The Tomorrow-Tamer (6 page)

Doree put her hands over her face, and Tachie, horrified, looked from one to the other, still unable to grasp the actuality of their despair.

“You no got money–at all? De time wey I come for you shop, I anger too much for you. Now angry can no stay for me. My friend, I sorry. Befoah God, I too sorry. But what I can do?”

“It is not your concern,” Mr. Archipelago said with dignity. “We do not expect you to let us stay. We are not appealing for charity.”

But Tachie could not stop justifying himself.

“I look-a de shop, I see Eur'pean womans all dey gone, I see you no got lucky. But I no savvy propra. I t'ink you got money you put for bank. Now I see wit' my eye you tell me true, you no got nothing. But what I can do? I no be rich man. I got shop, I got dis place. But I got plenty plenty family, all dey come for me, all dey say ‘Tachie, why you no give we more?' My own pickin dey trouble me too much. My daughtah Mercy, she big girl, all time she saying ‘meka you buy for me one small new cloth, meka you buy powdah for face, meka you buy shoe same city girl dey wear it–'”

Mr. Archipelago peered sharply at Tachie.

“Your daughter–facepowder–shoes–she, too, is changed–”
cloth, but her face was thickly daubed with a pale powder that

“I tell you true. Mistah Arch'pelago, why you're looking so?”

The balloon that was Mr. Archipelago suddenly became re-inflated. He began to spin on one foot, whistled a Viennese waltz, bounced across the room, grasped Doree's hand, drew her into his comprehension and his laughter. Together they waltzed, absurd, relieved, triumphant.

“Mr. Tachie, you are a bringer of miracles!” Mr. Archipelago cried. “There it was, all the time, and we did not see it. We, even we, Doree, will make history–you will see.”

Tachie frowned, bewildered.

“I see it happen so, for white men, wen dey stay too long for dis place. Dey crez'. Mistah Arch'pelago, meka you drink some small beer. Den you head he come fine.”

“No, no, not beer,” Mr. Archipelago replied, puffing out his waistcoat. “Here–a flask kept for medicinal purposes or special celebrations. A brandy, Mr. Tachie! A brandy for the history-makers!”

He and Doree laughed until they were weak. And Tachie, still not understanding, but pleased that they were in some lunatic fashion pleased, finally laughed with them and consented to drink the unpaid-for brandy.

That evening they painted the new sign. They worked until midnight, with tins and brushes spread out on the dining-room table, while Brasso and Silvo squawked and stared. The sign was black and gilt, done in optimistically plump lettering:

 

ARCHIPELAGO & DOREE

Barbershop

All-Beauty Salon

African Ladies A Speciality

 

The men of the town continued, not unnaturally, to have their hair cut by the African barbers who plied their trade under the
niim
tree in the market. The African women, however, showed great interest in the new sign. They gathered in little groups and examined it. The girls who had attended school read the words aloud to their mothers and aunts. They murmured together. Their laughter came in soft gusts, like the sound of the wind through the casuarina branches. But not one of them would enter the shop.

Several times Mr. Archipelago saw faces peeping in at the window, scrutinizing every detail of the room. But as soon as he looked, the curious ones lowered their eyes and quickly walked away.

The hair-straightening equipment (obtained secondhand, and on credit, through Tachie) remained unused. Each day Doree dusted and set back on the counter the unopened packets and jars of dusky powder and cinnamon-brown make-up base which she had hurriedly ordered from the city when she discovered that the Africa Star Chemists, slightly behind the times, sold only shades of ivory and peach.

Another week, and still no customers. Then one morning, as Mr. Archipelago was opening his second bottle of Dutch ale, Mercy Tachie walked in.

“Please, Mr. Archipelago–” she began hesitantly. “I am thinking to come here for some time, but I am not sure what I should do. We have never had such a place in our town before, you see. So all of us are looking, but no one wishes to be the first. Then my father, he said to me today that I should be the first, because if you are having no customers, he will never be getting his money from you.”

Mercy was about sixteen. She was clad in traditional cloth, but her face was thickly daubed with a pale powder that
obscured her healthy skin. She stood perfectly still in the centre of the room, her hands clasped in front of her, her face expressionless. Mr. Archipelago looked in admiration at the placidity of her features, a repose which he knew concealed an extreme nervousness and perhaps even panic, for in her life there had not been many unfamiliar things. He motioned her to a chair, and she sat down woodenly.

