A Single Swallow (22 page)

In mid-afternoon we arrive in Batouri, where the driver and our most important passenger, a fat army officer whose presence has melted the roadblocks, burst into roars of laughter at the sight of my face, coated in the orange-red dust of the road. I try to shift the red coating with a backyard bucket, suspiciously observed by chickens, while Patrice and Pascale order fish – a dorade, served with mayonnaise and a small cloud of envious flies. The plates were washed in a bowl of brown water, the cook's fingers were thick with fat and stained with ash and the flies were so persistent that they barely left the fish for an instant when you flapped a hand at them. We eat with our fingers, with relish. I have no fear for my stomach: I will eat anything put before me now, regardless of the conditions of its preparation. All trace of my fastidiousness has gone. Partly because I am so thoroughly inoculated, partly because nothing can be as bad as Ebola, and partly because what little food we come across is delicious. The dorade is cooked to perfection.

In the evening we change bus in Bertoua. The composition of the travellers shifts: many are Muslims, all are men. We set off at higher speed into the gathering dark. First the road runs through forest, then at last the shuddering ceases and we hit tarmac. We stop once more, beside a long bright strip of shops and bars, where gas lights, bright hand-painted signs and activity of people eating, drinking and milling around take on an hallucinatory quality: we shuffle around yawning until the driver herds us back into the Toyota where we reassemble into a drowsy heap, heads on each other's shoulders, feet under the armpits of men in front and half wake, half doze as a large moon rises, the lights disappear, reappear, flash and thicken, and then roads, and houses, and at last, at midnight, Yaoundé gathers around us. It is huge and shapeless, with many more buildings than lights. It seems to have
no centre, no focus – dark streets, shacks, hills covered in lightless buildings. I am suddenly grateful I am travelling with friends. It would be no fun to arrive here alone, exhausted, late at night.

Pascale is going on to Douala, a journey which will take the rest of the night. His endurance is spectacular; we have all found a place in our heads where we can take refuge, leaving our bodies swaying and bumping to the irregular rhythm of the road, but for Pascale to do this journey twice a month must take another level of steel. We swap email addresses and embrace.

‘Don't take the train to the north,' he says, and Patrice agrees vehemently.

‘Why not?'

‘
Petits voleurs!
' they chorus together: Little thieves.

Patrice and I take a taxi. Tonight is on me, I insist: Patrice knows a hotel. It is grotty but cheap – tomorrow we will find a better one, he says.

‘Goodnight then,' I bid him.

‘You are going to bed?'

‘Yes! Aren't you?'

‘
Non!
I am going out. Come and drink!'

‘Oh God. I don't know . . . Let's clean up. Call for me when you're ready.'

The bathroom has the first mirror I have seen for days. My face and hair are dark red and my features and body have changed shape. My face used to be rounded but is now triangular. The cheek bones are prominent, the sockets of my eyes have lost their softness. There is a stillness in my gaze, either of exhaustion or of ease. I am as unworried, these days, as I have ever been. My body is pared down. Over my flanks, hips and stomach there is no spare flesh at all. I am over a stone lighter than usual, I reckon. The travelling seems to have altered the way my body works. I have had none of the stomach or bowel problems I believed were guaranteed for a European on the road in Africa: on the contrary, what food we have eaten seems to be absorbed directly into my system, leaving almost no waste. I can go without food for a day and not really think about it. I can fall asleep instantly
and wake to an unfamiliar wakefulness immediately. I can sit on a bus, my eyes open, with the rest of my body almost asleep, in neutral, almost oblivious to discomfort, armoured against the passage of uncomfortable time with a blank, bovine patience. Europeans have no idea of the routine physical discomfort of travel as people travel here. You never have a seat to yourself. The heat is omnipresent and unrelieved. And everything always breaks down.

Even my walk has changed: now I am very light-footed, immediately aware of any imbalance of weight in my rucksack. By adjusting it, and my stride, I can move the pressure around my feet: no more blisters.

‘Sebago . . .' Patrice had said, admiringly, looking at my feet.

