1990 - Brazzaville Beach Read online

  I looked at Usman’s Mig. To my eyes it was an ugly plane. It sat low on the ground and was tilted back somewhat, as if on its haunches. The air-intake to the jet was in the nose, a large black hole. On either side of this were twin elliptical recesses, each containing the snub barrel of a machine-gun. We walked round it. The wings were swept back, their leading edges showing a dull gleam of aluminium where the paint had been worn away by the friction of wind and dust. There were dark streaks of oil and grease on the flaps and the soft tyres looked like they needed inflating. I touched the thin metal sides of the plane. It was hot.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said. “These planes are made from aluminium and aluminium is made from bauxite.”

  “They dig bauxite out of the ground here. No wait”—he was going to interrupt me—“what if some of that bauxite is sold to the Russians who turn it into aluminium which is made into Mig 15s? Then they sell the Migs to the air force here who bomb the people who dug the bauxite out of the ground.”

  Usman, to his credit, looked uncomfortable for a moment. Then he shrugged. “It’s a crazy world, you know? Anyway, they don’t sell any of this bauxite to the Russians.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.” Then he ducked under the wing to see what the mechanic was doing. I touched the plane again, rubbing the palp of my finger over a seam in the metal. This Mig seemed much smaller, close to, than I had imagined, having seen them many times flying in and out of the airport. On the ground and at this proximity their machine-like quality was far more in evidence. I could see all the scratches, dents and stains, the rows of rivet heads, places where the sun had caused the paint to flake and blister. Suddenly it was like any other machine—a bus or a car—a thing of components and working parts, of tubes and wires, levers and hinges. A flying machine.

  Usman reappeared.

  “What do you think of it?” he said.

  “What’s her name?” I said facetiously.

  “He not she.”

  “I thought planes and ships were female.”

  “Not this one. This is ‘Boris’. Good Russian name. Big strong bastard.” He gave it a bang with his fist. “D’you want to sit inside?”

  I walked up to the cockpit and peered inside. It looked grubby and very well used, the leather on the seat creased and fraying, the instrumental panel chipped and scarred.

  On one side of the cockpit wall hung a curious cloth pouch, like a purse, embroidered with beads.

  “What’s that?”I said.

  Usman reached past me and opened the flap. He took out a small blue-black gun, with ebony panels set in the grip with his initials inlaid in silver.

  He showed it to me like an artefact, and then offered it to me to hold.

  “It was from my squadron. When I left the air force. It’s Italian, the best.”

  It felt heavy for such a small gun. The metal was cold.

  I gave it back. “Why do you carry it in your plane?”

  “Good luck.” He smiled. “My special protection. And in case I’m shot down.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Here, let me help you climb in.”

  “Come on, Usman. I’m hot. I don’t know anything about planes. I don’t care.”

  “Poor Boris,” he said to the plane ruefully. “She doesn’t like you.”

  I had to laugh. Jesus Christ, I said, and turned and walked back to the car.

  “What are those things?” I said, pointing at the silver teardrops on their little trolleys.

  “Gasoline,” he said. “Drop tanks.”

  IKARIOS AND ERIGONE

  No Migs fly out of the airport these days. A few months ago the air force moved its main base further south to counter the increasing EMLA threat. The Airport Hotel is even more deserted than usual, as a result. I eat there once or twice a week, whenever Gunther invites me, and often we are the only diners in the entire restaurant. Which is a shame: the food has improved vastly under the new management. A new manager was appointed some months ago, a Greek, called Ikarios Panathatanos.

  Ikarios is a hefty, balding man who reminds me a little of Hauser. One evening he told me the origin of his Christian name. The source is a very minor figure in Greek mythology. The original Ikarios was a farmer who discovered how to make wine from the grapes he grew. For a while he kept the secret to himself, making his wine and drinking it alone, covertly. But he enjoyed the experience so much he decided one day that he should share the pleasure with his neighbours and invited the entire village round to his house to partake of his marvellous discovery.

