A Fringe of Leaves (31 page)

The assembly of women, and more than anyone the mother, were none the less determined to transfer the sick child to the captive’s arms. The child herself left Mrs Roxburgh in no doubt that she was to become the nurse, for a mouth was plunged upon her right nipple, and the yawed hands straightway began working on her breast. Compassion inspired by the memory of her own attempts at motherhood was flickering to life, when her foster-child doused it beyond re-kindling. On discovering that she had been deceived, the little girl bit the unresponsive teat, and spat it out, and screamed and writhed in the nurse’s arms. Pain alone would have driven Mrs Roxburgh to drop its cause, but the mother’s looks dared her to, and the blows she received on her head and shoulders from the attendant women, persuaded her to keep hold of the wretch.

Presently, when she had quieted it, she seated herself on the ground beside a fire burning near the entrance to the hut, and hoped she might be, if not forgotten, at least ignored. She sat mechanically stroking the diseased arms, the greasy hair. An automaton was what she must become in order to survive.

Round her the blacks were proceeding with their various duties, beneath a splendid sky, beside a lake the colour of raw cobalt shot with bronze. Despite her misery and the child in her arms, Mrs Roxburgh could not remain unmoved by the natural beauty surrounding her. Evening light coaxed nobler forms out of black bodies and introduced a visual design into what had been a dusty hugger-mugger camp. What she longed to sense in the behaviour of these human beings was evidence of a spiritual design, but that she could not, any more than she could believe in a merciful power shaping her own destiny.

For lack of a better occupation, and to keep her dangerous thoughts at bay, she continued rocking her disgusting charge. Once she caught herself saying aloud, ‘Sleep, sleep,’ and by grace of some mechanism, ‘sleep—my darling,’ more for her own comfort than the child’s; the sound of her voice, she realized, was a consolation.

She could feel quickening in her, not only that abstract hunger for absent faces and familiar voices, but desire for food to fill the hole which actual hunger had gnawed in her belly. The air was alive with distracting scents as the women tended the embers where they had laid fish, varieties of root or tuber, and a brace of small furred animals, their muzzles and almost human hands still testifying to the agony in which they had died.

Mrs Roxburgh could have fallen upon these agonized creatures, torn them apart, stuffed her mouth, even before the fur was singed, the flesh seared, before the blood had ceased bubbling in them. But when the feast was ready she was not invited. As superior beings the men set about gorging themselves with appropriate solemnity. Without a doubt the physical splendour, both of the mature males and more slender youths, was worthy of celebration. Occasional morsels were thrown to the wretched females, who grovelled in keeping with their humble station, and scooped up the scraps, and shook off the dust before devouring them.

The captive was free to listen to the noise of sucking, bones being cracked, and to watch the contortions of black throats. Food had at least sent her charge scuttling back to the mother, but this left the nurse with nothing to distract her from her own hunger.

Towards the end of the meal, somebody (it could have been the child’s mother) flung her a fish-tail and a dorsal fin. She snatched them up from out of the dirt and started sucking at the glutinous membrane, risked her mouth on the barbed fin for the sake of a shred of flesh she imagined she saw adhering to the base, ran her tongue round her lips and teeth, licked her deliciously rank fingers—and whimpered once or twice to herself.

(Could she perhaps crawl out after dark and scavenge for the bones of those small furred animals? But dogs carried off any remains their masters had failed to swallow. One partially bald cur bit her as she tried to seduce him into sharing his booty.)

While dusk crept amongst them, and shadows became increasingly entwined with tree and smoke, an elder rose and led the tribe in a kind of lament. The prisoner concluded that the natives were at their prayers, for their wails sounded formal rather than spontaneously emotional. She considered adding at least an unspoken prayer of her own, but found she lacked the impulse; her soul was as dry as her hanging breasts. If she had ever worshipped a supreme being, it was by rote, and the Roxburgh’s Lord God of Hosts, to whom her mother also had paid no more than lip service. Her father was of a different persuasion: as a young man he had belted out the hymns, but fell silent later on. A silent girl, she had inherited his brooding temper. As she now recognized, rocks had been her altars and springwater her sacrament, a realization which did but increase heartache in a country designed for human torment, where even beauty flaunted a hostile radiance, and the spirits of place were not hers to conjure up.

