Whitethorn (90 page)

In the confusion that followed I forced my way through the guests and up onto the bandstand where I took Mike by the arm. ‘Ferchrissake, Mike! Come, let's get out of here,' I cried. ‘These people are about to lynch you, man!'

With the guests crowding around the prostrated forms of Gladys the Man-eater and fat Jack Devine, we managed to reached the door safely. ‘Quick, let's go!' I urged.

‘No, wait!' Mike called. Turning to face the crowd, he yelled, ‘Fuck you all!' Then he clenched his fist and raised his arm above his head and shouted, ‘
Uhuru
!'

Driving Mike back to Makindi, I started to laugh. ‘Jesus! For a moment there I thought I was presiding over the demise of the last of the Fingers!'

Mike too began to laugh, the first time we'd laughed together in three weeks and four days. ‘I guess my membership of the Thika Club is somewhat in jeopardy,' he grinned, sounding surprisingly sober. Then suddenly serious, he added, ‘I grew up with those people, that sententious old fart Jake Devine is my godfather, ferchrissake. As for Gladys the Man-eater, she and Bobby were like sisters. Sam and I grew up thinking of her as some sort of surrogate aunt we were constantly forced to tolerate.' He gave a short laugh. ‘She'd take off her tennis shoes in the lounge room and her feet always ponged to high heaven.'

‘How did she get her carnivorous nickname?' I asked.

Mike laughed again. ‘Blow jobs! She's famous in the district for them. Bobby gave it to her when some ten years ago she came across Gladys on her knees behind the tennis court pavilion pleasuring a standing Jock.'

‘And she
forgave
her?' I asked, surprised.

Mike grinned. ‘Of course! They were at school together in England. Gym frock always beats cock! But as I recall she gave Jock hell for months afterwards. Conjugal rights withdrawn until further notice, separate beds, that sort of malarky. She finally relented when Sam suggested to Jock that the next time they went to Nairobi, he book the Royal Suite at the Stanley, take Bobby to dinner and present her with a string of South Sea pearls. Sam, as usual, solved the problem.'

At the mention of Sam's name I started to choke up and drove on in silence for a while, trying to hold back my tears. Then, having regained my composure, I asked, ‘Mike, have you thought about what you're going to do?'

Mike shook his head slowly. ‘After that fiery little speech this afternoon I can safely carve the name Captain Michael Finger, in anticipation, on my tombstone. The army won't be giving me any further promotion and I'll be damned lucky not to be drummed out of the Kenya Regiment. Game, set and match to Chris Peterson.'

‘I thought you were pissed; now I can see you're not. You gave that disastrous speech deliberately, didn't you, Mike?' I didn't wait for him to reply. ‘I've bloody told you before, this is not a fight you can possibly win! It's obvious you were not brought up in an orphanage where you learn to bide your time, pick your target, strike fast, cover your arse and have a plausible alibi. You don't solve anything by making an appointment to see the bloody governor so you can give him a dressing-down. Or by accusing the white hierarchy in the district of being a bunch of lying, cheating, dishonest, exploiting, thieving, racist bastards. That, if I remember correctly, was only your opening sentence! Finishing off with “
Uhuru
!”, the cry for freedom, now that was a
really
classy touch – that is, if you plan to be totally ostracised by the white community and, as you said yourself, drummed out of your regiment.'

Mike turned to look at me. ‘Tom, I'm the last Finger. I don't have to shut up any longer simply because my views embarrass and compromise my mother and father or make things difficult for Sam, who, as you know, shared my views. What I said this afternoon is the truth and sooner or later the whites in Kenya
must
face the truth. These people are either in denial or stupid or both! My family lost their lives because of the cheating and lying, the duplicity and the racial arrogance of white Kenya. Gladys the Man-eater is correct, as a child I did play with the “little nigger boys”. I regarded myself as one of them. I still do. I am not a
white
Kenyan, I am simply a
Kenyan
! I can't stand by and see my country torn limb from limb because white is always right. It isn't!' He brought his clenched fist down hard against his knee. ‘It bloody
isn't
!' He was silent for a moment. ‘Oh God,' he said softly, and then began to cry.

