The Tomorrow-Tamer (23 page)

Tetteh paused.

“On that remembered night,” he said, “I first was setting my eyes upon my pure diamond man.”

 

The small chop-bar was crowded that evening. Tetteh had to work his way around the drinkers, around the bumping and
shuffling boys and their high-heeled girls who had to dance even here. Tetteh paid for one glass of beer and carried it high above his head to avoid spilling any of it. The only vacant chair was at a table beside an open window. With every tweak of breeze, the light curtain lifted and the city scents of night fluttered and spun in–the salt sea, peppery soups, heat, bodies, dust, and peeled oranges the roadside stalls sold. Tetteh sat down and sipped his beer slowly. He did not notice the man sitting beside him at the table, until the other spoke, to himself but aloud.

“Sickening.”

Tetteh turned. The voice was distinctly English. Europeans did not often patronize the chop-bars. The man was young, with yellow hair plastered flat to his scalp with perspiration. His face was long, his hazel eyes large and despondent. He wore a white linen suit, and on the table beside him lay a piece of headgear long fallen from fashion here–a solar topee. Tetteh leaned towards him.

“Excuse me. You are not finding this drink suitable for your delicate stomach?”

“What?” said the stranger. “Oh, I see. No, you misunderstand. I was referring to the dancers. The way they're dancing, you know, and the music. Calypso. Highlife. Just cheap jazz, really, nothing else.”

The chop-bar proprietor cranked the handle of the gramophone and put on another record.

 

I gev my money to my wife

For mek me chop–

Time I come back from beezniz

My wife run away.

 

“So,” Tetteh said, smiling his annoyance, “highlife is not for you. Then why do you stay?”

The European sighed and ordered another gin.

“You don't see the point, do you? You're like all the rest. Selling your birthright for a mess of gramophone records.”

Tetteh opened wide his eyes and clenched his fists.

“How is that again, please?”

But the stranger only waved a weary hand and drank half his gin-and-tonic at a gulp.

“Don't be offended. And don't for heaven's sake expect me to fight you. You look rather undernourished, I must say, but I don't doubt you could win. I never fought anyone in my life, and I most certainly don't intend to begin now. No–all I meant was that I'm disappointed. Sleazy nylon shirts. Pidgin English–a depravity, if I may say so. This highlife caper. Signs advertising political meetings and anti-malarial pills. All of it so dreary. The Lord knows England is drab enough. I thought it would be different here.”

“What you think to see in this place?” Tetteh enquired unpleasantly. “Men with big spears and wearing maybe one banana leaf?”

“You may not believe it,” the stranger said, “but I've read extensively about the structure of tribal society here. Always had a personal interest in this country, owing to my family's finances. Your ancient culture had a weird magnificence about it–witchfinders' dance, festivals of the dead, offerings to the river gods, the medicine man's phenomenal sense of the dramatic. To me, those things constitute the true Africa. What's more, it still exists. But how to discover it? That's the maddening part. I've been in villages, but people clam up so. I found one revolting crone who purported to be a fetish priestess, but she turned out to be only another Bible spinner. Stabbed
verses with a meat skewer. Didn't read them, of course–gave them to her clients, to swallow like pills. Universal cure-all. Grotesque–one should be grateful–but hardly African. It's the pure customs which interest me, not these dilutions.”

Tetteh looked at the other man curiously.

“Those old ways–why you like them so greatly?”

“I told you,” the white man said in his gentle voice. “They have a terrifying splendour.”

“I hear you,” Tetteh said, shrugging, “but I do not say your words are staying in my ear. What was bringing you here, anyway?”

“Sorry. Ought to have introduced myself sooner. I'm Philip Hardacre. Ever heard of the Hardacre Mine? Diamonds. My grandfather discovered it and leased the mineral rights, crafty old bastard. Family felt I ought to visit the place, I can't think why.”

Tetteh whistled. “Diamonds–in your own hands, all those diamonds.”

Hardacre smiled tiredly. “They ought to belong to you–I suppose that's what you're thinking. Don't fret, your government will find a way of getting them back one of these days. You could have the whole bloody lot as far as I'm concerned. All I ever wanted was to become an anthropologist, but of course the family wouldn't hear of it.”

