Death Needs Time

“Death needs time for what it kills to grow in.” Slowly, always and forever, that endless march, that spinning wheel, that circular argument with life.

Nigeria was a maelstrom. It was like being picked up by a hurricane and dumped down in a place that bore no relation to reality. At the airport, black men with black guns, found me out and bribed father to release me. Their west African tones were clipped and frightening. I did not understand that they hated me because I was white.

We were driven 'home', by Ezekiel, father's chauffeur. The bungalow, where my parents lived, was part of an ex patriot estate. There was one road in and one road out. Armed guards arrived at night, tall and regal with bows and arrows. Father called them “The black watch”. One sat at the front of the house, the other at the rear, underneath my bedroom window. When they moved around their shadows were thrown against the whitewashed wall. It scared me.

Grace, the maid, stood in the kitchen, hands on her ample hips. Mother spoke to her and she laughed. She was always laughing. I could never work out at what. Her weight ensured that her feet were always planted firmly on the floor. They turned out a little. She waddled when she walked.

The gardener was called Chico. His brother, David, was the cook for next door. Chico was a little simple, but he climbed trees like a monkey. There were several in our back garden. A particular favourite was the paw paw tree. The fruits it yielded reminded me of soapy melons, with pale orange flesh. I ate them with salt. Astringency was required.

Plantain and sugar cane also grew in gay abandon, spilling about all over the garden. Chico cut me rods of the cane, with his big machete. He hacked down hard, pulling and twisting. I whittled the bark off and cut it into small chunks. “You chew, you chew,” he said. I put a chunk in my mouth. He nodded and smiled. Sweet syrup washed over my gums and tickled my tongue. I kept chewing, until the fibre of the cane was sucked dry. I spat it out.

Our house was surrounded by a concrete lined trench, about two foot deep, dug to drain the water away. I had never seen rain like it. It fell in droplets the size of oranges, and they were warm. As soon as it had started it stopped. I liked standing in it. Despite the fact it carried dirt and detritus it washed me clean, better than a bath or a shower.

The bathroom was my nemesis. I liked the word nemesis. Father heard me scream the first time I went to bathe. He shouted through the door “It's only a gecko, it won't hurt you”. The small, green-brown lizard had frozen on the side of the bath, its long toes stretching to enable it to cling to the plastic. I looked at it. It looked back at me, then started to bob its head up and down up and down. I squealed again. “Just get in the bath, it won't get in with you.” I hated the practicality of father sometimes. Easing myself in I made sure I kept the gecko in my sights. Little head, up and down, up and down. It ran away quite quickly, its long tail following it.

Reptile life, however, was preferable to insect life. One night, putting my dressing gown on, I felt prickles between my shoulder blades. I reached back, intending to scratch. I tensed when the scuttling started and howled when the spiky feet made it round to my belly. Father skidded into the room, across the white, polished, stone floor as I jumped up and down. “What is it? What is it?” he said breathlessly.
“I don't know, it's on me. Get it off me. Get it off me.”
“Stand still forgodake.” I was dancing around in horror. He ripped my dressing gown and night dress off. The biggest cockroach I had ever seen fell on the floor. It was brown. Its shell was very shiny, almost like mahogany. Father unheeled his flip flop and brought the rubber down hard. He missed. The cockroach ran up the wall. He did not miss the second time around. The insects shelled body exploded. Blood popped out of it and sequinned the stipple effect. A large smear was spread across the wall. “Christine. CHRISTINE!!! Come and clean this off.”

I put my clothes back on very gingerly. Father told me that I should check everything before dressing. I felt sick in case there were cockroaches in my underwear drawer. Later that night I found I could not sleep. I squatted outside the sitting room door for hours, hoping that somehow mother and father would see me and invite me in. I must have fallen asleep, because the next morning I awoke in a camp bed at the bottom of their bed. I was very grateful that they had not put me back into my own room. I did not have any flip flops.

Lying flat on my back I listened to the wildlife outside. From my vantage point I could see only the ceiling and the glittering white doors of father's wardrobe. He had a poem pinned to the front. Over the period of a few weeks it singed itself into my retinas and burned itself onto my memory:-

“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!”

This was who father wanted to be. I knew that. He spent his life working with wornout tools. He never breathed his loss. His will was his own. He understood what it was to have his dreams turned to shit. He had started again. It was the last line though, “You'll be a man my son!” that must have really cut.

Arthur White, father's father, my grandfather, was, by all accounts, a terrible man. A violent alcoholic, he had married his first wife, father's mother, for her money. He beat her. He abused her in the most awful ways possible. Father told me that he often “Heard her screaming”.

He tried to garnish fond memories of his mother, but she died when he was seven. There was this one time, when he was out playing with his friends, and he was overtaken by a sudden bout of diarrhoea. He ran home, shame faced, shit escaping from the legs of his shorts and dripping down his legs. His mother was in the kitchen, baking, he said “She was forever baking”.
“Leonard, what's the matter love?”
He rushed past her, to nowhere. She caught up with him. I expect, at this point, she was able to identify the issue. Rather than pushing him away, like a mangy dog, she took him in her arms and cuddled him.
“It's only an accident. Accidents happen to everyone.”

Father smiled a bitterly tight smile.

“After she died, he put the other two into the orphanage, but he kept me. Even sent me to school, 'til I was nine.” He brushed an imaginary speck of dust off his trouser leg. “Then I went into the mills. By 14 I was on fishing trawlers and at 17 I signed up for the war.” He put his head in his hands. “I did a dreadful thing, but it wasn't my fault, see.” Mother looked up from her knitting. “I had a step-mother. He only married her so he could get his hands on her shop. Drank it away he did, and he was always messing around with other women.” His voice went hoarse. “She got Doug and Elsie out of the orphanage, looked after them like they were her own.” He flexed his hand, forming his fingers in and out of a fist. “But he wanted shot of her, so he got her declared an unfit mother. I had to go to court and give evidence. I spoke up against her. I knew I was lying. I thought I was doing it for the best. I didn't know they'd put Doug and Elsie back into Dr Bernadoes. They never forgave me.” He got up and left the room.

I used to stand on the verandah, surrounded by the sort of vicious vegetation that can only grow in a tropical environment. Outside the city gates, in the bush, where civilisation was defeated by jungle, the trees stretched up to the sky, canopies fighting for space. On the tallest, that spread arrogantly, vultures would sit. I could see them in the distance, massively hunched, waiting. I knew they were scavengers. That they tore apart the bodies of the dead, no matter how rank, or how rotten. In places like Nigeria, everywhere in fact, there are always those who feed on the carcasses. They are sitting there, revelling in their patient virtue.

Read more!