Red Joker

by Michael Nicholson

  Everyone in turn had ‘scratched’. They’d filed stories on Guano exports, copra production, the harvest of coco de mer, a delectable palm fruit grown nowhere else in Africa, the tourist industry, the strategic importance of Union (1) vis-a-vis Western shipping lanes and (2) its potential as a site for intercontinental ballistic missiles. Expressman Doubleday, in a rare and sudden lapse of self-discipline, actually spent Company money on a taxi to the island’s biggest sugar plantation, having misheard of a process for turning sugar alcohol into petrol.

  The prospect of leaving Union alarmed everyone. But it thoroughly depressed Faraday. He was in love.

  For the past two mornings, before breakfast, he had walked down the Boulevard Dr Clobert to the harbour and The Killing of Sister George. From a distance he had established that the tanned-skinned girl with the long blonde hair had been on deck. Then, with the tingle of sweat on his forehead, uncomfortable clammy hands and an odd loose feeling in his bowels, he had strolled with a casualness too deliberate to be convincing along the wooden-slatted pontoons towards her. But on both occasions, with less than twenty yards to go, he had turned about and walked hurriedly back to the hotel’s scrambled eggs and bacon.

  The failures distressed him and his depression extended into the evening so that by midnight, those two midnights, he found himself sitting between Prentice and Protheroe on a high barstool doing exactly what they were doing.

  Faraday had become dependent on a drink called ‘Devil’s Disciple’, a punch made up of dark rum, cacao, mint juice and soda, which he drank from a glass fibre jug moulded inexpertly in the shape of a skull.

  Last night, Prentice and Protheroe, in spite of their own uncertain and unsteady state, had half dragged, half carried Faraday up to his bedroom and left him sprawled unconscious and fully dressed across his bed.

  Faraday, woken by the maid with tea, experienced what was certainly the worst pain he could ever remember. He felt his head was being crushed and his feet, swollen inside his shoes, throbbed against the tight laces. He was lying face down, his left arm wedged under his right shoulder. Blood had not easily circulated during the night and now the arm was cold and totally without feeling and, watching it, knowing it was his, he found it wouldn’t move.

  He rolled over on to his back, dragged the arm limply over his chest, and felt the nausea rising from his stomach to his head. He picked up the dead left hand with his right and dug his nails into the palm. The white skin turned whiter but there was no feeling, so he lifted it and waved it above him, hoping to revive circulation. Feeling nothing he let it drop. It fell unguided and unfortunately on to the tray on the bedside table. The teapot somersaulted into the air and fell, perfectly centred, on to his open shirt, hot tea scalding his chest.

  A minute later when Expressman Doubleday, alarmed at the commotion, came rushing in from his bedroom next door, he found Faraday standing in a pool of vomit bending over his bidet, a jet of cold water aimed at his chest, hitting his left arm violently with his right.

  It was after the doctor had left that Faraday, his chest thick with Aquaflavin Emulsion, decided the absurd state of affairs should stop. He lay back on the pillows and stared at the ceiling. The painkillers given him by the doctor began to make him feel drowsy and as he dozed off, he decided to introduce himself to the girl in the blue denim shirt on The Killing of Sister George without further ado.

  Elizabeth Pilger smelt him first. There was no breeze and the medication drifted across the deck to her very strong.

  ‘Are you ill?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wounded?’

  ‘Tea.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Scalded. Arm fell asleep.’

  She smiled, not understanding and continued her washing. She was rasping the leg of a denim trouser up and down a wooden washboard.

  He had expected panic and was quite prepared for the return of a stutter on the consonants B and S which had tortured him so much at school. But there was no panic, and no stutter. The soreness of his chest was his only irritation.

  ‘Have you come to see my father?’

  ‘No.’

  She wrung out the trousers, tied string through the belt loops, threw them over the side and dunked them in and out of the water to rinse them.

  ‘I’ve come to see you,’ said Faraday.

  ‘That’s nice. We seldom see many English people here.’

