Red Joker

by Michael Nicholson

  ‘It’s about time we moved on,’ said Prentice.

  ‘Where to?’ asked Protheroe.

  ‘Where d’you fancy?’

  ‘Cape Town,’ said Protheroe. ‘The Boers are about to launch their three-tier Parliament! ’

  ‘No thanks. Read the other day that skin cancer is on the increase ’cos of over-exposure to the sun.’

  ‘How about Rawalpindi? Good election story coming up . . . first civil rule in ten years.’

  ‘No thank you. Matey. Too many bloody Paks. Might just as well go home.’

  They were still standing at their lavatory bowls shaking themselves of the last drop of moisture at the tip.

  ‘I reckon. Matey, we push for Nairobi, some decent yams there, ivory smuggling, secret safaris, return of the tsetse fly, repeat a couple of Ugandan horror stories and bang a few glad-rags at the New Florida Club. Yes?’

  ‘Right!’

  Still in his decision-making mood, Prentice backed out of the lavatory and followed by Protheroe waddled across to the telex room. He dialled, waited for his answer-back and began typing:

  MIRRORMAN PRENTICE UNION.

  CONSIDER STORY DONE AND RECOMMEND IN VIEW ENORMOUS EXPENSES WE CUT LOSSES. FOR YOUR INFORMATION PROTHEROE OF MAIL EN ROUTE NAIROBI FOR FEATURES RUN AND SUGGEST I PROCEED THERE SOONEST. HAVE RECEIVED ADDITIONAL WAD VIA BARCLAYS WITH THANKS. AWAITING YOUR REPLY SOONEST.

  REGARDS PRENTICE.

  Protheroe sent an identical message with only

  certain changes to suit house style and within half an hour they both received, as they always did, permission ‘ONWARD-WISE.’

  As Prentice and Protheroe celebrated the success of their conspiracy with rum cocktails on the terrace overlooking the Boulevard, Doubleday, recognizing the early warning signs, persuaded the telex clerk to let him read their messages. Then he too used the simple device with the same success. He had never known it fail.

  It was the custom in Petit Royan every evening except Sundays, after the shops had closed, after the animals had been fed and the countless garden plots had been watered, for families to promenade. Nothing ostentatious. To promenade it was enough merely to dust down and freshen up, enough to light a pipe or roll a cigarette and then walk slowly with one’s family along the entire 280 yards of the palm-lined Boulevard Dr Clobert.

  Sometimes one of the older men would wear a waistcoat over his collarless working shirt to carry a prized pocket watch. Other promenaders, alerted to the waistcoat and its cargo and anxious to please, would ask the time of day as they passed and then be delighted at the proud flourish as the silver half hunter was drawn slowly by its chain, and expertly prised open by a black and broken thumb nail and the hour and minutes announced.

  Shopkeepers, having shuttered their premises, would stand at their open doorways, their families sitting on the pavement around them, and men who had been dealing with each other all day, bargaining, bickering, hauling Guano or cutting sugar cane, would, on the promenade, greet each other as if they were meeting for the first time that day. They would shake hands, light each other’s cigarettes and exchange polite nonsense about the weather, their families, their work, the Government, the tourists.

  And their women would nod at each other as they passed with a haughtiness that made the yards between them seem miles and themselves seem strangers, women who had worked their day together, swopped each other’s soap at the wash-house, suckled each other’s children, smelt each other’s sweat as they had hoed the endless furrows between the grapevines on the slopes of the mountain.

  On the promenade they would all assume an evening dignity, and it was not to be sacrificed to familiarity.

  Faraday had never promenaded before, but he found it a surprisingly civilized thing to do. He held Elizabeth’s hand as lightly as he could without exactly letting go. It would not do, she had told him, her father’s eyes twinkling, for a single girl to promenade alone, even a girl as well known on the island as she obviously was. Wives as they passed smiled politely, their husbands raised their hats and kept them raised long after their wives had turned to greet others.

