Pieces of Light Read online

  From when I was five my parents would tell me what a big boy I would be when I was seven. So now and again I would talk to my parents about my plans.

  ‘When I’m seven, can I go with Tarbuck up-river, and see the cannibal village?’

  ‘They aren’t cannibals any more,’ my mother said.

  ‘But they eat Jesus!’

  ‘Hugh, that’s naughty to say that.’

  ‘But can I go when I’m seven? You keep saying what a big boy I’ll be, when I’m seven.’

  ‘You will be a big boy. A very big boy.’

  Then she would look almost tearful, and I wondered for some time if I was going to die on my seventh birthday – be sacrificed in some way. There were quite a few villages in the area where human sacrifices were carried out, as there was at least one group who ate people because – like crocodiles – they liked the flavour of human meat. There were also those who ate captured warriors as they ate leopards – to become braver in battle. Quiri told me that in his village the Devil woman ate snakes – especially the black mamba, if it could be found – to become better at telling who had done something wrong, for snakes were famous for their cunning. In our village, I thought, we eat a man-god who is made of bread, and drink his blood, which is made of claret. The grown-ups did, anyway: I would do the same (like the cannibals) when I was old enough, apparently.

  I asked Quiri if there were villages where they sacrificed children. He nodded, frowning. Then he slapped his thigh and laughed. I felt a bit sick. I asked him then if the children were told that they were going to be sacrificed. He stopped laughing, pouted his lips, and frowned again. He shook his head. Then, my heart beating horribly loud and fast, I asked him if it was decided early on, maybe years before, even when the child was a baby. He told me that there were signs, and one of the signs was a lot of questions about sacrifice.

  Then he was called to go in by Joseph, and I was left to ponder, kicking stones into puddles or at the hens in the yard: the sky was awfully grim, but it hadn’t rained all day. I was six years and six months. It was now September. I went into the house and asked my mother, who was unpacking some thick steel syringes in the office, if I could go with Father to Ikasa on the long canoe, next May, if the rains weren’t too heavy. She seemed rather shocked.

  ‘That’s rather a long way away, Hugh! You are a little planner, darling. Like your father.’

  My father was hammering away outside, doing something to the Bean’s engine, ‘taking advantage of the dry’, as he’d put it. There was something about my father that annoyed my mother, apart from his evening gin (which made him cross, not happy); perhaps it was this planning thing.

  ‘But can I, Mother?’

  ‘I think that should be all right, Hugh.’

  My father went to Ikasa once a month. He picked up telegrams there, and urgent supplies, and chatted with the Chief, and resolved disputes. My mother occasionally went with him, but she didn’t like to abandon her surgery – or, perhaps, me – to the ayah or the other servants.

  ‘But you musn’t get in the way. Just watch, and be good. Why wait until May? You’re big enough now, I think. I’ll ask him.’

  I nodded calmly, and she looked disappointed with this reaction.

  ‘And can I go with him to Crater Lake the November after that, when the rains have stopped?’

  She blinked hurriedly, as if I was blowing my breath directly into her face.

  ‘The November after that?’

  ‘Yes. When the road’s better.’

  ‘Why not this November, darling? I’m sure he’d be happy –’

  ‘I’m planning things, Mother, like Father does, with his thing on the wall and all the numbers. I have to know if I can go in a year’s time, when the rain has cleared up, and the track’s better.’

  She stayed looking at me for a bit, as if trying to read my thoughts. I put a cloud over them. Quiri could still read them behind a cloud, like he could tell what the moon was doing even in the covered months of the rainy season. Not being Quiri, she gave a little sigh and brushed her forehead with her forefinger, as she always did when she was secretly agitated.

  ‘It’s a road, darling. Your father likes to call it the Main Road.’

  She stared at a point just in front of me and then dived back into her box and talked about syringes, and serum, and how even the needles seemed to rust, and how the suppliers had got some lint ‘specification’ completely wrong.

  ‘But next November,’ I said.

  She stopped, her hand covering the big red cross on the lid of the box.

  ‘I’m sure that’ll be fine, Hugh,’ she said, in an oddly high voice, looking not at me but out of the window. She was fibbing, of course: I could see that.

