1990 - Brazzaville Beach Read online

  In due course the other members of the project drifted in. First came Ian Vail and his wife Roberta. They said hello and then took their trays back to their cottage. Then Eugene Mallabar himself entered, collected his food and sat down opposite me.

  Even his most embittered enemy would have to concede that Mallabar was a handsome man. He was in his late forties, tall and lean, with a kind, regular-featured face that seemed naturally to emanate all manner of potent abstract nouns: sincerity, integrity, single-mindedness. For some reason his too neatly trimmed warlock’s beard, and its associations of substantial personal vanity, did not detract from this dauntingly positive air he possessed. Tonight he wore a faded blue polka-dot cravat at his throat which set off his tan admirably.

  “Where’s Ginga?” I asked, trying not to stare at him. Ginga was his wife, whom I quite liked, despite her stupid name.

  “Not hungry, she says. Touch of flu—perhaps.” He shrugged and forked chicken generously into his mouth. He chewed lazily, almost side to side, as if he were eating cud. He used his tongue a lot, pushing his food against his palate, searching for morsels around his molars. I knew this because I could see it: Mallabar ate without closing his mouth properly.

  “How was your day?” I asked, looking down at my plate.

  “Excellent, excellent…” I heard him drinking water and wondered when it would be safe to look up. “Mmmm,” he went on, “we had five in the Feeding Area. Four males and a female in oestrus. Fascinating series of copulations.”

  “Just my luck.” I snapped my fingers in parody disappointment.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Ah.” I felt an immediate and intense weariness descend on me. “You know: I’m in the south. All that fun going on here.”

  He frowned, puzzled, still not with me.

  “It’s not important,” I said. “Forget it. So Ginga’s got flu?”

  “We have it on film.”

  “What?”

  “Today. At the feeding area.”

  “No, Eugene. Please. It doesn’t matter.”

  He smiled slyly, nodding. “All right. Got it. You were teasing me.”

  “Look, Eugene…Oh God.”

  He was snapping his fingers. “Just your luck. Got it.”

  I felt my neck muscles knot. Jesus Christ.

  He forced out a long chuckle and ate on, hugely.

  “How was your day?” he said after a while.

  “Oh…Clovis smelt his finger for a couple of hours.”

  “Clovis?” He shook his fork at me.

  “XNM1. Sorry.”

  Mallabar smiled benignly at my error, stood up and went to refill his plate. Mallabar was one of those people who could eat as much as they liked and remain thin. As he moved to the buffet he passed Ian Vail who was returning with his tray for the pudding of sliced mangoes and condensed milk. Vail smiled at me. It was a nice smile. The adjective was exact. He had a nice face too, only a little plump, with pale eyelashes and fine blond hair. He put his tray down, came over and squatted close by me.

  “Can I come and see you?” he said, softly, so Toshiro wouldn’t hear. “Later. Please? Just to talk.”

  “No. Go away.”

  He looked at me: his eyes were full of rebuke for my coldness. I stared back. He stood up and left. Mallabar returned with a heaped plate. He watched Vail leave before sitting down.

  “Are you going with Ian tomorrow?” he asked.

  “NoClear,” I said, too abruptly. “No, I’m back in the south.”

  “I thought he was planning to invite you.” Mallabar was eating vigorously again. I watched him with genuine fascination. Why had no one ever told him, I wondered, that he ate with his mouth open? I supposed it was too late to change, now.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What was he saying to you, then? It was very brief.”

  “Who?” I said ingenuously. Mallabar was notoriously curious about his colleagues.

  “Ian. Just then.”

  “Oh…That he was passionately in love with me.”

  Mallabar’s mobile face stopped.

  I looked at him: head cocked, open-faced, eyebrows raised.

  He smiled with relief.

  “Good one,” he said. “Excellent.”

  He laughed hard, showing me more of the contents of his mouth. He drank water, coughed, drank some more.

  Hauser stared curiously at me from the other end of the table.

  “Ah, my dear Hope,” Mallabar said and touched my hand. “You’re incorrigible.” He raised his glass to me. “To Hope, our very own tonic.”

