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‘You know, Bruce’ – he stopped and looked at me from under his eyebrows with his hand resting on the back of my neck – ‘you’re kinda weird, but you’re OK…I think, anyways.’
We went back into the house and sat opposite each other on the sofas with big tumblers of Scotch in our hands and a bottle and a bucket of ice on the table. We drank and refilled without speaking. I took Kershaw’s photograph out of my shirt pocket and flicked it across to Charlie.
‘I’m looking for this guy. His boss wants me to find him, says he hasn’t heard from him in a week. He describes him as missing.’
‘Steve Kershaw,’ said Charlie, rolling his glass across his forehead. ‘English. Buys sheanut in Cotonou.’ He spun the photo back at me across the table.
‘When did you last see him?’
‘He was in here about three days ago with a blonde girl, French I think, I didn’t know her. Nice looking though. Great legs, nice ass.’
‘Three days doesn’t sound like he’s very “missing” to me.’
‘You asked me a question,’ he shrugged.
‘Was he intimate with this French girl?’
‘Kind of,’ he patted his bald head with his hairy hand. ‘Sex rather than marriage type, I’d say.’ Charlie twisted his leg under himself and winced. ‘You know, this concubinage thing confuses me, Bruce. It sounds…financial.’
‘It’s like a common-law wife,’ I said, my eyes widening with the whisky on an empty stomach which was loosening off the gab more than I wanted it to. ‘I know you Americans are keen on marriage. Divorce, too. But in Europe now, marriage is out. People live together, they don’t need to tie the knot in front of God any more. It keeps the divorce rate down. I’ve met quite a few Americans who’ve had three or four wives, which to Europeans sounds like upgrading, like we do with computers. The Africans? Well, they have all four wives at once, it shows they’re making money. But then they say divorce is not a cheap option in the US. Is it a status symbol there yet, Charlie?’ He didn’t answer but stared at a bookcase with no books in it.
‘You been married before, Charlie?’
Charlie, who was sitting sideways on the sofa with his arm thrown over the back of it, gave me a sideways look as if I was trying to cheat off him in an exam. He held up two fingers and took a large slug of whisky from his glass, including a lump of ice which he crunched.
‘And you’d like to make Yvette number three?’
Charlie didn’t react well to that dart into his private life. He’d shown me more than he’d wanted to earlier and, being a businessman always on the lookout for leverage, thought I could be the type to abuse it, which is the sort of thing he would do. The look he gave me told me so. It left me with frost bite down my front. His face lost expression, his eyelids closed a little, and he spoke in a soft voice. ‘We were talking about Steve Kershaw.’
As he said this, Charlie’s brain spun and clicked into a different mode. He was not a man to reveal what he was thinking. I had caught him off guard. Charlie knew that I knew that Yvette had got through, if not to the heart, then at least to the fillet steak. He leaned back with his elbow on the arm of the sofa, straightened his leg and sipped his whisky, licking the liverish lip to show that he was relaxed. He put his glass down on the carpet and rubbed his face with his hand.
‘Steve Kershaw,’ said Charlie in a voice that had a very straight edge to it. ‘Can I call him Steve?’ he asked, not expecting an answer but just to show me he was back in town. ‘Steve Kershaw used to come in here with a lot of different women. He only came in at the weekends. I never once saw him with another guy. I saw him in here with black girls, white girls, Orientals, Indians, tall girls, short girls, beautiful girls and ugly girls but I never saw him with a guy.’
‘He likes women,’ I said, shrugging my eyebrows.
Charlie drew a straight horizontal line with his hand. ‘I don’t trust that kinda guy.’
‘Did you know any of these women?’ I asked.
‘The only woman I knew to talk to was a woman called Nina Sorvino. She works in the trade department of the US Embassy. She liked him but thought he was kinda intense. I don’t know what happened but something went wrong. She was here last night giving me the lowdown. I think he was into weird sex. She wasn’t specific.’
‘D’you mind if I talk to her?’
‘Try her. She’ll tell you more than I can. She might know some other people. I’ll call her tomorrow, let her know you’re gonna be in touch.’
‘Did you ever talk to him?’
‘Uh huh. Like I said. Not my type.’
Charlie poured himself a very stiff whisky and did the same for me. He took a gulp out of his as if it was nothing more than a cold beer. He grunted as the alcohol hit his system. The blinds were coming down in my head and I could see Charlie was beginning to paw the ground with his hoof.
‘Whaddya think’s gonna happen, Bruce?’ asked Charlie, slapping the back of the sofa and lapsing into a more pronounced American drawl. It was the usual thing – Charlie on the hunt for information. He was a businessman, a trader, one of the good ones who realized that information was everything and he didn’t give a damn about the source. He knew better than anybody else that not hearing the vital piece of news in Africa wouldn’t just mean that you missed out on some action, it could cost you your whole business and, in bad times, your life.
