The Mission Song Read Free Page B

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 smile 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