Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [244]
One of Inchebe’s great strengths in argument – and it was one peculiarly infuriating to Billy – was that he never sought to persuade. He radiated always a placid, unassertive confidence of being in the right. ‘What you b’lieve you business,’ he said. ‘I tellin’ trut.’
Both men were somewhat out of temper. They had spent most of the day trying to shoot turkey in the swamps without any success, stumbling and slipping in pursuit of that most wily and sagacious of birds, making gobbling noises in the vain hope of drawing one to them. All they had got were two small squirrels, hardly enough for a stew. In such situations they each tended to lay the blame on the other. They were in any case on terms of exasperated familiarity owing to the fact that they shared the same woman. Sallian Kivee had grown very fat and had never been a beauty, but she was a good-tempered woman, very faithful by nature and an excellent cook. She had been content for ten years now with these two.
‘I hear you talkin’ bigmowf Dinka Meri,’ Billy said, ‘say her you got rainstone, make yourself out big rainman.’
Inchebe returned no answer to this, merely gazing around him with his small, bright eyes. Billy too was silent for a while, as if baffled. Of late years a habit of suspended consciousness had grown in him. At any time, when he was alone or with others or even, as now, in the midst of argument, there would come a certain kind of hush over things, everything before him would seem fixed somehow, arrested. Accompanying this was a kind of perplexity at the strangeness, the ultimate illogicality, of his being where he was. He felt this now as he looked away towards the first huts of the settlement. Only the sloping thatches of the roofs were visible from here; the rest was concealed behind the stockade of palm logs that encircled the whole area. He and Inchebe were standing outside this, lower down, on a track that led through thin forest. Some children were playing together up against the stockade and two women stood talking nearby. Beyond them, in the distance, he saw the hulking form of Libby go past, carrying what looked like fencing for a fish trap. Probably on some errand for Kireku, he thought with faint contempt. ‘Dinka never go b’lieve you,’ he said. ‘She not born yestaday, she sabee you jus’ tryin’ git you leg over.’
Inchebe was unmoved. ‘I not born yestaday, neever. I sabee you tryin’ git you leg over.’
Dinka was young, twenty-two or three, it was computed, tall and graceful, scornful of smile but melting of eye. She was visited by a man of the Bulum, middle-aged and taciturn, known to everyone by the single name of Amos. But her regular man had failed to return from a fishing trip and was now presumed drowned.
‘You jaloos, Billee,’ Inchebe said. ‘Dat what it is.’
Billy feigned laughter. The floppy brim of his hat nodded up and down. ‘Me jaloos? Dat a good ’un. Ho, ho, look de big ’portant rainman of Africa.’
‘Prentiss man.’
‘What you say?’
‘I prentiss rainman.’
‘Aha!’ Billy’s eyes shone with triumph. ‘Dat a different song,’ he said. ‘Dat not what you tell Dinka.’
At this moment Sullivan came up the track and joined them. He was carrying a palm-fibre basket three-quarters full of freshwater mussels. ‘Well, me brave lads,’ he said. ‘Will you look at this now?’ He took up a handful of mussels and let them slide off his palm into the basket, watching the clattering blue shells with eyes that were hallucinated-looking in the deep tan of his face. Sullivan was a great man for mussels and clams and knew all the best places. Gathering them he was sometimes taken back to his childhood in Galway, foraging for shellfish in the salt recesses of this same ocean.
He was naked except for his deerskin moccasins and a breech-clout of braided palm leaves and he smelled of the fish oil he had rubbed on himself against mosquitoes. His black hair fell almost