by Lesley Lokko
She walked unsteadily in the dark back towards the terrace, heat licking her face like a furred tongue. A mosquito sang insistently somewhere near her left ear. She swatted it impatiently. Another twig snapped; something rustled in the blackness behind her. She turned and waited. The clouds parted suddenly to reveal a sheeny, luminous moon that threw an eerie light across the ground. The rains were due shortly. The air was pregnant with sweat. Every glass she took from the refrigerator would bead almost immediately with condensation. At the same hour every afternoon, a sudden gust of cool-smelling wind would blow across the lawn, followed by bursts of air that flattened pieces of paper against the fences, sending up little scurries of dust into nowhere. Ten or fifteen minutes later, a low drumming would begin, turning to a deafening roar within seconds. It rained so hard and noisily you could barely hear your own thoughts. An hour, occasionally more . . . then it ceased as quickly as it had started. She’d never known rain like it.
She sighed as she continued up the steps to the front door. So many things to get used to. Would she ever get the measure of the damned place? Probably not.
One of the armed security guards was suddenly come upon in the dark. He sprang guiltily to his feet. ‘Vous désirez, madame . . . ?’ He’d been napping on one of the plastic chairs on the veranda.
She waved him away with a hand. ‘Non, merci,’ she said and walked slowly up the stairs. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. Sylvan still wasn’t home.
18
A week later, she was on her way back from the grand marché in the centre of town, delicately picking her way through the piled-up garbage, accidentally caught up in the crowd, when she heard a noise behind her, a long rolling sound, like thunder. She stopped. The silent bodyguard who accompanied her everywhere and whose name she didn’t even know almost bumped into her. ‘What’s that noise?’ she asked, tilting her head to the air, like a dog sniffing the approach of strangers.
‘Nothing,’ the bodyguard shrugged dismissively. ‘Just the market women. They make too much noise.’
‘No . . . there’s shouting. Listen.’ The sound grew louder, a drumming from somewhere behind Rue Tokmaké. ‘What’s happening?’ The sound was growing louder, a rhythmic, swaying chanting of some kind.
He shrugged again. He was carrying her bags, pushing people rudely out of the way as they tried to make for the car. In one, she’d packed a few precious slabs of cheese that she’d bought herself from the Lebanese trader on rue du Grand. It was pointless sending the maids to buy cheese. The poor women couldn’t tell if something had gone off. In the other, there were several bolts of the beautiful local fabrics she liked to turn into those striking dresses she wore on state occasions. There were few white women who could carry off the elaborate headdresses and the strikingly bold patterns and colours, but she could. She had three seamstresses – Nadine, Isabella and Marie-Antoinette – on permanent duty. Together they pored excitedly over the magazines she brought back from Paris, turning out ever more intricate and cleverly fashioned haute couture à l’africaine. ‘It’s nothing,’ he repeated. ‘Let’s go.’
Suddenly the air was ripped apart by gunfire. She turned and saw a crowd of men running towards them, hands linked, some of them carrying crude banners that she couldn’t make out. Everything around them had come to a complete stop. Suddenly the market women who normally sat cooking and gossiping comfortably got to their feet, shouting and screaming. There was another burst of gunfire and the crowd began to dissolve as people broke into a run. A few stray dogs and chickens, picking up on the sudden burst of fear, began to bark and squawk, adding to the confusion. She saw the first line of soldiers advancing down the road, guns trained on the crowd, who by now were running in every direction around them.
‘Madame . . . go! Get inside the car!’ she heard the bodyguard yell above the noise of gunfire as people began to push and shove. A woman balancing a wide pannier of bread on her head broke into a run, sending the loaves flying. ‘Madame!’ The bodyguard was shoving his way through the women crowding round to get to her. She caught a glimpse of her pink basket spiralling upwards, cheeses wrapped in greaseproof paper flying through the air. Someone grabbed her arm. She gasped and struggled to break free but it was her bodyguard. He’d abandoned her purchases and was shoving her roughly in the direction of the car. ‘Get in, madame! Get in!’ He pushed her forwards until they reached it. He yanked open the door and shoved her in the back. There was no time to argue. The driver already had the engine running. More gunshots rang out, pinging crazily against the parked cars around them. The driver turned round, shot them a terrified glance and responded automatically to the bodyguard’s scream, ‘Go!’ The car lurched forwards, narrowly missing a woman whose mouth opened as if in slow motion but no sound came through the thick bulletproof glass. Anouschka covered her head with her hands, too terrified to scream.
