This Side Jordan (18 page)

She looked upset. Then she smiled and reached out to touch him on the arm.

‘Don’t worry about it, Mr. Amegbe,’ she said. ‘Even if he does think that, I won’t. Honestly.’

Nathaniel looked away, too full of loathing and self-loathing to speak.

‘Thank you, Mrs. Kestoe,’ he said finally, slowly, dutifully.

‘Oh – that’s all right,’ she said naïvely.

Nathaniel suddenly threw back his head and burst into laughter. It cleansed and purified him. He waved at her gaily.

‘Yes,’ he cried, ‘thank you, Mrs. Kestoe! A thousand thanks!’

Miranda looked at him in astonishment. As the car drove off, he saw her puzzled frown.

The parade swayed in its slow dance along the street.

– Oh my people, who dance in joy, who dance in sorrow.

K
umi and Awuletey had promised to get in touch with Nathaniel immediately after the interview. He waited in his office until six that night, but they did not come. Finally he went home.

‘What is it?’ Aya asked, as soon as she saw him.

‘It is nothing,’ he mumbled.

‘Something troubles you. I can tell.’

‘It is nothing,’ he insisted. Then, impatiently, ‘You trouble me when you keep asking stupid questions.’

Offended, she turned away and would not speak to him all evening. Akosua made gloomy reference to the dangers of upsetting pregnant women, until Nathaniel, tired and on edge, went out to Obi’s Friendly Chop Bar and drank too much palmwine.

The two boys were probably out celebrating. There would be no room left in their thoughts for anything else. When they settled down in their jobs, they would let him know. That must be it.

He knew he would not be able to contain his aching curiosity. He would get in touch with them. But how?

When he sent out letters to the boys who failed, he had borrowed the list of addresses from Mensah. And Mensah was in Ashanti now, touring the villages, spouting the Great Promise. Futura Academy did not boast a registrar. There was one clerk, an old man who Nathaniel suspected was a feebleminded relative of Mensah’s. But he did not know where the old man lived. The two boys’ addresses had been on their applications, but Nathaniel had foolishly destroyed these.

At last it became clear to Nathaniel that his only point of contact with Kumi and Awuletey was, ridiculously, through Johnnie Kestoe.

The next morning Nathaniel had a headache and complained about his digestion until Akosua snapped that no one had found her cooking at fault before.

‘It’s not your cooking!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got worries, troubles –’

‘Worries, troubles,’ Akosua mimicked. ‘What has your wife got? She’ll have a bellyful of pain any day now, and you talk about your troubles. Do something, then.’

Aya sat silent and miserable while they bickered, her eyes large as a child’s that has just finished crying. She wanted only for them to be quiet, he knew, whatever they felt.

‘Akosua, Akosua, my sister – please –’ he hated his conciliatory tone and for a moment he hated this spare competent woman who had taken over his house.

Akosua was pacified.

‘I will make some more tea.’

‘Fine, fine,’ Nathaniel said hopelessly. ‘Some tea. That will solve everything.’

The two women looked at him uneasily, as though they thought he had some strange affliction of the mind.

It was then that Nathaniel decided to go and see Johnnie Kestoe.

The office was busy but not impressively so. Nathaniel walked through the outer office where the clerks sat, and his eyes searched among them. But neither Kumi nor Awuletey was there. He had to wait on a bench in the outer room for some time before he could see Johnnie Kestoe.

Nathaniel wondered if he were being kept waiting purposely. People did that. What a comfortable sense of power it must give, to be able to keep people waiting outside your office, until the moment you chose to say ‘now’.

‘Mr. Kestoe will see you now,’ someone said.

Nathaniel blundered in. Why had he brought his briefcase? Obviously, Johnnie Kestoe would think it unnecessary. Probably he would be amused. Nathaniel could hear him recounting it – ‘this fellow came into my office, lugging a dirty great briefcase – nothing in it, of course –’. A book of Gold Coast history was in it, several old essays, that day’s newspaper and a wadded-up handkerchief. Nathaniel longed to throw it away, to drop it. He considered going out again and leaving it on the bench. But the clerks would laugh.

‘Good morning, Mr. Kestoe.’ He spoke more loudly than he had intended. ‘I happened to be passing by, and –’

Johnnie Kestoe’s eyes were cold.

‘Indeed? I didn’t think you’d venture to show your face around here – now.’

Nathaniel felt the sweat forming under the bridge of his glasses. Soon it would run conspicuously down his nose.

‘I wondered –’ he began again uncertainly. ‘I thought I’d enquire – did you see those boys yesterday, Mr. Kestoe?’