  ‘I’m from the hotel.’

  ‘There are eleven hotels on the island.’

  ‘The Hotel de la Quai. You possibly know it.’

  She nodded at him and smiled again.

  ‘I saw you the other evening,’ he said, ‘on the yacht, coming back with the President. I was standing on the Point.’ ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘Good heavens!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why good heavens?’

  Faraday seemed to recollect a similar conversation in another place, but it seemed light-years away now.

  ‘Only that it’s extraordinary you should remember me.’ ‘You made the children laugh,’ she said. ‘You were standing in the shadow of the Governor, directly under him and the children said he’d just had a baby. We thought it was rather funny.’

  There was a pause. He looked at her. She seemed happy to dunk denims.

  ‘I’m a journalist. Here for the coup.’

  ‘You can’t have been very busy.’

  ‘It’s been very disappointing! It’s my first one.’

  ‘Mine too,’ she said. ‘Perhaps if you’re lucky things will get worse.’

  She pulled the denims out of the water and began slapping them against the hull. Faraday thought she had rather lovely broad shoulders.

  Then he saw the head. He couldn’t be certain how long it had been there. It was large, covered in black turning to grey, uncombed curly hair. ‘Liz,’ it said, Twill not put up with that kind of noise when I’m downstairs trying to write. For God’s sake get a mangle.’

  The head began to sink back through the hatch.

  ‘Daddy, there’s a journalist here. Come to report the coup.’

  The head stopped, turned and began to rise again.

  ‘How d’you do. I’m Pilger. Adam.’

  ‘Faraday, William.’

  ‘Friend of Elizabeth’s?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Come aboard,’ Pilger said, and pulled himself out of the hatch, catching Elizabeth’s hand.

  He was a large man, tall and, except for a heavy middle section which sagged over his leather belt, well proportioned. He reminded Faraday of Hemingway and, like his daughter, he was very tanned. Just below his hairline there was a layer of peeling sunburnt skin. He moved slowly but in a very balanced, co-ordinated way, so that he gave the impression he was geared from inside at half speed. Faraday wondered if he had ever had to hurry in his life, or whether he had ever felt the need to.

  He wore shorts made out of the rough cotton Faraday had seen on the mulatto men in the sugar fields, and what must once have been a tennis shirt; it had a tiny penguin embroidered over the left breast pocket.

  His eyes were blue and they twinkled. Faraday had heard of eyes twinkling but had never seen a pair do it. These did.

  He spoke through a tiny opening in his black and grey speckled beard. ‘I used to work for the Corporation myself once,’ he said.

  ‘Actually,’ Faraday said, ‘I work for the other side.’

  ‘Other side?’

  ‘The commercial side.’

  ‘Good Lord!’

  ‘Independent Television.’

  ‘Heavens! ’

  ‘It’s a kind of opposition.’

  But Pilger said nothing more. He just nodded his head, which Faraday took to be sympathy.

  ‘Trouble is,’ Faraday sai
d, ‘I’ve come all this way for nothing.’

  ‘Hardly a coup at all, would you say?’ said Pilger.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘More a re-grouping?’

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘I hardly know. I’ve not much experience of coups. Fact I’ve none.’

  ‘Blood and guts?’

  ‘Well, that’s what London expected. They’ll be very disappointed.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with you newspeople, always expecting events to fit neatly into your scheme of things! Shame for you, though.’

  ‘They seemed so sure,’ said Faraday, ‘at least I think they were. They would never have sent me otherwise - they’re always so careful.’

  ‘Oh! Never, never let us doubt what nobody is sure about. Chesterton,’ said Pilger.

  ‘I thought it was Belloc.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Faraday, anxious not to lose his way in the conversation, said, ‘There doesn’t seem to have been any opposition. No fighting. Hardly an argument.’

  ‘William,’ Pilger rested his very large hand on Faraday’s shoulder, ‘President Laurent could have taken this island with a rounders bat and still have had fire power to spare. There wasn’t, my dear boy, a word fired in anger.’

