The Mission Song Read online

  But why quibble? I was an official dot on the world population map, ever thankful to the long left arm of Rome for coming to my aid.

  • • •

  Directed by the same long arm to my non-native England, I was placed under the protection of the Sanctuary of the Sacred Heart, an eternal boarding school for ambiguous Catholic orphans of the male gender set among the rolling Sussex Downs. My arrival within its prison-like gates one arctic afternoon in late November awoke a spirit of rebellion in me for which neither I nor my hosts were prepared. In the space of a few weeks I had set fire to my bed-sheets, defaced my Latin primer, absented myself from Mass without permission and been caught attempting to escape in the back of a laundry van. If the Simba had whipped my dear late father in order to prove that he was black, the Father Guardian's energies were directed to proving I was white. As an Irishman himself, he felt particularly challenged. Savages, he thundered at me as he toiled, are by nature rash. They have no middle gear. The middle gear of any man is self-discipline and by beating me, and praying for me while he was about it, he hoped to make up for my deficiency. Unknown to him, however, rescue was at hand in the person of a grizzled but energetic friar who had turned his back on birth and wealth.

  Brother Michael, my new protector and appointed Confessor, was a scion of the English Catholic gentry. His lifelong wanderings had taken him to the remotest ends of the earth. Once I had grown accustomed to his fondlings we became close friends and allies, and the Father Guardian's attentions commensurately declined, though whether this was a consequence of my reformed behaviour or, as I now suspect, some pact between them, I neither knew nor cared. In a single bracing afternoon's walk across the rain-swept Downs, interrupted by demonstrations of affection, Brother Michael convinced me that my mixed race, far from being a taint to be expunged, was God's precious gift to me, a view in which I gratefully concurred. Best of all he loved my ability, which I was bold enough to demonstrate to him, to glide without hiatus from one language to another. At the Mission house I had paid dearly for showing off my talents but under Brother Michael's doting eye they acquired near-Heavenly status:

  “What greater blessing, my dear Salvo,” he cried, while a wiry fist shot out of his habit to punch the air and the other foraged guiltily among my clothing, “than to be the bridge, the indispensable link, between God's striving souls? To draw His children together in harmonious and mutual understanding?”

  What Michael didn't already know of my life history I soon recounted to him in the course of our excursions. I told him of my magic nights at the fireside of the servants' hostel. I described how, in my father's last years, he and I would journey to an outlying village, and while he was conferring with the elders I would be down on the river bank with the children bartering the words and idioms that were my day-and-night preoccupation. Others might look to rough games, wild animals, plants or native dance as their path to happiness, but Salvo the secret child had opted for the lilting intimacies of the African voice in its myriad shades and variations.

  And it was while I was recalling these and similar adventures that Brother Michael was granted his Damascene epiphany.

  “As the Lord hath been pleased to sow in you, Salvo, so let us now together reap!” he cried. And reap we did. Deploying skills better suited to a military commander than a monk, the aristocratic Michael studied prospectuses, compared fees, marched me to interviews, vetted my prospective tutors, male or female, and stood over me while I enrolled myself. His purposes, inflamed by adoration, were as implacable as his faith. I was to receive formal grounding in each and every one of my languages. I was to rediscover those that in the course of my roving childhood had fallen by the wayside. How was all this to be paid for? By a certain angel delivered to us in the form of Michael's rich sister Imelda, whose pillared house of honey-golden sandstone, nestling in the folds of middle Somerset, became my sanctuary away from the Sanctuary. In Willowbrook, where rescued pit-ponies grazed in the paddock and each dog had its own armchair, there lived three hearty sisters of whom Imelda was the eldest. We had a private chapel and an Angelus bell, a ha-ha and an ice-house and a croquet lawn and weeping lime trees that blew down in gales. We had Uncle Henry's Room because Aunt Imelda was the widow of a war hero named Henry who single-handed had made England safe for us, and there he was, from his first teddy-bear lying on his pillow to his Last Letter from the Front in a gold-cased lectern. But no photograph, thank you. Aunt Imelda, who was as tart in manner as she was soft in heart, remembered Henry perfectly well without, and that way she kept him to herself.

