In one of the rows of seats a lone white woman traveller lay sleeping, stretched over her battered flight bag along three black plastic spoon-shapes. A cracked panama had slipped from her sun-browned face.
Johnny and I were in trouble. Johnny was American, but had come back from somewhere to London for the trip. For our separate reasons we’d missed the first leg of the official journey. We had expected to join the expedition here, for a special charter to the capital of the country that lay to the south. Our destination was in there somewhere, beyond the desert and the great river. But we had missed the plane. Perhaps we had missed the plane…The real trouble was that Johnny would not bribe, because bribery and corruption were the root causes of so much of Africa’s misery.
The hall was devoid of information sources. The little man, whose hissing and hovering was making Johnny look like a girl alone at a late-night bus stop, had already told us what he was going to tell.
“I’ll ask one of the women,” I said.
But she spoke no French or English or didn’t want to get involved. Faces around her gazed stonily out of the archipelago of dark robes and peeping finery. A woman made an unintelligible comment in a tone of deep contempt: the natives were hostile.
We tried to remain calm.
Johnny stretched and pressed his hands behind his head, raising the fan of eel-brown hair that was overheating his neck. He looked, momentarily, like a hostage getting ready to be shot.
“Embarkation for Planet X: colonist class. Isn’t it weird how these places always manage to make you believe there’s no air outside. That’s futurism for you, comes from the cultural phase our world was in when the standard concept of ‘airport’ was laid down. I mean, look at those chairs.”
“I suppose they might be more comfortable in a lower gravity.”
I had bumped into Johnny by chance at Gatwick. Our paths had crossed several times before, in our small world; and we’d always enjoyed each other’s company. Johnny Guglioli was a young American (USA citizen, I mean) of a highly recognisable type: shrewd, naive, well-informed and passionate about the world’s ills and the possibility of curing them. His writing had a strangeness that worried people a little, even after it had been toned down by his editors, and his selfless arrogance infuriated many. But I respected Johnny. He could be absurdly didactic. But loud or brash, his eyes never lost the uneasiness of those children of Utopia, good Americans, who have woken up and found themselves—well, here, where the rest of us live.
For that bruised puzzlement in the face of what people call normality I could forgive him a good deal. I could forgive him—almost—this disaster.
In any more hopeful location I’d have walked out of the airport and found myself a bus. But there was nothing outside the dusty glass doors, in the place where Johnny said we couldn’t breathe: only a few dead thorn bushes, the red track from the airport building and an endless waste of sand.
Aircon fans roared in a mind-deadening way and without any noticeable effect on the heat. I wondered how many of the Africans here had been awake that night. I wished I knew how the hell to deal with Johnny, whose button black eyes had gone blank with stubborn virtue…though it would break his heart to miss this gig. I was tortured by the suspicion that somewhere close there was a VIP lounge where the rest of the expedition were sipping cold drinks.
“Shall we try the Virgin desk again?”
The lone white woman sat up, yawned, and said, “Oh, hallo Anna. So you’re in this too? How are the kids?”
She smiled dazzlingly. “I suppose you’re another Snark hunt.
I hadn’t recognised her. Awake her face shed years, its expert makeup lighting up like magic.
“Johnny Guglioli,” I said. “Braemar Wilson.” And took a mental step backwards. The smile was clearly meant for Johnny alone.
I’d known Brae for a long time, known her before she adopted that nomme de guerre. The last time I’d seen her in an airport, her heels had been three inches high. Her dewy complexion had never seen the sun, and apart from the essential smart briefcase, her luggage was none of her business. But she was equally immaculate in this role. Wherever did she get those shorts? They were perfect.
“Braemar Wilson as in the pop-soc vids?”
“The same. Though I’m almost ashamed to admit it, in such company. I’ve read your work, Johnny. If I told you how much I admire you, I’d sound like a groupie.”
