Man Belong Mrs Queen by Matthew Baylis

Author:Matthew Baylis [Matthew Baylis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908699657
Publisher: Old Street Publishing
Published: 2013-01-16T11:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

In Which a Sorcerer Finds My Spectacles

AND the rain continued to thunder down like the horsemen of some pitiless army, turning the festival field into a delta and driving all those with no kin in the village into a gnarled old cow shed smaller than my first bedsit. I lay on damp reed mats, drenched and sick, between Siyaka and a powerfully scented gentleman in a Manchester City shirt, all of us packed so tight that to scratch one’s balls required the cooperation of a dozen others.

‘We have many kinds of yams on Tanna pphwt,’ the strong-smelling man intoned happily in between bursts of championship spitting, ‘a purple kind and a hairy kind and pphwt a woman yam and a man yam and a yam that’s almost as tall as you pphwt…’ I nodded weakly, barely taking part in the world around me. The air was thick with the fumes of the kerosene and the slathered-on face paint of the women, who were confined to the other half of the shelter, screened from our view by a hasty arrangement of rice sacks. I was dying.

‘Very bad,’ Siyaka said glumly. ‘The women cannot dance. My wife … very disappointed.’ He picked at something stuck to his beloved radio, his face assuming a hunted look, as if, in a thousand ways, Mrs Siyaka might cause him to be very disappointed too. The mud began to seep through the walls and the Chief of Iapnamal, a very dark, very stooped, very jumpy individual, launched into a Lear-like rant, wading around in the rain and bellowing at the skies. I asked Siyaka what he was saying. ‘He wants to know who did it,’ Siyaka explained. ‘Who has made it rain.’

‘Why are there no pphwt yams in England?’ my neighbour mused, determined the conversation should not meander from its moorings, and equally unconcerned that no one else was joining in. ‘What do you eat?’

Siyaka said it was like the Flood in the Bible. They had their own story about that, he explained. It concerned another of mountain god Kalbaben’s sons, a being called Nasabl. Kalbaben had charged him with protecting Tanna from the rains, so Nasabl had rolled up the island like a leaf, so that it bobbed around upon the stormy waters, but did not sink. Afterwards, when the land was dry, he unrolled the leaf and Kalbaben said he had done well.

‘Nasabl had a white skin,’ Siyaka observed. ‘Like you.’

‘That’s not Nasabl,’ said my other neighbour. ‘That’s Mwatiktik. He lives on the mountain as well, and he’s the god of the gardens and all the yams. He’s not Kalbaben’s son, he’s his brother.’

‘Brother-in-law,’ Siyaka countered.

‘You don’t know anything, Siyaka!’

It was a very male conversation – no different to a pair of Englishmen clashing over the Arsenal line-up. But if anyone’s opinion should be trusted on the matter of this pale-faced yam god, I thought, then it was the man who’d spoken about nothing but yams for the past two hours. It was useful, too.

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