  • • •

  But Brother Michael knew my weak spots too. He knew that child prodigies — for as such he saw me — must be restrained as well as nurtured. He knew I was diligent but headlong: too eager to give myself to anyone who was kind to me, too fearful of being rejected, ignored or worst of all laughed at, too swift to embrace whatever was offered me for fear I wouldn't get another chance. He treasured as much as I did my mynah-bird ear and jackdaw memory, but insisted I practise them as diligently as a musician his instrument, or a priest his faith. He knew that every language was precious to me, not only the heavyweights but the little ones that were condemned to die for want of written form; that the missionary's son needed to run after these erring sheep and lead them back to the fold; that I heard legend, history, fable and poetry in them and the voice of my imagined mother regaling me with spirit-tales. He knew that a young man who has his ears open to every human nuance and inflexion is the most suggestible, the most malleable, the most innocent and easily misled. Salvo, he would say, take care. There are people out there whom God alone can love.

  It was Michael also who, by forcing me down the hard road of discipline, turned my unusual talents into a versatile machine. Nothing of his Salvo should go to waste, he insisted, nothing be allowed to rust for want of use. Every muscle and fibre of my divine gift must receive its daily workout in the gymnasium of the mind, first by way of private tutors, afterwards at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where I obtained First Class honours in African Language and Culture, specialising in Swahili with French a given. And finally in Edinburgh where I achieved the crowning glory: a Master of Science degree in Translation and Public Service Interpreting.

  Thus by the close of my studies I boasted more diplomas and interpreterships than half the flyblown translation agencies hawking their grubby services up and down Chancery Lane. And Brother Michael, dying on his iron cot, was able to stroke my hands and assure me that I was his finest creation, in recognition of which he pressed upon me a gold wristwatch, a present to him from Imelda whom God preserve, entreating me to keep it wound at all times as a symbol of our bond beyond the grave.

  • • •

  Never mistake, please, your mere translator for your top interpreter. An interpreter is a translator, true, but not the other way round. A translator can be anyone with half a language skill and a dictionary and a desk to sit at while he burns the midnight oil: pensioned-off Polish cavalry officers, underpaid overseas students, minicab drivers, part-time waiters and supply teachers, and anyone else who is prepared to sell his soul for seventy quid a thousand. He has nothing in common with the simultaneous interpreter sweating it out through six hours of complex negotiations. Your top interpreter has to think as fast as a numbers boy in a coloured jacket buying financial futures. Better sometimes if he doesn't think at all, but orders the spinning cogs on both sides of his head to mesh together, then sits back and waits to see what pours out of his mouth.

  People come up to me sometimes during conferences, usually at the teasy end of the day between close of business and the cocktail frenzy. “Hey, Salvo, settle an argument for us, will you? What's your mother tongue?” And if I consider they're being a bit uppity, which they usually are because they have by now convinced themselves they're the most important people on the planet, I'll turn the question round on them. “Depends who my mother was, doesn't it?” I reply, with this enigmatic sm
ile I've got. And after that, they leave me with my book.

  But I like them to wonder. It shows me that I've got my voice right. My English voice, I mean. It isn't upper, middle or coach. It isn't faux royale, neither is it the Received Pronunciation derided by the British Left. It is, if anything at all, aggressively neuter, pitched at the extreme centre of Anglophone society.

  It's not the sort of English where people say, “Ah, that's where he was dragged up, that's who he's trying to be, that's who his parents were, poor chap, and that's where he went to school.” It does not — unlike my French which, strive as I may, will never totally rid itself of its African burden — betray my mixed origins. It's not regional, it's not your Blairite wannabe-classless slur or your high-Tory curdled cockney or your Caribbean melody. And it hasn't so much as a trace of the gone-away vowels of my dear late father's Irish brogue. I loved his voice, and love it still, but it was his and never mine.