  Then I said, ‘For my eighth birthday, I would like a fishing basket, to put in the little rapids like the Africans do.’

  The rapids were a cluster of rocks at the furthest point of our clearing, where the water jetted and frothed for a few yards. The servants had caught fish there in their cone-shaped baskets, which they left tied at night. She smiled uncertainly and brushed her forehead again. She seemed about to say something: her mouth opened, then she smiled again, blinking quickly at the floor by my feet.

  ‘So I can fish when I’m eight,’ I went on, ‘when I’m big enough, by myself.’

  ‘Oh, Hugh,’ she said, ‘I don’t know about that.’

  There was a horrible silence. I couldn’t bear it any longer. I turned on my heel and went straight to my room. I thought, lying on my bed, trying to cool my face with a book: something terrible is going to happen to me just before the big rains start. My seventh birthday, on April the fifteenth, will come just before the thin drops start to fatten. I am going to be sacrificed on my seventh birthday, like the pale-skinned pure boy a nearby village used to leave out pegged to the ground for the leopard spirit, once a year.

  I was loved by my parents and the servants, but Quiri had once said: I know a place where the most loved person is given to the gods, for nothing less will do.

  But we are Christians, I thought. Then, with a terrible lurch in my stomach, I’d remembered the lines that were said each Sunday, in the main room of this very house: ‘And he gave His only-begotten son, most beloved of the Father . . .’

  My mother was at the door. She came and took my hand. My heart was pounding. I hugged her.

  ‘Has someone told you, Hugh?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ I wept.

  ‘I have to admit it. You can’t stay here, not for ever. We’re going to England, next year. Our long leave. Together, darling. You’ll be seven. We’ll be going to Uncle Edward’s, and his very nice house, with a big soft green lawn, and woods, and –’

  ‘What kind of woods?’

  ‘Oh, English woods. Bluebells, and foxes, and primroses, and lovely trees, dappled light, nightingales, all that sort of thing. You’ll be able to breathe there. No malaria, no tropical fevers, no frightful ants or snakes or crocodiles or jigger flies or tsetse flies or ju-ju or goodness knows what else. It’s civilisation, Hugh. Your country. You can roll about on the lawn, without worrying about it. There’ll be lots to do, and lots to read and learn. School. Children. You’ll enjoy it so much.’

  ‘Then you aren’t – I won’t be sacrificed?’

  She seemed to jump in my arms; then rested very still, but with a hardness in her body that I could feel against my chest. Her breath was in my hair, moving it slightly: otherwise I might have thought she had suddenly died. Each breath hit my scalp in a warm gasp. I had made my mother cry. This made me suspect that the English trip was a story. My mother was being forced, as the mothers of the loved ones in the villages were, and as the Virgin Mary was, to give up her son to the gods. I felt so powerless that I never brought the subject up again, and made it disappear into the deepest shadows of my own mind, where I could not think about it except when it crept out in the middle of the night, as the most powerful of the malign spirits usually did.

  About t
hree months before my seventh birthday, when the rains had slackened, I accompanied my parents and Quiri on a short bush tour. The Bean had never started again, and the spare parts it needed never turned up, or were always wrong. Instead, three BSA motorcycles, used by despatch riders in the last war, had arrived. They’d come down the river, perched on three dug-outs, because the final bit of the track between us and Ikasa was still a swamp. They had long, graceful handlebars and slim fuel tanks and curvy saddles but could take on the roughest or most liquid ground. The wheels were strange: they each had a smaller metal wheel attached to their spokes; my father pointed out the brake-pad that clamped to this inner wheel and squealed the machine to a halt. I wanted to hear the engines explode into life, but it took a fortnight to clean and oil and adjust them. My father was always very thorough. The bits were unscrewed in a heap of spanners and rags, and I worried that the three cycles would end up like the Bean, already tangled up in creepers beneath its tin awning.

  Then one day, as we all watched, my father strapped on his thickest leather puttees and bush-boots, and kick-started one of the cycles. He crouched by the engine for a few minutes, changing its roar to a growl, and then its growl to a trembling throb, before mounting the saddle and moving off rather uncertainly, his boot descending a few times and slithering on the earth as he picked up speed. The chickens scattered, terrified. When he appeared again round the corner of the main building, we all laughed and cheered. He sped past with a look of great concentration.

