Story 9 from ‘Absurd Tales from Africa’ by Robert Gurney
It was back in the nineteen-sixties. Colin was doing a PhD at Makerere on traditional medicines. He had been investigating the claims of hunter-gatherer tribes-people regarding natural treatments of cancer and had spent years in the forests of Uganda and Zaire quizzing witch doctors and local chiefs. He had not come up with anything positive. If only he could find a berry, a flower, a fruit, any sort of plant with the magic properties he would be made for life. He would become an instant millionaire and not have to work again. His wife might even stay with him. Oh, and yes, he thought, millions of people would be spared a horrible fate.
He had a side-interest. He suffered from an irritating and recurring cough that he put down to something he had picked up in the jungle. He took time off now and then to tour around Uganda trying to track down a local remedy for his cough. He eventually came across one in the north of the country, not far from the Sudanese border. It was the fruit of the sausage tree, Kigelia africana.
It became a bit of an obsession with him. Perhaps it filled the void that the lack of success in finding a cancer cure had left in him.
He packed his flat on the top of Nakasero Hill with the tree’s “sausages”. He had a frame built in his large kitchen from which he hung the fruit. His kitchen began to resemble a Spanish bar filled with long, dangling hams. Visitors from Karamoja and Achole would often be seen emptying the boots of their cars at the side of the block of flats and carrying armfuls of the fruit to his kitchen door.
He ground up the dried flesh of the pendulous objects and made a sort of tea out of them. This he bottled. By boiling the liquid down, he found he could also make pastilles, cough sweets, if you like, adding sugar and other easily available substances to make them palatable.
He was only too aware that he was running out of funds for his cancer project. The biotech firm in Cambridge that had been backing him was threatening to pull out, leaving him high and dry. He had appealed to the Americans but his pleas fell on deaf ears.
Well, he thought, needs must. He began to travel from town to town in East Africa, selling bottles of his sausage tree cough mixture or packets of tablets to Indian duka wallahs. He began to do a good trade.
He arrived one day in the thriving town of Soroti. Not successful enough yet to stay at the main hotel, he pulled up in the car park of Soroti Club. Somebody had told him they would probably let him sleep on the couch in the bar, if he spoke nicely to the club secretary, Clive Moon.
Colin had great charm and in no time at all he had managed to persuade the secretary to let him sleep in the clubhouse.
They had a few drinks together and then, at about midnight, it was time to turn the lights off and turn in. The secretary locked the door as he left.
Now, in the middle of the bar was a huge coffin. In actual fact it was the bar. What had happened was this. An oversized coffin had been constructed (secretly) by the Public Works Department for a very tall expat who was thought to be dying. However, he went back to UK and died there so it was surplus to requirements. After a few years, no further giants turned up to die so it was given to the club because the PWD needed more space. The unusual bar was the talk of the town.
Colin settled down fully dressed on the sofa. It was quite comfortable and he had a thick blanket under which he could keep himself warm during the cold Ugandan night. He felt secure and fell fast asleep.
Whether it was the alcohol or something else — out of habit he had taken one of his cough drops and perhaps it had reacted with the waragi, the local banana gin favoured by club members — he found himself in the middle of a terrible nightmare.
A strange noise, like a wooden box being moved on the floor, filled the air. The scraping got louder and louder. In his dream he found himself running from one end of the bar to the other, pursued by the giant coffin! He ran to the door to let himself out, only to realise that he was locked in. He tried the windows but they had security devices on them to stop thieves getting in.
Total terror gripped him. He had heard that Clive, whose day job was Head of Biology at Soroti’s predominantly Asian high school, had kept huge preserved pythons in the coffin prior to their dissection by the older boys. There was also a rumour circulating in Uganda that mature male gorilllas were kept there while waiting for a plane, a de Haviland Dove with extra fuel tanks inside, to come to a secret landing strip outside Soroti whence they were flown away, via a chain of private airfields along the Nile, to private zoos and collectors in Europe and America.
In his dream he experienced the coffin pushing him into the gentlemen’s loo. It was crushing him against the old-fashioned urinal. He began to cough. Automatically his hand went into his pocket to locate the small bottle of cough drops.
He took one and immediately the coffin stopped moving. It backed away slightly, enabling him to extract his backside from the bowl. The coughing stopped and the coffin began to slide backwards towards its original position, and function, as the club’s bar. The stools that had been knocked over righted themselves.
Then he woke up. He found the light switch. He realised that it had all been a bad dream. He smiled to himself and found himself laughing and singing out loud the following words to the tune of the Andrews Sisters’ song ‘Money is the root of all evil’:
Everybody knows that cough drops stop coughin’,
Everybody knows that cough drops stop coughin’,
Take them today, take them today, take them today,
Yeah!
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Story 10 in this series is ‘The Giraffe Man Among the Twa’.
….to be continued.