  WHAT I LIKE TO DO

  What I like to do with him is this. We are lying in bed, it doesn’t matter when, at night or in the morning, but he is warm and drowsy, half asleep and I am awake. I lie close to him, my breasts flattened against his back, his buttocks press against my thighs, my knees fitting his knee backs, his heels on my insteps.

  Without much ado I slide my hand over his hip and hold him, very gently. His penis is soft and flaccid. So light in my palm. Light as a coin—a weight, a presence merely, but that is all. For a while nothing happens. Then the warmth of my cradling fingers slowly makes him grow. That fleshy inflation, the warmth now transferring back to me with the exothermic flush of blood irrigating the muscle tissue. This power I have, this magic transformation that my touch effects, never fails to excite me. Engorged, thickening, veined like a leaf, it slowly pushes through the loose cage of my fingers, and he turns to face me.

  Hope Dunbar had heard people talking about John Clearwater in college for some time before she met him.

  Clearwater.

  The name stuck in her head. Clearwater…She recognized its reoccurrence in conversations several times without taking in its context.

  “Who is this Clearwater everyone’s talking about?” she asked her supervisor, Professor Hobbes.

  “John Clearwater?”

  “I don’t know. I just keep hearing the name.”

  “He’s the new research fellow, isn’t he? I think that’s the one.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Incredibly brilliant man, that sort of thing. Or so they say. But then they always say that. I’m sure we’ve all been ‘incredibly brilliant’ in our time.” He paused. “What about him?”

  “Nothing. Just curious about the name.”

  John Clearwater.

  A few days later she saw a man in her street with a folded newspaper in his hand looking up at the houses. He wore a gaberdine raincoat and a red baseball hat. He looked up at the façades of the terraced houses curiously, as if he were thinking of buying them, then he turned away.

  Hope had rounded the corner off the Old Brompton Road and he was headed in the opposite direction, so she never managed a proper look at him. It was the conjunction of the raincoat and the baseball hat that made him singular in some way. The thought came to her, unbidden, that this man might have been John Clearwater.

  Two days after this encounter she was walking along an unfamiliar corridor in the college (she had been up to the computing department to collect a print-out for Professor Hobbes) when she passed a door that was open by about six inches. The name on it was ‘DR J.L. CLEARWATER’. She stopped and peered in. From where she was standing she could see a corner of vermilion college-issue carpet and a bare wall with Sellotape scars.

  For some reason, and with untypical presumption, she took a step forward and pushed the door wide.

  The room was empty. Clouds in the sky shifted and the spring sunshine suddenly painted a yellow window on the wall. Dust motes still moved, unsettled recently.

  On the floor were a dozen cardboard boxes filled with books. The desk was clear. She went round it and opened two drawers. A chain of paper clips. An olive-green paper puncher. Three boiled sweets. She searched the other drawers. Empty. A tension and baffled excitement was beginning to quicken inside her. What was she doing in this man’s room? What was she playing at?

  On the soft c
hair in the corner was a coat. A woollen coat, charcoal-grey herringbone. Then on the mantelpiece above the gas fire she saw a mug of coffee.

  Steaming.

  She touched it. Hot.

  Her mouth was dry now as she picked up the coat and went through the pockets. A pair of sheepskin gloves. A small plastic bottle of pills marked Tylenol. Some change.

  There was a noise at the door.

  She turned. Nothing. No one. It swung mysteriously on its hinges, an inch or two, shifted by some nomadic breeze roaming the building.

  She laid the coat back on the chair. John Clearwater, she heard teasingly in her head, John Clearwater, where aaaaare you? Her eyes flicked around the room looking for something—she wasn’t entirely sure what. She wasn’t entirely sure what weird motives were making her behave in this way.

  She picked up the mug of coffee and sipped it. Strong and sweet. Three spoonfuls of sugar, she would guess. She put it back down. The pink lipstick crescent of her lower lip was printed on the rim.

  She turned the mug so her trace was unmissable, and left.

