Vinegar Soup

by Miles Gibson

  ‘Leave her alone, Frank,’ said Gilbert gently.

  ‘I was just trying to help.’

  Gilbert sat smiling in his Sunday-best suit, hair oiled and shoes polished, holding his belly like a prize pumpkin. ‘We’ll feel better after lunch and a couple of drinks,’ he promised.

  ‘I wasn’t frightened,’ insisted Veronica as she took his arm.

  ‘I know,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘I’m ready for anything,’ she muttered, scowling at Frank. But an hour later, strapped in the tail of an Air Afrique 747 bound for Batuta, she started to shake and burst into tears.

  ‘Quick!’ said Gilbert. ‘She’s gone again.’ He pulled a flask from his jacket and while Frank struggled to hold Veronica’s head, gave her a large dose of brandy.

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ll look after you,’ whispered Frank, wiping her chin with his hand.

  Veronica sobbed, closed her eyes and prayed until she fell asleep.

  The aircraft creaked and swayed, its belly dragged upon the peaks of tremendous clouds. A seat-belt sign began to flicker. The smell of hot food drifted from the galley kitchens.

  ‘Where are we?’ said Frank.

  Gilbert tugged on a sleeve and squinted at his watch. ‘Spain,’ he said. ‘Or it might be Morocco.’

  ‘You went to Morocco,’ said Frank.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Gilbert. ‘Sam found us work in Casablanca.’

  ‘What’s it like?’ asked Frank. He pressed his face against the window and peered down at the mountains of cloud.

  ‘It’s not like Africa. We’re the wrong side of the Sahara.’

  ‘Will we see the desert?’ asked Frank hopefully.

  Gilbert smiled and stretched his feet. ‘Wait until you see the forest. You’ll be amazed. You wake up in the morning and it’s like the beginning of the world. You can’t hear anything but the echo of monkeys calling to each other through the mist. When you step outside it already feels warm and the earth smells sweet as Christmas pudding. And just for a moment, as the sun comes up through the trees, you feel like you’re the only person in the world. I can’t explain. But Sam knows what I’m talking about. He’ll show you.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Frank.

  Lunch was delivered by a plump girl with a square head and a smile stitched to her face. She pulled three trays from a metal trolley, thrust them forward and hurried away. Frank and Gilbert unhooked the little shelves that served as tables and carefully arranged the food. They tried to shake Veronica awake but she refused to open her eyes.

  ‘It smells good,’ said Gilbert, exploring the nest of plastic cups and bowls. There was a cup containing a thick and doubtful fruit juice. A second cup held a water biscuit sealed in a cellophane envelope. Between the cups a small dish held a pale bread roll and, wrapped in foil, a yellow lump of glue called cheese. The largest dish contained a slice of soft, white meat and a stew of unknown vegetables, decorated by creamed potato, machine moulded into a flower. Finally there was a plastic carton containing a sweet, yellow sludge stamped with a sugar button and sprinkled with desiccated coconut. The sludge tasted slightly of butterscotch.

  The cutlery was wrapped in a paper napkin which, when it unrolled, revealed a curious number of spoons. Gilbert chose a fork, a small knife without teeth and deliberately set to work.

  For a time the aircraft became a long canteen, filled with the clickety clack of tethered prisoners striking their trays with plastic spoons. Across the aisle an old woman wearing fake hair and a jacket made from squirrel skins was making a lot of noise with her butterscotch. Beside her a little man, soft and pink as a baby, was tugging at the wrapper on his ration of cheese. The woman turned and looked at Frank. She gave him a long and hungry smile.

  ‘You’ll feel better if you eat something,’ said Frank as Veronica’s face emerged from the collar of her coat.

  ‘What is it?’ she grunted.

  ‘I don’t know. I think it’s chicken,’ said Frank.

  ‘Is it?’ said Gilbert, looking surprised. ‘I thought it was veal.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ groaned Veronica.

  ‘No, it doesn’t taste like veal,’ said Frank, poking his bowl.

  ‘It doesn’t taste like chicken,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘Is it turkey?’ said Frank.

  ‘It doesn’t smell like turkey,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘We could ask someone,’ suggested Frank.

  ‘They won’t know,’ growled Gilbert. ‘They’d tell you anything just to keep you quiet.’