  I was so happy, I jumped up and down and Quiri did a little dance next to me. When my father finally wobbled to a stop, he was grinning from ear to ear. The machine smelt deliciously of Castrol oil, and made the air above it move around, as the air did sometimes off the river or the roof on burning days. My mother then had a try, on her machine. She had bush-trousers on, like my father, and her hair was drawn into a tight bob. She found the bike very heavy, and it took her some time to move more than a few yards without her boot kicking the ground – but she was soon riding calmly round and round, frowning as much as my father. I chased after her, but she was too fast for me, even though the machine seemed to be lumbering its way along.

  There was a sudden cheer from the servants, and I saw Quiri setting off across the yard, his engine coughing like a tubercular. I ran towards him and made him swerve and take a light tumble. He put me on his lap and we chugged around together, slowly increasing speed until the river, when it was next to us, flowed the other way.

  A chair was made, which could be bolted on to the back of either cycle; it was no more than a cushion in a basket, but it was my seat, my place. We thumped and smoked and throbbed our way, my father and I, until he was certain I wouldn’t tip him over. I was very happy – even if my view was the back of his bush-shirt, stained with sweat in a big dark shape I made faces out of, or islands full of treasure. I could cling to his big belt, or waist, or to the sides of the pannier, and sometimes lay my head against his hot, wet back, feeling its spine rub against my ear as we roared about, my knees drawn up high and my feet vibrating on the wire guard that curved over the fan belt.

  The day came when we set off up the track to Odoomi, the servants who were left waving us goodbye. Our plan was to spend a few days there and in the two or three neighbouring villages, and then to go north a little further to the lake my father had already seen and swum in, dark and calm in its crater. Boxes on the back held our equipment and supplies: we were travelling lightly.

  When the little caravan started to make its way up the ‘road’, I was so excited I forgot to worry about the gorilla spirit, though my own personal fetish was in the small canvas pack on my back. This was a grease-paper packet containing a holy wafer ‘borrowed’ from Tarbuck’s tin; a feather which I persuaded myself was from the beautiful bird; a river pebble in the natural shape of a crocodile; a tiny bone found near Hargreaves’s grave, and a miniature woodcarving made from a fallen branch of the sacred ebony tree that grew near Quiri’s village, given to me by Quiri for my sixth birthday. He said it was carved in a trance by the chief mask maker of the area. It showed a skull, in the shape of my mother’s egg-timer, but flat and shiny. It was supposed to be worn around the neck. It was by far my most precious belonging.

  I had already visited the village several times, and the children greeted me warmly, crowding around my chair and helping me down. The people here went about naked except for a glistening cover of palm-nut oil and some ornaments. I knew the Reverend Tarbuck didn’t approve of this, but I didn’t really notice it. The unmarried women wore a belt of beads around their waist, while the married ones tied a square of the same beads to it, hanging between their legs. The men wore ankle-bracelets of leather, a line of beads around the head with a feather or two stuck in, and a twine of liana just beneath the chest. The only other decorations were patterns on the bare skin, burnt in with sticks from the fire. These were done, my father said, at different stages in life. They were mostly on the face, the stomach, and the forearms.

  Quiri had told me what some of them meant: the half-moons, the dotted squares, the banana-shapes, the circles-within-circles. I knew which youths had been told secrets, which women were married, and which parts of them had been ill or infected. Everyone had the same thick line across their cheekbones as Quiri had. The mark of the snake, he’d said: the mamba. The mamba protects little children. I felt uncomfortable again at my unmarked, pink face: I am a fat white grub ready for the birds. The flecks of pink on many of the faces were (I understood from Mother) smallpox scars: underneath the ebony lay this pink flesh. Perhaps, I thought, I was missing a layer of skin, and their pink palms were where that layer had been rubbed away.