  There was another sighting, she thought. Again, she could not say why her instinct was so emphatic, but she was sure that this was her man. She deliberately did not seek him out, but she found that as she wandered through the precincts of the college, going about her business, she was evaluating, unconsciously, every strange male face she encountered. She had an absolute confidence that she would recognize him.

  Then, one evening, she was at an off-licence buying a bottle of wine, en route for a friend’s dinner party. The place was busy and there was a queue at both tills. Her bottle was wrapped in tissue, but when she presented her ten pound note it was discovered that there wasn’t sufficient change. While the attendant burrowed in the adjacent till for a fresh supply of coins her attention was suddenly attracted by a man leaving the shop.

  He was at the door, on his way out, when she turned. He was bareheaded, dark-haired and wearing a biscuit-coloured tweed jacket. From each pocket protruded a bottle of red wine. Under his right arm he carried an untidy bundle of books and papers. The weight of the bottles stretched the material of his jacket across his broad shoulders. She thought, first: that’s one way to ruin a jacket. And then, almost immediately: that’s John Clearwater. He left the shop and moved out of sight.

  The sales assistant laboriously counted out her change. By the time Hope was outside there was no sign of him. She felt no frustration; she knew it had been him. And she felt quietly sure that she would meet him, eventually. There was time enough.

  And she was right. It took a little longer than she had calculated, but their respective trajectories finally touched at a faculty party. She saw him standing by the drinks table and knew at once it was him. She was almost drunk, but it was not alcohol that gave her the confidence to push through the room and introduce herself. The time had come, it was as simple as that.

  THE MOCKMAN

  Pan troglodytes. Chimpanzee. The name was first used in 1738 in the London Magazine. “…A most surprising creature was brought over that was taken in a wood in Guinea. She is the female of the creature which the Angolans call ‘Chimpanzee’, or the Mockman.”

  The Mockman.

  Chimpanzees can, without encouragement, develop a taste for alcohol. When Washoe—a chimp reared with a human family and taught deaf and dumb sign language—was first introduced to live chimpanzees, and was asked what they were, he signed, “Black Bugs.” Chimpanzees use tools and can teach other chimpanzees how to use them. Chimpanzees have pined away and died from broken hearts…

  Genetically, chimpanzees are the closest living relatives to human beings. When genetic matches were made of chimp and human DNA it was found that they differed only by a factor of 1½ to 2 per cent. In the world of taxonomy this means that chimpanzees and human beings are species siblings and, strictly speaking, the classification should really be changed. We belong to the same genus —Homo. Not Pan troglodytes, then, but Homo troglodytes and Homo sapiens. The Mockmen.

  I was eating my breakfast—a mug of milky tea and a drab slice of bread and margarine—when Joao arrived, Alda accompanying him. Alda was slim, like his father, eighteen years old and, oddly, with much lighter-toned skin, almost caramel-coloured. He had a big, open face and an attentive air, as if he were curious about everything he saw. He was not particularly bright, but he was very keen. I asked him what had happened about his military service.

  “No, no,” he said with a relieved grin. “Too many soldiers now. War he finish soon.”

  “Oh yes?” This was news to me. “What do you think?” I asked Joao.

  He was less sanguine. “I don’ know.” He shrugged. “They say UNAMO is finish…But you still remain with FIDE and EMLA.”

  “UNAMO is finish,” Alda said with some emphasis. “They catch them at Luso, near the railway. Kill plenty plenty.”

  “Who caught them?”

  “The Federals…and FIDE.” He made diving sounds, his caramel hands swooping. “Gasoline bombs.”

  I reflected on this. “I thought FIDE was against the Federals.”

  “Yes, they are,” Alda said patiently, “but they both don’t like UNAMO.”

  “I give up,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  It was cool this early in the morning, sometimes I thought I saw my breath condense, just for an instant. The sky was white and opaque with misty cloud, the light even and shadowless. A heavy dew on the grass turned my dun leather boots chocolate in seconds. We walked through the silent camp, heading south.

  As we passed Mauser’s cabin I heard my name called. I turned. Hauser stood in the doorway wearing an unattractively short, towelling dressing-gown.

