by Jean McNeil
They were seated for breakfast. It was only eight o’clock, yet the morning heat gathered around them. She wanted to rip it apart, like drawing an invisible curtain, to get somewhere beyond it where she could think straight again.
‘Why does she want to come now?’ Storm said. ‘She’ll have to bribe her way through twenty road-blocks. That’s if they let her cross the border.’
‘It’s your father’s sixty-fifth. Anyway she’s a writer. They always go where the action is, don’t they?’ Julia asked, to no one in particular. ‘When I worked with those guys –’ she assumed Julia meant journalists – ‘I’d drive them to the airport. They’d be on their way to cover the latest atrocity. There would never be space on the plane – the army, the spies, the UN would have booked it out. You had to hand it to them, they always got a seat. Delphine’s like that,’ Julia said. ‘You can depend on her to always get a seat on the plane.’
‘What does she write?’ she asked.
‘Plains of the Serengeti, you must have heard of it. Lost Land of the Boroi. Big books with lots of photographs.’
‘I don’t read coffee table books.’
‘Well, nobody reads them, obviously.’ Julia scraped her chair out and rose from the table. ‘We don’t see much of Delphine. She finds it boring here. We’re not ambitious enough for her.’
She went to fetch one of Delphine’s books from the shelf. She pulled out the one with the thickest spine. The cover shot was of a vast agglomeration of wildebeest from above – a helicopter shot no doubt. It showed a knot of burly beasts, their distribution almost geometric. Around them were tawny clumps of stone. She peered closer to see the giant shoulder muscles of the cats, perfect and rounded as loaves of bread. The knot of wildebeest was surrounded not by stones but by lions.
She turned the book over. Delphine appeared, holding a spear with a spade-shaped tip. She was tall and thin and wore her grey hair in a loose braid over her shoulder. An outline of red lipstick was her only concession to makeup. She was dressed in a battered pair of brown trousers that had perhaps once been suede. She recognised her uncle’s startling blue eyes. They stared forthrightly, almost defiantly, at the camera.
‘She’s very beautiful,’ she offered.
‘She is.’ Julia’s voice was grim. She turned to Storm. ‘What are you doing tonight?’
‘I thought Rebecca and I might do something.’
She shot him a look, which he deflected.
‘That’s lovely, darling.’
She watched him cross the living room. His muscles seemed to have their own individual life. He had the rangy architecture of a creature that spent most of its life in anaerobic blasts of effort: cheetah or impala.
They’d had a straggly herd of impala around camp in Gariseb. Once she had seen a cheetah give chase. The impala had a thin black chevron stripe down the side of its body. It leaped from side to side, bounding two metres at a time, in an attempt to shake off the cheetah, which ran so low to the ground it looked as if it were in collusion with it. Finally the cheetah dropped back. The gazelle kept going, a black blare of panic in its eye. She watched the cheetah, its flanks heaving, through her binoculars. It lay down on the ground and panted.
She felt faint; if she hadn’t been sitting down already, she would have fallen to the floor.
‘Rebecca, are you alright?’
She swivelled towards Julia, who regarded her with that alert yet uncomprehending gaze of hers.
‘Yes, fine.’
‘It’s just you look changed, somehow. Have you finally put on weight?’
Her eye searched for him, but he had gone. None of Storm’s mystery had diminished, although a familiarity was taking root. The change in her state seemed to have transferred itself to Julia, who shone with renewed purpose, with the special density of intimacy. Yes, Julia felt her change, was animated yet confused by it, as if she had been granted a second life, but as someone else.
At the kiosks outside the small supermarket at Kilindoni were racks of newspapers splattered with red headlines, red shirts, blood, gashed faces. In the background were faces shining in pain and fear. Red was the colour of TANU, the ruling party, which was fighting to remain in office in the upcoming elections, and it cast its shadow over the news.