They zigzagged their way in fits and starts down the road that was now thronging with running men and women until they reached Avenue de la Présidence. It was almost empty. The driver put his foot down and they went sailing across the intersection with Avenue de Gaulle and straight up the boulevard that led to the palace. The car screeched to a halt in front of the main entrance and the bodyguard leapt out. He was in a state of high excitement. He opened the door for her and then ran towards the rear of the palace, his firm, high buttocks pumping furiously as he went.
‘Madame?’ Ophélia, the cook and housekeeper, was standing in the hallway, surprised to see her back so soon. ‘Est-ce-que ça va, Madame? Tout va bien?’
‘Yes, yes,’ Anouschka said breathlessly, aware that her hair was dishevelled and her face bright red and sweaty. ‘There was some trouble . . . in town.’
‘Trouble, madame?’
Anouschka nodded. ‘Yes, I’m not sure what was going on . . . there was a crowd . . . and some gunshots. I don’t know what—’ She stopped herself just in time. How many times had Sylvan warned her against saying too much in front of the servants? ‘I’m going upstairs,’ she concluded.
Ophélia looked at her but said nothing. As Anouschka turned to go, she saw someone standing in the doorway to the kitchens, just to the left of the stairway. She saw Ophélia make a quick, concealed gesture with her hand but the gesture was so swift and so fleeting it was hard to tell what it was. A dismissal? Warning? She didn’t know. She suddenly felt rather overwhelmed. Where was Sylvan? It was nearly eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning. He was normally downstairs in his study with half a dozen ministers and officials. The driveway was usually full of the dark green Peugeot 504 cars that every government official seemed to use. Today it was empty.
She climbed the stairs wearily to their room and closed the door. She switched on the rattling air-conditioner and kicked off her shoes. She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at her hands. They were shaking. She saw very clearly again the faces of people in the crowd. A young man who turned his head to see where the shouts were coming from and whose face almost collided with her own. The details flashed before her eyes. Yellowish-brown skin, pocked by tiny raised pimples and straggling whorls of tight black hair. Near the mouth there was a tiny puckered strip of light pink, a scar, perhaps. She wasn’t aware of even seeing it at the time. The pregnant woman whom the driver had nearly knocked down in his haste to get away. The pinkish wet inside of her mouth as it opened on a scream, row upon row of beautifully even teeth. A hand flattened against the window as the car tried to move through the crowd. The pale imprint of the palm, lines etched clearly in darker brown and, turning slightly as the hand moved away, the clear line where the velvety blackness of the outer hand met the salmon pink of the palm. A watch; a frayed cuff-sleeve; the flash of earrings and someone’s headdress, which had slipped. Everything, every little detail, came flooding back. She let herself slide off the bed until she was sitting on the ground. Her head felt heavy and her heart was thumping fast. Nothing had actually happened. They’d got away, driven home. But something might happen, n
o? If not now, then one day. Soon.
19
SYLVAN
Like many things he read about himself, it wasn’t quite true. He had not been his father’s favourite son. There were even some who whispered he wasn’t his father’s son at all, not that he paid them any attention. He folded the newspaper carefully and put it aside. In all likelihood, it was his stepmother who had started the damned rumours in any case. Even now, so many years later, she could not accept that a young French actress, une femme blanche, had supplanted her in her people’s affections. The woman who was now – and who had been for the past nine years – La Première Dame.