  He had spent the whole day with her. At midday they had shared ham and pickles on George and afterwards she had walked him from one side of the island to the other crossing the high peak that divided the two shores. The mountain was called ‘La Souffrière’, ‘the monster that rumbles’, because of its occasional volcanic murmurings and the fissures that would break open and scorch the willow herbs and heathers with trickles of grey molten lava.

  As they had come down the far slopes, Elizabeth had taken his hand and led him through a small forest of eucalyptus to one of Union’s formal tourist attractions.

  It was cordoned off by a small wooden fence and a hand-painted sign read: ‘The Slave Pit’.

  It was a circle dug into the earth twelve feet deep and twenty across, built of stone cut so fine and so square that no man, however desperate to escape, however sturdy the shoulders he stood on, would be able to force even a fingernail into the cracks for support.

  Leading into the arena of stone was a narrow tunnel, two feet six inches high, and as wide as it took a man to drag himself along it. Two hundred years and more ago, Arab traders coming to the island for its slaves, fruits and spices had herded a hundred blacks a time into the pit. Men, women and children were forced by whips and dogs to crawl along the tunnel to their open prison and the Arabs had looked down at their Kaffir prizes and the bonus they represented to the shrewd trading man.

  But the pit’s real cleverness, Elizabeth said, was its architecture, because as only one man or woman at a time could crawl back out of the tunnel, it needed only one Arab with a cudgel at its end to prevent a mass escape.

  Tall palms ringed the pit, the only palms like them on the island. As the Arabs had stood there those hundreds of years ago, they had spat out the pips of the only fruit they had brought with them, and the date had become another of Union’s many fruits.

  Still holding his hand, Elizabeth had taken him across meadows of long grass on the lower mountain slopes, along lanes lined with willows that reminded him of Wiltshire, past orchards of apples, limes and oranges until they came to the sand-dunes and the sea.

  Then, without speaking, the hot afternoon sun on them, they had undressed and swam naked, and as the waves covered his surprise, Faraday wondered if he had died without knowing it and had entered heaven.

  Afterwards they had lain on their bellies, side by side in the shallow warm surf with the lapping water barely covering their bodies.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You seem very sure.’

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘After one day?’

  ‘Five,’ he said. ‘It’s five days now.’

  ‘Do you always fall in love so fast?’

  ‘No. This is my first time.’

  ‘Like your coup,’ and she began laughing.

  He waited. ‘Love is a coup,’ he said. ‘You’ve won me.

  You’ve taken me. There never was such an easy conquest.’

  ‘That’s not exactly how I remember it, William.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way . . . I meant. . .’

  ‘Yes I know . . .’

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘How can I? We’re still almost strangers.’

  ‘After that?’ he asked as she turned on her side. He watched the water rise and then ebb again leaving her uncovered and glistening.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Even after that.’

  ‘I don’t see that’s possible.’

  ‘Just because we made love?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think it’s possible. Many people seem to manage it.’ Again the flow of the tide, the white surf running up her long brown body and ret
reating quickly again as it reached her shoulders. He saw her skin sparkle in the sun and felt his love rise again, felt it in his stomach and the pain of the hard sand against his groin. He raised himself slightly to give himself more room as she watched him.

  ‘I do love you . . . Oh Hell! . . . there must be other ways of saying it.’ She laughed again.

  He said, ‘Journalists are the world’s worst communicators.’

  She held out her hand, the open palm towards him, and he kissed it.

  ‘You’ll do,’ she said. ‘But I’m glad William, really I am. It’s nice being loved.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There isn’t an “and” William.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Maybe if you’re very ardent. . . and a little more patient.’ She tugged teasingly at his hair and he skimmed his hand across the water causing a spray.

  ‘Do you know,’ he said, but not looking at her. ‘I desperately want to remember poems. That would be ideal, to woo you with a love poem.’

  ‘Rupert Brooke?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Keats?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Mine.’

  ‘William! You? A poet?’

  ‘Yes! Or was. I suppose everyone was once.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘Women aren’t.’

