George thought he could hear the whooping laughter of the drinkers through the crackle.
“Listen, George … We may get cut off … One question. You know that Pan-African shipping convention in Lagos next month?”
“Yes. I’m going there.”
“You are? That’s great, George. Great—”
“Will you be there?”
“Me? No, I’m not going. But you’re sure you can make it?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Fantastic. That’s all I wanted to know.”
“Shall I … see anyone there that I know?”
“Yeah,” Teddy laughed. “A lot of goddam shipping bores. Anyway, what’s happening there?”
“Nothing much. The odd demo. The curfew’s getting irksome.”
“Tough shit.”
“Teddy?” But the connection had been broken. There was nothing on the line except a lot of bronchial rattles and wheezes.
He flew to Lagos with a small splinter of anxiety lodged somewhere in his mind. At the convention, he loitered for a while in the emptying hall at the end of the first plenary session. Each time he went back to his hotel he asked if there were any messages for him. Boyce of Mombasa wanted a drink; Ashworth of Freetown proposed lunch. No word from Teddy or his friends. The convention dragged. George ached to be back at work.
On the fifth day, just a few hours before his plane was due to leave, he found out why Teddy had called him in the night. It was in the Lagos Times. The Figuera, a Portuguese naval patrol vessel, had been sunk. She had fuelled in Bom Porto. Twelve hours out, a series of explosions had torn her apart. Nine crew members, including the captain, were missing, presumed dead. There was a photograph of the survivors—men wrapped in blankets, stepping ashore from a Swedish ship in Dakar. Another blotchy picture showed the bunkering station.
George, staring at the paper, felt first fury, then contempt. Teddy was a shit, a lying bastard and a bloody fool. He felt betrayed by his friend. How could he do this to me? Then, as no more than a guilty afterthought, he pitied the drowned sailors; the sea set alight, the broken ship going down.
It had always been understood. The bunkering station was out of the quarrel. It was like an independent state, a tiny Switzerland. The military governor accepted that. So did Aristide Varbosa. George was probably the only man in the entire country who enjoyed the trust of both sides in a war of small atrocities and dirty skirmishes. Now that trust was destroyed by this vicious, infantile piece of terrorism.
He flew back to Montedor, raging over every slow mile of the flight. He was too angry to eat or drink. He sat in First Class, scattering spent matches on the floor as he lit and relit his pipe and tried to learn the strange new language of scorn and dislike for Eduardo Duarte.
The military governor was a shy man. He had a bad complexion and looked scuffed like his uniform. His questions to George came out sounding like apologies.
“It is an appalling thing,” George said; “a disaster for the country.”
“I have to hold myself responsible. It was a simple failure of security.”
“Even so, they know that it’s in their own interests to—”
“This is not a football game. It is our job to protect our troops.”
“The only reason I’ve been able to keep the station running is because both you and the PAIM people have honoured the idea that it cannot ever be treated as either a target or a base. You know I have friends on both sides,” George said, wondering quite what it was that he wanted to confess.
“Of course. That is necessary. I understand that.”
George did not mention the telephone call. The last thing on his mind was any desire to shield Duarte. It was his own stupidity he was trying to hide: how could he have been so dim as to fail to see that it was his absence from Bom Porto, not his presence in Lagos, that Duarte had been checking?
The patrol boat dropped out of the news. The Creole day foreman was held in detention, along with six other of George’s men. There were rumours of torture; George was careful not to listen too closely.
Six months later, the Portuguese left. Varbosa was President of the Republic; Duarte was Minister of Highways. George stayed on at the bunkering station. After a few stiff weeks and two painful lunches, Duarte slipped back into being Teddy again. He was simply too funny to hate, George decided. And he was the only person that George knew in the city who could play squash.
If only things had rested there.
In December 1975, Teddy had produced a piece of paper in the bar of the Club Nautico and asked for George’s signature in triplicate. “Mr President requests,” he said.
“Why?”
“Oh, George, you know about the bullshit of office. Soon we’re going to be as bureaucratic as Egyptians. We black folks just love paperwork, honky.”
George signed.
