William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

He was quite emotionless as the beam hit Innocence’s face, only a taut, stretched feeling in his body. Her eyes and mouth were wide open, as if frozen in mid-yell. On her right shoulder and down the right side of her face was a curious scorch or burn mark, an oozing weal purple against her chocolaty skin. The rest of her body appeared quite untouched and solid in its ungainly repose. Her clothes were sodden — a cheap nylon short-sleeved blouse, a native cloth wrapper-skirt — drenched by the downpour. Her right hand was held out along the still damp ground, pale palm uppermost, fingers slightly curled.

Poor Innocence, he thought, what a way to go.

He rose to his feet and walked back towards Isaac, who had been joined by the constable. Morgan returned the torch to him.

‘Look, Isaac,’ Morgan said. ‘We have to move her.’ He felt a little unsteady on his feet. ‘We can’t just leave her lying there for Christ’s sake. Where’s her house?’ Isaac indicated a doorway in the middle of the block. ‘Has she any family?’ Morgan asked.

‘There is one daughter. Maria,’ Isaac told him. Morgan remembered her too, a slim teenage girl who also worked for the Fanshawes. She was only fourteen or fifteen. He sighed.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Isaac, will you and Ezekiel’, he mentioned the Commission porter, ‘help me move her into her house until we can get an undertaker to come? Ezekiel?’ he called into the crowd and Ezekiel emerged, a large bow-legged man with a pot-belly. He joined them a little unwillingly.

‘Constable,’ Morgan instructed, ‘if you take the arms with me, and you — Isaac — with Ezekiel take the legs. OK? Come on then.’

Nobody moved. There followed a brief impassioned burst of conversation in native dialect. Then Isaac spoke:

‘We cannot totch her, sah. Please, I beg you once more. Ifin you totch her before, you will bring yourself trouble. Bringing everyone wahallah. You no go die well,’ he finished up solemnly.

Ezekiel nodded in glum agreement. ‘Plenty wahallah sah, for every people.’

The constable drew Morgan to one side. ‘Excuse, sah. This people are believing for Shango. They think that ifin they move this dead woman, they go die themselves one time.’ The constable smiled condescendingly. ‘They think Shango is angry with them. They have to make big juju here. Bring one fetish priest before.’

Wahallah, juju, fetish priest, lightning gods…Morgan stood in the dark compound, smelling the damp warm night, listening to its noises all around him, his eyes fixed on the body of the dead woman, wondering if it was all some frightful dream he was having. He massaged his temples with both hands. ‘Constable,’ he said conspiratorially, ‘will you help me move her — get her out of the way at least. The two of us should manage.’

‘Ah.’ The constable spread his hands. ‘I cannot. If I move the body before they make juju they will think I make Shango angry. They will not like it.’ He shrugged his shoulders in apology. ‘I must go. I will make my report.’ He saluted, turned and walked out of the compound.

Morgan felt waves of panic break in his mind. He thought hard. The crowd showed no signs of dispersing, they stood patiently in their group beneath the cotton tree, as though awaiting the arrival of some VIP, obsessed by this sign of Shango’s displeasure that the god had dropped in their back yard. Morgan called Isaac over. ‘Isaac,’ he said gently. ‘It is against the law to leave a body in the open like this. I have to call an undertaker. Now, will you let them remove the body?’

‘They will not,’ Isaac said equably.

‘Pardon?’

‘When they see that Shango has strock this woman. They will nevah lift her.’

Morgan smiled. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’ll just have to take our chances on that.’

♦

An hour later Morgan sat disconsolately on the concrete surround of the wash-place. Innocence still lay untouched half a dozen yards from his feet. He had phoned the police, who claimed that as no crime had been committed it was nothing to do with them. Then he had phoned a firm of undertakers in Nkongsamba, who said they would be out within the hour.

They had just left. Isaac and Ezekiel had spoken to them and the two undertakers, lugubriously dressed exactly like their European counterparts, had flatly refused to disturb the body until the fetish had been done. They even became quite angry for a while, accusing Morgan of trying to hoodwink them into offending Shango.

In the east the tree tops were silhouetted against a thin gash of pale lemon. It was ten to four. Innocence would be stiffening up now, he thought queasily, her eyes and mouth for ever open, her body permanently twisted round. He had tried to appeal to the servants’ Christianity — they were all Christians, this was no pocket of paganism — but their polite and unconcerned references to tribal protocol, the required summoning of the fetish priest, the various necessary rites, the obligatory slaughter of a goat, only confirmed to Morgan what he’d always expected: that they could shed their Christianity as easily as a pair of trousers. He stood up and went over to stare down at Innocence. Her death stirred nothing in him now. The fact that he was standing looking down at a dead person, someone who he had known, raised no emotions in him. She wasn’t a person anymore, she was an object — a thing — effectively reified by that lightning bolt: a thing, moreover, that was turning into a bloody great problem.

He felt very tired and rubbed his jaw, rasping the bristles on his face. It was still quite dark but through the nim trees he could see the corner of Fanshawe’s house. He pictured the family: father, mother and daughter sleeping soundly in their beds. While he stalked about this gloomy compound like some demon insisting on the body that was due to him. It made him sick, he hated every fucking one of them, their stinking bourgeois affectations, their ghastly fake chinoiserie, their prim enclosed little minds…He felt his face going hot. This was no good, he told himself, there was no point inveighing against the Fanshawes now, calm down, he advised, calm down. He walked over to the cotton tree. Only half a dozen maintained their vigil now, sitting on the high tangled roots that spread out from the base of the trunk like grotesque varicose veins.

‘Isaac?’ Morgan said hopefully.

A tall stooped figure rose up. ‘I am Joseph, sah. Joseph the cleaner. Isaac ‘e done go for sleep.’

Wise man, Morgan thought. ‘OK Joseph,’ he said firmly — it was like dealing with a gang of Old Testament prophets. ‘You savvy dis fetish thing?’

Joseph nodded. He had a shaven skull and was very black, almost Nubian in appearance. In the crepuscular light he looked two-dimensional, a hole cut out of the environment. ‘Yes, sah,’ he said. ‘I go savvy am.’

‘Fine,’ Morgan said, maintaining his businesslike tone. ‘Great. Go and get the juju man and we’ll do the fetish.’

‘Please, sah. I no fit do it,’Joseph said simply. ‘The family of this dead woman must do it.’

Oh bloody hell, swore Morgan despairingly, there’s always another hitch. ‘All right, you’d better get Maria,’ he said. Maybe there would be some way of ending this morbid farce after all. Soon Maria was brought, weeping and swollen-eyed and supported by two women. She was clutching a rosary in her hands. If it wasn’t so serious, Morgan thought to himself, it would be bloody funny.

‘Maria,’ he began gently, acutely conscious of his terminal fatigue, his frayed nerves and the massed forces of frustration hemming him in. ‘Maria, you know that before anyone will…move your mother, we have to get a fetish priest along?’ She weakly nodded her assent. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘it seems that only you can make this possible. You have to get the priest,’ At this point Maria let out a great wail of dismay and collapsed ‘into the arms of the two women. Morgan backed off in alarm. ‘Joseph,’ he called out. ‘Go and see what the matter is.’