Blood Is Dirt (10 page)

‘Buying palm oil and cocoa. I trade commodities.'

‘They say that can be volatile.'

‘If you're greedy you can lose your shirt.'

‘I've heard it can get worse than that.'

‘It can. But I don't put all my chips on one number and pray. I've been in a lot of casinos, the Golden Nugget
and
the London Stock Exchange to name two. I don't like them. I spread my risk. Lose some. Win more. Percentages and hedge. That should be the name of my company... but then I wouldn't have any clients.'

‘What
is
the name of your company?'

‘Selina Aguia Limited,' she said, smiling. ‘Boring but true.'

She took a slug of her drink and stretched her long tanned legs out on the sofa and smoked. She was tall, taller than Heike, maybe over six foot and big boned, strong like an athlete. Her arms were muscular, not as defined as they would have been if she'd pounded yam all her life, but they'd seen some work. The corner where her shoulder joined the pectoral had been sculpted and the stomach under the vest looked flat and board hard. She had a narrow back and big unsupported breasts which stood firm. And those hands. The wrists. She was a powerful woman—put her in a charcoal suit and some sharp shoes that were big enough and watch the directors of the board collapse.

‘There was something about the toxic waste...' I started.

She swung her legs off the sofa, found her briefcase and took out a file which she handed to me. Written on the cardboard flap was: ‘Briggs/OTE/Chemiclean'.

‘That was all I could find in my father's office. The short happy life of Napier Briggs. He thought he was on a roll.'

‘Was he the one who took you to all those casinos?'

‘Best thing he ever did,' she nodded.

‘Another one of your father's gambles?' I asked, holding up the file.

‘Not all of it. The toxic waste was good business. I mean, it was bad and illegal but he made money out of it. The scam was the gamble.'

‘Is there a site for the dump mentioned in this file?' I asked.

‘It says something about a traditional ruler who owns land in Western Nigeria. They've built a concrete bunker... something like that.'

‘This toxic-waste dump I've just seen...' I held up a hand to stop her interrupting. ‘This toxic-waste dump which my partner and I have just uncovered,
and
got shot at by the army doing it, is located in Western Nigeria, just across the Benin border.'

‘You were shot at by the army?' asked Heike.

‘I ran into a tree
while
I was being shot at which is why I'm not dead. Bagado came through too. The army were being oversensitive and a little renegade too.'

‘You mean...'

‘I mean there was an informal and impromptu burial of a man who died after a tub of acid fell on him.'

The silence was broken by Heike slapping her leg. The mosquito was full of blood—very full.

‘Do you think,' I asked Selina again, calmly, ‘that Napier arranged the shipping for the dump I've just seen?'

‘I don't know,' Selina started, uncertain of her ground for a moment, unable to detect the tone. ‘How many shipments are going to the site in Western Nigeria mentioned in that file. Heike just told me you've been investigating a village in the same area. You come back saying it's toxic waste. We can make an assumption but we can check it too. There are copies of the bills of lading in the file, there are the container numbers and the discharge port which, in this case, was Tin Can Island, Lagos.'

‘How much of it was there?' I asked.

‘Three hundred and eighty tons in drums, in forty-five containers.'

‘There was over a thousand two-hundred-litre drums at the dump which, if they all had water in them, would be about two hundred tons. But toxic waste is heavy—acids, metallic sludges, chemical wastes, they all have specific gravities much higher than water... so the quantities could be about the same. If it's relevant, the language on the drums was Italian.'

‘OTE were the shippers,' said Selina. ‘They're Italian based out of Leghorn.'

‘Aguia?' I asked. ‘Is that Italian?'

‘I was married to an Italian fashion designer for six long months. I was telling Heike about it before...'

‘The cufflinks man?' I asked.

‘Handcuffs,' she said, getting shrewd.

Something uncomfortable hung in the room and, after we'd sent out enough signals to agree on that, we all laughed.

‘Let's go to La Verdure,' said Heike, ‘before I kill him.'

