by Louise Dean
‘Indirectly, possibly.’
‘Indirectly?’
‘Yes, not directly. With supplies. Drugs. Possibly. If it were to meet certain criteria and conditions.’
‘Oh. I see. But we need tables and chairs, you see, and to pay the rent on a small building, just one or two rooms. I wonder if you could see this as some sort of publicity, whereby your company would be associated with recovery, perhaps that’s it. What is your company’s objective here in Kenya, Mr Bird?’
‘My company’s objective is to make a profit for its shareholders,’ he said stiffly. He turned around to look for Wainanga.
Shit, he said to himself. Shit.
Nobody said anything as they went into the administration block. The three of them — he, the intern and Dr Wainanga — sat with the matron and other members of staff who’d been summoned, on wasted sofas, sipping warm Fantas. It took him quite a while to realize that the visit was over and they were all waiting for him to announce his departure.
Chapter 11
Rachel bit into Jeff ’s leg when she pushed their daughter into the world, then she counted the fingers and toes of the baby and got out of the birthing pool, dried and dressed herself and took her daughter home while Jeff slept on, on the birthing bed. When he got in a few hours later she was already established as a mother, feeding the baby, crying at the news on TV and so it went on for what seemed to Jeff like a very long time; Rachel in a nightdress, leaking love.
He fell by the wayside. He stole out early evening to find a more complex kind of life in the dark of nightclubs, watching people be sweet and saucy, wrapping themselves around each other. He’d come home and piss the bed and be sorry about it.
It was the baby’s old-fashioned looks that touched his heart, not to mention the crazy leg-kicking when she saw his bony face. He put her little fat hands on to his rough beard and spoke to her with wide-eyed affection.
Rachel met Jeff at her place of work in Manhattan, where he hung morosely, the Creative Director of a small ad agency, a forty-two-year-old bachelor, high and dry due to the repeated obfuscations of his friend and business ‘partner’ regarding the ‘partnership’.
His boss, Don Abrams, was a multi-rused multimillionaire who ran on Diet Coke and spleen and made Jeff ’s life a misery of want, tempting him with some celebrity acquaintances into thinking he was going to have a life worth watching. And Jeff was easily tempted.
Because the boss said he liked Rachel, it gave Jeff the idea to take her to bed, several times, and he even told her she had nice lips. But he never did say that he loved her. Rachel omitted to take her pill and Jeff, perhaps jaded with picking off the floor his gay neighbours and perhaps embarrassed about having been picked off the floor himself when the recreational drug went up the alphabet from e to k, decided to move in with Rachel. He came with very little of use or worth to live with her in her stifling top-floor apartment in Brooklyn. She cooked, she washed and ironed, she kept beer in the place, she took care of his needs in order to keep him there.
She was determined to save him. Her mother had killed herself. She wasn’t going to let anything like that happen again. She could see he could go one way or the other, so she offered herself as an example to him. She went window-shopping for a small loving God, and found one convenient to their home, a nice Dutch Presbyterian church, and she herself was very stirred by the communal prayers and coffee mornings. We are all in this together, she liked to think, lumbering up and down the hills in the bitter winds with rice cakes and peeled miniature carrots and juice boxes for the mothers and children’s group.
She kept taped copies of the sermons from church and Jeff listened and tapped her knuckles with his fingertips at the good parts. He could see their point; God wasn’t all bad. She asked the pastor to marry them and when he interviewed them he informed Jeff he would be marrying a Christian woman. Any questions?
‘Why do I cry at communion?’ asked Rachel, and the old pastor smiled at her with his Ray Charles head-wobble.
‘The Lord is with you then,’ he said.
She felt a most highly favoured lady with all the love that was coming into her and going out of her. She was wrecked physically with the additional weight, some forty pounds of overenthusiasm, and when she went to see the doctor just the week before she gave birth on account of her haemorrhoids, she learnt a new word. ‘Yowzer.’
About six months into little Maud’s life, Don Abrams turned up at their door. He was a man with a lot of friends who didn’t like him. He was wealthy, a little tight-fisted, but the combination kept people on their toes and he was dubbed ‘charismatic’. He was attractive, ugly as he was, huge and volatile and he insinuated himself into everything he could, in counterpoise to Jeff who hesitated and stood apart. Whereas Don knew he was master, Jeff never knew he was servant. They were like bread and butter, and they needed each other, and after they met, Jeff never went free of him. He knew he should mistrust him, all the women in his life told him so, but being better than the man seemed like such a pittance he couldn’t be bothered with it. He just wanted to stand in that man’s wake, in the sidelines, penniless but possibly superior in some way.
Don Abrams, founder of several advertising agencies, came there with disaster on his hands. His only son, a teenager by the second of his four marriages, had taken his life in a cupboard in their place in the Hamptons with one of his father’s handguns. Don had found him and handled the necessary. It was August, he’d been up there on his annual vacation. It would hit the papers the next day. He wanted to hide, he wanted to drink. And so Rachel and Jeff hid him, and gave him drink for a week, and the three of them talked every evening after supper, lying on the floor with heads on the bottom of the sofa, in that single girl’s apartment, side by side, and they managed to get the big man through his bad week.