  ‘The first reports we got in London were that Laurent had secretly trained a small army.’

  ‘How absurd,’ said Pilger. ‘You must realize that on an island this small you just cannot do anything secretly. If you wink at a woman on one side of Union, her husband will know about it ten minutes later on the other. I know. I’ve tried it.’

  ‘They say he’s a Marxist.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean a thing, not a thing in practical terms. He’s an academic, and academics tend towards extreme positions, they think it becomes them. He’s a Socialist all right - aren’t we all supposed to be nowadays? But his Marxism is in his head, not his heart. He’s often saying he’s a practical man and he means it. He understands the economics of Union, understands the tourists are its bounty, they bring in almost all its revenues. And tourists tend to be frightened by radical regimes . . . or regimes they consider to be radical.’ ‘The deposed President said in London that the coup had been engineered by the Russians,’ said Faraday.

  ‘And he said in Paris, William, it had been masterminded by the Chinese.’

  ‘You mean the Communists weren’t behind it?’

  ‘My dear boy, shall I break confidences and repeat something the President told me yesterday, fishing?’

  There was a pause until Faraday realized he had been asked a question.

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘He said that neither the Russians nor the Chinese had sent him their congratulations for the coup because each felt the other was responsible for it. And that,’ smiled Pilger, ‘I think is beautiful.’

  At exactly that moment, three hundred miles away due west, on a white sand beach dotted with the hulks of rotting palms and smelling of washed-up kelp, eighty men walked in single file down to the sea. They were naked except for simple flower-patterned loin-cloths and they might easily have been mistaken for fishermen on their way to their longboats to catch grouper and marlin in the deep water

  beyond the shelf. Except that their blackness wasn’t African and their heads were shaved. Except that their loin-cloths had been made from the same roll of cloth, and they walked perfectly in step and in an oddly familiar military way. Except that no man spoke and their longboats were already low in the water, heavy with a cargo under tarpaulin covers.

  One by one the twelve longboats filled with the men until finally they turned their heads to the right, to a boat at the end of the line. A man in a red skullcap waved and they began pushing together with their paddles, long, deep, powerful strokes. The boats moved off abreast of each other and about five yards apart, over the breakers and into the troughs until the tailman in each had manoeuvred his boat and his crew into the smoother water where the shelf ended.

  Five sharks surfaced and swam between the boats, keeping level. One by one they edged alongside, nudging the hulls, feeling their weight and their substance. But a volley of paddles hit out at the sharp dorsal fins catching them from behind, tearing the leathery skin, and the fish turned sharply on their sides and dived.

  For an hour and a half they continued paddling until they heard a whistle from the man in the far boat. Then the tail- men pulled outboard motors from under the tarpaulins and minutes later all twelve longboats, bows high now at their fifteen knot speed and still line abreast, had altered course slightly and were heading due east to a destination known only to one man among them. The man in the red skullcap whose eyes never left the horizon ahead.

  6

  ‘It’s one of the reasons I never drink water,’ said Prentice.

  ‘What is?’ asked Protheroe.

  ‘Peeing into a bog.’

  ‘Odd thing to say.’

  ‘Not really. Matey.’

  The two men were standing either side of the thin plywood partition that divided the two lavatory bowls on the hotel’s ground floor. They had just finished a long, wet lunch at the bar.

  ‘Just look at it,’ said Prentice staring into the enamel bowl, ‘full of pee and poison. Ever considered what happens to it? Straight into sewage renewal and right back at you next week through the nearest tap. And they have the bleedin’ cheek to suggest I drink it? Not even gin would sterilize that rubbish. It might be fit for some bleeder’s consumption but not mine. Matey . . . not mine.’

  There was no answer from Protheroe’s side except the flush of water.

  ‘D’you know,’ said Prentice, ‘when I was a kid in church . . .’

  Protheroe started laughing.