  No. My spoken English is blank, scrubbed clean and unbranded, except for an occasional beauty spot: a deliberate sub-Saharan lilt, which I refer to sportingly as my drop of milk in the coffee. I like it, clients like it. It gives them the feeling I'm comfortable with myself. I'm not in their camp but I'm not in the other fellow's either. I'm stuck out there in mid-ocean and being what Brother Michael always said I should be: the bridge, the indispensable link between God's striving souls. Each man has his vanity and mine is about being the one person in the room nobody can do without.

  And that's the person I wanted to be for my ravishing wife Penelope as I half killed myself racing up two flights of stone steps in my desperate effort not to be late for the festivities being held in her honour in the upstairs rooms of a fashionable winery in London's Canary Wharf, capital of our great British newspaper industry, prior to a formal dinner for the selected few at the exclusive Kensington home of her paper's newest billionaire proprietor.

  • • •

  Only twelve minutes late by Aunt Imelda's gold watch, you may say, and to all outward appearances salon fresh, which in bomb-scared London with half the tube stations on the blink might be regarded as an achievement, but to Salvo the hyperconscientious husband it could as well have been twelve hours. Penelope's big night, the biggest of her meteoric career to date, and me her husband rolling up after all the guests have walked over from her paper's offices across the road. From the North London District Hospital where I had been unavoidably detained since the previous evening by circumstances outside my control, I had splashed out on a cab all the way home to Battersea, and made it wait while I quick-changed into my brand-new dinner jacket, this being de rigueur at the proprietor's table, with no chance to shave or shower or brush my teeth. By the time I arrived at the due destination and in the appropriate costume, I was in a muck sweat, but somehow I had made it and here I was; and here they were, a hundred or more of Penelope's assorted colleagues, the upper few in dinner jackets and long dresses, the rest smart-casual, and all of them crowded into a first-floor function room with low beams and plastic suits of armour on the wall, drinking warm white wine with their elbows out, and me the latecomer stuck at the edge with the waiters, mostly black.

  I couldn't see her to begin with. I thought she'd gone AWOL like her husband. Then I had a moment hoping she'd decided to stage a late entry, until I spotted her squashed up at the far end of the room engaged in animated conversation with her paper's top brass and wearing the latest thing in flowing satin trouser-suits that she must have bought herself as a present and changed into at her office or wherever she'd last been. Why, oh why — cried one side of my head — had I not bought it for her? Why hadn't I said to her a week ago over breakfast or in bed, assuming she was there to say it to: Penelope my darling, I've had this great idea, let's go to Knightsbridge together and choose ourselves a new outfit for your big night, all on me? Shopping is what she likes best. I could have made an occasion of it, played her gentleman admirer, dined her at one of her favourite restaurants, never mind she's earning twice the money I am, plus perks you wouldn't believe.

  On the other hand, for reasons to be addressed in a more reposeful moment, there was another side of my head that was very pleased I hadn't made any such proposal, which has nothing to do with the money, but says much for the contrary currents of the human mind under stress.

  An unknown hand pinched my bottom. I swung round to meet the beatific gaze of Jellicoe, alias Jelly, the paper's latest Young White Hope, recently poached from a rival newspaper. Lank, drunk and whimsical as usual, he was tendering a hand-rolled cigarette between his slender finger and thumb.

  “Penelope, it's me, I made it!” I yelled, ignoring him. “Tough time at the hospital. Terribly sorry!”

  Sorry for what? For the tough time? A couple of heads turned. Oh him. Salvo. Penelope's spearman. I tried louder, deploying wit. “Hey, Penelope! Remember me? It's me, your late husband,” and I got myself all geared up to launch into an over-elaborate cover story about how one of my hospitals — I would not for security reasons have mentioned which — had summoned me to the bedside of a dying Rwandan man with a criminal history who kept going in and out of consciousness, requiring me to interpret not only for the nursing staff but for two Scotland Yard detectives as well, which I hoped was a predicament she would take to heart: poor Salvo. I saw a creamy smile come over her face, and I thought I'd got through to her till I realised it was beamed upwards at the thick-necked male who was standing on a chair in his dinner jacket shouting, “Quiet, damn you! Will you shut the fuck up, all of you?” in a Scottish brogue.