 

We drove the short distance to the La Verdure restaurant. I offered Selina a bed at our place for the night. Heike had already moved her in. I told her she could stay as long as she liked, as long as she could stand the friction. She said she'd test the friction for at least tonight and she wanted to talk some business with me in the morning. She said she was glad of the company. So was Heike. She didn't have to say it. But she did.

We sat out in the garden under an awning where there was some crappy fishing montage consisting of a stuffed varnished fish, some rotting net and some spherical blue-glass floats. We ate steak and chips with salad and drank a lot of cold red. Selina had the sharpened senses of the recently bereaved. She savoured everything—the food, the wine, new people, the dippy waiter, the size of the three white guys in the bar, the beauty of the six hookers waiting for someone to buy them a drink, even the heat, which was monstrous because the fans were being ornamental rather than working. Death brings the living to life, has a way of showing you that at your worst moment it's still worth going on.

We went back home and took it in turns in the shower. Heike and I drank whisky. I was allowed to after I told her what Bagado had said about the Scots and gout. I said a couple of funny things about it but she didn't laugh. Maybe they weren't funny but it was that time of night after a good time when you're prepared to cough at anything. I had that uneasy feeling that she could only bear me in company, could only bear me as long as she didn't have to talk to me directly.

I was last in the shower and found Heike lying naked under a damp-patched sheet, staring at the ceiling, when I came into our room with a towel around my waist. Only a small lamp was on at the bedside, just enough to read by. A single rectangle of light shone in the top left corner of the window frame—a room lit in a higher floor of another house. A man stood with his hands on the windowsill looking down into his black garden. An aura of streetlighting hung over the roofs.

Heike propped herself up on an elbow and looked me up and down. The antagonism was still there, along with plenty of drink.

‘What's going on, Heike?'

‘Ach, nothing.'

‘You haven't liked me much since Bagado called the other morning.'

She didn't say anything but fell back on to her pillow and looked at the ceiling again through half-closed eyes.

‘Can't stand being in the same room as me?' I asked.

She shrugged, which meant she knew what was bothering her and I did too, but how to get it out. She stuck the heels of her palms into her eyes.

‘I was glad you went away for a couple of days,' she said. ‘Then I wasn't glad. Then I was again. It's been like that. Moody. It was good having Selina around. She pulled me out of myself.'

‘How do you feel about me now?' I asked. ‘Am I on the couch?'

‘Not with her next door,' she said, taking her hands away from her face. She propped herself up on an elbow and smiled with some resignation in there. She looked me up and down with other things starting to work inside her head. It excited me. She saw it and sighed from down around the back of her knees at what she recognized in herself.

She threw back the sheet, sat on the edge of the bed, her legs apart, the dark triangle visible, and pulled the towel off my waist. She gripped my buttocks and pulled me to her and kissed my belly, her breasts nudging at the painful hardness of my erection, her nipples hard and cool around my loins. I stroked her head and bent down to kiss her. She turned her back on me, crawled to the wall and leaned a forearm up against it. She stretched the other hand behind her, took hold of me and guided me into her. I kissed her madly over her shoulder, our lips never quite touching, the column of tendon in her neck frequently between my teeth. I smoothed a hand down her belly to her thighs, to our moist, tense connection. We moved rhythmically, her face up against the cool wall, the sweat pouring down my chest, rivulets running down her arched spine. My hands were full of her breasts. I clamped my mouth on to the roll of muscle at her shoulder and desperately tried to thrust harder, and further in, so that I could become a part of her.

At the last moment, Heike already trembling in my hands like a frightened bird, a feeling shivered over me. We were being watched. It was so strong that I turned on shuddering thighs to see the door open, the light from the street painting the edges of things in the living room and something, someone. Then an ecstatic light burned fast and wide in my head with the brightness of magnesium and I collapsed against the wall which was slick with sweat gone cold and clammy.

