Shit. Shitty. Shittiest. A Horrible Way to Wake Up

The other day, I decided it was time to shovel shit.  I need some weathered goat pooh for the raised beds around the restaurant, about a truck load, and I knew just where to go and get it.  Even though Joaquim, one of my neighbors, is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard, he is a well-built fellow and would be able to help me shovel the valuable product from the upper floors of the nearby restaurant, abandoned since colonial times and now the dormitory of the local goat population.  The floors are about six inches deep with the stuff and if I didn’t nick it soon, someone else would.

Joaquim had promised that he would turn up early in the morning returning at the same time, the wheelbarrow he borrowed from me a month or so ago.  Angolans, by the way, do not shop for tools and equipment; they augment their stock by borrowing so it is worth keeping on top of them.

Marcia had left for town at eight, I was already dressed and ready for Joaquim.  He had taken my truck to give Marcia a lift to the main road where her personal taxi driver was waiting for her.  On the way back he would collect the wheelbarrow and then we could get stuck into shoveling the smelly stuff.

Nine O’clock passed.  Then Ten.  Midday I helped myself to the cold left over duck and red cabbage from the night before.  By one pm I was seething with rage.  If you really, really want to annoy me, agree to help me at a certain time and then switch your phone off for the next few hours and cruise around in my truck.

Finally, at 2pm I heard my truck coming.  It isn’t just dogs that can recognize the sound of their master’s vehicle arriving from a long way away, master’s themselves are pretty good at it.  I know every creak and groan of its chassis, every clank and rattle of its drop sides, every asthmatic complaint of its exhaust and groan inwardly in sympathy with its gearbox at the sound of every missed gear.

I am always lending Joaquim my truck.  I own the only ones in the village so of course I will help out.  Life can be pretty tough for these people and fishermen can’t afford the outrageous hire charges just to move a load of material, often with a lower value than the diesel consumed, yet so important to them.  But I fucking hate it when they take the piss.  Where the hell had he been all these hours?  This time I was going to fucking have him.  I bent down to put on my sandals to give thr traction I would need to plant to really good one on the end of his nose...

Joaquim came into the room.

‘Kimmie, my dear and trusted friend’ I gasped, ‘I can’t move!’

I was on my hands and knees, one sandal gripped in a white knuckled fist.

‘Sr Thomas,’ he started, ‘I am really sorry I took so long but…’

‘Fuck where you’ve been all this time, you bastard, get me off the floor’ I politely encouraged him through gritted teeth, I was in agony.  Sweat was dripping off me and I was convinced I would vomit.

Like I say, he is a big bloke so he scooped me under the armpits and had me on my feet in only ten hours of excruciating pain.  Actually, he achieved that maneuver in seconds, it just felt like hours.  I hate showing pain in front of natives but I think I did squeal a bit.

Blokes like Joaquim, the skivers of the world surviving without regular employment through a wit that escapes honest, hardworking citizens have all the luck.  We had earlier arranged through his contacts with the Catholic Church (building their new Church here) that he would fix an hour’s use of the damn great front loader the Left Footers had on their site to bring in a couple of bucketful’s of black soil so that we could shovel it by hand into the beds.   The front loader broke down so that notion was stillborn.  He promised me he would arrange a couple of helpers to shovel the soil into the back of my truck but then it rained which would mean my truck bogging down in the soft soil.  He gets away with it every time.

I sat there gasping wondering just how many of my vertebrae had shattered into razor sharp shards and was ready to call it a day when the git pushed me too far.

‘Shall I call Marcia?’ he asked solicitously.

You little shit, I thought, we ARE going to shovel shit, you’re not going to get away with it this time.

‘Have you got the wheelbarrow?’ I demanded, ‘Good.  Throw them shovels on as well and let’s go’

The old restaurant is quite an intricate piece of architecture.  My original idea had been just to park up with the truck as close as I could and then run the wheelbarrow empty up the stairs and then back down them full creating a pile of droppings on the ground we could then shovel into the back of the truck.  Double, even treble handling I know but efficient enough if you are not in a hurry and your spine is in one piece rather than millions.

I let Joaquim drive for two reasons.  Firstly, I needed to remind him who was the boss so it was his duty to drive me.  Secondly, because it was all I could do to climb into the passenger seat; trying to press on the clutch or haul on the steering wheel would have been terribly embarrassing as I wasn’t wearing highly absorbent nappies.  Back pain is debilitating in the extreme but, as I was finding out, can be subsumed not only by painkillers, but by pure hatred as well.