  So the villagers drank their fill. However, as the symptoms of intoxication began to overwhelm them they grew convinced that this was an elaborate plot Ikarios had concocted to poison them. So in a drunken, paranoiac panic they stoned the hapless farmer to death.

  But the tragedy did not end there. Ikarios’s daughter Erigone, overcome with grief at her father’s death, decided to take her own life and hung herself from an olive tree.

  That was all Ikarios knew about his illustrious namesake. Ikarios has a pretty little three-year-old daughter whom he has naturally called Erigone. He sees nothing sinister in the connotation at all.

  Hope needed a job and Professor Hobbes found her one. He telephoned her one day and suggested she come and see him. Months had gone by since her doctorate had been awarded and she could not satisfactorily explain her lethargy, even to herself. She had published one article and done some reading, but little more. It was as if she wanted someone else to initiate the next stage of her professional career, as if she hadn’t the courage to take the next step unguided, of her own volition.

  Hobbes was an elderly-looking man, in his early sixties, pot-bellied and moustachioed, who could have auditioned successfully for the role of old codger or benign grandad in a television commercial. The affable looks, however, belied a shrewd and often malicious nature. He was a powerful and influential figure in his field and the various scientific societies he was active in. Each year, from amongst his students, he selected one or two as special favourites and spoiled them blatantly, securing grants, better laboratory facilities and, eventually, jobs, almost as a demonstration of the efficacy of patronage.

  In her first year Hope had been chosen as one of the elect. And it was understood too that if Hobbes took an interest in you it extended well beyond the walls of his department and was of no fixed duration, to be terminated unilaterally by him, as and when he felt like it. There were eminent academics around the world who were reminded periodically that the markers were still out and yet to be called in. Hope was well aware, as she first did little, and then nothing, to find a job, that her inertia would not pass unnoticed. When she heard Hobbes’s surprisingly soft voice on the telephone, it was with sly relief rather than guilt that she gladly agreed to meet to ‘discuss her future’.

  “What is going on, Hope?” Hobbes said. “I mean just what the hell is going on?” He poured her a glass of wine. It was white and fragrant and perfectly cold. Hobbes had a fridge in his office. He smiled at her as she drank.

  “Why didn’t you apply for that lectureship in York? I could’ve rung Frank.”

  “I got married.”

  “So what?”

  “Having got married, I rather wanted to spend some time with my husband.”

  “How sentimental.”

  “I need a job in London.”

  “You should have taken the York job and commuted. Doesn’t everyone do that sort of thing now?”

  She let him berate her for her naivety for the allotted time, and then said she wouldn’t mind something short-term. John was planning to go back to the States, she lied spontaneously, and said that she would not want to commit to anything that would last more than a year. Hobbes grudgingly said he would see what was around.

  He called her again within a week. He had two jobs for her, he said, and she had better take one of them. Both were to start as soon as she was ready, both were a one-year contract. Neith
er was exactly in her area but she was well qualified to do them, and, in any event, he was ‘old friends’ with both the men in charge. The best one was in Africa, he said, studying wild chimpanzees.

  “No, I don’t think—”

  “Don’t interrupt. They’re desperate. It’s American-funded so you’ll be very well paid. And it’ll open all sorts of doors for you.”

  No, she said, she couldn’t go to Africa now. Out of the question.

  He told her about the other job. “One tenth the money,” he said, disgustedly. The advantage as she saw it, though, was that she could do it part-time. It was a survey of an ancient and historic estate in South Dorset, near the coast. An historian, an archaeologist and a geographer had been studying the landscape’s history, and they needed an ecologist to complete the picture. “Dating woodlands and hedgerows, that sort of thing,” Hobbes said. “Not wildly exciting, but I told them you could handle that. No problem. Don’t let me down.”

  She duly met the project director, a former student of Hobbes, it turned out, and she was automatically approved. Graham Munro was a gaunt, mild man who was very unlikely, she realized, to challenge Hobbes’s estimation of her ability. She would start in a month, they agreed, and she would spend two to three days a week working on location. Munro told her that there was a farm cottage on the estate that she could bunk down in.