Tetteh regarded Hardacre thoughtfully and with a new interest. It seemed to him that the white man's linen suit was covered with miniature lights, and the lights were diamonds, and the diamonds pierced at Tetteh's eyes and shone in a blaze of stars.

“Those bush people you mention,” he said offhandedly. “I am remembering one small village which is known to me, very deep in the bush. No proper road there, and no one
entering that place unless with greatest difficulty. In that village of Gyakrom is one old man who owns some very strong ju-ju, or so I heard it. He is priest for some python god, and is calling frequently many pythons out of their forest. You are acquainted with pythons? No poison, but they strangle. Yet for this old man they never strangle. At all.”

Hardacre dropped his bored expression. “Look here, are you serious?”

“In my life I am never more serious than this moment.”

He would need a few days, Tetteh stipulated, to convince the ju-ju man of Gyakrom, for such practitioners of magic were well known for their reluctance to perform before the eyes of foreigners. With the proper observances to the god, however, the matter could be arranged. Hardacre contributed willingly enough the funds for palm-wine libation, but when it came to Tetteh's fee he showed an unexpected tendency to haggle. Tetteh remained firm.

“Myself, I would not walk even one step for such a thing. If I see this man for you, then you must pay. Fifty pounds–for you this is not such an amount.”

Hardacre yielded at last. The night was balmy and the streets nearly deserted when the two of them ambled out of the now-peaceful Paradise Chop-Bar. Hardacre placed his solar topee on his flat pale hair.

“I'm a bit squiffed. Hope I shan't regret this tomorrow.”

“At all!” cried Tetteh. “I tell you, it was Luck brought you to me.”

He toasted with an imaginary glass the unseen presence.

“I thank you, Uncle,” he said.

 

At daybreak, after three hours' sleep, Tetteh boarded a mammy-lorry. He was wearing his best clothes. He would
not appear in his village in anything less. His trousers were a little threadbare, but well pressed and still recognizably grey flannel. His nylon shirt shone in electric orange like a neon light. The other passengers, several dozen of them, sat or crouched or perilously clung at the back of the lorry, amid the sacks of sugar and crates of yellow soap. But Tetteh paid the extra and rode beside the driver. The mammy-lorry was green and lustrous as a mango leaf; and it had KING KONG painted on the front and GOD SAVE SOULS on the back.

“The old road, Kofi, into Gyakrom,” Tetteh said, “what is it like now?”

The driver laughed. “Gone. It is gone. Fallen into the river. Grown over with vines and mangrove. What do you care about the old road?”

But Tetteh only smiled and donned his sun-glasses, which he never wore except when he visited Gyakrom, and generously offered the driver a cigarette.

The village faced the river and was surrounded on the other three sides by forest, a heavy green wall of palms and ferns and small thorny bushes, all tangled and matted together like snarled hair or cats' fur full of burrs. The marketplace was still crowded when the lorry pulled up, although it was almost dusk. The driver shouted, and a swarm of small dust-silvered boys ran to help him unload the sugar and soap.

Tetteh, ignoring the market and its people, flew out of the lorry like a locust spreading his orange wings, and made for home. It was a hut like any other, mud plastered over woven sticks and thatched with palm boughs. Tetteh's brother Kwaame was outside. He was a powerfully built man, and although he was two years younger than Tetteh, he always seemed older, for it was he who had stayed home to help with
the cocoa farm, and his face already bore an enclosed and habitually worried expression.

“Tetteh!” Kwaame looked up. “You are in trouble?”

Light-limbed, Tetteh capered and twirled, his shirt glittering in the last frail sunlight. He clapped his hands, whistled like a tree toad, moved his shoulders and narrow hips to a highlife beat.

“No! No trouble. Money. Money, money, money. We are going to be rich.”

Tetteh's mother appeared in the doorway, a large and heavy woman wearing a dark blue cloth patterned with trees that branched fantastically like sea-coral.

“Tetteh! It is really you!” Tears came immediately to her eyes. She spread her arms and gathered Tetteh in like a slip of driftwood to some great shore. Then she held him away at arm's length, scrutinized and scolded him.

“Why do you not come home more often? Your bones show–do you never eat at all in that place, that city? It wounds my heart to see you.”