“Good,” he said. “Doree and I welcome you. Now–can you help us to know, a little, the way you want to look?”

Mercy's splendid eyes were blank no longer; they turned to him appealingly.

“I would like to look like a city girl, please,” Mercy Tachie said. “That is what I would like the most.”

“A city girl–” Mr. Archipelago ran a finger lightly over the chalky powder on her face. “That is why you wear this mask, eh? Ladies never know when they are beautiful–strange. They must be chic–God is not a good enough craftsman. Fortunate, I suppose, for us. Ah well. Yes, we will make you look like a city girl, if that is what you would like the most.”

Confused by his sigh and smile, Mercy felt compelled to explain herself.

“I was going for seven years to the mission school here, you see, and all my life I am never knowing any place outside this town. But someday, maybe, I will be living in some big place, and if so, I would not want to feel like a bushgirl. So I wish to know how it is proper to have my hair, and what to do for the face. You do not think I am foolish?”

Mr. Archipelago shook his head.

“I think the whole world is foolish,” he said. “But you are no more foolish than anyone else, and a great deal less so than many.”

Doree, who felt his reply to be unsatisfactory, placed her splay-hands on the girl's dark wiry hair.

“Not to worry,” she said. “We'll straighten your hair just enough to set it and style it. We'll take that goop off your face. You got lovely skin–not a wrinkle–you shouldn't cover it up like that. We'll give you a complete make-up job. Doll, you'll be a queen.”

And Mercy Tachie, her eyes trusting, smiled.

“Do you think so? Do you really think it will be so?”

The air was redolent once more with the potions and unguents, the lotions and shampoos and lacquers, the nostril-pinching pungency of ammonia and the fragrance of bottled colognes. The snik-snik-snik of Mr. Archipelago's scissors was the theme of a small-scale symphony; overtones and undertones were provided by the throb of the dryer and the strident blues-chanting of Doree as she paced the room like a priestess. Mercy began to relax.

“My friends, they also would like to come here, I think, if they like the way I will look,” she confided. “Mr. Archipelago, you will be staying here? You will not be leaving now?”

“Perhaps we will be staying,” he said. “We must wait and see if your friends like the way you look.”

Mercy pursed her lips pensively.

“Will you not go back, someday,” she ventured, “to your own country? For the sake of your family?”

Doree glared, but Mr. Archipelago was bland. He had never minded the curiosity of his lady customers.

“The charming questions,” he said. “They begin again. Good. No–I have no family.”

“Oh, I thought it must be so!” Mercy cried.

“I beg your pardon?”

Once more she became self-conscious. She folded her hands and looked at the floor.

“I have heard,” she said apologetically, “that you were leaving your own country many years ago because you had some bad trouble–maybe because you thought you might go to prison. But I am never believing that story, truly. Always I think you had some different kind of trouble. My aunt Abenaa, you know, she lost all her family–husband and three children–when their house burned down, and after that she left her village and came to live here, in my father's house, and never again will she go to that village.”

“You think it was that way, for me?” he said.

“I think it–yes.”

Mr. Archipelago straightened his waistcoat over his belly. In his eyes there appeared momentarily a certain sadness, a certain regret. But when he replied, his voice expressed nothing except a faint acceptable tenderness.

“You are kind. Perhaps the kindest of all my ladies.”

At last the ritual was accomplished, and Mercy Tachie looked at herself in the cracked and yellowing wall-mirror. Slowly, she turned this way and that, absorbing only gradually the details–the soft-curled hair whorled skilfully down onto her forehead, the face with its crimson lipstick and its brown make-up that matched her own skin. Then she smiled.

“Oh–” she breathed. “It is just like the pictures I have seen in
Drum
magazine–the girls, African girls, who know how everything is done in the new way. Oh, now I will know, too!”

“Do you think your friends will overcome their shyness now?” Mr. Archipelago asked.

“I will make sure of it,” Mercy promised. “You will see.”