  ‘I don’t believe this is happening!’ shouted Veronica. ‘I’m strapped to a chair five miles high in some damn fireball the size of a supermarket flying to God-knows-where and you want me to eat God-knows-what with a plastic spoon!’ She snatched at her paper napkin and threw the cutlery over the floor. Gilbert produced his opium flask and plugged her mouth. She sucked greedily. Open your mouth. Close your eyes. Cover your ears to stop the noise. Engines screaming. Flames eating along the wings. Fire. Smoke. The cabin filled with poisonous fumes. Hair scorched. Skin glowing. Spoons melting in clenched teeth.

  When the meal was finished people began to yawn and scratch and fall asleep. The old woman with the fake hair snored into her squirrel skins. Her companion picked halfheartedly at the cellophane on his wafer biscuit. Frank sat quiet with his arms wrapped protectively around the bundle of overcoat in which Veronica had made her bed.

  Gilbert sat and sucked his teeth. He thought of Sam at work in the kitchen making plans for their first supper. Apricot tart or fruit dumplings. He was always a devil for hot puddings. Women loved him for it. The smell of him seemed to make them hungry. Animals. Cannibals. All over the world. Feasting. Strong women soaked in rum, stuffed with raisins, glazed with treacle. Soft women rolled in butter, filled with chocolate, burning with brandy. Feast or famine in those days. Did he ever take a wife? Not likely. He would have mentioned it in his letters. Remember to ask him.

  The aircraft hissed through the freezing sunlight. Frost sparkled on the edge of the wings. The air conditioning whistled.

  ‘What’s the time?’ asked Gilbert.

  ‘Three twenty,’ said Frank.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘When do we land?’ said Frank.

  ‘Four fifteen,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘It feels like we’ve been flying for ever.’

  ‘Can you see anything?’ asked Gilbert.

  ‘No,’ said Frank, peering through the little window.

  Gilbert grunted and settled down to sleep with his head on a polythene pillow.

  Frank looked over the rows of narrow seats, set straight as cemetery headstones. Occasionally a hand or the top of a skull would rise above a seat for a moment before sinking back into its grave. He yawned and rubbed his face. He felt tired and uncomfortable. Last night he had fallen asleep in a bed in the corner of a room in a house in a street in a city already a thousand miles away and tonight, by some miracle of navigation, he would fall asleep in another bed in the corner of another room in a hotel on a street in a city he had never seen. And how such things were made possible, why they were thought necessary and why no one else seemed surprised by them, exhausted him and hurt his head.

  While they sat in the great machine pretending to eat and sleep as if nothing unusual were happening the whole world was changing around them. Spinning. Spinning. Riches to rags. Princes to pumpkins. The coins in his pockets were now worthless tokens. The keys he carried were just souvenirs. Tonight he would open his mouth and speak in a foreign language. Tomorrow he would be a stranger.

  A fat child ran shouting down the length of the aisle pursued by its angry mother. Veronica cringed at the sound of their feet. It starts with a shout and a scuffle. Mad soldiers disguised as women. Rifles slipped beneath their skirts. Bombs strapped to their bodies like breasts. The moment arrives. They throw off the mask. Reveal the secret face of terror. Something snaps. Something goes wrong in their heads. They scream. They laugh. They fire their rifles at the s
un. And then the silence. Blood. Bone. Scraps of hair. Crimson petals floating to earth.

  The aircraft staggered and sank. The engines growled. A stewardess made an announcement in three languages that no one could understand. There was a clatter of seat belts. The wings were engulfed by cloud.

  ‘What is it?’ Veronica shouted through the uproar. She turned to Gilbert and squeezed his arm.

  ‘We’ve arrived,’ he grinned, trying to button his jacket.

  The clouds broke open and the earth rushed to meet them.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ gasped Frank with his face pressed against the glass.

  ‘What?’ yelled Veronica. ‘What?’

  ‘Africa,’ said Frank. He turned and smiled, his eyes bright with excitement.

  ‘Where?’ she demanded, leaning across him to chance a glance through the window. But the aircraft was already sinking towards the airport across a grey sweep of concrete waste.

