1990 - Brazzaville Beach

by William Boyd; Prefers to remain anonymous

  Nothing had changed at the hotel. There was no reason on earth why it should have, but I was vaguely disappointed. When you yourself have suffered considerably, it is hard to cope with the rest of the world’s indifference to your experience, and upsetting to see how unmarked it is. You cannot understand its relentless preoccupation with the mundane.

  I collected the key to my room. I had cleaned myself up a little since my rescue but I needed a bath and some new clothes. But now I wanted to see Usman.

  I walked through the hotel gardens, and along the concrete pathways towards his bungalow with a new feeling of benign resignation beginning to suffuse me. Mr Doblin was right: I needed a few days of total, selfish inactivity.

  I knocked on Usman’s door but there was no reply. I peered through the window and saw his clothes and possessions were still there. Surprises never work for me: the people were never there; the hidden presents were discovered prematurely; the accomplices spoke out of turn; the flowers were delivered to the wrong address. I thought I would leave him a note in any event. “Guess who?” I would write and leave my room number; that would at least be a low-order surprise.

  An obliging chambermaid opened his door for me. I entered. I smelt his smell. The room was dark and I crossed to the desk to switch on the lamp. As I did so I trod on something that gave with a small satisfying crunch—like standing on stubble in a field, or on a walnut shell. I stepped back and trod on something similar. I returned to the door and switched on the ceiling light.

  On the floor were half a dozen of Usman’s tiny horse-fly aeroplanes. Two had been crushed—pulverized absolutely—by me. The other four lay where they had fallen. I picked one up. The horse-fly was desiccated, a husk, its legs bent, clenched. I picked up the others and laid them carefully on Usman’s desk. There was no point in leaving a note.

  At the airport I waited in an empty room at the gatehouse. There was stricter security than there used to be—no one was allowed near the hangar where the Migs were parked. Something had changed, at any rate.

  I waited for nearly an hour, and smoked three cigarettes, before someone arrived. Eventually, an immaculate air force officer came to see me. He had pale brown skin and his eyes were small and deep-set. I told him I was a close friend of Usman Shoukry and I wondered where he was. The officer informed me immediately and matter-of-factly: Usman Shoukry did not return from a mission.

  I suppose it was news I was expecting, but, for some reason, I blushed. My eyeballs felt hot in their sockets.

  “What happened?”

  He shrugged. “A navaid failure, I believe.”

  “Navaid.” I remembered what Usman had told me: your ground crew is your greatest enemy.

  “Can I talk to the other pilots?” I asked. I tried to remember their names.

  “There are no other pilots.” His face slowly formed an expression of vague disconsolateness, then brightened. “Can you borrow me a cigarette?”

  “Of course.” I handed him the pack, he selected one and passed it back to me. We both lit up. “Where are the other pilots?” I asked.

  “All the other pilots left, after Usman Shoukry never returned.” He looked serious. “Too many navaid failures, they said.” He spread his hands. “You see, we have yet to lose an aircraft to enemy fire. And yet we have lost seven, no eight, to navaid failures. And other misfortunes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One aircraft was stolen. Two others were damaged in a parking accident.”

  I exhaled and looked around. I was beginning to feel weak again.

  “A navaid failure…Could he have crash-landed somewhere?”

  “I suppose so.” He paused and thought. “In theory.” He picked a shred of tobacco off his tongue and looked unfavourably at the burning tip of his cigarette.

  “Is this American?”

  “No. Tusker.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a local brand. Don’t you know it?”

  “I only smoke foreign brands…Do you like it?”

  “Yes.”

  “My God.”

  “Have you any idea where his plane might have come down?”

  “No. He was far in the north, on the UNAMO front.”

  “Ah.”

  “Nobody saw him.” He thought again. “He may have crash-landed, but we have no aircraft for a search.” He smiled regretfully at me, then, seeing my sad face, said, “Who can say? Maybe he will make his own way home. One day.”

