Stone Kingdoms (16 page)

‘Oh sure, sure,' replied Homer. ‘I guess big business could cream off a little of their profits, sink the hand deeper in the pocket but you know, Charlie, there's kind of a problem with that, isn't there?'

‘What's that, Homer?'

‘Well, you know it seems to me that the more you lay out to someone the less inclined they are to do things for themselves. I saw this programme once back home. These panhandlers, these bums, were picking up more money on the streets than some folk with honest jobs. Don't seem right, does it? Where's the incentive to get off your butt and make things happen if you know someone's coming round handing out all the time?'

There was a murmur of assent round the group. Sandro came over and rested his arms on the top of the brush he had been using to scoot fag ends out into the street.

‘But it's hard to get off your butt when some drought's wiped out all your crops or killed off your cattle and your kids haven't had anything to eat in a week,' said Wanneker, still smiling.

‘Sure, Charlie, I take your point and don't get me wrong, I'm all for putting food in the hands of starving children, but you know what I'm saying. Sometimes it feels like we're pouring
water
into a bucket with a hole in it. And one thing you can't tell me, because I've been around these places too long to buy any bull, is that in every place where we bail them out some local bigshot's not taking a fat cut.'

The gang gargled its agreement and one of them formed a bull's eye with his thumb and finger, then there was a call to Sandro for more beer. ‘Sure,' said Wanneker. ‘But maybe that's the price that has to be paid.'

‘But, Charlie, they're taking food out of the mouths of their own people and we're supposed to go on paying the bill. Back home, a lot of poor whites, poor blacks, without a job between them, maybe they're just gonna start saying that charity begins at home. Know what I mean, Charlie?'

‘Maybe we're just trying to clear up a mess we helped make in the first place.'

‘Now that's crazy talk, Charlie, and I don't think you believe that for even a second. Back home I have to listen to all this shit from these so-called African-Americans, and a lot of talk from people who ain't been closer to Africa than the Staten Island ferry about what a paradise this is and how us whites screwed it up, when the truth is that the only decent things they have we gave them. And every pathetic little state of theirs ends up with a flag like a bubble-gum card and a national debt the size of the Empire State.'

And so it went on into the afternoon, until Wanneker was called away to take a call from Stanfield. He couldn't make it due to operational difficulties and they arranged a new rendezvous later in the month. We left the oil men tanking up as if the state might go dry at any minute and walked round the narrow streets of the town, followed at every turn by little clouds of children who tugged our clothes and begged for money. We passed a mosque with blue enamelled doors and a police station where they invited us in to inspect our papers to help ease their boredom. As the crowd of children grew bigger we returned to the hotel and Charlie drove the jeep far out
through
the town and across a seam of scrub on to a deserted beach where we sat and fanned the sea breeze round our faces. There was no sign of any kind of life, and we drank some of the bottles of beer he had lifted from the bar.

‘Weren't those guys something?' he said, slugging on the beer. ‘What a bunch of assholes.' And then he did an impersonation of Homer and made us laugh. ‘You guys want to go for a swim?'

Veronica giggled and joked about having no costume. ‘Did you never go skinny-dipping, Veronica?' he asked, and she shook her head and said there wasn't much point because she couldn't swim, and then we started to laugh at things that weren't funny and he asked me if I wanted to go for a swim and he asked in a way that assumed I wouldn't. Getting out of the jeep I walked down to the water's edge, slipped out of my clothes, and without looking round walked out a little and started to swim. I felt the sweat and dust of my body washed away by the cool heave of foam as I let myself float, kneading the water with my fingers, kicking it up between my thighs. When the sun felt hot on my head I ducked below the surface and let the water rush through my hair. As I shook it out of my eyes I saw Charlie leave the jeep and, still holding the bottle, run to the water and shake off his shorts and top. His body was white and thin and as he held up the bottle to take one last drink the sun hit it and it looked as though he was drinking light. Then he was swimming out towards me, the colour of his hair and groin glinting in the sunlight before vanishing and reappearing.

