by William Boyd
“Well, you can’t get back to Nkongsamba. They’ll have road-blocks on the highway now, for sure. And there’s a twenty-four-hour curfew on in the capital as well. So if I were you, I’d go to the airport hotel down the road. Show them your ticket. I suppose you’re in our care now, after a fashion, and they’ll bill the airline. I should think they’ll be glad of the custom. Everyone else has kept well away, stayed at home. In fact you’re the only person who’s turned up to catch a flight today. I suppose you were just unlucky.”
Morgan turned away. Unlucky. Just unlucky. Story of his life. He climbed morosely into the car and told Peter to take him to the airport hotel. Peter backed up with alacrity and they drove off.
The airport hotel was a mile away. They were stopped by a patrol on the road and Morgan again explained his predicament, flourishing his passport and ticket. He was sunk in a profound depression; the final bizarre revenge of a hostile country. The magnitude of his ill-fortune left him feeling weak and exhausted.
Morgan had stayed at the airport hotel several times before. He remembered it as a lively, cosmopolitan place with two restaurants, several bars, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a small casino. It was usually populated by a mixed crowd of jet-lagged transit passengers, air-crew and stewardesses and a somewhat raffish and frontier collection of bush-charter pilots, oil company troubleshooters and indeterminate tanned and brassy females whom Morgan imaginatively took to be the mistresses of African politicians, part-time nightclub singers, croupiers, hostesses, expensive whores and bored wives. It was as close as Morgan ever came to being a member of the Jet Set and a stay there always made him feel vaguely mysterious and highly sexed. As they approached, he recalled how only last year he had almost successfully bedded a strong-shouldered female helicopter pilot, and his heart thumped in anticipation. Every cloud, he reminded himself, silver lining and all that. That had to be the one consolation of a truly awful day.
The airport hotel was large. A low-slung old colonial edifice at the centre was lined by shaded concrete pathways to more modern bedroom blocks, the pool, the hairdressing salon and the other amenities. As they swept up the drive, Morgan looked about him with something approaching eagerness.
The large car-park, however, was unsettlingly empty, and Morgan noticed that the familiar troupe of hawkers who spread their thorn carvings, their ithyphallic ebony statuary and ropes of ceramic beads on the steps up to the front door were absent. Also there was an unnatural hush and tranquillity in the foyer, as if Morgan had arrived at the dead of night rather than midday. Sitting on squeaky cane chairs in front of the reception desk were two bored soldiers with small aluminum machine pistols in their laps. The clerk behind the long desk was asleep, his head resting on the register. One of the soldiers shook him awake and as Morgan signed in he noticed that only a few names were registered along with his own.
“Are you busy?” he asked with faint hope.
The receptionist smiled. “Oh, no, sah. Everybody gone. Only eight people staying since last night. No planes,” he added, “no guests.”
An aged bellhop with bare feet and a faded blue uniform showed Morgan to his room in one of the new blocks. Morgan was glad to find the air-conditioning still functioned.
The day’s frustrations were not over. Morgan tried to phone the Commission in Nkongsamba but was informed that all the lines had been closed down by the army. He then went back outside and instructed Peter—who had elected to stay and live in the car in the car-park—to drive to the embassy in the capital and report Morgan’s plight.
Peter shook his head with a convincing display of bitter disappointment.
“You can never go dere,” he lamented. “Dey done build one big road-block for here,” he gestured at a point a few yards up from the end of the hotel drive. “Plenty soldier. Dey are never lettin’ you pass.”
So that was it. Morgan looked at his watch. By rights he should be high over Europe now, a stewardess handing him his meal on a tray, an hour or so from an early evening touchdown at Heathrow Airport. Instead he was marooned in a deserted hotel complex while a military coup raged outside the gate.
He walked sadly back to his room through the afternoon heat. Lizards basked on stones in the sun, idly doing press-ups as he approached, reverting to glazed immobility once more as he walked on by. To his left he saw the tall diving board of the swimming pool, and some asterisks of light flashed off the blue water he could glimpse through the perforated concrete screen that surrounded the pool area. Normally it would be lively with bathers, the bars crowded with sun-reddened guests, the nearby tennis courts resounding to the pock-pock of couples rallying. Where were the other people who were staying here? Morgan wondered. What were they like? He felt like some mad dictator, or eccentric millionaire recluse, alone in an entire multi-bedroom block with only his taciturn guards for company.