  11

  It was a smell that Frank would remember for the rest of his life. He stepped from the cool, machined air, through a cabin door and was caught in a suffocating blast of heat, dust, smoke and aviation fuel that carried him down the steps and into the African afternoon. He staggered in the sunlight, screwed up his face against the glare and saw Gilbert marching Veronica across the apron towards the airport buildings.

  ‘Follow me!’ he shouted back at Frank. ‘Follow me and say nothing!’ He speared Veronica in the armpit and raised her slightly from the ground so that she danced on tiptoe beside him. Her head wobbled dangerously in its socket.

  They reached the immigration hall and joined the beleaguered caravan of pale travellers in crumpled clothes, clutching tickets and bottles of duty-free Scotch. The woman in the squirrel skins nursed a large, rubber doll in her arms. The doll wore a lunatic grin and a pair of canvas shoes. Beside them a tall man in a wrinkled blue suit held an electric toaster against his chest.

  Frank, bewildered by the heat, the noise and the crowds of black faces shouting in French, stood meekly in Gilbert’s shadow and hoped that no one would notice him. They shuffled slowly to the desk with their passports open like prayer books. When each had been blessed with a small rubber stamp they were free to search for their luggage.

  At the customs shed they unbuckled the suitcases and cheerfully flaunted their underwear. Veronica’s tiny brassieres excited less interest than Gilbert’s Bovril and he was obliged to leave several bottles behind him as a goodwill gesture.

  ‘Have we got everything?’ said Gilbert, once they had repacked and found their way back into the sunlight.

  Veronica nodded.

  ‘What next?’ said Frank, squinting around him. Africa was a car park, a bank of grass and a length of dusty road.

  Gilbert was about to confess that he hadn’t been told what should happen next when an old man with a face the colour of blood sausage climbed from a battered Toyota and beckoned them forward.

  ‘What does he want?’ hissed Veronica suspiciously.

  ‘Passengers, you daft bugger,’ said Gilbert, hoisting his suitcase on to his shoulder and stepping into the road.

  ‘How do you know?’ demanded Veronica.

  The old man walked around his car, kicked the tyres, opened the doors, spat in the dust and clambered into the driving seat.

  Gilbert, Frank and Veronica squashed into the back of the car and settled their legs around their luggage. It was hot. The seats burned their skin. The roof glowed like an oven. Gilbert immediately broke out in a sweat that filled his ears and drenched his collar. Veronica struggled to pull open her overcoat but the heat and the brandy had taken her strength. She flopped and gasped like a suffocating fish while Frank tried to break her buttons. When they thought they were certainly going to die, poached to death in their own juices, the driver turned and offered a blood-curdling smile. Gilbert gave him a slip of paper on which he had written the name of a hotel and they drove the eight kilometres into Batuta without another word between them.

  Veronica didn’t open her eyes again until she was standing in the air-conditioned twilight of the Hotel Napoleon. Her room was a pure, white cube, the windows sealed, the air sweet and perfectly chilled. When she was sure that the door was locked and the floor wouldn’t move beneath her feet she pulled off her clothes and fell on the bed exhausted.

  It was an hour or more before she felt sufficiently interested to explore her surroundings. Africa was a blue carpet, an empty wardrobe, a glass bowl of tropical flowers. She walked around this clean, cold world with a shivering pleasure. When she went to use the bathroom she found herself squatting in a pharoah’s tomb, a fancy chamber of hand-painted tiles, with a bath like a marble sarcophagus. She sat on the bowl for a long time, elbows propped against her knees, watching herself in the endless mirrors; and for the first time that day she felt comfortable and safe.

  In the next room Gilbert and Frank were already planning tomorrow. After breakfast they would need to change their money, check out of the hotel and find the central railway station. The express train left at noon. They should reach Bolozo Noire before midnight. Gilbert studied Sam’s letter and tried to trace their route on the map.

  ‘It’s a shame we can’t stay here for a few days,’ sighed Frank.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Gilbert. ‘We don’t have time. And, anyway, we can’t afford it. At this place it costs you a fiver to fart.’

  ‘It’s enormous,’ said Frank, looking through a copy of the hotel brochure he had found beside his bed. There were pictures of a swimming pool, a tennis court and something that looked like a shopping arcade.

