Guerrillas
The brown, tattered lawn, the hot glitter of the many-angled corrugated-iron roof, the sun on the ocher-washed concrete walls, the sloping shadows, the bright soft petals of bougainvillaea, the pink of oleander and the congealed-blood color of hibiscus blooms that had quailed and folded, the derelict bush stretching to the white-trunked wall of forest: it was all as she had remembered it. It all continued to exist.
When the car stopped in the road and Roche got out and slammed his door and she got out, the delirium was over; and she was in control of herself again, marveling at, and regretting, the now dead excitement. And it was only as they walked into the yard, through the gate that had been left open, that she thought that her second visit here might be made known to Roche, and her version of her meeting with Jimmy be shown as false.
No one was in the yard. No one appeared on the porch, white in the sun. The car port at the side of the house was empty; there was a dusty old stain of oil on the concrete. The door from the porch to the living room was open.
Roche called: “Jimmy!”
There was no reply. He walked into the living room, and Jane followed him. She saw again the electric blue carpet with the black and yellow splashes; the bookshelves, the books, the photographs in stand-up frames; the desk, untidier than it had been; the chunky three-piece suite upholstered in that tiger-striped furry material. Various sections of a newspaper, roughly folded, lay on the couch; the inky-looking, comics supplement was on the glass-topped table. There was a light coating of new dust on surfaces; dust, disturbed by their passage through the room, could be seen to rise in the glare reflected from the white porch. With the room untenanted and exposed, it was possible to see it stripped of its furnishings, to see it bare, with only the mahogany-stained shelving on the wall. She considered the sulking, vacant, curly-haired children in the mutilated photograph.
Calling “Jimmy! Jimmy!” Roche began to walk through the house, and Jane walked behind him. She entered a passage she remembered. She began to know alarm and disgust again; she began to feel the need to get out quickly, to be herself again. They walked noisily, creating noise in the echoing concrete house. Roche opened the door into the kitchen; and the sight and smell of dirty plates, stale food going bad in the heat, strange food, further unsettled her. She thought: I feel like screaming. The thought came to her as words alone; but then within herself she began to simulate an imaginary scream.
Walking now like a man who knew that the house was empty, no longer cautious, and suddenly simply curious, Roche opened more doors. Jane followed him. She saw the bedroom. She saw the unmade bed, the two sunken pillows, the stiff off-white stains on the sheet, a spring or two of hair, specks of dirt or tobacco, the yellow candlewick bedspread half on the maroon-carpeted floor. The door to the bathroom was ajar and she had a glimpse of the low tiled wall which marked off the shower area. She saw the view through the high, barred window: the afternoon sky, the distant line of bush, the crests of the spiky forest palms. The room was close; it smelled of distemper and old clothes; not even the wind cleared that. On the bedside table there were two paperback books. Cheap paper curling in the heat. A pornographic cover. A shallow round jar of some cream.
She stood in the doorway with Roche, who was sucking on the end of one temple of his dark glasses. Something of his excitement had gone.
He said, “He isn’t here. Shall we go across to the Grange?”
“Let’s go home.”
She followed him back to the living room. He stood for a while beside the tiger-striped couch, sucking on the glasses, looking. Jane studied the photographs. The room felt hotter now. The glare from the porch was fierce.
Jane said, “I hope the water’s on when we get back.”
He moved to the desk. He began to read a blue aerogramme letter.
Jane said, “I think we should go. This place is creepy.”
He said, throwing the letter down on the desk, “Another brush-off.”
She went to the desk and, not taking the letter up, leaving it on the desk, she began to read.
Dear Jimmy, We were vastly amused by your letter. That place certainly sounds ripe for something, from your description of it. You are certainly the right man in the light place. But Lord Thomson and the Sunday Times might be a better market for the series of thirteen you propose writing. We are not in that league, as you know, and the feeling here is that something more in the nature of hard news, offbeat but illuminating, might be of more use to us rather than the psychological analysis you propose, which I know is your forte and which I personally would find fascinating, as I need hardly remind you. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how much longer we can go on. I am beginning to feel that we are an incurably frivolous people and as a nation we seem resigned to giggling our way to oblivion. The scene as we knew it is no longer what it was, and I personally feel that the time has come to batten down the hatches and ride out the storm. But perhaps out of all your experiences might come some powerful and hard-hitting novel—how good, by the by, to hear that that progresses smoothly. It will certainly give a much needed fillip to the form which, like everything in this nook-shotten island, seems to be dying on its feet. You have no doubt heard of the staggering increase in property prices over here. We have managed, at enormous sacrifice, to become enfeoffed of a ruin in Dorset, which much occupies us these days, so at least we will be sheltered during the coming storm. The natives are so far friendly. At least no one has painted swastikas on our doors or dropped excreta through the letter slot. But that may come, when they get to know us better. Marcia sends her love. We will continue to scan the newspapers for news of you and your doings, which from this distance seem vastly exciting. Yours ever, Roy.
Roche stood beside her while she read.
She said, “Is he really writing a novel? Is that the novel, do you think?” She took out a writing pad from below some papers.
Somebody said, “Yes?”