His second question was answered that evening when he went down to the restaurant. There was a table of four Syrians or Lebanese men, and an ancient, wrinkled American couple. The Lebanese ignored him; the Americans said, “Hello, there,” and looked anxious to exchange grumbles about their common predicament. Morgan sat as far away as he could. Pretend nothing has happened, he told himself; as soon as we start behaving like victims of a siege—sharing resources, privations and anecdotes—this enforced stay really will become a nightmare.
He was well into his rather firm avocado when the eighth guest arrived. If he had been asked to speculate, unseen, on his or her identity, Morgan—knowing his luck—would have laid long odds on the eighth guest being a nun, an overweight salesman or moustachioed spinster. He was surprised then, and almost enchanted when a young woman entered wearing the dark-blue skirt and white blouse of BOAC. She was quite pretty, too, Morgan assessed, his avocado untended, as he watched her sway through the empty tables to her seat close to the Americans.
For a minute or so Morgan’s heartbeat seemed to echo rather loudly in his chest as, more surreptitiously, he scrutinised the girl. “Girl” was perhaps a little too kind. She looked to be well into her thirties, that short blond hair certainly dyed, a slightly predatory air about her features due to the rather hooked nose, the liberally applied cosmetics, and lines that ran from the corners of her nostrils to the ends of her thin orange lips. She had amazingly long painted nails that matched the colour of her lipstick.
For the first time that day Morgan’s spirits were lifted. Something about her—the dark eye-shadow, her tan against the white cotton of her blouse—reminded him of the brisk sexual allure of the helicopter pilot of the year before. He passed the rest of the meal in a pleasantly absorbing miasma of sexual fantasy.
Fantasy was all he had to content himself with, however, as the girl appeared to return to her room directly after dinner. Morgan drank a couple of whiskies in the bar but was driven out by the increasingly clamorous garrulity of the four Lebanese, who played bridge with a quite un-English fervour and intensity. The American couple tried to befriend him once again but Morgan repelled their polite “Say, do you have any idea where we can change some dollars?” with a rush of eyebrow-jerking, shoulder-shrugging pseudo French: “Ah, desolé, haw … euh, je vous ne comprendre, non? Oui? Disdonc, eur, bof, vous savez haha parler pas Anglais. Mmm?” They wandered off with an air of baffled resignation.
The next morning, Morgan looked out of his fifth-floor window. From this height he commanded a considerable view of the hotel area. He could see Peter pissing into a bush on the edge of the car-park. A military jeep was pulled up in front of the central building. Over to his left and partially obscured by a clump of trees he could see the swimming pool: a static blue slab surrounded by grey concrete and ranks of empty lounging chairs. Then, as he watched, a small figure came into his line of vision. It was the stewardess, wearing what looked like a tiny yellow bikini. She jumped into the pool and swam round. Morgan watched dry-mouthed as she clambered dripping up the steps and fingered free the sodden material of her briefs, which had become wedged in th
e cleft between her buttocks. Morgan turned from the window and rummaged in his suitcase for his swimming trunks.
Morgan was not proud of the state he had allowed his body to get into. Always what his mother had called “a big lad,” he had assiduously developed at university a beer-gut which never disappeared and indeed had since expanded like some soft subcutaneous parasite around the sides of his torso, padding his back and swelling his already considerable buttocks and thighs. He could have done something about it once, he supposed as he stood in front of the full-length bathroom mirror; there was nothing he could do about his balding head, but the recent addition of a thick Zapata moustache had effected some positive transformation of his appearance. A straggling line of pale brown hair ran straight down from his throat, between his worryingly plump breasts, to disappear beneath the waistband of his capacious trunks. “Not a pretty sight,” a girlfriend had once remarked on observing him as he stumbled—soap-blind—from the shower, groping for a towel. Well, it was too late now, he concluded, inflating his chest and trying to suck in his stomach. In a suit he fancied he looked merely beefy; but this was another trouble with tropical climes: the terrible exposure that resulted through the regular need to shed as much clothing as possible.
