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Today, we have 70 poems + 11 stories + 3 essays = 84 works by 43 authors

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Before the Start-Up by Ron Taylor

Boys are lined up in the bright morning outside Ranger’s office, waiting to be told off. They chatter loudly as they wait, with occasional fits of high-pitched giggling. Chisiza, the head boy, goes around with a worried smile, his everted lips parted to show big horselike teeth. Ranger the site superintendent nags him through the open window of his office, in which, skulking behind the inner door, one of the offenders waits, rolling his eyes with frantic unconcern. That is, if you asked him, he’d tell you he didn’t give a shit, really about being told off.

"Hey Chisiza! You’ve got to check your boys in, I tell you!"

Ranger’s bald head pokes out of the window and Chisiza, feeling the hard blue eyes of this knobbly Scotsman fix the back of his neck, grinds to a halt and, turning, doffs his cap and bends in a slight bow to look down at ruts in the red laterite road. He remains in this position while Ranger moans on about his shortcomings and still stands there, like a schoolboy in detention, after Ranger’s head is withdrawn, his voice carrying on, muffled and plaintive, in a lecture to the eye-rolling one on matters of attendance.

" All right Jalo... Now you know as well as I do, two pounds on Fridays but only if you come in on the other days...you boys always talking about having to visit your wife and kids...which ones anyway..."

Five minutes later Jalo comes out, his face changing in the sunlight from sorrow to triumphant laughter. Chisiza drifts off quickly before the next mansized boy goes in and the voice starts up again. The Monday morning tribunal over, all the boys move off to their work stations, replacing caps and loudly congratulating one another like students who have passed their exams. The morning expands in a sparkling bubble of light, a black electrician sleeping twenty feet aloft on a cable conduit, stirs and almost drops his pliers. Perhaps he’s been visiting one of his wives too. A hygenic smell, like that of heather Ranger thinks, pierces his nostrils as he comes out of his office, followed by the tumbling hulk of his Afrikaaner foreman de Kok. The superintendent heads off down the site road towards the preheater furnace, which is generating loud explosions, de Kok complaining vainly and virulently into his deaf ear.

" I told him twice now. How many times do you have to tell them? In the Union we got a method with the dumber munts - "

At the other end of the site, the labourer in question, three quarters asleep, leans on his broom handle over the rim of a large tank half filled with sulphuric acid. Now and then he reels slightly from the effect of the fumes, but he is too sleepy to move farther away. The sun shines hot and satisfying on his slumped head and shoulders. He hardly notices the face of the white man which briefly peers up under the peak of his cap, asking:

" Conscious ?"

After a while he drags the broom another yard or two around the tank before relapsing, the little worms of bilharzia flickering in his blood.

"We don’t say munts here" says Ranger, who has heard this one word. "What’s the matter here then ?"

Two standard six boys, who will help operate the sulphuric acid plant after the start-up, fail for the seventh time to light the oil burner, which must be lit to anneal the preheater furnace. Puffs of black oily smoke drift about in the hot, seented air.

"Try it again, try it again, we’ve got all week!"

Ranger darts forward, picks up a piece of cotton waste and thrusts it at a big boy, Ezekiel, who fixes it on a stick, dips it in a can of oil, lights it, pokes it ihto a hole in the preheater furnace and fiddles with the oil gun controls. A roaring sound ensues which dies down, after which comes a loud bang and jets of flame shoot from the hole. Ezekiel leaps backwards, kicking over the oil bucket. Smuts of oily soot fly about. Ranger looks depressed and the foreman de Kok shouts loud instructions in Afrikaans, which no-one understands. Ezekiel explains.

"The end of the gun, I cannot see it -"

They try again. De Kok’s loud voice parrots that of the site superintendent, who is losing interest in the proceedings. The foreman takes over and performs an unsuccessful demonstration, cursing loudly when he gets soot in his eye. Ranger goes away with Foster, the chemical engineer over from UK, who is in charge of starting up the plant.

Marriott, Foster’s assistant, has left the bilharzia sufferer and is talking to Chisiza the head boy at the rear gate of the site. From where they stand, rocky Southern Rhodesian bush tumbles away indefinitely in silent profusion. Far out, kopjes bulge and shake under a high sun.

"Ah took Law to the higher certificate..."

