. Both sexes of the African elephant have tusks.'

‘Eight and a half tons,' Dr North corrected gently.

‘Our waiters,' Mrs Cathcart announced to the rest, ‘if you look, have got bare feet.' And she made a clicking noise with her tongue.

The waiters too could understand English.

‘Oh dear,' said Sheila, perplexed.

She'd asked for tea, they'd given her coffee. Sheila looked around and decided to drink it.

‘Say, guess what?'

This was Garry Atlas again leaning forward with a quiz question; veins on his neck bulging. ‘Guess what I saw on the end of the diving board?' He turned to everybody at the table. ‘Someone had scratched on it with a knife, or something. “
REMEMBER-DAWN-FRASER
”. It's there. And in brackets they've put
A-U-S-T
.'

‘Austria?' Borelli suggested.

‘She's our swimmer!‘ Cathcart cried out down the end.

‘Right!' Garry nodded.

‘Someone's been here before us,' giggled Sasha to Violet.

Sshhh.

‘One of the best,' said Doug. ‘The 1960 Rome Olympics, remember?'

‘The first woman to break sixty secs for the one hundred metres,' Kaddok said. ‘Freestyle.'

The stranger they'd seen at the pool passed but didn't stop at the table. He gave them the thumbs up.

North lit a small cigar and glanced at his watch.

There was a lull as they realised where they were; or how far they had gone away.

‘Have you been overseas before?'

Sasha shook her head. ‘This is the first time.'

Directly below lay the pool illuminated by Dutch underwater lamps, ultramarine slab sloping to dark cold at the deep end. The surface tilted with the shifting dining room fixtures and candles, fluid lights, and the board floated, an interesting twisted rectangle. The board and the surrounding tiles were still riddled with pools. Further out, the bordering lawn was soaked in shadow and suggestion, black but not completely, Reinhardt's black. And from the dining room they could see over the wall large silhouettes, evidence of new constructions, capital, and a hidden flashing light. There was no muffled racket from there now; no distant sibilance of wheels, not even the last truck or a bicycle bell. It was late but the window-wall also possessed pleasant editing properties. The entire continent felt empty.

‘There aren't many lights,' Hofmann reflected as he folded his serviette, breaker of silences.

Does he mean neon?

‘This is Africa,' Whitehead reminded him, almost rudely, looking down at his cup.

The Museum of Handicrafts:
MUSEUM
spelt
MUSEU
. Of handicrafts, arts'n local artifacts perhaps. These people were known for their woven baskets and the painted gourd; grass bags; jewellery as strapped to the forehead: and so on. Fabrics, but to a lesser extent.

Many other groups after sitting down to the English breakfast must have strolled the same three or four blocks to the Museum, for although they took up the full width of the footpath, talking and pointing things out to each other, often pausing for photographs, little notice was taken of them by the locals, the natives preferring the road. Doug Cathcart had a pair of powerful binoculars and now and then stopped, his bow-legged wife alongside, as he focused on a distant cyclist or a woman breastfeeding. The morning was clear and pleasant. Except for his shuffle and the way he leaned to hear his wife, Kaddok looked no different from anyone else. Most of the others wore special sunglasses too. As they turned into the square and saw the building, someone—it was Gerald Whitehead—let out a low whistle of disapproval.

Facing them the Museum dominated, overwhelmed the square. It was para-Palladian, ambitious in scope, hoping to gain kudos from one of the previous high points in Western civilisation. It had the grey steps, the portentous columns, porticos and mock balconies; while the square in the foreground had been set aside as a piazza, concave à la Siena. Such was the Museum's presence (pressure) the roofs of the ramshackle shops lining the square had splintered upwards. On the short left side a collapsing lazaretto and a basket factory had trees and shafts of grass growing out of the cracks.

There were other things wrong. Gerald stood making sounds of unbelievability with his tongue.

1) Look, that proposed ‘piazza' in the foreground was a dustbowl. It was paved with mud bricks but crowded with squatting apothecaries and vegetable dealers; skinny men flogged aphrodisiacs (displayed on folded blankets); outdoor butchers there to one side, a Club; rhythmic Malevich knife-grinder next cranking a large stone with one foot; what looked like rows of Medicine Men (their arcane jars, powders, animal skins); an elderly ocularist; Sirdarjis and drifting Somalis; the inevitable tellers of fortunes—at least two dozen of them under torn umbrellas; and there were canvas awnings, an acrobat suspended between nasal monotonous hawking. The function of the ‘piazza' was neatly eclipsed.

2) The museum itself. Somehow its ratios were out. It was ungainly, oppressively so. Through an oversight or to fit into the square it had been made squat. A good case of the Golden Rectangle ignored or misunderstood. Architects should sign their names on buildings, as they do in Argentina.

Gerald kept shaking his head, muttering. Was anyone else so aghast?

3) On the roof to one side had been grafted a cupola. Quite incongruous. It was pink, a huge Moscow breast, pierced by a tilting television aerial.

4) And flanking the entrance, two rusting pedestals held a half-ton pair of vulgar terrestrial condors—or were they crows?—cast in concrete. These were visible from a great distance. Dr North told Sheila they were African vultures.

