A Darkening Stain (23 page)

‘I wouldn't want to invade your privacy,' I said, a tad Victorian, but I really didn't need to hear about Helmut.

‘It's easier to talk to strangers.'

‘As long as they stay that way.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You don't want to reveal your inner life and then have it paraded around your family and friends.'

‘Oh, I see, I thought you meant you didn't like being intimate.'

Maybe I didn't.

‘Surely Helmut was bisexual,' I said, thinking, we're not going to get away from the guy so let's do him and quick.

‘No. He was homosexual. He always preferred boys. It didn't bother me. Our relationship suited each other. He liked to be seen with a beautiful African woman on his arm and...' I knew I had to look her in the eye for this, ‘... and I didn't like sex. Still don't.'

The relief was substantial.

‘So what happened to...?'

‘Everything in Africa is sex,' she said, bitterly and with disgust.

‘It's the only fun there is if you're living in grinding poverty.'

‘You were going to ask me something,' she said, not enjoying the concept of a billion people hoeing their way to a night's satisfying rut.

‘So what happened to Helmut if you suited each other so well?'

‘He died.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Don't be,' she said. ‘Helmut was a great card player and I can assure you he had a very good understanding of probability.'

‘AIDS?'

‘He was very reckless.'

My drink was over and I'd just sent the instructions to my legs to get up and out of there when Elizabeth whipped my glass off me and set off across Lake Parquet. She came back with the tumbler half full. I took it with both hands.

‘Unfortunately,' she said, sitting down, legs underneath her, ‘I was too. One night.'

‘Not reckless, I hope.'

‘That's why I cancelled the furniture.'

Conversation not derailed after all, very much on line. The whisky glass rattled on my teeth making an idiot of myself. She laughed, out came the pointy teeth, snapped shut.

‘When I first saw you,' she said. ‘I thought we had something in common.'

‘I'm not HIV positive if you're asking.'

‘I didn't mean that,' she said. ‘I thought we'd both lost something valuable to us.'

‘Well, I might have just lost my wife,' I said, the whisky talking now. ‘I mean my girlfriend.'

‘Which?'

‘Girlfriend. She's pregnant. That's why I keep calling her my wife. She corrects me ... every time. She would have if she were here. She's German too,' I finished like a complete asshole.

‘Why do you say “might”? You
might
have just lost her.'

‘I told her I'd been unfaithful.'

‘That usually works.'

‘But I lied.'

‘Then you're
very
strange.'

‘It was a
very
complicated situation.'

‘That wasn't what I meant about losing something.'

‘I lost my car a few months ago,' I said. Avoidance tactic.

‘You mean
that's
new?' she said, and smiled without opening her mouth.

‘Your sense of humour's coming along.'

‘What about your innocence?'

‘Fresh out.'

‘Me too.'

‘I was joking.'

‘I don't think you were.'

Here we go with the inner child stuff.

‘Where did you lose yours?' I asked.

‘I'm not talking about virginity,' she snapped, the last word tripping over her teeth, annoying her.

‘Then what
are
we talking about?'

‘I told you. That's what we have in common.'

‘Lost innocence? Well, there must be a hell of a lot of people like us. Most of Lagos for a start. You want to go wandering the streets downtown see how much...'

‘You think so?'

‘I don't know what you've done to lose it.'

‘What
I've
done,' she said, savagely, beginning to get shrill.

‘Nobody loses it for you.'

‘I didn't even
have
a childhood,' she said, her tight fist beating on the arm of the chair.

This was getting screechy. Her mouth was open nearly all the time now and those teeth with the lips curled back snapped and snarled in the jam-packed air of the room. The sweat sprung out of me, and the chair clung as if I was its last possible chance at happiness. I gripped the arms while Elizabeth Sokode went off on a rant.

‘I'm not African, I'm not white, I'm not even halfcaste. I'm a nothing. I don't belong anywhere. I take the bits I like from both cultures but none of it is me. Do you know where I went for my school holidays?' she asked, thumping her stomach with her fist as if she'd just knifed herself.

