Red Joker

by Michael Nicholson

  ‘Marxism then?’

  ‘Ah! I’m happy to see you can tell the two apart. So many assume that they necessarily go together, but you understand of course that needn’t be so.’

  Prentice nodded knowingly back, and then to the others in the room.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said the President, looking up and around the room, ‘I will not bore you with the dialectic of materialism or the infrastructure of African Soviet Satellites. But let me assure you, and through you the rest of the world, that under my government Union will remain very much as you see it today.

  ‘We do not have the type of economy that would encourage me to pursue favourite Marxist ideals. I have spent much of my academic life advocating Marxist fundamentals, but I would not, on an island of this size, attempt to impose such a thing here, as much as I would like to. But I do sincerely believe, as a humanist and a political- economist, in the fairest system for the greatest number.

  ‘We could very easily of course establish Marxism overnight. But we would starve just as quickly because we haven’t the means to sustain it.

  ‘My case, simply put, is this. I shall pursue a policy of non-alignment which, considering our political geography, is the only one that can ensure our economic safety.’

  ‘So the American Satellite Tracking Station stays?’ asked Mailman Protheroe.

  ‘Yes,’ said the President, seeming a little more at ease now. He rolled a pencil between his palms the way a child makes a Plasticine snake. It made a slight whirling sound which seemed to divert all but the most interested in the room.

  ‘I see no reason,’ he said, ‘why it shouldn’t continue operating. It is here after all for peaceful purposes and this morning I received further assurances from Washington to that effect.’

  ‘And all the Americans . . . one hundred and twenty of them . . . they all stay too?’ The Mailman again.

  ‘I’m told the station cannot operate without them . . . yes of course they will stay.’

  ‘So Mr President,’ - Protheroe sounded determined - ‘to maintain your policy of non-alignment, you might also allow Russian ships anchorage here for the first time?’

  The Beebman leant back. ‘This one,’ he said loudly to his cameraman who had been filming at his own professional discretion the past few minutes of talk anyway.

  President Laurent paused. This was a question he had been expecting and one he had prepared for but, nevertheless, he knew that however it was answered it would cause some embarrassment later.

  He carefully laid the pencil down, positioning the lead tip level with the front edge of the table, looked up and began to examine the faces of those closest to him.

  ‘I do not,’ he said after his pause, ‘see any reason for new agreements concerning anchorage or supply facilities here. No ship in the past has ever been refused entry here and no ship will be in the future.’

  ‘Especially Russian warships?’ asked Protheroe.

  ‘No! Not especially Russian. All ships are welcome. That possibly is God’s purpose in creating small islands in large oceans; as refuge for tired ships and their crews.’

  Alf Prentice coughed loudly. ‘Mr President,’ he said, ‘it seems so little is going to change here that I’m surprised you thought a coup was ever necessary.’

  Both aides either side of the President began shuffling their papers and whispering advice into his ears, but he gently pushed them away.

  Again he looked slowly around the room. Faraday had at first thought it was deliberately done for its dramatic effect, but he realized now this wasn’t so. The man was composing an answer to an unexpected question and Faraday was impressed at the man’s obvious sincerity.

  Photographers focused for the hundredth time. Journalists were bent double over their notebooks scribbling so fast and so illegibly that few afterwards would recognize what they’d written and would be forced to resort to one of the many tape recorders on the table in front of the President.

  Prentice was sticking a thumb up his nose again and flicking pellets at the Mailman, but his aim was becoming sloppy and most were landing on the Beebman’s lightweight wash-and-wear tropical jacket instead.

  The President rested his arms on the table and began tracing the grain of the wood on the desktop with his fingernails.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘we are not ambitious people here. We are such a small island there just isn’t the room for grand design. If I have any personal ambition, it is to continue living here with my children and those thousands of Unionese who belong to the larger family. Simply that.

  ‘Union, as you have seen, is a very beautiful island. It is quite properly, I think, described by our tourist office as “God’s own fruit and vegetable garden”. Its beauty is its only asset, with of course, the added bonus of whatever the seagulls care to leave behind.’ He smiled.

