‘Filing,’ said Prentice. ‘Pound to a penny.’
‘Christ knows what,’ said Protheroe.
‘Probably today’s lunch menu,’ said Prentice. ‘D’you know there’s something bloody obscene about the way that man is always on the telex. I reckon he gets the same kick out of punching tape that perverts get from leather underwear.’
Faraday looked down the beach. Girls were playing Tong- Tong and an old woman was filming a super-eight special of her poodle polluting children’s sandcastles.
Beyond them he could see the Beebman standing at the water mark; now dressed in his safari suit, the surf splashing his ankles, he was preparing the eleventh take of his fifth ‘piece to camera’ in two days. He stood rigid in front of the lens, microphone in one hand, a wad of notes in the other, horribly earnest.
Faraday heard the occasional line . . . ‘Sun-drenched island paradise, perched precariously between the . . .’
‘Day-Lewis has gone off,’ he said casually to Prentice and the rest. ‘I saw him catch the ferry early this morning.’ Reaction to the news startled him, it was so unexpected. Prentice coughed violently into the stone jug, gin flew up his nose, drenched his sinus and stung his eyes. He scrambled up blindly, slapping his stomach and buttocks as if he’d been attacked by wasps.
Protheroe farted involuntarily which shocked him almost as much as Faraday’s announcement.
Doubleday, making the most of the confusion, scooped up the loose change that had been left on the table as a tip to the beach waiter on a previous round and dropped it expertly into his top jacket pocket. Only the waiter saw, and cursed Doubleday, his future and his family in coarse Patois.
‘You saw him do bloody well what?’ yelled Prentice, between fits of sneezing. His eyes were bloodshot and streaming.
Faraday realized something had upset them. He came out of the water. ‘I saw him buy a ticket at the Harbour Master’s office this morning. Just before breakfast.’
‘A ticket to where?’ Prentice was staring out to sea, his voice had suddenly become dull and empty.
‘I didn’t ask him,’ answered Faraday. ‘But the posters on the side of the ferry were advertising day trips to Kyjack at 32 francs return.’
Protheroe had joined Prentice and they stared out to sea together, side by side. Without looking, Protheroe bent down, searched for his rum, found it, stood up again and slowly lifted it to his silent open mouth.
‘. . . sun-drenched island paradise, perched precariously between the ambitions of the West and East . . .’ The sea
breeze picked up the Beebman’s twelfth take and passed on.
In a faraway almost friendly voice, Prentice asked, ‘And where is Kyjack, Faraday, me old Matey?’
He sounded like an old blind man asking for help to cross a busy street.
‘It’s an island fifteen nautical miles east from here. One of Union’s archipelagoes and the only other one that’s inhabited. Couple of hundred people there.’ Without thinking, he added, ‘There’s not another ferry till next Friday.’
There was a long pause.
‘Fuck me! Jesus Christ! And kick me old Granny in a coal bucket,’ said Prentice. Protheroe, suddenly coming to terms with the situation, began pacing backwards and forwards from the Martini parasol to the edge of the water, marching almost, turning expertly about on the ball of his foot like a sentry at St James’s.
‘Trust the sneaky bastard,’ said Prentice. ‘So much for the communal pot and bloody tit-bits and share alike crap! ’ But Protheroe didn’t seem to hear.
‘Now come on lads . . .’ said Doubleday, ‘. . . Day-Lewis never agreed to share . . . can’t remember him being asked anyway.’ He silently beckoned to the beach waiter with the crook of his little finger.
‘And you can shut your bleedin’ mouth, Matey, if that’s all you can say,’ said Prentice very loudly, and with malice. ‘What we need now is a plan.’ He was himself again.
He too began pacing with Protheroe, walking the same distance, umbrella to sea, turn, sea to umbrella. But, after the first leg, the pace exhausted him and he slowed down to his own hardly moving shuffle.
Doubleday, always ready to make a profit, pulled out his little red expenses book and wrote . . . ‘FERRY TRIP TO THE ISLAND OF KUJACK: 32 FRANCS. PLUS TAXI TO AND FRO HARBOUR: 15 FRANCES, PLUS LINCH SELF: 8 FRANCS, PLUS ENTERTAINING CAPTAIN AND CONTACT ABOARD: 20 FRANCS. PLUS GRATUITIES: 4 FRANCS.’ He totted up the cost and was well pleased with his day’s work.