The elections felt like approaching storm. The air had the electrified, unhappy smell of a turbulence both feared and desired. Al-Nur Attack Puku. The story asserted that the city near the border, once beloved by tourists, a mini-Zanzibar, everyone said, where Christian and Arab culture had coexisted happily for over a millennia, had been hit the previous day. The insurgents had been hoping to kill tourists but they had long fled, so they had to content themselves with killing local Christians.
She scanned the article while walking across the bridge that spanned the entrance to Kilindoni harbour. Five political parties dominated the landscape, the article told her. Here, in the east, the Tswalu ethnic group prevailed; they had formed an alliance with the centrist Kandinka group to form TANU, the powerful political alliance that included the most dominant ethnic group in the country, the Milau.
This was as far as she got. Without the military strategists and political analysts that her training provided she was lost. She did not understand the blood feud intricacies of politics, whether in the UK or the countries where she deployed herself. She saw politicians as alchemists, mixing potions of power and fear. Politics was responsible for the wounds her hands prowled and sutured as much as any gun.
Her uncle, on the other hand, was a political man. He would not have arrived at his position without making strategic alliances. Now that the elections were approaching her uncle took more and more calls on his mobile phone, laying it down on the table at mealtimes where it vibrated, crawling across the table.
There is no place for the white man in the politics of this county, she heard him say at one of Julia’s dinners. You have to become black. For political purposes, I am a black man.
She’d looked at him then, expecting to see a different skin. You’re a black man in every way, Bill, one of his associates replied. I think you’ll even be president one day.
She arrived back at the house and perceived her aunt’s absence instantly. Without Julia the house was rudderless.
She saw a figure in the living room. As with Storm, names sounded wrong with her uncle. She didn’t know what to call him.
She took her place in one of the rattan chairs opposite him.
‘Am I disturbing you?’
‘Rebecca, you are family. It’s not possible to be disturbed by you.’
‘I bought the newspaper. It doesn’t look good, the elections.’
‘Elections in this country never look good.’
‘Who do you think will win?’
‘Rudai, of course.’ He named the oldest political dynasty in the country. ‘They are very powerful.’
He stared at her, an identical note to the one she saw behind the bullish wall of Storm’s eyes. It could be distrust, or tolerance. In his eyes they looked the same. She realised she had no idea how to appeal to these people’s confidence, or what would trigger it. She nearly said: I’m a doctor. I have three university degrees. But that doesn’t matter here, her uncle would say.
‘Julia told me,’ she ventured, ‘about the bank.’
‘Oh.’ Grey circles had accumulated under his eyes, smudges of ash.
‘She said there’s a lot of money at stake.’
‘Yes, fourteen million depositors in total. All of them locked out of their accounts.’
‘What do you think of the investigation?’
‘It’s equivalent of a land grab. It’s the first time it’s happened here, with the banking system. Our backers are in Dubai and India, where such things don’t happen. Suffice to say they’re not impressed.’
‘That’s Africa, as they say,’ she offered.
‘Who says that?’ His face had a rigid cast. ‘The banks in the UK were bailed out by the UK taxpayer to the tune of sev
eral billion. Do you think you and your fellow taxpayers will ever see a penny of your money back? What happened to the hedge fund managers and the futures traders and the sub-prime merchants who generated that crisis? Are they behind bars? The UK is Africa.’
‘I think you need to rest. You look tired.’
‘Yes, Rebecca, thank you, I realise that.’
His attention drifted away. He stared out into the garden. From the distance came the crash of the sea.
When he had turned back his face had softened. ‘Your mother thought I was a crook. A man fed on colonial fat.’ He gave her a thin smile. ‘Like her you’re pointing the finger in the wrong direction. Africa is no more corrupt than Europe; there are just fewer ways to hide it here.’
She sat in silence, shocked that he had mentioned her mother. He had never referred to her before. Had they ever even met?
‘Why don’t you just go back? the Africans say to us,’ he went on. ‘But there is no back.’ The word clanged in his mouth. ‘There is no Europe. England is a foreign country to me. I am an African. A white black man.’ He pinched his forearm arm, puckering the skin.
