Blood Is Dirt (7 page)

Bagado nodded. The tyres roared on the hot tarmac, which glistened in the sun as if glass had been shattered across it. He passed a hand over the dusting of white in his hair—tired of all this.

‘He's giving me no choice,' he said.

‘You're going back to him?'

‘If I don't, we're finished. That was his last card, Bruce—he'll close us down, strip you of your
carte de séjour
and have you deported.'

A dog slunk across the road and I braked. The tyres squealed in the heat and women walking with their heads loaded into the sky shot off the road into the bush followed by their children who maintained line like chicks after a hen. The car kicked up a jib of dust from the edge of the road. The women stopped and turned, their necks straining under their loads to see if anybody had been hit.

‘Christ, Bagado, what did I ever do to him?'

‘You know me, that's enough.'

‘This is it then?'

‘What?'

‘The last job.'

‘Until...'

‘...until they find Bondougou down a storm drain. The pies he's got his fingers in are very hot.'

‘Yes. It might not be so long.'

‘Then it'll be Commandant Bagado, maybe, and we'll all have to bow and scrape.'

‘Kiss the hem of my mac.'

‘I'd rather worship the ground you walk on, if that's OK.'

‘You don't sound very annoyed.'

‘Oh, I am, Bagado. I am. But what can a poor boy do?'

We drove on in silence. The car fuller now with that and the unsaid thing still there. Another half hour passed.

‘What did you make of the Napier Briggs thing?' I asked.

‘It looked like a warning to me. Don't see, don't hear, don't speak.'

‘To who?'

‘Anybody that's got half a mind to be nosy.'

‘From who?'

‘A big man. Probably the guarantor you talked about who said it would be fine to go out into the
cocotiers
and pick up two million dollars of an evening... What the hell were you thinking of, Bruce?' said Bagado, suddenly annoyed.

‘I'll tell you exactly what I was thinking of, and I'm not proud of it.'

‘Ten thousand dollars?'

‘You got it in one, Bagado. You're wasted here, you should be a criminal psychologist.'

‘Criminal?' he asked the inside of the car. ‘I suppose it bloody nearly was, what you did.'

He looked off out the window and shook his head. We drove on in silence. The unsaid thing still inside me, bigger than a full set of luggage.

‘Has Heike spoken to you?' I asked, unable to bear listening to the roar of the road any longer.

‘Aha!' said Bagado. ‘No.'

‘What was the “Aha!” about?'

‘Nearly an hour and a half for you to get it out.'

‘What?'

‘What's been on your mind since first thing this morning. You're improving.'

‘I am?'

‘A year ago you'd have waited until nightfall and the third whisky.'

‘I've given up whisky.'

‘During the week.'

‘It hasn't helped.'

‘Take it up again.'

‘The gout's still niggling.'

‘I don't suppose you know that there's almost no incidence of gout in Scotland.'

‘You're kidding.'

‘They don't think whisky brings it on. Beer, red wine, port's more the thing.'

‘What about the purine?'

‘The purine?'

‘All the Arbroath smokies, the oak-smoked kippers, the tinned pilchards, the wild salmon leaping up the glens—all that purine.'

‘What's that got to do with it?'

‘Purine brings on gout.'

‘And you think...?' Bagado roared and then settled back. ‘You better go back on the whisky before the rest of your brain packs in.'

I gave him a bit of slab-faced silence after that. He didn't notice. So I told him what had happened before I left home this morning.

‘Maybe she doesn't like you,' he said.

‘Give it to me straight, Bagado. I can't take all this faffing around the bush.'

‘Well, I don't mean permanently. Just for the time being. She's gone off you. It happens. I asked a woman in Paris once how she came to kill her husband. She said it all started when she saw him cleaning his ears with his little finger and wiping it on her furniture.'

‘I took your call in the living room, went back into the bedroom and she was off me. No reason. Just dead to me as if she was in a state of shock.'