  ‘. . . I remember, fart-arse, our vicar giving us a sermon on the evils of drink. He’d brought a garden worm with him, had it up there on the pulpit and then dropped it into a glass of water. While it was still wriggling, he pulled it out again on a pencil and dropped it into a glass marked “Gin”, and the poor little bleeder died. Just like that! “There,” he said, “d’you see the lesson to us all?” “Right,” said an old bugger from the back . . . “if you’ve got worms, drink gin!”’

  Protheroe laughed. Then farted. And then belched. ‘You’re getting uptight all of a sudden about water,’ he

  said.

  ‘It’s those stupid kids we had to entertain . . . Political Commissars they called themselves. Kept ordering iced water and the bloody hotel had the cheek to charge me for it. How d’you get merry on that?’

  ‘Put it down to revolutionary passion,’ said Protheroe. ‘Anyway it gave us a few names for the screwsheets.’

  ‘I’ll need more than a few names to get my expenses through on this trip, I tell you,’ said Prentice. ‘My bloody lot are so tight nowadays you need management clearance for a taxi to Shepherd’s Bush.’

  During their lunch, Prentice and Protheroe had become involved with a group of young Laurent supporters, all wearing the berets and T-shirts of Che Guevara, which, as Prentice remarked, showed just how much behind political fashion they were in the Third World.

  They had introduced themselves as Political Commissars, a title which later proved to be self-designated, and they had distributed badly duplicated pamphlets on the origins of the coup. It was entitled: ‘Victim and Victor’ which Prentice said reminded him of a song and dance routine. This upset the senior of the young Commissars, a bearded, acned youth, so short-sighted he walked with his right hand stretched out in front of him like a bumper. Accidentally he had walked into Doubleday who was himself side-stepping to avoid a round of drinks and the youth’s palm had touched his stomach. The Expressman, thinking the youth was queer or a pick-pocket, or both, had reacted with a ‘Don’t you come that with me my lad . . . you’ve come to the wrong place for that,’ a
nd the vernacular baffled the boy. But he was completely confused when Prentice, holding up the pamphlet, stood up from his stool, waved his hands either side of his head like a Black and White Minstrel and shouted: ‘Presenting to you Victim and Victor,’ and sang: ‘Everybody was feeling rosy . . . so Rosy got up and went home.’

  One by one, every journalist and photographer in the bar was visited by the eager Commissars and their grubby pamphlets were exchanged for the pressmen’s expensively embossed visiting cards. And then, in typical spite and it being their trade anyway, the journalists resolved to filibustering, out-talking the youngsters on radicalism, tourism, Marxism, capitalism, journalism and other ‘isms’ the young radicals, because of their age and puritanism, had never heard of.

  To a boy and girl they professed disgust at the stories they heard but, as Doubleday said later, their eyes gave them away. Certainly they went back to their headquarters in the basement of the island’s only massage parlour, better acquainted with journalists and capitalists and the vices both shared.

  The bearded, short-sighted leader tried to erase from his mind the afternoon’s dreadful experience, especially the story detailed by the Los Angeles Times correspondent of the woman who squatted on the bar top in Manila, Philippines, and sucked dollar bills into her vagina like a human vacuum cleaner.

  And by concentrating on Marx’s dialectic, the youth thought he’d almost succeeded when suddenly he remembered the follow through story told by the Christian Science Monitor reporter, of a similar woman, similarly squatting on a bar in Macao, who on payment of five dollars would pick an already peeled banana by the inward flexing of her vagina muscles and then, in an awkward back-inclined position, fire them out again in one-inch segments at the men around her. She was called, said the Christian Scientist, ‘Tambourine Sal’ because everyone ended up banging her!

  So the bearded youth surrendered to the obscene images and sat limply and cross-legged in a corner of the basement room, picking at the blackheads of his nose and flicking them into the unknown. His first innocent exercise in group leadership and political persuasion had failed. And when his mood of depression ended that evening he decided instead to become a charge hand in the massage parlour supplying hot towels and cold beers to the customers upstairs.