  “Glad I caught you,” he said. He handed me back my specimen bottle, clean and empty. “Most amusing. Did you think it up by yourself or did that genius Vail help you?”

  “What’re you talking about?” I said coldly. I can be as frosty as the best of them.

  “Your feeble joke.” He pointed at the specimen bottle. “For your information, the last meal your chimp enjoyed appeared to be a chimpburger.” His thin false smile disappeared. “Don’t waste my time, Dr Clearwater.”

  He went back into his cabin, haughtily. Joao and Alda looked at me with eager surprise: they rarely witnessed our arguments in the camp. I raised my shoulders, spread my palms and looked baffled. This needed further thought. We set off once more.

  Eugene Mallabar had started the Grosso Arvore Research Project in 1953. It began modestly, as a field study to flesh out some chapters in his doctoral thesis. But the work fascinated him and he stayed on. He was joined two years later by his wife, Ginga. Between them their investigations into the society of wild chimpanzees, and their scrupulous and original field studies, soon brought scientific acclaim and increasing public renown. This became genuine celebrityhood, on Mallabar’s part, when he published his first book, The Peaceful Primate, in 1960. Television films and documentaries followed and Grosso Arvore, along with its telegenic founder, thrived and grew. Research grants multiplied, eager PhD students offered their services and government influence broke through the hitherto impenetrable barriers of red tape that had stood in the way of real expansion. Soon Grosso Arvore became a pioneering national park and game reserve, amongst the first in Africa. Then came the international success of Mallabar’s next book, Primate’s Progress. Invitations, citations and honours followed; Mallabar became the recipient of a baker’s dozen of honorary doctorates; there was a biennial cycle of lucrative lecture tours in America and Europe; Mallabar chairs in Primatology were established in Berlin, Florida and New Mexico. Eugene Mallabar’s place in the annals of science and ethology was secure.

  The essence of the Mallabar approach to the study of chimpanzee society was painstaking and time-consuming. Its first and key requirement was that the observer habituate himself with the apes he was studying so that they accepted his presence in their world without fear or inhibition. Once that had been achieved (it had ta
ken Mallabar almost two years) then the next stage was to observe and record. Over the years of the project this process had evolved into something highly organized and systematic and vast amounts of data were gathered and analysed. All observations were logged in a uniform way; chimps were identified, followed, and their biographies were steadily compiled and annotated over the years. The result was that, over two decades on from Mallabar’s initial studies, the Grosso Arvore project now represented the most exhaustive and thorough study of any animal society in the history of scientific investigation.

  Mallabar was not alone, of course: there were other celebrated primate studies going on as well in Africa—at Gombe Stream, at Mahale National Park, at Bossou in Guinea—but there was no doubt that Mallabar, and Grosso Arvore, had the highest profile and attracted, thanks to the allure and skill of its founder, a reputation that could only be described as glamorous.

  In this long catalogue of success and glory Mallabar had made one important error—but it was one he could not have foreseen, to do him justice. He had chosen the wrong country. The civil war which began in 1968 brought massive problems, not to say occasional danger. Happily, the fighting that took place was always at a safe distance, but there remained always the threat of sudden upheavals and breakouts from enclaves. The crude violence employed by the four armies contesting power, and the unpredictable nature of their fortunes, meant that the old days of glossy magazine stories, cover features and TV documentaries were over. The census of the chimpanzee population of the Semirance Forest (a very expensive and ambitious undertaking) was the first casualty of the unrest once the supply of PhD students dried up. Work permits and visas for the remaining scientists became far harder to come by, and all manner of provisions became unobtainable as international opinion and superpower muscle-flexing imposed official or unofficial economic sanctions. Worse still, the uncompromising savagery of the Federal Government’s attempts to crush the competing guerrilla factions drew mounting condemnation and opprobrium from the West. The supply of grants and awards—the fuel upon which Grosso Arvore ran—began to dwindle alarmingly. Eugene Mallabar and Grosso Arvore found themselves attached, by association, to a bankrupt regime with an unsavoury international reputation. Mallabar, needless to say, protested everywhere that the interests of scientific research had nothing to do with politics, but to little avail.