Don in turn humbled himself prettily, did the dishes, and amused the baby by pretending to drink from the bottle. And they marvelled at their handiwork, the fruit of compassion, in bed together they reviewed the man’s true qualities once under their roof, and Jeff was impressed with the magic of Rachel’s Christianity and what it could effect. He told them everything, Don, about his life, his regrets, he said he had done some bad things. He doubted he could change.
‘It was the worst of times and the best of times,’ said Don on his way out. He added, ‘She’s too good for you, you great dope.’ And gave Jeff a little mugging slappity-slap on the side of his jaw.
Jeff tipped his head out of the way and stepped back. ‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’
‘I’m serious. Rachel, when this guy lets you down come see me.’
They laughed.
He looked at the two of them and his whole face seemed full of tenderness for them. He put his hands on the doorposts. It wasn’t love that caused him to speak, it was something else, which made him angry and gave him the sort of pain that is better to cause others than to feel oneself.
He said, ‘You kids shouldn’t be here. We’re all going to hell here. I bought this plot of land last time I was in the South of France; a pal of mine took me to see it and I fell in love with the views and all and I got this architect to start making plans. I sort of thought me and Tyler would get over there sometime. But what about if you guys went over there and got it built for me? You’ve got a flair for that kinda thing, J., design and all, you could oversee the thing, make sure it comes off according to the plans and even do the décor. You’d get it right, I know you would. We have the same taste in women after all! And you know what, you guys? You could bring your kid up someplace she can run about . . . somewhere a kid can be a kid.’
‘What about the business?’ said Jeff.
‘Don’t you worry about that, man. You know how easy it is these days to stay in touch, email and whatnot.’ His mobile phone rang and, much consoled, he shouted into it all the way down the stairs, abusing the caller with ribald humour until the door closed on him.
And then after the eleventh day of that month, with
ash filling the skies and tumbling into their backyard in Brooklyn, they decided to take Don up on his offer.
Jeff was a cartoonist and a poet on the side; he kept a small notebook in his man-bag for his preferred thoughts. Often he forgot it and was obliged to use Rachel’s mind to make notes; he’d relay the essence in cryptic style, using no more than four trigger words as if afraid to let her have more in case she robbed him, as if somehow his penny-gags would give her a head start up the tree of life. Back at home he’d take out his pens and draw it up. He’d submitted some to the New York Times. He’d had a few published. He hoped to make something of it, undisturbed by the demands of his day job. Make people buy new underwear; make people drink Gatorade every day; make people go on a cruise. The last one he drew there was a 1950s mom and pop, standing with their arms around each other looking woefully down at their cute-looking kid, who had a cowboy comic book in his hand. The caption read: Son, we are the bad guys.
‘I think we’re done with America for the time being,’ said Rachel, as they drove to Newark airport, Nice-bound.
‘We’re going to create our own way of living, baby,’ said Jeff.
A stray dog was running along the turnpike traffic, its ears back, a stupid grin on its face, cars braking all over the place, and the dog just jauntily larruping along. It nearly gave Jeff an idea, he reached for it, he could feel the knot of it, but as happened sometimes he couldn’t untie it in time to see it before it went.
Rachel saw the dog too, and she saw Jeff watching it with his mouth slightly ajar, his hairy long fingers twitching on his knees, and she thought to herself: Well, we’ll be better off in the countryside. He won’t stray . . .
The first year or so there, Jeff and Rachel persuaded themselves that they were cannily managing the appointed construction team and were keen-eyed enough to spot the inflated prices, and they took the manager to task over it; so much so, he took other work and they were forced to use an assortment of sons of friends of friends, mostly Simone and Guy’s, with Simone insisting she oversee their payment in cash and dashing out of her bungalow the moment she saw more than two men assembled about Jeff to ‘negotiate’.
Most jobs began in earnest with fifty per cent up front and were abandoned by the next bank holiday. A crack team of losers went about the place erecting walls, knocking down walls, and generally fouling up the architect’s grand plans, but eventually a house emerged, though what lay beneath it was anybody’s guess.
One elderly, very feeble team of olive pickers, charged with the plumbing, simply threw an assortment of cheaply bought plastic tubing underground, ate their lunch slowly, and left, the better off for their day out.
Each new team bemoaned the corruption of the last and so Rachel took to sitting with her tea, supervising, from the concrete interior, the sediment of the area’s male population acting out construction. A dwarf was winched past an open window with roofing materials. He returned with gravity’s full assistance and she took him to hospital and bought him chocolates. The bashful JCB driver, new to the machine and overjoyed with it all, drove over the newly laid outdoor electrics and watering system and the crane operator swung a palm tree into the balcony and produced an avalanche of tumbling rubble. The bank manager allowed his friend, who ran the first construction company, to lodge a false cheque to the sum of thousands of euros.
All of this melodrama kept their friends amused in the evenings and after a few drinks they’d suggest it was time for them to give a hand themselves. Jeff agreed, and there was much baseball hat slapping all round; he pretended he saw the funny side, it was not his money, after all. But he sat biting his raw thumbs in the cold of his ‘works office’, what would be the utility room, losing his bonhomie. Am I a racist or am I a misanthrope? he wrote on the first page of a virgin notebook. He sat back and blinked. He knew it then; he hated people. They drove him crazy. All of them except Maud. But one day, she’d drive him crazy too.