When we arrived, I realized that I would suffer something more acute than physical pain, I would endure the shame of allowing Joaquim to do all the shoveling by himself.  Bollocks to that, I needed a simple solution.  I needed to find an efficient way to get the shit from the top floor into the back of my truck.

The restaurant stands on the banks of the Rio Kwanza.  Shoreside are staircases preventing any vehicle coming up alongside.  Riverside, however, were pathways leading to a bankside terrace lined by mature palm trees.  Beyond the terrace were the kitchens and leading off to the right, a small courtyard above which was an upper storey window.  The courtyard was sunken but otherwise ideal if only I could back the truck in there.  Joaquim has the attention span of an amoeba so it wouldn’t to do hang around trying to figure out the last bridge I had to cross before I arrived there so I climbed into the truck, reversed it in through the entrance, maneuvered across the restaurant floor and onto the terrace, gave it a lot of right hand down and along the bank before reaching the old kitchens.

Joaquim, master dodger of work, was impressed.  Actually, I think he was both impressed and amused.  So I had proved to him that I could pass a truck through the eye of a complicated series of needles but I was well and truly confounded now.  In fact he even called out some encouragement:

‘Estas fudida agora!’  he exclaimed. (You’re fucked now).

You see?  This is where natives consistently underestimate their expatriate guests.  Think of Rorke’s Drift.

The power steering pump mountings on my truck failed ages ago.  As the mounting bolts have sheared in the block, to rectify this means an engine out.  Bugger that, I thought at the time, it’s nothing a foot on the dash and heaving on the steering wheel can’t sort.  So I pulled the belts off the power steering pump pulley and ran the truck like that.

Now I was faced with a hundred and thirty five point turn and a bloody great drop into a yard if I made it.  The width of the esplanade I had just reversed down was half the length of the truck.  On a normal day, I wouldn’t even have been there, it was just that Joaquim was really starting to piss me off.  He pissed me off even more when he said if I dropped the four rear wheels in, he was convinced I could get it out again.  Like hell I would, I just spin the tread off the tyres trying.  The little shit, he just wanted to see me bog the truck so that he could go home.

There’s a lot of rubble, both wood and hard core that falls off a restaurant after twenty years of neglect.  So I started collecting it to make a ramp.  Joaquim caught on and lent a hand.  Pretty soon, I was satisfied but basically I was aiming at two 40cm wide ramps over which I had to run the rear wheels of the truck.  Once again, I was threading needles.

Perhaps overcome by a bit of conscience, Joaquim tried to stop me, irritating me yet further by suggesting I could never do it but then he saw the red mist and stood back.  Marathon runners (I was one once) have to go through something called ‘The Wall’.  It is bloody painful and sorts the men out from the boys.  Those who fail drop by the roadside.  Those who do get second wind and a crack at the win.  I had my second wind by then and five minutes later, the bed of the truck was underneath the upper storey window.

All we had to do was drag the wheelbarrow up to the first floor, fill it and then tip it out of the window into the truck and repeat.  I got my truck load of fertilizer.  Joaquim muttered something about me being hard as stone but the Portuguese also translates into stupidly stubborn.  No shit! I thought.

The next morning, after a sleepless night, it took me half an hour just to carefully roll myself into a position that would allow me to swing myself out of bed.  As I stood there, naked, one hand on the back of the sofa and the other on the surface of my desk, several things occurred to me at once.  Marcia was nowhere to be seen, my cigarettes and lighter were beyond the reach of a man with a shattered spine and I really desperately needed the loo which was an impossible twenty yards, two steps and two doors away.

I could hear the maid in the kitchen.  Could I really be so desperate as to call out allowing her to discover me shivering with spinal rigor mortis, my shriveled willy hanging out and in danger of giving her a hell of a lot more to clear off the floor than a bit of trampled dust?

