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The clapped-out airport bus smoked like a burning tyre. It was a mobile coldstore and the driver wore white wellingtons. Hotel reception was like check-in at the morgue. We were all Nairobi bound, all frozen stiff and starting to notice each other for the first time, the pack shuffling into suits. The men had no hand luggage, just the clothes on their backs and the duty-free. The women were mostly mothers with babies, bundles of plastic bags and nappies. The husbands swapped business cards. They all had import/export shops but business was only so-so, which was why we were all flying the cheapest airline in the world.
—This is my Mombasa number …
—This is my Bombay address …
The English lads were bragging.
—Nah, bit of Swahili and they drop at your feet. All you have to say is hapana mzuri and you get the lot for nothing …
No one edged my way till I was at the desk. It was clear I had to share a room with the bloke behind me.
—I’m Frogget, he said.
—I don’t really want to share, I said.
—No trouble. Fuckin shoot through, I will.
He swung a key fob the size of a wooden tennis ball.
—Stops yer puttin it in yer fuckin mouth, dunnit.
He tried it in the lock, upside down. He reeked of Gatwick bars and two-dollar vodkas on the Tupolev over.
—I’ll kick the fuckin door in if this key don’t fit. It’s the way I like to do things, you know, no nonsense, drive it out. That’s me. Drive it right out I do.
He threw open the door and swung his plastic bag with the 200 Marlboro on to the first bed and walked straight back out to find the bar. The room was two beds wide, the big triple-glazed window was a glass sandwich and wouldn’t close. Net curtains swayed more from heavy filth than wind. Beyond the steps below, there was a perfect surface of untrodden snow. Pine trees lined the road a hundred yards away. Cement trucks and heavy tippers drove by in the dusk which fell like bonfire smoke. The air was pitted with diesel fume and sludge and the airport was lit up by yellow-fever floods. Against the snow a soldier, a gun and a dog.
I fell asleep and woke with a stiff neck from the sub-zero draft to find Frogget rummaging in his carrier bag.
—Run out of fags didn I. Aint you avin tea?
—Where?
—Downstairs, in that canteen.
Frogget tore the wrapping off his box and threw it on the bed, lit one up and left in a puff of smoke. I took the lift downstairs to the canteen and sat on my own in one corner, scratching my dry hair and smoking on a parched throat. A few curled slices of black bread see-sawed on the tablecloth if I touched it. The mothers crowded at the kitchen door for warm baby milk, the men laughed in the bar and the canteen was silent. A Russian waitress brought a plate to my table, picked up the bread, put it on the new plate and brushed crumbs on to the floor.
—Ticket, she said.
—What ticket?
—Meal ticket.
—I haven’t got one.
—Reception.
She took the bread away so I walked down the marble stairs to reception. A soldier opened the outer door and snow blew in. He brushed it off his greatcoat, stamped his boots and lit up a cigarette. I got the meal ticket and went back to the canteen and the waitress by the tea urn said:
—Sit over there, with your friends.
I joined the only two I recognised from the flight.
—You come for the shit sandwiches? I’m Ray, he’s Steve, pleased to meet you.
—Norman, I said.
—How far you going Norman?
—Nairobi.
—What takes you to Kenya then?
—Just a visit, I said. What takes you, Ray?
Frogget came out of the toilet and slammed his beer bottle down, spilling it on his fags and barging in on the conversation.
—Me? he said. You talking about me? I’ve bin out there a coupla times. Livin on the beaches with them lads that rip off tourists, you know, girls and all. I got a few down there, Malindi, Lamu. You just ask fer me in a bar. Say mzungu Frogget and make like you mean I drink a lot. I tell yer, when I’m down there I drink till I don’t know where the next one’s comin from. Couple o’months an I’ll be back ‘ome but not before I’ve whacked it in. Coke, smack, speed, White Cap, Tusker, anything yer like, me. Yeah, smack it up I do.
Ray leaned forward and said:
—You ever chewed that root?
—Mirrah, you mean?
—Yeah, that’s the stuff. Acid and mirrah. Couldn’ ‘andle that could they, them natives?
Frogget looked at Steve.
—Well Steve, he said. What you up to?
—Yeah Steve, Ray said. What turns you cuckoo?
Steve was still silent, turning a Rothman’s packet in his hands, lifting the flap, closing it, putting the packet down. He scratched his leg and sighed before biting his lip.
—Yeah, well, I dunno do I.
—Ah come on Steve, fuck me. You aint goin out there to Kenya to buy a fuckin ice cream, China, I know.