‘What?'

‘Sebago!' he said again, pointing at my shoes. Other people had said the same thing; only now do I understand. There are little ribbons on the sides of my shoes, showing the make.

‘That's good?'

‘
Oui!
' Patrice nodded, emphatically – ‘The best!'

There is no reason why it should seem so strange that here, of all places, people should be label-conscious and brand-savvy, but it does.

I take a shower, which runs red, then a cold bath, which is also red. I photograph it and my face with my mobile phone.

‘Let's go!'

Patrice looks very smart. We go out into hot, dark rain. There is very little traffic moving in Yaoundé.

‘Where are we going?'

‘Club.'

‘What club?'

‘You will see . . .'

We sample two. The first has an empty restaurant downstairs; upstairs it has torn-up plush, bright lights and extremely loud music. Behind the bar the server is asleep: Patrice wakes her gently. Onstage seven women are dancing. They turn their backs to the audience, bend over to reveal buttocks under short skirts and begin to shake. They shake and shake, rotating, humping, jerking and shaking again,
all their faces set in concentration as they study their own reflections in a mirror at the back of the stage.

The second club has very low ceilings and red lights. The customers are a mixture of women and men, many in couples. The entertainment is stripping, only the stripping is done out of sight: a tall, naked woman emerges and makes her way through the throng, stopping in front of couples to gyrate and thrust. The couples giggle wildly. She approaches us. I am so tired that this is all becoming a hypnogogic dream.

‘Please,' I say, weakly, as she begins to jerk her groin towards my face, advancing with tigerish steps.

‘Please, madame,' I try again, ‘I am so tired, really, I am just here for a drink . . . please, I implore you, excuse me!'

I look at Patrice. His face is set in a monumentally stern expression, as if we are about to take on an implacable foe in battle. If I had the energy I would laugh wildly and run out of the club but my body has given up. The naked woman turns on Patrice who sets himself, elbows on knees, fists together and stares fixedly ahead. She fills his vision with her midriff. The music crescendos and Patrice does not blink. It is single combat now; Patrice's granite gaze versus the woman's most intimate part, which she thrusts towards his nose.

Patrice does not quail. The music climaxes and stops. There are cheers and the whole club applauds – the woman, primarily, but also, one senses, Patrice. I have seen men stare down a few things, but never anything like that.

Yaoundé is built on hills. On their crests and ridges are the skeletons of buildings like the ruins of Rome. But these are not the relics of antiquity; they are the shells of a future that never came to pass. Concrete frames, with doorways and holes for windows, their construction was halted when the money ran out. Now they stand, unsafe, rain-weakened, waiting for someone who will not come to pull them down and start again. Around their feet are the shacks and bungalows of the city. We switch hotel to a relatively homely place overlooking
the railway tracks. All day and all night there is activity down there as trains shunt, load logs and clank sombrely away down the line to Douala, the port and the world across the sea. It seems to be the only thing that works and never stops working in Yaoundé, this mechanism for transferring tree trunks from trucks to flat cars.

Through television, the newspapers and gossip the political situation becomes clearer. I stand with groups of silent men, when the evening editions of the papers come out, staring at the headlines on news-stands. The demonstrations lasted for three days. In riots which began as a transport strike over the fuel prices maybe forty people died, maybe more. The authorities used tear gas, water cannon and live ammunition. Now many of those arrested are coming to trial and being rapidly sentenced to prison. Newspaper editors have been threatened and radio stations taken off the air. As a last word on all this, the government has just announced the budget for the next twelve months: the police and the army have been given significant pay-rises.

‘That is all it takes,' says a barman. ‘The army are the best-paid in the country. They will shoot us to protect their salaries. Nothing is going to change.'

Patrice comes into my room and sits down. He is awkward, tense with a kind of frustration I have noticed in him, as if his huge muscles crave something solid to test themselves against. He takes off his cap and spins it unhappily in his hands.

‘Horace, will you help me?'

‘Of course. What do you want?'