And then, at three times the budget and over eighteen months, the structure of the house was up, and Rachel brought some local cokehead gypsies to the site to finish the work, and the campfire evenings outside seemed almost idyllic with the young traveller women juggling or spinning ropes on fire and the gypsy leader of the band playing his guitar and tempting the middle classes with Latin-style lovemaking.
The icing was put on the cake by some gay friends of the Dutch who came down from Rotterdam in campervans and painted and decorated the place in the manner of a tart’s boudoir, bringing from the junk shops all that their sense of irony could stomach; gaudy chandeliers, broken chairs, Victorian chaises longues, all to be painted red or black and covered in velvet or silk.
One way or another all their friends worked on the project, crafting hopeless cupboards, hanging cheap doors. One or two had bad experiences with electricity, the better tools went missing, the hospital repaired the flesh wounds at a good price, and a child’s electronic toy, trapped inside the wood decking by the pool, bleeped for months every day at 5 p.m., reminding them to open a bottle. By the end of the second summer, the road to Ikea was strewn with the debris from the open-topped 2CV and baskets and curtain rails bumped in and out of the convoy of camper vans following, and they had friends, plenty of thirsty friends. Their home, Don’s house, was like the common room for the expats in the area. They were never alone.
The house was done, but Don Abrams did not come and see it. He sent very little in the way of work, but he kept them with enough in the way of funds for them to tick over, enough for Jeff to dabble in a little wine-growing with a farmer across the way. He liked to drive the tractor. They both took to the place. It was the land; God’s own, they agreed.
And on beatific mornings under the lovely sun, Jeff stooped to study the vines, to feel the grapes, and he listened to the old winegrower, all the while squeezing with his palm from the dog-eared phrase book all the words he could find in his defence and little Maud behind him, retching down her stripey front the bitter grape skin and pips. That sticky hand in his, stuck fast, made him feel like a good person.
Chapter 12
Jeff and Rachel took refuge from their home and its stream of visitors by going next door, where Richard was received into his home with tipsy hilarity and some piss-taking regarding his suit and shiny shoes. The three of them were smashed, the music loud and distorted.
As Richard went through to the bedroom to change he saw that the sofa was a mess of magazines, the beds unmade, and he felt anger reveal itself; he wanted to break something. He looked at his hand on the handle of his son’s bedroom, all knuckle, and instead of allowing the door to open as it should he shoved it and saw a fragment of wood break from the latch.
Maxence was playing his Game Boy in bed. Richard told him he had to go again to Africa next week but he’d be back as quickly as he could and with a present; he could have a stone from a pyramid, a lion’s claw, a bag of camel dung, or a Pygmy’s loincloth. His son put his arms around his neck and Richard put his hands on the boy’s back and whispered in his ear what he always said to him, ‘You’re my boy, be the little man now and sleep tight,’ and then he went to the bathroom and stood in front of the sink, holding on to it. He looked at her earrings on the window ledge and swept them to the floor.
* * *
Earlier that week, when he came home from work, Valérie was outside in the car. She’d been there since she brought Max home from school.
‘Does she think she’s bloody Princess Diana?’ Richard had moaned to Max, referring to her sense of melodrama.
‘She’s alive though,’ Max said with circumspect logic, and he continued, talking at his father in his usual rambling way, a flicker of a clever grin sometimes showing itself when he ventured into the philosophical, while Richard nodded and assented, occasionally raising his eyes to give a show of interest.
He told Max he wouldn’t go out to her. He would make the supper himself. He cooked the steaks and made pasta to go with them. He opened a bottle of good red. They took
their supper without her and after they cleared away he went outside to get her. It was dark. He found her, head sideways on the steering wheel, arms hanging limp, in the act of listening with complete absorption to a hip-hop track, which finished with the sound of thunder and lightning.
‘Who’s that you’re playing?’ he asked her, his hands together on the roof of the car, his forehead against them as in prayer. She pressed a button, extinguished the music.
‘Puff Daddy.’
‘Puff Daddy,’ he repeated, deadpan.
She looked at him. ‘You’re killing me, both of you, you’re killing me,’ she said. Then she got out of the car and walked inside.
‘It’s the time of the month,’ he said to Max.
His son was sitting in the pink and blue neon thrall of Star
Academy on the television, his teeth at rest on his lips. Richard
sat down next to him with his head in his hands and Maxence moved forwards to sit on the floor, right in front of the screen, turning the volume up, the remote outstretched, shaking in his hand as he willed it louder and louder.
* * *
‘Ri-schard! Dinner! Are you deaf ? Merde . . .’
He joined the three in the kitchen. He wanted a whisky. When he opened the cupboard Simone’s stash of home-grown weed in a carrier bag fell out. She’d used their electronic scales to parcel it out in August. She’d made a loss with the ex-pats never having money on them, and so far not one of them had returned to pay her for what they’d taken. He poured himself a large drink. He might as well play catch-up.