—Well, Steve said, to see what’s there I suppose. You know, this and that, here and there.
Ray slapped him on the back and said:
—Well that’s about all anyone can do isn’t it? That’s what I’m going for and I’ve seen it all before. He’ll get a girl. He’ll be alright.
I got up and walked off thinking what was so different about me? I was looking for a woman too wasn’t I?
Next day the bus took us out to the airport at twenty to midnight, bouncing across the frozen ruts. We were put back in the deserted glass corridors, let loose and ignored. Frogget and Ray were in a bar and Ray was beginning to stagger and sing Polish drinking songs, encouraged by the barmaids with their two-dollar vodkas. Steve was glassy-eyed and wanted to ask me something:
—D’yer reckon I could get to South Africa like, overland?
—Nah, Ray says. No one can. Not even him.
He pointed to an African at the other end of the bar then swayed towards him.
—You won’t even get out of Nairobi. Boukrah. That’s all they ever bleedin say there, boukrah. Tomorrow, always bleedin tomorrow. Isn’t that right friend?
Ray put his arm round the African’s neck and the African pushed it off.
—I’m not your friend. I don’t even know who you are.
—All Africans are my friends. You’re an African, all Africans are my friends, so you’re my friend because you need me.
—I don’t need you man.
—Yes you do, you need me to look after you. All Africans need me to look after them. I’m the white man and I say jambo bwana to the black man. I want you to love me.
He reeled against the wall, bounced off and fell against the African.
—I don’t want you to love me, white man. Get your hands off. Don’t touch me.
Frogget went over.
—Leave it Ray, you’re a public nuisance. You want some village people you should’ve said, man. Get on down to Lamu.
—No, Ray said, getting a hand on the African’s head. Let me kiss you, I want to kiss you, you’re my friend.
—Get off. Are you homosexual or something?
The African went to a table and sat down.
—Yeah, alright, I’ll be one. I don’t mind homosexuals, let me fuck you, come on I want to fuck you.
The African stood and caught Ray by the elbow.
—Fuck off man and leave me alone.
Ray fell against the wall.
—Blacks don’t have to like whites any more. You never seen a black man before?
—I’m just having some fun …
Ray went along the bar looking for his vodka.
—All these black pigs are the same. He’ll get over it.
THREE (#ulink_2af0f80e-6dde-5f69-8e92-2a05fc665f39)
One afternoon I found this German helmet while clearing the bank above the lavoir. Joy had been gone three days, but when I looked back down the chemin at Le Haut Bois nothing told me she’d ever been there. No window steaming as the kettle boiled, no Joy packing logs in the basket, no scubbing of her wellingtons on brittled mud. So I kept away from that house, letting the phone ring and the door clap in a pealing wind. It scraped through the barns day and night and drove sleet-rash into my face, preaching at my chapped lips and fingers.
I’d begun to landscape, starting by the lavoir the way me and Joy had meant to, but the earth was frozen shut. Every hamlet in France has a lavoir, a water source and washing place. Joy had wanted to turn ours into a water garden, to plant willows and excavate the stone walls and the granite slabs, but it was still a gullion of sludge, just a cow-hole for Monsieur Aunay’s beasts. The bank above was a snag of dead bramble, buckthorn and flailing whips of untrimmed ash, but I’d cleared halfway, tugging links of barbed wire fence from claws of grass where even the dirt was rusted. It was German Army wire, you could tell from the clips between barbs.
The helmet was under leaf-mould and lifted out like a bowl, leaving a smooth hollow of dry, configured roots. The leather webbing was complete, snapping as it eased free. And there, like a coronet, still recognisable after fifty-two years, were woven sprigs of lavender.
For a second, this soldier was more real to me than Joy, sitting in the meadow with his helmet capped on the fence-post as he scratched his head and guzzled stolen cider, the farm behind him ransacked. He’d splashed himself in the lavoir and filled his canteen from the trickling spring, ears drying in a stroke of summer. I held this rusty helmet with its Bosch-drop over the ear, picking out rust-wafers and sycamore leaves like fossils of extinct fish, running my finger round the bullet hole. He’d stood up, put the tin hat back on, the hole appearing as suddenly as the shot, straight through the daydream, killing him where the helmet fell.
I carried it back to the house at dusk, driven inside by the merciless cold. Because of the wind I was sleeping downstairs, rolled up in the duvet on the floor between the armoire and the woodstove, instead of adrift under the roof in our big empty bed. Up there the tiles slid away at night and splintered in the yard, like dreams of broken teeth. Even the glass out of the skylight took off and put a deep scratch down the side of the Land Rover.
