by William Boyd
He headed the car down to the main gate, saluted the night watchman and turned left down the long straight road into town. The Commission lay off the main road between the town of Nkongsamba and the state university campus. It was a two-mile drive down a gentle slope into the town. The Commission was placed atop a ridge of low hills that over-looked Nkongsamba from the north-east. One and a half miles further up the road lay the university campus where a significant portion of the expatriate British population of the Mid-West lived and worked.
Morgan considered going home for a shower but then abandoned the idea. Home was on an enclosed residential estate prosaically called New Reservation (he sometimes felt like an American Indian when he gave his address), which was about twenty minutes away from the Commission on the major highway north out of Nkongsamba. He had told his servants, Moses and Friday, to expect him back but he could always ring them from the club. It would keep the idle bastards on their toes, he thought savagely.
The road was lined with flamboyant trees on the point of bursting into radiant scarlet bloom. The rain, if it came tonight, would bring all the flowers out. He drove past the saw-mill where Muller, the saw-mill manager and West German chargé d’affaires, lived. There was a French agronomist at a nearby agricultural research station who looked after the interests of the few French people in the state, but between them and the Commission they made up the official diplomatic presence in Nkongsamba. All the big embassies and consulates were concentrated in the capital on the coast, a four-hour drive away on a deathtrap road.
He began to approach the outskirts of town. The verges widened, dusty and bare of grass; empty stalls and cleared rickety tables of day-time traders lined the route. He passed an AGIP filling station, a shoe factory and a vehicle park and then suddenly he was in the town, busy and bustling as people and cars made their laborious way home after work. There were some larger concrete buildings on the outskirts, covered in wrought-iron work and standing in their own low-walled gardens. Strange sweet burning smells were wafted into the car’s interior through the open window.
He slowed the car to walking pace as the streets narrowed and joined the creeping honking procession of cars that clogged Nkongsamba eighteen hours out of twenty-four. He let his hand dangle out of the window and thought aimlessly about the day and the massed ranks of his current problems. He asked himself if he was really that bothered about Priscilla and Dalmire, if it really affected him that much. He got no clear answer—there was too much bruised masculine pride obscuring the view. He drove on past the swarming mud huts set a little below the level of the road, past the blue neon-lit barber shops, soft drink hoardings, the ubiquitous Coke signs, the open-air garages, furniture shops, tailors sewing furiously on clacking foot-powered machines. He saw the looming flood-lit façade of the Hotel de Executive and his heart sank as it had become used to these past two months, as the memories of his first confidential meeting with Adekunle—held within its walls—hurried into his mind. Tin advertisements glittered around its door, reflecting the lights that were going on now dusk was settling on the town. He heard the raucous blare of American soul-music emanating from within its courtyard-cum-dance floor. “Tonite!!” proclaimed a blackboard propped outside the entrance. “Africa Jungle Beats. JOSY GBOYE and his top dandies band!!!! Fans! Be There!” Morgan wondered if Josy Gboye had been playing that fateful evening.
He turned off the main road and went bumping over potholes up a steep street that led past the Sheila Cinema, which was offering Michele Morgan and Paul Hubschmid in Tell Me Whom to Kill and Neela Akash, billed as a “sizzling and smashing Indian film.” He drove by the cinema and pulled the Peugeot into the forecourt of a chemist’s shop. He tipped the attendant a few coins and walked along the road, ignoring the small boys running and chanting by his side. They were shouting “Oyibo, Oyibo” which meant white man. It was something every Kinjanjan child did almost as a matter of course; it didn’t bother him, it was just a persistent reminder that he was a stranger in their country. He shook off his escort and two minutes’ brisk walking brought him to a newish row of shops. There was an optician’s, a Lebanese boutique and a shoe shop; above them were three flats. Hazel lived—courtesy of Morgan—above the boutique.
He looked quickly about him before running up the steps at the side of the building to the first floor communal passageway at the back. He took out his key and opened the door. The first thing he noticed was the smell of cigarette smoke and his tetchy mood sparked into anger as he had expressly banned Hazel from smoking now that he had given it up himself. The room was also dark as the shutters were closed. He groped for the light switch and flicked it down. Nothing happened.
