Blood Is Dirt

by Robert Wilson

  ‘Maybe she’s not in there,’ said Heike.

  ‘You think she’s taken a twelve-foot jump into the neighbour’s garden and talked her way through their house just so she doesn’t have to face us in the morning?’

  Heike gave me a slow shrug, plugged a cigarette into her holder and lit it.

  ‘I would,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I don’t think she gives a shit about last night. You would, but she doesn’t.’

  ‘I wouldn’t sexually assault my hostess in the back of the cab.’

  ‘Why are you whispering?’

  ‘Oh, fuck off.’

  ‘Five minutes, Selina,’ I shouted. ‘If you’re not out in five minutes it’s all off.’

  I slumped on the sofa and sipped coffee. Heike watched her smoke stretch itself out in the languid air. We waited the full five minutes.

  Selina’s door opened. She stood for a moment in her flat sandals, khaki shorts, a long-sleeved white silk shirt and a pair of very black wraparound sunglasses. She cocked her head at the door and left. We followed her down to the Pathfinder. I noticed a large bruise on the inside of her thigh as she got in the back. We drove in silence to the airport.

  Heike stopped outside the airport entrance. Selina got straight out and walked into the terminal. I told Heike not to hang around.

  ‘She doesn’t look too happy to me,’ she said. ‘Talk to her.’

  ‘Do you think she’ll talk back?’

  ‘Be charming, Bruce, you used to be good at that.’

  Selina handed me a boarding pass. We went into the departure lounge, sat on some plastic seats and sweated while two guys put together some pallets of crates of whisky out of the duty-free store. They wheeled them out to the Nigeria Airways plane which stood on the tarmac a hundred yards from the building. They called our flight and the anarchy started. We ran for the doors and burst out into the thick, hot afternoon air.

  There was no question of flight attendants showing us to our seats. You sat where you could. The aisles and rear seats were taken up with whisky. We threw our bags into an overhead and got our backsides down. Three people got sent back to the terminal.

  The plane manoeuvred its way out on to the runway with seven of the overheads flapping open and the back of my seat bust, supported only by the crates of whisky on the seat behind. The toilet door banged open and shut when they applied the brakes. There was no crew in sight and no word from the captain.

  A couple of weeks earlier the military dictator’s son had been killed in an aircrash in Nigeria and the minister of transport had come on to the World Service to tell us that most Nigeria Airways internal flights were ‘nothing better than flying coffins’. I didn’t think I needed to mention this to Selina, and anyway, she wouldn’t have twitched. She was cool. Those wraparounds said butt out to chit-chat.

  It was a short hop to Lagos, the plane barely bothering to get above wave height over the Gulf of Guinea. Soon we were banking sharply over the sprawl of rusted corrugated-iron roofs with holdalls and hats flying around us. A man in a blue shirt with epaulettes and black trousers was thrown to his knees in front of us. He grinned insanely. He was probably the pilot working his way to the back for a pee. Anything was possible.

  We landed at Murtala Mohammed airport, the pilot taking his time to go into reverse thrust so that we had to swing away a little wildly from the perimeter fence. There was no applause. We cruised to the terminal in silent tears.

  Our papers were in order but it still cost us 5000 CFA each to get into Nigeria. They’re like that there. We fought like Vandals with the cabbies and drove the price down 1000 per cent. Selina sat in the back like a mother accused of murdering her children and said nothing in the four hours it took us to get to Y-Kays.

  We took our room keys. I drank beer and danced in the air con and put a call through to Selina, who didn’t answer. I went out to the Peninsula restaurant and sat on their terrace and ate brilliant Chinese food and looked at the lights flickering on Five Cowrie Creek.

  Back at Y-Kays there was no change. Selina was locked in her room and hadn’t been out. I put a call through, she didn’t answer again. I packed it in for the night. I’d just opened a slim volume of Philip Larkin I liked to travel with when the phone rang.

  Any drink your side?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘I’ll bring some.’

  I got dressed, made the bed, turned off the table light and put the overhead on. I sat at the table with the Larkin on show and slapped some unambiguous, sexless charm on my face thicker than pan stick. She knocked and brought a bottle of Red Label in with her. I found some glasses. She fingered the Larkin. Turned on the table light and cut the overhead.