  ‘In the past, since our formal Independence from Metropolitan France, the proceeds of what Union produced went into the pockets of too few people. The President I now replace had five cars, including two Mercedes Benz and another, what is called I’m told, a Lamborghini. In the harbour you can see his schooner. Solitaire. He owned three villas here, one on the Seychelles and another in Kenya south of Mombasa.

  ‘All these items will shortly be put up on sale and sold at the highest market price we can get, and the money will be used to build schools and clinics.

  ‘His personal fortune has been estimated at over four and a half million US dollars, safely banked in Zurich, and which we cannot touch. And while this man flirted with high society in Europe, America and Asia, gambling, providing for a succession of mistresses, people here still walked barefoot. Many didn’t even know where to find a clinic when they were sick. There was only one school, provided by the Church, so less than eight per cent of our children can read and write as a consequence. They were destined like their fathers before them to remain pretty mulattos in floppy straw hats . . . to clean shoes and pose politely for the tourists’ cameras.

  ‘As I have said, gentlemen, the source of our wealth must remain unchanged . . . that we must accept. But we shall change its distribution. More will have more, now that I have the power and the duty to give it to them.

  ‘This coup was necessary. You are very wrong if you think otherwise.’

  Faraday walked slowly towards the Seapoint Monument at the end of the harbour wall, which ran out to sea like a bent forefinger. It stopped just short of the coral reef, allowing about thirty yards of deep water for boats to come and go, so the harbour was well sheltered from the occasional violent movements of the Indian Ocean and the winds that played tricks on the tides.

  Faraday had sent his story, pretty film of Petit Royan, life as usual in the streets and markets, fishing boats, women cleaning crabs as their men cleaned nets. It had not amounted to much but, as Prentice had pointed out, ‘If it isn’t there, the biggest lens in the world isn’t going to find it.’

  Faraday was frankly disappointed with his first coup. He’d always thought of them as violent with the aftermath of violence to be recorded; tanks on the streets, machine-gun nests on the rooftops, frightened refugees carrying their babies to safety, the liberators’ rifle butts bruising their backs to hurry them along. Buildings damaged by the street fighting. Ministries holed by rockets, roads ploughed up by mortar shells, the new flag of the new masters flying above the radio station.

  But there was none of this on Union, which made things very difficult, because Faraday and his film crew, like the Beebman and his, needed to record the moment of history on celluloid and there would be disbelief in London as they watched his film rushes blood, sans tanks, sans anguish, sans sprawling bodies in the gutters. He wondered, as he stood looking out to sea, whether his inexperience had deceived him, whether he couldn’t have created more drama in his report had he introduced more informed source ‘speculation’ of present and future. Speculation wa
s, after all, the newsman’s carrot.

  He wondered, long after the film was on its way by jet to Europe whether he had succumbed to President Laurent’s plausibility. Perhaps he should have written more innuendo into his script suggesting, as Prentice and the others had done, that the pleasant Professor President was the frontispiece for something far more sinister. It was all, he knew, merely a matter of interpretation; as it had been put to him once, ‘. . . just find the film to fit the bias’. But, entirely due to his honest inexperience, Faraday had filmed only what was available, which was, after all, the reason for their visit. They had boarded the deposed President’s yacht, had filmed his five cars, including the purple-painted Lamborghini with its solid gold gear change and its silver lame seat covers. They had interviewed tourists in the streets, on the beaches, verandahs and cafes. All had first to be told of the coup before they could say what they thought of it. This ignorance wasn’t their fault. It would be another three days before the weekly Union Nouvelle newspaper carried the story.

  They had filmed women picking coffee beans, boys climbing palms for coconuts, children gathering guavas, pineapples, pomegranates, mangoes and lychees, their fathers cutting sugar cane, their mothers pruning the grapevines.