‘Black men are generally much poorer than you are.’
His reply was quick. ‘Do you mean you have to be poor in order to qualify as authentically black?’
She understood her error. Her uncle had an advantage, she reminded herself. He was on home ground here.
‘There hasn’t been a white man of significant wealth or political influence in this country for thirty years at least,’ her uncle said. ‘In case you think I’m abusing some sort of privilege. The colour of your skin has been trumped by money. That’s what race and class is here now: money. In fact you could say our white skin is a disadvantage. They see us coming and they think, we will make you pay.’
She didn’t ask him who the they, the we, was. She supposed it ought to be obvious, but she had noticed that her uncle rarely talked in terms of us and them, as other whites she had overheard – guests at Julia’s constant soirées, people at neighbouring tables at Reef Encounters – did. She might make many judgements about him, but her uncle was not racial – the softened term locals used, rather than racist.
‘Yes, we are just minor players here, now.’ He exhaled, a gesture that might have been a quiet sigh, or fatigue. He looked tired, she thought. He was sixty-five, he would soon begin to feel the dictates of the body, he would no longer be able to drive the seven hours to the capital without tiring, or play golf for four hours in the equatorial sun. What was the advantage of arguing with this man? He had already bested her, in so many ways. When had they become rivals? Perhaps they were this from the beginning and Bill understood this, much more clearly than she did. Any antagonism they felt was not personal, in a strange way, rather it was about the situation that engineered their meeting, his position in life – his values, choices, right back to the flash of entrepreneurial zeal that had led his ancestors to this country in the first place – versus her far less expeditionary and ruthless origins.
‘You say Britain is a foreign country, yet you’re happy to carry its passport and bank in its offshore islands.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, amenably. ‘That’s the sum of it. I make use of my connections.’ His back straightened. ‘But I’m an African. That’s all I will ever be, no matter how many times they rob my bank account, or my property is confiscated for the state, or radical Islam try to bomb us back to Europe, as they see it.’ He leaned towards her, his long body easily bridging the space between his sofa and her baraza, eating the distance. His eyes flared with a strange fire. She breathed in, searching for signs of alcohol, but his breath smelled vaguely of lemons.
‘There is no Europe.’ He stared at her. ‘It’s all a pretty fiction.’
‘But there was,’ she said.
‘Oh, undoubtedly. But now the Chinese own Europe, and in thirty years twenty per cent of the population will be Muslim. You think Al-Nur here is a problem. Just wait.’
‘You seem to look forward to that.’
‘Oh, not really. I’ll be long gone by then.’
She looked out to the edge of the house, where the living room dissolved into the dark garden. She would never stop expecting to see a wall there. She had been raised inside, in houses with walls and cold rooms, and this would stick.
William MacMaster had been born in Benghazi on the Libyan coast. His father, a settler farmer, was also a Royal Engineer. He had qualified before the war and spent most of it in Burma, in charge of one hundred and fifty Ghurkha fighters who had bestowed upon him the ultimate honour – he had become their brother. He’d worn a turban and carried a ceremonial scabbard gifted to him by his troops.
Bill had never known this incarnation of his father. He’d grown up a prosperous farmer’s son in a rambling farmhouse joined to three rondavels by cool corridors, half open to the elements, lined with hedges of hibiscus, china sets and cutlery and gin and tonics at sundown, and a semi-insane African grey parrot for a pet who uttered Swine at intervals, and who otherwise spoke only in profanities. All this had imprinted itself on his consciousness: the stone farmhouse, rondavels orbiting it like satellites, thrilling grey mountains puncturing the sky and beyond these, a sere plain stretching all the way to Ethiopia.