Faraday was genuinely surprised at the commotion and was anxious not to cause any further upsets. But he was nevertheless desperate to know what he had said that meant so much.
‘Why did Day-Lewis catch the ferry, Prentice?’ he asked.
‘To get the bloody story.’ Prentice, his eyes still streaming, was searching for his handkerchief. Unable to find it, he pulled his shirt off his head and blew his nose loudly, filling the tail with mucus, gin and sand.
‘What story?’ asked Faraday.
‘The story we’ve missed,’ said Protheroe on his about- turn. ‘The story he’s got.’
Faraday was still confused. ‘But how could he have a story? He’s only been gone three hours . . . the ferry will only just be arriving there.’
‘’Course he’s got a story,’ said Prentice. ‘Think he’d catch a ferry for the bleedin’ fun of it? Would you?’
‘Well actually,’ said Faraday, ‘I had thought of it . . . make the most of the . . .’
Prentice groaned loudly and Faraday, realizing he was only aggravating things, decided to say no more.
Prentice and Protheroe now ignored each other, immersed as they were in their own separate tragedies. Prentice, twisting his shirt tail around his fingers, began to hiccup. Protheroe continued his pacing, still turning about immaculately and uttering a new obscenity every time he did.
Doubleday, in the shade, very quietly ordered himself another drink with the loose change he’d stolen from the waiter who, on his way back to the bar, cursed again the white man’s cheek with oaths that dated back two hundred years.
Faraday, knowing that an apology would only do harm, rolled down his trousers, picked up his shoes and socks and began walking up the beach away from the drama.
Behind him, to the right, came the Beebman’s
‘. . . sundrenched island paradise perched precariously between the ambitions of the East and West, desperately trying to hold its own . . .’
But the breeze turned again to the sea and Faraday never did hear the end of it.
The cannon on the Governor’s Fort was fired at the traditional hour to mark midday and white doves scattered into the air, then regrouped and began sweeping in formation above the harbour.
Faraday reached the Boulevard Dr Clobert, named after a Parisian surgeon who had donated a clinic, and stopped a horse-drawn trap. Its varnished wood was overpainted with flowers and grapes and a small canvas bag hung between the mare’s hind legs to catch what, the driver told Faraday, his courgettes thrived on.
A sign nailed to the palm tree outside the hotel warned people of falling coconuts, and a blind man played marimbas. Faraday read the menu pinned to a brass stand and waved to the concierge as he ran up the steps to the wide cool courtyard inside.
The Socialist Republic of Union was now two days old and there was cold fresh lobster mayonnaise for lunch.
It was the dogs that alerted them, long before the army convoy had reached the rice fields, and they stood up from their work and raised their right hand in a limp salute, as their political commissars had taught them to.
The convoy followed the track as it ran in a half circle around the small harbour of Chinde, where the Zambesi River joins the Indian Ocean on the Mozambique coast. The villagers, planting rice in the marshland both sides of the raised dirt track, had heard convoys before but passing on the main Beira road a coup
le of miles away. They had never seen one this close before, never this close to the sea.
They counted the green, canvas-topped lorries as they passed and saw they were filled with soldiers and wooden
crates and they wondered why they should come to the rice fields, why, if they were travelling north, they hadn’t kept to the main road. There was nothing at the end of this track except the eucalyptus forest the Portuguese had planted thirty years ago to try and drain the marshes. And beyond that were the shallow stagnant lagoons, the sand- dunes and the sea.
They watched their dogs chase the slow-moving trucks, snapping at the tyres, saw them suddenly scatter yelping as a smaller truck came up fast from behind, an open truck with four soldiers sitting in the back, their rifles pointing to the sky. The villagers slowly waved their salute again and the driver turned in his seat and saluted back, his fist clenched tight, punching the air above him.
Later, after dark as the villagers sat round their fires and ate their boiled ground rice, one of them who had been working his rice paddy closest to the track said the driver of the small truck, the one who had waved back at them, had been wearing a patch of cloth on the back of his head. What the Portuguese used to call a skullcap. And bright red.
4
‘He’s locked it. Christ! The bleeder’s locked himself in.’