Still, he felt quite good as he strolled down the walkway towards the pool, a carefully slung towel modestly covering his shuddering paps. A few more soldiers lounged by the hotel entrance, and the sun beat down from a perfectly blue sky. The enforced, unreal isolation and the unsettling threat of casually sported arms he found strangely invigorating, as if the deserted hotel complex were infused with a lurking wayward sexuality only waiting to be sprung from cover.
Morgan spread his towel a polite few chairs away from the girl. She was lying on her front, bikini top undipped. He was perturbed to see the Lebanese encamped on the other side of the pool playing bridge. There was a fat one, far fatter than Morgan, in a white shirt and Bermuda shorts. The others wore tiny swimming suits like jock straps: two thin weaselly men—one of whom had a face pitted like a peach stone—and the fourth, gratingly handsome in a lounge-lizard kind of way, with a thin moustache and a thick springy rug of hair over a lean and muscly chest. Morgan worried rather about him; he kept looking over at the girl.
There was a persistent roaring in his head; furious red static grumbled and flushed behind his eyes; slabs of heat burned his thighs and belly. Morgan was sunbathing. It was agony. He sat up, rockets and anti-aircraft shells pulsating and exploding everywhere he looked, and reached behind him for the bottle of beer he’d ordered and kept in the shade beneath a lounger. The bottle was still cool, the green glass slippy with beads of condensation. Morgan took great juddering pulls at it, beer spilling from the upended bottle over his chin, dripping onto his chest. His brain seemed to soar and cartwheel with the alcohol. He let out a silent, satisfying belch and stood up ready to plunge into the pool.
The first thing he noticed was the girl’s striped towel, occupied only by the damp imprint of her body. Then he heard a ripple of laughter from the shallow end of the pool and he saw her chatting to the hairy Lebanese, who, as Morgan gazed, stood on his hands and walked round with his brown legs waving comically above the water, to the delighted laughter of the girl.
It can only have been this flirtatious display of agility, coupled with the dizzying effects of the cold beer, that drove Morgan to the diving board. As he climbed laboriously to the top he grew increasingly aware of the absurdity of the position he had committed himself to, and of all its hackneyed connotations. He sensed, as he emerged on the highest board, the attention of the others below turn to him. He had only seconds to decide. Beyond the lip of the board he saw the girl looking up at him, and the frank interest of her gaze inspired him and yet was somehow depressing. Depressing to think that he had stooped to these despised macho techniques to gain the girl’s absorption, and inspiring to find that they actually worked. He hitched up the waistband of his trunks. He would compromise: he wouldn’t dive—he wasn’t sure if he could remember how—and he wouldn’t climb back down. No, he would jump. He tried to saunter casually to the edge of the board. The pool slowly revealed itself beneath him. He thought: good God, it seems higher from up here. Bloody high. Shouldn’t there be some kind of legal limit …? His doubts were cut off in midstream as he realised with a gulp of horror that he had missed his step and clownishly fallen forward off the board, not an elegant vertical jump, but at a gradually diminishing angle of forty-five degrees to the water. And as the glinting, shimmering surface rushed up to meet him, Morgan spread his arms in a grotesque parody of a swallow-dive and belly-flopped full force with a ghastly echoing smack.
Everything was white. White and fizzing as if he were immersed in a glass of Andrews Liver Salts. He felt strong arms pulling him to the side. He felt his hands on the tiled edge of the pool. He took great gasping mouthfuls of air. His vision cleared. The hairy Lebanese was by his side, an arm protectively round his shoulders. Morgan shrugged him off and looked up. The stewardess crouched on the pool edge above him, concern filling her eyes.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “It made an awful sound.”
“Mmmm. Sure,” Morgan wheezed. “I’m … fine.”
He rested in his room all afternoon. The entire front of his body was flushed and tingling for at least two hours. The girl had gathered up his stuff, draped a towel across his winded shoulders and led him back to his block. He felt as if he had just swum the Channel; his lungs heaved, his body creaked with pain and he could barely gasp replies to the girl’s worried solicitations. And when the pain and the agony subsided it was replaced with an equally cruel shame. Morgan writhed with embarrassment on his bed, cursing his ridiculous pretensions, his preposterous life-guard conceit and his absurd gigolo rivalry.