  His report ended with President Laurent’s Press Conference. Not sensational stuff. As Prentice had said, it was something to do with a silk purse and a sow’s ear.

  It was no consolation to Faraday that every other reporter on the story was as desperate, ‘scratching’ it was called. Only the Beebman seemed busy, constantly running to his car, to his room, to his car again; to the chemist.

  Faraday was standing at the very edge of the seawall. Behind him was the Monument, tall and made of bronze. The inscription on the granite plinth read: ‘Henri Lucien Chaudenson. Governor, 1749-1821’.

  In the tourist guides. Governor Chaudenson was described as a strong, handsome man of stubborn Gallic nature, but two and a half centuries of sea spray and south-westerlies had changed all that. There was nothing strong or stubborn about him now. The face was smoothed and pitted by salt and the bronze eyes had lost the sculptor’s sharp retina. They looked blank, seeing nothing, not the vivid blue horseshoe of coral, nor dolphins that frequently eased their way through the deep water channel, nor the squadrons of flying fish reflecting every colour of the sun and sea as they skimmed the water, dipping and banking, sometimes bouncing the waves before they dived below.

  According to the tourist booklet, the statue of Governor Chaudenson had been erected a year after he had died peacefully in his bed from a stroke, aged seventy-two. He had never married again, though any reasonable man of any reasonable church would have understood had he done so. But the memory of his loving wife and children left behind prevented him and somehow he had never regretted it.

  Faraday looked up into the worn face, wanting to feel the romance of history, prepared to communicate with his ghost, urging the spirit of the man past to fill up the crevices of the bronze container. Perhaps, he thought, the ghost did return sometimes to watch the sea and reminisce on the journey that brought him here, regretting maybe the fondness for Cognac that had thereafter confined him. Perhaps the spirit of Chaudenson took very much for granted the sights and sounds of the island that Faraday now marvelled at.

  Seagulls flew low over the reef, turning their heads to one side, scanning the odd bit of flotsam before they flew to their roosts for the night. Faraday turned his back to the sea and watched them in the twilight on their straight course to the mountain rocks above the harbour and the houses.

  Petit Royan, being the only town on the island, was therefore its capital. Its streets rose from the harbour up the slopes of the mountain, narrow and winding criss-crossed by even narrower alleys. All were cobbled in lava stone and laid out in the fan pattern so traditionally French. The different colours of each stone now caught the low evening sunlight and from where Faraday was standing they looked like a mosaic.

  The houses were painted white or ochre-brown with elaborate handpainted patterns of fish or flowers wherever there had been a bare patch of wall. Red clay pantiles covered most roofs, though here and there green glazed tiles marked the houses of the more well-to-do. All of them had been built facing the sea in a broad semi-circle with the harbour as their centre and because the rise of the mountain was so steep, their rear first-floor windows were level with the streets behind.

  And everywhere there was hibiscus, jasmine, bougainvillea and fuchsia in colours Faraday hadn’t before realized existed on nature’s pallet. He had never seen such a concentration of colour. It was as if an aircraft had flown low over the town dropping seed packets at random.

  He stood still, closed his eyes, then opened them again, and anyone watching nearby might have thought he was ill. But he was trying desperately hard to remember it all, anxious it should remain indelible, available to instant recall years ahead. He knew that so many things were gone forever once the eye had left them.

  He strolled slowly back towards Petit Royan and felt

  the breeze on his neck, a soft draught, warm and smelling of salt. He saw the last seagulls, white specks on the dark rock-face, settling for the night, and small squares of yellow electric light began to appear at house fronts as the last sunlight dropped from their stucco.

  And in the harbour lagoon, men sat quietly in small boats with rod and line as teasing fish jumped around them.

  ‘If you ask me, Mateys, there never was a coup. We’ve been brought here on false pretences, and I’ve a bloody good mind to make a formal complaint on behalf of the International Press Corps.’