  TWO KINDS OF CATASTROPHE

  Catastrophe theory is the one we have been waiting for, the study of abrupt change, the catalogue of discontinuity.

  It tells that all the myriad disasters, downfalls, cataclysms and calamities, great and small, from the unbearably tragic to the mildly irritating, derive from seven basic archetypes of catastrophe.

  There are seven types of catastrophe. All forms of abrupt, non-continuous change will be covered by one or other of these archetypes. They are known as Fold, Cusp, Swallowtail and Butterfly Catastrophes. There are three varieties of swallowtail, two of butterfly. But the two we are interested in are fold and cusp catastrophes: they are far and away the most common.

  Take one easy example of abrupt change in the world—the popping of a balloon. When a balloon bursts there is no way it can be unburst, as it were. The fold catastrophe is like this, conditioned by a single factor. It is the most simple paradigm of change. The balloon bursts, the catastrophe has occurred. There is no going back.

  Life is a fold catastrophe, and its single control factor is time. The catastrophe takes place when time stops. In the language of catastrophe theory, our life follows the same mathematical pattern as the inflating and bursting of a balloon. Fold catastrophes cannot be reversed.

  Cusp catastrophes are different. In a cusp catastrophe there is always the chance of recovery, a possibility of return to the pre-catastrophic state. Being knocked unconscious would qualify as a cusp catastrophe, so would a nervous breakdown or an epileptic fit, or boiling a kettle of water.

  Take a look at anyone’s life. Take a look at your own. In the long fold catastrophe that makes up your three score years and ten you will encounter many cusp catastrophes along the way.

  Hope slept badly on the sofa. Before dawn she managed an hour or two of sounder sleep, but when she woke she felt unsettled and had a persistent dull ache in the small of her back. She drank strong tea and ate a thick slice of toast and Marmite in the kitchen, trying to stem the sensations of nervy irritability that made her feel oddly tense and jumpy. What was wrong with her? Perhaps it was merely the effects of waking with a sore back after a night of shallow, fitful sleep. Perhaps it was the thin drizzle falling outside that heralded a damp and uncomfortable day in the woods…Perhaps it was having her estranged husband at home again, sleeping upstairs in her warm bed.

  She drove to Knap House along splashy lanes. The clouds were low, dense and formless, and the light that filtered through them was pale and unflattering. In her rearview mirror her face looked lumpy and bloodless. She parked her car in the courtyard of the stable block and tramped up the wooden steps to the project office.

  “You feeling all right?” Munro asked, solicitously. “Look a bit wan.”

  “I didn’t sleep very well. I—” she made her tone more brisk. “I thought you should know that John’s here again. Staying with me for a few days.”

  “Oh. Good.” Munro’s mild polite smile said: how is he?

  “He’s much better. I thought, you know, if he met up with those estate workers…”

  “I’ll make sure everyone knows.”

  “He’ll be going for walks, etcetera.”

  The office was overheated and overlit. Hope felt a soporific wave wash over her. She wanted to lie down on the wooden floor and sleep.

  “Have you thought about the job?” Munro asked, cautiously. “I mean…” He did not elucidate what he meant: it was a coded, timid apology for his presumption in asking.

  Hope had in fact h
ardly considered his offer at all, but she said at once, “Yes. Yes, I have. I’d like to take it on.”

  Munro’s glee was touching.

  “Wonderful,” he said. “Well…well, that brightens up a dull day.” He went on with his genteel compliments, telling her how pleased he was, but Hope barely listened. Instead, she was asking herself why she had spontaneously committed herself to staying on at Knap right through the next summer. There was only one explanation.

  She spent a few hours working doggedly in the sodden wood she was classifying. The rain had thickened and the whole world she moved in seemed a succession of variations on water: earth and water, trees and water, air and water. As the afternoon grew murkier she decided to head for home. She had paperwork to do there. Perhaps she would even have an early night. But then she remembered her bed was occupied.

  She parked the car outside the cottage. Light glowed from all the windows and she could hear the noise of music from her gramophone. She walked round to the back door where she stripped off her heavy, wet parka and waterproof trousers and kicked off her rubber boots.