A month later, they were leaving the club when Teddy opened the lapel of George’s white alpaca jacket and slipped an envelope into his pocket. “From the President’s office,” he said. George waited until he was home before he opened it.
The letter began “Honourable Sir” and named him as a loyal friend of the Republic of Montedor. Enclosed was an official-looking slip of paper, soon deciphered. It listed the number of a bank account in Carouge, Switzerland, and showed a bilan courant of $41,324.60. George felt a giddying rush of nausea and panic.
“Don’t be ridiculous—” he told Teddy the next evening.
“It’s not me, man,” Teddy said. He had just rechristened the Rua Marítima the Rua Fidel Castro, and had taken to going everywhere in his old faded-blue battledress.
“I don’t care who it is. You know I can’t take it.”
“You can’t take money from the government? Since when? You are a government employee now, George.”
“Not this money.”
“Your Christmas bonus. Listen, I know what you’re thinking. It has nothing at all to do with that gunboat. Nothing. I swear. By the Virgin and the holy saints, OK?”
“Patrol boat,” George said. “It was a fishery protection vessel.”
“Whatever. But I tell you, George. There’s no way you can give it back. You try talking to the President, you make a big insult to the government. Varbosa tries to pay you a tribute, not a big one, for your work in this country; you are going to throw it back in his face, huh? Because you are still angry over one operation of PAIM in four years of revolution?”
“I don’t take dash,” George said.
“It’s not dash, George. Anyway, it’s not a question of taking it. It’s there. It’s in your name. Varbosa himself can’t write a cheque on that account.”
“I don’t want it.”
“So give it to the birds.”
The more George thought about it, the more lonely the money made him feel. It made him feel a foreigner in the only place that he’d ever felt really at home. Had he been in England, the whole business would have been transparently offensive and absurd. Here, no-one could see his point. Not Teddy. Not even Vera. He didn’t dare mention it to Humphreys, who would have been scandalized by the story.
He buried the bank slip at the bottom of the inlaid Adeni chest, but the gross particularity of the figures stuck in his head. He tried translating them into other currencies, but they didn’t come near to adding up to a round sum in escudos, pounds, francs or marks. Roubles, maybe? Cuban pesetas? Whatever previous life those dollars had lived, George knew for sure that it was a disreputable one.
Twice a year, a letter came from the bank in Carouge. George threw them away unopened. He could feel the untouched money slowly growing behind his back. As the interest on it accumulated, so did the percentage on his embarrassment. He was ashamed of himself. Lying alone in the small hours, he pictured the Figuera ablaze, the slick of black oil staining the sea, the ballooning liferafts.
In 1980 he was in Geneva for three days. The OPEC Oil Ministers’ Conference had bred a swarm of satellite conferencelets, and George was
delegated to one of these in order to lobby the representative from Curaçao. Driving his rented car back to Perdita Monaghan’s cavernous apartment in Vevey, he saw a sign saying CAROUGE 7km. It was still early afternoon: the banks would be open, Perdita was out for the day, the dreadful Fergus was in, as usual. George had time to kill. He took the turning.
The bank was a small one, in a shopping precinct off the main road. George gave his name and the account number to a teller who went away and busied himself at a computer terminal. He came back with a printed slip. $63,137.48. It wasn’t quite as much as George had feared it might be. He withdrew $500 and spent twenty minutes in the boutiques on the shopping precinct, where he bought a rainbow dressing gown, a miniature Japanese camera and a pair of Italian swimming trunks.
It didn’t work. The furies evidently weren’t going to be appeased by these daft offerings. At the thought of his pile of dirty money in Carouge, George still felt leaden.
The dressing gown got left behind in the closet of Fergus’s room. A week later, the camera was stolen in Bom Porto, from the front seat of a landrover. George wore the trunks once. They made him look as if he was sporting a scarlet codpiece. Vera lay in the sand and laughed.
“Wowee!” she rolled her eyes in mocking pantomime. “Hey, you been keeping something from me, George?”
He shucked off the trunks and splashed naked in the surf. Vera watched the bay for sharks.
Fifteen months later he went to Geneva again. He avoided the road to Carouge, but dreamed of the Figuera. In his dream the sea was empty, flat and sunlit: a captain’s braided hat floated on the water. George tried to snare it with a boathook; it bobbed away out of reach.
