Warlight(10)

During the silence of the staggered meal breaks, there was a different atmosphere. One or two sat on a hard chair for the thirty-minute lunch, with the rest of us on the floor. Then the anecdotes about sex began, where words like “quim” were used—and which involved sisters or brothers or mothers of best friends who seduced and educated youthful boys and youthful girls with a generosity and lack of ownership most of them would never witness in real life. The drawn-out, careful lessons of intercourse in all its varieties, described by Mr. Nkoma, a remarkable man who had a scar on his cheek, took the whole lunch break, and I would end up washing dishes and pots for the rest of the afternoon, barely recovering from what I had heard. And if, with luck, Mr. Nkoma was working beside me at Sink One the next day or the day after, the plot—like a long, intricate serial of my new friend’s youth—would continue with a further sexual episode. He was describing a universe of charms, with all the time in the world and with seemingly absent husbands as well as the absence of children. The young Mr. Nkoma had enjoyed piano lessons with a Mrs. Rafferty and, as if to climax the whole of his apparently fictional storytelling, late one afternoon when some twelve of us were decorating the stage in a banquet room for the night’s upcoming event, Mr. Nkoma rolled a stool over to the piano and sat down to play a luxurious melody while we worked. It lasted ten minutes and everyone became still. There was no singing, just his educated hands riffling the keys in a sultry and wise way, so it was impossible not to be thereby amazed at the truth of what we had thought were his earlier fictions. And when he finished he sat there for half a minute and eventually closed the piano quietly as if that in itself was the end of the story, the truth or proof of it, of what Mrs. Rafferty in the town of Ti Rocher, four thousand miles from Piccadilly Circus, had taught him.

What did that glimpse of storytelling do to the boy I was? When I think of those episodes it is not the forty-six-year-old Mr. Nkoma with his scar I see, but Harry Nkoma, a boy, as I was then, when Mrs. Rafferty made him a tall glass of soursop, told him to sit down, and asked a series of quiet questions about what he wished to do with his life. For I believe that if anything was invented, it was just the graphic paragraphs of sex that he described so freely to his small lunchtime audience, the older man’s knowledge from his later life most likely layered on top of a more innocent youth. The truth was in the boy, scarred or perhaps still unscarred, who came with two other delivery boys to Mrs. Rafferty’s house, where she had said to him on that first meeting, “You go to the same school as my son, don’t you?” and Harry Nkoma had said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“And what do you wish to do with your life?” He was looking out of the window, not really paying attention to her. “I would like to be in a band. Play the drums.”

“Oh,” she said, “anyone can play the drums. No, you should learn the piano.”

“She was so beautiful,” I still recall Harry Nkoma saying, describing to us all, with a novel-like skill, her coloured dress, her thin bare feet, the slim dark toes, and the pale paint on those nails. All those years later he remembered that clear line of muscle in her arm. So without any disbelief I fell in love, as Harry Nkoma had, with this woman who simply knew how to speak to a youth, taking her time to listen and think about what he had said, or what she was going to say, pausing, bringing something from the fridge, all of that leading, according to Harry’s grown-up tale, to a preparation for those sexual stories none of us could have imagined or was prepared for as we sat on the floor by the sinks at the Criterion, while Mr. Nkoma sat above us, on one of the two available chairs.

He said her hands felt like leaves on him. After he had come in her—this curious and startling act of magic—her palms had brushed his hair back from his face until his heart stopped speeding. It felt like every nerve was finally stilled. He became aware she had most of her clothes on. In the end it had all been hurried, there had been no uncertainty or torment. Then she slowly undressed, then bent sideways so she could lick the last drop from him. They bathed by an outdoor tap. She poured three or four buckets of water onto his skull and it coursed down, his body suddenly aimless. She raised the bucket and the water fell along her body and she slipped her hand down within the run of it to clean herself. “You can play concerts in other parts of the world,” she said, later, during another afternoon. “Would you like to do that?”

“Yes.”

“Then I shall teach you.”

I sat silent on the floor, listening to this fairness of sharing I already knew existed nowhere else in the world, which could occur only in dreams.

In the trolley hall, between the kitchen and the service lifts that rose to Banquet Level, a game of Scratch Ball took place. Whatever stage an anecdote had reached, whatever tiredness existed among the staff, the last ten minutes of our lunch were given over to two teams of five, who charged each other in the rectangle of uncarpeted concrete that was six feet across. Scratch Ball was not so much the skill of passing or running as it was of balance and brute force, where you heaved the scrum of your team forward, all your fury seeming more furious because it had to be done in silence. No verbal damnation, grunts, or yells of pain to betray the anarchy of what was happening in the trolley hall, like old silent footage of a riot. The squeak of shoes, the sound of falling bodies, was all that gave away our lawlessness. Then we lay there, breathing heavily, got up and went back to work. Mr. Nkoma and I returned to the large sinks, thrust fragile glasses into the rotating bristles, and tossed them a half-second later into boiling water so the person drying would pluck them free as they bounced back up and stack them. We could do over a hundred glasses in fifteen minutes. Plates and cutlery took longer but for now someone else was doing that, and it was just Harry Nkoma and I with our recent lunchtime anecdotes subsiding into what felt like needed sleep, where they belonged naturally. There was only the great noise of the kitchen in our ears, the taps gushing out water, the huge wet brushes humming in front of us.