‘No.'

‘School.'

I nearly laughed at that. It was just too damn tragic. And if I had it would have come out high and hysterical like a vixen on heat barking to the full moon. But for her, with her black shiny eyes flashing over me, the horror was still fresh, the abandonment a blight that had ruined her.

‘I'm surprised you still see your father,' I said.

‘He was a weak man.'

‘And your mother?'

Her limbs were folding back down again now having been wildly overextended and she lapsed into silence. I dropped a couple of gulps to keep the glare down in the room.

‘You have no idea,' she said after some time.

An aircraft took off loudly overhead. I had the whisky down to half an inch. My face felt hard and fat like whale blubber.

‘That'll be the last plane out tonight,' she said.

I saw her spending night after night in her empty palace counting aeroplanes and imaginary slights.

‘The rain's coming now,' she said.

‘I was thinking I've got to be going.'

‘Not for an hour or two. The rain's coming. Listen.'

The palm trees were wilding outside, hissing and clapping. Elizabeth got up and opened some French windows and the shutters out on to the verandah. Cool air blasted into the room. She shuddered and left, taking my glass from me on the way. I went out and up to the mosquito netting. The garden was floodlit now and I could see the dog runs around the high walls, the angled razor wire on top.

The brushes started on the snare—the unmistakable sound of a line of heavy rain moving across the city.

Elizabeth reappeared in designer blue jeans and a fat, cream rollneck which came up to her nose. She handed me my refill. Another three inches. The wind drove the rain over the walls, through the palm trees and it crashed on to the house. The lights in the garden blurred. Madame Sokode looked out like an animal but not one that felt safe or protected by the rain, rather a predator that could see rich pickings after. She hugged herself and spoke without taking her eyes off the rain.

‘I get cold very easily,' she said.

‘Maybe you're more African than you think.'

‘I can't eat fish-head soup or grass cutter,' she said, ‘I can't stomach manioc or cassava.'

‘You've got to be brought up on that stuff.'

‘Why did you come and see me today?' she asked suddenly, as if I'd had romantic intentions or regretted a bust-up.

‘A proposal,' I said.

‘How did you hear about me?'

‘In the business community in Benin. Names get thrown around. I don't remember where I heard yours. The High Commission told me where to find you.'

‘What is this proposal?'

‘Can I just use your lavatory before we get into this?'

‘You'll have to go upstairs in one of the bedrooms. The downstairs isn't plumbed in yet.'

I ran like a madman up the stairs, eyes bugged, tongue out on its stalk, trying to shed some of that unbearable tension. I saw on the landing that her bedroom door was ajar and I couldn't resist a peek.

It was the smallest room in the house. The walls bare apart from a poster of a young white movie heart-throb. The bed was single and on it were cuddly toys—two dolls, a wild-haired troll and four plastic ponies with lurid tails. There were books, lots of
them in a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. A nightmare read of romantic slush—table settings and princes, linen and love.

A door slammed below. I got out and took a long shuddering leak. I found my face had set in a plastic half laugh in the mirror.

Elizabeth was pacing the verandah, arms folded, thick mountaineer's socks on her feet. I sucked a half inch off the whisky.

‘Are you interested in gold?' I asked.

‘Is this a business proposal?'

It's not a marriage proposal.

‘I wanted to know if you'd be interested in buying some Ashante gold,' I said.

‘How much?'

‘Around two thousand ounces, just under a million dollars' worth.'

She stopped and stared into the floor for a moment. The business brain flickering. The number of emotional cripples and close to certifiably insane people who hold down top jobs and run business empires—it's amazing. Maybe that's what it took ... being a kid without the innocence—single-minded, total aggression, fuzzy concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, and a desperate need for total playground dominance. Was that the only way I could justify my own failure?

