Vinegar Soup

by Miles Gibson

  ‘I think we’ve arrived,’ Veronica whispered into Frank’s ear. He opened his eyes and struggled weakly to pull himself from her embrace; but when he looked from the windows the town had gone.

  The forest smothered them again. For a few kilometres the road became a narrow ledge of rock that seemed to roll dangerously among the tops of trees, then it plunged into a gravel trench that slithered and sank beneath them.

  ‘Where’s the hotel?’ asked Veronica anxiously. She peered into the twilight. The trees were wrapped in succulent skirts of undergrowth, mosses, ferns and red wax flowers. Cobwebs hung on invisible threads. The earth steamed.

  ‘There!’ shouted Gilbert, pressing his face against the windscreen.

  They climbed a ridge and broke into the sunlight. Happy grunted and stopped the car with a fart.

  It was a shabby building with a deep veranda and walls the colour of mud. The word HOTEL had been daubed on the roof in thick, white paint.

  As the car stopped a figure moved from the darkness of the veranda and walked out towards them. He was dressed in a grubby cotton jacket and a pair of shapeless black trousers, worn to a shine at the knees. Beneath an old straw hat his face was the colour of boiled ham. Gilbert ran to meet him.

  ‘You’re Boris!’ he boomed, snatching at the man’s hand.

  Boris grinned. ‘Mr Gilbert!’

  They shook hands, laughed, slapped each other on the shoulder, shook hands again.

  ‘And Miss Veronica,’ declared Boris as Veronica stepped from the car.

  ‘And this must be Hank.’

  ‘Frank,’ said Frank, falling over his feet.

  ‘Are you tired?’ asked Boris. ‘Did Happy behave himself? Good. Good. Well. I show you the rooms we prepared. Everything is ready. You want to wash? You hungry? You like something to drink? Maybe. Happy can bring the luggage.’

  Boris began to move away. Gilbert climbed the veranda and followed him into the hotel, Veronica leading Frank, Happy farting with the strain of the suitcases. They crowded into the entrance hall and stood, uncomfortably, blinking into the gloom. An old chintz sofa with greasy arms was sprawled in a corner. A table cluttered with books and magazines ran the length of one wall. The London Pageant. Ideal Home. Baxter’s Book of Mountain Memories. Where the spines had broken yellow pages sprang apart and curled like brittle fans. A mottled mirror, blind with dust, hung by a chain above the door.

  They stared at each other for a few moments, waiting, excited, baffled by the silence. Frank and Veronica sat down in the sofa. Gilbert steamed with excitement. He kept looking around, grinning and nodding his head. The sweat rolled down his neck and stained his collar. His hands trembled.

  ‘Where’s Sam?’ he boomed.

  Happy looked scared. He dropped the luggage, made a dash for the daylight and clattered off down the veranda.

  ‘All in good time,’ said Boris. ‘Let me show you the rooms.’

  ‘Bugger the rooms!’ roared Gilbert. ‘It’s time I took a look at Sam. Where is the old devil? I want to show him the children. He drags me halfway around the world and then plays hide-and-seek. Is he here? Where is he?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Boris. ‘He’s here.’

  ‘Bring him out!’ laughed Gilbert.

  ‘He’s in the garden,’ said Boris.

  He led them through the empty hotel and into a courtyard protected by a fat, mud wall. A chicken scratched in the dust. A stack of chairs stood creaking in the blistering heat. They walked past a kitchen block and a store room, to the far end of the yard where a small plot of earth was marked by a barbed-wire fence.

  ‘There,’ said Boris. He pulled off his hat and gripped it tightly in his hands. He seemed reluctant to approach the fence.

  ‘Sam?’ whispered Gilbert. He ran forward, stumbling, catching his coat on the line of barbed wire.

  The plot had been destroyed. The ground was trampled and where once all kinds of plants might have flourished now there were only broken bundles of wilted leaves kicked and thrown in every direction. It looked like the work of a madman or perhaps some marauding animal. The garden had been dug out and nothing was left but a mound of fresh earth.

  Gilbert stared at the mound. The kettle of flowers. The wooden cross. Flies swarmed around him, drawn down to the stink of rotting cabbage. He stared at the mound and then raised his eyes, looking out towards the forest.

  ‘How did it happen?’ he said softly.

  ‘The fever,’ said Boris.

