The Male Response

‘After you with the old tribal customs!’ exclaimed the Birmingham man, slapping his hands together and making succulent smacking noises in his cheek. He dug Soames in the ribs. ‘Ever tried a bit of the old tribal customs?’ He lowered his voice confidentially. ‘I had an Arab bint once during the last war. Talk about strong! She got her legs wrapped round me and dug her heels in the small of my back like a human nutcracker. Scared me stiff at first, it did – I was only a youngster in those days.’

‘Quite,’ agreed Soames, feeling enthusiasm was required of him. The Birmingham man was goaded into fresh revelations, so that Wally Brewer and Timpleton leant over to catch what he was saying.

‘I knew a good thing when I found it,’ the engineer boasted. ‘Ah! I was back round there again next evening. “Dig your heels in again, missis,” I said. And she did. Strewth! We’ll be okay if they’re like that in this Umbalathorp, I tell you. She was a nice little bit, that Arab bint. They shave off their pubic hairs before marriage, you know.’

This anthropological detail reminded Brewer of something he had heard.

‘A lot of these African women slap goat dung on it to improve the sensation,’ he said. ‘It’s like using curry powder with meat.’

It was Timpleton’s turn to chip in.

‘You haven’t lived till you’ve had an Italian girl,’ he said.

‘Japanese,’ Brewer contradicted firmly. ‘Japanese. Nothing like a little Jap girl – up to all the tricks, they are, taught about it from the nursery. When we set up that computer in Yokohama last year …’ He guffawed to show that the sentence could not be completed in words, not even over the wilds of Africa.

‘Just let us loose in Umbalathorp, that’s all I say,’ Timpleton remarked.

Soames said nothing. He could not casually reveal his sexual experiences in this way – not that he had ever felt anything so exotic as an Arabian heel grip in the small of his back. Obviously it was time he asserted himself.

Ignoring the chatter of the other men, he fell into a reverie. Now or never, presumably, was his chance to break the bonds of his confounded reserve, to leap free from the constraints of a cold temperament and climate. On this trip he would prove himself a man or die in the attempt.

Sexual fantasies surged through his mind. Massive thighs opened up before him, pair after pair, like doors down a Versailles corridor. Soames went through them all, unruffled, laughingly denigrating his own prowess. The tenth woman, who could speak a little English, cried aloud for mercy.

‘Mercy!’ exclaimed fantasy-Soames. ‘My good woman, this is only a dress rehearsal.’

‘But I cannot exhaust you. You are a Casanova among men.’

‘Nonsense, chicken. It’s just – well, I’m a branch of a lusty family.’

‘Branch, sir? This thing, it is more like a trunk!’

‘It happens to be a prominent feature in the Noyes family, that’s all.’ And as he left, tossing a few dollars negligently to the bowing and awe-struck proprietress, he called over one shoulder. ‘Try and find some fresh girls for me tomorrow night, madame – something with a little fire in it.’

The madame was weeping, trying to give him his money back.

‘Please do not come here again, sir,’ she pleaded. ‘You wear out all my best girls.’

But the girls were protesting to her, begging to be allowed to lie with Soames just once more.

‘All a beautiful dream,’ Soames told himself, sighing heavily.

He glanced out of the window to see if there was any break in the tousled green carpet beneath them. The plane was lurching in rather an un-English manner as if investigating a new way of coping with turbulence. This might have been either because they were flying over a range of mountains or because half of one wing was trying to detach itself from the plane.

This latter phenomenon riveted Soames’ attention. He no longer felt capable of joining in the small talk about him, which had now turned to the possibilities of hunting in Goya. Instead, he gazed sickly at the wing. It was making the leisurely flapping movements of an old pterodactyl; a girder inside the leading edge must have snapped even as Soames looked, for the flapping became abruptly more pronounced. The pterodactyl had sighted food.

Soames was petrified – not by fear but by a less wholesome emotion. He was the son of a doggedly timid father and an assertive mother, and the war between his parents had been perpetuated in him. Now the urge to stand up and do something useful was quenched by a conflicting urge which said to him, ‘Think what a fool you would look if you walked through into the pilot’s cabin, tapped him on the shoulder and announced “one wing’s coming off, pilot” – and he turned round and said, “Yes, I know; mind your own business”.’

