by William Boyd
Apart from the claustrophobic proximity of the buildings to one another, and the noisome cloying stench of rubbish and assorted decomposing matter, it was the heaving manifestation of organic life in all its forms that most struck Morgan about Nkongsamba. Entire generations of families sprawled outside the mud huts like auditioning extras for a “Four Ages of Man” documentary, from wizened flat-breasted grandmothers to potbellied pikkins frowning with concentration as they peed into the gutters. Hens, goats and dogs scavenged every rubbish pile and accessible drain-bed in search of edible scraps, and the flow of pedestrians, treading a cautious path between the mad honking traffic and the crumbling edges of the storm-ditches, never ceased.
Among the brightly clad swarming crowds were alarmingly deformed leprous beggars, with knobbled blunt limbs, who staggered, hopped and crawled along, occasionally, if in a particularly dire condition, propelling themselves about on little wooden trolleys. There were lissom motor-park touts escorting big-buttocked shop assistants; small boys selling trayfuls of biros, combs, orange dusters, coathangers, sunglasses and cheap Russian watches; huge-humped white cows driven by solemn, thin-faced Fulanis from the North. Sometimes dusty, dirt-mantled lunatics from the forests could be seen weaving their nervous way among the throng in crazed incomprehension. One day Morgan had come across one standing at a busy road junction. He wore a filthy loincloth and his hair was dyed mud-orange. He stood with wide unblinking eyes gazing at the Sargasso of humanity that passed before him, from time to time screaming shrill insults or curses, shuffling his feet in a token spell-casting dance. The crowd laughed or just ignored him—the mad are happily tolerated in Africa—content to let him gibber harmlessly on the pavement. For some reason Morgan had felt a sudden powerful bond of sympathy with this guileless fool in his hideously alien environment—he seemed to share and understand his point of view—and spontaneously he had thrust a pound note into his calloused hand as he edged past. The madman turned his yellow eyes on him for a brief moment before stuffing the note into his wide moist mouth where he chewed it up with a salivating relish.
Morgan thought shamefacedly of the episode as he surveyed the town. Depending on his mood Nkongsamba either invigorated or depressed him. Of late—or at least for the last three months—it had cast him into a scathing misanthropy, so profound that had he possessed a spare nuclear bomb or Polaris missile he would gladly have retargeted it here. Blitzed the seven hills in one second. Cleared the ground. Let the jungle creep back in.
For an instant he visualised the mushroom cloud. BOOM. The dust slowly falling and along with it a timeless weighty peace. But inside him he suspected it was probably futile. There was just too much raw, brutal life in the place to allow itself to be obliterated that easily. He thought it would be rather like that cockroach he had tried to kill at home the other night. He had been lost in some lurid paperback when out of the corner of his eye he’d seen a real monster—two inches long, brown and shiny like a tin toy, with two quivering whiskers—scuttling across the concrete floor of his sitting room. He had enveloped it in a noxious cloud of fly-spray, swatted it with his paperback, stamped on it, leapt up and down on the revolting creature like some demented Rumplestiltskin, but to no avail. Although it had been trailing a transparent ooze, its whiskers were buckled, it had lost a couple of legs and was only groggily keeping on course, it had nonetheless made the shelter of the skirting board.
He turned away from the view and the faint noise of tooting cars that came through the firmly closed windows. The rain would be nice, he thought, dampen the dust, provide a bit of coolness for an hour or so. It was important to keep cool, he said to himself, especially now. He felt fine in his office, he had his air-conditioner turned up high, but outside his enemy the sun lay in wait eager for battle to recommence. He had decided that his low heat threshold was something to do with his complexion: pale and creamy and well supported by a thick layer of subcutaneous fat. He had been in Africa for nearly three years and still hadn’t developed anything you could call a real tan. Just more freckles, zillions of them. He held his forearms up for scrutiny; from a distance he looked as though he was quite brown but as you drew closer the illusion was exposed. He was like some animated pointilliste painting. Still, he reflected, if his calculations were right, in another year all the freckles should merge together to form a continuous bronzed sheen, and then he wouldn’t need to sunbathe ever again.