They sat quietly in the shop after Mercy had left. They felt spent and drained, but filled and renewed as well. Doree stretched her long legs and closed her eyes. Mr. Archipelago bulged in his carved rocking-chair, and cradled to and fro peacefully, his shoes off and his waistcoat unbuttoned.

The crash of noise and voices from outside startled them. They ran to the open door. Spilling down the street was an impromptu procession. Every girl in town appeared to be there, hips and shoulders swaying, unshod feet stepping lightly, hands clapping, cloths of blue and magenta and yellow fluttering around them like the flags of nations while they danced. A few of the older women were there, too, buxom and lively, their excited laughter blaring like a melody of raucous horns. At the front of the parade walked Mercy Tachie in new red high-heel shoes, her head held high to display her proud new hair, her new face alight with pleasure and infinite hope. Beside Mercy, as her guard and her champions, there pranced and jittered half a dozen young men, in khaki trousers and brilliantly flower-printed shirts. One held her hand–he was her own young man. Another had a guitar, and another a gourd rattle. They sang at full strength, putting new words to the popular highlife “Everybody Likes Saturday Night”.

 

“Everybody like Mercy Tachie,
Everybody like Mercy Tachie,

Everybody everybody
Everybody everybody

Everybody say she fine pas' all–”

 

Mr. Archipelago turned to Doree. Gravely, they shook hands.

“By an act of Mercy,” Mr. Archipelago said, “we are saved.”

 

They walked along the shore in the moist and cooling late afternoon. The palm boughs rustled soothingly. The sound reminded Mr. Archipelago of taffeta, the gowns of the whispering ladies, twirling forever in a delicate minuet of dust, the ladies watched over by pale and costly marble angels, the dove-grey and undemanding ladies of his insomnia, eternally solacing, eternally ladies.

He watched Doree. She had discovered a blue crab, clownishly walking sideways, a great round crab with red and comic protruding eyes, and she stooped to examine it more carefully, to enjoy its grotesque loveliness. But it did not know that it need not be afraid, so it ran away.

“Archipelago,” Doree said, “now that it's over, and we're here to stay, I guess I oughta tell you.”

“No,” he said. “There is nothing you need tell me.”

“Yes,” she insisted. “You know when you asked me if I could go back, and I said I couldn't? Well, I guess I didn't give you the straight goods, in a way–”

“I know,” Mr. Archipelago said quietly. “There was no troubled past. I have always known that.”

“Have you?” she said, mild-eyed, not really surprised. “How did you know?”

He glanced at her face, at the heavy make-up that covered the ageing features, ravaged and virginal.

“Because,” he replied slowly, “for me it was the same. I, too, had no past. The white ladies and now the brown ladies–they have never guessed. I did not intend that they should. It is not their concern. But we know, Doree, why we are here and why we stay.”

“Yes,” she said, “I guess we do know. I guess we both know that. So we don't need to talk about it any more, do we?”

“No,” he promised. “No more.”

“And whatever happens,” she went on, “even if we go broke, you won't get any more fancy ideas about me finding a better job somewhere else?”

“The new sign–” he reminded her. “Have you forgotten what it says?”

“That's right,” she said. “‘Archipelago & Doree'. Yeh, that's right.”

Mr. Archipelago sniffed the brine-laden wind.

“Smell the sea, Doree? A perfume for our collection.”

She smiled. “What shall we call it?”

“Oh, nothing too ornate,” he said lightly. “Perhaps
eau d'exile
would do.”

The sea spray was bitter and salt, but to them it was warm, too. They watched on the sand their exaggerated shadows, one squat and bulbous, the other bone-slight and clumsily elongated, pigeon and crane. The shadows walked with hands entwined like children who walk through the dark.

 

THE MERCHANT OF HEAVEN

A
cross the tarmac the black-and-orange dragon lizards skitter, occasionally pausing to raise their wrinkled necks and stare with ancient saurian eyes on a world no longer theirs. In the painted light of mid-day, the heat shimmers like molten glass. No shade anywhere. You sweat like a pig, and inside the waiting-room you nearly stifle. The African labourers, trundling baggage or bits of air-freight, work stripped to the waist, their torsos sleek and shining. The airport officials in their white drill uniforms are damp and crumpled as gulls newly emerged from the egg.