Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

‘You are hurt, Voter?

No, he was not hurt. His body was fine. He gently pulled his arms away from theirs and waved a hand in front of his face, making it clear they should leave him. Behind them other members of the crew were clearing the bodies. He watched, still stunned, as the man with the blood in his eyes was hauled over a broad shoulder, and carried off the ship, like one of the thousands of sacks being carried back and forth on the dock below him. He felt the bitter taste of bile rise in his throat, the swelling of nausea in his stomach and, thinking he was going to vomit, he turned again to the ship’s railings, resting his hands on them, his head bowed, breathing deeply. The urge to be sick passed and he raised his head once more to look down on the dock, which was teeming again with work. In fact, it looked like it had never stopped. It was all energy. Energy and sweat. The essential ingredients for empire building, for the building of new countries, new lives. New dreams. But energy and sweat would never be enough on their own. As he had just witnessed, there was always blood too.

One of the Europeans standing on the harbour side, a stocky man in khaki, had spotted him looking out over the dock. Arthur saw him now, squinting up at him, one hand shielding his eyes beneath his solar hat, the other raised above his face, waving. He seemed to be smiling, but it was hard to tell. Arthur raised his own arm in reply, and waved back, not sure in himself if he was waving a greeting to this man or waving goodbye.

♦

Bishop William Gaul had been waiting in Beira Bay since the previous day, and on the dockside since dawn. He was, he knew, by nature an impatient man, but this delay, he felt, would have tried the patience of even the most saintly of constitutions. The Boer War grinding on in the south didn’t help, cutting off all supply routes from Cape Town, making Beira Bay the main point of entry for anything and anyone from Europe (and from where he was standing it seemed as if Europe was sending most of herself to Africa). The port was impossibly busy. The ship he had been told was carrying Cripps had stayed stubbornly anchored far out all yesterday evening, and was still there earlier this morning. Now, at last, it had been allowed in. But he was still waiting, and the sun was rising, and the heat of the day was finding itself, flat and harsh on his skin. So he stood there, at the back of the docks, stock still among the hundreds of moving bodies and voices, looking up at the high sides of the ship. Anyone standing close enough would have heard him muttering frequently under his breath, damning the Boers for their stubborn persistence in this war, and even occasionally the British too, for theirs.

Like the other Europeans on the quayside the Bishop wore khaki. Both his drill apron and his clerical coat were of this colour. He was small, only five feet tall in his boots, but stocky with it. His face was clean-shaven, and his skin a sun-burnt brown, taut across his cheekbones despite his age. He was fifty-five. The only discernible lines on his face were about his eyes, deep crow’s feet, developed by years of squinting through the sun’s glare. His cheeks were lean, and beneath his helmet, which was tipped back from his forehead, was the suggestion of closely cropped grey hair, receding above the temples. His eyes were blue, and made all the brighter in contrast to the bloodshot whites about them.

Bishop Gaul had been stationed in Rhodesia for seven years now as Bishop of Mashonaland, and on meeting people had taken to introducing himself as ‘the smallest bishop with the largest diocese in Christendom’. His listeners often found it hard to distinguish with which of these feats he was most proud, but he liked it as a line. He liked people to know where he stood, of the scale of things here. And he liked to be the first to mention his height, denying anyone else the chance of an early jibe or comment.

The Bishop had lasted a long time, much longer than most. A total of nineteen years of service, starting off in the south, far south, in the diamond town of Kimberley, then migrating north, into Mashonaland and the sudden violence of the native uprising of 1896. A widower, he’d arrived in Southern Rhodesia seven years ago a hollow man, a husk blown north on little more than the wind of his wife’s death and his own song lines of grief. He’d come to replace Bishop Knight Bruce, looking for more of the pioneering work he’d done in Kimberley, where he had risen to the challenge of that town to become both rector and archdeacon. It was a hard town, hard as the diamonds at its core, where the prospectors spent the days flogging their bodies in the mines and the nights dreaming of the future happiness their riches would bring them. They mined the earth for the elusive diamonds, while he mined their souls for an equally elusive faith. It seemed like an agreement, a contract, and over time he’d gained a respect in the town, and not just when he was needed, to marry, bury, christen. He also won the respect of the miners for who he was — a man doing his job just like them. And diamonds and God, he’d come to decide, had a lot in common. They both held promises for men, and were received either by those who worked hard, who went looking, or more often than not, by those who just stumbled upon them. No logic. Gems, hidden in the dirt. Soul prospecting.

He’d had some success with this prospecting in Kimberley. Not much, but enough to keep his belief lit, enough for him to feel he was touching the edge of something, here on this wild continent. But that was a long time ago, and more recently he’d begun to feel his energy dwindle, his eye wander more towards what was to come, rather than where he was now. Towards the end, and where that might be. Natural, maybe, for a man of his age, away from home for so long. Not that he was sure where home was any more. When he was married it had been anywhere with her, his wife. Now, however, it was often bush camps, ramshackle churches, one-horse towns. Would he return to England? Perhaps. Or would he end in Africa? He’d often thought about this, ending it in an African way, not an English. Waking one night in his camp to the sound of the old elephants, swinging their huge weight through the bush on their way to their mausoleums of bone. How he’d walk out of his tent and watch their ink-dark shapes pass before him, and how he’d follow in their giant footsteps, walking with them to the secret place where he would take one last look at the veld stars before lying down with them. To end. To disintegrate and subside into the country which had for so long been calling out for his body, which had for so long craved this union. Dust to dust, bone to stone, his blood seeping into the soil.

♦

As he stood there, waiting, the bishop absent-mindedly flexed his right hand, and rubbed it with his left where it still ached and blushed across the knuckles. A punch. An upper cut, yesterday, clean between the man’s arms, cracking on his chin. A hard chin, he thought now, as he opened and closed his hand and felt the soreness of the bone under the skin. He hadn’t wanted to hit the man, but as was so often the case in this country, it happened almost naturally, violence evolving like a strange flower out of the barest of provocations. Like yesterday. A hot, cramped train shunting along, stopping for long moments of time under the midday heat. Flies in the carriage, the boring veld outside. And inside, a furnace, where he sat, sharing his hard seat with a bunch of railway workers, Irish navvies, work-dirtied hands and week-old stubble darkening their faces. The close space was filled with their smell, stale and new sweat pungent on their clothes. They were eating and drinking, swigging beer from the large brown bottles favoured by the working men. He didn’t mind this, the drinking. That was something else that happened here, and he understood why it did. But their language, he minded. It was coarse and blasphemous. The Bishop liked language, he liked words, and to hear them denied was for him like watching someone take a sledgehammer to a beautiful gold watch. Sitting there, his eyes glancing off the dull yellow and browns of the view, it got to him, the insult on his ear. So he asked them to stop. Once politely, then, when they did not, a second time more forcefully, hoping his clerical dress might at least induce a sense of propriety in them. It did not, and the loudest of them let him know this. A fat man, his shirt open to his navel, revealing whorls of matted hair across his chest and overblown stomach. He leaned over to the Bishop and spoke close to his face.