The Idea of Love

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The Idea of Love Page 5

by Louise Dean


  Valérie’s parents went dressed in their best, as Elizabeth Taylor and Eminem, she in a long dress with coastal frontage, and he in his white nylon tracksuit, showing a vest where it was unzipped to the waist. Guy buoyed himself with red wine before going up, all the while deploring the fact that the foreigners spoke English in France.

  They went up past Jeff ’s vineyard, on the lane that was lined with olive and pine trees shimmering in the thick of the heat. In the driveway they strolled past the four-wheel drives, the long Mercedes estates and the novelty 2CV that seemed so mournful, sagging into the gravel. Simone would take a bag of grass with her; it was her new business venture. Guy was growing the plants on their terrace.

  Sitting down to dinner was a fuss with the chummy protocol over the boy/girl thing. The couples were flirtatious outside of their couple as the evening progressed. The rule was ‘don’t cross the line’, no hands; only where the line was drawn was never clear. The sexual themes to the conversation were intense, and it surprised Richard coming fresh from his own secret life that they didn’t find it dangerous, that it was no kind of foreplay, that they didn’t get aroused, that once they got these things out they managed to put things back in the box in the right order afterwards.

  These themes usually emerged before dessert. The covert search for intimacy was conducted in drink, in forcing a moment, herding everyone towards it, everyone present must come to the table of nakedness, but like the pot of gold, the intimacy disappeared before anyone could get there.

  Simone and Guy began the dancing, moving together with practised choreography. After their generation, dance-wise, everything had fallen to pieces, and the younger couples joined in with some slovenly pogo-ing and breast shaking. At this point of the evening, Richard usually smoked outside with Jeff and the Dutchmen and chatted over the events of the day: the Arab kids were burning cars down in Nice, socially France was falling apart; the unions were crippling the country.

  Adele, an Englishwoman, took up a broom to sing into and made them laugh at her big-lipped pouting, then she bent over and mooned them. Her husband watched impassively.

  It was a return to the school disco. The outdoor stereo surging, the ex-pats converged upon the kitchen to seek saucepans and ladles and form a band and the heartbreak of a German who lived in a shack down beyond came up in his truck with a huge searchlight and beamed it on the revellers. He screamed over the hedge, ‘I cannot sleep. I cannot sleep.’

  The Dutch wife called back, ‘You should have thought about that in 1939!’ And they turned the sound back up.

  On the last Saturday in that August the couples rallied in the local town for dinner, the bottles kept coming and the staff brought out plates; cassoulet for the boys and aioli for the women, the women in shining dresses, the men in Bermuda shorts. A wily estate agent had taken a break from his kidney dialysis to open a nightclub in a cellar and put in there a leftover 1960s band who took a pause from their own illnesses to play cover versions and it was there they went after the meal.

  Guy was ejected from the nightclub when a wineglass smashed to the floor, more than likely because his tracksuit seemed to be wallet-less. In solidarity, the whole crew shipped out, high on inebriate principle, and the estate agent stood at the door, scolding his bouncer for his loss. It was like the UN leaving a war zone, the roundabout weeds trembled as four-by-fours took it at full speed and the party moved predictably to Jeff and Rachel’s.

  They stood in the kitchen, with the lights on bright and all the surfaces white under the glare. It was after two in the morning. There was some desultory dancing outside by the ladies, but the men retired to the dining table with bottles and glasses and, shortly, first Valérie then the other women followed so that the Dutch couple, the two English couples, Jeff and Rachel, Valérie and Richard, were sitting around the long table drinking together, eating cheese and biscuits and smoking pot. It was three in the morning.

  ‘Does anyone know where our children are?’ quipped Jeff, shaking his head and lighting up. The bottle was passed around and emptied, and he went to get another. No one had any intention of leaving.

  ‘We should see this thing through,’ said Simon, Adele’s husband, winking, his lips puckering as he topped himself up and took a trembling sip, drawing from the rim as if it were a pint of beer. ‘Here’s to our happy life in the Var. God bless us all,’ he said, raising his glass.