It was the name, she’d once told me, on the gate of the miserable little house she’d been renting after her divorce. Some redundant housewives start up phone-a-birthday-cake businesses. Mrs Wilson had become, in a very few years, a household name in the burgeoning ‘infotainment’ market. Her girlish deprecation irritated me. She had no reason to defer to young Johnny. The ground she covered was hack, but not the treatment.
“Hell no!” cried Johnny. “I want to be the groupie. That ‘Death and the Human Family’ thing! It was terrific!”
There was a break for mutually appraising laughter—in which Brae warned me, by withholding eye contact, not to presume on our long acquaintance in any way. I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.
“Maybe you can tell us what’s going on.” Johnny affected a casual tone. “Did we really miss our ride, or are these guys just teasing?”
“Oh, it’s gone all right. A late change: I feel less paranoid now I know you two didn’t get the news either.”
She examined us.
“What’s the problem? You transferred to the scheduled flight, didn’t you? Or what are you doing in here?”
Johnny’s lightly tan-screened face turned brick colour.
“The flight’s full. We’re fucking grounded.”
Braemar looked at our little man, who was still making his obscene gesture. She enveloped the whole situation in a smile so tender and so knowing that Johnny had to ignore it.
“What’s my reward, Johnny, if I get you back on stream?”
Having ignored the smile he was able to laugh: to groan with theatrical sincerity. “Name it! My life is yours to command!”
So that’s how it’s done, I thought.
She never asked us for money, then or later. She simply took our coupons away, and brought them back turned into boarding passes. I have no idea how Johnny imagined that this was achieved, or if he was just plain faking too.
The hotel was a huge tower, a landmark of the French-planned city centre. The taxi driver had called it ”l’Iceber”: it looked as far out of place and as rotten as might be expected at this latitude. We could see from the outside whole swaths of yellow-stained decay, sinister great fissures in the white slabs, broken windows.
There was no phone and no drinking water in my room so I had to come down again. I found the coffee shop and bought a bottle of local beer. There was no one about. Brae and Johnny were maybe sleeping, maybe (I surmised grumpily) improving their acquaintance somewhere. The rest of our gang was on a sightseeing tour and there seemed to be no other guests. Miraculously, I got through to Wales on a cardphone in the lobby. Unfortunately it wasn’t my husband or my wife who picked up the handset. It was Jacko, Sybil’s child but my darling.
“Is Daddy there, Jacky? Or your Mummy? Go and fetch someone, Sweetheart.”
“Mummyanna.” He sighed heavily, and broke the connection. I couldn’t get through again.
Outside in the desolate boulevard young women sat selling vegetables. In front of one of them, three tiny aubergines lay in the dust, another had a withered pimento and a bunch of weeds. There were no customers. Africa looked like a dead insect, a carcase sucked dry and blown away by the wind. It was too late. No one would ever know what city might have stood here: alien to me, efficient, rich in the storied culture of a bloody and complex past.
People come to my country to see the castles.
In my business I am always dealing with the forward-echo, that phenomenon which is supposedly forbidden in our continuum. But things do affect the world before they happen, I know it. I’m always piecing t
ogether footage which is significant because of some event further down the line. I was caught in one of those moments now. Because I couldn’t talk to my family it seemed as if the world was about to end. I wished Johnny and I had stayed back in the desert, trying to do right.
There was a banquet that night in the Leonid Breshnev suite: a bowl of tinned grapefruit segments with a cherry at every place. One of my neighbours was another journalist, a silly Japanese woman. On the other I found a Major Derek Whynton, military observer for NATO: a chiselled-profile, blue-eyed, very British type. I was foolish enough to remark—between the grapefruit and the fried grasscutter- that I’d thought the evidence was conclusively against the kind of activity he’d be interested in. I triggered an interminable lecture, and worse. Some men will take absolutely anything for a sexual invitation—and of course this was Africa, where you can’t be too careful. In the middle of the monitoring-industry PR he smiled archly, laid a hand on my knee and asked me if I was married.
“Yes, twice.”
He angled himself so he could count my rings, and blenched visibly.