  Being employed cheered her up, she discovered. She wondered if it had been her joblessness that had made her fractious and worried, rather than John. He was pleased for her too, he said. They made plans for him to come down with her some weeks, if his own work permitted.

  In her final month of idleness she suggested they both take a holiday. They decided to go back to Scotland, and rented a small house on an island off the west coast, reached by ferry from Mallaig.

  Their house was on the edge of the island’s only village. It was a low, single-storeyed, thick-walled cottage with deep-set windows with a view of the harbour and the bay. Inside it was plainly and functionally decorated: white distemper on the walls, brown linoleum on every floor and minimally furnished. There were two armchairs facing the fire and a dining-table with four chairs in the main room. The bedroom had an oak cupboard and a high, iron, double bed. There was a chilly lavatory but no bath; all washing had to be done at the sink in the kitchen, a small room at the back of the cottage that contained a gas stove but no refrigerator. There were working fireplaces in the bedroom and sitting-room, both of which heated the water. The whole place was lit by gas lamps. There was no phone, no television, no radio.

  John said it was like living in a D.H. Lawrence novel, but he liked it, and so did Hope. It was austere but it worked. The fires kept the place warm, the hissing gas mantles provided adequate light for reading. The bed was big and hard and there were plenty of grey, prickly blankets. It was curious, but she found that the rigours of keeping the little house functioning imposed a similar discipline on them. They washed up after meals for the first time in their married life, and they never allowed the baskets of peat and logs to empty. They ate solid, simple meals bought from the village store: tinned stew and potatoes, meat pie and baked beans, freshly caught herring and cabbage. After their meal they would sit in their respective armchairs in front of the fire and read for two or three hours, or play chess. Hope had brought a sketch book with her and a quiver of new pencils. She started drawing again.

  The older houses of the village were clustered around the simple harbour. The newer and remarkably ugly buildings—the post office, the ‘Mini-Market’, the primary school and the village hall—were set widely apart on the land behind, placed apparently randomly, facing different directions as if they were ashamed of each other. On a small promontory that jutted out into the bay was an hotel, the Lord of the Isles, that contained the island’s only licensed bar. Elsewhere, throughout the island’s eight by two miles area, were a handful of crofts—one or two derelict—another semi-village on the north shore and one grand house, surrounded by a small copse of leaning, wind-battered scotch pines, that served its current owner, a Dutch industrialist, as a fifth home. He owned great tracts of the island—hence the derelict crofts—and occasionally helicoptered in with his house guests for a summer weekend. Nobody on the island could understand why he had bought the place.

  Very quickly, Hope and John established a routine. They awoke early, after eight hours of sound and dreamless sleep. John lit the fire in the sitting-room while Hope prepared the breakfast. Then they did their chores—replenishing fuel, buying food, preparing a packed lunch. This completed, they set off on their bicycles (hired from the Lord of the Isles) and cycled off—rain or shine—until they found a beach or cove that appealed to them. John was reading nothing but detective novels—he had three dozen paperbacks with him—and as they cycled along he would recount, with astonishing recall and detail, the story of the latest one he had read. Once they had found their beach, and had settled themselves, they prowled around, searching the tidewrack for flotsam and jetsam. Hope sketched, John read or went for walks. They never saw another soul.

  They might cycle on after their lunch—their aim was to have covered the entire shoreline of the island—and they usually returned home about four in the afternoon for tea, and sometimes a siesta. At opening time they would stroll up to the Lord of the Isles for a drink and would linger there until they felt hungry. Then followed their prosaic meal and an evening’s reading and drawing. They went to bed when they felt tired, normally before eleven. They made love every night of that holiday, almost as a reflex. The slab, marmoreal cold of their bed had them squirming into each other’s arms for warmth and their arousal was immediate and simultaneous. Their sex was as efficient and unpretentious as their surroundings—no foreplay, no experimentation, no undue prolongation of climax—and they were both asleep within minutes of it ending.