  ‘They fuck you up, don’t they?’ she said, referring to the Larkin.

  ‘My parents didn’t,’ I said, pouring the whisky.

  ‘That you know of,’ she said.

  She sat on the end of one of the beds. She wore a black T-shirt over the same shorts, no shoes. She lit a cigarette.

  ‘I’ve been out of control,’ she said. ‘Had to shut myself down for the day. Pull myself together.’

  ‘Did you eat?’

  ‘You sound like my mother.’

  ‘Ninety per cent of emotional trauma is hunger.’

  ‘For what?’

  I called reception and asked them to send out for some jolloff rice and a bottle of beer.

  ‘It got out of hand last night. That piri-piri vodka. Then the grass. I went to the New York New York afterwards, met a couple of French guys and went back to their hotel with them. The Aledjo. They had a bungalow. We drank some stuff they had there. Pastis, I think. Then it sort of happened... one of the guys liked to get rough. I got this bruise and some burns...’

  ‘They raped you?’

  ‘It wasn’t rape, Bruce.’

  My mouth opened but the words didn’t come.

  ‘I liked it.’

  ‘Selina, your father’s just died. You were close to him. You’ve just buried him on your own. Now you’re trying to...’

  ‘Spare me the bullshit, Bruce. Don’t start telling me I’m trying to replace my father’s love and using sex to do it because my head’s not on straight, I’m emotionally distraught, I’m buggered up inside, because I’m not.’

  ‘I won’t then.’

  ‘I’ve always been like this, ever since I was a kid playing games in the back garden I’ve been on for it. It’s the way I am—I’ve just had a job admitting it to myself, that’s all. Been feeling guilty about my appetite. Thought I should have a loving, monogamous relationship and couldn’t understand why I wanted to go off with... with anything that moved. I thought there was something wrong with me.’

  ‘Maybe there is.’

  ‘Maybe the time’ll come when I have to go and talk to somebody about it, but right now, just so you know, I’m OK. More than OK.’

  ‘Even without Napier?’

  ‘Even without him. It’s been a release. I mean, he screwed up his relationship with my mother, tried to fit these other relationships into his life somehow and didn’t succeed and now it’s all over.’

  ‘Did the money make a difference?’

  ‘I hope that wasn’t a nasty thought.’

  ‘Finding out that your old man was a bad boy. Does that give you a bit of licence?’

  ‘To be bad too? Do you think I’m bad?’

  ‘Not so far. Not so long as you realize that Heike and I don’t swing.’

  ‘Swing? Now that’s a word. A sixties word. Such an innocent word for a decadent practice. You baby boomers had a way with words.’

  The boy arrived on cue with the jolloff rice, some irons and a bottle of beer. The jolloff, tinged red from being fried in palm oil, was studded with pieces of chicken. Selina polished it off without raising her head, wiped her mouth and fingers off and nodded, agreeing with whatever she’d just thought.

  ‘Maybe I am bad. At the very least I’m perverted.’

  ‘You didn’
t answer my question about your father.’

  ‘We don’t know that he was bad.’

  ‘We know he shipped some toxic waste. We know he’s got seven million dollars in a deposit box, not even in an account. A box, Selina. That’s because Swiss banks are tougher than before. You can’t deposit dough like that into an account without answering questions. And another thing—we know he had a lot of his owners’ money stripped out of his account in a so-called four-one-nine scam. What happened to that? Well, I’ll tell you—I reckon that’s what he was going to pick up in the cocotiers the night he got killed. So don’t tell me how blameless...’

  ‘OK, so he was bad. We just don’t know how bad. He didn’t leave me a list of names saying these are the saps I fucked over in my life, give them a wide berth. He left me a key nada mas.’

  ‘I’ve got a problem that I didn’t have yesterday until you told me about the money.’

  ‘To do with my father being a bad guy?’

  ‘To do with going into the cocotiers with your father to re-cover his stolen money. I thought I was chaperoning him. Making sure he didn’t get slapped.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Well, it looks like a big risk for him to have taken with seven mil in the treasure chest. Him knowing who he was dealing with. You know he asked me if I had a gun that night?’