I stopped the car by the side of the road, shifted the gears into neutral and pulled on the handbrake. Then I grabbed Mike and pulled him towards me so that his head rested on my chest, my left arm holding him about the shoulders, my right hand cupping his head. And then I too began to weep. Mike wept for his family and his beloved country, and I because Africa had killed the woman I loved more than my own life and it had left me so cruelly to live.

After a while Mike moved away, and I pulled out the choke a fraction, pressed the starter button and we drove off. We were both silent for some time, recovering from our mutual blubbing session, when Mike said, ‘I'll go into politics.'

‘Sure, I can see all of white Kenya bumping and pushing each other aside to be the first to vote for you! Suggested slogan: “Let's give Kenya the Finger!” '

‘Trade union official, black workers, that's where I'll start,' he said. ‘In the meantime I'll grow coffee and marry a Kikuyu or an Indian woman.'

The sun was setting as we drove into the front gates of Makindi, the brilliant crimson flame tree blossoms blending into the scarlet and gold of the day's end. ‘Well, I'm glad that's settled,' I replied dryly, then added somewhat sardonically, ‘
Of course
, you'll be having the wedding reception at the Thika Club with all the usual crowd present.'

Mike laughed. ‘Mark my words, Tom Fitzsaxby, Kenya
will
change.'

‘Yeah, but will Africa?' I asked.

I received a double first at Oxford, graduating in jurisprudence and African studies, and was encouraged to go further, with the university offering me a fellowship to Rhodes House. I thought about it, though not very seriously, as the wriggling word ‘Mattress' simply refused to be scrubbed out of my psyche. I was going home to Africa where I had some unfinished business to attend to.
Curiously, the sea trip home from Southampton on the Union-Castle Line's
Bloemfontein Castle
proved to be the proverbial sea change I needed. The Suez Canal had reopened after the Suez crisis, but this one passenger vessel did the trip to Africa anticlockwise, my idea being to hitchhike from Cape Town back to Johannesburg and see my own country.

I fulfilled yet another ambition on my list of things to do one day. I'd always promised myself that I'd take dancing lessons at Arthur Murray Studios, and I was now able to do the next best thing. The ship had a dancing instructor, a vivacious older woman, who seemed to take a liking to me. She taught me the waltz and the foxtrot as well as the rumba and the tango, while several of the young women on board taught me how to jive and jitterbug, and were kind enough to invite me to limber up in their bunks. You'd have thought, wouldn't you, that I'd have learned to dance with Pirrou? But, as a professional dancer, she would never dance for recreation and so I'd missed out. With Sam my ineptness on the dance floor had never emerged; we'd both cherished the time we shared together and spent none of it at the Thika Club Saturday-night dance.

With the exercise on the dance floor and the good food on board, by the time I arrived in Cape Town I was fit, had gained weight and was returned somewhat to the old optimistic Tom Fitzsaxby. Imagine my surprise to find
Oom
Jannie, of the Steinway Baby Grand fame, and Hester, his wife, waiting to meet me at the docks.

I had written to him from England when the idea of hitchhiking from the Cape had occurred to me, mentioning the sailing date and day of arrival in Cape Town. I wrote to ask whether it would be convenient to call in on him. I'd received an airmail postcard with a picture of the BOAC Comet and one sentence in Afrikaans which when translated read: Come, please, Tom, you are always most welcome. Jan Odendaal.

Oom
Jannie greeted me with a great bear hug. ‘
Ag
, Tom, I said to Hester, no, man, this time he's not going to get away, we going to fetch him, hey!' Then holding me at arm's length, he declared, ‘Now we not talking one night, you hear? We talking as long as you like and definitely more than one week!'

Before I could thank him, Hester chipped in. ‘
Ja
, Jannie is always talking about you, ever since he came back from the Transvaal with the pianos in the Rio.'

Oom
Jannie released me and I turned towards her. ‘
Goeie
môre
, Mevrou Odendaal,' I said, extending my hand.