And Jane turned to see the boy with the Medusa head, the boy with the pigtails of aggression, the boy with the twisted face, the tormented red eyes. He was standing in the doorway in his jeans, jersey, and canvas shoes. He moved aggressively toward them.
She was grateful for Roche’s coolness.
Roche said, “It’s Bryant, isn’t it? Where’s Jimmy, Bryant?”
The boy didn’t answer. He came to the desk; he gathered the writing pad and letter and other papers together and put the blue-tinted glass ash tray on them. He went to the couch and began to refold the newspaper.
Roche said, “Where’s Jimmy, Bryant?”
And when Bryant spoke, over his shoulder, it was almost with a shout. “Why you ask me?”
Roche said, “We’ve come to see Jimmy, Bryant.”
“He’s in town.” And then Bryant sat down on the couch and began to sob. “He’s in town, he’s in town.” His eyes were red: the red of aggression turned out to be the red of weeping.
Roche sat on the arm of the couch. “What’s happened?”
Bryant said, “They kill Stephens.”
Jane said, “Killed?”
“When?” Roche said. “I haven’t seen the papers today. Is it in the papers?”
Bryant leaned back on the couch, turned his head to one side, and looked up at the ceiling. He was sobbing; he was waiting to be comforted.
Roche said, “Is it in the papers?” Then he said to Jane, “Meredith didn’t say anything about it. He should have told me.”
“Not in the papers,” Bryant said, wiping his eyes with a long finger, a thin, crooked finger. “It happen early this morning. They was waiting for him. On the radio they say he draw first. They was waiting for him. Watching the mother house.”
“Meredith knew!” Roche said, standing up. “Meredith knew!” The fact seemed important to him; it was like the main shock, overriding all the rest of Bryant’s news. He said, “Is that where Jimmy has gone?”
“The police was giving up the body this afternoon. They taking it from the mortu’ry to the mot
her house. I didn’t want to go.”
Roche said to Jane, “I think I should go.”
Bryant rolled his head on the back of the couch and used his long finger to wipe the rim of his eyes. “I should go too. But I don’t think I can stand it.”
“I’ll give you a lift.”
Jane wanted to cry: No!
Bryant said, “Leave me here.”
Jane said, “I want to go home.”
“Leave me here,” Bryant said, looking up at the ceiling.
“Jane!” Roche ordered. “Let us go.”
She started at his tone. He was already walking, brisk, athletic, his pale khaki trousers seeming looser around his waist; and she hurried after him. Yet when they were in the car—the sweat instantly breaking out on their faces and backs: the air heated, though the windows had been left open, the seats blazing—he went still.
He put his hands on the wheel and said, addressing himself, “I must drive carefully. In times like this one must drive carefully.”
And very slowly, as though he was indifferent to Jane’s reaction, as though he was alone in the car, he began to drive along the narrow empty road, sitting tense at the wheel, studying the asphalt surface, sometimes broken at the edge, sometimes overgrown, loosened into gravel here and there by tufts of browned grass. Jane was silent; it was as though she too was alone. The sunlight was yellowing; it softened the wall of bush that bounded the flattened wasteland of stunted shrubs and collapsed long grass. Slowly, though not as slowly as when they started, they approached the highway. The scorched hills appeared, dark-red and brown, smoking in many places. The slanting sun picked out every dip on the hills, every fold and wrinkle. They turned onto the highway, black and smooth from traffic.
Roche said, “I think I should go. It must be terrible in that house now.”
There were not many cars on the road. The factories were closed. Far away, deep in the brown fields, there was a scattering of parked cars. The trunks of these cars were open, and the drivers could be seen, tiny, isolated, intent figures, cutting grass for the animals they kept at home. In open spaces in the little concrete-and-tin settlements children played, kicking up dust.
“Meredith knew,” Roche said. “They stopped me on Friday, you know, and they searched the car.”
He was half addressing Jane now, but she acknowledged nothing.
Past the junked cars in the sunken fields, past the factories, past more country settlements, the suburbs, they approached the city, the rubbish dump smoking yellow-gray, the smoke uncoiling slowly in the still afternoon, rising high and spreading far, becoming mingled with the pink pall from the bauxite loading station, the whole shot through with the rays of the declining sun. Sunlight gilded the stilted shacks that seemed to scaffold the red hillsides. The land began to feel choked. But the shantytown redevelopments were subdued; those repetitive avenues of red earth showed little of their usual human overspill. There were few trucks amid the smoke and the miniature multicolored hills and valleys of the rubbish dump, and not many scavengers. On each fence post a black carrion corbeau sat undisturbed; others on the ground hopped about awkwardly, two feet at a time.
Jane rolled up her window, to keep out the oily smoke and the deep dead smell.
Roche said, “Picking the carcass clean. They’ll pick the carcass clean.”
Fixed in the posture of alertness, though no longer driving slowly, still concentrating on the road as though watching for obstructions there, he did not sufficiently notice that the line of traffic he had been following had thinned out; and it was some time before he saw that he was entering a quiet city. They crossed the concrete canal that drained the ever rising swamp over which this part of the city had spread. But there had been no Sunday-afternoon “swagger” groups on the bridge, no plump young women in plastic curlers, no men with shirts out of their trousers and open all the way down.