  ‘You had a gun?’

  ‘He asked me if I had one. He was playing nervous that night and I thought firearms were the last thing he needed.’

  She lit a cigarette and ran her hand through her crop.

  ‘That was nearly exciting.’

  ‘Thanks, I’ve been working on my narratives.’

  ‘But I can’t help you.’

  ‘Was he just being greedy?’

  ‘Still can’t help you.’

  ‘So that’s it. He was a bad guy. He liked to play in the mud. He liked to get dirty. Don’t you think he deserved to get slapped?’

  ‘Slapped, maybe. But not whacked, and not like that.’

  I told her about the body in the blue Datsun and Quarshie’s lesson in politics.

  ‘So? They’re powerful and ruthless, we knew that already,’ she said.

  ‘This is one of the richest countries in Africa and the people your father mixed with want to control it. There are no rules at that level and white people don’t mean a thing.’

  ‘Are you trying to talk me out of this?’

  ‘Maybe some of these people tomorrow will know you.’

  ‘They won’t if I know Napier,’ she said.

  ‘You know there’s probably no going back after tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, I’m still in. Are you?’

  ‘If you can bring yourself to tell me anything about your father that’s got a shred of truth in it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know where...’

  ‘You must have been through all his stuff back in London. The house, the office. You must have turned those places upside down. There must have been something somewhere to show how seven million dollars got to be in a safe deposit box.’

  She crushed the cigarette out, poured herself a gob of whisky and offered me one. She sat and thought and worked out how little truth she could get away with.

  ‘Graydon Strudwick,’ she said after a few minutes.

  ‘The money came from Graydon?’

  ‘There’s no evidence of that. There’s just meetings in Zurich.’

  ‘In a diary?’ I asked. ‘Anything else in the diary apart from “my meetings with Graydon”?’

  ‘He had a complicated love life.’

  ‘Any names?’

  ‘No. Just X and Y.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been that complicated without Z,’ I said. ‘Did your mother run off around the time when X and Y appeared?’

  ‘She did go off with Blair.’

  ‘Not answering the question. Did you do a media course in that MBA Napier paid for?’

  ‘It looked like X was the problem.’

  ‘Not-so-innocent Napier.’

  ‘He always painted himself as the injured party.’

  ‘What happened to his business after your mother and Blair left?’

  ‘It went through a bad time.’

  ‘And then it picked up around the time Napier started coming to Nigeria and meeting Graydon.’

  ‘There was a coincidence.’

  ‘Do you know how they met?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re being a little tight with your lips.’

  ‘I’m employing you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I can’t do this alone, but in business, I don’t trust people. You tell people too much and they start thinking for themselves.’

  ‘You tell people too little and they do the same thing and they go down the wrong track.’

  ‘There’s an element of risk in everything.’

  ‘I’ve taken a lot of risks for you so far.’

  ‘And you’re going to be well paid for that.’

  ‘But no inside track.’

  ‘To give it to you brutally—the management doesn’t share everything with the employees.’

  ‘You know more than I did when I was twenty-five.’

  ‘Maybe you didn’t get fucked over until you were older. Maybe you didn’t know anything that was useful that you could tell someone so that they could use it and fuck you over. Maybe...’

  ‘I had a sheltered childhood.’

  ‘Maybe you did.’

  Chapter 18

  Lagos. Sunday 25th February.

  It was a rare day along this coast when the breeze had been stiff enough during the night to clear the pollution and leave the air fresh and breathable. The sun wasn’t shining through some fifty denier tights for a change, but slapped straight down on to the wild-headed coconut palms, the fluttering fanned voyager palms, and even the frowzy, flappy banana palms managed to look chic. There were shadows, clear and sharp, and out on the water, ships that were usually lost in a nylon haze cut shapes on a blue sky that would normally be bleached to ash.