“Two husbands?” He sounded seriously alarmed.
“One husband, two wives.”
The major was relieved, but mildly disgusted. “Polygamy, eh? That’s a remarkable regression. I don’t mean to be offensive, but it seems odd that any modern young woman can accept that arrangement.”
“If that was the arrangement, I wouldn’t accept it.”
There was a big darn at my place. I studied it, intensely bored. A clean white tablecloth is a lovely thing. But when a thing gets to be more trouble than it is worth you throw it out. Or put it in a museum. There is no human artefact so sacred it deserves to stay in circulation forever.
At least I’d got rid of the hand. Major Derek marked me down as emergency rations, only slightly less dodgy than the local whores. He discovered he had to hurry away somewhere, between the ice cream and the speeches.
Spiky electric candlebra hung low over the crowd, like spiders in ambush. Some bulbs were brilliant, some dark, making a broken pattern that was repeated as if continuously by the glass doors to the roof terrace. It looked as if something out there was eating up the stars in random mouthfuls.
Johnny was at the bar, with Brae. She wore a pricey little khaki number, Islamically modest. Johnny probably thought it was her old school uniform. She was regaling him with bad-taste stories about the African notables. Johnny didn’t mind this too much. They were only politicians.
“What about that guy Obofun Ade—in the white with the kind of hippie embroidery?”
Nigerian pharmaceuticals billionaire, vocal backer of the West Africa Federation Initiative. The African contigent at this gathering was alarming: almost as if something really important had happened.
“A lot of what Ade says makes sense…”
“True enough. But you know where the money comes from?” “Cheap neuro-drugs, undercutting the fat-cat multinationals-” “They say his family’s plant is based on kidnapped streetkids.”
“Aaah…”
“Rows of them. Kept alive in vats…”
“Aaah, Brae…”
I was listening before they saw me, they were being loud.
“I don’t want to hear any more of your dirty jokes. You’ll get us thrown out.”
“Jokes?” said Brae. Her eyes slid contemptuously around the colourful gathering, her fingers tightened around her glass. I could see the indigo shade in her unpolished nails: a sign that Johnny was unlikely to read. “Who’s joking? They were always like it. ‘As we neared the city we passed several human sacrifices, live women slaves gagged and pegged on their backs to the ground, the abdominal wall being cut in the form of a cross and the uninjured gut hanging out. These poor women were allowed to die like this in the sun…Sacrificed human beings were lying in the path and bush—even in the King’s compound the sight and stench of them was awful. Dead and mutilated bodies seemed to be everywhere—by God! may I never see such sights again!…’ Benin, 1897. I memorise a lot of stuff. It’s handy to have it on tap when I’m recording. That’s from The Diary of a Surgeon with the Benin Punitive Expedition. The Benin were losing a war of worlds at the time and I suppose they still are: in which situation these people seem to think that anything goes.”
I suppose I looked unhappy. Brae smiled at me serenely, with a warning in her eyes. Johnny decided to ignore this last weird assault on his liberal conscience.
“Hi Anna. Having fun?”
I was annoyed over his defection, especially since I had the impression, even more clearly than at the desert airport, that Brae was wishing that I would vanish. So I just shrugged.
Braemar took out a cigarette and lit it. Johnny was astonished. I don’t suppose he’d ever seen a lady smoking before. She smelled of something as unsophisticated as a chocolate bar, most unlike the taste of the Brae I knew. The sweetness and the tomboy plain frock made a stunning combination. Braemar was pushing middle-age, and too clever to lie about it overtly. But she’d done an expert job on confusing the issue tonight. Poor Johnny! In her way, Brae was as much an armaments expert as Major Whynton.
She turned, drawing stagily on the cigarette, to survey the room. “Isn’t this place wonderful? I feel like Bette Davis on a liner. Or like Marlene Dietrich in a saloon. I think this must be the restaurant at the end of the universe.”
Something was chewing up the stars outside. Johnny laughed.
