by Louise Dean
‘Oh, stop it,’ she said.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere, when she was cooking or speaking to someone on the phone, he’d want to dance with her, he’d take her hands in his, old-style, and try to turn her round. He spoke to her through the bathroom door, it could never wait and yet it was so trivial what he wanted.
‘Did we buy the towel with the dolphin on it at Marineland?’ He asked that one of them sleep in his bed with him or that he
come in with them.
‘You are nearly fourteen!’ she accused him.
‘He needs you,’ Richard would say to her.
But she wouldn’t concede. When he was in bed, she went to look at him and stood in the doorway. In the gloom, he’d open his eyes enough to see her but not so much as to be seen looking. Then one evening he sat up and told her he wished she wasn’t angry with him. She told him he must not annoy her then.
‘Don’t you love me?’ he asked her.
‘Of course I do.’
‘Kiss me then, kiss me goodnight.’
When she did, he took her hand in his. ‘You have beautiful fingers. Oh, did I do that to you?’ he asked, tenderly, running his thumb and fingertip over a burn on her finger.
‘No. I did it on the oven.’
‘Oh. I thought it was me. I’m sorry,’ he said and he kissed it.
‘There. All better, now.’
‘I wish you were dead,’ he said to her other times.
‘You shouldn’t say things like that to me.’
‘Why not?’ he’d ask, genuinely interested. ‘The words come into my head and I have to say them. I don’t know if that’s what I want or whether I want you to say something to me so that’s why I’m saying it.’
‘I’m not playing games with you, Maxence.’
The days were busy enough but she had nothing to do with them. She was never alone; the painter had come to do the front room, and when the painter went, the plumber came, delivery men came, there was the postman at midday and Guy came up for a smoke, hoping for a chat here and there; Simone came up to help with the ironing and rearrange the drawers and drink and smoke, and then there was Max back home and then Guy came up again to watch her getting supper ready, then Richard came in and she had little peace or time for herself, but at night she held her nose and plunged underwater to attend to her proper life.
Her dreams returned to her in pieces throughout the day. She thought about Jeff. She had seen the way he looked at her. She was going to tell him that she was in love with him when they were alone.
She lay in bed with a hand between her legs and waves of feeling came from her head, flooded across her breasts right through to her nipples and went down between her legs, ending in an angry little thud, and she burst into tears. Music was bad for her. Drink was bad for her. People were bad for her.
Chapter 15
The pre-adoption counselling pamphlets remained on their neighbours’ kitchen counter for a couple of weeks under canteen tickets and leaflets and rubber bands and keys until Valérie put them in the bin. By then, Rachel had grown impatient of waiting for the rugby coach to procure her another child to love and had taken the business into her own hands.
She scoured the internet for orphans and found the website of a young Christian man who had traversed war-torn Sierra Leone like a Pied Pastor collecting orphans. There were Polaroid photos of each child with their names handwritten on them in black felt tip, some forty or so, for whom he provided. There was a particularly beautiful five-year-old girl, the only one not smiling, with huge solemn eyes that called out for a mother; Salamatu.
She felt called. She decided to pray about it. She wondered how He felt about her there on her knees. What kind of love was it if it was love? Was it paternal love? Or dread of his most difficult creation? Fury, pique and patience, these were all in the mix of parenthood but none as much as the task of simply cleaning up after the child.
‘Father, here I am,’ she said. And she waited, and said it again, and she felt a small stirring inside of her.
She bought the plane tickets — Nice, Gatwick, Freetown — from the small sum of money her mother had left her in a bank account in England and then she told Jeff what she’d done. She asked Simone if she would look after Maud for five days. No one said not to go and she was glad of that. Jeff was non-committal about it all. The party juggernaut was motoring on towards the Christmas tollbooth. Rachel sat drinking without conviction, wondering why she wasn’t getting drunk.
Rachel went over to Simone’s to have her tarot cards read on the eve of their departure for West Africa. Beware of a black man, Simone said dourly after shaking her head at each card she turned over, each one apparently worse than the last.
Thanks for the advice, said Rachel. She left Maud with Simone, so that she could get on with the packing. As she went out, passing by their kitchen, she glimpsed Maud standing on the dustbin doing the washing-up and Simone behind her encouraging her with the dirty stringy cloth as the little girl took into account the tap, the windows. She heard Simone’s lovely unfettered laughter ringing out free and true and she felt chastened by it and stopped and looked up at the vast sky; she felt like a small bad person, a creeping thing.
That night she woke on the floor and called out to Jeff who wasn’t there, he was drinking with the Dutch and the neighbours.
She got back into bed, afraid, and her heart felt heavy as a car battery pulling her down to the bottom of a pond. She fell into dreams and said to herself: I must open my eyes. It was as if her eyelids were sewn shut; she kick-started her heart and opened them. She wondered why it had been so hard, what part of her had urged her to open them and what part had held her back?
Downstairs they were drinking their way through the American business partner’s cellar. The opening chords of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ rose through the ceiling.
‘Go home and entertain yourselves,’ she whispered, pulling the pillow up around her ears, feeling better for having spoken out and shamed the dark.