  I was wearing a pair of crisp off-white chinos, a petrol-blue viscose short-sleeve shirt and a pair of blue-and-burgundy dock-siders (no socks) and, for once, I didn’t mind how I was smelling. Selina wore a big, baggy, wide-flared pair of blue-and-white-striped pyjama bottoms with a navy sleeveless top with just one button holding her in. She sat in the rear of the taxi with her arms stretched across the back of the seat and an ankle crossed over a knee while an expensive flip-flop kept pace with what was going on in her head. She smelled of something vigorous like Eau Sauvage or one of Calvin’s concotions. She’d discarded the wraparounds and brought out some very dark, gold-rimmed lozenges that did little to protect her eyes but a lot for her style. Her crop stood up spiky and alert without looking moussed and the red lipstick she’d applied looked as if it tasted good.

  The watchman wouldn’t let the taxi in and we walked it up the drive arm in arm. This time the house was fronted by cars and the cheapest was a BMW 7 series. The front door was open and we legged it through to the pool and an hilarity of voices. Ali approached with a trayful of flutes and we restrained ourselves by taking one each. The champagne was brick cold and fizzed right out to the inner ear.

  Gale glided through the crowd, unmissable in an ochre sarong split up to the crotch to the tantalizing point which had the men slitting their eyes. She had a matching bikini top which squeezed her breasts inwards and upwards and a couple of drops of champagne were clinging there with sheer delight.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, kissing me on the lips, ‘this trash won’t be staying for long.’

  I introduced Selina. Gale drank her in and got instantly blotto. She gave her a kiss on the lips too. Everything looked set for a long, strong afternoon. A man with pink tinted glasses, silver hair on his head but none on his body, approached and tried to impress himself on us.

  ‘Get lost, George,’ said Gale. ‘Go bore Tilana over there by the bushes.’

  George backed aw
ay and did as he was told.

  ‘You have to be brutal with that type,’ she said, ‘or he’ll bore your hair limp. Now, let’s get you out of the mayhem and into the inner sanctum.’

  Gale took Selina’s arm and led us around the pool past the hungry eyes of various other types of George who stood with their hands resting on the waists of the willowiest African girls I’d ever seen off a catwalk. We got shot of the mêlée, rounded a corner of shrubbery and headed across a piece of lawn to a walled garden.

  ‘They don’t belong to them, Bruce,’ said Gale over her shoulder. ‘All provided by the house. Know what I mean?’

  ‘One of your inventions?’ I asked as we entered the walled garden.

  ‘How many of these you seen in West Africa?’

  It was spectacular. The walls were maybe twelve feet high and supported a domed structure of aluminium pentagons overgrown with orange, red and purple bougainvillea and passion flower. The sun still broke through to dapple the terracotta floor tiles and the water in an oblong pool whose fountain had been paid to trickle at a level just below consciousness. Fans whirred silently in the roof but not so strongly that napkins, silk shirts and underwear would get sucked up into the thermals above.

  The walls were lined with plants and creepers. Interesting shrubs, which only grew on mid-Atlantic volcanoes, had turned out to impress for the occasion. Tendrils of this and that stretched out to caress attractive women, who leapt and brushed them off quickly, spilling their drinks on to bold men’s trouser fronts. The space was big enough for forty people to mill without crushing.

  At one end was a raised platform where there was an arrangement of an open square of swinging sofas. I’d seen swinging sofas before—all fringes and florals—with half-inch tubular frames which behaved like experienced drunks on the verge of collapse but miraculously holding it together. These ones were German engineered, Italian designed with British décor. You could have gone down a rollercoaster in one of them.

  Two of the sofas were occupied by a man on each. One of them had to be Graydon. A man who looked as if his tan, his perfect, golden, even tan went right up to the patch behind his scrotal sac. A man who looked as if he had been born between sets at a country-club tennis court in Beverly Hills. A man whose manicure was more expensive than most people’s orthodontistry. A man wearing the crispest, whitest shirt, the darkest, richest, naviest-blue shorts, the springiest, most mushroomy-coloured espadrilles of any that’s graced the portals of Saks 5th Ave. Gold-diggers’ spades were tinnitus to him. He held a highball of Perrier with a twist of lark’s song in it and rolled his finger against his thumb as if he had a bogey to flick.