Chisiza’s huge lips curl back shyly over his horse teeth and with slight panic his eyes avoid those of his jaunty questioner. He wears a convict’s get-up of thick khaki which fails to conceal in him a certain useless or un-used refinement. Once chief storekeeper at a company mine, he was relegated to the factory site for allowing his relations to thin out the stock.

"What would you like to do then?"

Chisiza giggles in embarrassment.

"Ah do not know. Perhaps to travel to UK."

"Are there many of you do that? Students I mean?"

"Ah - do not know. Ah don’t think so."

"Why not go to Nigeria? More opportunities for you there than in the UK, and no colour bar, either."

From Chisiza’s blank look, Marriott almost supposes he knows as little about Nigeria as other boys Marriott has asked about various ‘foreign parts’ of Africa. Of course, Nigeria is a thousand or so miles away, across the uncrossable Congo... But they all knew about that land of golden opportunity the UK, even if they couldn’t get there.

Fat Ezekiel, who has escaped from the furnace-lighting squad, rolls up and butts in, chuckling,

"This man, he study book all evening, he is too clever for me -"

Chisiza tries to cut him short but he goes on.

"He say to Mister Ranger you give me office job but Mister Ranger he say no, what about that time in mine -"

The two boys tussle, Chisiza’s hand over Ezekiel’s mouth. Marriott remembers seeing them walk through the factory gate that morning hand in hand, swinging their linked arms and singing in high, amorous voices. There was nothing ‘suspicious’ about this, Marriott was sure: Ezekiel had told him he had a wife back in his bush village and girl friends in Salisbury, twenty miles away. Chisiza at twenty five or so appeared to have neither - perhaps he was a bit over-refined...but now he remembers his authority and orders Ezekiel back to the oil gun, which at last lighted, is entertaining a knot of spectators with an occasional backfire.

Marriott wanders over to the cooling water pond and sits on its low surrounding wall, near the outfall from which a large, lazy sluice of water sends out rhythms of waves. Half closing his eyes, he could be enjoying watery joys nearby some beck or falls, on a particularly hot, bright summer day back in Aberdeenshire... but look, here he is instead, how very remarkably, in a bush factory in the middle of neo-colonial Africa...

He opens his eyes as Ranger comes along to sit by him and complicate the watery music, interruping its flow with a bony finger, enquiring without much intent,

"D’you think if we put a weir in we could measure the flow rate ?"

They sit in idle expectation of an answer from somewhere or other. The scene is now more like two people in a city park admiring a lazily splashing fountain, surrounded by scented air. They hear noises of random activity like that of tennis players and nursemaids, which in fact is that of plumbers and fitters, and smell instead of public garden flowers a factory aroma of creosote distilled off newly painted pipes by the noon sun. Raising their heads they see Foster aloft on the acid-absorber tower, fussing about in a pair of shorts which look baggy even from below.

"He’ll have to watch himself in them" says Ranger.

Their gaze lowers into sharp-edged lilac shadow which brings relief from the spring glare, but hearing a crackling noise they look up again to see Foster, who has ceased ordering everyone about, to point to something going on in an area behind the tower, towards which people are slowly drifting, leaving whatever they have been doing while they can, before the start-up (after which there will be no time to drift any more ) to find at the edge of the site a gang of labourers burning a halfacre of bush.

"What's up now ?" asks Ranger, who must know everything. McCanna, his site engineer, a thin man with a canny sense of humour, calls out from the edge of the burning patch, "Mice for supper."

They go over and are joined by Foster, who trots alongside holding a lead-beater’s hammer. The lead-beater follows bemused, scratching his African head. Conflagrating bush squirts acrid smoke down the throats of all assembled watchers, as coughing, they see blueoveralled figures dodging about in the smoke after scuttling fieldmice, hundreds of which are scooped up, pinched dead and interred in cloth bags, ready for roasting that night. As they watch, a bulky figure in overalls even baggier than Foster’s shorts, with a melon-slice grin and eyes spouting tears, stumbles from the inferno holding his bag at arms length, to lurch off wildly down the compound road, followed by the popeyed gaze of de Kok, who at length turns to the others a moonface full of pockmarks and indignation.

"Now I arsk you - you can’t call that human - eating bloody vermin!"

"Lovely, man, with salt and a bit of parsley!" says McCanna.

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