“Ah, c’mon, Brae. Life will go on. Let’s face it, the overwhelming majority of human beings couldn’t give a shit even suppose—which I doubt—that we find the real thing lurking up in them there swamps…Hell, some of them work here. We might as well be dentists as far as he’s concerned.”
The barman grinned.
“But we need the aliens, Johnny. And we need them to be out of reach. The futuristic encounter with otherness has been our afterlife for as long as our culture can remember. What else can it be—the other world, of spiritually etiolated lifestyles, reduced surfaces: cleanliness, order, protein pills for food? Where did the first crude practitioners of the SF genre conceive these images of white garbed citizens thronging the shining corridors? There is only one other world, Johnny, one theatre of eternal mysteries and unreachable solutions. We go there when we die. What we’re doing here is enacting one of those stories where some champion unwisely takes on Death as an opponent. If the meeting that belongs on, that essentially is, for us, the other side of things: if that event invades the world of experience—then what can happen next?”
Johnny smiled indulgently: but it was time to show some muscle. In conversations of this kind he expected to be the one spinning out wild skeins of logorrhoea.
“Crap,” he said. “You know as well as I do there’s nothing going on here. It’s just a good lig: plane tickets, free drinks and some kind of copy. I’m planning to write it up for the National Enquirer.”
Braemar grinned slyly.
“I have heard,” she remarked, “that ufology is the nearest thing the USA has developed to an ethnic religion. You know, like Hinduism or Islam. The poor kill animals and wear posies. The intellectuals pretend that’s all crap. But you still catch them making puja sometimes.”
The brown river was huge, it looked vast as a continent. A river like that impresses on you sharply the scale of Africa. There were market stalls along the waterfront, customs booths, warehouses and a long open shed through which I could see the boat pier. Two black limos and a jeep were pulled up beside our shiny bus. A man in a sober white man’s suit—it was the Minister for Culture, I had spoken to him briefly at the banquet- was talking heatedly to a group of river policemen. His aides hung back, hands dangling by their sides. The inevitable bodyguard (there was a war somewhere about: there always is, in Africa) stood at attention, rifles butts along their trouser seams.
Our state-visitors’ cruiser had dematerialized. There was only the regular riverboat. It was standing at the pier now, stuffed with people. I hadn’t
let them put anything of mine in the baggage compartment (I’ve played this game before). I shouldered my bags and quietly got down. I bought myself a cold coke, the bottle decanted over a fistful of ice into a small plastic bag with a straw. Soon Johnny and Brae drifted up.
“You reckon that ice is okay?”
“No,” I said, my belly instantly beginning to gripe.
So he bought a drink and stood grimly sucking: as if he was showing some kind of solidarity by courting diarrhoea. Braemar declined.
“I think we’ve entered the Zone,” she said.
Johnny brightened a little.
“Yeah, the situation’s hopeless. Pods all around us. Don’t you think that guy in the suit has a kind of pod-ish look too?”
We sat on a decaying wooden bench by the entrance to the pier. The bus slowly emptied: our gang prowled uneasily. What happened next was perhaps inevitable. An English journalist lost his head and tried to shove his way through to the boat. The soldiers hurried over…
Johnny jumped up on the bench, waving his plastic of ice and cola. “The aliens are among us!” he yelled. “They’ve taken over these peoples’ minds! Are you gonna let them get you too? Come on, you guys! Where’s your journalistic integrity? This is the greatest story ever told!”
I don’t believe he realised that people might get killed. I did, and it didn’t slow me down. The pack surged. A mindless mediaperson greed possessed me. I burrowed, kicked, shoved, elbowed…until a shot was fired, and everything went quiet.
Someone got hold of my arm. It was one of the soldiers. My bowels turned to water. I saw them going after another figure: couldn’t see who. Everyone else was being rifle-prodded back through the shed.
“Vous devez payer, madame—” in the back of the neck, the death of all my nightmares…
Grazing The Long Acre Page 9