Pieces of Light Read online

  ‘Did you like that?’ my mother asked. London started up again with a big crash just as the attendant pushed the doors open for us. I nodded. Ancient Egypt was in Africa. It was too loud to say anything.

  ‘Well, don’t sound too enthusiastic,’ said my mother.

  So I made sure I didn’t, even though something golden was flowing through me from head to foot.

  The next day we went to the zoo. Everything wanted to be let out. They all want to go back, like me, I thought.

  ‘It smells beastly,’ I said, and my mother found that funny.

  I pressed my nose to the bars all the same because the animals at home made sure they weren’t seen easily, or at all.

  ‘Goodness me, there’s the leopard, Hugh.’

  The forest was full of leopards, but this was the first one I had ever seen alive. It was like the skin my father had spent ages tanning, but with something stuffed into it that rippled and then stared at us. The cold wind blew across it and it shivered. I shivered, too.

  ‘It is rather frighteningly huge, isn’t it, darling?’

  There was something called the Leopard Society at home. I had no idea what this was, except that it was even more frightening than a leopard. I knew that my mother was thinking about the Leopard Society, looking at this shivering creature on its concrete rock.

  There were other odd things: it was very odd not to see a pith helmet or a Bombay bowler, or mosquito boots, or fly switches, or no more than a handful of black people. I still couldn’t sleep properly without a mosquito net between me and the night. Night didn’t really happen, anyway: lights blazed inside and outside. The tall drooping gas ones were lit and snuffed by a funny little man in a black cape, with a long pole, who whistled like a bird early in the morning. Before then, instead of the night calls of the forest, I heard only the rumble of a storm that never came and the calls of car horns and klaxons, and strange, high shouts that sounded like the beginning of a dance. There were no drums. There were no murmurings of servants around the fire. The light in the middle of the room made everything cruel-looking; my mother instructed me not to put my fingers in the holes in the wall. I knew this from the Allinsons, who had a generator. Instead of the smells of river and forest and rain, there was a sickly sweet scent of beeswax and mothballs and old carpet, and that same sourness from the street that came in through the window and lay on your tongue and tickled the back of your nose.

  ‘Isn’t London extraordinary,’ said my mother, collapsing on the bed after a long tour of several very big and never-ending shops that turned out to be one shop, called Harrods. (Horrid Harrods, I was thinking.) ‘Isn’t London quite, quite extraordinary. Do you know, Hughie, I feel quite bush. I feel quite the native, marvelling at it all for the first time. And it’s so wonderfully cold. Oh, come here.’

  She put out her hand and I lay down next to her and cried. I wanted the river, not the jumbly street below. I couldn’t get used to the idea of things passing the window, continually on their way to somewhere else. Nothing ever stopped, though it always sounded as if it was about to. What were all these people hurrying off to do? Even in Duala, which I had visited once, or twice, one somehow understood what everyone was doing, however bustly they were. I should have brought the bones of the bushbaby with me. I thought of it curled up under the brick in the wet red earth of the compound and cried even more. Quiri was wrong: the spirit had stayed in the bones, I was sure. And the bones were far away and all alone.

  I clung to my mother as one clings to another in a flood. The flood slowed us both, though my mother was becoming too fast for me. Her fingers were stroking the back of my neck. I stiffened.

  ‘Darling, you’ve got the most enormous bite.’

  She made me turn my head, worried by the possibilities. Her fingers crackled at the nape of my neck. I heard her breath being drawn in, hissing between her teeth.

  ‘Oh good God,’ she said. ‘Oh, that’s appalling.’

  She wasn’t really addressing me; I felt I was asleep. She made me tell her the truth about it. When I did, she nodded and looked decided about something.

  That evening she wrote a letter to my father, but I wasn’t allowed to read it. I sent a card of Buckingham Palace, with Please give my love to Quiri and the others, as a PS. The next day she took me to a skin doctor who pronounced the mark ‘indelible’ – unless I had a painful operation which ran the risk of infection. I had already decided that if my mother tried to get rid of Yolobolo’s sign I would jump from the window into the street four floors below.

