My Name is N

‘Not yet, Bruce.’

‘Not yet what?’

‘I’m not yet your wife.’

‘I said wife?’

‘Your slip’s showing. The Freudian one.’

I reached over. She leaned back. I ran my hand up the back of her neck. She resisted. I forced her into a kiss until she broke away.

‘I won’t take that as a proposal. If it’s subliminal it doesn’t count,’ she said. ‘It’s still in the head.’

‘And you want it from the heart.’

‘I didn’t want it to sound too much like romantic trash.’

‘Leave that to me, I’m good at the pulp end of things.’

I got an inadvertent look.

‘What else has Bagado said to you?’

She shrugged and sipped her glass, which was empty.

‘You two’ve been going through my school report again.’

‘He doesn’t think you’re bad…’

‘I know, I know…he thinks I’m “morally weak”.’

‘He thinks your only guiding principle is your own fascination.’

I called Helen in with the Red Label. She dragged it in kicking and screaming. I poured a finger and brimmed it with water.

‘One thing you might want to remember is that if Bagado hadn’t come along, I wouldn’t be involved in any of this. I was doing fine until…’

‘He embroiled you in his crusade?’

‘Yes, I think that’s fair. He’s the one who involved me in bigger things. People killing and getting killed and sometimes for no other reason than a base human emotion like…jealousy.’

‘Jealousy?’ she said with mock outrage, not rising to the bait. ‘Jealousy’s a very strong emotion.’

‘Especially sexual jealousy…so I’ve heard.’

‘Maybe for men.’

‘No, no, women too. How’d you like it if I told you I’d been sleeping with somebody else, you pregnant and all.’

Her face stilled in an instant and she started in on me, eyes jutting.

‘See what I mean?’

She sat back, caught out.

‘You and I are different,’ she said.

‘No, we’re not.’

‘Our relationship is based on sex.’

‘Is it?’ I asked.

‘That’s how it started, remember the desert?’

‘The ground,’ I teased.

‘Piss off.’

‘There is more than just sex…isn’t there?’ I said, reaching for her hand.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, allowing me a fingernail. ‘And if you did sleep with someone else, whether I was pregnant or not, I’d…I’d…’

‘I believe you.’

‘How did we get on to people killing each other…?’

We laughed and I gulped some Johnnie Walker.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘An example of my overfascination, how I get over…No, I know what I was going to say. Africa. What I’ve learned from Africa, from this work, is that I’m not indifferent any more. My life’s not set in aspic like it was in London. I don’t just work, play, sleep. I’m not protected from ugliness by my job. Reality isn’t TV. I see the limbless poverty at every traffic light, the fat people in bars eating money sandwiches which, as you’ve probably gathered, means I don’t totally and unequivocally love the place. It drives me crazy. I go mad when the Africans decide not to do things, when they tell you everything except the one thing you want to hear, when they disappear off to their village without a word, but then I’m charmed by their innocence, the way they join their lives to ours. That’s Africa for me – not a whole lot between those two mood swings – wild anger and happy delirium.’

‘Have I ever seen you on one of those deliriously happy days?’

‘You were asleep last night so you didn’t see it.’

She leaned over and kissed me and went for the watered-down whisky while she was at it. I pulled it away.

‘Just a smell,’ she pleaded.

‘Seven months to go,’ I said, and let her have a sip.

‘Longer than that. I don’t think babies like milk cut with Red Label.’

‘This one will,’ I said, slipping a hand up her top. She pulled away.

‘Don’t,’ she said, ‘we’re not finished yet.’

‘We must be after all that crap.’

‘Bagado,’ she said, flatly, ‘doesn’t think you’re much good at the work.’

‘Don’t let him speak at my funeral.’

‘He says you’re good at the business stuff – loading ships in the port, managing gangs and transport – but crime. Solving crime. Seeing what’s going on around you, making deductions, cracking problems…no.’

‘No?’ I said, lightly.

‘That’s what he says…and you know why?’

‘You’re going to tell me. I can feel it in my water.’

‘You get involved in events. You get carried away. No objectivity.’

‘Very interesting. Is that it now? Can we…?’

She came around my side of the table. I pushed my chair back and she sat astride me and put her arms around my neck and her lips up to mine.

‘That’s it,’ she said.

‘You know something,’ I said, pushing her top up over her head, finding no bra. ‘Talking about solving crimes. I solved one of Bagado’s yesterday. Five men dead in a ship’s hold. Suffocated, no sign of violence. How did they die? I came up with fresh timber. Then Bagado came within an inch of telling me he wouldn’t mind somebody taking Bondougou out of the game. What does that sound like to you?’