They had climbed the steps and were approaching the main doors. From behind the pillars figures stirred. A beggar on crutches managed to stand up, other gangetic shapes moved and as both Louisa Hofmann and Violet felt it necessary to lift their hems, bones shot out, fingernails, yes, for baksheesh.

‘Don't give them anything,' Doug Cathcart shouted, his mouth dry. Borelli had one hand in his pocket. ‘Or you'll never get rid of them. They'll tag along!'

And Kaddok, raising his camera at one—a face swollen with ganglia—nicely caught the open mouth and milky stare of a native, blind.

Looking up then they could see that the sans-serif
MUSEU OF HANDICRAFTS
was ‘printed' in neon pipes.
MUSEU
was not a misspelling or an example—as Sasha had assumed—of some local dialect. The
M
had long ago fallen off in a wind and as they passed underneath they were showered in sparks from the permanent short circuit.

Sheila attached herself to the Cathcarts as they moved inside and immediately began looking around for the handicrafts. The unexpected bright lighting, circuits of flickering fluorescent, punctuated by duds and ceiling fans, and others about to expire, made her sneeze. She blew her nose. The Museum sounded completely empty. A few divisions of plywood broke up the cavernous space. Even from a distance these looked ricketty.

In a peeved voice Gerald asked whether it was open or finished yet.

There was after all a smell of fresh paint.

Doug Cathcart cleared his throat, a bit irritated.

Ah! a tall robed figure appeared. He had bare feet and so they hadn't heard him. Sasha and Violet exchanged glances, raising their eyebrows. He was a Masai, stone-faced, and smelling of cattle. Although he said nothing they all followed him. Now in the bright hall they could see heads and eyes of the museum staff in cubicles apparently waiting for their arrival. The guide stopped and looked on with them. An attendant—or was he curator?—in khaki shorts and bare feet busily wrapped some rope around a dented lawnmower. His cubicle was crowded with lawnmowers. All appeared to be in original condition (the bottle-green duco) although the filigree of scratches and the mirror-finish of the flywheels indicated a long hard life. One still had the rare canvas grass-catcher, a British invention. Borelli speculated whether that model would have been pre-Suez. Along with the sturdy British motorcycle, the mowers (
By Appointment
…in gold transfer) held the lion's share of the export market. At the height of the Empire… Foreshadowing the Empire's decline, the BSA motorbikes and Moffatt & Richardson mowers of the 1950s developed stasis in their design and model range, proclaimed more a sturdy heaviness, as if the traditional arteries from Head Office had gradually and irreparably hardened.

With a leap backwards the mechanic/attendant started a two-stroke. Within the stone walls it kicked up a tremendous reverberating racket and the blue smoke made the ladies step back and press handkerchiefs to their nostrils. He started another, then a third—a small one with an unusual kick-starter. Then he turned to the one which clearly held pride of place, the large bowling green model in the foreground: heavy roller and perforated tractor seat! For all its size this seemed to be the quietest of them all, ‘the Rolls Royce of lawnmowers'; but by then with what, four, five firing and vibrating together it was difficult to tell. For Chrissake!' Doug Cathcart shouted. ‘Tell him to stop!' Turning and waving his arms at the guide he found the Masai and the Brown attendant standing open-mouthed, watching the machines. The smoke—‘carbon monoxide', Gwen Kaddok repeated several times, choking—would hang in the hall for hours.

The next few exhibits were without attendants.

Under glass three English toothpaste tubes were at different stages of use: full, half full (thumb-dented tube, white worm protruding), and a fine example of a completely empty one, squeezed dry, corrugated, curled and scratched. Alongside lay a pair of false teeth and arrows pointing back to the toothpaste. The teeth alone were a source of wonder. The mechanic had left the mowers and with the Masai had both elbows on the cabinet. At intervals he looked up and Gwen Kaddok noticed him staring at her teeth. She gave a confused smile. He turned back to the display.

The next cabinet a few yards on held a compass and a French cigarette-rolling machine, but what attracted their guide's attention was nailed on the wall above it: a U-shaped magnet barnacled with small nails and hairpins. Visitors could apparently test its mysterious power for themselves. But when the guide touched a bottom pin the whole lot came away like bees and scattered over the floor.

Garry Atlas had missed this. With Violet Hopper and Sasha he had gone ahead, perhaps looking for the handicrafts, and he called out, ‘Hey, this is a beauty. Get a load of this!' The others came up to an early TV set standing in a slight puddle. To demonstrate its colour and moving qualities—because there is no television in Africa, the dark continent—the insides were filled with lime-green water and three brightly coloured fish darted about, this way and that, chased by a baby crocodile. ‘Perpetual motion,' Phillip North nodded; he recognised the fish. About a dozen natives from the cubicles they hadn't yet reached were squatting in front, hands on their knees, watching. A striped sitringee had been placed on the floor for this purpose. Doug Cathcart stepped in front of the guide and in a loud voice asked where the Handicrafts were—‘as you advertised?' There must have been a language problem. The Masai looked blankly at him, then back at the TV screen.

‘Jee-zus,' said Garry through his teeth.

‘Don't worry,' said Borelli with a wave of his hand.