  The children tugged at my clothing, wanting me to play with them. I was still a bit deaf from the growly roar of the motorcycles, but the children’s excitement was even louder. I nodded and smiled and felt princely and weak at the same time. The roofs were thatched and pointed, with entrances that made even me need to duck. The Chief’s house was a bit bigger and with a low fence of woven liana around it; my father told me that in this compound the Chief heard the people’s complaints and dispensed advice, like a native DO. He was small and plump, with a moth-eaten robe of leopard skin (I was worried about that) and a crown of feathers that came over his eyes. He held a snakeskin rod in his hand, which no one else was allowed to touch on pain of death. This was drummed into me before we set out. The village council met under a huge acacia tree; tame bush dogs slept in its shade, and hens scratched about everywhere.

  We slept in a hut behind this tree. The hut was kept for visitors, and it was bare except for a gourd bowl of what I thought was milk in the corner. Quiri told me that it was millet paste mixed up with boiled water. We each had to take a sip, and it was cool and refreshing. The water in the big red gourds outside was for us to boil. A fire was smoking in front of our hut; we ladled the water into a pot and left it on the fire. The smoke kept away most of the mosquitoes, once dusk fell, but we put up our mosquito nets anyway because there was a deadly beetle that lived in the thatch and liked your sleeping smell so much it dropped on to your head. The hut had been very carefully swept, but Quiri checked the earth floor for jiggers.

  All around us the forest spoke, and a bright three-quarter moon rose. I made it huge and blinding with my father’s heavy field binoculars. There was dancing, and the fetish woman waved feathered twigs at us behind a wooden mask with white eyes. It came down to her belly and made her invisible to evil spirits. The dancers’ feet shuffled and stamped, helping the sun roll through the bottom of the earth, waking the ancestors up. My mother’s fly switch swept in front of her in time to the beat of the drums: if I closed my eyes, I could float off the stool and come back again without her noticing, for the drumming held me up in the air with its pounding palms. We sat in a big circle of all the people and ate plantains and millet porridge and sweet mangoes and (unless I was being teased by Quiri) grilled mamba meat with fearsome pili-pili powder sprinkled on it. At my father
’s request, the Chief ordered his drummers to tell the next village that we were coming. They drummed the words and the words were carried off into the darkness like the heartbeats heard through my mother’s stethoscope. Quiri had told me you could sometimes feel the earth’s heartbeat in your feet. It was carried into the light on the backs of cicadas, where it spoke to men and kept the trees growing. The reply was so faint that my father’s bad ears couldn’t pull it out from between the night calls of creatures and the endless sizzles of cicada. But it was a welcome, the Chief said.

  I dozed against my mother as the adults discussed matters of local importance, each seated on stools carved with grimacing faces. My father was always nodding seriously when I woke up, his face flickering in the fire like a god’s. I had played hard with the children, showing them the rules of cricket (those I knew) with my rubber ball and a couple of thick sticks. Big gourds served as the wickets. I was watched from the corner of a hut by Herbert E. Standing’s spirit, accompanied as it always was by the sweet smell of linseed oil. I made a century, and bowled three wickets. He clapped each time, but reminded me that the aim was to teach, not show off.

  In my dreams, to which I was carried by my mother, my camp bed became a boat, full of my playmates, sailing over the treetops with a glorious throbbing roar. I woke, once, in the middle of the night. My head rested on my canvas pack, which held my fetish packet. Quiri, sleeping outside, no longer had the fob-watch – but I didn’t even think of Sir Steggie marauding beyond, such was my complete happiness, hearing my mother’s gentle breathing, my father’s grunts, and thinking that life was going to be full of such days, stretching before me in their smoky richness for ever.

  We took a week to reach the lake; more village parleys, feasts, firelit dances and cricket; more bumping and roaring along the track, through dense forest, the patter of light rain on thatch, morning mists caught high in the treetops as we climbed higher and deeper and further into paradise. By the time we took the path up the ancient volcano’s side, I had almost forgotten my old life. We had seen none of the creatures I had wanted to see: no elephants, no gorillas, no leopards. But I had a creature more precious than any of those, resting in my pocket. We had passed a group of hunters with bows and arrows, crouched at the bottom of a huge grey mahogany tree next to the track. They were not surprised to see us. Quiri talked to them over our chugging engines and he told us that they knew, from the drums, we were in the area. Pieces of light fell on their naked bodies and gleamed like ashes off a fire. One of them was holding something tiny in his hand. It was something they had caught.