In another year! He laughed harshly to himself; the way his life was currently going it would be a miracle if he lasted beyond Christmas and the elections. The mad implausibility of this last event made his head spin every time he thought about it. Only in Kinjanja, he thought, only in Kinjanja would they hold elections between Christmas and the New Year. Not just any old elections either; the Yuletide poll had all the signs of being the most important yet held in this benighted country’s short history. These thoughts brought him reluctantly back to his work and he moved away from the window, warily circling his desk as if it were wired to explode. Cautiously he sat down and opened the green file that lay to one side of his blotting pad. He read the familiar heading: KNP. The Kinjanjan National Party. He opened it and the still more familiar features of its Mid-West representative, Professor Chief Sam Adekunle smiled out at him from beneath the celebrated handlebar moustache and muttonchop whiskers. Numbly he riffled through the pages, his eyes dully flitting over the projections and assessments, the graphs, demographic surveys, breakdown of manifestos and confidential analyses of the party’s political leanings. It was a good, capable piece of work: thorough, painstaking and professionally put together. And all done by him. He turned to the last page and read his final memorandum to the effect that the KNP and Adekunle were the most pro-British of the assorted rag-bag of political parties contesting the future elections and the one whose victory would be most likely to ensure the safety of UK investment—heavy, and heavily profitable—and to encourage its maintenance and expansion in the coming years. He remembered with little satisfaction now how pleased Fanshawe had been with his work, how the telex had buzzed and clattered between Nkongsamba and the capital on the coast, between Nkongsamba and London. Great work, Morgan, Fanshawe had said, keep it up, keep it up.
Morgan cursed his efficiency, his acuity, his confident evaluations. Fate sticking her oar in again, he thought grimly; why hadn’t he chosen the People’s Party of Kinjanja, or the Kinjanjan People’s Progress Party or even the United Party of Kinjanjan People? Because he was too bloody keen, he told himself, too effing smart, that’s why. Because for once in his life he’d wanted to do a good job, wanted some acclaim, wanted to get out. He slammed the file shut with a snarl of impotent anger. And now, he accused himself mercilessly, now Adekunle’s got you by the short and curlies, hasn’t he? Strung up and dangling.
Blackmail, so the detective novels he read informed him, was a nasty word, and he was surprised that he could pronounce it in such close association with his own name and suffer only minor qualms. Adekunle was blackmailing him—that much was clear—but perhaps his comparative equanimity stemmed from the bizarre nature of his blackmail task. However unpleasant it was it couldn’t be described as onerous—in fact, he hadn’t done a thing about it in the ten days since it had been delivered. Adekunle could have asked for anything—the contents of the Commission’s filing cabinets, the names up for New Year honours, an OBE himself, free access to the diplomatic bag—and Morgan would have gladly complied, so desperate was he to keep his job. But Adekunle had made one simple request—simple as far as he was concerned, nightmarish for Morgan. Get to know Dr. Murray, Adekunle had said. That’s all, become his friend.
Morgan felt his brain slow to idle of its own accord, a kind of fail-safe device when it became dangerously overloaded. Murray. That bloody man again. Why, why did Adekunle want him to befriend Murray? What on earth could two such utterly different men as Murray and Adekunle have in common that would be of interest to either one? He hadn’t the faintest idea.
He
shook his head violently, like a man with water stuck in his ear. He put the file away in its drawer and dispiritedly turned the key in the lock. He must have seemed like a gift of heaven to Adekunle, he decided—a fat white man joyfully offering himself for sacrifice.… At this point he rolled down the reinforced titanium steel blinds around his imagination, a mental trick he had perfected; he didn’t want to think about the future and resolutely ordered his mind to ignore that forbidding dimension. He could achieve the same effect of solitary confinement, a sort of cerebral Coventry, with other recalcitrant faculties like memory or conscience which could be irritating, nagging things in certain circumstances. If they didn’t behave they didn’t get spoken to. He closed his eyes, leant back, took deep breaths and allowed only the monotonous hum of the air-conditioning unit to fill his head.
He was on the point of dozing off when he heard a rap on his door and, squinting through his eyelashes, saw Kojo enter.
“Oh Christ,” he said impatiently. “Yes, what is it?”