  ‘When?’

  ‘A few days ago. We wanted to keep him until you arrived but we couldn’t risk it in this heat. I’m sorry.’

  Gilbert nodded. An eagle drifted from the treetops and hung, motionless, in the darkening air.

  13

  Frank leaned back in his chair and gazed out at the night forest. The air was warm and hissing with insects. Fifty yards away the trees appeared as frozen fountains, fantastic shadows against the sky. Through the feathered peaks of these shadows he watched stars drifting like sparks blown from a brilliant fire.

  Veronica, beside him, was talking to Boris. She was talking about Olive and the Hercules Cafe, about Gilbert’s stories of Sam and how, when she was flying, she thought she would die. She spoke in a whisper, afraid of disturbing the sleeping forest, and kept pausing, frowning, searching for words while Boris listened, soft as a priest.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ said Boris gently, when Veronica had finished. He sat with his back to the forest, shoulders pressed against the veranda and a bottle of brandy in his fist. A moon the size of a dinner plate hung in the darkness over his head. ‘You’ve come. I shall stay. You want to see the hotel? Yes. Tomorrow. Don’t take long. No one here. Empty rooms.’

  ‘You’re closed,’ said Frank.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re closed because of Sam.’

  ‘We never closed,’ exploded Boris. He laughed and sloshed the brandy into glasses. ‘Sam said we was like the Windmill. We never closed but somehow we never looked open. We had problems. Difficulties. It hasn’t been easy these past few months.’

  ‘What went wrong?’ asked Veronica.

  ‘Don’t matter,’ sniffed Boris. ‘Finished. Sam said Gilbert would fix it. Sam always had plans for the place. Sam was like that. Crazy bastard. God rest him.’ He took off his hat and fitted it tightly over his knee. His hair was long and bleached by the sun. He wiped his nose. The hat had left a yellow crease on his burnt red skin.

  ‘God rest him,’ said Veronica.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come. You sitting there. Me sitting here. Sam sitting at the bottom of the garden. Let’s drink to Gilbert.’

  He pressed his glass against his mouth, jerked back his head and the brandy disappeared. He snorted and sucked air through clenched teeth. Frank and Veronica tried to imitate him.

  ‘It goes to my head,’ wheezed Veronica. She laughed and coughed and wiped the tears from her eyes.

  ‘It’s French,’ said Boris, as if that explained everything and he gave the bottle a little shake.

  ‘Lovely,’ gasped Veronica.

  Boris nodded. ‘I save this bottle for something special. Drank the others when old Sam died. Poor bastard. Broke my heart. He loved brandy.’ He carefully refilled their glasses and replaced the bottle between his boots.

  Frank thought again of Gilbert standing over the grave of his friend. For a long time he hadn’t moved, he hadn’t spoken, but stood pressed forward against the barbed wire. When they had helped him away his face looked grey and swollen. His clothes were torn. There were flies crawling over his hands. It was one of the few times in his life that Frank had seen him defeated, as if all the sorrow and disappointments, the little pains and defeats of twenty years had squeezed with the strength to burst his heart. Boris had pulled off Gilbert’s shoes and helped to put him to bed. He had looked at them. He had said nothing. They drew the mosquito nets around him and waited until he had fallen asleep. Where had he gone in that sleep? Had he hurried back to Olive or was h
e running out to Sam? He had closed his eyes against the living and slipped away to be with his ghosts.

  Frank felt a pain in his stomach. He squirmed in the chair, pulled up his knees and hunched his shoulders, trying to smother the slashing knives.

  ‘What’s wrong, Hank?’ asked Boris.

  ‘Nothing,’ whispered Frank. He pulled back his head and tried to smile. The brandy splashed his knuckles.

  ‘It’s his stomach,’ said Veronica.

  Boris stared at Frank. His eyes flashed in the lamplight.

  ‘It’s my stomach,’ said Frank.

  ‘You shouldn’t be drinking,’ Veronica snapped.

  ‘I can’t eat,’ complained Frank. ‘I’ve got to drink.’

  ‘Have you taken something for it?’ asked Boris.

  ‘We don’t have anything,’ said Veronica.

  ‘No medicines?’ said Boris.

  ‘No,’ confessed Veronica. ‘Nothing but Paludrine for the malaria.’