Marcia covers the furniture with cloth, drapes, not sure of their proper name.  They are just great swathes of material disguising the shabby nature of our mobilia.  At the other end of the sofa arm I was clinging to, I could see my mobile phone.  So with my left hand, one that only has two working fingers, I started to chew the sofa cover.  Tantalus.  Til now I thought it an interesting parable.  I wasn’t desperate for juicy fruit or sweet water, I wanted to get my hands on a Nokia phone but by Hell I was beginning to realize what he went through.  Every time I tugged on the cloth, the phone stayed where it was, out of arm’s reach.  Finally the last fold of cloth was absorbed by my grip and the phone started to move in the right direction.  Gently I tugged it toward me.  By now the sweat was dripping off me.  I was in excruciating agony and the phone was so close.  My knees were trembling, my bladder was bursting and my bowels were in desperate negotiation with the last loyal bit of my anatomy, my sphincter.  I tugged some more and the phone slid off the sofa and tumbled to the floor.  The back flew off and the battery fell out.  To understand Woe, one has to experience it.  Phoning Marcia for help wasn’t a bad plan, it was a jolly good idea, I just cocked it up.

Many years ago when I was stationed in Belize, I was persuaded to have a go at the annual Easter cross country cycle race.  Sherman, my mate and trainer warned me that once we reached Cayo district and started to make the climb onto the Vaca Plateau, I would get ‘real ugly’ with the pain.  If Sherman could have seen me trembling, about to explode from every bodily orifice including my eye sockets, I am sure he would have agreed that no man was ever uglier.

 The door burst open and Alex rushed in, dodged around me and grabbed the remote for the TV.

‘Morning Daddy!’ he chirped happily, ‘My turn for the TV now? I want Charlie and Lola!’  He calls the BBC children’s channel Charlie and Lola, sometimes Sean the Sheep.  Heswitched the TV on, plonked himself on the sofa and started to flick through the channels.  He has no idea what he is doing, he just keeps pressing buttons until he sees something he likes or the decoder loses its mind and decides to rescan all the channels.

‘Alex?’

‘Yes Daddy?’

‘Daddy is sick’

‘Sowwy Daddy’, he replied without taking his eyes off the TV.

My survival, my last dregs of self-respect, now depended on a distracted four year old.

‘Alex, you see my phone on the floor?  Can you pass it to me please?’

He gave the phone a quick glance, ‘It’s bwoken Daddy’ and carried on changing channels.

The enduring bond between parents and their children depends to a large extent on the lack of perceived injustice.  As a kid, I used to be thrashed by my mother for reasons that completely escaped me and those indelible memories have coloured our relationship ever since.  So whilst suddenly overwhelmed with an urge to scream at him, ‘Give me the fucking phone NOW you little shit!’ I elected instead a more subtle approach.

‘It is your turn, Alex.  If you pass me the hand control, I will put Charlie and Lola on.  While I am doing that, can you pick up my phone?’

He gave me the control and while I selected CeBeebies, he gathered up the bits of the only link I had to relief.

Alex sat there just out of reach and attempted to put the various bits of the phone back together.

‘Please, Alex, just give me the phone’

‘I can do it Daddy!’

Tantalus all over again.  Alex can be a girl’s blouse sometimes.  If he thinks you are criticizing him, he will just drop everything, flounce out and descend into a God Almighty sulk.

When Alex burst into the room, he had left the door wide open.  With one hand on the sofa and the other on my desk, hunched as I was, I was presenting my arse and a couple of fifty four year old dangling prunes to the casual scrutiny of anyone passing by on the way to the shop.  Usually, with the door open, they see me sitting behind my laptop, now they were seeing a brown eye wink.  All I needed to complete my misery was a passing Arab climbing off his camel at the sight thinking, ‘OOH!  There’s everything on the menu here at Fat Hippo’s!’ before tucking in.  With everything unimaginable happening to me so far this dreadful morning, I wasn’t ruling any further embarrassment out.

‘Alex, please, just give me the phone’

‘No, I can do it!’ he insisted while trying to stuff the battery in upside down.

I heard a shocked intake of breath behind me.  It was Mengita, the maid, come to clear the detritus of the previous evening off the table.

‘Mengita, please, don’t go!’, I bawled, ‘just throw a towel around me!’

Considering that Africans are happy to bathe naked in a river, they are surprisingly prudish in a domestic environment.  She carefully inched her way into the room with her eyes firmly glued shut.  I had to give her the ‘left a bit’, ‘right a bit’ instructions so she could unhook a towel from behind the door.  It was only once she had draped it over my rump she opened her eyes again and I could explain.

‘Oh, Sr Thomas!  That happened to my Father!’ she exclaimed, ‘He never walked again and died in his bed!’

Considering that all this started because of shit, and now I badly needed one, this was a historically based prognosis I could have done without.

‘Mengita’, I asked, ‘is there anyone in the shop, customers of mine with discretion, who could help me to the loo?’

‘Sure’, she replied.

I think half the village turned up.