Thorpe - Pieces of Light

Contents

Fiction

Ulverton

Still

Poetry

Mornings in the Baltic

Meeting Montaigne

for my parents

Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956 and brought up in India, Cameroon and England. He has published two books of poetry, Mornings in the Baltic (1988) and Meeting Montaigne (1990), and two novels, Ulverton (1992) and Still (1995).

THE INCIDENT WITH the gorilla remained with my mother for the rest of her life, as certain tiny wounds do on the face. I learnt of it very early, through Quiri, who was about sixteen at the time. We had wandered together up the path into the forest. He stopped at a certain point and took from his pocket a big tooth on a piece of twine. I was five.

Na whatee dat ting dere? I asked.

Quiri pointed into the underbrush. He told me that the hairy man was buried there, and it was a place of great power, and that he would batter your head to bits if you forgot his tooth. He picked up two sticks and held them flat to his temples, grimacing. I laughed and laughed. That is one of my earliest memories: Quiri pretending to have his head bashed in by the gorilla spirit.

I asked my mother about it, a few days later. Wed been flicking through My First World of Marvels. Gorillas filled one page. They were rather savage looking, with big white teeth and red gums. My mother told me that they were not so tall and savage looking, but that they were very heavy. I wondered how she knew they were very heavy.

Have you seen one in the forest, Mother?

She paused, then nodded.

And did it bash your head to bits?

She smiled.

Oh yes, and it took lots of glue to put it back together again.

I then told her what Quiri had said. Her face had a cloud on it. This cloud came upon her whenever she was about to be ill with her malaria, when my father announced that he must go up-country next week, or when he received a letter from Lagos or Buea that had something to do with a post. It used to come upon her when one of the people she was treating died. It used to come upon her when I would tell her how, when I was grown up, I would build my own house next to the guest bungalow, with a big cage for the beautiful-bird-smaller-than-its-tail that visited us from time to time, pecking at the grain for the hens. I never understood, then, why this displeased her. Worse, it would even come upon her when I mentioned how, at the age of seven, I would make my own canoe and paddle up the reach to my secret hut.

This time the cloud stayed on her face for the rest of the day. I hoped she wasnt going to be ill again.

Mother, are you all right?

She asked me to leave her be.

Is Mother all right, Father?

He asked me why I had asked. He was in the office, as he always was just before my supper. I knew he wanted to build a big road, but there were too many bridges between one end and the other, and most of them were broken, or not even built, or made of lianas and therefore too narrow for our Bean Tourer to cross.

Because theres a cloud on her face.

He told me not to talk like an African.

I wasnt talking like an African.

Yes, you were. I want you to talk good English, or people will laugh at you.

Who will laugh at me?

People, back home.

But this is home.

Hugh, you have to realise something. Youll be going home soon, to your own country, where Uncle Edward and Aunt Joy are

The land full of letters and telegrams.

He hesitated.

Is Quiri teaching you still?

I was having lessons in Quiris language.

No, I lied.

My father ran his fingers along his moustache and grunted, returning to his papers. Im going to talk to your mother, Hugh, he said as I was going out. I stopped, studying the big map pinned to the door, with its rolling hills made by the damp. The road my father was about to build, once the bridges had been sorted out, went up and down these hills. Im going to feel sick on this road, I thought.

Oh Hugh, said my father, rather sadly.

What?

Nothing. Run along now, theres a good fellow.

My father was a very good father: my happiest times were watching him grunt among bits of the Bean, the bits he rubbed and rubbed with oil to stop them rusting. Although he spent a lot of his valuable time taking the car to pieces and putting the pieces back together again in just the same way, it was the only sensible thing to do, he said: we couldnt have a horse or a pony or even a donkey because this was tsetse country. Each time one of these was brought on the boat, with a lot of trouble and effort, it was bitten and had fever and died, then a huge hole had to be dug.

The first part of his road was the track that went into the forest just behind us. It was decent for ten miles, all the way to the village of Odoomi, because my father had laid logs upon the swampy bits. The Bean made the run at least five times before the heat and damp changed the fuel in some way and the engine stopped. I was sure it was because we had not brought the gorilla tooth, for every other time Quiri had accompanied us.

The story of the gorilla and Mr Hargreaves happened long long ago, before I was born. Other things happened before I was born. There was a big war and my father was in it; he watched ships sink to their masts in Duala harbour. (When we visited Duala one time, we saw these masts with seagulls sitting on them. The masts must be very old, I thought.) He was terribly badly ill with yellow jack and was mended by my mother in England. They came out to Africa together on the big steamer and stayed in Buea, where its always wet and chilly. Then they came here, to Bamakum, on the Reverend Tarbucks little steamer, called SS Grace. This was a clever boat, my father said, because it had a shallow draw and a flat bottom to take the creeks, and was made of steel plate. There were marks on this plate where a hippo had bitten it which also happened long long ago, before I was born. Like the Bean, the boat had been taken to pieces and put back together again. The Bean and the boat were like my jigsaw puzzles.

I wasnt allowed to walk into the forest on my own. But the next time I went with Quiri I watched for when he took out his tooth fetish. It was next to a white tree with a wiggly branch and I put that into my head. I thought: when I am seven, I will walk on my own to the village and back with a canvas pack and water-bottle. This was my secret plan. I was not afraid of the forest. Not, at least, of its animals. At night I lay awake and learnt to tell the difference between the cries and calls, when one stopped and when one started. I wasnt sure who each of them belonged to, but I gave them owners anyway: leopard and monkey and mongoose and parrot, gorilla and elephant and bat.

I knew that this point in the forest was powerful. One time, Quiri showed me gorilla tracks, made in the soft mud after a long week of hard rain had cleared to mist, the mist rising in huge clumps and getting snared in the treetops or rolling over the swollen, noisy river. The tracks, he explained, were the spirit of the dead one walking about, visiting his friends and sorrowing.

Why sorrowing? I asked.

Quiri put on a complicated expression, as if his thoughts were moving just under the skin. Then he took my hand and led me away, in the direction of the village, away from our home: my father appeared with Mawangu, further down the track. He was on foot, in his bush-boots, finding out about the rains attack on his track. It had dug new channels, thrown the logs about higgledy-piggledy, cast up heaps of mud, washed out the stones he had tipped into the swampier parts and replaced them with khaki-coloured pools, already bubbling with frogs. In several places there were whole trees fallen across, the ground too softened for their roots to hold. He looked rather miserable, talking to Mawangu now the Odoomi Road Chief. Mawangu kept his teeth filed to sharp points, so that when he smiled he looked like the mask in the main room. He was smiling now.