‘You know I am a rugby player, and I am good.'

‘Yes.'

‘But they would not let me go to France, to play.'

‘No.'

‘So will you invite me to Wales?'

‘Of course! But why do you want to come?'

‘Because if I can get a coaching certificate from a European Rugby
Union I will be able to work here. Even if I cannot play, I can coach. If I could visit you I could get a certificate and come back . . .'

‘I got one of those at school. It was easy . . . I don't see why we shouldn't get you one. But how will you pay for your flight?'

‘I have a friend . . .'

Mr Kenneth is much older than Patrice, small and bald with a direct gaze. He is a businessman based in Yaoundé for whom Patrice had done a little work – mostly lifting and packing, as far as I can tell. I am prepared to be suspicious of him, as he is of me. We speak English, Mr Kenneth being an Anglophone, and interrogate each other, politely, as Patrice watches us, head turning from one to the other as he tries to follow our conversation.

‘But why do you want to pay for Patrice?' I ask.

Mr Kenneth nods rapidly as he makes each point.

‘Because I have seen him play rugby and I know that he is good, because there is nothing for him here, because I do not want to see him waste his life. If we could give him a chance . . .'

I was certain of him very quickly but we talked for half an hour and then I summed up.

‘I cannot promise anything but I will do everything I can to help Patrice come to Britain. I have no house of my own but when he arrives in London he can stay with my father and me for a night or two and then we will go to Wales where my mother lives. She has a farm and spare rooms. I am sure she will be very happy to put us up for a couple of weeks, and Patrice could certainly help us with the farm. In Wales we will try to get Patrice a coaching certificate. I have friends who are into rugby there: if we can, we will get Patrice a trial, or at least introduce him to a Welsh club. I cannot promise he will get a coaching certificate, but we will try. At least he will see something of the world, and I will repay him for his great kindness to me.'

Mr Kenneth nods gravely.

‘I will pay for Patrice's flight,' he says, ‘and I will give him some money for Britain.'

We look at Patrice like two fathers who have hit upon a plan for the advancement of a child. There is something about his bulk, his
directness and his troubled-son's air of having been helped and of needing help that inspires one's urge to help. It is as if he was not made for the world Mr Kenneth and I know, of complications, of probable failures, of connections, strings, snakes and ladders, but for the parallel, brutally sanitised world of the rugby field. How amazing it would be to welcome Patrice to Britain, to take him to a rugby game, to get him a certificate – and what a fairy tale it would be to see him play, to ‘put his body on the line' as they say in the game, for the pleasure of spectators; how magical it would be to give him a shot at the kind of triumph his great hero had achieved: the Cameroon-born flanker of the French national team, Serge Betsen. We shake hands and embrace. Patrice goes to his room and comes back:

‘Horace, I have something for you,' he says, and presses something into my hand.

‘I am also a sculptor,' he says, shyly. ‘This is how I make some money.'

It is a small bronze bull with buffalo horns. It is very heavy and very beautiful. It stands on three legs, the fourth being slightly raised, as if pawing the ground. The power of the bull and its barely arrested forward charge are eloquently present in the metal. Greatly moved I hug Patrice again, then we go out to see about the visa: how hard can it be?

‘My God, he's only a bloody Taff!' booms the white-haired man. Three nights later I am having a gin and tonic in the hotel bar: the white-haired man has been gossiping with one of the waiters. His French is very fluent and the waiters all seem to adore him. One of them has just asked me where I am from.

‘How do you do?'

We introduce ourselves. His name is Barry and he is British.

‘I am in the oil business,' he confesses, not embarrassed, but confessional nonetheless. ‘I have been to every single country on this continent.'

‘How does Cameroon compare?'

‘Bloody terrible! Terrible! Haven't you seen it?'

‘Well, a little.'

‘Do you know – the people here have coins? Fucking coins! Not even notes. Coins. Do you know what that means?'

‘No.'

‘It means they've got nothing. It means that when they die there is a ditch, a bloody ditch, which they throw your body into.'