The Migration of Ghosts

by Pauline Melville

  FOR JOY

  And let thy goste thee lede

  – ‘Balade de Bone Conseyl’, Chaucer

  Contents

  The President’s Exile

  Mrs da Silva’s Carnival

  The Duende

  Lucifer’s Shank

  Don’t Give Me Your Sad Stories

  The Parrot and Descartes

  The Fable of the Two Silver Pens

  The Sparkling Bitch

  Erzulie

  Provenance of a Face

  The Migration of Ghosts

  English Table Wuk

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  The President’s Exile

  The president walked up the steps to the entrance of the London School of Economics where he had studied as a young man. He wore a calf-length, navy-blue alpaca coat and a fawn cashmere scarf tied neatly, like a cravat, around his neck. Recently he had undergone an operation on his throat and he worried about protecting the vulnerable area from the cold winds of a London winter.

  He passed through the swing doors and stood for a moment on the marbled floor of the large entrance hall. It was not term-time and there were few people about. Nobody recognised him. He remained there for a minute or two. The balding man at the porter’s desk was looking down at some list or other and paid him no attention. He hesitated for a moment wondering what he should say if asked what he was doing there. He would simply say that he was President Hercules and that he had studied law here some thirty – or, goodness, was it forty – years previously and that he had now returned to take an affectionate walk around the place.

  In fact, he had not been happy there. Nobody would recognise him, he knew that. It was too long ago. Nor would they know that he was in exile.

  His hand gripped the bottom of the briefcase under his arm more tightly at the recollection of his new and unaccustomed lack of status. It was still unclear to him how it had happened. However hard he tried to remember, the precise sequence of events escaped him. The transition from real president to exiled president remained a blur. The more he sat in his hotel room and tried to remember, the more it slipped from his grasp. He wondered whether he might not be in the throes of a nervous breakdown.

  He remembered entering the hospital for minor throat surgery. The limousine had delivered him to the front doors where a team of Cuban doctors waited to greet him. The sun was blazing down. He remembered the warm wind on his cheeks. Photographers took pictures of him shaking hands with the surgeons before going inside. After that, he remembered nothing.

  The president was standing staring at the floor when he realised that by remaining motionless he would attract attention. He walked over to the lift. Inside he randomly pressed a button. He could not remember which floor housed the law faculty and anyway it had probably all changed. But stepping out of the lift on the third floor, he felt a familiar sense of unease as he recognised the shabby corridors and the warm smell of dull, wooden doors and cheap furniture polish. Notices on various offices indicated that this was now the social anthropology department. But it was certainly the same floor that had once housed the department of legal studies.

  He looked through the small window in the door of one of the rooms, cupping his hand to shade his eyes from the reflection. The long, solid desks were the same ones he remembered but now each desk supported a row of grey computers. He tried the door. It was locked. He stared through the window.

  Why had he felt drawn to visit this place again? There had, after all, been enough successes in his life. Why, he wondered, should he feel compelled to return to where he had suffered an unforgettable, if minor, humiliation. He recalled the episode.

  His tutor had waved his essay in front of the rest of the seminar group and then handed it back to him with the words:

  ‘This is remarkably like an essay from one of the current third-year students that I marked last year. I shall give you the benefit of the doubt this time but I warn you that if anything similar occurs again I shall report it to the dean.’

  Naturally, he had feigned surprise and looked mystified, although he had, in fact, copied the essay from the student whose effort had been marked with an alpha plus. His own work was of a reasonably high standard but it was the certainty of obtaining the best grade that he had been unable to resist.

  That same evening, a group of colonial students at the Mecklenberg Square hostel listened and sympathised as he insisted with righteous indignation, over the evening meal of chops and gravy, that the similarity between the essays had been an extraordinary and unfortunate coincidence. He talked scathingly of his tutor whom, he said, undoubtedly shared the racial bias common to all colonial masters and just wanted to see him degraded.

  Several of the students from that batch at Mecklenberg Square had gone on to do well in later life. Two were currently prime ministers of African states. One had gone to Sandhurst Military Academy and was now a general in Ghana. He himself had become the first black president in South America.

  He prided himself on the fact that he was one of the few presidents on that continent who could mix and feel at ease with the crowd in the marketplace. Sometimes he would order his driver to stop the car at one of the street markets so that he could walk amongst the pungent smells of vegetables, herbs, washing powders and cocoa beans or stroll between the stiff carcasses of dried fish, to talk and joke with the stall-holders and ask them about business. In his speeches he often referred to the importance of ‘the small man’.

  It was the same on open days at his official residence. He enjoyed the bonhomie, mingling with people in the grounds, chatting, gesticulating and jostling his way through the guests as those around him closed in and clapped him on the back.

  But when he was out of the country, officiating as head of state at some international conference and he bumped into his former fellow students, he fretted over whether any of them remembered the time that he was accused of cheating and the public smile froze on his face.