‘Maybe in your distracted state you scratched yourself, you know, unattractively.'

‘That's interesting,' I said, dismissing it. ‘So what d'you think that was all about back at the office? The Gerhard thing.'

‘Maybe that an attractive woman like Heike could do better than the deadbeat she's decided to live with.'

‘Deadbeat?'

‘Your expression, I think.'

‘Deadbeat?

‘I don't think that's it, by the way. She doesn't mind you being a deadbeat.'

‘But I'm not a deadbeat. A deadbeat's someone...'

‘It's part of it, but it's not it.'

‘I'm not a deadbeat. I get up in the morning. I go to work...'

Bagado gave me the yackety-yack with his hand.

‘What was your annual income last year?'

‘Come on, she's got a job, Bagado. It's different, for God's sake. I'm a street hustler—different ball game altogether.'

‘We're missing the point, but you understand me, I think.'

‘I do?'

‘Sex is not the only thing.'

‘The Great Leap Forward, Bagado, I missed something. The link. Let's have it. And what do you know about my sex life?'

‘That it's very good.'

‘She told you that?'

‘She didn't have to. Whenever I come to your house the two of you are in bed together.'

‘What's wrong with that?'

‘Nothing, but it's not the only thing.'

‘Even a “
deadbeat
” like me knows that.'

‘What do you think the difference is between you and Gerhard?'

‘He's stable, got a good job, he's older, he's German, he's got a sense of humour like an elephant trap...'

‘He's been married and he wants to get married again to someone who likes Africa.'

‘Heike's not interested in Gerhard. We've been through all that crap with Wolfgang.'

‘And look how far you've come in a year. She needs some reassurance that there's a point. A year's a long time for a woman creeping through her thirties.'

‘She doesn't creep.'

‘You're being weak, Bruce. You make out you look and don't see but you know better than I do. You just can't bring yourself to the marks. You're afraid that she'll leave you. You're afraid to move on. You're being a modern man.'

‘That's enough of that kind of talk, Bagado. Enough. You're getting very close to using that word and I don't want to hear that word in this car...'

‘Commitment? There, I've said it. Better in than out.'

‘You can hear the ranks of bachelors' bowels weakening,' I said, cupping a hand to my ear.

‘I don't know what you're afraid of,' he said, sawing the scar in the cleft of his chin. ‘Compromise?'

‘You've been pulling some vocab. out of the bag today, Bagado.'

‘Is that it? You're afraid of compromise? You should see what I'm going to have to do when I go back to Bondougou.'

‘I've already done some compromising. It wasn't half as painful as I thought it was going to be. What I'm afraid of is that if I cross the line it might not work and I'll be in a deeper problem than if I don't cross the line in the first place.'

‘She'll go,' said Bagado. ‘That'll solve your problem.'

We arrived in Kétou at nightfall. The aid station was closed, with a
gardien
outside who showed us a restaurant where we had some
pâte
and bean sauce and a couple of bottles of La Beninoise beer. We drove out into the bush, set up a mosquito net against the car, rolled out some sleeping mats and had an early, very cheap night out under the stars. I lay on my back and felt like a deadbeat. The pattern had held for more than a year. Now things were falling to pieces and all out of my reach. Bagado going back to his job, Heike tapping her feet and behind it all the dark shadow of Bondougou, his eyes flickering in his head.

Sunday 18th February.

 

Gerhard's people were dedicated and came in as early on Sunday mornings as they did during the week. They gave us coffee and directions. We crossed the border into Nigeria just after 8 a.m. and headed north from a town called Meko on a dirt road. After ten kilometres we hit a roadblock guarded by men wearing army fatigues and holding AK-47s loosely in capable hands.

‘They look like the real thing,' I said, as we cruised up to the soldier standing with his hand raised.

‘This is no place for armed robbery, unless they're very stupid.'

The soldier came to my window and looked in and over our shoulders.

‘Where you going?' he asked.

