by Louise Dean
It was a grand marble emporium throughout; the hotel and the bedrooms were luxurious to the global standard. One only knew one was in Africa at all because of the constant telephone interruptions of the staff.
He’d sat on the toilet in his bathroom that afternoon, fielding calls — ‘Er, Mr Bird? Yes, sorry for the interruption, are you aware of the functioning of the air conditioner system?’ — and using the bidet as his library, stowing there the conference programme and the folders of facilities the hotel afforded.
From the bath he lay looking at the bathrobe behind the bathroom door. In all his travels, he had never taken one down from its lynching.
He stood dripping wet in front of the bed, untying one and laying the robe out with its arms wide, and he felt curiously disembodied. Unobserved, one fell apart; nothing made sense. He turned to the wardrobe. His suit on the hanger seemed strange to him too. What an undertaking it was to dress oneself in costume day in, day out.
Down at the bar, a man sat two stools down from him with a fashion-beard, colour tone ‘barely there’. When Richard lit a cigarette, he started to wave a slender hand in front of his face and Richard sat biding his time, waiting for him to say something, knowing he would. Richard smoked the cigarette with moral fervour.
He’d been up and on the pavement outside the hotel at seven, waiting for the conference bus. He’d been subpoenaed to the World Psychiatry Conference to testify to Europharm’s interest in African psychiatric learning; the more exotic studies presented by the Dutch or Danish young lady docs — spirit travel amongst the Kamba — and the more practical by the young African doctors — post-traumatic distress in the Johannesburg townships. He was there to shake hands and reassure them of Europharm’s commitment to their peccadillo, mostly over dinners and drinks.
The bus driver was late. An hour late. He complained to a young idiot with a clipboard who replied to him: This is Egyptian time, sir. The entire city passed him by distributed in familysized arrangements on motorcycles, jeering. Ladas hooted. One honked at his ankles, and he jumped out of the way, then seeing the hand gestures and moustachioed smiles of the driver cajoling him, he got in the back of it. The driver was euphoric; with wailing radio, cigarette in mouth, he hastened into a 1950s sepia panorama, driving at the haze. They crossed the Nile and the driver sang along to the Arabic music with moody conviction.
There was no conference bus for his return to the hotel either, so he took another Lada taxi. The similarly moustachioed man in his long beige jellaba implied, with tilting head and sorrowful looks, that the back door handle was not working and Richard would be obliged to sit up front. No sooner were they in the thick of the ten-lane traffic, nipping in and out of each stream willy-nilly, when the man started badgering him in his language. Richard found he could understand it quite well unfortunately. It was bound to be about money or sex. He hoped it was the former. He looked out of the window, away from the driver. Not put off in the least, the driver touched Richard’s wedding ring and laughed and laughed. He then used hand gestures to ask Richard whether he wouldn’t like a drink with a straw, quite a thick straw. Richard pointed at the road. Cars were veering off it here and there quite suddenly, cars that had simply run out of petrol or given up the ghost, donkey carts hared into the gap in the mêlée, and boys with goats walked up the central grassy aisle of the twenty-lane road into Cairo.
He was mulling it over now, four beers in. He’d never had sex with a man. Valérie’s father, who did his military service in Algeria, said he had. His life was a plausible tale until you hit Algeria and thereafter it was anyone’s guess what really happened. He said he’d been buggered in Cognac, the place. They had clinked glasses. Your health! Good times, the old man said, back then you could ask a woman to piss on you and she would. It made him smile to think of Guy and his plain way of talking.
The young man at the bar spoke up now. ‘Don’t make me the passive smoker also.’
Dutch. Richard rolled his eyes and went to put out the cigarette.
‘Can I have one, if you don’t mind? I’m trying to renounce it . . .’ He was a gamin little fellow with merry eyes.
They got talking. He was a Transcultural Psychiatrist, he said.
‘Want to come up to the roof bar and meet my friend?’
‘Is he also a Transcultural Psychiatrist?’