  ‘No medicines,’ said Boris, turning to Frank. He retrieved the brandy and poured himself another glass as if he were trying to recover from shock.

  ‘Gilbert says it’s the heat,’ said Frank miserably.

  ‘I’ll get Happy to bring you something,’ declared Boris. ‘Where is that lazy bastard?’ He hammered on the veranda and bellowed until Happy came running from the house. ‘Medicine box!’ he barked.

  ‘Do you think it’s anything serious?’ asked Veronica.

  ‘No,’ said Boris. ‘Sam was fever. Hank is hot. The sun does something to the stomach.’

  ‘It hasn’t happened to me,’ said Veronica.

  When the medicine box was produced Boris rummaged through a jumble of bottles and cardboard cartons. Most of them seemed to be commercial samples. He selected a packet of tiny white pellets and gave them to Frank.

  ‘Try a couple,’ he said. ‘Let me know what happens.’

  ‘What are they?’ asked Veronica, pulling the packet from Frank and trying to read the label.

  Boris shrugged. ‘We’ll soon find out,’ he said. He grinned and winked at Veronica.

  ‘Your hair is white and my hair is white,’ he said after a while.

  ‘Yes,’ said Veronica.

  ‘His hair is dark.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She laughed and licked her teeth. She looked comfortable in this strange place with this peculiar man. She crossed her legs and balanced the glass on her knee.

  ‘What do you think of the old place?’ he said, returning to his brandy. He waved his glass at the house. ‘It was built by a German missionary. Came out. Want to save the world.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ asked Veronica.

  ‘Cannibals come creeping out of them trees one night and eat him,’ said Boris. ‘Perhaps he went mad or the fever got him. I don’t know. It was a long time ago.’ He grinned and reached for the bottle. His jacket hung open. His chest was covered in thick, grey hair. A crucifix hung from his throat.

  ‘It’s smaller than we imagined,’ ventured Frank.

  ‘We got ten bedrooms here,’ said Boris. ‘We got the biggest place south of Bolozo Rouge.’

  ‘Sam wrote letters,’ explained Veronica. ‘He said there were fifty bedrooms and a night club and everything.’

  ‘Dreams,’ sniffed Boris. ‘Sam was a terrible man for dreams.’

  Frank was silent. He sprawled in the chair, eyes fixed on his empty glass, and felt the world swelling and falling around him. Bruised by fatigue and confused by the brandy, he sensed Veronica was flirting with Boris. He gloats. She laughs. He drinks. She watches him. What happens if the drink turns him nasty? No escape. Nowhere to hide. Nothing but fear and darkness and forest. Watch him. Don’t let him touch her. They say you can smell fear. Why doesn’t she pull down her dress?

  He tried to catch their conversation but he couldn’t unravel the words; he heard someone call his name but he found he couldn’t answer them. He tried to stand up, sagged, staggered, and then they were helping him to his room, pulling off his clothes and folding him gently into the bed.

  The next morning he woke up to find himself in a small, square box of sunlight. A window. A wardrobe. His suitcase at the foot of the bed. He groaned and closed his eyes. He had dreamt that he was home at the Hercules Cafe: his room damp and filled with shadows, beyond the window the sound of traffic squelching through the wet street, a draught from the keyhole strong enough to lift the lino, Olive upstairs shouting, Gilbert downstairs laughing and, above everything, the smell of fried eggs, tomatoes, sausages, hamburgers, bacon smoke, burnt toast and fresh coffee.

  There was a knock on the door and Boris appeared with a breakfast tray.

  ‘Are you awake? You’ve been asleep. Look, I’ve brought you some breakfast.’

  Frank sat up and shivered. A fan in the ceiling churned the air, sucking at the mosquito nets.

  ‘How is your stomach?’

  ‘Empty,’ said Frank. He stared at the tray. There was coffee, bread and a large banana. The coffee came with a biscuit and a little jug of condensed milk.

  ‘Is Gilbert awake?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Boris. He smiled. ‘And Veronica. She is washing. You can wash. I will show you. When you are ready. I shall be waiting.’

  He walked towards the door and then paused, turned and glanced under the bed.

  ‘Look in your shoes,’ he advised gravely.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Spiders,’ said Boris.