The dark closed in and the moon shone hard as a mortuary light, flooding the room in formaldehyde sheen. I ate a bag of monkey nuts instead of cooking, and used the German helmet as a bowl for the empty shells. If I fell asleep before exhaustion the mice would wake me, pulling at my hair, so I set this corral of wooden mouse traps called Lucifers round the floor and slept inside it, only they snapped all night. Or the geese at their watch would wake me, running round the yard like Nazis in a daze, confused by the moon or in a panic over the two-foot-long coypu who kept a den in one corner of the mare and emerged at night like a submarine.
For several nights a smell had curled up into the house from under the floorboards. But now it detonated just as I settled down, so I put my clothes back on over my pyjamas and thought okay, I’ll rip the floorboards up.
I spent an hour smacking the torch in the barn as I looked for the jemmy, unable to strike matches in there because of all the US Army jerrycans leaking jeep fumes since 1944. Everything was black except this old goat skin nailed to the back of the barn door. The same door the Normans used to nail owls to in 1745.
I stepped on a rake and the six-foot handle smacked me under the left eye. I couldn’t get the Land Rover started to use the headlights and even the split-charge terminal had rusted up in the damp so I couldn’t run a spot off the lighter socket.
When I did get back to the house with the jemmy I couldn’t smell the body at all. I hoped I’d dreamt it, only once the door was closed the stink unfolded twice the size. The problem was now obvious. To get the planks up I’d have to take the wood stove out and it was still alight. I opened the door and all four windows, kicked the smokepipe off and dragged and rocked the iron box across the clay tiles. It belched smoke and I had to wrap my left arm in a wet towel. When I reached the big granite fireplace the stove crashed on to its side. I’d forgotten to take the chimney panels out so the smoke spewed back into the room. I knocked the panels down and rushed outside half asphyxiated, waiting for the smoke to clear from the house.
Then I had to empty and dismantle the armoire because it was too big and heavy to move alone, which meant bagging Joy’s clothes, something I’d been putting off. Once that was done I knocked the armoire pegs out and stacked the pieces neatly in the grand séjour. Next came the armchair, the table, the bookcases and some barrels we’d used as tables. The worst thing was this polystyrene sheeting we’d glued down to keep the damp and the cold out. On top of it was cheap blue carpeting tacked tight against the skirting. In spite of this the wind still got under there and the carpet billowed, in-out, in-out, like the floor was breathing.
It was 3.30 a.m. by the time I had the boards up and there were drifts of polystyrene swirling round the house, all charged with static and wind from the open door like a scene from one of those dozy plastic snowshakers I had in the sixties, a souvenir of Madame Tussaud’s.
I stepped onto the bare clay three feet below the floorboards and found the body of our cat curled up in the corner. She must have crawled through the vent after a mouse or eaten a poisoned rat and crawled in there to die. It was me who’d put rat poison down. I hadn’t minded too much when they’d gnawed holes in the night or even when I saw one run across the floor with an apple, only one night I woke to find a rat sitting on my stomach.
I put the cat in a bin bag and buried her in the wind and the dark as tears blew in my mouth and up my nose like flies. Then I sat at the table in three jumpers and two joggings, drinking coffee as the sun rose like a glint on the ice, the door still open, unable to see the point in putting anything back.
FOUR (#ulink_a9c60a1e-7a7e-5e1f-bf30-00860486ebb9)
Austen met me at the airport in his 1956 Land Rover and we left Ray, Steve and Frogget arguing with porters in the airport bar. Straight off Austen said:
—So you’re Zan’s boyfriend are you, bloke? Well, she said I’ve got to keep you away from all those Kuke dolly birds at the Starlight Club, ha!
A crate of Guinness rattled in the back along with two sacks of maize, two hens tied by the legs and debes of paraffin and water.
—They’re for Wanja, he shouted over the engine as we rattled across potholes towards the Ngong Hills.
—Zan tell you about Wanja, bloke?
—What do you mean?
—I think she’s gone mad. Bloody worrying, bloke.
—Zanna?
—No, ha. Wanja. Round the bloody bend. Those fucking Tanzanian witch doctors. She puts bloody lipstick round her eyes and mutters to herself all day. Found her walking round the shamba last night, starkers. Says there’s a devil in her stomach. Wanjiku’s running the place now. She’s only twelve. Can’t go to school in case her mother burns the place down.
It was probably the drought turned Wanja mad because a wind like a blowtorch scorched across the shadeless plain. The Ngong Hills looked desolate in the clear air.