‘You're a hell of a swimmer, Naomi,' he said, gasping for breath and trying to steady himself in the swell.

‘I grew up beside the sea – my father taught me when I was a child.'

On the shore, Veronica was paddling and waving out to us and as I waved he looked at my breasts lifting out of the water. I turned away and swam parallel to the shore and I could hear
the
slap and thrash of his arms as he tried to keep up. He was calling too but I couldn't make out the words and then after a while I turned and waited for one of the larger waves and followed it to the shore. As I started to wade in he caught up with me and I felt the hot dampness of his arm as he draped it across my shoulders.

‘Wow, that was good,' he said. ‘Did you enjoy it?'

I told him I felt cleaner, and when we reached our clothes we put them on straight away and lay down in the sand beside the jeep until the sun had dried us. As we drove back to the hotel the light was thickening and silencing the conversation, coating each of us with our own thoughts.

When we arrived back at the hotel, the oilmen were still in the bar but they had other companions now – four young girls, probably somewhere between the ages of seventeen and twenty. They were wearing Western skirts and blouses and had flowers in their hair. The oldest one sat smiling and joking but the eyes of the others flitted round like little birds unsure of where to land. They held their glasses tightly, the red polish on their nails and the white flowers in their hair the only bright points in the gloom of the bar.

‘Got company then, Homer,' said Charlie as we passed them.

‘That's right, Charlie. Six months is a long time, a man has to stay sane. Think of it as an investment, doing our bit for the economy,' he said, handing one of the girls a cigarette and lighting it for her.

Veronica and I walked on to the stairs but we could still hear his voice. ‘Don't worry, Charlie – we're not stupid. Double rubbers all round!' There was the sound of laughter and the clink of glasses and a loud voice urging one of the girls to sing.

We reached our room and in a short time Veronica was asleep. I think she'd drunk too much and soon she was snoring gently, her arm lolling across my pillow. From the bar below I
was
conscious of a girl's voice singing and something took me back out into the corridor towards the sound, but before I reached the top of the stairs I was met by the American called George. He was unsteady and had to hold the rails as he came towards me, lurching in front of me as I tried to pass him and stretching out his arm to stop me, then angling me into the wall. I pushed him away but he came close again and I could smell the rancid mix of alcohol and sweat, the sour stream of his breath.

‘You have beautiful hair,' he whispered, and touched it with the back of his hand. As I tried to move away he grabbed my hair suddenly, pinning back my head, and when I kicked out at him and shouted, he pressed me tightly into the wall so it was difficult to move. ‘Come to my room and have a drink with me, forget the world's troubles for a little while.' I shouted at him again and started to lever myself off the wall with my feet. Then a hand grabbed his shoulder and spun him round and I thought Charlie was going to hit him but there were loud apologies and talk of a misunderstanding and then George stumbled back to the bar.

‘Are you all right?' Charlie asked and I said yes and laughed, wanting all the time to be back in the sea, swimming slow and straight, feeling the waves sweep the ruck of my back and carry me forward with a will other than my own. And so I let him take me to his room and hold me in his arms, listened to him tell me I was beautiful, and it didn't matter that he lied because maybe there was no truth, and so I lay on the bed and held him while he kissed and nuzzled my body, tasted the salt of my skin on his lips. We didn't speak and the only sounds were the whirr of the fan and from the bar below a girl's song threading a melody through the clink of glasses and a babble of voices. My body felt a stranger to me under his touch and as he came into me my cry of pain shocked him, stopped him for a second, and then he stroked my hair and told me everything would be all right and as my hands fanned across his back, his need rose and
fell
inside me, breaking again and again in its hunger. And the fan turned, rippling and raising the net above our heads while through the sounds of his want filtered the high cadences of the girl's song before at last it was swallowed by the slap of hands on tables, the bounce and rattle of glasses and his final cry as he spent himself in me.