‘Yes,’ Johnnie Kestoe said. ‘I saw them. Didn’t you gather that?’

‘Oh. You interviewed them?’

‘Yes. I interviewed them, Mr. Amegbe. Are they the best you could do?’

‘Well –’

Johnnie leaned forward across the desk. He was breathing rapidly and his nostrils flared. Nathaniel could see now that the whiteman was very angry.

‘Do you want to know what happened? I’ll tell you. The little chap –’

‘Kumi.’

‘Yes. He did a lot of talking. I should think that’s about all he can do. Said he’d had a lot of experience as a clerk. Said he could type –’

‘He studied typing. They all did.’

‘Who taught it?’ Johnnie asked rudely. ‘An imbecile? I gave him a test. What a farce.’

‘He would be nervous –’

Nathaniel could see him, typing to dictation from this man, at an unfamiliar machine, the clerks giggling in the background.

‘Perhaps so,’ Johnnie said dryly. ‘That’s hardly my business, is it? I assure you, there wasn’t one correct word in the whole thing. I didn’t even test his speed. I could tell it was hopeless.’

‘I see.’

‘He begged and implored for a job,’ Johnnie went on. ‘He didn’t speak English too badly. So do you know what I did? I told him he could come in on two weeks’ trial as a filing clerk, and I’d see if he was capable of picking up anything.’

‘He is an intelligent boy,’ Nathaniel said. ‘He should not have told you he had experience. But he is an intelligent boy. I know that, Mr. Kestoe.’

‘What you call intelligent, Mr. Amegbe, and what I call intelligent must be two different things. Do you know what young what’s-his-name said then? He said he would accept the job, but he wanted to know first how soon he’d be promoted, because he thought an administrative post would suit him. He thought it would suit him! Of course he never bothered to ask himself how he’d suit it. So I told him to get out. Naturally.’

‘He did not mean it the way it sounded to you, Mr. Kestoe,’ Nathaniel said stubbornly. ‘He is ambitious, that is all. What is the harm in that?’

‘Harm!’ Johnnie shouted. ‘I’ll tell you what the bloody harm is! I get youngsters in here every day, looking for an easy leg up. I’ve given some of them a try-out, and I know what they’re like. They sit on their fat behinds and read magazines all day, and feel hurt because they’re not branch managers in a month. I didn’t think you’d waste my time sending me that sort of boy, Mr. Amegbe.’

‘They are not like that,’ Nathaniel said slowly, tenaciously. ‘Kumi – he is not like that. It is just the way he talked –’

‘It’s the way they all talk. How you people can prattle about Independence –’

Nathaniel stood silently, not daring to speak because if he did he would shout and shout and keep on shouting.

He hated Johnnie Kestoe. He had never felt it so explicitly before. There were Europeans he had disliked or despised, and sometimes he had hated them in general. But now he hated this one, this individual. Nathaniel’s hatred numbed him like a narcotic. He felt almost drowsy with it, as though
in a dream he could take a step forward and kill this man. But he did not move.

‘What about the other boy?’ he asked finally, his tongue thick and heavy.

Johnnie had turned back to his desk. He gave Nathaniel a bored glance, and his voice was casual, but it was only a mask – the anger was still there and still close to the surface.

‘Oh – him. Biggish chap, pretty clueless. I nearly hired him.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I told him he could have a job,’ Johnnie Kestoe said, ‘as a messenger.’

Nathaniel could hardly believe what he had heard.

‘A messenger –’

‘Yes. But when I told him what his work would be, he turned it down. Said it wouldn’t suit him. It wasn’t the sort of job he’d expected.’

Big, easy-going Awuletey, with the quick grin and the loping walk. He was not brilliant, not even very clever, perhaps, but he was earnest and he worked hard. Nathaniel could see him in a messenger’s khaki, scarcely distinguishable from his school khaki, sitting outside this office, waiting for someone to give him an errand to run.

After the dream, the bitter morning, and no further dreams to allay the craving.

‘Of course he turned it down –’ Nathaniel cried. ‘He didn’t want to be a messenger!’

Johnnie Kestoe looked at him with raised eyebrows.

‘What else could he be?’

For a moment, silence – even within Nathaniel’s mind. He wanted to protest, but he could not. He raised his head slightly, and what he saw in the whiteman’s eyes frightened him.

‘Mr. Amegbe,’ Johnnie said quietly, ‘what made you think I would hire boys who had failed their School Certificate? My wife must have told you that those particular posts might lead to advancement in the Firm. Did you really think I was as stupid as that?’