  Rachel put on a U2 track and urged them to listen to it. Some nodded, some shook their heads. They were drunk and overcome. They traced the lines of the song with their mouths.

  ‘But we’re not the same . . .’

  Rachel had been thinking about Africa, she said, and her eyes were brimming with tears. ‘The problem of our times,’ she said, ‘and here we are in paradise.’

  Simon played the track ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ as they passed Simone’s weed between them.

  Adele sat listening to the lyrics, lost in her thoughts, ostentatiously gloomy, biting her lip, her eyes bulging.

  Rachel was describing the disparities between Africa and the USA. She was shaking. Jeff put his head in his hands. Across from Rachel, the Dutchman looked grave, Joop’s chin was on his chest. A telltale snort gave him away as having nodded off.

  ‘I had that falling off the sidewalk thing again,’ he said to his wife.

  Rachel stood up. She was flushed, her chest was high. She looked, Richard thought, like he felt when he was having one of his little crises. She had long red hair. Her skin was limpid and nothing was adhering to it. Her under-eyes were smudged with a ring of kohl that looked like a rubbed-out pencil mark. Her mouth was slipping off her face.

  ‘I’m going to show you something. I said I wouldn’t show it to anyone but I am going to.’ And with that, she went, in fits and starts, rather like a ball bearing in a pinball machine, between sofas and chairs into a side room and came back with a DVD.

  ‘Oh, Rachel, for God’s sake, no,’ said Jeff, raising his head from his hands to see the joint was out.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Valérie.

  ‘You dirty buggers,’ grinned Simon, rubbing his hands.

  ‘Come on then, I’m up for it,’ said Adele.

  It was a documentary made using a handheld camera of the civil war in Sierra Leone. There were no opening credits. In the first scene, from under the tin roof of a colonnade of shops, the camera panned to take in a street with three or four dead women face forward with their arms outstretched before them, a toddler on its back with its mouth open, and it moved to focus on a teenage boy being held by another, on his knees, his head thrust back with the barrel of a gun at the nape of his neck. You could see one of the boy’s legs from the side. You could see the cross-hatched sole of the flip-flop, the button of the toe strap out; umbilical. Bang. The boy collapsed. Dead.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Simon.

  Jeff got up, strode over to the television and turned it off.

  ‘That’s enough,’ he said.

  ‘I’m going home,’ said Valérie, standing. ‘This is stupid. Je ne suis pas d’accord. Stupid. I can’t watch any more.’

  Rachel put her hands in her hair. ‘We must go to Africa and help them. We can’t just sit here doing nothing!’ The others were sobering up quickly.

  ‘We know your heart’s in the right place, Rachel,’ Richard said.

  ‘We’ve got to be going,’ said Adele. She put an arm around Rachel, squeezed her, looked into her face and put her thumbs to the sides of Rachel’s wet eyes. She hugged her, ‘Come on, love, don’t upset yourself.’

  Simon patted her shoulder as he rose. ‘Come on, love, cheer up.’

  ‘I can’t cheer up,’ she said, sitting down at the table, alone now that everyone else had stood. ‘Don’t go. Don’t leave me,’ she said as they went out into the hallway. ‘Don’t go. Don’t leave me. Don’t go.’

  Jeff was at the front door, turning on the porch light and bidding their friends goodnight. After the last had gone, he went to bed, ignoring he
r at the table, passing her by.

  ‘You embarrassed yourself,’ he said to her when she climbed into bed alongside him, and he turned on to his side, holding the edge of the bed, feeling for the lamp switch.

  ‘I’m lonely. I don’t know what the point is of anything any more,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘You’ve had too much to drink. We’re lucky. That’s all. Like you can help Africa! Like they need your help! Go to sleep.’

  ‘It’s not just the drink. I feel this pain inside of me, I don’t know why . . . Why do I feel like this? Is it loneliness? Fear? Is something very wrong? Is something bad going to happen? Do you love me?’

  ‘It’s not a good idea to talk about this stuff now when we’ve had a lot to drink.’ He closed his eyes and lips in three firm lines. He clicked the lamp switch.