She took my hand in both of hers. ‘You must call me
Tante
Hester. It's really nice to meet you at long last, Tom.'

Oom
Jannie's wife was a big, handsome woman with steel-grey hair pulled back from her face, culminating in a bun at the back of her head. ‘To have a piano in the house like that,' she paused and smiled at her husband, ‘is to know somebody loves you a lot.'

‘
Ag
, no, it was Tom's idea all the time,'
Oom
Jannie protested in an embarrassed voice.

I laughed, shaking my head in denial. ‘
Tante
Hester, let me give you
Oom
Jannie's exact words.' I pretended to think, although I had never forgotten them as they were quite the nicest expression of a man loving his wife I had ever been privileged to hear. ‘ “You know, Tom, forty-three years is a lot of years and a lot of loving. Hester only asked me for one thing in all that time. When we got the first big wool cheque, only last year, the one when we became all-of-a-sudden rich, she said to me, ‘Jannie, do you think now we can have an inside lavatory? I'm getting too old to go outside in the dark.' You can't pay enough for that kind of loving, Tom.” Then he said he was going to buy you the Steinway,' I concluded.

Tante
Hester stood there smiling, her eyes filled with sudden tears. ‘Thank you for telling me, Tom,' she said quietly.

Oom
Jannie was clearly embarrassed and, blustering somewhat, said quickly, ‘You see, I told you,
ouvrou,
this boy is a whole dictionary, he never forgets words! When he told me why the shape of the pianos was so funny you should have heard him tell how the special sound it makes is made in Germany and it's called acoustics.'

‘Look who never forgets now!' I laughed.

I had only one suitcase, mostly filled with books, and I followed my unexpected hosts to the parking lot.
Oom
Jannie, it seemed, had finally run the old Rio into the scrap heap and now drove a large Mack truck with multiple gears. They were both big people and so the front seat, the only seat, was pretty snug with the three of us.

‘You know the floor polisher?'
Oom
Jannie said, as we got on our way.

‘
Ja
, your
bonsella
from the pianos.'

‘Let me tell you, Tom, Hester loves that machine, she doesn't let the
kaffir
women do the floor polishing, even old Martha, she won't let her, will you,
ouvrou
? Whoever heard of a
white
person polishing a floor, hey?'

‘
Ag
, with a contraption like that a person doesn't have to even bend down, but you can't let modern machinery get into a servant's hands, they break everything right in front of your eyes,'
Tante
Hester declared.

‘We lucky now we got electricity, it happened only last year,'
Oom
Jannie said.

‘But you've had the floor polisher five years, even longer,' I said, not quite understanding. ‘You mean you didn't have electricity until last year?'

‘
Ag
, Tom, that time in that shop in Johannesburg, with the pianos, it was such a nice
pasella
I didn't have the heart to tell you.'

‘And you just kept it, until now?'

‘
Ja
, man, every week Hester polished the polisher,' he laughed.

Hester started to explain. ‘Tom, in life a person mustn't get everything all at once, because then you can't appreciate it. First the lavatory inside the house. I can tell you, that is a very big blessing in a person's life. A person gets old and their inside doesn't always work at the right time. Then you must go outside to the
kleinhuisie
in the middle of the night, or maybe use a chamber-pot if it's only a number one. In the Karoo in winter it's icy-cold and dark and you nearly die to go outside if it's number two. So that's the first big blessing, now you got a lavatory right next to the kitchen and you just pull a chain and everything's gone, finish and
klaar
. It's a miracle from God, you hear? Then the piano, God gives you that for happiness and to praise His precious name and when the family comes to have a nice singsong, you can play all the old
boere musiek
. Now electricity all of a sudden comes right past the house, put in by the government for the abattoirs at Bakoondfontein. So now I have the floor polisher, and it's a big show-off, and in no time flat we got shining floors so you can see your face. Martha, who has been with us thirty years, she's getting old like me and now she doesn't have to do the polishing on her poor swollen knees.'