Across the room, staring at herself in closed, dreamy self-absorption, la Première Dame herself sat, mid-point in her preparations for a state dinner. A visiting delegation from his ‘old friends’, the French. That was the line the journalist had used. Ses anciens amis, the statement somehow managing to be both benign and sinister in the same breath. He looked down at his bare feet after their hour-long pedicure. It was in Paris that he’d acquired the taste for such small luxuries. Pedicures, massages, bespoke tailoring. Nothing in the world like the attention money could buy. Nowadays his suits and shirts came directly from Dege & Skinner in London and a local girl came in once a week to attend to his hands and feet.
His mind drifted back to the article. In spite of himself he was impressed. It was cleverly done, subversive rather than inflammatory, written in the flowery, somewhat overwrought language that the journalist, Kweku Ameyaw, liked to use. He knew Ameyaw. They’d actually been students together in Paris at the same time, though their social circles had never really overlapped. An intense man, given to protests and demonstrations and Trotskyite sentiment. Sylvan remembered him well. He’d returned to Lomé long before Sylvan. He sighed. It was high time someone paid Ameyaw a visit. He pulled the soft flesh of his lower lip into his mouth, biting gently. Whom should he send? Attipoe? Gbédéma? He scratched his elbow. Of the two, Gbédéma was certainly the more brutal. Still, brutality had its uses, he mused. There were some, including his so-called friends, the French, who thought he was too soft. Too friendly. That his marriage, and the trappings of luxury it had provided him with, had weakened him. It seemed not everyone was as thrilled with his movie-star wife as the Togolese public.
He let go of his lip with a soft ‘phut’ and sighed deeply again. Yes, he would send Gbédéma to pick Kweku Ameyaw up. Rough him up and scare him a little. Not enough to make him leave – no, that would be counter-productive. He didn’t want the subversive little shit writing about him from the safety of Barbès. He wanted him close, nearby, here where he could keep an eye – and a thumb, if necessary – on him. Make him toe the line. The last thing he wanted was to give free rein to every journalist with a typewriter and access to liberal French editors with axes to grind. It was ironic. Those very editors with whom he and Anouschka had once danced and dined were now only too ready to give voice to those weaselly little agitators like Ameyaw. He found it almost laughable. The editor of Le Figaro – Didier Cohn – he knew him. Hadn’t they spent many a winter evening in the same Pigalle bars, drinking from the same bottle, even slept with the same girls? For him to turn around and print the kind of mealy-mouthed rubbish about ‘press freedoms’ and ‘unpopular economic reforms’, not to mention all that nonsense about the glass factory at Agouenyive that had provoked the bloody demonstration in the first place . . . unforgivable. A betrayal, really.
He yawned, his attention distracted by Anouschka, who had risen from her toilette. She was wearing a loose silk robe and a pair of high heels. She put one high-heeled sandal down carefully in front of the other as she crossed the room, like she used to in the old days when he’d sat in the front row of those warehouses and hotel lobbies and train stations that they’d converted into catwalks or whatever they called them, packed with beautiful women and their gay, flamboyant male counterparts. He’d sat amongst them drinking the free champagne, making small talk, watching with the rest of them as those absurdly slender, elongated creatures from another world strutted up and down, stopping in front of him, hands balanced jauntily on that piece of bone that could hardly be called a hip before turning and swaying, swaying as they sauntered back and forth. He felt the strong stirring of desire within him, deep inside his belly. He looked down at himself, watching with detached fascination as his penis thickened, tenting his shorts. His suit lay draped over the chair by the window. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly eight o’clock. The dinner was due to begin in half an hour. Anouschka took for ever to get ready. If he approached her now they would surely be late. She would be hot and sweaty and her hair would require ‘fixing’. The thought did nothing to dampen his sudden ardour. He got up purposefully, his cock now fully erect and throbbing dully. They would be late. So what? The French would wait. They would all wait. Wasn’t he le fucking Président? He laughed suddenly, delightedly, at his own wit.