“Nevah powah for heah,” said a voice.
Morgan jumped, alarm making his heart pound. “Who the hell is that?” he demanded angrily, peering in the direction of the voice, and, as his eyes became accustomed to the murk, made out a figure sitting at the table. “And where’s Hazel, for God’s sake?” he continued in the same outraged tone, stamping across the room and throwing open the shutters.
He turned round. The unexpected visitor was a lanky black youth wearing a yellow shirt open to the waist and disgustingly tight grey trousers. He was also smoking a cigarette and wearing sunglasses. He raised a pale brown hand in Morgan’s direction.
“Howdy,” he said. “I’m Sonny.”
“Oh yes?” Morgan said, still fuming. He opened the door of the bedroom. Hazel’s cheap clothes lay scattered everywhere. He heard the sounds of splashing from the small bathroom. “It’s me!” he bellowed and shut the door.
Sonny had risen to his feet. He was very tall and slim and he stared moodily down at the street below, smoke curling from his cigarette. He was wearing, Morgan noticed, very pointed brown shoes.
“Pleased to meet you,” Sonny drawled, the mid-Atlantic tones grating on Morgan’s ear. “Nice place you got for Hazel.” Morgan made no comment; Hazel had some explaining to do. Sonny glanced at his watch face on the inside of his wrist. “Ah-ah,” he said, dropping his pose, “six o’clock done come. I must go.” He loped to the door. “Thanks for the beer,” he said, “so long”; and he slipped out.
Morgan noticed two empty bottles of Star beer on the table. He strode to the kitchen and slammed open the fridge door. One bottle left. He calmed down slightly. If that bitch had given Sonny-boy all the beer, he told himself, he’d have strangled her. Then his face darkened. He asked himself what the bloody hell that lanky spiv had been doing in his flat anyway? Drinking his beer while Hazel washed. Muttering threateningly he poured himself a glass from the remaining bottle and went back to the bedroom door. “Hurry up,” he shouted. He sat down on the plastic settee and stretched his legs out in front of him. He took a long draught of the beer and its chill briefly made his temples ache. He gazed possessively round the room. It had cost him a lot, but it was worth it to get Hazel out of the rancid hotels she had lived in previously. He wanted her away from the bars and the clubs, somewhere he knew she’d be, somewhere discreet where he could get hold of her when he wanted. Selim, the Lebanese boutique owner from whom he rented the flat, could be trusted to keep what little he knew, or guessed, to himself.
The flat was small and crudely finished to the normal standards of Kinjanjan masonry and housefitting. Bare concrete walls with loose, fizzing light switches and waist-high electric points, angled door and window frames with sophisticated jamming potential, tapered skirting boards and so on, but at least it was a home of sorts. Hazel had placed a purple rush mat on the terrazzo flooring but that was her sole contribution to the decor. Apart from the settee upon which he was now sitting, the only other furniture Selim had supplied was a formica table with spavined aluminium legs and two steel-tube and canvas chairs of the sort that are normally seen stacked against the walls of assembly halls. The cramped kitchenette at one end of the main room contained a sink, a calor gas stove and a fridge. The only item Morgan had contributed to his love-nest was a large standard fan which norm
ally stood in the bedroom, gently rotating to and fro, blasting a steady stream of cool air onto the bed. Suddenly the lights went on, the fridge shuddered and started to grumble softly away.
Hazel walked into the room. She wore a threadbare pink towel wrapped around her body and secured beneath her armpits. She was without her wig and her short woolly cap of hair glistened with water droplets. She was a pretty girl with a light brown face and pointed chin. Her lips were large and her nose small and wide; only her eyes marred the classic negroid aspect of her features. They were thin and almond shaped and gave her a strange uncertain suspicious look. She was small with heavy breasts and hips and thin-calved legs. Her toes were bunched and buckled from the fashionable shoes she crammed her broad feet into. In the interests of gaudy sophistication she had plucked her eyebrows away to tiny apostrophe marks. In his less charitable moments Morgan accused her of being flighty and unashamedly venal—she had two illegitimate children who lived with her family back in her native village and of whom she rarely talked. She spoke instead of clothes and status, her two main interests in life, and Morgan fully realised that a white lover and this flat represented a leap of several rungs on this unpredictable ladder.