  We went to Griffiths McAllister in Regent Street and I was very glad to see khaki tunics and shorts and bush-boots, hurricane lamps and cholera belts and Bombay bowlers, even if the place smelt very sweet and stuffy. My mother bought some shirts and trousers and a Union Jack. Our flag had looked sad on its rusty pole as my father saluted our departure. My mother washed the flag every week, but mould had damaged it. When she took it down, every Sunday, she would tut at the green patches on the cloth. By the time of my departure it had been washed too many times and the red had completely disappeared. It looked like a map of a hilly and forested place, not a flag. The new one was big and bright and the man serving agreed with my mother that the colours were fast and the cloth durable, stroking his hand over it as if it had to be calmed down.

  It seemed wrong to me – that she might well return with a new Union Jack, but without me.

  I lay on the big bed with my card as she was writing her letter and thought about this. I thought of myself as wrapped up in the flag, smuggling myself back home. I had read somewhere that when a sailor died in battle they wrapped him in the Union Jack and let him drop from the side into the sea. I wondered whether they had done this with the dead trader on the ship, but my mother had said that a young man had told her he was a chap ‘gone to seed’, so they probably hadn’t.

  There might be a mistake; they might think I’m a sailor’s corpse and let me slide into the ocean, wrapped up in the flag, before my mother knew it.

  The light bulb in the lamp hanging from the middle of the ceiling was giving me a headache. I was amazed to see no insects – not even a moth – fluttering around it. I counted the windows on the photograph of the Palace. My mother kept glancing at me from the little table, where she was writing her letter. I felt like a piece broken off something, but I wasn’t sure what. I wasn’t sure whether this piece was me and my mother, or just me. My mother and I, I corrected myself. Lucy had teased me about the way I talked: she said it was ‘out of date, like an old book’. Lucy was staying with a friend in Chelsea, then was bound for her aunt’s in Twickening, or Twickingham, or something, and then ‘horrid school’. I’d probably never see her again. She had to see a special doctor, someone who knew all about tropical diseases. So did I, even though I didn’t have a tropical disease. I also had to see someone about my eye. It was much worse, in London. I tested it against the pale net curtains.

  ‘Are you all right, darling?’

  ‘Yes. What are you writing?’

  ‘Why don’t you look at the Meccano set I bought you?’

  ‘What are you writing?’

  ‘Just saying Hello, we’ve arrived safely, to Father.’

  ‘It’s taking you a long time, just to say that.’

  I closed my eyes and saw again the trees sliding across the view of home over the bay’s waters. In front of it were millions of white faces with hats on, bustling and jerking about. However much I tried, I couldn’t get rid of them.

  I was saving my Meccano for later, but I gave up and tried to build a crane. The hotel carpets were annoyingly thick, and it kept falling down, and, I lost some of the tiny screws. I prepared for bed and my mother read me a story, then left me to sleep. I imagined her downstairs in the hotel lounge, chatting gaily as she did on the ship when she was feeling well enough, a graceful glass in one hand, a cigarette in its ivory holder in the other. A strange, sickly light came in through the thin curtains blown by the summer breeze, along
with the grumbles and shouts and boomy roar of the city. I touched the mark on my nape, then noticed Herbert E. Standing billowing in the curtains. The air sucked them flat and he was left by himself for a moment. The sweet scent of linseed oil filled the room. He was holding a bat, so warped that he could have scooped water with it. I smiled, and then had a sudden, dreadful fear that he had changed and become evil, that he would approach and batter me to bits with the bat.

  Instead, he started to cry, his face rumpling like a piece of cloth. I watched him, trying not to move or show any expression on my own face. I wasn’t sure whether he was crying for himself, or me. I had left the cricket set at home. There’d been no point in taking it, if I was coming back. Anyway, the cases were full to the brim.

  ‘Sorry about the cricket set, Mr Standing,’ I said, quietly.

  The curtains rippled and he was gone. I could hear rain on the glass of the window. The smell that came up was like the baby of the smell that came after storms at home, and it sent me immediately to sleep.

  I knew, the moment I arrived at my uncle’s house (a couple of hours in the train from London), that I would never escape it. There was a gate, a laurel-hedged drive, and then the huge house, sideways on. As the old-fashioned trap turned and bumped past the blank brick wall, I resigned myself to the rest of my life. I thought: Yolobolo’s secret won’t be known for a very long time. I won’t be going back to Africa.