Prentice turned and spread-eagled himself across the telex room door re-enacting the Crucifixion. Faraday watched from the stairs.
‘He’s filing,’ said Protheroe and Doubleday together.
‘’Course the cunning bastard’s filing, and he’s tied up the machine so that our lads in London can’t pick up on his first edition and send it back to us for a follow-up.’
The three stared at each other and then at the door, tortured by the sound of the chattering telex as J. J. Day-Lewis sent his scoop to the Daily Telegraph Foreign Desk in London.
They had waited all afternoon for him at the quayside by the Harbour Master’s office, straining their eyes for the first sighting of the ferry returning from Kyjack Island. It was past five o’clock when they saw Day-Lewis, shoulder to shoulder with the captain on the platform above the wheelhouse, such, as Prentice was to remark later, was the prestige still of the Daily Telegraph among foreigners.
If Day-Lewis saw them, he didn’t acknowledge, didn’t return their happy, friendly waves. Even before the gangplank had been fastened, Protheroe had galloped up it, ahead of the ticket collector, to help him with his luggage, which happened to be a pair of sunglasses, a straw boater with a bright red silk band and a rolled-up copy of Newsweek. But Day-Lewis ignored Protheroe’s flourish and went down the gangplank unaided, neatly sidestepping Prentice’s outstretched helping hands.
Doubleday, standing almost upright for the occasion, opened the door of the taxi Prentice had ordered, but Day-Lewis, still unseeing, preferred to walk. He adjusted his sunglasses squarely on the bridge of his nose, tucked the rolled magazine under his arm like a swagger cane, patted the boater firmly on his head and marched away, the steel- tips on his shoes singing on the cobbles.
‘Rude bleeder,’ said Doubleday.
‘Rude?’ shouted Prentice, ‘He’s uncouth.’ He swore loudly at the taxi driver who was demanding payment for waiting and trotted up the gangplank to join Protheroe on board. Together they opened lockers, emptied waste bins, drained empty Coca-Cola bottles and peered into portholes, scouring the ferry for any evidence to explain Day-Lewis’s sudden journey abroad.
The ferry’s captain, an old mulatto with grey crinkly hair and long eyes, yellowing slightly, even helped them, when in answer to his question, ‘C’est que vous faîtes?’ Protheroe had answered, ‘Cherchering pour un alien agent prefabricator.’ He had always insisted that a second language was essential to a successful career as a Foreign Correspondent.
They searched for nearly an hour, but found nothing. Then Protheroe, about to leave the ferry, suddenly in his quick anger kicked the gangplank and it fell neatly into the water between the boat and the quay.
The mulatto captain, certain there had been a very good reason for it, retired below to read back numbers of Figaro, and Le Canard. He had long been a keen student of international affairs.
After some moments of confused shouting. Doubleday, still waiting on the quay, was ordered to bring another gangplank and in twenty minutes he returned leading two large fishermen carrying the replacement.
Totally exhausted, Prentice and Protheroe came ashore and Doubleday wrote into his little red book: ‘to hire of gangplank: 40 francs, plus gratuities to gangplank- men: 10 FRANCS.’
All in all, he thought, a very profitable day.
Everyone else in the hotel had gone to bed. Even the barman, a veteran of late-night marathons, had fallen asleep in a standing position by the fridge.
It was two a.m. and Faraday was as tired as he could ever remember being. He felt sick with the rum inside him and the ugly smell of stale tobacco. The plastic-covered seats they sat on were sticky in the heavy, moist night air even though the windows were open. The mating cicadas in the palms along the Boulevard, and the hiss as the sea met the sand beyond, were the only night noises.
Prentice and Protheroe sat on their usual barstools staring into their drinks. They had watched Day-Lewis leave the telex room at ten o’clock clutching sheaves of copy and some minutes later reappear down the stairs, fresh and in a change of clothes, smelling of eau de cologne and running a file lightly across his fingernails. They had watched him smile at the headwaiter and saw the flurry of attention as he sat in his usual window seat overlooking the Boulevard and the late evening traffic.
Protheroe had suggested they searched his room but Prentice said that was unethical, and anyway, Day-Lewis wouldn’t be idiot enough to leave the story lying around.
They had not eaten. The dreadful waiting for the callback from their London desks had crippled their appetites.
