Free Looking for Mrs Dextrose by Nick Griffiths Page B

course not.” This time he didn’t laugh.
    My mouth opened but nothing emerged.
    Gdgi spoke: “Did you trust him?”
    I didn’t dare explain. “He wouldn’t want to harm your shaman, then?”
    “He would be more likely to harm me, Pilsbury. He enjoys power. I am sure he would love to become leader. That is why I would never accept anything from him. He is a true shaman. He
understands the powers of all the plants and trees in the rainforest. There is no poison he could not make… Is there a problem here, Pilsbury?”
    The cigar. How easily that could have been laced with something. And I had pretended it was from me. Had Gdgi smoked it? I hadn’t noticed, but then I had hardly watched him
throughout the entire feast. I scanned the table for it, for a scrunched-up butt. Checked the ground. Saw nothing. Should I ask him if he had smoked it? But then, what if he had? If I said anything
now, I could drop myself into a whole heap of trouble. What to do? Shit. Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit.
    Think positive. “No, no trouble,” I replied, smiling weakly. “Tell me, where do you get your delicious honey?”
    One can only take so much apiculture when one’s mind is firmly elsewhere. At least it took his mind off our shaman chat, and eventually he seemed to bore himself and
announced that he had to answer nature’s call. Seizing the opportunity, I zipped back to my seat. The Shaman was there, his bastard dummy dead-eyeing me through its cracked monocle.
    “You’re coming with me,” I said, tunnelling fingertips into his bicep.

 

    “What did you do to the cigar?” I demanded, still gripping him by the upper arm.
    He shrugged me off. “Oo-ouldn’t you like to know!” went his puppet.
    I grabbed the dummy round its scrawny neck. “Did you poison the cigar?”
    The Shaman’s eyes flared. He wrenched the boy away and, pulling back, I tore its fucking head off.
    The Shaman screamed, snatched it from me, thrust the wooden neck back into place. Now even the dummy’s eyes seemed aflame. “You klay dangerous gane.”
    Rubbish. “I was buying your ‘klowerthul nagic’ from joke shops when I was six years old. You don’t scare me.”
    The Shaman peered at me over imaginary specs, dirty grin spreading. “Thery thoolish oo-ords,” he lisped. Not even attempting to speak through the dummy now.
    Fuck it, I thought, and punched him, hard, in the face. It surprised even me. I wasn’t a violent person. In my defence, the Shaman wasn’t a nice man.
    He saw it coming too late and went down like a gigolo on a client. The dummy flew backwards into the wall of the hut.
    I pulled open his cloak while he groaned, found the map, snatched it out and folded it into my back pocket. That still didn’t seem enough payback, not after all his double-crossing and
lies. An idea came to me. Striding to the back of the hut, I picked up the dummy.
    “Think I’ll take this with me!”
    Prone and groggy, the Shaman craned his neck to see what I was doing and howled, though pitifully, like a crone all out of newts’ eyes. He tried to grab my ankle as I made for the door but
I kicked his hand aside. As I walked outside, breathing in the jungle and wood-smoke, he croaked after me: “You oo-ill klay thor this.”
    I made straight for the motorbike and sidecar, fortuitously parked near the village’s entrance/exit, away from the ember glow of the feast.
    No time for second thoughts or guilty concerns. No time for goodbyes. Time to scarper.
    As I reached the bike a commotion came from the direction of the feast: voices rising and a woman’s shriek, then more screaming. People were gathered around a prone form – at the
table where I had been seated, the head table. It could mean only one thing. Gdgi had gone down.
    I had to keep telling myself: it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.
    I threw the wooden boy into the sidecar and straddled the saddle. Unnoticed still, my heartbeat in my eardrums, I desperately patted down my pockets