20
SIX MONTHS LATER
ANOUSCHKA
The sour, metallic taste in her mouth was a dead giveaway. That and her swollen breasts. She put her hands on her abdomen and drew a deep, shaky breath. It had been six weeks since the night Sylvan had practically forced himself on her just before the all-important dinner with the French ministers and members of his cabinet. Yes, that was the night she’d conceived. It had to be. She’d been so angry with him that she hadn’t allowed him near her since. She’d had to take a hasty shower, re-dry her hair and then the bloody electricity went out and it took them half an hour to find the damn garden boy with the key for the generator . . . all in all, by the time she’d managed to make herself presentable again, she was over an hour late. She was furious. The dinner had gone badly. Everyone except Sylvan, of course, was in a foul mood. He left shortly afterwards on one of those interminable, pointless multi-country trips around the region. Niger and Chad. Did she want to accompany him? Hell, no. She felt her stomach turn again. Well, if she really was pregnant and she managed to hold on to the baby, it would mean leaving Lomé for the next few months. She hadn’t been back to France since Christmas and she was desperate to go.
She leaned her forehead against the marginally cooler surface of the mirror and took a few deep, shuddering breaths. Four pregnancies in ten years, all of them over before they’d properly begun. Sylvan didn’t know; no one knew. Did she actually want a child? Aside from the obvious danger a baby would pose to her figure, the prospect was daunting. Feeding, washing, cleaning, spending hours with it dangling a set of plastic baubles above a cot, all that ridiculous-sounding baby-talk that she heard others make – could she, Anouschka Malaquais-Betancourt, actually do that? She’d never been the maternal type. If the truth were told, the miscarriages she’d suffered had actually been a relief. And yet . . . there were worse places to have a child than Lomé, she mused, flushing the toilet on the thin trail of vomit that was surely the evidence of a pregnancy. There were servants galore. Housekeepers, cooks, nannies, drivers, gardeners, an endless supply of other children. Anyone and everyone to make the day-to-day running of the household and the bringing up of a child as trouble-free as possible.
Except, of course, it was anything but trouble-free. Supervising the damn staff was a full-time job, nowhere more so than Lomé. She thought of the two young girls whose job it was to keep their Parisian apartment clean and tidy and nearly wept. Here she had to remind everyone not once, not twice, but every single day. Clean this, wipe that, dust here, sweep there. One of the girls, that sullen girl whose name she could never remember, just looked at her with the cow-faced, mutinous expression that was impossible to read . . . and then continued to do what she’d always done – almost nothing – despite her screaming instructions to the contrary. There were days when, exhausted by the effort of arguing with them, she retreated to the bedroom, switched on the air-conditioner (if the electricity was on) and lay down on the bed, stunned into sleep by defeat. In some ways, despite her position as la Première Dame, they had the upper ha
nd. Who cared if the dressing table hadn’t been dusted? She did. Who cared if there were no fresh flowers to greet guests in the huge marble lobby? She did. The head cook in the palace was a Moslem and therefore didn’t drink. Pointless, therefore, expecting him to judge the merits of one wine over another. In the battle to apply her own exacting standards to a wayward, reluctant household, she’d lost. Sylvan didn’t understand her despair. He didn’t want to be bothered with tales of how no one listened to her, how difficult it was, how sulky and uncooperative the staff were. Just get it done. He had a whole country to run. She’d been given a house. Surely she could manage that?
Seen from that perspective, then, a child might be both blessing and curse. It would get her out of the place for at least six months, probably more. She’d be cosseted and looked after, fussed over by her mother – well, perhaps that was stretching things a little far – but she’d see all her old friends again, and François . . . she began to brighten up. A baby would mean an excuse to stay in Paris a little longer. A chance to see her friends. A change. Some new outfits, a new hairstyle, new shoes, a complete makeover. She’d be back in the papers again, back in the public eye. She hurried into the bedroom and fished a notebook out of her bag. By the time she’d finished making a long list of all the things having a baby might mean, her bad mood had all but disappeared. She took a long, leisurely bath, did her hair and dressed for dinner. The foreign minister and his wife were invited; she made sure to look her best. Sylvan was delighted with her; she’d been walking around with that grumpy expression for weeks, he whispered, as they walked together towards the dining room. Tonight she looked beautiful, just like she used to.