‘The father of them.’ They got up from their stools and made their way past the sad eyes of the doorman, who wished them all the good in the world, ‘What about you . . . are you also a psychiatrist?’
‘I’m a salesman. The mother of all salesmen. I’ve just been appointed Head of Sales for Europharm Africa.’
‘Well, my God, then you’re very important. You must come and have a drink with us. We can tell you all about Africa.’ The young man pressed the elevator button. The elevator shaft was glass and gold and neon lit. They stepped out into the hot jammy air of the Cairo night.
There were low latticework tables with shishas, the settees were draped with assuit shawls, there were brass plates and goblets and ostrich plumes, lamps swinging and rock music playing. Down in the streets of Cairo below, twenty-seven million people were in different states of wakefulness and sleep, crammed in hovels. Osama bin Laden’s face was on the TV screen behind the bar. A group of businessmen were sitting up there, drinking beers, hands digging into bowls of nuts.
Richard and his friend ordered a drink and some appleflavoured tobacco for the shisha. A man walked over to them wearing a pale linen suit. His hair was almost blue-grey, his face in contrast very tanned and his eyes a vivid blue.
‘Stefan!’
‘Michael!’
‘Ja! Here! Here! Join us. Join us.’
Richard was introduced and they set to drinking and taking turns at the shisha. Pretty soon the Transculturalists were, for Richard’s benefit, discussing the tying and binding of psychotics in faraway places. They moved on to Islamic anti-female practices. They all had a lot to drink so things became more universal, less humourous. Michael told Richard that they had come up from Burundi where they were counselling the survivors of the war suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. There were millions of people there who had seen their parents, or their children, butchered. There was a pause but Richard did not offer up where he had come from and what went on there.
Stefan had been working in Africa since the 1970s; a small man who donned big-man imagery; motorbikes, ganja smoking, he’d played the cavalry of psychiatry, lamping round Africa, claiming deranged souls for the Prince of Orange.
‘They’ve lined me up for some doctor-shadowing in Kenya,’ said Richard. ‘I want to get to know the region; grass roots.’ It was dreary, he thought, what he’d become, but he could never help himself saying what he thought others wanted to hear.
‘Africa’s one big mess. That is all you need to know.’ Michael’s striped shirt broke out in checks. He went right on to tell them that as a gay Transcultural Psychiatrist he’d found it very hard to get sex with a man in Afghanistan but it wasn’t exactly a bowl of cherries in Burundi either.
Michael’s cheer was minty fresh once he’d come out. It turned out he had arranged a date for later on that evening with a local man. He explained how in New York you could have sex with a man and when you asked him his name he refused to tell it to you, it was considered too intimate. There was a lot to this Transculturalism business, it seemed.
‘It’s a predicament,’ said Richard. It occurred to him that all of our endeavours — work, war, charity, altruistic or not — might in fact just be ways of getting sex with strangers.
The three parted ways at the lobby, Stefan and Richard leaving Michael to try first names with a stranger, whilst they went to the dinner. The bus was pulling in, two and a quarter hours late.
Forty minutes later, the busload of ageing shrinks pulled up in front of three pyramids. Rudely woken, furry mouthed, the docs staggered through the sand to a marquee, open at the front with more low brass tables. There were
a couple of camels outside and some dancers waiting in rags and sequins, bras and big trousers. Two belly dancers were checking the plasters on each other’s heels.
Inside a line of delegates were standing, one by one, plate in hand waiting for a turn at the tureen. Richard bought a bottle of wine and he and Stefan went and stood side by side, admiring the pyramids — three of them and beside them, to their left, their spectral doubles, like holograms, an optical illusion. A camel pulled on its leash, swayed over to them and urinated; the two men stepped aside.
Richard thought he ought to say something intelligent, Stefan being the sort of man who inspired it; he was really bad company. He was very tired, then, of spending time with strangers; one got so far, a potted version of one’s experience life-wise, and never any further, and it got more and more condensed and the only thing to hope for was that the other person knew something you didn’t. He found he had nothing to say and hoped his silence would seem thoughtful. He yearned to be in a pub, in England, laughing.