Figuera.
Extraordinary. The locked door was wide open, the room empty.
There was a prolonged warning blast from a ship on the estuary. A rusty Panamanian coaster was moving upriver through the pool, dragging its wake behind it like a giant flared skirt. The small boats tipped and slithered on their moorings. As the wake hit them, their reflections shattered. The coaster cruised slowly past the window, a thuggish pike in a pond of minnows. In the still air, the frosted trees on the hills across the water looked etched on glass.
Struggling into his old trousers, George was already full of his trip. He’d take Sheila to lunch, then fly to Geneva. He loved plans, tickets, timetables—all the engrossing paraphernalia of being off and away. He was looking forward—even to the aeroplane, he realized. It made a blessed, unexpected change from looking back. He wanted to husband this new mood, as if it was a precious fluid that could easily evaporate if handled carelessly.
Hugging his good humour, he climbed down the stairs, stooping hunchbacked under the low beams. His parents’ cottage had been built for Celtic dwarfs. There was altogether too much of George to fit it—too many knees and elbows, too alpine a skull. Feeling clumsy and oversized he filled the kettle in the gingerbread kitchen and padded off to look up the number of the railway station. His bare feet stung on the cold slate. It was like the floor of a church; there was something echoing and ancient in its soapy smoothness. His dim ancestors looked very dusty this morning. The sun showed up cracks and coagulations of old paint that he’d never noticed before. The Gainsborough really was a dreadful daub; the cousin’s right hand looked like a piece of meat and, in this light, she had acquired a severe squint. For the first time, it occurred to George that the ancestors were his. He could do with them what he liked now. The cousin, for a start, could go to Oxfam. That was a cheering thought. Yes. Sheila could take anything she wanted, then he could dispose of his dead family one by one in jumble sales. How much lighter life would be without them. How long they had outstayed their welcome. How richly they deserved their marching orders.
Listening to the double burr of the phone ringing at St Austell station, George served notice on his forebears and hummed “Tiger Rag”, keeping time on the slate floor with his bare toes.
CHAPTER SIX
The moment the taxi turned left and crossed the river George was lost.
He’d always prided himself on knowing his way pretty well around London: he kept a useful map of the place lodged in his head on which the city was painted as a string of brightly coloured districts. On the extreme right-hand side there was the area around Charing Cross, where you went to shows and rummaged around for secondhand books. Then there was Soho, where you ate. The bit in the middle was where you did general shopping. To the left of that there was St James’s, where you put up, and where you bought shoes and shirts and stuff. Then there was a stretch of green, before Knightsbridge began. George had always felt protruberantly male in Knightsbridge. When he was married, it had been Angela’s territory and it was still somehow wife-coloured: expensive, over-scented, peopled with voices shouting endearments at each other. After Knightsbridge, there were just People’s Houses; miles of high, white stucco, like an enormous cake. George had nibbled at the icing there, always at the invitation of friends of Angela’s. The edges of the map were marked by gothic railway stations—platforms on which, for some reason, you were always saying goodbye and getting onto a train and never getting off one and saying hullo.
This was right off the map. It seemed to be off the taxi driver’s map too. When George gave the man Sheila’s address, he’d said, “It’ll be three quid over what it says on the meter, mate. And no complaints afterwards …”
“It’s only … Clapham,” George said.
“Bloody Brixton, more like. Most drivers, they’d turn you down flat. I would myself. Only I’ve stopped now, en’t I?”
He had driven on for a hundred yards, then, without turning his head, he shouted through the partition: “Woman, is it?”
“My daughter,” George said stiffly.
“Women.” The driver pronounced the word wimmin and made it sound like the name of an affliction like piles or eczema. Wimmin, according to the driver, never told the truth about where they lived. If they lived in Kilburn, they always called it Hampstead; if they lived in Earls Court, they always said South Kensington.
“Now it’s all bloody Clapham! Don’t matter where they live, do it? Streatham, Tooting, Tulse Hill, Balham … they all say Clapham. Lah-di-fuckin’-dah!”