‘Role reversal,’ she said, and pressed my head down on to her breasts.

‘Thanks.’

‘Now shut up.’

I lifted her up on to the table and stripped her panties off. She tore at the front of my trousers. I sucked on her nipples until they were nut hard. She grabbed me and steered me into her and my knees gave at the feel of her soft, wet warmth. I drove into her lifting her off the table, my hands and arms full of her creamy back. She held my face to hers with the back of her hand round my head and rucked up my shirt.

‘Turn the lights off,’ she said. ‘I’m not entertaining the whole street.’

She wrapped her legs around me. I walked to the wall and lashed out at the lights. Half her face appeared in a corner of light from the street. Her head rose and fell against the wall. My trousers sank to the floor with the weight of keys and money and the jolt of each thrust.

‘Just don’t go indifferent on me,’ she said, and dug her heels into my buttocks, urging me on.

8

I left Heike sleeping and took a taxi into the Jonquet at midnight. I found the L’ouistiti in front of the taxi rank to Parakou. The bar left you in no doubt as to its intentions. Even the name, to my ear, had a girlie mag, fluffy bra, stripper’s pout to it.

The building’s plasterwork was as flaking and pitted as an old doxy’s make-up and, rather than redo it, they’d just slapped some blue paint on top – gloss, as if that would make it better. Now the paint had started coming off in dermatological skeins so that ‘scabby’ was not being unfair. The lighting, beyond the plastic strips of the fly curtain, was red and sore as if the room had been chafed raw. The girls standing in the rasping light, who weren’t hitting on customers yet, had their smiles up on the shelf with the bottles of grog. They were neither drinking nor smoking. They were talking amongst themselves but not chit-chat. It looked more medicinal than that.

I’d hardly got my leg over the back of the moped when my arms were taken up by a girl on either side, so that trying to pay the driver left me in an Olympic wrestling hold requiring a knot expert. They bundled me towards the entrance. The bar was narrow and stretched a long way back and looked intestinal in the light, the few punters inside ulcerating against the walls.

A sailor type was slumped across two high-backed wooden chairs, leaning on an elbow, his face sweating, his eyes tearful and his Adam’s apple working overtime swallowing bad memories. A girl had a hand in his pocket, massaging his wad. My two girls tried to steer me in there next to him but I sailed on past, heading to the back of the place where there was a big guy sitting on a high stool next to a door. He had to be stoned, the way he was sitting, both legs hanging off the stool, his body doubled over, an elbow on one knee and his head floating in his hand like a nodding dog. He straightened when I hove into his tunnel vision.

‘Charbonnier?’ I asked.

The guy’s lids, heavier than obols, stayed at half mast, so I leaned in on him and gave it to him louder in his ear. He reached over to the door with the speed of a hog-filled anaconda and rapped on it twice, finishing with a flourish and a how-about-that look. I wouldn’t have minded giving him a how-about-this elbow in his what-the-hell mouth, but one of the girls had started work rubbing my already sore penis and I shrugged the two of them off.

Inside there was a small-boned Beninois fellow with an accounts book and a calculator in front of him. He stuck a pen behind his ear and folded his arms.

‘Le blanc? Il est dedans?’ I asked.

He nodded. All these guys had been to some French waiters’ school.

‘Je veux le voir,’ I said

He leaned back and pressed a button on the wall, speedier than his friend. A door buzzed open. A pair of hands was sitting behind a desk. The hands, in a cone of light, were arranging a line of grass on three cigarette papers stuck together. The owner of the hands was in the dark and it took time to get used to the contrast and pick him out and when I did he still hadn’t adjusted the astonishment out of his face.

‘Hi, Jacques,’ I said, getting it quicker than usual.

‘What the fuck are you…?’

‘I got lucky,’ I said. ‘Want me to call you Michel now?’

‘Take a seat,’ he said, going back to his work. ‘I hope you smoke.’

‘I gave up.’

‘Tobacco?’ he asked. ‘There’s no tobacco in this.’

He started to roll the monster spliff which was his bulkhead against a long night of Christ knows what nastiness he had raking through his brain. I took the seat in the hot room across from him, my back to an open netted window. The glow from the desk lamp picked up his thin face, a worn and sweating face that was lined in a way that meant he sneered a lot…probably at himself in the mirror of a morning if he could bear it. He’d lost most of his hair, apart from a few strands he’d combed over the creamy whiteness of his pate. He had a tan line across his forehead from wearing a hat, a Panama that was hanging on the wall behind him.