  Then these thoughts dipped and swirled and disappeared into the flood of life like scraps of paper.

  My uncle came out, and then my aunt. We alighted from the trap. My uncle paid the driver a penny and called him Stan. Stan scratched his mutton-chop whiskers and flicked the horse into motion. The wheels ground away across the gravel and my uncle was tousling my head.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘the very spit.’

  He looked at my mother and laughed. She gave him a cross look. My mother was always telling the servants off for spitting.

  Aunt Joy had no hat on, just very short hair that curled up to touch her cheeks and a spotty dress that stopped at the knees. She had heavy shoes on, and in between was a lot of sunburned leg. I could smell the house through the open door; meat and beeswax mainly, much like a lot of open doors in England, I’d noticed.

  ‘Hello, dears,’ said my aunt, wringing her hands. ‘And how’s our African boy?’

  She gripped my face and kissed me on the nose. I was so surprised my mouth fell open. Her palms were very cold. I wrested my face away and stepped back. They were laughing, all three of them. Uncle Edward had his arm around my mother.

  ‘You look astonishingly well, dear sister,’ he said.

  I thought my mother looked pale and drawn after our stay in London, but didn’t say so.

  We went into the house, a red-faced maid called Susan puffing like the branch-line train as she carried our suitcases behind us. From the outside the house was nearly as enormous as Buckingham Palace, or at least as big as our hotel in London. Now suddenly it was all shadowy corners and big pieces of furniture and curly rugs tripping me up, as if the inside had been washed badly and had shrunk.

  I stumbled about after the adults until I was shown my room. It was up two flights of creaky stairs. When I looked out of the window I was surprised to see a huge lawn with trees at the end, and bright green fields beyond those, rising to a crest with funny grassy bumps on. I hadn’t had time to notice the garden at all, before we went in. This wasn’t the same garden as my mother had put into my head, but it didn’t matter. The big trees around, one of them a sort of dried-blood red, cast big shadows on the grass, which was very smooth and the green of my father’s folding card table. The sun was low in the sky. There were white and blue butterflies, and tall spiky flowers like furled flags, and a few of those special ones called roses, like at Buea. The green fields stirred in the breeze and I fancied for a second they were lakes or even seas, so like waves were the shadows that passed across them. The sky was paler here, though almost cloudless; everything was paler, in fact. Even the shadows falling across the lawn were paler than the shadows in Africa. It reminded me of the washed-out Union Jack on its post in the station.

  My uncle gave me a humorous card to pin up above my bed: it showed what he called a ‘piccaninny’ with big red lips and a fat belly standing in a mess of banana skins. His white eyes were rolled up, looking at someone – an adult, obviously – out of the picture. Printed across the bottom in large black letters was: I ain’t seen yo’ bananas. The child had a blue ribbon tied around his middle, with a big bow behind, like the gifts for people my mother had bought in Harrods. His belly sagged over this ribbon. I didn’t understand the point of this card, but my uncle pinned it up anyway, laughing.

  After my room in Africa, my room in England was quite small and narrow, but not at all dark; there were two windows with diamond-shaped leading, each with a sill wide enough to sit on. There was a small lamp with a blue china shade on the bedside table, and a ceiling light with a buff shade made of some animal’s skin, as thin as card. The cupboard was huge, with squeaky doors and a lazy latch that would go to sleep halfway through the night and let the doors swing open, terrifying me. I worked out that this meant that the floor, if not the house, was on a slope.

  There were two framed pictures in the room; one of a ruined church on a cliff and the other of a girl with a bucket grinning in front of a gate. At first I thought this picture was as real as the paintings of Sir Steggie back home, but after running my finger over it I realised it was printed, like the pictures in the magazines. There was a large rug on the floor, faded but with dark patterns I could use as roads for my Dinky cars. Around it was a dark sea of oak planks which I could use for the racing cars because the planks were going the right way. My uncle was proud of these planks: all the wood in the house, he said, was oak. I liked the colour of this wood, and its smell, and the fact that it stayed calm and unchanged: in Africa, anything made of wood buckled or split or was eaten by insects.