He also knew that the boy who packed his groceries last month, or the young army sergeant at the road block could, with not very many twists of fate if he didn’t draw the line at shooting people, become a highranking minister, or even the president himself.
‘The President might survive this one, but it’s going to be painful,’ I said. ‘He’s losing the support of the people. France is edging away from him. There’s going to be a question mark about future US aid. He’s been around too long. It’s happening everywhere else in Africa. The day of the dictator is over. They’re all feeling the cold wind now. Africa’s going to be a different continent by the end of the century.’
‘What about here?’ said Charlie.
‘The army’s the problem. You’re never safe until you’ve got the army with you. The army’s full of northerners from the President’s tribe. They’re not going to want to see their man go.’
Charlie finished half a tumbler of whisky in one tip, poured himself some more and added another half inch to mine.
‘The southerners will get their election. The President probably won’t get in, but whoever does will be under threat from the army from day one.’
‘A coup.’
‘The first thing any civil administration will want to do is weaken the army. Generals in the US don’t like that and they don’t like it here either.’
‘Is anybody talking about this kind of thing on the street?’
‘On the street they just want multi-party democracy. They don’t know what it means beyond free elections with more than one party, but they want it. Some of them think they know what it means but they don’t realize how much choice complicates things. They see France and Germany with democracy and they know how wealthy those countries are. So they think, if they’re rich, we’ll be rich. But there’re some big gaps and a lot can happen in the gaps.’
‘It’s gonna be a fuck-up, in other words,’ said Charlie, his voice thick with the drink.
‘It’s just the next stage. Africa’s been dominated by the Europeans and now it’s going to be dominated by their systems. It’s the only road.’
‘The only road they know is how to fuck things up.’
Charlie started pacing up and down the room. His forehead was glistening despite the air conditioning. Somebody had put a couple of bags of cement on my shoulders. I drank some more to see if it lightened the load.
Some hours later, which turned out to be minutes, Charlie stopped wearing a trail in the carpet and fixed me with a malevolent, drunken eye. Maybe I hadn’t been answering his questions, or maybe it was just the time of night when it occurred to him to start disliking company. I decided not to look back in case it stirred up his machismo and I caught the full force of Hurricane Charlie in an enclosed room. Wherever I did look, things either came towards me or I went towards them. I realized from the silence burning behind his eyes that the subject was going to change, and for the worse. As always with Charlie, it was going to get personal and it was going to be about sex.
‘How’s that babe of yours, Bru?’ he asked.
‘Heike, Charlie. Her name’s Heike.’
‘Yeah, Heike. Kraut, right? Ossa Kraut like inna sack?’
‘Maybe it’s time for me to go.’
‘Come on, Bru, ossa Kraut like inna sack? I went with a Thai chick once, she was tighter’n a duck’s ass.’
‘That’s not something I’d know about.’
‘On account of what, Bru?’
‘On account of English ducks are suspicious of people who come at them with that kind of thing in mind.’
Charlie poured some more whisky into my glass and topped up his own.
‘You think you’re smart,’ he said, shaking his head and panting a little from the alcohol crashing around his system. ‘English people. They think they’re smart. Nina. She likes English guys. Me? I think they’re all faggots. But Nina…when you meet her she’ll tell you she likes English guys. She says: “They don’t fuck you with their eyes.”’
‘Now that’s true, Charlie, once we’ve been told what to do it with, we remember.’
‘You don’t know when to shut the fuck up.’
‘I’m drunk. That’s what happens. It just keeps pouring out of me.’
‘I thought you could take it.’
‘I can. I like it and I can take it. But I can’t take it and keep my mouth shut.’
Charlie drank half his tumbler and nodded to me. I took a gulp which blazed its way down my oesophagus. He topped me up so that I had neat whisky to the brim and did the same for himself.
‘Cheers,’ he said, and took an inch off the top, to show me that the real men were on his sofa. ‘The first English guy I met was at my brother’s. My brother makes films in LA.’
‘What kind of films?’
‘Thrillers, comedies…’
‘Right, I was just making sure he wasn’t a Pasolini or anything.’
‘He does skin movies too, if he has to. Pays the bills.’ Charlie liked to talk tough.
‘The English guy?’
‘Yeah. My brother throws a party, like he has to, to get work now and again. It’s one of those parties, lot of girls. Lot of working girls, you know what I mean. They going round with the blow, little white piles of it on silver platters with spoons. I’m talking with these two guys. One of them is English. He’s a writer. Calls himself Al ‘cos he’s in the States. His real name is Algernon. What sort of a fucking name is that? Anyways, Al’s got a plate with some canapés on it. The girl comes round with the blow and Al picks up the spoon, loads it with blow and sticks it onna side of his plate. Then he says to the girl: “You got any celery to go with that?” Now that is what I call one big asshole.’
‘I laughed.’
‘I heard you,’ said Charlie. ‘You wanna see one of my brother’s films?’
‘No thanks, I got to go.’