‘Yes,' she said, and the rain stopped so suddenly she turned around. ‘That could be very interesting, depending on the price, and the usual quality and delivery.'

‘Where do you want it delivered?'

‘Here in Nigeria.'

‘When?'

‘Immediately as possible.'

‘Quality?'

‘I have someone who can help on that.'

‘And price?'

‘It would be interesting for me if you could accept part money and part goods in kind.'

‘What did you have in mind?'

‘Perhaps that depends on your principal's interests.'

‘Maybe
I'm
the principal.'

‘I don't think so,' she said.

Arguing with that kind of shrewdness was just going to wear out my tonsils.

Thursday 25th July, on the Lagos/Cotonou road.

 

I followed the storm back to Cotonou. Always on the edges it sucked me on, but not into the hard four-inches-a-minute stuff, just squally, windscreen-slashing rain. I set up some thought programmes to shut out the clips of Heike's hurt which were replaying in a continuous loop. Marnier and Sokode—the physically maimed, the emotionally crippled—an interesting love match if she'd liked sex more, not that Marnier was a performer these days but he did like to talk. My great non-plan—selling Marnier's gold to Madame Sokode—where was that going to get me? Looking stupid or, worse, badly exposed. The seven schoolgirls—huddled together in their brown uniforms, wincing under the roar of the rain on the corrugated-iron roof of some shack out in the lagoon system—headed for Lagos and what?

None of it worked. Heike's pain and the pointlessness of her feeling it tortured me all the way back.

Cotonou was bruised, battered and blacked out after the storm but refreshed. Home was deserted. There was a leak in the kitchen. I poured a Red Label. It was 3 a.m. Heike's clothes had gone. All her possessions. No note. I sat in the dark with the bottle in my crotch and drank steadily, but the long drive had taken the edge off my drunkenness and nothing could numb me now. I lay down on the floor and drank even more. Then I slept. Badly.

I woke with my fingers round the glass and Helen's flip-
flopped feet inches away. I rolled and felt the world roll with me. Nausea lurched. I breathed and stabilized.

‘She gone away, Mr Bruce.'

‘Did she say where?'

‘I axed her. She woul'n't say,' said Helen. ‘She comin' back?'

‘I don't know.'

She rested the sheaf of reeds she used for sweeping on her shoulder.

‘Mebbe is time,' she said.

‘For breakfast?'

‘Breakfas'? No. Time for me go home. I'm tired this place. I wan' be with my people again.'

‘Don't be hasty.'

‘Sistah Heike gon' come back?'

‘I don't know, Helen. We're going to have to try.'

‘Swat I'm sayin'. I don' wan' go through this no more. I don' wan' see you fightin', I don' wan' hear you swearin', I don' wan' see you drinkin' strong dring, I don' wan'...'

‘I'm going to take a shower now, Helen.'

She went back to her sweeping.

‘Rain come in the kitchen,' she said.

‘Thanks, Helen.'

I did my business, picked up a sandwich and headed for the office. The
gardien
said I'd had visitors, the same one and three times that morning, a white man.

I stood in the middle of the office, ate the sandwich and drank bottles of Possotomé. I sat and studied the empty square left by a broken tile kicked out of the floor. The afternoon heat herded itself into the room. I slept and was woken by a polite knock from the
gardien
who told me the white man had arrived.

A big solid guy came in behind him. He had a heavy beard in which the sweat beaded so that he had to squeeze it out every once in a while.

‘Where you been?' he asked, drying himself off with a small
white towel he kept for the purpose on his shoulder. Lebanese, American accent.

‘I didn't know we had an appointment.'

He cocked his head at the
gardien
who was still bent round the door.

‘You wanna
give
him a pen and a book so we can make our appointments.'

‘He can't write,' I said, waving the
gardien
out. ‘That's why I have an answering machine.'

‘I don't think you'd appreciate my message being left on it,' he said, and sat down. The man liked himself a lot, liked talking tough, too.