On the third day I really lost patience with him and told him a few harsh things about fighting a war of survival, calling to my aid more or less the rhetoric for which his radio scripts were famous. “Fuck your war! Fuck your survival!” he shouted at me. All the same he got better soon afterwards and suitably shamefaced. Then I relented somewhat myself and began privately to make serious inquiries about sugar on his behalf.
Another friend at the Directorate told me about a certain Father Doherty who lived ten miles away and controlled Caritas relief stores for the entire district. A well-known and knowing Roman Catholic, my friend, he warned me that Father Doherty, though a good and generous man, was apt to be somewhat unpredictable and had become particularly so lately since a shrapnel hit him in the head at the airport.
Cletus and I made the journey on the following Saturday and found Father Doherty in a reasonably good mood for a man who had just spent six nights running at the airport unloading relief planes in pitch darkness under fairly constant air bombardment and getting home at seven every morning to sleep for two hours. He waved our praises aside saying he only did it on alternate weeks. “After tonight I can have my beauty sleep for seven whole days.”
His sitting-room reeked of stockfish, powdered milk, powdered egg yolk and other relief odours which together can make the air of a place uninhalable. Father Doherty rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand and said what could he do for us. But before either of us could begin he got up sleepily and reached for a big thermos flask atop an empty bookcase harbouring just one tiny crucifix, and asked if we cared for coffee. We said yes thinking that in this very home and citadel of Caritas whose very air reeked solid relief one could be sure that coffee would mean with sugar and milk. And I thought too that we were doing excellently with Father Doherty and set it down to our earlier politic admiration of his dedication and courage in the service of our people, for although he had seem
ed to wave it aside, judicious praise (if not flattery) was still a weapon which even saints might be vulnerable to. He disappeared into a room and brought back three mean-looking fading-blue plastic cups and poured the coffee, a little on his little finger first, into the cups apologising for the incompetence of his old flask.
I began politely to swallow mine and watched Cletus with the corner of my eye. He took a little birdlike sip and held it in his mouth.
Now, what could he do for us, asked Father Doherty again covering three quarters of an enormous yawn with the back of his hand. I spoke up first. I had a problem with hay fever and would like some antihistamine tablets if he had any in stock. “Certainly,” he said, “most certainly. I have the very thing for you. Father Joseph has the same complaint, so I always keep some.” He disappeared again and I could hear him saying: “Hay fever, hay fever, hay fever” like a man looking for a title in a well-stocked bookshelf, and then: “There we are!” Soon he emerged with a small bottle. “Everything here is in German,” he said, studying the label with a squint. “Do you read German?”
“No.”
“Nor do I. Try making one thrice daily and see how you feel.”
“Thank you, Father.”
“Next!” he said jovially.
His short absence to get the tablets had enabled Cletus to transfer most of the coffee from his cup to his mouth and, moving smartly to the low window behind him and putting out his neck, disgorge it quickly outside.
“Name your wish. Joost wun wish, remember,” said Father Doherty, now really gay.
“Father,” said Cletus almost solemnly, “I need a little sugar.”
I had been worrying since we got here how he was going to put that request across, what form of words he would use. Now it came out so pure and so simple like naked truth from the soul. I admired him for that performance for I knew I could never have managed it. Perhaps Father Doherty himself had unconsciously assisted by lending the circumstance, albeit jovially, a stark mythological simplicity. If so he now demolished it just as quickly and thoroughly as a capricious child might kick back into sand the magic castle he had just created. He seized Cletus by the scruff of his neck and shouting “Wretch! Wretch!” shoved him outside. Then he went for me; but I had already found and taken another exit. He raved and swore and stamped like a truly demented man. He prayed God to remember this outrage against His Holy Ghost on Judgement Day. “Sugar! Sugar!! Sugar!!!” he screamed in hoarse crescendo. Sugar when thousands of God’s innocents perished daily for lack of a glass of milk! Worked up now beyond endurance by his own words he rushed out and made for us. And there was nothing for it but run, his holy imprecations ringing in our ears.
We spent a miserable, tongue-tied hour at the road-junction trying to catch a lift back to Amafo. In the end we walked the ten miles again but now in the withering, heat and fear of midday air raid.