‘It’s a short,’ said Charlie, leaning over, picking up the zapper and the TV came to life. There was a picture of African straw-roofed mud huts and two girls pounding yam.
‘This is Africa.’
‘This is Togolese TV, asshole.’
Charlie clicked on the video and a dark ill-lit picture came on in which only the movement of things could just be discerned.
‘Is this wildlife or something?’
‘Kinda.’
As the camera pulled back, Charlie turned the sound up and the telltale tinny music and sobbing ecstasy accompanied a shot of a woman laid out face down on a bench, her wrists and ankles tied underneath. A huge and hairy man who looked as if he drove trucks during the day held her thin waist in large and sinisterly gloved hands while he worked on her from behind. Another man sat in dazed concentration at the other end of the bench with the woman’s head nodding in his lap.
‘Good night, Charlie,’ I said, and lurched out of the room.
‘Good night, chickenshit,’ he shouted after me, without taking his eyes off the screen.
I needed some fresh air. Things appeared cut together like a film. There was no feeling of time passing. The dark corridor, the bird-like flower in the pot, the door, the warm wet darkness, the bar door. The bar door was locked. I walked down towards the sea.
I knew there was a steep bank of red earth down to the sandy beach but it was very dark and the bar was shut down so there was no light. I eased forward with one foot ahead of me until I felt stupid enough, then I stopped and looked out. My eyes got used to the dark. I was very close to the bank. It was closer to the bar than I remembered it. The sea was slowly eating its way into Charlie’s compound. It wasn’t going to be long before it all tipped into the Gulf of Guinea.
Standing in the dark was giving me sensory deprivation rather than sobering me up. I walked back to the bar; Charlie was still sitting in his living room, his brother’s film flickering on the screen. I fell heavily on my shoulder and kicked out at whatever I had fallen over, which groaned. I crawled back, and in the dim light I could just make out the slack features of the drunken Lebanese. I called the gardien and we hauled him up to the paillote, which left me speechless with a huge quantity of blood crashing through my head. The boy was covered in ants and his face and hands were swollen with mosquito bites. The gardien said he would put him in one of the guest rooms. After ten minutes, my pulse went back down from my ears to my wrist and I got in the car and drove back to Lomé.
There were street gangs operating in the centre of town and on the coast road at night. They wanted money in the name of democracy. I decided to go around town and headed for one of the causeways across the lagoon that hardly anybody used at night. There was no street lighting. There was nobody out. The noise from the cicadas closed in. A tyre burned in the middle of the road, the thick black smoke making the night thicker and blacker.
A group on a piece of wasteland stood around a blazing oil drum whose flames slashed out at the night. As I approached the lagoon, two kids ran across the road and into the dark. Further on, a young woman trotted with her hands covering her cheeks. A young man stood at the side of the road as I rolled past with my elbow out of the window. He slapped my arm.
‘Go back. Go back,’ he said.
I cut the lights, got out of the car and looked down on to the causeway. A car was parked diagonally across the road, its headlights flaring out across the lagoon. In the light, three people stood looking out into the lagoon, their hands behind their backs as if inspecting something. They crumpled forwards off the road. The sound of three shots, delayed, cracked across the water. The black, still lagoon rippled out in silver lines before the lights died on the causeway.
‘Go now. They’re coming,’ the young man said to the back of my head.
‘Who’s they?’ I asked.
‘Nobody knows,’ said the young man.
We heard the car approaching. The young man ran, his shirt tail flapping. I drove down a side street and parked by a house out of sight of the road, got out and looked back down the street. A single car drove past at walking pace with no lights on.
Ten minutes later I drove across the lagoon. The mosquitoes screamed across the water.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_bb2ddcea-01d8-517f-82cd-d8939aa9218a)
Thursday 26th September
By morning, my face was welded to the bed, I had an arm like a plastic leg and a brain as dry as a monkey nut and no bigger. Something rattled in my inner ear as I sat up. I drank the best part of a litre bottle of water and felt intimidated by the brightness of the sunlight slanting through the slats of the shutters forming white bars on the marble-tiled floor. I stared into them for a while until they lost what little meaning they had.
I made it to the shower and rehydrated to full size underneath it. I shaved with limited success. I flossed for the first time in a month and ended up with a cat’s cradle in my mouth. I dressed as if I’d done it before but could use some maternal supervision. I flipped off the air conditioner, opened the shutters and staggered back as the sun slapped a white rhomboid across the room. By the time I’d got to the bottom of the stairs I was ready for bed.
On the verandah, Jack was asleep in the lounger with the radio murmuring on his stomach, the TV quiet for once. I poured some coffee, ate some pineapple and retreated to a shady corner with a pair of sunglasses.
‘Morning,’ said Jack.
‘Should be,’ I said.
Jack opened one eye and found me with it.
‘What happened to you?’
‘Man to man with Charlie. The usual. Half pints of whisky, no water.’
‘Did he get ugly?’