  On the edge of the village was a hairy, sloping football pitch and behind one of the goalposts was a rusting skip that was the repository of all the village’s ‘hard’ rubbish, as the notice on its side proclaimed. Newspapers, boxes, tins and bottles—anything that the earth could not break down. All the ‘soft’ rubbish, their landlady, the postmistress, informed them, was to be buried. There was a spade in the wee shed by the back door for this very purpose, she told them, and she would be much obliged if they interred their refuse at least twenty yards from the house. On their third day on the island Hope volunteered to dispose of two plastic bags of hard rubbish if John would take care of the soft.

  There was a keen breeze and a fine drizzle that spattered against the hood of her windcheater, but the clouds above were hurrying and broken and Hope could see shreds of indecent blue amongst the grey. She was stiff from cycling and so, after depositing her rubbish, and in an attempt to loosen up, she jogged slowly round the football pitch a couple of times. The island was flat, the roads were well metalled. Only the strength of the wind impeded or assisted cyclist and machine.

  Half a dozen cold little boys in sports kit ran out of the schoolhouse and listlessly kicked a too big football at each other, their complaints shrill and protesting. A young schoolmistress, who was clearly indifferent to the rules of soccer, ignored them, hunching out of the wind by the goalposts to light a cigarette. Hope smiled at her as she jogged past and received a cheery good morning in reply. They had seen each other in the Lord of the Isles the night before and no doubt would continue to do so for the rest of the holiday. Hope looked at the little tottering boys with their raw red noses and knees and hurried back to John.

  He was not in the cottage so she went to look for him, through the back garden, a stretch of humpy waste ground with brambles and nettles, towards the remains of what she supposed was a wooden privy and a carious dry-stone wall. Beyond that was the heathy spit of land that made up one arm of the bay and beyond that the sun shone on a brilliant cold Atlantic.

  John was on the other side of the wall, in his shirtsleeves, standing in a freshly dug pit, waist-deep, digging. He was una
ware of Hope’s approach, so preoccupied was he with his task. He looked round when he heard her laughter.

  “For God’s sake,” she said, “it’s a poly bag of chicken bones and potato peelings, not a bloody coffin.”

  He looked, as if for the first time, at his hole and its prodigious depth. His expression was bemused, slightly surprised.

  He climbed out, smiling vaguely.

  “Got carried away,” he said. Then he dropped his spade. “Hold on, I’ve…I’ve got to write something down.” He ran into the house. Hope rummaged in the pockets of his jacket, hung on the hinge of the privy door, found his cigarettes and lit one. The sun that had been shining on the sea had moved to the land and it warmed her face as she sat on the stone wall and looked at the hole John had dug. The earth was moist and peaty the colour and consistency of the richest rum-soaked, treacle-infused chocolate cake. The blade of the old spade was clean, its edge silvered from years of abrasion, the handle waxy and worn with use.

  She smoked her cigarette and was about to go and look for him when he rejoined her. He was frowning. He picked up the spade and looked at it as if it held some answer to a baffling question. He threw the bag of rubbish in the pit and began to fill it in.

  “It’s quite extraordinary,” he said as he worked. “I started digging. And then my mind…” He paused. “I started thinking.” He screwed his face up. “And I worked something out as I was digging,” he said slowly, as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened. “Something that had been puzzling me for ages. That’s why I had to go and write it down.”

  “What?”

  “An equation.” He started to tell her but she stopped him.

  He laid the squares of turf over the soil and stamped them down. “Quite weird,” he said. “The whole thing.”

  That evening, after the meal, instead of reading, John sat at the table and worked, steadily covering the pages of her sketch book with the complex hieroglyphics of mathematical formulae. The next day he had no detective story to recount to her but he was so elated at what he had achieved the night before that he went swimming in the sea, naked, for all of ninety seconds. She folded him in a towel and then in the picnic blanket, laughing at the image he had presented emerging from the waves, white with shock and cold, and his crabbed, crouched stumble up the beach to rejoin her.