Then, his years in the capital. There his life is a circuit of receptions and cocktail parties. He is both in a position to choose and yet must be chosen. He raises capital, he founds an airline, then buys houses: one, two, three. He goes into business in the clothing market, making sweatshirts and jeans. Still his father’s farm thrums out pyrethrum and alfalfa, managed by a foreman. His unrustled cattle grow fat on the teeth of his security operation – men are shot so that his cattle can be slaughtered. He plants experimental crops and is the first man in the country to pasteurise milk.
He is garrulous, a talker. He travels often for business. There, in Brazzaville, he meets Julia. He is ten years older than her. The puzzle of his life is complete.
Between these signposts are numberless days when little happens, when failure laps at their shores. Mitsubishi dealerships; his business importing cut-price antibiotics from France only to be overtaken by generic pharmaceuticals from India, which flood the market in the 1980s; the vitamin supplements from South Africa instantly outmoded by steroids. He makes business trips to Dubai and Johannesburg to procure machinery at a third of the import price; he pays Somali truckers to cross the border with goods undeclared. He knows every twist and turn of this country. I know how to make things work here, he says frequently to his family, his visitors. He does business in Saudi Arabia and in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. He looks the other way as competitors are hassled, or squashed. He imports Danish yoghurt and makes a killing.
Could Storm and Lucy really have emanated from this man? Lucy, with her cool intelligence. Storm, with his austere self-containment. The truth was, Bill had nothing to do with his children. He was their father; he had given them his genes. They carried the outlines of his face. They might even have his ruthlessness, his restless ingenuity, his catlike ability to get up after being knocked down. But apart from that, no trace of his character could be found in his children.
‘Rebecca. I think I lost you there.’
The file which was the source of this information, which she had read on Anthony’s laptop in the capital only days before coming to the coast, closed itself in her mind.
She allowed her gaze to return to the living room, lit with Julia’s gin bottle lanterns, to the small scratching sounds of the tropical night.
‘You’re a thinker, aren’t you?’
‘You say that as if it’s something unsavoury.’
He shrugged. ‘It depends on what you think. On whose behalf you are thinking.’
She was too exhausted to be alarmed at this drift in the conversation, what it might mean. She was so tired, from the weight of the knowledge she had procured about her uncle, and by association about all of them. Knowledge should be empowering. But it ended up crushing
you. Once known, knowledge could not be unravelled, stuffed back into a box labelled Oblivion. Only now, at thirty-seven, was she coming to understand the true nature of its burden.
‘I think I’d better turn in,’ she said.
Bill’s eyes, darkened with the night to the green-grey of heavy woolen blankets, were lidded, furtive.
‘You’re friendlier than she was. You’re not as conflicted, as jealous. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for all of this. I wish we had known her. I wish we knew you.’
‘We can. I’m here now,’ she said, but sensed her error. She was distracted by his use of the past tense. Something was over, for him. The knowing, the regret. He already inhabited the future.
‘You’re still here.’
Margaux was waiting on the terrace of Reef Encounters. The ocean rolled ashore behind her in batter-thick breakers.
‘Did you expect me to have left?’
‘I just had this feeling that I’d try to call you one of these days and find you gone. Everyone else has skedaddled.’
‘Well, I’m not going anywhere.’ She adjusted her sunglasses to the noonday glare. The beach was empty. That the tourists were leaving, or no longer coming, was an open secret. It was evident in the dark, silent bars and restaurants of Fitzgerald’s and Reef Encounters.
‘Have you seen the new Foreign Office directives?’
She had, she said. There was little talk of anything else. Three days before the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had changed its travel advice for the coastal zone, citing intelligence that an Al-Nur attack was imminent.
‘It’s amazingly effective, isn’t it?’ Margaux said. ‘Issue a random threat, Thomsons or First Choice cancel the charter flights, invalidated travel insurance etcetera, watch the tourists disappear to Thailand. Although the Italians seem more adventurous. At least they keep coming.’
‘Everyone seems so shocked that it’s happened. You’d think they’d understand the risk of being a resort next to the biggest terrorist threat since Al-Qaeda. Anyway, I’m not in a rush to get back. I worked four months straight without two days in a row off before I came here.’