Chapter 16
Nairobi reminded Richard of the geography books of his school-days and how they depicted modern life in the Commonwealth, Meccano-constructed office blocks, painted pale-blue bungalows, and the government departments with their PegBoard black-and-white notice boards. Except, there were long lines of people along the length of the road back to the hotel, with picks at equal spaces, men and women, digging to lay a new cable. Less-employed men stood singly here and there, burning rubbish, and the cattle mingled with the traffic.
He was back this time to ‘shadow’ Dr Wainanga’s friend in Nyeri, to see the ‘shocking lack of medicines’ according to the doctor’s last email and to note ‘and convey please most forcefully the number of very mentally sick people in our country being just the same as in your own’.
‘There are other drug companies,’ the doc had said coyly as he shook Richard’s hand at the airport, ‘but none we like so much as yours so far, nor as generous, but you see, Mr Bird, we must like each other, trust each other and know each other.’
Say what you like, old pal, Richard had thought, handing over his passport to the airline desk, he’d noticed people felt better for a spot of rhetoric before they signed these sorts of contracts.
So here he was again, playing the white man. It would be the last time for a while anyway. Once signed up, he’d not be back for a year or more. Next stop, Uganda.
That evening he took a beer in the bar at the Norfolk. There was an open fireplace, a leather armchair and sofa, it was all rattan and polished wood, fake leopard-skin rugs and black-andwhite photos of the 1930s. He took the armchair and the waiter put his head alongside his in a confidential style as he poured out a Tusker beer from its bottle.
An Englishman, slightly camp, dishevelled, sat down on the sofa opposite. He ordered a beer too, kicked out his legs.
‘Staying here?’
He was, himself, for three more months no less. He had already been there nine months. Making televisi
on shows, very popular, millions of viewers. They were sponsored by a condom manufacturer, racy little episodes, a week’s anticipation culminating on Friday night, with a sort of, well, a sexual scenario really, he put it cheerfully. Condom comes to the rescue. Wonderfully successful. The chap who owned the company used to make porn magazines, but this was much more profitable. Poacher turned gamekeeper. The British government co-funded it too, and the World Health Organization.
‘My company helps fund one of the World Health Organization’s projects out here too.’
‘What are you up to?’
‘It’s a big drive to eliminate the stigmatization of mental illness in Africa. No television shows. But that’s a good idea.’
The Englishman had straggly greasy hair, a weather-beaten face and a rather juvenile ethnic bracelet tied in a knot around his wrist.
‘So you’re shopping madness and I’m shopping promiscuity. Cheers to us.’
‘I suppose they’ve always been around.’
The man started to laugh, took a drink and then laughed again. ‘What a business,’ he chirped. ‘I used to make movies but I sold out. I’m a sell-out! I love it. I live in Vietnam now; great place, great girls.’
After dinner, Richard returned to the bar.
Travelling was unravelling, falling apart, too much drink, too much food, and the acid stomach of something being amiss. Nightmares about infidelity, not to mention the strangers in and out of his own bed who made him prone to such suspicions. He took a whisky and then another.
When an Englishwoman came and sat up at the bar, Richard bought her a drink. He was feeling increasingly disconsolate but nevertheless he was prepared to be cheered in his usual way.
She was a journalist, covering the elections. She had led quite a life. She was happy to tell him something of her sexual adventures. Politicians; useful, she stressed with emphasis. She said she’d slept with hundreds and hundreds of men and though she’d tried ‘relationships’, she used her index fingers in the air here, she found them disappointing, not knowing a person was so much more interesting than knowing them, she smirked.
He didn’t like her but he did find her attractive. She had long ringlets, a mass of curls, hard lines on her forehead, bangles on her wrist, she was noisy and she was thin. It was no surprise to either of them that she came back to his room with him and they had sex. She was businesslike. She took her underpants off but left her top on. That was a new one.
He gave her his best, good long strokes, and she clutched at him for a bit then pushed him off and climbed on top. She certainly knew what she was doing. She put a hand under his chin, pushed his head back and almost as if in some unkind imitation, mimicked a man fucking a woman. She put a fingertip underneath his balls and pressed hard as if trying to find the choke button. With or without him, she appeared to reach some sort of climax and he conceded his own. When she came she said ‘urgh’. Then she got up, went to the toilet, came out, pulled on her underpants, belted her skirt and said, ‘I always feel depressed afterwards.’
Not as much as your prey, he thought.
‘Do you want a drink?’ he said.
‘Not now, it’s too late,’ she said. She got up and put her wallet in her back pocket. ‘Thanks anyway,’ she said.
He was still lying there, in the same position, on his back, crumpled and dejected with his cock sheepish in his genital hair, as she gave him one last glance over.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘listen a minute, let me ask you something.’ He switched the side lamp on. ‘I’m interested, that’s all. You say you’ve slept with hundreds of men, but what I want to know is why, I mean it can’t be that different . . .’
She sat on the end of the bed, facing the door but turning back with a gentle face. There was pity perhaps, as if having to include in the bedtime story a little word of warning.
‘When you get a man into bed and out of his clothes, you see the boy, you see who he really is, that’s why. I’m interested in the boy not the man.’