  At once his unruly audience fell silent, gathering to him with sheepish obedience. For this was none other than Penelope's all-powerful editor-in-chief Fergus Thorne, known in press circles as Thorne the Horn, announcing that he proposed to make a facetious speech about my wife. I hopped about, I did my utmost to make eye contact with her, but the face from which I craved absolution was lifted to her boss like a flower to the sun's life-giving rays.

  “Now we all know Penelope,” Thorne the Horn was saying, to jeers of sycophantic laughter which annoyed me, “and we all love Penelope” — a significant pause — “from our respective positions.”

  I was trying to squeeze my way through to her but the ranks had closed and Penelope was being handed forward like the blushing bride till she was stationed obediently at Mr Thorne's feet, incidentally providing him with a bird's-eye view down the front of her highly revealing outfit. And it was beginning to enter my mind that she might not have registered my absence, let alone my presence, when my attention was diverted by what I diagnosed as God's judgment upon me in the form of a force twelve heart attack. My chest was trembling, I could feel a numbness spreading in rhythmic waves from my left nipple, and I thought my time had come and serve me right. It was only when I clapped my hand to the afflicted area that I realised that my cellphone was summoning me in its unfamiliar vibrator mode which was how I had set it prior to departure from the hospital one hour and thirty-five minutes previously. My exclusion from the throng now turned to my advantage. While Mr Thorne developed his double-edged remarks about my wife, I was able to tiptoe gratefully towards a door marked TOILETS. Making good my exit, I glanced back one more time to see Penelope's newly coiffed head lifted to her employer, her lips parted in pleasurable surprise and her breasts on full parade inside the skimpy upper section of her trouser-suit. I let my phone go on trembling till I was down three steps into a quiet corridor, pressed green and held my breath. But instead of the voice I feared and longed to hear above all others, I got the avuncular north country burr of Mr Anderson of the Ministry of Defence, wanting to know whether I was free to take on a bit of rather vital interpreting for my country at short notice, which he sincerely hoped I was.

  That Mr Anderson should be calling a mere part-timer such as myself in person indicated the magnitude of the crisis at hand. My normal contact was Barney, his flamboyant floor manager. Twice in the last ten days Barney had put me on standby for what he called a hot one, only to
tell me I could stand down again.

  “Now, Mr Anderson?”

  “This minute. Preferably sooner, if that's convenient. Sorry to break up your drinks party and all that, but we need you fast,” he continued, and I suppose I should have been surprised that he knew about Penelope's party but I wasn't. Mr Anderson was a man who made it his business to know things denied to humbler mortals. “It's your home territory, Salvo, your heartland.”

  “But Mr Anderson.”

  “What is it, son?”

  “It isn't just her drinks party. There's the new proprietor's dinner afterwards. Black tie,” I added, to impress. “It's unprecedented. For a proprietor, I mean. Editor-in-Chief, yes. But proprietor—” Call it guilt, call it sentiment, I owed it to Penelope to put up a show of resistance.

  A silence followed as if I had caught him on the back foot, but nobody does that to Mr Anderson, he's the rock on which his own church is built.

  “Is that what you're wearing, is it, son? A dinner jacket?”

  “It is indeed, Mr Anderson.”

  “Now? As we speak? You've got it on?”

  “Yes.” What did he suppose? That I was attending a Bacchanalia? “How long's it for anyway?” I asked in the ensuing silence, made deeper, I suspected, by the fact that he had put his massive hand over the mouthpiece.

  “How long's what, son?” — as if he'd lost the thread.

  “The assignment, sir. The urgent job you need me for. How long?”