He had met her at a party at the university where she told him that at one time she’d been a primary school teacher, a career which he suspected she’d abandoned for casual prostitution, though he recognised that the term carried little opprobrium out here, as was witnessed by the unconcern over her two bastards. For all his cynical evaluation, Hazel was necessary to him, more so now than ever, he realised, as a boost to his tottering ego and a source of reliable, uncomplicated sex. At least, that was the plan, and he treated her selfishly and imperiously in the pursuance of it. But, somehow, it had never really worked out; the expected satisfaction had not materialised, and he was faced with the growing suspicion these days that things were in reality running along some subtle scheme of Hazel’s devising and that it was he not she who was being exploited—a feeling that the unexplained presence of people like Sonny in his life only served to emphasise.
He noticed that she was holding an unlighted cigarette in her hand.
“Can you give me a light?” she asked as if he were a stranger.
Morgan sighed inwardly. He’d have to put a stop to this now. He stood up. “Look, I told you, no smoking.”
The cigarette drooped between her lips. “You have never come for three days,” she said sulkily. “What am I supposed to do? And then you tell my guest to go,” she added accusingly.
“I didn’t tell him; he just went,” Morgan said, then, wondering why he felt he had to defend himself, burst out: “Anyway, I don’t give a good God damn. When I give up smoking you do too, and no questions asked. What do you think it’s like for me to kiss you?”
She looked coy at this.
“And,” Morgan went on, “who was your ‘guest’ anyway? Sonny or whatever.”
She put the cigarette down on the table and secured the tuck in her towel. “It was my brother,” she said flatly. Morgan felt his indignation seeping away. He tried to keep his eyes off the way her large breasts splayed beneath the towel, tried to ignore the tickle in his groin; he had to see this out first.
“I thought you said you had no brothers.”
“Yes, from my mother. This is same father, different mother.” She looked at him unperturbed. Morgan considered the veracity of her story; there was no way he could compete under these circumstances.
“All right,” he said grudgingly, “but I don’t want him to come here again, OK?”
Morgan dropped the condom in the tin waste-paper basket under the sink in the bathroom. He was still being cautious. Murray had told him to “use the sheath at all times.” It was typical of Murray to call it a sheath, he thought; he could still hear the man’s dry Scottish accent. It was typical also, he reflected bitterly, how Murray’s influence reached into the most private areas of his life. He shook his head in resigned disbelief; it was uncanny how it happened. But also he was still not entirely happy with Hazel’s explanation of Sonny’s presence and he didn’t feel like taking any chances. He always expected Hazel to make a fuss about his using contraceptives and the implications they had, especially as he had forced her to go on the pill a couple of months ago, but she had made no visible sign or comment as he had laboriously rolled it down over his flagging erection. The fan had been turned up to full and had swept the bed with cool draughts, drying the sweat on his buttocks and back.
Afterwards, he found he could still taste the Fanshawes’ sherry in his mouth for some reason, and had sent a protesting Hazel out for some more beer to wash it away. “If you hadn’t given it to bloody Sonny-boy you wouldn’t have to go, would you?” he had satisfyingly rebuked her.
While she was away he had decided to run a bath. This simple act was equally unreliable and ridden with pitfalls. He turned on the cold tap and for a full minute all he heard was a muted whistle of air, then the tap juddered, gave a couple of metallic snorts and a low-pressure stream haltingly flowed out for a while, filling the bath with two inches of water, before it was reduced to an ineffectual dribble. Morgan carefully lowered his sweaty body into this, gasping as his genitals were immersed. He soaped himself as best he could and splashed the lather off. Hazel brought him his beer and he sat for ten minutes or so in the bath sipping direct from the bottle. Presently a benign alcoholic haze began to fog all his undesirable memories. He turned on the tap again, found the pressure had built up and washed his hair.