  The odd thing was that even after he had been president for many years, he felt unsure of his position. He felt like a charlatan. And this was nothing to do with the rigged elections that had kept him in power for nearly two decades. He would have felt like a charlatan even if he had been fairly elected.

  His father, a civil servant, had once told him he would never amount to anything because he lacked moral fibre. The office of president felt like a carapace he had assumed to cover his failings. The only question he ever really wanted to ask his fellow presidents and prime ministers at those conferences was whether they felt the same.

  ‘Do you feel too that we’re all a bunch of frauds?’ he wanted to ask, but never did.

  He turned away from the seminar room and walked down the corridor back towards the lift. He inspected his Cartier watch. Quarter-past eleven. He had nowhere particular to go and for some reason felt reluctant to leave the building straight away.

  He abandoned the lift on the ground floor and made his way to the Old Theatre. This was where important visiting lecturers delivered their addresses. Nobody paid heed to him and he walked over to the door on the right and slipped quietly inside.

  Here things had changed. The auditorium was at the same raked angle as he remembered but instead of the parquet flooring and banks of gloomy, high-backed, oak seats, the entire place had been carpeted and the wooden benches replaced by plush and comfortable seats like a real theatre.

  There was no one there. A microphone stand, an empty glass and dusty jug of water stood on a table on the stage awaiting some phantom speaker. The president sank into one of the upholstered chairs with relief and put his briefcase down on the seat next to him. He loosened the scarf round his neck gingerly
. The operation wound on his throat had not healed properly. Sometimes it oozed a colourless fluid. He touched the ridged scar gently with his fingertips. They came away a little wet. He searched for a handkerchief in his coat pocket and held it against the places where the seeping plasma escaped.

  Anxious to put out of his mind the unpleasant memories occasioned by his visit upstairs, he tried to console himself by re-living the time when he had won the Best Speaker’s Prize for oratory at the Inns of Court. But all he could remember was how he had felt at the time – a sense of incredulity that the judges should reward him for something that was so easy, telling lies in a powerful and persuasive manner. He could barely see the credit in that because even as a child he had recognised the distinction between public lies and private truths. He thought it was second nature to everyone. What was oratory if not the art of public lies? For him, all discourse was to some extent a matter of lying.

  Lying had never been a problem. It is easy for those with a good grasp of reality. The same sound grasp of reality made him a pragmatic politician.

  ‘It is simple,’ he had said in the early days of his political life. ‘I am the African leader. My rival is the East Indian leader.’ He would say this quite openly when most of the progressive forces in the fifties supported his rival whom they understood to be leader of the masses. His rival campaigned up and down the country on the basis of racial unity. Meanwhile, he negotiated with the Americans and British and took power knowing he would be able to rely on people to vote on the basis of racial division.

  ‘I deal with realities,’ he said.

  And it was this that made his present position so disturbing. He was not sure exactly what the reality was. If he knew the events that had led him here, he would know what to do about his current situation. But he seemed to have difficulty in concentrating. He leaned forward in his seat and clenched his fists together, head between his hands. The important matters were vague, yet other irritating and inconsequential memories such as the tutor accusing him of cheating all those years ago remained vividly in his mind.

  Feeling a little hot, he opened the top buttons of his coat. For some reason his thoughts travelled back to the occasion when his father had compared him unfavourably to one of his schoolfriends, a certain Michael Yates. He was eleven. He had arrived home from school to find his father standing on the polished floor in front of the open verandah doors, scowling over a letter from his headmaster. It concerned some minor misdemeanour. It was not the misdemeanour that the headmaster complained of, however, but the disproportionate and elaborate web of lies and deception that had been fabricated to cover it up.

  ‘You shame me,’ his father had roared while his sister looked on with satisfaction from beside the dresser. ‘Why you can’t be like Michael Yates? Michael Yates is open and honest. Michael Yates is a straightforward boy. You sneaky. Why do I have to have a lampey-pampey sneak for a son?’

  Years later, as president, when he was about to make a speech at the Critchlow Labour College, he spotted a familiar figure as he made his way down the aisle to the rostrum. These were the days when he had begun to wear an item of purple every day and to sign his name in purple ink like an emperor. He stopped to shake the hand of his old friend from schooldays, whose hair was now thinning on either side of a peak at the front and who beamed at him from the sidelines.

  ‘Michael Yates. What are you up to these days?’

  ‘I’m teaching in the secondary school at West Ruimveldt.’

  The president slapped him on the back.

  ‘Pleased to hear it,’ he said, before continuing down to the platform.

  That afternoon, the president arrived back at his office and told his secretary to ensure forthwith that a Mr Michael Yates was sacked from his post at West Ruimveldt secondary school and refused a post anywhere else. For the rest of the morning he basked in the satisfaction of an ancient score settled. President Hercules had a phenomenal memory for slights. He could remember any politician who had offended or opposed him and the precise details of the occasion.