‘Where’s Doubleday?’ asked Prentice.
‘Said he was going for a pee,’ said Protheroe.
‘That was half an hour ago.’
‘He’s had a lot of beer.’
‘With our bloody money. Jesus! He’s still the meanest bastard I’ve ever met. He’d swipe the skin off a lice! D’you know . . .’
‘He’s probably gone off with a jungle bunny. It is after
midnight.’
‘What’s a jungle bunny?’ asked Faraday.
‘Girls, Matey . . . black ones . . . what he calls his “bit of cocoa”.’
‘Why only after midnight?’
‘That’s his Jekyll and Hyde,’ said Prentice. ‘Come midnight and his chopper takes over. Has to blow his load. Can only do it with black ones. It’s the only thing he’s ever been known to spend his money on.’
‘Doesn’t spend much then,’ said Protheroe.
‘D’you know,’ said Prentice, warming to the subject, ‘I’ve actually seen him bargaining with a hooker on the job.’
‘Seen him?’
‘Seen him! Nigerian Civil War . . . August ’68, shared a room with him at a brothel in Lagos. Only a bit of curtain between us but I can see Doubleday sitting on her now. Bloody great piece she was with her hair twisted into spikes so that her head looked like a sea mine and arguing about the price. But he got his way and he swore blind she tried just as hard to please.’
‘He once told me,’ said Protheroe, ‘he could only really enjoy it if he thought he was getting a bargain.’
‘I remember,’ said Prentice, ‘when we got to Port Harcourt, following that bastard Adekunle as he buggered the Biafrans. We shacked up for the night in some grubby hotel, shared the room with two Japanese photographers. Doubleday pulled in a bunny, straight out of a mud hut, but pretty with it and he started banging her right there in the corner. The Japs protested so Doubleday told them to go and sleep on the balcony where they were eaten by mosquito
es. Then, sod me, an hour later, if he didn’t go out to them and ask if they had change for half a crown.’
‘He’ll cripple himself with SDs if he’s not careful,’ said Protheroe.
‘What’s SDs?’ asked Faraday in what had become now a very small, tired and faraway voice.
‘SDs lad,’ said Prentice, ‘is Sperm Deficiency; it’s when your sperm factories can’t keep up production . . . supply not keeping abreast of demand if you see what I mean. You get SDs lad and you’ll know it. Balls drop, stomach tightens and you bend over like a hunchback. Haven’t you ever noticed that old Doubleday can’t stand upright?’ Protheroe began laughing. Then, ‘Jesus, the machine! ’ They ran to the telex room and Faraday, feeling quite dizzy now, slowly followed them, guiding himself from table to table. The barman, in his half sleep assuming the sudden noise was Prentice, reached out, eyes closed, for the bottle, poured gin on to the floor and fell back gently against the fridge again, asleep.
The words appeared at extraordinary speed on the pink telex paper, and it was, as they’d expected, the first of the call-backs.
020045 MIRROR LONDON URGENT: TO PRENTICE FROM ELLIS NIGHT DESK. HOW COME TELEGRAPH LEAD CLAIMING SECOND COUP UNIONWISE QUERY. FIRST PERSON DAY-LEWIS REPORTING BREAKAWAY REPUBLIC KYJACK ISLAND QUOTING UDI LEADER: WE KYJACKS CAN PADDLE OUR OWN CANOE END QUOTE STOP DISAPPOINTED WE CANNOT FOLLOW-UP UNABLE TO REACH YOU AS YOUR TELEX OCCUPIED TILL OUR LAST EDITION BEDDED STOP AND REGARDS.
Prentice groaned and grabbed the back of the chair to steady himself. Immediately the machine began again. Protheroe didn’t even bother to read the answerback code. It had to be for him.
MAILMAN EX LONDON URGENT: MAKE LIKE HELL KYJACK BOY BEFORE SUNDAY’S UPDATE WITH EMOTIONAL FRONT-LINER.
Faraday left them and slowly, wearily climbed the broad sweep of stairs to find his bedroom. He got to the landing just in time to see a bare, slim, very dark-skinned back disappear into a bedroom halfway along the corridor. As he passed, he could hear Doubleday and the girl arguing. Faraday hoped she would get the better of the bargain but somehow, sadly, he doubted it.
Red Joker Page 4