When he stepped out of the bath he saw Hazel sitting in her bra and pants painting her fingernails. Morgan drained his beer bottle. There were two good things about living in Africa, he told himself convivially: just two. Beer and sex. Sex and beer. He wasn’t sure in what order he’d place them—he was indifferent really—but they were the only things in his life that didn’t consistently let him down. They sometimes did, but not in the randomly cruel and arbitrary way that the other features of the world conspired to confuse and frustrate him. They were as reliable as anything in this dreadful country, he thought, and, he reflected smugly, feeling more buoyant and pleased with himself all of a sudden, he was certainly getting enough of both.
He dried himself leisurely. Hazel had switched on her transistor radio and low monotonous soul-music issued from the crackling loud-speaker. Morgan thought about ordering it silenced but decided to be obliging and refrain. Hazel was reliable too, he thought kindly—well, almost, in her own bizarre way. He was grateful to her.
Standing rigidly to attention and craning his head forward Morgan could just see the tip of his penis beyond the burgeoning swell of his pot-belly. Beer and sex, he thought. When he couldn’t see it any more he’d go on a diet. He continued to pass the towel regularly over his body but it was no longer having any effect; he wasn’t wet exactly, but remained distinctly moist. He padded through to the bedroom and stood in front of the standard fan. He took a large tin of talcum powder from Hazel’s crowded dressing table and liberally dusted his armpits and groin. When his pubic hairs had turned a ghostly white he pulled on his underpants—pale-blue billowing boxer shorts. This had been another of Murray’s recommendations. There was the man again, Morgan seethed, but he had to admit it made sense, and it was comfortable. Kinjanja’s humid clime was not suited for tight, genital-bunching hipster briefs; you had to let the air get to those dark, dank places.
He caught a glimpse of a section of his torso in Hazel’s dressing-table mirror. Fat lapped over the waistband of his boxer shorts. He was particularly distressed by the two pads that had seemingly clamped themselves immovably to his back—like tenacious alien parasites—in the region of his kidneys. He was getting too large: fifteen and a half stone at the last weigh-in. He winced at the memory. He had always been on the biggish side; in his beefy adolescence his mother had tactfully described him as “big-boned,” though “burly” was how he now liked to see himself. He was of average height, around five foot nine or ten, and had alwa
ys cut a stocky figure but in his getting-on-for-three years in Nkongsamba he had put on almost two stone and his silhouette seemed to bulk larger every week.
He crouched down and peered over Hazel’s shoulder at his face in the mirror. He fingered his jaw-line. Christ, he thought with some alarm, the bone is half an inch below the surface. He stretched his neck from side to side, turning his head and squinting at his profile. He had a broad face; it could carry the extra flesh not too badly, he reckoned. He smiled at himself, his strong smile, showing all his teeth. There was something vaguely Brandoish about him, he felt. Hazel looked up from her nail painting, thought he was smiling at her and smiled back.
Standing up he inflated his chest, sucked in his gut and flexed his buttocks. He didn’t really look thirty-four, he decided, that is, if you ignored his hair. His hair was the bane of his life; it was fine and wispy, pale reddish-brown and falling out. His temples took over more of his head every month. Somehow his widow’s peak held on, a hirsute promontory in an expanding sea of forehead. If his bloody receding didn’t stop soon, he reflected, he’d end up looking like a Huron Indian or one of those demented American Marines, currently wasting the inhabitants of South-East Asia, who shaved their heads leaving only a prickly stripe running down the centre. Gently, with all ten finger tips, he teased the soft hair across his brow; it was too sad really.
Back in his clothes he returned his attention to Hazel. She was spending a long time preparing herself for something, and it wasn’t for him. He looked around the room and its tawdriness set his spirits in the now familiar slide—the frame metal bed with its thin dunlopillo mattress, the cheap local furnishings, the bright ceiling light with its buzzing corona of flying insects and Hazel’s garish mini-skirts and shifts cast around the room as haphazardly as seaweed on a beach.
“Can’t you keep this bloody place tidy?” he said complainingly. Then: “And where are you going tonight?”