“I am a boy born to wound his mother's heart,” Tetteh said cheerfully, putting his arm around her waist and leading her into the hut. “See how thin you are growing with worry.”

Tetteh's father was inside. He scowled and blinked his eyes when he saw his son.

“You! What has made the paramount chief honour us with his presence? I thought you had forgotten where Gyakrom was.”

“Welcome me, papa.”

“All right,” the old man grumbled. “I welcome you, then. Here–what are you doing with those, Tetteh?”

Tetteh had begun busily collecting an assortment of
objects and placing them outside the hut door. Three blue saucepans; a headpan and basin of Japanese manufacture, enamelled with peacocks and gigantic peonies; half a dozen tin spoons; a hurricane lantern; two shaky rush-bottomed chairs which had been purchased cheaply from an impecunious merchant twenty years ago; a gilt-tasselled white satin pillow bearing the elephant and palm insignia of the old Gold Coast Regiment; three china saucers with the cups missing, embellished with Biblical scenes and given to Tetteh's mother in the distant past by some missionary's wife at whose confident knock the gates of heaven had no doubt long since opened wide; Tetteh's baptismal certificate from Saint Sebastian Mission, with a floral border of forget-me-nots; a green glass vase cracked at the bottom; a third of a bottle of De Kuyper's Dutch gin; a box of Blood Purifying Pills; a large alarm clock; and, finally, a small gramophone which lacked a handle and which only Kwaame, who had a mechanical flair, could ingeniously wind with a piece of wire and a twig.

“Are you mad?” Tetteh's father cried. “Put them down at once. Does my own son rob me?”

“Please, papa, trust me. I am not taking them far. They will be looked after. It is only for a few days. Come here, Kwaame. I need you. You must get the boys busy, all the boys in the village. A python hunt. Two shillings for a dead, five for a living one. You'll do it?”

Kwaame hesitated, then his laughter boomed through the hut. Not so much happened in Gyakrom, and Tetteh had the ability to make life eventful.

“For you, madman, I will do whatever you say, this once. But why?”

Tetteh half-closed his eyes.

“We are going to play a game,” he said. “It is called Casting Nets For The Diamond Fish. Listen, and I will tell you.”

 

Tetteh pulled up the rented lorry in front of his father's dwelling. Philip Hardacre climbed out, groaned, cautiously felt his limbs for possible dislocations, and vainly attempted to brush off his white linen suit which was covered with a fine powdering of red dust and a number of black oil smears from the lorry.

“Oh, my Lord,” he said, “I can hardly move. No wonder the village is isolated. I've never seen such a road in my life. I swear I thought we weren't going to make it, Tetteh.”

Kwaame bounded around the corner of the hut. He appeared to be clad only in a leopard skin, although in fact he wore his loincloth unobtrusively beneath it, for decency. Tetteh recognized the pelt. It had hung in Opoku the Drummer's hut for as long as he could remember, and was in consequence slightly bald in patches, for the fur had been nibbled at by cockroaches throughout the years. On his head Kwaame wore a gazelle skull with one horn missing and small red feathers stuffed into the eye sockets. He brandished his machete, newly-sharpened, within a few inches of Hardacre's face, and the Englishman drew back.

“My word, he doesn't look very friendly.”

“He is a tempered person,” Tetteh agreed, “but you he will not harm. He is the ju-ju man's helper.”

He grasped Hardacre's elbow and took him inside the dwelling. The room was bare of furniture–not so much as a stool. A pile of calabashes and earthen pots stood beside the door. The hut had been decorated by Kwaame, following Tetteh's instructions. Strings of bush-rat bones and chicken
feet were festooned across the room. Large bunches of leaves and grass, dotted with pellets of clay, hung from the thatched roof. Several wooden clubs stood in one corner, with feathers and clusters of cowrie shells tied around them. Hardacre sank down onto a grass mat.

“What's the significance of the leaves, Tetteh?”

“Magical medicine,” Tetteh said sternly. “Do not touch, please. Special for the gods of this house.”

“Perhaps the old man will be kind enough to elaborate on the question of the household gods,” Hardacre said, “and their connection with the broader tribal deities. The relationship of gods, of course, mirrors the structure of the extended family group. I wish I didn't have such a rotten headache. What a ghastly ride that was. Good heavens, who's this?”