That was one story that Cletus presumably wanted me to tell to celebrate our first tea party. How could I? I couldn’t see it as victory in retrospect, only as defeat. And there were many, the ugliest yet to come.
Not long after our encounter with Father Doherty I was selected by the Foreign Affairs people “to go on a mission.” Although it was a kind of poor man’s mission lasting just a week and taking me no farther than the offshore Portuguese island of São Tomé I was nevertheless overjoyed because abroad was still abroad and I had never stepped out of Biafra since the war began—a fact calculated to dismiss one outright in the opinion of his fellows as a man of no consequence, but more important, which meant that one never had a chance to bask in the glory of coming back with those little amenities that had suddenly become marks of rank and good living, like bath soap, a towel, razor blades, etc.
On the last day before my journey, close friends and friends not so close, mere acquaintances and even complete strangers and near enemies came to tell me their wishes. It had become a ritual, almost a festival whose ancient significance was now buried deep in folk-memory. Some lucky fellow was going on a mission to an almost mythical world long withdrawn beyond normal human reach where goods abounded still and life was safe. And everyone came to make their wishes. And to every request the lucky one answered: “I will try, you know the problem …”
“Oh yes I know, but just try …” No real hope, no obligation or commitment.
Occasionally, however, a firm and serious order was made when one of the happier people came. For this, words were superfluous. Just a slip of paper with “foreign exchange” pinned to it. Some wanted salt which was entirely out because of the weight. Many wanted underwear for themselves or their girls and some wretch even ordered contraceptives which I told him I assumed was for office (as against family) planning, to the great amusement of my crowd. I bustled in and out of my room gaily with my notepaper saying: “Joost wun wish!”
Yes, near enemies came too. Like our big man across the road, a one-time Protestant clergyman they said, now unfrocked, a pompous ass if ever there was one, who had early in the war wangled himself into the venal position of controlling and dispensing scarce materials imported by the government, especially women’s fabrics. He came like a Nichodemus as I was about to turn in. I wouldn’t have thought he knew the likes of us existed. But there he came nodding in his walk like an emir on horseback and trailing the aroma of his Erinmore tobacco. He wondered if I could buy him two bottles of a special pomade for dying grey hair and held out a five-dollar bill. This was the wretch who once asked my girlfriend when she went to file an application to buy a bra to spend a weekend with him in some remote village!
By forgoing lunch daily in São Tomé I was able at the end of the week to save up from my miserable allowance enough foreign exchange to buy myself a few things including those antihistamine tablets (for I had abandoned in our hasty retreat the bottle that Father Doherty gave me). For Cletus—and this gave me the greatest happiness of all—I bought a tin of Lipton’s tea and two half-pound packets of sugar. Imagine then my horrified fury when one of the packets was stolen on my arrival home at the airport while (my eyes turned momentarily away from my baggage) I was put through make-believe immigration. Perhaps if that packet had not been stolen Cletus might have been spared the most humiliating defeat that sugar was yet to inflict on him.
Mercy came to see him (and me) the day I returned from São Tomé. I had a tablet of Lux soap for her and a small tube of hand cream. She was ecstatic.
“Would you like some tea?” asked Cletus.
“Oh yes,” she said in her soft, purring voice. “Do you have tea? Great! And sugar too! Great! Great! I must take some.”
I wasn’t watching but I think she thrust her hand into the opened packet of sugar and grabbed a handful and was about to put it into her handbag. Cletus dropped the kettle of hot water he was bringing in and pounced on her. That I saw clearly. For a brief moment she must have thought it was some kind of grotesque joke. I knew it wasn’t and in that moment I came very near to loathing him. He seized her hand containing the sugar and began to prize it open, his teeth clenched.
“Stop it, Cletus!” I said.
“Stop, my arse,” he said. “I am sick and tired of all these grab-grab girls.”
“Leave me alone,” she cried, sudden tears of anger and shame now running down her face. Somehow she succeeded in wrenching her hand free. Then she stepped back and threw the sugar full in his face, snatched her handbag and ran away, crying. He picked up the sugar, about half-a-dozen cubes.