Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

‘If yooze weren’t a fecking sky-pilot I’d knock you down for that. We’ll talk haws we want, won’we, lads?’

The smell of the beer, sweet on his tongue, his friends’ drunken agreement. The Bishop felt his anger rise and the adrenalin rush in his body, making his hands sweat and his balls tingle. He stood up, to the inevitable response.

‘Jeezez Christ, e’s a bloody dwarf!’

‘Are yooze still sitting there, Father?’

‘Feck me if it isn’t a pigmy we’ve got here!’

The man stood up opposite him, again to the laughter of his mates. He looked down on the Bishop, enjoying the height difference. The Bishop, however, held his stare while he removed his collar and drill apron, throwing them on the seat behind him. His heart beat fast, pumping his anger around his body, but his mind was calm. Still.

‘There lies Bishop William Gaul of Mashonaland. Here stands’—more laughter—‘Billy Gaul.’

The veld rubbing by outside, the sun, brash through the open window.

‘Now you can knock me down.’

An awkward pause, in which the man put down his beer bottle on the bench behind him, then turned slowly to the others, who were all looking at him, quiet with expectation. He met their gaze, then a smile opened across his tobacco-stained teeth. He laughed, and they responded. That laughter pulled at the Bishop’s nerves, tugged them tight, and it was as the man was turning back to him, still smiling, as he was raising his hands, clenched, that he hit him. Clean on the chin. And he went down. With the weight of a shot horse, he went down, and with him went the Bishop’s heart, sinking at the sight of this man folding to his knees.

♦

He looked up from his knuckles to the ship again. Apparently violence had risen its head there this morning too. From what he could gather from the rumours and reports doing the rounds of the port, the German crew had told a group of Somalis brought from Aden they would be used as slaves, not workers on the railways. It was the young Portuguese policeman who came to collect them this morning who bore the consequences of this information. Badly beaten by all accounts. Which of course had brought his colleagues with their swords and pistols. He’d heard the shots. He sighed. Thick-skinned as he was, the indifference with which life was treated here still got to him.

In the past ten years the Universities Mission to Central Africa had already lost fifty-seven men from the two hundred missionaries sent to them. Blackwater fever, diarrhoea, animals, uprisings. The country could find a hundred ways to kill a man, and the Bishop was all too aware that they were taking its soul with their graves. The new missionaries knew it too and were now even told to write their will before making the journey. And choose their epitaph. From what he could gather though, Cripps was a harder man than most. A boxing and cross-country blue. Quite a runner apparently. Still, you can never tell, he’d seen good men go under before. And apparently Cripps was also a poet.

An increase in activity on board and around the ship’s gangway caught his drifting attention. The first passengers were disembarking. A bustling stream of hats, leather trunks, dresses and parasols. Women and children first. The Bishop scanned the people behind the women, the men, for Cripps, wondering as he did what kind of epitaph a poet chooses for his grave. He thought he knew who he was looking for as he was sure he’d seen him earlier, shortly after he’d heard the shots on board. A tall figure silhouetted against the morning glare, resting his hands on the railings of the deck. He’d waved, and the figure had waved back. Disorientedly slowly. His arm delicate against the sky.

Half an hour passed before the Bishop finally caught a glimpse of Cripps coming down the steep gangway. Yes, it was the same man. Head and shoulders above his fellow passengers. He was walking beside a younger, pale-faced man and looking about him, his long, thin frame making him resemble a curious heron. As he neared, the Bishop took stock. An awkwardness about him. Sun-blushed skin, the tops of his ears blistered and burnt by the voyage. His safari suit far too small. Thin wrists. Not those of a boxer really. Striking eyes, not a stare as such, but certainly a deeper gaze than most. The Bishop took this all in, his own practised eyes skimming over Cripps once more before passing judgement. He gave him five years at the most. Five years before the fever, the sickness, the home-1 ust, the whole truck and trial of this country buckled him. He was close now, and the Bishop walked towards him, revealing himself from the crowd, his sore right hand outstretched.

‘Father Cripps, I presume? Welcome to Mozambique. Bishop Gaul. The smallest Bishop with the largest diocese in Christendom.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The smallest Bishop with…’

Cripps’ eyes were on him; in his, studying him from below a frown. The Bishop petered out. ‘…the largest…oh, never mind.’ Then, indicating the one small suitcase he carried, ‘Is this all your luggage?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, let’s get you out of here. This way.’

Indicating to an African boy to take Cripps’ suitcase from him, the Bishop turned and began to make his way through the moving crowd to where his car and driver were waiting, thinking as he went that he’d never trusted poets anyway, but also, that he may have been wrong about Cripps lasting only five years. His handshake had been that of a physical man, and his body, though slim, seemed taut with muscle. And those eyes too, they promised more.

♦

That evening Arthur took a walk along the beach that laced the shore to the north of the harbour. The sand was pale in the dusky light, and the remaining threads of a sunset lay across the horizon. He was relieved to be walking on the beach, out of the quarters where he and the Bishop were billeted for the night at the Universities Mission to Central Africa. They were comfortable, very comfortable compared to his weeks at sea, but he found the place somewhat oppressive. The talk after dinner had been mainly about the war in the south, or of other matters of which he knew little. Unlike the other men there he had not spent his recent years on the African continent and he found the discussion alien and awkward. The Bishop, too, he was finding difficult. He was hard to connect with and Arthur felt he had failed to win his trust, though he couldn’t think why. ‘A peppery fellow, who I hope to be great friends within the future ’ is how he had described him to his mother when he’d retired to his room after dinner to write to her. And he did hope they would grow to be friends. There was the potential, he was sure, somewhere beneath their awkwardness, for a genuine connection.

Though he knew his mother would want to know every detail of his first impressions, he’d played down the incident on board the ship that morning. He could not, however, disregard it completely in the letter, and had slipped in a few lines about it in the closing paragraph, hoping it wouldn’t register too strongly there. He told her what he knew of the events leading up to what he had witnessed, then brushed over the actual confrontation as a ‘ bit of a set-to on board ’. The platitudes of the phrase jarred in him as he remembered the man with blood in his eyes, and they were, he feared, betrayed anyway by the sentence he wrote immediately afterwards. ‘ I fear , ’ he told his mother ‘ that it may be an all toocharacteristic introduction to this dark continent ’ Perhaps he would try and write the letter again. She knew him well and he knew her. That line would ring back through the letter like a plague bell at dawn, transfiguring every other phrase it met until she would see nothing but danger and death in his writing. And maybe she would be right. The shooting did after all hang heavy on his mind, especially since the Bishop had told him the pathetic chain of events leading up to what he saw.