The Devil's Garden by Edward Docx Page B

before he could stumble.
    ‘Hello, Mubb. Hello hello hello.’
    ‘Dig dig dig,’ he shrieked. Digging had obsessed him ever since we had passed twenty minutes together digging a hole for a D . hirsuta I had planted near the lab.
    ‘Dig dig dig.’ His shiny black hair had been trimmed again so that there could be no better example on Earth of a bowl cut; and his cheeks bulged so far up his face with his grinning
and his squealing that they squeezed his eyes half closed, giving him the appearance of a deranged boy-emperor – life, death and all the kingdoms of the sun at his whim.
    José, his older brother, sloped up. He was a sombre four to Mubb’s two and yet already he had the bearing of one resigned to an existence of fraternal glossing and oblique
compensations. He stopped short, placed both his hands behind his head and looked up at me with an expression that said: I know he’s mad; I have talked to him about it; but there’s
nothing further we can do; we just have to persevere.
    ‘Hello, José.’
    ‘You come eat tambaqui ?’ he asked.
    How could I refuse such an invitation?
    ‘Yes,’ I replied.
    Mubb shrieked.
    José nodded and winced and nodded.
    ‘Dig, dig, dig,’ Mubb began again.
    Tupki himself emerged from the trees, holding up his hand in salutation.
    Rebaque used to make a point of maintaining good relations with our neighbours – the river folk, the missionaries, the farmers, the various workers and the Indians alike. And now that the
Colonel and the Judge had left, I wanted very much to continue in that spirit. I placed Mubb back on his feet and offered him and his brother some of the juice on the table, which they drank at
terrifying speed.
    Tupki climbed the stairs and murmured his thanks and then said something to José that I did not understand. The two brothers set off down the path towards my hut and Tupki and I sat down
together at the low table.
    ‘Brothers who are friends need fear nothing in the world,’ I said.
    Tupki had no true smile but his pained eyes softened momentarily and the furrow of his brow shallowed a fraction.
    ‘All my children are different,’ he said. ‘Same mother, same father, same food. I don’t know how it happens.’
    He was a short man with a thick black-and-grey moustache and though brawny-armed he had a tight little belly as if he had just swallowed his sons’ football. His face told of hard work and
harder liquor and he had the odd double manner – solicitous and yet scornful – of a ticket tout. He always wore the same things: a nondescript T-shirt, football shorts, sandals and a
tattered straw hat in the last possible stage of disintegration. He was a fisherman. And he was a father – nine times over.
    He had come, he said, to see if I and ‘my ant people’ (here he did manage a grin of sorts) would like to eat with him and his family. He would have asked us earlier but he had not
been finding the fish.
    ‘Thanks,’ I replied. ‘Of course, we would love to . . . José tells me that it is tambaqui . I’ve never eaten it. They say it’s the best.’
    He nodded and began to explain that certain fish had vanished, returned, disappeared, required libation, become plentiful. I neither understood nor quite believed him.
    ‘I will bring something to drink,’ I said.
    He made no effort to hide his satisfaction at that.
    ‘Come tomorrow,’ he began. There was the faintest note of distraction in his voice and I had the sense that there was something he wished further to say.
    ‘The day after is better for us,’ I said. I wanted us to have some free time together again – to eat in the evening as before and play cards. ‘I’ll bring my
assistant, Kim.’
    There were squeals from beyond; Mubb had escaped his brother’s attempts at distraction. They were coming back at maximum speed across the clearing.
    ‘They can help with our work today,’ I said, ‘if you want to stay for lunch. We’re cleaning the whole place.’
    Tupki could