While he finessed the joint I found my gaze locked on to a framed line drawing on the wall which I thought was a still life of a bowl of fruit, but on closer inspection proved to be an Oriental woman weighing a pair of huge balls and about to fellate an impossibly large cock.

‘That one gets the girls every time,’ he said.

‘On the first train out of here?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ he said, and licked the papers to his joint with a very red and glistening tongue that didn’t look as if it could mind its own business for very long. He smoothed off the spliff and put a twist in the end. He tore a strip off a Marlboro packet, roached it and sat back to admire the craftsmanship.

‘So what brings you to me, M. Medway?’

‘I thought we could have a chat about a mutual friend.’

‘Jean-Luc? No. I don’t talk about Jean-Luc. You think of something else.’

The sweat stood out on his forehead and I felt my own runnelling down my spine.

‘It’s hot in here.’

‘The air con’s broken. It’s going to rain.’

He lit the joint, puffing at it to get it going, and then took a huge drag and held it in for so long he squeaked. He let the smoke out slowly and repeated. His eyes glazed and his face softened to a concentrated luxuriousness.

‘You don’t happen to have any whisky?’

He opened a cabinet, poured me a shot of something and handed over the glass.

‘If you want to talk, you have to smoke as well.’

‘Too paranoid?’ I said.

He leaned over and bug-eyed me.

‘Who?’ he said, and smiled with as close to a good nature as he could get without borrowing a Ronald Reagan mask.

‘Maybe that stuff’s good for you,’ I said. ‘Smoothes you out. Stops your nerves jangling in your ears.’

‘In my ears?’ he asked, nicely stoned now.

‘Whatever.’

‘Smoke,’ he ordered, and held out the reefer.

I took a tentative drag and didn’t cough my heels up. All the pollution I’d been breathing had taken the virginity off my lungs.

‘Enjoy,’ he said. ‘There’s not much else around here.’

I nodded at his porno drawing and took another quarter drag from the joint, not wanting to get wrecked in the first minute and waste my time here.

‘Not here, M. Medway. Not in Africa. There’s plenty of girls to fuck, but, you know how it is for them, fucking the white man c’est comme un travail de ménage.’

‘You shouldn’t knock yourself like that, Michel.’

‘Knock myself?’ he asked, rapping his head.

‘Tu ne dois pas dire du mal de toi-même,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of other people around who’ll do it for you.’

He grunted and leaned back in his chair.

‘You need to smoke some more, M. Medway. Take it in…deep.’

‘Marnier,’ I said, sipping the whisky, the strong flavour of the grass like a hay espresso in my mouth. ‘Tell me about Marnier. Why do you have to do little jobs for him? Especially when you don’t like doing them for him…do you?’

‘I have no choice.’

‘What’s he going to do to you if you don’t?’ I asked. ‘Kill you?’

‘Kill me. Pah!’ he roared, and rocked back on his wooden chair. He fought his feet out from under the desk and put them up on an unopened ream of paper he had sitting next to the phone. He was wearing dirty white plimsolls with no laces. He drew a hand down his gaunt features, picking up some sweat on the way which he wiped on to the thigh of a pair of grey cotton trousers which had been pounded that colour by an African washerwoman. ‘What would he get out of killing me?’

‘I wasn’t being serious.’

‘Smoke some more.’

I took a longer drag on the reefer, which seemed to satisfy him. I fitted the joint between his fuck-you fingers and he nestled back into his chair.

‘The only reason I’m living is because of Jean-Luc. So why would he want to kill me?’

‘I didn’t say he would.’

‘Non?’

The dope was ungluing the conversation fast. A warm glow emanated from my stomach which was being fuelled by my extremities which felt like frozen chicken parts. My eyeballs prickled. My tongue was lilo size and dry and musty like sun-scorched canvas. The whisky added no lick to my mouth. The silence I was in now felt long and ruminative of such things as the wood grain in Charbonnier’s desk, the two missing eyelets in his plimsolls and the crepey quality of the skin on the back of his hands.

‘How did Jean-Luc get cut up?’ I asked, after a small century of chair creaking.

‘Uhn?’ said Michael, resettling himself and tilting back in his captain’s chair. I repeated the question. Time leaked through my fingers.

‘Sierra Leone,’ said Michel, while I tried to remember the question. He handed back the joint. I waved it away. He insisted.

‘What happened in Sierra Leone?’ I asked, the smoke leaking out of me everywhere, the corners of my eyes, my knuckle joints. ‘What was he doing there?’

‘Buying diamonds,’ he said, from what seemed a long way off now.

He eased the joint out of the back of my hand, which was no longer mine, but lay quietly on the desk top ready to be put on.

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