Under the pressure of darkness and common desires her captors were sorting themselves into families and the huts allotted to them. Darkness might have encouraged her to disappear had she known which direction to take. An aching body and numb mind persuaded her instead to crawl inside the hut to which the mother of her charge had retired, together with other women and children and the elder who had led their prayers. By good fortune the mother elected to keep her child for the night, allowing the nurse to enjoy the freedom of her own dreams.

She had lain down on the edge of a somnolent fire which increased the airlessness of the hut and added to the warmth given off by the bodies crowded there. As cold encroached from out of the forest and off the lake, she edged closer to the buried coals, and turned to roast her other side. What she might be suffering physically she barely felt, for she was soon absorbed into tribal dreams broken by soft cries of children together with other more mature grunts and moans.

During the night she returned to her body from being the human wheelbarrow one of the muscular male blacks was pushing against the dark. There was no evidence that her dream had been inspired by any such experience, but she fell back upon the dust, amongst intimations of the nightmare which threatened to re-shape itself around her. Her trembling only gradually subsided as she lay fingering the ring threaded into her fringe of leaves and she became once more part of the suffocating airlessness and moans of sleeping blacks, her own sleep so deep and dreamless she might have died.

She awoke by a colourless light in which human forms were already moving, fanning half-dead fires to life, airing their grumbles, urinating. By the time the surrounding trees had risen through a mist, the tribe appeared to have re-assembled, and the lamentations of the evening before were repeated in a cold dawn. Whether the wailing was intended to exorcize malign spirits, the captive felt that some of her more persistent ghosts might have been laid by this now familiar rite. She was, moreover, comforted to find herself still in possession of her body, even though aching, and frozen where it had not been seared; the life was flickering back inside her like the first hesitant tongues of fire the blacks were coaxing out of buried embers.

Such scraps as had been left over from the evening meal were brought out from net bags and soon consumed. The prisoner would have gone hungry had she not salvaged a charred fern-root let fall by one of the privileged. Inside the layers of dust and ash the root had a bitter flavour of its own. She was grateful for it. Afterwards she went down to the lake as nobody attempted to restrain her, and would have drunk from it had not a little girl approached through the mist and brought her to a hole in which furze of a kind had been stuffed. After removing this bush the child motioned to her to drink. Mrs Roxburgh was surprised at the sweetness of the water.

‘You are my only friend,’ she said when she had finished.

The little girl laughed and dimpled. She rubbed her thighs with her hands, and may have been blushing under her skin. She would not speak, but accepted to hold a proffered hand, and even pressed it, though cautiously.

‘I’d give ’ee a kiss if tha wudn’ take fright,’ Ellen told her. ‘Or wud ’ee?’

To share her unhoped-for happiness, she might have risked it. But the child looked so grave she left it at that, and they returned to the camp hand-in-hand.

With the exception of this little girl, she had been so ignored by her captors she hoped her day might continue undisturbed. The men were gathering up their spears, clubs, nets and ropes with the solemnity of the superior sex preparing for an expedition. The men did look superior. Contrasting with the women’s irregular stubble, curly manes of well-greased hair hung to their shoulders. Where the women slouched, grown slommacky from bearing children and carrying loads, the males were for the most part still personable in old age, disfigured only by the welts from incisions deliberately inflicted in patterns on their chests, backs, and often handsome faces.

As the men departed with an arrogance proper to a mission of importance, Mrs Roxburgh was ready to throw in her lot with the depressed women, when they suddenly descended upon her for some calculated purpose. Three of them seized her by the hair, stretching it to full length, even yanking at it for extra measure, while one beefier female began hacking at the roots with a shell.