We parted and slid down to the pillows, Heike feverish now with her hands up to her mouth. I pulled the sheet over her. Where our bodies touched were like spot welds. I could hear Heike's clotted breath from her overwrought throat. She turned into the wall. I stroked her back and she started as if my fingers were live. Her shoulders shook with each breath and then smoothed out. She slept.

I got up and glanced around the living room. I checked the front door. Selina's bedroom door was shut. I padded back to bed, lay down and watched the ceiling recede. Emptiness grew in my stomach as the moment of union seeped out of my mind. In the absence of something new we'd always fallen back on the old way of communicating.

The line had been crossed twice. Forwards but then, as usual, backwards. Now I was out in the cold again, which even the hot African night, jammed into the room, couldn't warm.

Cotonou. Tuesday 20th February.

 

I woke up as stiff and sore as a wind-dried duck. Heike's space was empty. I was lying diagonally across the bed. She was in a T-shirt and knickers looking out of the window, her hair wet, staring at the overcast day.

‘It's six thirty,' she said. ‘I'm late.'

‘Did it rain?'

‘No.'

‘I didn't ask you last night... what was all that about with Gerhard?'

‘All
what
about with Gerhard?' she said, some needle in her voice.

‘There was something going on with Gerhard... In the meeting.'

‘Why did you have to be so tough with him... about money?' she said.

Well, even I knew that wasn't the reason but we were started now.

‘Why
I
had to be so tough?'

‘We're an aid agency. Aid not ad. We don't have the money for it.'

‘I'd like to be a charity too but I don't want to see Bagado's kids starve...'

‘I still have to pay the rent whatever...'

‘Stick it in, Heike.'

‘Look, Bruce, I have to work with Gerhard. He assesses me and reports back to Berlin. He puts pressure on me.'

‘So you wanted to say to him, “This is my man.” You didn't have him in mind as a role model?'

‘Gerhard. A role model for you? You've got to be committed, Bruce Medway. It's dangerous having you and your ideas out there.'

She stepped into a skirt and left the room. I pulled on a pair of jeans, went into the kitchen and squeezed the juice out of some oranges from the fridge. Why did my eye always land on the whisky bottle? The last thing I wanted was a drink, wasn't it? Heike poured herself a glass of juice. I wondered how these things happened to people. How did people bring themselves to the marks? What do people say these days, you know, to take things forward? Let's get married? Get off the grass. Nobody gets married these days. Let's have kids? Yikes. One minute I'm an arm's-length bachelor, the next I want little versions of ourselves running around. Who's going to believe that? Not me. There's got to be a halfway house, for Christ's sake. Then you find yourself saying words like ‘sharing' and before you know it...

‘What's going on in there?' asked Heike.

‘Nothing.'

‘The usual,' she said.

‘You're a bit sharp this morning, aren't you?'

‘I've a small hangover and I'm a little annoyed.'

‘About the Gerhard thing?'

‘No, about the you thing.'

‘More juice?'

‘Why should I introduce you to the role model? Why not just run off with him? You know, cut out the duffer, go straight to the real thing.'

‘Maybe you wanted me to learn something from Gerhard.'

‘He's a divorced workaholic.'

‘And talking about workaholics. Do you think I'm a deadbeat?' She snorted a laugh out at that.

‘You don't want to ask that question looking like you do this morning.'

‘Do you mind paying the rent?'

‘I get a housing allowance. You're broke.'

‘It's not drawing us together though, is it?'

She laughed at that too.

‘You're like a dog wandering around a park barking up trees.'

‘I'm working my way round.'

‘Good luck,' she said. ‘I've got to go to work.'

 

Out of the kitchen window, I saw the same man I'd seen last night but on the balcony this time, staring down into the same garden, looking as if he'd got nowhere in a whole night-time.

Bagado arrived while I had my head over the sink contemplating a puke.

‘I was just on my way down to my new office,' said Bagado.

‘You're sounding cheerful. I suppose you've got your own desk and phone, your own office plant, don't have to share with whitey any more.'