No refrigerated trailers were unloading at the market. There were no groups of vendors and porters preparing, in an atmosphere of the caravanserai, for the long night and the early-morning market. Instead, half a dozen police vans were drawn up in the dusty market yard, and policemen stood in groups close to their vehicles.
Roche said, “I know that something is being prepared for me. They searched me on Friday. They saw me at the house.”
Jane said, “I want to go home.”
She rolled down her window. Fresher air blew in.
Abruptly he turned into a cross street, one of those that cut through the center of the city.
He said, “I must go. They’ll believe that I knew.”
He came to the main square and he saw it as he had never seen it before, empty, without people or cars, the wooden stalls in the center roughly shuttered. Between the square modern buildings, he saw tiled mansard roofs, corrugated-iron roofs in faded stripes of red and white, stylish finials, decorated wrought-iron balconies: domestic features of the upper parts of older buildings that normally didn’t draw attention to themselves but were now thrown into relief by the emptiness below. No restaurant vans or coconut carts, no queues at the bus stops, no crowds waiting for route taxis at corners: a stripped, sunlit square, with a spread of litter in the open gutters and little dust eddies on the wide intersections. He saw police trucks in the shadowed streets leading out of the square. He saw groups of policemen. He saw rifles and tin helmets.
He stopped. A policeman with a helmet and a rifle broke from a group and came running out into the sunlight and across the intersection to the car, his boots pounding on the asphalt. He was shouting; his words were indistinct. Even with his rifle he looked vulnerable and a little absurd, with his short serge trousers, his exposed thighs, his truncheon, his puttees.
He shouted, “What the hell you doing here?”
And when the policeman came to the car Roche saw that he was young and nervous. He had shaved closely; every pore was distinct, and he was sweating on his scored top lip.
He said, “Where you think you going?”
He spoke with exasperation rather than authority. His gray shirt was sweated under the arms; an inch or so of white undershirt showed beyond the short sleeves.
Few of the other policemen looked at the car. Most were looking up the empty shadowed streets.
Roche said, “I’m sorry. We didn’t know about this. Is it bad?”
“Trouble, I don’t know. Big trouble. You live near here? Where you live?”
“The Ridge.”
“Man, you drive there fast. Take the Circular Road and drive. Don’t stop. Drive.”
He turned and began to run back across the empty square to the group he had left.
And Roche drove as he had been ordered. He drove out of the square and took the road that skirted the center of the city, and he drove fast. It was a wide road of low shops and palings, cafes and rum shops, old timber houses squeezed into small plots, occasionally a more spacious, and now stranded, old-fashioned house with fern baskets hanging in the veranda, intermittent concrete developments. The road, usually lively, was now almost empty, and the slogans and posters on walls and palings stood out. Roche saw, again and again, Birth Control Is a Plot Against the Negro Race; he saw Don’t Vote. He saw the posters for Doctor Andy Byam, “America’s Gift to God.” He saw After Israel Africa. He saw After Israel. He saw, and he realized he had been seeing it for weeks past, AIA, the letters written one below the other, reduced sometimes—a mystery simultaneously discovered and solved—to the hieroglyph of a two-headed arrow. And through the calm of the lower Ridge, where nurses still sat on brown lawns and children still played, he continued to drive fast. The shopping plaza was closed. Climbing higher, he passed the house labeled Taylor; he turned at Chez Wen; he passed The Mortons. And when at last, in their own yard, they got out of the car, to silence, it was as though they had both yielded to a private lunacy during that fast drive.
They separated without speaking. The house, with closed doors, was stuffy. Jane opened the folding doors at the back and went ou
t on the porch. It was quiet and cool.
The shadow of the house reached halfway down the sloping back garden. Sunlight still caught the children’s house, whose door was open. Sunlight fell on the brown vegetation of the hills. The city on the flat land below was only just beginning to grow hazy. It was quiet. The radios all around and below had ceased to play: the reggae party was at last over. Far away, the airport, fading into haze, showed two white planes.
Jane thought: I’ve left it too late.
ADELA WAS in, but Sunday was her day off; and it had been established that on Sundays she was not to be spoken to. Jane and Roche could speak to her only if she spoke to them first. On Sundays Adela did her own chores. She hung her mattress out of her window to catch the sun, beat her mattress; did her washing. She also did a lot of cooking: on Sundays she was at home to her friends and relations. She had her own front entrance, at the side of the garage; and she had a back entrance, with a flight of concrete steps, useful as seating.
A wall of concrete blocks, about ten feet long, screened off Adela’s little back yard from the rest of the back garden. The previous tenants had tried to cover this wall with a flowering vine and with the local ivy. In the drought the vine had shriveled; the ivy had lost its leaves and the brown stems had begun to come away from the wall. Where they were loose, the stems looked like dead millipedes, with hundreds of little hanging feet; where they were still fixed to the wall, the stems looked like encrustations of mud, the nest of some kind of wasp or ant. The concrete wall was a concrete wall; it couldn’t pass as a decorative architectural feature. And behind it was Adela and her private life.