The Birmingham man and Wally Brewer were discussing the rival attractions of football and game-hunting with Deal Jimpo. Ted Timpleton stared whitely ahead like an actor whose lines had gone from him for the night – the first night. The sedate flapping of the wing had changed now, changed into an angry shaking, as if the cargo plane were an animal just waking to the hideous injustice of having to carry humans in its digestive tract.

Breaking at last from his trance, Soames stood up. As he did so, the loudspeaker in the cabin broke into life and the pilot’s voice said harshly, ‘I’m going down for an emergency landing. We’ve developed a fault. Strap on your safety belts and sit tight, all of you. No need to panic.’

‘What the hell’s the matter?’ the Birmingham man asked. ‘Do you think we ought to see if we can give him a hand, Mr Noyes?’

‘We’re going to crash!’ Timpleton said, standing up. ‘My wife warned me …’

‘Sit down at once, and do as the pilot says,’ Deal Jimpo said, loudly and firmly.

Both Timpleton and Noyes, rather to the latter’s annoyance, at once obeyed the command.

‘Bugger that, I’m going to see if I can help the pilot,’ the Birmingham man said, running forward and disappearing through the connecting door into the cabin. They were diving now, the turbulent green lurching up uninvitingly to meet them, the plane bucking as it set its nose down. A small suitcase of the Princeling’s shot out of a luggage rack and scuttled down the gangway after the Birmingham man.

‘Oh my God,’ Timpleton said. ‘Now we’re for it, Mr Noyes.’

‘N-nonsense,’ Soames replied with an attempt at a joke, ‘the pilot knows the Apostle is too valuable a cargo to damage.’

Long afterwards, he recalled with surprise how loudly Deal Jimpo and Wally Brewer laughed at his remark; and even in the face of what might conceivably be death-in-a-veil, he found himself resolving to try and make more jokes in future. Then Wally caught his eye, winked broadly to indicate that this was for the abject Timpleton’s amusement, and began to sing ‘Abide With Me’.

The noise in the cabin was so deafening that they could scarcely hear him. The earth which from the serenity of a few thousand feet up had looked as smooth and inviting as an electric blanket, now revealed itself in its true colours: a savage, Jurassic world of broken hill and valley, loaded with rivers and trees. Space in which to land was absolutely nonexistent. Uneasily, queasily, Soames tensed himself for the fatal shock. Just through the window, the wing was a giant fist shaken at him. It sounded like a madman’s banging on shutters.

Now they seemed to be clipping the tree tops. Startled giraffes broke through a tiny clearing and galloped beneath them. The suitcase was shuffling its way back up the gangway.

Four passengers with dry, open mouths sat clutching seat-backs. Their flight was so bumpy they might have been leaping from tree top to tree top. Wally Brewer’s oil-coated hair flapped up and down on his head.

‘We’re going too fast,’ Soames whispered.

Abruptly the jungle stopped. A sea of grass rushed beneath them. The plane dropped towards it. Now they staggered in for a landing, forest fringing them on either side, more rising up like a wave a mile ahead. It had to be now or never.

Their wheels touched the ground. A mighty hissing, a boiling sea of grass-noise, rose round them. And in that instant the loose wing struck the flowing earth.

With a crescendo of noise, the plane was flung round off its course, pitched back into the air, hurled on to one shoulder.

Timpleton screamed and somersaulted across the gangway. He had not buckled his safety belt properly.

A mighty mvule, outrageous, irresistible, spread out its branches to them. Foliage slashed across their windows. With a last heave, the body of the plane struck something solid. Everything in the universe rattled.

Maniac sound, maniac silence.

Chapter Two (#ub094c41d-8dec-5246-976c-ade47befc427)

‘… whoever seeks abroad …’

The men and dwarfs seemed to be carrying an ocean liner, which was made of rubber and only semi-inflated, so that it flopped about as they dragged it up Everest.

Soames jerked out of his dream and opened one eye.

‘Yes, I’m inside the liner,’ he thought. ‘It’s clear to me now. It’s not made of rubber; it’s made of grey plastic and filled with special grey air …’

His mind cleared. He squeezed his eyes, opened them both, took a deep breath, roused, remembered.