The Bush: Hank The Aid Detective - Softcover

Richard Rathwell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0954760700 ISBN 13: 9780954760700

Publisher: Blue Orange Publishing, 2004

About this title

Review

This excellent novel works best in the ways it is able to convey world views. -- Bookpleasures web site

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

There were ten columns of women. Each column had fifteen women; each dressed in an ankle length royal blue skirt made of shirt cotton and each in a brick red blouse. They all had white head ties and not a hair showed. They were arranged by height with the shortest at the front. The square on which they stood was hot and windless. The fine white sand lay undisturbed. There was one very short woman who shifted herself to stand on one foot then another. The rest were motionless. The sky was without clouds.

Madame Youngo came onto the veranda through her office door. She was a tall woman and heavy set. Her head tie was elaborate and fringed. She walked slowly to the only high backed chair in the row of chairs facing the square. The chair was woven from thin wicker. It was positioned in the precise middle of the veranda in the shade from the overhanging roof. After smoothing the wrinkles from her brocaded and embroidered silk ‘up and down’, she sat.

On each side of her, and slightly behind, sat six male teachers, three to each side, all dressed in white smocks and leggings. They were on green plastic chairs. Standing at the right end of their chairs, still on the veranda but at the end, was a man in green military uniform holding a long cane in one hand. At his feet was a small stool. On the other end of the veranda was a short man in a colourful yellow flowered shirt and with him was a dog. He held a metre long cardboard tube.

The square had low cement buildings on three sides. Each too had a veranda. They were all painted dark green. The roofs were of dull grey corrugated tin, striped with dust filled rivulets. The square was open on the side opposite the veranda of Madame Youngo, of her office, and of where the male staff sat, mopping their brows with white neck scarves.

Beyond the open side of the square, past the rows of women, were two lines of palms bordering a gravel path which stretched the distance to an open gate in a tall chain linked fence. Clusters of other green buildings were to the left and right of the palms and of the path. A dark mustard coloured plain sloped downward from outside the fence. It stretched miles and miles to a ring of mountains floating over the plain in the heat haze. The plain was dotted with green and grey patches, some trees and to the far right in a slight depression was a village.

Behind and above Madame Youngo’s office, only one half mile behind opposite the plain and the far ring of mountains was a sudden and isolated mountain. It was every shade of green and was topped by a mist. From that direction came the hum of insects and the twitter of lizards. Other than those sounds and that one small woman there was only quiet and some heavy breathing in the square in the heat.

The two male foreign guests were, of course, within the office but could see the assembly through the glassless windows. The assembly could see them. It was proper they should be there and in any event it was cooler inside. The seven female teachers were in a classroom facing the square to the left of Madame Youngo. Two veiled and one unveiled face could be seen against the dark through the empty window frame.

Chatter arose and then stopped in that dark room as Madame Youngo, glancing from side to side, lifted herself from her chair and took one step towards the square on the veranda. This step took her from the shadow of the overhanging roof of her office directly into the sunlight.

"You are ladies of the night," she said softly through tight lips.

Edition details

• Publisher: Blue Orange Publishing
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0954760700
• ISBN 13: 9780954760700
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336