  Chapter 10

  The smell of Africa hit Richard as he stepped off the plane in Nairobi; a slightly oriental smell; water on the boil, mouldy rubber; the hot-water bottle. He noted the amber light on the face of the driver as they headed along the airport roads, well peopled but alien with enormous mobile-phone billboards, and the people, wandering, looking back over their shoulders, in their improbably coloured clothes — green, pink, red — matte, dark skinned, their heels triangles of coral pink, down to earth.

  The driver issued peaceable words to the men at the several security checks on the way out, ‘Sa-sa, sa-sa. Sawa.’ He wore a cardigan. Here, so close to the equator, they dressed as if it were cold. The little kids with their red woollen balaclavas, the ladies with skirt suits and sweaters.

  In the back of a rubbish truck, four people trod rubbish and grinned, holding on to the back of the driver’s cab, thrilled to the teeth. The mottoed minibuses criss-crossed the lanes, glory in transit, crammed full of life, scandalous. A group of pedestrians with heavy loads passed like the dead carrying their own gravestones. As the minivan pulled up, the sound of the cicadas entered through the open window along with the belch of modern Africa; dirt and diesel.

  Soon Richard’s mind would close like a daisy in the evening time, he would no longer see this in the blinding light of arrival, he would be back in the realm of his work, moving towards the white as they moved towards the black and he would no longer wave back at the children who presented him their salutes.

  He was here to make contact with the Head of Psychiatric Services for Kenya. He sat, his fist at his mouth, considering the meeting. He had found the best approach was to hold back. He would set out his stall by proposing to sponsor the department and the training module for new psychiatrists specifically. He had with him ten laptops loaded with the drugs trials and stats and psychiatric reference material. On the next visit he would be offering them brand-name compounds at special rates conditional on monopoly.

  The Head of the Psychiatry Department at the government teaching hospital, Dr Wainanga, would want more than a laptop before giving any sort of commitment. This was how it always ran. His driver’s questions went unanswered while he thought about this. What could he justify? He struggled to bring the figures to mind; Year one, a market base of . . . a market penetration of . . . He saw himself suited before the board, ‘Brand share, ladies and gentlemen, one hundred per cent.’ Where else was this possible? He could give the man an early Christmas present.

  * * *

  The next day he visited the hospital and presented the psychiatry department with the laptops. A former patient took the photos of Dr Wainanga and Richard holding each other’s right hand, smiling for more than five minutes, almost as if in the process of transfusion, before the doctor cried out with impatience at the useless photographer. The boy had come to them after his brother reported him for stealing his potatoes. He was, however, in fact schizophrenic, said the doctor through his teeth, still waiting for the flash. So many of them were. Undiagnosed. As yet. Flash!

  ‘Bingo!’ Dr Wainanga quipped, sliding his palm free. ‘Will you be adding a safari to your trip?’ he enquired. His staff and students, biscuit nibblers, were circling, the laptops on tables were open and shining, a technical kid at each of them with his memory key out like a thermometer, checking their health.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m only here for work.’

  ‘Such a shame,’ the doctor brightened.

  One of the first things the British had done when they got to East Africa at the turn of the century was to build a railway. That done, they built a lunatic asylum, the Mathari. When the photo session was over, Richard and Dr Wainanga went up to view it.

  They traipsed round the bungalows and their animal runs looking at the inmates, with a bit of guidance from the doctor tour guide as to the exhibiting disorders. The men wore blue calico trousers and the women wore shift dresses, A-line, made of the same hard fabric.

  A woman took Richard’s hand. Her hand was sticky. Her two front teeth had a cliff line of calcium across them, they stuck out of her mouth like doll’s legs. Her face was warty. Eight years in two bare concrete cells, and burnt-out women came and went, as lifeless as she, swept in and swept out. They came empty-handed and stayed that way. All they carried was in their heads.

  One round room with five decrepit beds. One oblong room into which big round plastic bowls were brought, one with rice, one with stew, and big plastic containers of water and plastic cups, three times a day. One cooler wall, one hotter wall, concrete between them. Gardening work down by the slums, a chance to look over the fence.