  Prentice sat on the sand in trousers and braces, his shirt drooped across his head like an Arab’s kaffiyeh. He had applied suntan cream lazily and unevenly so that the brown cinnamon streaked across his chest and back like whip weals. His face was red and sore and the purple-red nose, already beginning to blister, threatened to burst and spray them with gin and plasma. He had rolled up his trousers to his knees and had managed to cross his legs so that he sat there, his stomach almost touching the sand, like a grotesque white Buddha.

  He nodded towards the Boulevard and the direction of the President’s house. ‘I don’t think that bastard realizes just how much we’ve spent coming out here.’

  ‘Christ, Alf, you’ve got a bloody nerve. Pissing yourself stupid and complaining about it,’ said Mailman Protheroe.

  ‘Don’t be snide. Matey, it doesn’t become you,’ said Prentice. ‘I just wouldn’t like us to forget it’s our readers who are paying for all this.’

  Protheroe blew him a kiss, and laughed.

  ‘Your bloody Rag,’ said Prentice, ‘splashed this story just as big as mine, and the readers deserve a decent bloody follow-up.’

  ‘I’ve already done mine,’ said Protheroe.

  ‘Russian ships? A follow-up?’ Prentice started laughing which quickly became a cough. ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t send that to my Granny on a postcard.’

  ‘How d’you know I filed on Russian ships?’

  ‘’Cos every stupid blighter filed on Russian ships.’

  ‘Alf did,’ said Expressman Doubleday from under the shadow of a Martini parasol.

  ‘Who told you that?’ Prentice turned, sweat dripping into his eyes.

  ‘You just said everyone did,’ said Doubleday.

  ‘But I didn’t say I did,’ said Prentice.

  ‘Well did you?’

  ‘’Course I bleedin’ did. What else was there? Needed a bit of tarting up here and there, but it made the lead on page two.’

  ‘Second lead you mean,’ said Protheroe, ‘after the demolition of the Paris pissoirs.’

  ‘Why are you so consistently bloody?’ asked Prentice, adjusting his braces.

  ‘I say, Prentice.’ It was the nicely educated voice of the Beebman. ‘How could you file on Russian ships when the President categorically denied
any special facilities would be offered them?’

  The Beebman was breast-stroking in about three feet of water. He refused to go further because of his fear of sharks and things that go bump in the sea.

  ‘He did say. Matey,’ shouted Prentice back, ‘that the Russians could come here if they wanted, and if that isn’t a nod and a bleedin’ wink I’d like to know what is.’

  ‘What I think he meant, Prentice, is . . .’

  ‘It doesn’t concern me, my old friend,’ said Prentice, ‘what you think he bleedin’ well meant. I’m telling you what he bleedin’ well said. No ships would be refused anchorage here. That’s what. Matey. And who else but the sodden Russians would want to? Not the Brits for a start. We haven’t got anything that would get this far. I’m telling you that once TASS hits Moscow with that line, you’ll have the Soviet fleet queuing up all the way from the bleedin’ Bosporus.’

  But the Beebman had already begun breast-stroking again, daring himself into four feet of water and the unknown to be beyond hearing range of Prentice, and back to the safety of his own camera crew.

  Protheroe suddenly farted. It was very loud and very long, and immaculately controlled. It cracked like a rifle as it forced its way through the tight hairy cheeks of his backside.

  Prentice was downwind, something Protheroe had already established, but he didn’t move. He casually picked up the large stone jug containing the treble measure of gin and tonic and pushed his nose into it, breathing alcoholic fumes until the stench of Protheroe’s bowels had passed.

  Faraday marvelled at it all. He was standing in the shallow water a yard from the sand’s edge, trousers tucked up, shrimps and small fish touching his toes. Watching Prentice and the rest, he thought, was like seeing one of those plays where players know the plot but are allowed to ad-lib their own way to the finale.

  ‘Has anyone seen Day-Lewis?’

  Doubleday was still sitting in the shade of the large sun umbrella, fully dressed in jacket and tie, maintaining a lifelong habit of never exposing his body to the sun or other people’s attention during daylight.