‘Akata village.'

‘Closed.'

‘For why?' asked Bagado.

‘Big sickness. Nobody go in. Nobody come out.'

‘What sort of sickness?'

‘Typhoid. Cholera. We don't know. We just keeping people from going there 'til doctah come telling us.'

‘Which doctor?'

‘No, no, medical doctah.'

‘I mean, what's his name, this doctor. Where's he come from?'

‘Oh yes,' he said and looked back at the other soldiers who gave him about as much animation as a sloth gang on downers. He turned back to us and found a 1000-CFA note fluttering under his nose. His hand came up in a Pavlovian reflex and rested on the window ledge. He shook his head.

‘This not that kind thing. You get sick, you die. A white man out here, what do I say to my superiah officah?'

‘You give him this,' I said, and produced a bottle of Red Label from under the seat.

‘No, sah. You go back to Meko. No entry through here, sah.'

‘Who is your superior officer?'

‘Major Okaka.'

‘Where's he?'

The soldier shrugged.

We drove back to Meko and headed west for about fifteen kilometres before cutting north again, but not on a track this time, through the bush. Within twenty minutes we were stopped by a jeep and a Land Rover, one with a machine gun mounted on the cab. Four soldiers armed with machine pistols got out of the jeep and stood at the four points of the car. An officer type levered himself out of the Land Rover and removed a Browning pistol from a holster on his hip. The gun hung down his side in a slack hand. He approached the window and rested the gun on the ledge and looked at us from under his brow.

‘We're looking for Major Okaka. This is Dr Bagado from Ibadan.'

Bagado leaned across me and said something in Yoruba to the officer. The officer's other hand came up on the window and he leaned on the car as if he was going to roll it over. He grinned and spoke with an English accent that he must have picked up from the World Service in the fifties.

‘There is no Major Okaka on this exercise. We're not expecting a Dr Bagado. You have entered a restricted area. If you return to the main road nothing more will be said. If, however, you prove yourselves troublesome we shall have to escort you down to Lagos for interrogation. Your passports, please.'

He flicked though our passports, the Browning still in his hand, his finger on the trigger and a certain studied carelessness in where he was pointing it.

‘Who is the officer in command of this army exercise?' asked Bagado.

‘That is none of your business. You just go back to the main road. It's dangerous out here. If you wish, my men can escort you back to the frontier and ensure that you cross the border safely.'

‘That won't be necessary... er, Major...?'

‘Captain Mundo.'

He returned our passports and took us back to the main road. We drove towards Meko. The two vehicles disappeared back into the bush. Four kilometres outside Meko we came across a man walking in the dust at the side of the road, his jacket thrown over his shoulder and his white shirt filthy and patched dark by the hot morning sun. His trousers were no better. He looked as if he'd been kicked around. We offered him a lift. He removed a pair of black-framed glasses held together above his nose by electrician's tape. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes and got in. His name was Sam Ifaki and he worked for a weekly news magazine called
Progress.

‘Are you making any?' I asked.

‘Not here.'

‘What've you been doing?'

‘Looking around.'

‘Akata village?'

‘Not any more.'

‘Those army people roll you around in the dirt and send you back?'

‘Army people,' he said. ‘They're all the same, army people.'

‘So you're not interested in Akata any more?'

‘It's not my job. I was looking at a farming project outside Ayeforo. Some people told me there's something happening near Meko. I come. These people are rough with me. Tell me this business is none of mine. They tell me to go. So I go. If I don't, they kill me. They say it's nothing to them.'

‘What did you hear about Akata?'

‘Some sickness. They talk about the gods and such. That's why I'm interested.
Progress
likes to report on witchcraft. You know, we like to show the people this pile of rubbish. When people get sick it's not because of the gods, unless they think it's god business putting faeces in the water supply. Nine times out of ten this is the problem. We've been having some rain. Strange for this time of year. Things are messed up, is all.'