  ‘It’s certainly handsome,’ said Gilbert. He had expected mosquito nets and moonlight, bleached walls and wooden verandas, fans whisking the torpid air. But his disappointment had turned to astonishment. Here they had found a fortress of steel and glass, push-button music and climate control.

  ‘It says here that the Napoleon has three hundred and twenty-seven bedrooms,’ said Frank. He had noticed that the woman who splashed in the pool looked remarkably similar to the woman who walked on the tennis court who might easily be mistaken for the woman who strolled through the shopping arcade. Turning the page he found her again, sitting in one of three hundred and twenty-seven bedrooms, and smiling into a mirror.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Gilbert. ‘The old Coronation had nearly ninety and that was built before the war.’ He strolled across the room and plucked a banana from a bowl of polished fruit, carefully arranged on a marble table. He studied the banana for some time, searching for a blemish or the sign of a bruise. The banana proved to be perfect.

  ‘Breakfast leisurely in your room or the Coffee Shop,’ read Frank. ‘Soak up some sun at Poolside, play hard at Tennis or browse the beautiful Gardens. After a day of business or pleasure you will enjoy grilled meats and other international specialities cooked to perfection at the Restaurant Napoleon.’ He put down the brochure and gazed about the room. ‘Do you think Sam’s hotel will be anything like this?’ he inquired hopefully.

  ‘Well, he talked about a night club…’ said Gilbert. He skinned the banana and squashed it slowly into his mouth.

  ‘If it’s anything like the Napoleon we’ll need street maps to find our way around,’ said Frank.

  Gilbert grinned and licked banana from his chin. ‘Find us somewhere to eat,’ he said.

  Frank returned to the brochure. ‘We could try the Supper Club, the Restaurant Napoleon, the Coffee Shop or the Cafe Polynesian.’

  ‘The cafe what?’

  ‘Polynesian.’

  ‘No,’ sniffed Gilbert. ‘It sounds like gammon and pineapple rings. What about the Supper Club?’

  ‘It’s a picture of a woman in a diamond necklace smiling at a candle,’ retorted Frank.

  ‘We could try the Restaurant Napoleon,’ said Gilbert doubtfully.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ said Frank, rolling the brochure into a tube.

  ‘No,’ said Gilbert. ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘No,’
said Frank. He placed the tube against his eye like a telescope and used it to survey the floor.

  ‘And we don’t have to worry about Veronica because she still can’t get her mouth working.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Frank. ‘Let’s forget it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gilbert. ‘We’ll have an early night. There’s another long journey tomorrow.’

  At dawn the telephone rang. Veronica woke up and scrambled from bed in a fright. She had dreamt she was home at the Hercules Cafe.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Frank, when she picked up the phone.

  ‘Come and have breakfast.’

  ‘Frank?’ she whispered. ‘Frank?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frank.

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Six something.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Africa,’ said Frank. ‘We’ve had breakfast brought to the room. There’s coffee and toast and fruit and boiled eggs and some little sponge cakes full of sultanas. Come and get it while it’s hot.’

  Veronica pulled on her dressing gown and tiptoed along the corridor to the next room.

  ‘Where’s Gilbert?’ she said, when Frank opened the door.

  ‘He’s gone to find out about the train to Bolozo Noire.’

  Veronica settled herself in an armchair and let Frank wrap her knees in a napkin. ‘I didn’t think it would be like this,’ she murmured peacefully. She threw back her head and yawned like a cat.

  ‘What?’ said Frank as he served her a cup of thick, black coffee.

  ‘Any of it,’ said Veronica. ‘I mean, I’ve never stayed in a real hotel. It’s like a palace.’ She accepted a cake and nibbled at the sultanas.

  The door rattled and Gilbert appeared.

  ‘Is it arranged?’ said Frank.

  ‘The trains aren’t working,’ complained Gilbert. Veronica watched him stamp across the room in search of coffee and toast. He was wearing a linen jacket with a dozen useful pockets and a pair of loose trousers that were strapped to his stomach by a green elastic belt. The trousers billowed and flapped around his legs. Beneath the trousers she caught sight of a pair of heavy walking shoes. He looked dressed for a fortnight of camping. She felt sure that, asked to empty his pockets, he would produce a compass, a bar of chocolate and a Swiss army knife.