George stared out of the window, blocking his ears to the stream of the driver’s provocative abuse. They were passing through a part of London that he’d never seen—never even imagined to exist. It was the grubby midway hour between afternoon and night, and the landscape was dotted with smoky fires in old petrol drums. Derelict men and women stood round them, their faces reddened by the flames. A church went by. Its windows had been boarded over, and the porch had been demolished, leaving a hole in the building big enough for trucks to drive in and out between the altar and the street. A painted sign said WINSTON’S BUDGET RENTAVAN.
It looked a lawless country. The blocks of workers’ flats were dirtier, more sprawled and raggedy, than those of Accra and Dar Es Salaam; there was more trash blowing in the streets than there was in Lagos. Everywhere there were slogans, spraygunned on walls, signboards, standing sheets of corrugated iron. KILL THE PIGS HEROIN EAT SHIT FUCK THE GLC. George thought sadly of the innocent VIVAs of Montedor; no-one seemed to want anything to live long here.
Held up at a stoplight, the cab grumbled in neutral beside a petshop. In whitewashed lettering on its window, the shop promised budgerigars, kittens, rabbits, dogmeat, guppies, goldfish. It was hardly bigger than a lock-up stall, and its lighted window was opaque with steam, but it stood out in the landscape; a lonely monument to things that were warm, friendly, smaller than the human. Up there in the tower blocks, above this dead air that tasted of iron filings and burned tyre rubber, people were keeping kittens and knitting winter coats for dogs. Very rum.
George leaned forward. “Where are we now?”
“This? Lambuff. Souf Lambuff Road.”
“Oh.” To George the name had always meant a bishop’s palace and a jolly sort of dance called the Lambeth Walk.
&nb
sp; Encouraged by George’s question, the driver settled himself comfortably into another contemptuous tirade. The one-way system was, he said, a piece of stupid shit. He cursed all drivers of all private cars. A West Indian in dreadlocks elicited such a rain of bored obscenity that George tried to close the sliding glass between himself and the man. It was jammed open with a wooden wedge. The man was as inexorable as God’s wrath.
At a zebra crossing, an elderly woman in a caliper hobbled slowly in front of the headlights. “Get a fuckin’ move on, shagbag!” the driver said, and made her jump with a blast of the horn. It was as if his anger supplied the motive power for the taxi: fuelled with expletives, it dodged, braked, slewed, cut in. With every gear change there was another burst of filth from the driver. “Wet fart!” he shouted. “Wanker!” “You tit!” “You fuckin’ toerag!”
George, quailing in the back of the cab, lit his pipe.
“Can’t you fuckin’ read?”
“What?”
“No smoking! I don’t give a shit if you want to kill yourself, mate; you go ahead. Get fuckin’ cancer. But don’t you poison my lungs with your fuckin’ smoke—okay?”
Unable to speak, reddening with rage, George pocketed his pipe. Suddenly he was as angry as everyone else in South Lambeth. He boiled in silence; hating the driver, hating the cab, hating the traffic, hating the tower blocks and the bad air and the slow, ugly endlessness of the city as it repeated itself for mile after mile without a landmark. As the darkness thickened, it seemed part of the geography of the place: south of the river, into the dark. He was sure that he was being driven in wide circles, and twice spotted the same pillar of squashed cars rising over a gaping wall of corrugated iron to prove it.
Crouched low in his seat, he tried to get a view of the sky: if only he could get a fix on a star, he could keep tabs on where he was being taken. But the only lights up there were the windows of the flats. As the taxi lurched on through the traffic, they revolved over his head like constellations.
In Africa, George had tried to keep up with the news from Britain. He read the International Herald Tribune as often as he could find a copy, and subscribed to the Weekly Guardian. It had been with disbelief that he’d read of how suspected IRA men, held in detention in Northern Ireland, had mounted what they called the Dirty Protest. These men had expressed their indignation against the government by turning themselves into giant babies. They didn’t wash. They threw their food on the floor and ate it in their hands. They practised incontinence and daubed the walls of their cells with their own excrement. Sitting, out of the sun, in the Rua Kwame Nkruma, George had followed this story as if he was reading up on the customs of some remote and terrifying tribe. In Britain? Surely not.
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