Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [127]
‘Get out?’ Owen laughed on a rising note. ‘Where to? All my capital is sunk here. I cannot return a pauper, they do not welcome prodigal sons. No, I am caught here, seven degrees above the line, three thousand miles from my native seat.’ He laughed again briefly and licked slowly and carefully round his mouth. ‘I am hoping for an upturn in trade,’ he said in low tones. ‘Before the Porra Man gets me, eh, Mr Paris?’
It was Paris’s private view that fever and rum would find Owen first; but he was relieved to see the expression of weak jocularity that had come now to his host’s face. ‘I was something of a Porra Man myself, in England,’ he said, not knowing quite what he meant, wanting to keep Owen in this lighter mood.
In this he succeeded. The factor had come round full circle and was disposed to sodden laughter now. The notion of this rather gangling, crease-faced guest of his lurking and screeching was one he found very risible. And it was on this note of mirth and restored amity that the two men parted for the night, Owen unsteadily to his bedroom, where the Kru woman had lain asleep some hours already, Paris to the small guest room at the end of the house, with its bunk bed and net canopy and its own door on to the verandah.
Here he lay for a long time sleepless, in spite of the drink, thinking of the diseased slave woman and the voracious, mud-coloured crabs creeping up from the river, and of the extraordinary ramifications of this trade in human creatures. Fumbling in his mind for some grasp of the complex chain of transactions between the capture of a negro and the purchase of a new cravat by Erasums Kemp, his cousin, or the giving of a supper party by his uncle, he thought he heard again that distant pattering sound of surf or drums. There were occasional cries of night birds. Some time during the night he thought he heard the mutter of voices and afterwards groans that might have been caused by love or nightmare. Finally he fell into a troubled sleep, only to be brought awake again, not much after dawn, by the need to void his bladder.
He dressed and passed out on to the verandah and from there to the side of the house that was nearest to him. There was a chill in the air but no breath of wind. A thin mist lay over the compound and the shrub beyond it. There were sleeping forms under brightly coloured blankets in the lean-to where the woman had sat winding her thread.
Paris passed behind the house, avoided approaching too near the barracoon, which was silent and partly shrouded in mist, and urinated against the far side of a low shed near the edge of the clearing. In the immediate, mildly scalding pleasure of the discharge, he noticed nothing; but as he buttoned himself and prepared to return he became aware of a smell of animal decomposition, cold, dank, quite unmistakable. It did not come, as he thought at first, from within the forest, but from immediately before him, from inside the shed. He hesitated briefly then advanced his face to peer through the splintered plank. In rapid review, in the seconds before recoil, he saw three naked bodies, bloodstreaked and dreadfully staring, one bigger than the others, on its back, a big-featured face he knew, despite the blood-filled sockets where the eyes had been, a mounded belly the colour of dry clay, incongrously soft and smooth-looking, with a smear of red on it like a cattle brand. Flies had found them out, even thus early – he saw the gauzy glint of wings. One outflung hand had a thumb missing. He remembered the men who had held up their hands and grinned … As though reinforced by this recognition, the smell grew denser, sickening. Paris went back as though pursued across the clearing. He thought he heard a faint rattling from the barracoon. Glancing up he saw two vultures, heads settled on necks, asleep on the ridge-pole.
Later, at breakfast, he said nothing of his discovery to Owen, who was sick-looking and uncommunicative this morning, though he produced coffee for his guest from a carefully hoarded store,