Nathaniel could not sweat now, that was the terrible thing. His skin was parched and burning, like a man whose life is being shrivelled up in a fever’s fire. He rubbed his palms together. They were dry as charred grass.

‘I – I – I d-did not –’ his stammer had returned and his voice was like a hammer that never succeeded in driving a nail, ‘I did not think you were stupid. It was – not like that –’

‘Oh? What, then?’

‘They were – they wanted jobs – they needed – I thought –’

He realized with nausea that he would not be able to explain. If he told Johnnie Kestoe that the boys were not really failures, that they had not been adequately taught, it would reveal the true quality of Futura Academy. And what would it seem to imply about Nathaniel Amegbe, schoolmaster?

He was trapped. He could not say anything. His skin itched and burned with its fever.

‘They needed jobs –’ Johnnie Kestoe repeated. ‘Isn’t that nice? So you told them it could be arranged – at a price –’

Nathaniel stared.

‘Yes,’ Johnnie Kestoe said, ‘they told me. They told me there must be some mistake. It had been arranged, they said, and they’d invested over twenty pounds between them to get the posts –’

They had told him. They had told him. They were baffled and angry about the jobs, of course. And so they had told him, probably not even realizing how it would sound to him.

After the dream, the sick dry-mouthed awakening. Nathaniel knew now that the dream addict had been himself.

‘No! I – I swear to you –’ he choked, ‘it was not like that – you do not understand –’

‘I understand quite enough. You accepted bribes to do something it was not in your power to do. You don’t even give value for money, do you?’

Nathaniel could not reply. To speak would be like straining to make your voice heard across an ocean.

– Among my people, when a man asks for another man’s time, or thought, or consideration, he does not come empty-handed. It is a custom.

– ‘Mastah, I beg you, you go dash me one penny’. And the voice of the white priest echoed, scathing still, in his ears – ‘Beggars! Beggars! Shame on you!’ Never, never again had that boy begged dash from whitemen. Never. If you want to take dash, go do it from your own people. I suppose that makes it all right.

He had no words that would rise beyond his throat.

‘I’m going to report the whole matter to the police,’ the whiteman said. ‘What do you think of that?’

Then the sweat broke out on Nathaniel, fear made visible.

‘Please – please, sir,’ and through his panic he despised himself as much as if he had knelt, ‘please – if you would allow me to explain –’

The whiteman leaned across the desk.

‘You couldn’t explain,’ he said softly, venomously. ‘Not to me. What a fool I was, to imagine –’

Abruptly, he broke off and turned away. Without looking at Nathaniel, he jerked one hand in a short contemptuous gesture towards the door.

‘Get out of here. Go.’

Stumbling, half sobbing, Nathaniel went, his briefcase clutched in his hand.

Nathaniel walked.

From his prison, he could not see the streets or the people who moved close beside him. Automatically, he put one foot down after the other, a short stolid figure, his wide face expressionless.

The police. They would come, sure as death. African police, but they would believe the whiteman’s side of the story, not his. Kumi and Awuletey would give evidence. And that would settle it. For Nathaniel Amegbe, teacher of History, everything would be finished.

When he returned to his village, he could throw away his spectacles. What was there to see in that place, anyway? He could throw away his books and his briefcase – he would not need them.

The table, the chairs, the second-hand wireless, the bed with mosquito net – he would have to sell them. Strange, it was the thought of selling the big brass bed that bothered him most of all. Only somebody who was Somebody could sleep in a bed like that.

Kwaale would not get the money for her case now. She would have to send him money for his. What a laugh.

He could never explain, that was the worst. He could never explain to anyone. He could only walk away.

So many desires. Kumi and Awuletey’s desire to have jobs that were big and important. Nathaniel’s desire to create a place of belonging for those who had no place. The desire to do something, be somebody. The desire to be God and the desire to wear a silk shirt.

How could the whiteman know? He could not know.
He had everything. For him, tomorrow was now. How could he know what it was to need a mouthful of the promised land’s sweetness now, now, while you still lived?

Hatred ran like a fever in Nathaniel’s blood.

– You whitemen. You Europeans. You Englishmen. You whom we used to call masters. You whom we do not call master any longer. You who say you come only to teach us. You would like us to forget, wouldn’t you? You forget – it is easy for you. But we do not forget the cutting down of the plant, the burning of the plant, the tearing up by the roots.

– How many centuries’ clotted blood lies between your people and mine?

– I was there. I saw it – I was there. And the blood trembled in my heart.