13

On
the journey back to Bakalla there was no sign from Veronica that she knew what had happened. There was nothing to be seen or sensed that was different from what had gone before. Charlie talked and acted the way he always did, and when I saw myself in his mirror shades I felt glad that he didn't feel the need to pretend. I think Martine might have guessed. She never said anything but maybe she heard something in my voice when I talked of Mercu, or read it in one of a dozen other ways known only to people who live close together as we did in the camp. A couple of times I almost told her, but as each day passed its meaning diminished and I knew it would seem a kind of betrayal. Some nights, we sat outside the tent that was our home and talked until the light died in a searing flush of riven sky, always different from the night before, and I listened to the pleasure in her voice when she was able to surprise or shock me.

‘I've been to Ireland,' she said one evening.

‘You never said before. When? Where?'

‘When I was a student. I was with a boy on my course. We went to Dublin one summer and then we hired a car and toured different places.'

‘Did you ever go to Donegal?'

‘I don't think so. I suppose it was too far.'

‘And did you like Ireland?'

‘Yes, parts were very beautiful.'

‘And was this boy someone special?' I asked, watching her pull her knees tightly to her chest, the way she liked to do.

‘
All boys are special, Naomi – at the time anyway. Henri was a very nice boy. We had a good time in Ireland. We stayed in a youth hostel in Dublin which wasn't good – they made us have separate rooms – but when we got the car we'd stay in a different place every night and nobody seemed to care. Maybe when they heard we were French they expected it. The only thing I didn't like was in the morning they'd try to make you eat these big breakfasts – big plates of food with bacon and sausages and everything piled up, and sometimes when they were serving you'd see them looking at you a little.'

‘When I lived in Donegal I used to look at people like you. In the summers I'd see students, young people in cars or on bikes, sometimes hitching, and I used to wonder about the lives you led and how it felt to be as free as that. And it made it worse because I knew by September you'd all be gone and I'd still be living a life that never went anywhere.'

‘But you're in Africa now.'

‘Sometimes I think I'm dreaming it, dreaming it the way I used to dream different futures.'

She nodded her head and smoked her cigarette carefully, as if it were the last one she possessed.

‘And this boy Henri, did you love him?'

‘Of course,' she laughed. ‘I love all my boys. Always, even now.'

‘So what happened to him?'

‘Nothing, after a while we both became bored, that's all. Time for a change.'

‘Do you have many changes, Martine? Many boys?'

‘I don't count,' she laughed, ‘but I think quite a few.'

‘And do you sleep with all of them?'

‘Of course, Naomi – if it lasts long enough and I like them enough. Have you had many boyfriends?'

‘A couple, just a couple.'

‘And did you sleep with them?' she asked.

‘Just once.'

‘
Just once? It wasn't good for you?'

‘No, it wasn't good.'

And then she turned her face towards me, and when I felt the weight of her curiosity I joked, ‘I'm a minister's daughter, I have to be a good girl.'

‘Just because your father's a priest or a minister it doesn't mean you have to be a nun.'

I brushed something away from my face. ‘When I used to moan to my mother about the colour of my hair she'd say I was lucky I wasn't a nun out in the convent on the Point or I'd have no hair at all.'

‘I think my mother wanted to lock me in a convent once – she always disapproved of the things I did. When this is all over for us, you must come to Paris with me and I'll introduce you to many boys.'

‘And how do your parents feel about you being in Africa?'

She shrugged her shoulders and stubbed out her cigarette. ‘They don't like it very much, especially my mother. She worries, always she worries. My father . . . I think he worries too but he just tells me to be careful. He never interferes with my life. Even as a child he wanted me to discover things for myself.'

‘And what is it like living in Paris, Martine?'

‘Right now Paris seems very beautiful to me. If we were there now we'd be sitting in a little cafe I know in Montmartre, dressed in beautiful clothes and smelling nice, sipping our glasses of wine and watching the world pass by. When this is over, will you come and do it with me?'