  A cleaner bumped the doors of the theatre open with her behind and entered backwards dragging a hoover. The president gathered up his belongings and edged between the rows of seats towards the exit.

  He found himself in Kingsway. He looked briefly for a restaurant he used to frequent but it was no longer there. It had been replaced by a print and graphics store.

  The traffic streamed past him down towards Bush House. In a gap between two buildings opposite stood a beech tree, its delicate branches traced like a frozen neurone against the blank January sky. Missing the heat and humidity of his own country, he turned and walked in the other direction, away from Kingsway, down the Strand.

  There was no doubt that this exile was a temporary state of affairs. He would return eventually. When, was the question. He turned into Northumberland Avenue.

  The heavy, revolving doors of the building that housed the Royal Commonwealth Society decanted him slowly through and he was relieved to feel the burst of warmth as he entered. A uniformed security official trod silently across a sea of red carpet, presumably to ask him his business. President Hercules took the man by the elbow across to where a photographic portrait of the Queen and the Commonwealth heads of state hung on the wall. He pointed out his own picture in the line-up and laughed off the man’s embarrassment, tapping him lightly on the back to show that no offence was taken.

  The security man looked confused and apologetic as he returned to his position. The president took the lift to the first floor. He seemed bound by a compulsion to return to the scenes of episodes in his life which had shamed or demeaned him in some way. He could not stay away. It was as if, by returning and concentrating with all his energy on these episodes, he might be able to expunge them from history. And yet they were all minor setbacks compared to his achievements. Why did his achievements mean nothing?

  In the lift he began to sweat as he remembered in detail what had happened there.

  The incident had taken place when he had already been prime minister for several years and had just appointed himself president for life. He had stopped off in London on his return journey from the Commonwealth Conference in Lagos. The meeting he had chosen to address was not a public one but one by private invitation only. He must have had something of a premonition because he had left specific instructions that his sister was not to be invited. On his accession to the presidency, he had cancelled her diplomatic post in an act of private spite after she refused him a small piece of sculpture that their father had left her in his will. She had remained in London and he knew that his action still rankled with her. He did not want to see her in public lest she caused a fuss about it.

  His sister, however, had persuaded a friend to bring her along as a guest. The president was relaxed and in good form. He wore an immaculate khaki shirt-jack that sloped gently out from his chest to accommodate the foothills of what was later to become a mountainous waist.

  As his speech finished to a round of applause, he stepped forward to shake hands, first with the High Commissioner, then with other selected dignitaries and party supporters. At that precise moment, his sister stepped out of the lift into the foyer on the first floor where the small but distinguished audience milled about holding glasses of wine and chatting.

  ‘I will probably get into trouble for this, but I should like you all to know certain things about my brother, Baldwin Hercules.’ She spoke in an uncertain voice, but her feet were planted firmly apart and she held her handbag in both trembling hands.

  The gathering grew uneasily silent as she stood nervously in front of the lift doors, her head thrown back a little. She continued determinedly, looking straight into the eyes of her audience.

  ‘Nobody knows a man better than his own sister. Baldwin is a liar, a cheat and a bully. As a child, he always lied his way out of trouble. Lied. Lied. Lied. He always had to blame somebody else. He wanted to win everything. Yes, he is clever, but he has a cruel stre
ak. And I am warning you. You have let him have too much power. You all will suffer for it and so will the country. There is nothing he will not do and nobody he will not use to get what he wants.’

  A couple of people moved forwards to try and persuade her gently to leave. One of them pressed the button to open the lift doors behind her. Nothing happened. The lift had stuck. She continued, speaking more quickly now because she sensed that his security guards might bundle her out.

  ‘Somebody has to speak the truth before it is too late. We all know that elections are rigged. We must be the only country where the government is elected by the dead. Half the names on the lists are taken from tombstones. Eventually, he will kill to stay where he is. Socialist republic?’ She sneered. ‘Ask him why his daughter had to take up residence in Switzerland. I will tell you why – to caretake his secret bank accounts.’

  She turned her troubled eyes to the friend who had brought her there as a guest.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have done this. But I couldn’t help it.’ And she turned away from the lift and walked in silence down the carpeted stairs.

  That night she took a flight to Canada.

  During most of her outburst the president stood silent, an embarrassed smile on his face, his cheeks crawling with horror. When she mentioned the Swiss bank accounts, he turned away and began to speak with an air of amused resignation to one of his entourage.

  ‘A pity you can’t sack your family in the same way you can sack your ministers,’ he said ruefully, attempting to laugh the whole thing off. Sweat glistened in the creases of his neck. The man he addressed responded with a bray of palpably false laughter.

  Now the exiled president walked softly to the place where he had stood all those years ago. He stood in exactly the same spot on the carpet as if he were once again facing his sister, surrounded by phantom dignitaries. Prickles ran up his neck and along his jaw. He rubbed the thumb of his right hand against the middle finger nervously. He could hear once again every word she said and he shuddered as though his soul were being branded.