  “Hi, I’m back,” she called, as cheerfully as she could manage.

  The small kitchen was a shambles. Plates and saucepans were stacked in the sink. An open, empty tin of tuna-fish stood on the breadboard beside a crudely cut loaf.

  The sitting-room was blurry with cigarette smoke. John sat at the table which was heaped with his books and papers. On one arm of the sofa was a balanced plate with a few shreds of pasta drying on it. A half-empty bottle of red wine stood at John’s elbow. He rose to his feet when she came in and crossed the room to kiss her.

  “You look freezing,” he said, sweeping a newspaper off an armchair, which he ran up to the fire. She sat down in it obediently, feeling her anger pinch her nostrils.

  “Great day,” he said. “Brilliant.”

  “What?”

  “Work. Like a house on fire. Glass of wine.”

  “I thought you weren’t meant to drink when you were taking that stuff. Lithium.”

  “Glass or two won’t hurt. Mmm?”

  “Just a splash.” She took the glass from him.

  “Yeah, brilliant,” he said again as if he could hardly believe himself.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Topology. Mainly. Tiling. Very interesting.”

  “What…What did you do for lunch?”

  “Whipped up my tuna, cheese and spaghetti thing. Finished the lot, I’m afraid. I was starving.”

  Hope threw the last log in the basket on the fire. She sipped the wine, distastefully. She was not keen for it—it was the wrong time of day—but she thought it might help to calm her a little. She needed to banish all her selfish, petty irritations—the mess, the food, the colonization of her space—before she talked to him.

  “I spoke to Munro today.”

  “Who’s he?”

  She explained. She explained about the extension to her job, the new work required on the watermeadows and the downland.

  “What did you say to him?” John asked..

  “I said yes.”

  He thought about it for a second, nodding. “Fine. Good idea. I’d forgotten how much I liked it down here.”

  “John, you don’t understand!”

  “Easy…Christ.” He looked hurt.

  She sat down. “You’ve got to go,” she said simply, flatly. “You can’t stay here.”

  He looked at her. Now he had a bright, surprised expression on his face. She noticed that there were small deposits of dried saliva at the corners of his mouth, small sticky drifts at the junction of his lips. Lithium did that, she remembered.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He spread his arms. “Look, Hope, I understand,” he began. “Don’t worry. I was just…” He turned and gestured at the papers covering his desk. My desk, she corrected herself.

  “I’m sorry, Johnny,” she said again. “There’s no point in being dishonest about it.”

  “I’ll get all this packed away.”

  “Christ, there’s no hurry. I just had to tell you, that’s all. It had to be said. That was the problem. Stay on for a couple of days. Three. Whatever you feel like. We just have to know where we are.”

  “I might—if you don’t mind. Stay on. Just a day or so. I don’t feel quite ready for London.”

  “No problem.” She smiled. “I just couldn’t carry on just blandly assuming—”

  “No. No,, sure. You’re right.” He forced a smile. “I’m bloody sad.” He gave a short, dry laugh. “But you’re right.”

  She stood up and came over to him. She put her hand on his shoulder and he leant his head against her forearm for a second or two. She refilled their glasses with wine. She felt a giant relief spread through her.

  “Stay on for a couple of days,” she said. “I’d like that. Take it easy.”

  INVARIANTS AND HOMEOMORPHS

  After a storm the beach has always changed slightly in some way—the sand washed away here to reveal the rocks beneath, then piled up in a swelling dune four hundred yards away. Once, on what had been a wide flat area, a small lagoon formed for a week or so, about sixty feet long behind a solid sandbar. Then came another high tide with a strong wind and the next morning it was gone. The geography of the beach is always changing, yet it always remains the same.

  When I asked John why he had moved from turbulence to topology he told me that it was because he was tired of change, and wanted now to study concepts of permanence. He wanted to look at what remained constant in an object, regardless of the force or scale of its transformation. When something is bent, stretched, or twisted, he said, certain features of it resist deformation. He wanted to investigate these unchanging features. He told me the name that was given to them: topological invariants.