  ‘That’s nonsense.’

  ‘Isn’t. Think of one.’

  She didn’t answer but turned slowly on to her stomach and rested her chin in cupped hands and her fingers disappeared into her wet hair. He followed the curve of her back, dipping in a long shallow arch to her bottom. He was in love with her bottom too. It was small and beautiful, round and delightful and as brown as the rest of her.

  ‘How did your bottom get that colour?’

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘Brown.’

  ‘Same way as the rest of me.’

  ‘You sunbathe nude?’

  ‘Of course, don’t be such a prude.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Well here for a start. Or on the yacht, anywhere really, when there’s no one around, even when there is sometimes.’

  ‘I love your bottom,’ he said.

  She began laughing again. ‘Then write a poem about it, William, dedicate it to my bottom, it might be the first of its kind. ‘Bottom, bottom on the sand, who’s the fairest in the land . . .’

  ‘Elizabeth. Take me seriously.’

  ‘No. You mustn’t be so earnest. You’ll frighten me off. I don’t like being adored, don’t you understand? Let things roll along on their own. They’ll go one way or the other, either our way or not, that’s how friendships happen. You can’t organize them.’

  But he was anxious and she was making him more so. He was desperate for some admission from her, some formal exchange, a pact of a kind. Simple to say.

  ‘I haven’t time to wait, Elizabeth. I could get back to the hotel this evening and find a cable from London and I’d have to be on tomorrow night’s flight and I’d never see you again. I’m not an adolescent, I probably sound one, but I’m twenty-three and I’ve never been in love before and I do love you and I couldn’t catch that flight because I couldn’t leave you.’

  ‘You’re being very silly.’

  ‘I’m being serious.’

  ‘No, silly. Really, William, how long d’you reckon you’d last as a budding famous television reporter if you refused to catch a plane every time you fell in love? You’d be sacked.’

  And strangely, hearing it put that way, Faraday didn’t find that possibility in the least alarming. A week ago, the prospect of his career abruptly terminated would have shocked him, but not now. After a week of disappointment and disillusion, he was beginning to wonder whether a happier, fuller life might not be spent driving a bus or farming Norfolk turkeys. It wasn’t that he was becoming flippant about ambition. It was just that suddenly he found himself less and less curious about success.

  She was right of course. How dreadfully earnest he was, how dull, how dreary and introspective. How dreadfully, boringly dreary. Take stock, he thought. Look around. Hadn’t he just made love to her, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, ever known? Wasn’t there still the prospect of another day with her and possibly another after that and then another? Of course he would frighten her off with his adoration and his infantile poetry, of course she was right. Let things just roll along their own way and hope. ‘Do you know the Arab poem about bums?’ he asked.

  ‘William!’ And she raised her eyebrows in mock surprise.

  He sat up facing her, crossed his legs, began scooping up wet sand and heaped it over his private parts to stop them swaying in the gentle currents of the shallow sea.

  ‘It’s very short,’ he said, ‘it goes . . .

  There’s a boy across the river

  With a bottom like a peach.

  But alas and alas I cannot swim.’

  They were both laughing.

  ‘That’s better William,’ she said delighted. ‘That’s definitely much much better.’ He saw the total blueness of her eyes and she reached out and pulled him down to her and the white froth at the edge of the warm surf swept over them and oyster-catchers began their delicate dancing, scurrying and side-stepping the sea as it swept along the beach to the high waterline of tiny broken seashells.

  The Promenade lasted only an hour, between six and seven. Then men stopped and watched the flush of colour as the sun dropped on the western horizon of the Indian Ocean and over the landmass of Africa and the cold Atlantic beyond that.

  Two hundred and fifty miles away west, under that same setting sun, the twelve longboats and their crews made their first rendezvous at a point known to trawlermen as Noeola Flow, coming alongside a grey painted launch with no name and no markings.

  The twilight lasted just long enough for the transfer to be made. The longboats were tied with their bows together and a sea anchor was dropped at their middle.