He made a face.
‘It’s primitive. I suppose it’s my hobby, like stamp collecting. Only I like to denude powerful men. In general.’
‘Don’t you feel cheap afterwards?’
‘Nope.’
He felt the bed lighten again as she stood and he closed his eyes.
‘Well, I’ll say goodnight then.’
‘I don’t even like women any more,’ he said when he heard the door close, swinging his legs out of the bed and going to the minibar.
Maybe he had created the world he deserved. ‘I don’t believe in hell,’ he’d said to Rachel, one night when she was proselytizing.
‘It’s a stupid idea.’
‘It’s not an idea,’ she said, ‘it’s right behind you.’
‘You would say the same for heaven then,’ he countered.
‘Yes, I would,’ she said, ‘it’s not pie in the sky. As long as you know it when you see it.’
‘I’ll take what I can in this life, Rachel.’
‘But that’ll be all you get, Richard.’
And what about you? he thought bitterly. Have you got what you want?
He closed his eyes and saw Rachel’s face. He felt his heart move and he felt sick and afraid. He opened his eyes.
He posted the cigarette butt into the empty can. Two a.m. He couldn’t sleep. He needed someone to talk to. ‘Hi, Rachel, I know it’s two in the morning but I wondered if you wouldn’t mind just talking to me, telling me something preposterous, old-fashioned, and unlikely . . .’
Oh God, he needed a friend. He needed someone who loved him. He needed to love someone too. He put the bedside lamp on. He turned it off.
His wife did not love him! Was there one single piece of evidence he could bring to mind that she did?
He reflected on the last few years. She accepted his flowers with a ‘moue’ of disappointment. She was too logique, she claimed, for such gestures. Roses depressed her — she hated to watch beautiful things rot and die — and as for her former favourites, lilies, she decried the chore of them, those vainglorious paprika shakers that ruined white shirts and expired in a melodramatic swoon; she called them ‘cheap’. They’d given up on birthday and Christmas presents. For his last birthday she’d offered him fifty euros. He considered asking for seventy-five, for a joke, but they didn’t share the same sense of humour. She’d taken to wearing a beret, pulled up, it looked like a microwaved bag of popcorn on her head. It was navy blue and dusty, and it made her ears stick out. She looked like Marcel Marceau but God knows she wasn’t miming. She had pretty much told him everything he needed to know. He was a useless father and a bad husband; or so she said.
Her disarray was out in the open like the washing she put on the line that went through various rains and winds before being released from its distress, and washed and dried in the conventional succession by her mother. She kept a tragic theme tune on tap, agonized numbers that she played in kitchen or car incessantly, and he’d want to scream: Change the fucking track, I’ve got the message.
He thought of what his son had said about her. ‘Max, are you safe? My boy. Are you happy?’ He lay there with one hand reaching across the bed, open-palmed.
* * *
The next morning, idling by the pool with a Coca-Cola and trying to feel better, his eyes sore behind his sunglasses, he saw the Englishwoman. She looked over at him from her sunlounger and raised her glasses. The expression on her face was straight-laced.
* * *
Her legs were well crossed. He sat up and called out good morning. He told her he was heading on after lunch and she nodded. He told her he was going to visit a clinic in Nyeri. He was coming back in a couple of weeks to spend a whole week there, shadowing a doctor. She nodded again, evincing no interest.
‘You out here much longer?’
‘Who knows,’ she said.
‘Right.’
She called out to the waiter and began a conversation in
Swahili.
‘Well, see you,’ he said.
He went to the toilets to put his clothes back on and took a look in the mirror. He was shocked. The skin under his eyes was very lined, his forehead looked like glazed ham, sliced into, there were stray hairs sprouting from his nostrils, and they were ginger. His mouth tasted of nicotine.
* * *
That afternoon he checked into the hotel in Nyeri, sat down at six for dinner, and a Kikuyu marching band arrived before the vista of a cloud-obscured Mount Kenya, in tribal dress, singing, the sound of cymbals coming from the metal-purse knee pads that were filled with ball bearings. They were sporting skins, headdresses and face paint. Their legs were daubed with limestone stripes. The girls walked dumpily, down at the mouth. Behind them this land was comely red earth, divided into greenish smallholdings.
Before dinner he wandered to the church and graveyard, hailed by those going home from their work, and followed the pathway which was lined with the signs bearing the Scout movement commandments to Baden-Powell’s grave. The nearer to Nyeri, the nearer to bliss. This was the quotation of his they cherished above the reception desk in the hotel where he was staying. But Baden-Powell’s stone bore the simplest inscription Richard had ever seen. A circle with a dot in the middle, like the bull’s-eye on a target, one single shot to the heart of the matter; he remembered what the sign meant from his Scouting days —‘Gone home.’
That night, with the disco music in the background, he opened the French doors and walked out on to the lawn. The middle of
the night under his toes, he looked into the distance and saw twinkling lights from homes on the far hills, like fairy lights. It made him remember how Christmas felt when he was a child, when his mother was there, and it came to him with a rush: Here I am, in the middle of my life, in the middle of the world . . . He was standing on the equator. A circle with a dot in the middle of it.