  We visited the garden before supper. The air was full of midges, gilded by the light flickering in rays out of the trees at the side of the garden. Our shadows were very thin and tall, getting ready to sleep and fatten themselves in the big shadow of night. I wondered if the spirit in my shadow was aware of the coldness of the lawn, of the thinned and cooler air here in England.

  The dying sun wasn’t as red as at home, and neither was the sky. We entered a wood at the bottom of the garden; there were two woods, in fact. One was what my uncle called a beechwood, and the other was next to it but fenced off with wire. My uncle called this the ‘wildwood’, saying it as one word, but it didn’t look terribly wild to me. Its trees were a mixture of thin and fat, short and tall, young and old, and there was a lot of thorny stuff on the ground, and some thread-like creepers with pinky-red flowers looped from the branches. We went into the beechwood, though.

  ‘Oh, an English wood!’ said my mother, as if she had just received it as a present.

  I found the inside of it rather bare; someone had swept it. There was no mist, and the sun fell into the wood in bright shafts I could put my hand in and out of, as I’d done with Mr Tall’s magic lantern’s beam. The trees were oddly thick and most of them curved a bit, finishing not very high above us. I was amazed at how the leaves, if they were caught in the sun, glowed, like lumps of wood on Baluti’s fire when a gust blew across it. I realised quite quickly that in England a forest had very thin leaves, and its roof was nearer to the ground. One didn’t feel giddy looking up. There were no cicadas, and only a few birds singing, and the earth was dry underfoot, smelling very sweet. Then the trees ended suddenly at the field, which I gazed upon as if I had reached the end of the world. I couldn’t believe its size, nor its colour. It was malachite green with bright spots of red and yellow and blue, and I wanted to walk into it. But I wasn’t allowed to. One day soon I would sneak out and let the green stuff (my uncle said it was ripening barley) close over me as I swam through it, for I could not believe it was
not liquid in some way. Yet it rustled, as dry things rustle, as dry beans rustle in a gourd.

  ‘They make this into beer and food, Hugh,’ said my mother.

  ‘It used to be sheep, do you remember?’ said my uncle.

  ‘Yes,’ said my mother. ‘Things change.’

  ‘Are there snakes in the grass?’ I asked.

  They all laughed, especially my uncle, and he made a joke I didn’t understand.

  My aunt sneezed, and for that reason we had to go back. Crossing the lawn, my mother told me that we would see some sheep tomorrow, when we went to fetch the milk. The lawn no longer had our soul-shadows bumping along it, because it was twilight, and the grass had turned bluey grey. The wildwood was a dark lump in the corner. Being a shy boy, and still hurt by the laughter, I didn’t ask my uncle why there was a fence around it. I imagined my mother playing on this lawn, as a girl, but it seemed too long ago to be real. I was gripping the fetish packet in my jacket pocket. I didn’t yet know what spirits were lurking; the tiny forest my uncle called a beechwood struck me as a rather empty, echoey place. But no one can know, as Quiri put it, what milk a gourd contains until it is split.

  I felt my life narrowing, despite the newness of things. My mother was busy that summer, organising her medical supplies and so forth, and I spent much of the time running about in the garden, alone. I was absolutely forbidden to enter the wildwood. I accepted my uncle and aunt as parts of the whole, and the whole was England. England was neither bad nor good, but couldn’t be helped. I found the children introduced to me mostly puzzling; their ways were not strange so much as not very interesting. I could never find out what their symbol was, so I reckoned that nobody here had one. Some of them were strangely rough – pulling my hair or jabbing me with sticks for no apparent reason. My chief desire was to ask them about the spirits of the woods and fields, and what measures had to be taken when one walked in the countryside; only one boy, a little older than me, could tell me. He said that there were fairies at the bottom of his garden, and he left them acorn cups and beds of moss. He also said that there was a ghost in his cellar. He said it with such seriousness that I thought at last I had found someone who knew about these things. But then, with the same seriousness, he told me that he had discovered five diamonds in a hole behind the village church, and had killed ten black knights with his catapult, and that he had a very serious disease which anyone could catch by eating grass. I was just then nibbling at a grass blade, so I felt that he was a tease and not to be trusted.