The unexpectedness of the operation and the pain it caused made the victim cry out. ‘Leave off, can’t ’ee?’ Ellen Gluyas shrieked, and then, as Mrs Roxburgh took control, ‘Why must you torture me so? Isn’t it enough to have killed my husband, my friends?’ She was about to add, ‘Kill me too, rather than hurt me,’ but knew at once that she did not want to die.

After forcing her down on her knees her tormentors continued hacking and sawing. Between the shell and the efforts of those who were assisting, and who leaned back fit to tear out the hair by the roots, they got it off. Recovered enough from her pain and fright (at one stage she thought she might faint) the victim put up a hand and found she had become a stubbled fright such as those around her, or even worse. From the bloodied hand returned to her lap she knew she could only look horrifying.

But the women had not finished their work. They dragged her to her feet. Next the hide of some animal was brought, filled with a rancid fat with which they smeared their passive slave; she could but submit to her anointing, followed by an application of charcoal rubbed with evident disgust, if not spite, into the shamefully white skin.

Although nauseated by the stench, her sunburn smarting from the friction of the charcoal, she was beginning to feel after a fashion clothed, when again she was forced down upon her haunches. A young girl fetched a woven bag containing what could have been beeswax, with which they plastered her bleeding scalp. From a second, similar reticule, an old woman produced down by the handful and bundles of feathers. She could feel the old, tremulous fingers patting the down, planting the feathers in her wax helmet. An almost tender sigh of admiration rose in the air as the women achieved their work of art.

Laughter broke out, a stamping of grey-black feet, a clapping of hands. Only the work of art sat listless and disaffected amongst a residue of black down and sulphur feathers shaped like question marks.

If they had made her the object of ritual attentions, they had not forgotten her practical uses. Again pulled to her feet, the slave was loaded with paraphernalia, and last of all, the loathsome child, heavier it seemed than the evening before.

Their setting out was less ostentatious than that of their men. From the first moment they plodded, but no less purposeful for being flat-footed. Instead of spears they carried long, pointed sticks. They chattered unceasingly and with apparent cheerfulness. Now and then somebody thought to prod the slave; in more usual circumstances it might have hurt, here it served to punctuate the monotony. She looked down once and saw the pus from her charge’s sores uniting with the sweat on her own charcoal-dusted arms.

Disgust might have soured her had it not been for a delicious smell of dew rising from the grass their feet trampled and the bushes they brushed against in passing. The sky was still benign. Were she presently to die, her last sight, her last thought, would be of watered blue.

But she would not, must not die—why, she could not imagine, when she had been deprived of all that she most loved and valued.

Arrived at their destination, the women threw off their loads and started jabbing the ground with the sticks they had brought. She too, was encouraged to join in the search for what proved to be a kind of tuberous root. Any they unearthed were popped inside the net carry-alls. Although unskilled, aching, and still shocked by the operation to which she had been subjected earlier that morning, she was relieved to be rid of the child while digging, and free to indulge in the luxury of her own thoughts: a potato-cake she remembered frying on a bitter night of her impoverished youth; an aigrette with a diamond mount she had worn in her hair to a ball; Oswald Dignam’s milky skin seen throught the weft of fog at sea. She encouraged random images rather than consecutive thought, which might have driven her to search for a cause or reason for her presence in a clueless maze.

Something of the maze was indeed suggested by the natives’ movements, meandering over the hard earth, crossing and recrossing one another’s tracks in their interminable search. Yet the black women’s fate was not so far determined by invisible walls that science and experience could not guide them; their probing was almost invariably attended by success, while the benighted slave stabbed the ground more often than not fruitlessly.

The sun’s weight upon her shoulders replacing the weight of the child in her arms, she grew to hate the hard grey earth with its tufts of wiry, dead-seeming grass, although in the course of wandering from patch to patch, she realized she was beginning to develop a skill in ‘potato’-sticking, and when one of her companions looked in her direction, she laughed with pleasure for her discovery. Overcoming her instinctive suspicions the black woman laughed back. Both fell silent after this exchange, partly since their shared emotion had been but imperfectly conveyed, more because pleasure had to succumb to the demands of drudgery.