The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [72]
The brothel was a tin-roofed bungalow half-way down the hill on the right-hand side. In the dry season the girls sat outside in the gutter like sparrows; they chatted with the policeman on duty at the top of the hill. The road was never made up, so that nobody drove by the brothel on the way to the wharf or the Cathedral: it could be ignored. Now it turned a shuttered silent front to the muddy street, except where a door, propped open with a rock out of the roadway, opened on a passage. Wilson looked quickly this way and that and stepped inside.
Years ago the passage had been white-washed and plastered, but rats had torn holes in the plaster and human beings had mutilated the whitewash with scrawls and pencilled names. The walls were tattooed like a sailor’s arm, with initials, dates, there was even a pair of hearts interlocked. At first it seemed to Wilson that the place was entirely deserted; on either side of the passage there were little cells nine feet by four with curtains instead of doorways and beds made out of old packing-cases spread with a native cloth. He walked rapidly to the end of the passage; then, he told himself, he would turn and go back to the quiet and somnolent security of the room where the old Downhamian dozed over his book.
He felt an awful disappointment, as though he had not found what he was looking for, when he readied the end and discovered that the left-hand cell was occupied; in the light of an oil lamp burning on the floor he saw a girl in a dirty shift spread out on the packing-cases like a fish on a counter; her bare pink soles dangled over the words ‘Tate’s Sugar’. She lay there on duty, waiting for a customer. She grinned at Wilson, not bothering to sit up and said, ‘Want jig jig, darling. Ten bob.’ He had a vision of a girl with a rain-wet back moving forever out of his sight.
‘No,’ he said, ‘no,’ shaking his head and thinking, What a fool I was, what a fool, to drive all the way for only this. The girl giggled as if she understood his stupidity and he heard the slop slop of bare feet coming up the passage from the road; the way was blocked by an old mammy carrying a striped umbrella. She said something to the girl in her native tongue and received a grinning explanation. He had the sense that all this was only strange to him, that it was one of the stock situations the old woman was accustomed to meet in the dark regions which she ruled. He said weakly, ‘I’ll just go and get a drink first.’
‘She get drink,’ the mammy said. She commanded the girl sharply in the language he couldn’t understand and the girl swung her legs off the sugar cases. ‘You stay here,’ the mammy said to Wilson, and mechanically like a hostess whose mind is elsewhere but who must make conversation with however uninteresting a guest, she said, ‘Pretty girl, jig jig, one pound.’ Market values here were reversed: the price rose steadily with his reluctance.
‘I’m sorry. I can’t wait,’ Wilson said. ‘Here’s ten bob,’ and he made the preliminary motions of departure, but the old woman paid him no attention at all, blocking the way, smiling steadily like a dentist who knows what’s good for you. Here a man’s colour had no value: he couldn’t bluster as a white man could elsewhere: by entering this narrow plaster passage, he had shed every racial, social and individual trait, he had reduced himself to human nature. If he had wanted to hide, here was the perfect hiding-place; if he had wanted to be anonymous, here he was simply a man. Even his reluctance, disgust and fear were not personal characteristics; they were so common to those who came here for the first time that the old woman knew exactly what each move would be. First the suggestion of a drink, then the offer of money, after that...
Wilson said weakly, ‘Let me by,’ but he knew that she wouldn’t move; she stood watching him, as though he were a tethered animal on whom she was keeping an eye for its owner. She wasn’t interested in him, but occasionally she repeated calmly, ‘Pretty girl jig jig by-and-by.’ He held out a pound to her and she pocketed it and went on blocking the way. When he tried to push by, she thrust him backwards with a casual pink palm, saying,