He ate his evening meal as soon as the restaurant opened. Only the Americans accompanied him but they maintained a frosty indifference. He inquired at the desk if there had been any word about the coup or news of the airport opening. The reception clerk told him that there was nothing but martial music on the radio but he planned to listen to the BBC world service news at nine. Perhaps that would give them some reliable information.
Morgan found a dark corner of the bar and flicked through old magazines for a while. No one interrupted him. There was no sign of the stewardess or the Lebanese. He ordered a large whisky. To hell with everyone, he thought.
Shortly after nine Morgan went out to look for the receptionist but the desk was empty. He waited for a few minutes and then decided to turn in early. He was walking down the passageway that led out to his block when he heard noises coming from behind a door marked GAMES ROOM. He stopped. He could hear a man’s voice, an indistinct seductive bass. He then heard some feminine giggles. He was about to walk on when he heard the girl say, “No. Stop it. Come on now.” He listened again. She grew more insistent. “Look. Stop it. Really. Come on, it’s your serve.” She was still giggling but it seemed to Morgan that a worried tone had entered her voice. Then: “Ow!—Honestly, cut it out! No. Stop it, please.”
Morgan pushed open the door. The girl stood there in the hairy Lebanese’s arms. He seemed to be biting her shoulder. As Morgan entered they broke apart, and the girl, blushing, quickly readjusted the strap of her cream dress which had slipped down her arm. Morgan felt supremely foolish for the second time that day. He wasn’t at all clear about what one was meant to say in situations like this. The girl smiled; he felt slightly reassured. She seemed pleased to see him and backed away from the Lebanese. He smiled, too, white and gold teeth beneath his moustache.
“How you feel?” he asked Morgan confidently, tapping his stomach. “The belly. Is good?”
They were standing in front of a Ping-Pong table. Morgan walked over to it and picked up a bat. He swished it menacingly about.
“My turn to serve, I think,” he said pointedly, in as clipped and cool a tone as he could summon. “Why don’t you push off, Abdul? Eh?”
The Lebanese
looked at the girl, who earnestly studied her fingernails. He gave a snort of laughter and pushed past Morgan out of the room, saying something harsh and guttural in Arabic, as if he had a forest of fish bones stuck in his throat. An expressive language, Morgan admitted to himself, hugely relieved.
Morgan and the stewardess went to the bar and had a quiet, mature laugh about it all. There had been no real problem, the girl insisted. He was just getting a little fresh. Still, she was glad Morgan had walked in. They had a few drinks. The stewardess said her name was Jayne Darnley. She’d come down with a touch of upset tummy and had to be left behind when the last plane took off. Morgan bought some more drinks. She was wearing a loose satin dress and Morgan admired the roll of her heavy breasts beneath the bodice as she reached down into her bag for a menthol cigarette. They got on famously; Morgan even laughed about his ill-fated dive. “It was terribly brave of you,” stated Jayne. She came, it transpired, from Tottenham and had worked on “promotions” before becoming a stewardess. The whisky made Morgan feel virile and capable; he could smell the pungent scent she used, and the click of the sentry’s boots in the foyer lent a frisson of exotic danger to the atmosphere. He started to lie grandly. Yes, he admitted, he was leaving this country for a new posting: Paris. He was going to be defence attaché at the Paris embassy. “Ooh, Paree,” enthused Jayne. “I love Paris.” And from there, Morgan confided, a spot of work at the UN perhaps. After that, who knows? Although his first loyalty had always been to the service, he’d always had a secret yearning for the cut and thrust of political life, and with his experience, maybe.… Morgan went on to conjure up a large, interesting and cultured family, a trendy public school, a starred first. He created a modest private income, a chic pied-à-terre in Chelsea; he fabricated costly hobbies and recondite enthusiasms, and spoke knowingly of half-famous intellectuals, minor royalty, television-show compères. As the whisky and his rising sexual excitement fuelled his imagination, so Jayne grew more entranced, edging forward on her chair, lips set apart in a ready smile of anticipation. Her eyes gleamed; what a good time she was having. Morgan concurred, and called for another Pernod and blackcurrant.