LITMIR.BIZ

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tried to avoid, as he walked, torch in hand, the many pin-ups of nude women plastered by the workers all over the factory walls. But he wasn’t very successful. There was one in particular, in the locker room, which compelled him to inspect that area of the factory far more thoroughly than anywhere else. In this pin-up, the girl is bending over, arching her bushy tail at the eye of the beholder. She is naked except for a pair of black high-heeled shoes and a matching pair of open-meshed stockings. Her extended arms are pushing down on her knees, she is slightly pigeon- toed, and her pretty face is turned to the eye of that same beholder who, when he isn’t Duiker Gilbert Grace Berry, is someone called Jimmy Naidoo, for, pencilled near the girl’s open mouth are the words: “I want you, Jimmy Naidoo.”

      Duiker poked his torch into a few nooks and crannies on the factory floor, made a quick inspection of the reception room, barely glanced at the manager’s office, the assistant manager’s office, the canteen, the storeroom, the display room; and then he wandered into the locker-room where he spent some considerable time.

      His torch batteries were almost flat when he emerged, groggily, from that body-cloth smelling place and made his way back to the guardroom, the only area in the entire complex where an electric light shone. It was 3 a.m., time to phone head office. He dialed the numbers.

      “Yes?”

      “Er... hullo. Berry here.”

      “Yes?”

      “Everything’s fine this end.”

      “Settee’s comfortable, eh?”

      “Pardon?”

      “Having a nice cuppa tea, are you? Good snooze? Settee comfortable enough for you?”

      Duiker sighed. It was the same rigmarole every time he phoned. “I’ve just got back from a patrol of the entire premises, and everything is all right.”

      “Cooker to your liking?”

      “I...”

      “Hot water on tap. Electric kettle. Sorry we can’t offer you room service. Enjoy your holiday.”

      The line went dead. Duiker shrugged and replaced his handset. English humour, he supposed. Sarcastic buggers. He thought back to the last time he’d been in England, a good few years ago... stayed with Aunty Frances most of the time... Shropshire... must look her up one of these days... dilly old bat. He sighed for a second time, then he set his alarm for 3.55 a.m., and settled down on the settee for a snooze. In an hour’s time she’ll arrive to make us both a nice cup of tea before she cleans the reception room and the offices.

      Duiker thought back to his first night at the Alperton factory. A total stranger, and very self-conscious in his ill-fitting uniform, he had been grateful to Mr Charalambides who, after testing Duiker’s Turkish, his Greek, his Armenian, his Italian, his French, and his Spanish, had welcomed him in heavily accented but fluent English. It was he who had shown Duiker round the factory which was virtually deserted when he came on duty at 7 p.m.; it was he who explained Duiker’s simple duties to him, provided him with a torch but no weapon (much to Duiker’s relief); it was he who had warned Duiker to expect a charlady to arrive at 4 a.m. promptly, and had misguided him, by means of a devious wink, into fantasizing all night long, on the settee and off the settee, about his encounter with a Cinderella-like char dressed in rags and covered in ashes, but young and consumptively beautiful.

      Duiker had been about to enter his third, easily the shortest, experience of Romantic (in his case, unrequited) love: that kind of love whose origins the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, locates in the troubadours and minnesingers of twelfth century Europe. This is Amor, not Eros or Agape which are impersonal loves, but the deeply personal meeting of the eyes where fair, speechless messages are exchanged. Duiker’s first, impossible, Amor had been his cousin, Rosie Hadie, who had been decapitated by a truck on the Great North Road. They were pre-teens then, and the doctor - a gentleman by the name of Frankfurter who loved prospecting for gold-bearing quartz reefs in the dry river beds of Matabeleland - the doctor who signed Rosie’s death certificate, let it be known to at least one pair of ears that her accident had coincided with her first menstruation.

      Duiker’s second, equally impossible, Amor had been a girl young enough to be his daughter, one of the sheep who flocked to the Blood of Jesus Temple in Bulawayo, called Elizabeth Fawkes. She was a pale-skinned, dark haired slip of a thing, and when she paired off with that child of the devil, Jet Bunion; when she stopped attending services at the Blood of Jesus Temple; when indeed, Brother MacBraggert himself, with very little notice, emigrated to Perth, Australia via Margate, South Africa, Duiker’s world, for the second time in his life, fell apart.

      His third Amor took place on the first night of his new job as a security guard, somewhere in the semi-industrial heart of London. He had just under nine hours of it. From the moment Mr Charalambides mentioned the char, and winked, Duiker began to fantasize about a neglected waif who sometimes looked like Rosie, and sometimes like Elizabeth, dressed in rags and smelling of the hearth, with gentle grey eyes and a terminal but not unladylike cough.

      In his fantasy she was barefoot, and it was for the sound of bare feet pitter-pattering on the tarred road outside that he began to strain his ears, long before the magical hour. He wondered about her name. Matilda came to mind. Then Amanda. Then Snow White, Cinderella, The Little Match Girl.... By midnight he was physically ill with about-to-be requited love. The odour of kippers and the stuffy atmosphere did not help. He undid his bootlaces and he loosened his regulation tie. He downed a large gherkin in two bites. He struggled to keep his fantasy in check when it persisted in venturing into those soft areas barely concealed by the rags that hung from the perfect form of this abandoned girl.

      4 a.m. finally arrived. Instead of the pitter-patter of bare feet, the unmistakable squeak of a bicycle badly in need of lubrication assaulted Duiker’s tingling consciousness. He heard it clattering to a stop outside the entrance to the factory, heard keys, heard an unromantic hawking followed by an unromantic spitting, heard the familiar creak of the security gate as it swung open, heard sensible shoes clomping down the passage toward the guard’s room.

      Duiker stood up to greet sixty-three year old Mrs Grommet. She was not dressed in rags, or covered in ashes, or consumptively thin; she did not have grey eyes or a wan complexion, indeed she was black; but she gave the new night-watchman a kindly appraisal. “Lord love a duck,” she said, “you look liverish, young man [Duiker was in his forties] - let me make you a nice cup of tea.” She dug into her ample bosom and fished out two tea bags; then she made a bee-line for the kettle.

Chapter Two

       A Curious Thing

      The poet, I suppose, might have called it a felt thought, though in Duiker’s case, the immediacy of the experience had more to do with the sipping of strong, milky tea than, say, the odour of a rose. Call it, if you like, the running together of blood, imagination, and intellect; call it undissociated sensibility; call it an intellectual and emotional complex presenting itself in an instant of time. Play the tautology game. It was on their third, deeply satisfying sips of Brooke Bond (tagless) that Nothando Grommet and Duiker Berry had their sensibilities modified. In one voice of recognition they cried, “Patience!/Mr Duiker!” In one move they were in each other’s arms. She began to ululate, softly, against his neck, and the tear that ran down the side of her nose, skirted her mouth, and disappeared in the vicinity of her chin, was his.

      She never called him “Mr Duiker” again, and he called her “Patience” only a few more times. Let no one deny the influence for good of a strong cup of tea. In a moment, which can only be called epiphanic, the duality of servant and master was transformed into the unity of friends, companions, fellow Zimbabweans. It took more than one cup of tea, and more than one ginger snap, a packet of which Mrs Grommet produced from the capacious pocket of her apron, for them to tell their respective stories.

      Nothando Sibanda had been the “town” wife of Aaron,

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