Stefan put a hand on Richard’s shoulder. ‘I was wanting to say to you when we were on the roof — look down there, all of that can be yours. I wanted to say you must choose between three things. You can get rid of one of these from the world, you have only to choose, and all the world will be yours. You can get rid of madness, also sadness, also evil if you like to. So choose now.’
‘Right.’
‘OK. What do you choose?’ Stefan tightened his hold on Richard’s shoulder.
‘Is all the fun happening out here?’ It was Yvette Ducasse in a sequinned cocktail dress. She looked drunk.
‘Hello there, nice to see you,’ said Richard, horrified.
‘Hello there, nice to see you too,’ she replied, offering him her hand. She put out one leg and lowered her height by a couple of inches. She was wearing heels. ‘I’ve just been to one of these in Stuttgart and it was even worse. You don’t have a cigarette, do you?’
Shrinks smoked knowing how well nicotine worked, but only away from home. Good salesmen knew it and bought cigarettes duty-free on the way out to those conferences. Richard handed her a pack.
‘Here, take it.’
‘Thank you.’
She pressed her lips together, looked down at the packet and then as no one said anything more, she nodded slowly, gave a curt laugh, and said, ‘Well, see you then.’
‘We have history,’ said Stefan indifferently, ‘she and I. So. Have you chosen, Richard?’
‘Really?’
‘You have forgotten the question.’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
Stefan took another mouthful from the wine, and then he passed the bottle back to Richard. ‘Think about it. The sad, the mad, the bad. These are relatives. Two we can medicate, one we cannot. That is the one that must go when the others are extinguished. For sure. That’s the plan, that’s what we’re all fighting for. And here in Africa is a new battleground, a war which can be won.’
‘Oh, but aren’t they all just part of the spectrum of normal . . .’
‘There is nothing normal any more. Normal has gone. The world is changing, we have many problems. Too many people wanting the same things.’
I’m not sure I care, he wanted to say. It would be a terrible thing to say. He had to pretend. He had to pretend he wanted to hear this more than a log fire, a pint and some idle chat.
Yvette was standing in the queue for the bar, looking miserable.
* * *
Two or three men jumped the queue and she seemed to go farther back than forwards. The last he’d heard from her was a Post-it note attached to a stack of reading material she sent him from Geneva. There was a dossier, complete from pre-war Kenya with handwritten notes, a diary, letters, all belonging to one man who’d served the British medical authorities there. She’d put on the Post-it note ‘With love, Yvette’ and added her mobile phone number. He’d not called it. She’d also sent him some very strange documents that were hardly of any use to him in his company position, quite the opposite. One was the first-ever published WHO monograph, a curious old academic paper written by the English doctor in the 1950s. It suggested first that madness, from neurosis to psychosis, did not exist in Africa until the Europeans came. Googling the man he found the trail of his influence. His work was the basis of much 1970s literature on the same theme, and Richard ordered one or two of the books. Max had taken to one of them, and he’d been pleased Max was reading in English, even if it was a strange thing to start with, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. He’d bought him Harry Potter and the boy had said something quite rude about it and taken up this book instead. It was quite a stretch, he thought, for a thirteen-year-old for whom English was not his first language.
‘There’s this man,’ Richard said to Stefan, ‘I read about, the first psychiatrist in Africa, he claimed that before the whites got there, there was more or less no mental illness at all in the tribal societies he saw. No such thing as depression at all.’
‘Ah shit, man! This kind of thinking is bad science. Hey. Don’t shoot me in the back when I tell you this is racial bullshit. We have established the biological causes of mental illness. Enough.’
‘Yes. I know. I know. But I was very surprised to find it in my briefing pack from the WHO. I mean, say it was true? I know it’s not, of course, but imagine . . . Imagine selling sadness to Africa of all places, selling them pathological sadness . . .’
‘Who sent it to you?’
‘The lady who just asked us for cigarettes.’