Kojo approached his desk, unaffected by his hostility. “The letters, sah. For signing.”
Muttering complaints under his breath, Morgan went through the outgoing mail. Three negative RSVPs to semi-official functions; invitations to prominent Britons inviting them to a Boxing Day buffet lunch to celebrate the honoured visit of the Duchess of Ripon to Nkongsamba; the usual visa acknowledgements, though here was one rejection for a so-called minister of the Non-Denominational Methodist Brethren’s Church of Kinjanja who wanted to visit a sister mission in Liverpool. Finally there was a note to the British Council in the capital saying yes, they could put up an itinerant poet for a couple of days while he partook in a festival of Anglo-Kinjanjan culture at the University of Nkongsamba. Morgan re-read the poet’s name: Greg Bilbow. He had never heard of him. He signed all the mail quickly, confident in Kojo’s immaculate typing. Keeping the Union Jack Flying, he thought, making the world safe for Democracy. But then he checked his sneers. From one point of view it had been the mindless, pettifogging boredom of his work and the consequent desire to escape it that had made him attack the KNP dossier with such patriotic zest—and look at the can of worms that had turned out to be, he admonished himself ruefully.
He handed the letters back to Kojo and looked at his watch.
“You off home now?” he asked, trying to sound interested.
Kojo smiled. “Yes, sah.”
“How’s the wife … and baby? Boy, isn’t it?”
“She is well, sah. But … I have three children,” Kojo reminded him gently.
“Oh, yes. Of course. Silly of me. All well, are they?” He stood up and walked with Kojo to the door. The little man’s woolly head came up to Morgan’s armpit. Morgan peered into Kojo’s office; it was festooned with decorations, ablaze with cheap paper streamers.
“You like Christmas, don’t you, Kojo?”
Kojo laughed. “Oh yes, sah. Very much. The birth of our Lord Jesus.” Morgan remembered now that Kojo was a Catholic. He also recalled seeing him with his family—a tiny wife in splendid lace costume and three minute children all identically dressed in gleaming white shirts and red shorts outside the Catholic church on the way in to town a few Sundays ago.
Morgan looked at his diminutive secretary with unconcealed curiosity.
“Everything OK, Kojo?” he asked. “I mean, no problems, no major worries?”
“I beg pardon, sah?” Kojo replied, genuinely puzzled.
Morgan went on, not really sure what answer he was trying to elicit. “You’re quite … happy, are you? Everything going swimmingly, nothing bothering you?”
Kojo recognised “happy.” He laughed a high wheezy infectious chuckle. “Oh yes. I am a very happy man.” As he walked back to his desk, Morgan could see Kojo’s thin shoulders still shaking with merriment. Kojo probably thought he was mad, Morgan concluded. A not unreasonable diagnosis under the circumstances, he had to admit.
He took up his position again at the window and looked down at the driveway, trying not to think about Priscilla and Dalmire. He saw Peter, the imbecillc and homicidal Commission driver, polishing Fanshawe’s long black Austin Princess. He saw Jones walking out to his Volkswagen with the unrelentingly cheery Mrs. Bryce, wife of a geologist from the university, who acted as Fanshawe’s secretary. There were a couple of expatriate wives who did part-time clerical and secretarial work around the Commission, but Mrs. Bryce was the only regular one. She was very tall and thin and the calves of her legs were always covered with shilling-sized, angry red mosquito bites. Podgy Jones waddled along beside her. They stood for a moment next to Mrs. Bryce’s mobylette and chatted earnestly. No doubt, Morgan thought sourly, she’s telling Jones she’s “the happiest woman in Nkongsamba,” how she never grumbles and how everything is really “nice” if only you think about it in the proper way. Seeing how friendly Jones was being, Morgan half-heartedly wondered if they might be having an affair. In anywhere else but West Africa that notion would have raised shouts of incredulous laughter, but Morgan had known stranger couplings. Feeling vaguely grubby as he did so, he tried to imagine Jones and Mrs. Bryce making the beast with two backs, but the incompatibility of their respective physiques defeated his best endeavours. He turned away from his window wondering why he always ended up thinking about sex. Was it normal, and were other people similarly preoccupied? It made him depressed.
