Читать книгу The Curse of the Ripe Tomato - John Eppel - Страница 5

Chapter One

We Meet an Old Friend

Duiker Berry had come to the dregs of his drink; he filtered the last of the juice through clenched teeth. Some of the dill seeds slipped through the gap between his incisors. He bit into one and the flavour it released produced an unaccountable wave of nostalgia.

He looked sadly at the empty tin of Carmel dill gherkins, the last of the dozen he had brought with him from Zimbabwe, via South Africa. Now he would have to make do with a local product. Duiker had turned to gherkin brine after renouncing the demon drink - in his case, Castle lager - for religious reasons. Like so many of his compatriots who felt they had lost their reason for being when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, Duiker had knelt, for solace, at the sweetly tapered espadrilles - no socks, mind you - of a most godly young man called Brother Moral MacBraggert, founder of the Blood of Jesus Temple, and known as far afield as Chirundu, Triangle, and Umdidi for the power of healing in his right foot.

Duiker always felt slightly guilty after downing a tin of brine in one sitting. He preferred it chilled but there was no refrigerator in the Security Guard’s room. There was a stove, however - what the English called a cooker - where the day-time guard fried his kippers, the stink of which permeated the entire room. The central heating was uncomfortably warm, and Duiker could not work out how to adjust it to a healthier temperature. It was a passage-like room, so narrow that if Duiker stretched his legs as far as they could go - he gave his company-issue boots a brief appraisal - he could make contact with the opposite wall. It was deep, though, deep enough to accommodate the very long, black, vinyl-covered settee upon which he now sat. Next to the stove was a stainless steel sink with, above it, a little gas-heated geyser, which provided sufficient hot water for Mr Major, the day-time guard, to rinse his tea cup, his utensils, and his frying pan. Next to the sink was a small wooden table which supported an electric kettle and a telephone. It was Duiker’s duty to phone head office every hour, on the hour, and make a brief report. In this way the bastards ensured that he didn’t fall asleep on the job. With his first pay packet Duiker had cunningly bought a cheap alarm clock. This helped him to get in a number of fifty-five minute snoozes on any given night.

The walls were done in an off-pink gloss which reminded Duiker of a plastic doll he had once bought at the Bulawayo Auction Centre because it, in turn, with its swaths of blonde hair, reminded him of a girl he had once loved to distraction, a cousin of his called Rosie. These walls were grimy with the dust of a great city, and slippery with the condensation of whatever it was of Mr Major’s kippers that trended upwards. At the end of the room, sagging like a prolapsed uterus, was a round, baggy curtained window; it looked onto a tarred street, deserted at night, beyond which spread the viscera of semi-industrial London.

Duiker’s factory, which reconditioned the engines of Italian cars, was located in Alperton, a good seven miles from his bed-sit in Earls’ Court. He clocked in at 7p.m. and clocked out at 7a.m. He always expected to meet Mr Major either coming in or going out, but he never did. One of the few things Duiker did know about Mr Major was that he applied some kind of powder - probably for athlete’s jock - to his nether regions. The evidence was there every evening, on the seat of their shared WC: a little drift of white where, presumably, Mr Major’s balls would have nestled. There was a go-between, a Greek Cypriot called Mr Charalambides who had seven languages at his fingertips, and who greeted Duiker every evening and every morning in all seven. Mr Charalambides would give Duiker snippets of news about Mr Major and, no doubt, he gave Mr Major snippets of news about the polite man from Africa who wore a strange garment on his days off called a safari-suit and which quickly earned him the nick-name, Hotpants.

Duiker sighed, not unhappily - now that he and Nothando had made their decision - and got up to throw his gherkin tin into the rubbish bucket which was situated under the sink. There the reek of kippers was at its most intense. Time to do a token patrol of the factory. It had taken him a few weeks to get accustomed to being completely alone for hours in this vast building with all its silent machinery. He had been afraid, more of ghosts than flesh and blood intruders. Irrational for one who did not believe in ghosts, unless you’re talking about the miracle of Christ appearing to his disciples, after the crucifixion. Or Duiker’s old friend, Doc Chinaman. But that was when he had been a child; and now he must put away childish things.

His eyes 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.