  The motor launch, fifty feet long, possibly longer, maintained its position in the sea by the expert control of its twin screws forward and reverse until all eighty men and

  their supplies were aboard. Within minutes they had changed from their loin-cloths into something warmer, but it was impossible in the darkness to see exactly what. Nor, from the little light of their torches, was it possible to know what it was they were handling. And as the throttles were eased forward, the four engines drowned the conversation that then took place between the men on deck and their leader in the red skullcap.

  7

  Faraday was naked in his bed and pulled the sheets up tight under his neck, sealing his body from the night air. There was no other way to beat the mosquitoes. Every night the whine of their wings kept him awake as they skidded past his ears. The mulattos called them ‘Emmerdeurs’ . . . the night’s tormentors. In the morning, the sheets would be dotted in specks of blood. His blood and. the squashed bodies of the mosquitoes carrying other people’s.

  The lanterns in the courtyard lit up his room and he watched night animals hunt night insects on the wall opposite his bed. It was like a tiny hand-puppet show. During the day, he had noticed the wall was covered in dark brown blotches. The room maid told him the previous occupant, an American, a Texan she thought - he had a wide cowboy’s hat - had spent his nights throwing his long boots at the lizards on the wall as they hunted across it. Faraday realized, counting the marks of death, eighteen in all, that the Texan must have had exceptional aim, considering it was over twenty feet from bed to wall.

  He watched as a tiny gecko lizard moved carefully towards a spider that was picking at the remains of a squashed fly. It took the lizard over two minutes to cover less than a yard, then its tongue flicked out and the spider disappeared into its mouth, just as Faraday knew it would.

  All day
he had had the most extraordinary sensation of inevitability, a certainty about his future, a déjà vu in reverse. He felt he had embarked upon a journey and there was no getting off until he arrived, and this sense of predestination gave him security and in turn sudden and new ambition.

  It was Adam Pilger who had summed it up so perfectly.

  Faraday had sat on the deck of George, pleasantly tired after his sublime afternoon with Elizabeth and their evening promenade. He was one side of the polystyrene life raft and Elizabeth the other. Pilger was sitting in the cockpit, his back to them, resting against the wheel. It was warm, the sea breeze hardly moved the rigging, the sky was clear and Faraday could just make out Orion an inch to the right of the mast-top.

  They’d eaten boeuf bourgignon, and four empty bottles of Union’s Chenin Blanc were dumped upside down in a plastic bucket by Pilger’s feet.

  ‘The absence of alternatives,’ he’d said, ‘clears the mind marvellously.’ The phrase impressed Faraday.

  ‘President Laurent, you see, has no choice,’ Pilger said. ‘He is dependent on the goodwill of the West. Without it, he would need to go to the East, which is an alternative too ghastly to contemplate . . . as someone once said.’

  ‘He would love to change the fabric of Union, get rid of the Grands Blancs and their ostentation, their villas and their motor yachts, get rid of the French who make their money here and then invest it in France or the Ruhr. Don’t you see, William, this island is perfect for his blueprint of change? Having spent his life writing and talking Socialist theory he has suddenly the opportunity to put it all to work. Bit by bit of course he will, but slowly, so that no one outside will notice, certainly nothing radical enough to panic the tourists into spending their money and their holidays elsewhere.

  ‘He won’t rewrite history, he won’t re-educate, there’ll be no Ministry of Re-direction here. He won’t have them wearing Mao suits and I doubt if he’ll nationalize babies! He won’t do what Machel did to Mozambique, or Ratsiraka did to Madagascar . . . sorry! . . . Malagasy, close the door on the world and then wonder why they’ve suddenly gone broke. Laurent’s seen what happened to that mischief- maker, Nyerere, and his dreams of a Tanzanian Socialist paradise. Silly man went bankrupt, as they all do. Then they pull in the Russians or the Chinese to bail them out, get deposed by the young radicals who’ve been tutored and encouraged by the same Communist advisers and forever-after sit drinking whisky in exile wondering where it all went wrong.