If Mrs. Bryce was on her way home, he reasoned, trying to shake the mood from his shoulders, then Fanshawe must have packed up for the day, and he had every intention of following suit. He was in the process of unslinging his lightweight tropical jacket from the hanger on the back of his office door when the internal phone on his desk rang. He picked it up.
“Leafy,” he barked aggressively into the instrument.
“Ah, Morgan,” said a plummy, cultured feminine voice on the other end, “Chloe here.”
For a couple of desperate seconds Morgan was convinced he knew no Chloe, until he suddenly linked the name with the person who was Fanshawe’s wife: Mrs. Chloe Fanshawe, wife to the Deputy High Commissioner in Nkongsamba. The mental lapse came about because Morgan never thought of her as Chloe, and only seldom as Mrs. Fanshawe. Usually the kindest epithets were the Fat Bitch, or the Old Bag. The problem was that they hated each other. There had been no overt hostility, no bitter confrontation, no single act that set off the conflict. It was an understanding that they had both seemed to reach quite spontaneously, entirely natural and unsurprising, as if it were some unique genetic accident that had brought about this animosity. Morgan sometimes thought it was quite mature of them tacitly to acknowledge it in this unfussy way; it made co-existence less complex. For example, he knew instantly that this pointed exchange of Christian names in fact meant that she wanted something of him; so, guardedly, he replied: “Hello … ah, yes, Chloe,” testing the name on his tongue.
“Not busy are you, Morgan?” Ostensibly a question, it clearly functioned as a statement; no response was required. “Care to pop over for a sherry? Five minutes? See you then. ’Bye.” The line clicked.
Morgan thought. For a brief moment an unfamiliar elation bloomed in his chest as he considered that it might have something to do with Priscilla, solitary offspring of the Fanshawe loins, but the sensation died as abruptly as it had arisen. Dalmire had been crowing in his office not twenty minutes ago—nothing could have changed that quickly.
Wondering what she wanted, Morgan pulled on his jacket and walked through Kojo’s office and down the stairs. The sudden transit from air-conditioned chill to late-afternoon heat and humidity affected him as shockingly as it always did. His eyes began to water slightly, he was suddenly aware of the contact between his flesh and the material of his clothing and the wide tops of his thighs chafed uncomfortably together beneath his damp groin. By the time he reached the foot of the main stairs and had walked through the entrance vestibule and out of the front door, all the benefits of his afternoon’s cool comfort had disappeared. The sun hung low over Nkongsa
mba making the storm clouds menacingly dark and its glare struck him full in the face. The sun shone large and red through the dust haze of the Harmattan—a hot dry mistral off the Sahara that visited West Africa every year at this time, and that cut the humidity by a negligible few percent, filled the air and every crevice with fine sandy dust, and cracked and warped wood and plastic like some invisible force-field.
Morgan turned around the side of the Commission and walked down the gravelled path towards Fanshawe’s official residence some hundred yards away in the spacious grounds. The Harmattan had withered every blade of grass to a uniform brown against which the clumps of hibiscus and thickets of bougainvillea stood out like oases in a desert. To his left behind a straggling line of nim trees were the Commission’s servants’ quarters, two low concrete blocks that faced each other across a bald laterite square. Morgan could see, set up around the smoke-blackened verandahs of the quarters, the traders’ stalls bright with fruit and vegetables, and he could hear the singing of women as they pounded clothes at the concrete wash-place at the top end of the compound, the crying of children and the clucking of mangy hens. There were officially six dwelling units for the Commission’s staff but lean-tos had sprouted, grass shelters were erected, cousins, odd-job gardeners and nomadic relations had turned up, and on the last count forty-three people were living there. Fanshawe had asked Morgan to evict all unauthorised inhabitants, claiming that the noise level was becoming intolerable and that the rubbish dump behind the quarters was unsightly and encroaching on the main road. Morgan had yet to do anything about this, and he doubted strongly if he ever would.
He cut across the lawn to the front of Fanshawe’s house. He looked for Priscilla’s small Fiat and his heart leapt when he saw its rear poking out of the garage to the right of the house. She was at home then, he thought, unless Dalmire had taken her golfing. Self-consciously he adjusted the knot of his tie.