  The doctor translated the whispers of the woman who had Richard’s hand, her grasp now tightly congealed. He was not generally a hand holder. He never even held his wife’s hand.

  ‘She says she’s in here because she’s ugly. She killed her children in fact.’

  The woman gazed at him romantically. He felt a coursing sense of shame and revulsion; it was hard to say which came first.

  The doctor was an intern. He was young. He had questions that would not wait. ‘Excuse me, Mr Bird, I just wanted to ask about this World Health Organization programme which I know your company is sponsoring. So much money, you see, and if you are from this country and you see what I see and where money is needed, then you have questions. Please forgive me if it seems rude to ask why so much money is being spent persuading our peoples that they are mad . . .’

  ‘That is not the case,’ put in Dr Wainanga quickly, ‘there are plenty of people in this country who are severely mentally ill. Just as in Europe. You will be sure to see that in Nyeri, Mr Bird, when you get to visit my friend’s clinic there. Yes, you will be sure to see those long, long queues for the outpatients clinic. It is a fact that every bed on the psychiatric ward is taken one hundred per cent of the time. This service is oversubscribed. So you see we are thinking, naturally, here in Kenya it would be a good thing to get to our people those drugs which will allow them to lead normal functioning lives from their homes. This is a very important thing for you to know. You must write this in your notes. Please do not go back and forget what you are seeing here in our country.’

  The intern was from Nyeri too, he said. The White Highlands, it was known as once. The people there, his people, the Kikuyu, were once used as indentured labour, then they fought back. The British medical establishment in the colony described them as ‘psychotic’.

  ‘Of course things changed after the war,’ Dr Wainanga grinned.

  ‘And after independence the ringleaders became the first government.’ He laughed and Richard smiled. ‘They were political protestors not psychotics. And that was a long time ago, before we knew about the biological bases of mental illness,’ he added hastily, mopping his brow.

  They were standing in the heat of a corridor, looking down to the few patients tending the vegetable patch before the high wall. The intern continued doggedly.

  ‘I am concerned that our conception of the mind, as Africans, is based on a map drawn by a world that was empire and colony. The African mind is different, that is true, but the reason for this is of course cultural and not genetic and
what may seem to be aberrant to a European may be quite normal within the context . . .’

  ‘What has that to do with Mr Bird?’ Dr Wainanga exclaimed.

  ‘He is a businessman not a philosopher!’

  They passed back alongside the wire runs of the African patients, with Dr Wainanga continuing to recover ground by explaining the diagnoses of the patients held there, poking fun at the young man slightly by referring to his ‘learned friend’, whom he suggested would of course offer a more modern diagnosis — such as ‘depersonalization disorder’, he threw out, to show that he too knew his stuff. His cheeks were round. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. He was a survivor, Richard thought, just the sort of man he could work with. He would never be able to work with someone like the intern. The intern would be a pain in the neck.

  They made but a brief tour of the final ward, in which a number of the beds had only three legs, like shipwrecks. Richard could not imagine what contortions were required to sleep on them. Dr Wainanga insisted on showing him the latrines.

  ‘Lamentable,’ he said, in the doorway.

  One young man, naked apart from a raincoat, followed them out, stood up at the fence grinning and calling out, ‘Manchester United! Queen Elizabeth! David Beckham!’

  They stood in front of the verandahed whitewashed bungalow offices that had once belonged to the colonial-era chief psychiatrists.

  After a brief enervated exchange in Swahili with the intern, Dr Wainanga excused himself for a few minutes to get them some soft drinks.

  ‘Mr Bird,’ the young man began, and from his earnest expression Richard could tell what was coming was going to cause him discomfort. ‘I am a young man who loves his country and his people. Personally, of my own efforts and using my own salary and time, I am trying to put together a programme which offers local people free counselling. If your company were able to help, it would be very little money for you, and of course we’d name the centre after your company, whichever you prefer. Please excuse me. I am most passionate about this. Could you help us, please?’

 

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