‘Yvette Ducasse? She’s overemotional. Listen, Richard man, those papers, use them to wipe your arse. That woman, she is just a soldier. I turned that position down. And also this man you mention must, I think, be McClintoch. He had sex with lions. Ja. And also he was a racist. He measured African skulls. Completely discredited. Completely.’
‘Oh, really? I didn’t know that.’
‘Sure. And also you drink too much.’
He looked at his empty glass. Stefan was right. They went and joined the queue for the buffet, Stefan nodding and waving at many of the doctors, falafel rolling from his plate on to the ground. Richard knelt to pick up one or two and looked across the thousands of psychiatrists squatting on short stools around the low tables. Yvette was on a bench that was covered with a kilim rug at the side of the great tent, passed out, draped over it, one arm pointing to the floor.
He went over to her and knelt down to try and rouse her, to save her the embarrassment. She opened her eyes, and took his hand in hers. She would not let go and he would not make a scene so he was obliged to stay there; like a dog stuck in the act, he cast looks about himself.
‘Why did you send me those papers?’ he said. She opened an eye and a grey tongue-tip popped out to moisten her lips.
‘It’s obvious, Richard.’
‘But I’m just a soldier,’ he said, borrowing Stefan’s phrase.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know. But what you said about the land, it made me think you were a good person, deep down . . .’ She closed her eyes. He pushed her hair back from her face. She squeezed his hand. Like a little girl, he thought. But she wasn’t. She was the Head of the Mental Health Department at the World Health Organization. She had told him she loved him, after one dinner, after having sex just the once!
‘God, I’m so sorry,’ he whispered and shook her hand. He tilted his head to look from under his brow around the room at all the shrinks whose hands he ought to be shaking. He couldn’t think how he was going to raise a smile and yet that was what was required of him. She wouldn’t loosen her grip on him.
‘I like this coffee cup someone has in our department. It makes me smile,’ she whispered. ‘It’s got on it, “You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps.” That makes me smile. It is so true. Richard, I thought I was in love with you.’
Chapter 9
For the whole of August that year the Var was paralysed with heat and longing and the days were apathetic an
d the nights hopeful. Richard took his annual leave for the entire month. There was a new community of younger ex-pat families who had so taken to each other over the last year that they could barely be apart a night and it culminated that August in a spate of parties at their neighbours’ house and everybody known ever so slightly in attendance, even Guy and Simone. The English, couples of all ages, the Dutch and some of the more well-to-do locals, and even Guy and Simone, through Richard and Valérie, were called to partake in the cosmopolitan bonhomie.
It had started with a few dinners, once every month, then it picked up pace to be weekly parties, and every other night drinks, couple on couple and so on.
The previous September he’d taken his son to school in the mornings and noticed the large number of new foreigner couples clad in rather bohemian clothes, looking shabby in a way the locals did not, standing around, shaking hands or kissing cheeks and heading for coffee together, exchanging names and histories; some talk about discount airlines’ latest rates, the expense of London cabs.
Every morning his company car had crept into the village past those flushed-faced people taking their places in the cafés, waving the flag of their broadsheet English-language newspapers, toot-tooting at each other from their people movers, ‘Sweetheart, I am so hungover!’
His wife had no female friends. He’d doubted she’d take to any of the ex-pat women never mind all their bloke-ish denial of gender, their combat trousers, their swear words, their curry fixations. But they were asked as a couple to the parties and they went to each and every one, if he was home, though most happened during the working week and occurred unpredictably with phones ringing and gravel whirling, kids in pyjamas thrown into the back of the car. She’d started to go ahead of him and even without him. She said she was making friends.
Gatherings went on at Jeff and Rachel’s great villa until the early hours on what was still partially a construction site with children paddling in half-filled pools and open cesspits, hurling pétanque boules around, lighting fires and calling each other names, all just beyond their parents’ view, trailing around with shitty arses and occasionally coming into sight being upbraided by their fishfinger-flipping mummies for brandishing sticks as guns.