  Frank stuffed his mouth with bread, rolled on to the floor and peered suspiciously into his shoes. When he was satisfied they were empty he dressed and went out to search for Gilbert. He found him following Boris around the compound. The sun was already burning, high in a blue, blank sky. He stepped forward into the heat, shielding his eyes against the glare.

  ‘Good morning,’ shouted Gilbert as he approached. ‘Boris is showing me over the place. Come and look at the kitchen.’ He smiled and wrapped Frank’s shoulders in the hook of a fat, damp arm. His breath smelt of death and toothpaste.

  The kitchen was no more than a large shed with a dirt floor. The ceiling had been papered with the colour pages of magazines: advertisements for airlines, vitamins, beer and baby food. The walls were thickly coated with blue enamel paint. There were shelves and benches around the walls, a zinc tank with draining boards, a Kelvinator, a big wooden barrel and a cast-iron stove. The stove was an old wood-burner with a pot-bellied oven. The air stank of boiled eggs and blood.

  Happy was working at a bench, cutting up a goat with an axe. He had reduced the beast to a pile of hair, offal, legs and bones. The goat’s head lay on the floor and stared up at Happy with hard, astonished eyes. The bench was shining with blood.

  ‘These flies must be a problem,’ said Gilbert, slapping at the air with his hands.

  Boris frowned. He stared around the kitchen, as if he were looking at flies for the first time. He seemed puzzled by them. He tried to catch one with his fingers.

  ‘You bastard!’ he bellowed at Happy. ‘Clear out those bones!’ Happy flinched and farted. He gathered up the scraps and tossed them through the open window.

  Frank leaned from the window and squinted into the sunlight. At the back of the kitchen a great heap of rubbish was spreading slowly into the forest. It was an oozing porridge of skin, skulls, beaks, claws, bones, feathers, tails and teeth. Here and there a plastic bottle or drum stuck through the crust like flotsam caught in a petrified sea. Above the rubbish a shroud of grey steam was whisked by flies.

  ‘Where’s the dog?’ asked Gilbert, peering into the big, wooden barrel. The barrel lay on its side in a corner of the shed. It contained a pillow and a dirty, army blanket.

  ‘No dog,’ grinned Boris.

  ‘What have you got in the larder?’ asked Frank, staring at a wall of open shelves. The shelves sagged beneath the weight of buckets, baskets and bowls.

  ‘We got cooking oil, rice, onions and soap,’ said Boris, scratching his neck. ‘We got tomatoes, dry fish, plantain and
peppers. What else we got? We got sugar, salt and yams. We got eggs. We got tinned milk, cornstarch and coffee. We got bread. We got beer from the truck when the road is open. Today we got goat from the market in town.’

  ‘Do you bring vegetables up from town?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Yes. We got no garden since we planted Sam.’

  ‘I brought him Bovril,’ said Gilbert sadly.

  ‘What’s that?’ inquired Boris.

  ‘Bovril? Bovril is Bovril. Alas my poor brother. You know. Bovril. It’s a sort of beef gravy,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘Can you eat it?’ asked Boris.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it good?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ll have to lock it up in the store,’ grumbled Boris.

  Gilbert fetched his suitcase and Boris led them into the maze of sheds and cabins that clung, like a little shanty town, against the main walls of the kitchen block. In one of the sheds an old German generator cursed and thundered, straining at its rusted anchors, sweating pearls of hot, black oil. Boris stopped before something that looked like an ammunition store with barbed-wire garlands on the roof and a heavy padlock on the door.

  ‘Security,’ he said. ‘Don’t trust anybody.’ He poked the padlock with a key and rattled a length of chain.

  ‘You have to be careful,’ said Gilbert, to humour him.

  Boris nodded. The door creaked open and he ushered them into a hot gloom. The store room was packed from floor to ceiling with food. There were cases of canned cocktail sausage, bales of cornflakes, bundles of fruit cake and a thousand tinned apricots in heavy syrup. Everything was stacked in original factory cardboard. It might have been the hoard of some demented grocer.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Gilbert. He cocked his head and tried to read along the side of a carton.

  ‘Emergency rations,’ said Boris proudly. He sniffed and pulled on his big, meaty nose. ‘Top quality. No rubbish.’ He pushed a finger into one nostril and bent his nose out of shape.

  ‘But where did you find it?’

  ‘Food agents,’ said Boris. He unplugged his nose and watched nervously as Gilbert knelt down to open his suitcase.