  Throw a pebble in a pond and watch the ripples spread. To most people the widening circles would represent change. But to a topologist, John said, a widening circle is a symbol of constancy. A circle is a closed curve; that is its topological invariant, no matter how it grows or shrinks. I want to look at things that endure, he said, even though everything else about them is changing.

  The beach endures, I think as I wander along its length, as well as changing all the time. What is its invariant…? In the palm groves I see two old women from the village gathering fallen coconuts.

  In topology, objects that have the same invariants are regarded as equivalent, no matter how different they may appear when looked at. The crumpled disc of a deflated football has the same invariants as an inflated one, even though they look and perform quite differently. Objects that possess this equivalence are known as homeomorphs.

  I stroll up into the palm grove and greet the old women. They return my greeting. Here we are, I think three homeomorphs…Yes, it seems to me we share the same invariants. The differences between us are superficial. The women smile modestly at me as I say goodbye and continue on my way, then they stoop and begin to gather their windfalls again.

  I sat patiently in my room waiting for reception to call and tell me that Hauser had arrived. I had received a message from Grosso Arvore: Hauser was coming to collect me and drive me back to the camp so that the ‘terms of my contract could be discussed’. I was not at all sure what this meant or implied and not very keen, either, to return; but I knew it could not be postponed indefinitely; I had to go back if only to collect my few possessions.

  There was a knock at the door. It was one of the assistant managers, a young Ghanaian called Kwame. He informed me that the hotel were clearing out Mr Shoukry’s room, and the manager wondered if there was anything I might like to keep as a memento. I was surprised at such thoughtfulness. As we left the room the phone rang: Hauser was waiting in the lobby. He could wait a little longer.

  I stood in Usman’s sitting-room looking about me, feeling a little uncertain and troubled. Kwame waited discreetly at the door and behind him stood a couple of chambermaids with cardboard boxes and plastic bags.


  I went to the desk and opened a drawer. I saw Usman’s passport, some documents, some loose change. Nothing for me here. In the bedroom I opened the cupboard. His few clothes hung above four pairs of shoes. I felt strangely panicked. I knew I should take something, that I’d regret it later if I missed this opportunity. But what? I slid the hangers to one side. Did I want that linen jacket? Those ties…? A sudden sensation of nausea overcame me. The whole idea of a memento—a ‘thing’—as substitute for Usman seemed a gross indignity. I pushed another hanger: his official air force uniform, issued to all the pilots, which they never wore. On the shelf above, I saw his peaked cap still in its plastic wrapping and beside it the stiff glossy leather of his belt. The belt? Something useful, at least, that I could wear. I reached up and took it down.

  Clipped to the side of the belt was a neat brown holster. The leather was moulded into the shape of a stylized kidney. I undipped the flap. The holster held his small, compact Italian automatic pistol. I took it out and weighed it in my hand.

  I thought, with a sudden wrenching inside me, of Usman, in his swimming-shorts, that day at the airport, showing me his plane so proudly.

  His good luck charm, he had said. Why hadn’t he taken it with him? I thought, angry now.

  My fingers traced his initials on the butt.

  I knew at once this was what I wanted to keep. I slid it into my pocket and walked back to the sitting-room. It was a foolish thing to do, I told myself, but I had wanted it, the impulse to take it had been powerful. It was the only object in the entire bungalow that brought an image of Usman Shoukry back to me. But I continued my search of the room, however, for form’s sake.

  Opening a cupboard in the sitting-room I came across a cardboard box full of the equipment Usman used for the construction of his horse-fly aeroplanes: scalpels and razor blades, a fly-tier’s vice, slivers of matchwood and balsa, the almost weightless, transparent tissue paper. That sent me back to the desk again and in a bottom drawer I found a thin file full of delicate drawings of his prototypes. I told Kwame this was what I wanted. As I left the room the chambermaids sidled meekly in.