‘That’s unusual for someone pretty. Normalement les beaux aiment seulement les autres beaux.’
‘Who said that?’
‘Me.’
‘The truth is, Jean-Luc, I might have made the cut at the school dance when I was a youngster, but now I’m in that battle zone over forty, you know what it’s like, wrinkle and sag, wrinkle and sag.’
‘Stay out of the sun. Drink water, my friend.’
‘We’re not going to stay friends for long with that kind of advice.’
He laughed. A crackle of static shivved my right ear.
‘Now, Africans, M. Medway, now they have skin. Beautiful skin. But maybe that’s the nature of beauty…it’s always flawed. We wrinkle and sag and they’re…well, they’re born black.’
‘I’m sure they don’t see it that way.’
‘You’d be surprised.’
I could hear him coming up the stairs now. His feet sliding until they stubbed the next step, his breathing wheezing up badly even after five steps. The man out of condition on all those French filterless cigarettes he stained his hair with.
‘Smoker’s lungs, Jean-Luc, maybe it’s time for you to give up before you belly up.’
‘Look who’s got the advice now,’ he said, stopping on the stairs, the air roaring over the webs of phlegm in his lungs.
‘I’ll shut up, Jean-Luc, let you get to the top of the stairs…’
‘Without annoying me. If I get angry I can’t breathe.’
‘I’ll remember that.’
He got to the top of the stairs and coughed his heart up and spat it out on the floor in the hall.
‘Sorry,’ he said, creeping round the door, ‘for the mess.’
Whatever crap I was going to come up with stopped in a lump under my voice box. I’d done my bit of bragging about how much ugliness I could take, but I wasn’t prepared for what Jean-Luc Marnier sprang on me. His face was hardly a face any more. It wasn’t even an anagram. Not even an anagram put back together by a surgeon speaking a different language. It was an onomatopoeia. It yelled horror.
A scar like a bear-driven stock market collapse travelled from his right eye socket, across his cheek whose bone was knocked flat, underneath his nose where it joined the rip of his mouth for a second before going down to his jawline and into his shirt. There was nothing neat about the stitching. The skin was puckered and bulged in torn peaks. The end of his nose was missing and there was a deep divot across the bridge, which meant he breathed exclusively through his mouth and his right eye was a glazed wall, its socket shattered. Where there should have been a left eyebrow there was a thick, livid welt which ran round to his left ear, which wasn’t there. Below the ear a chunk of his neck was missing and the skin had been stretched over it. The other side of his neck looked like molten lino.
He straightened up at the doorway and walked to the chair like an old soldier pulling himself together, General Gordon, maybe. He sat down and reached into the pocket of his light-blue sleeveless shirt with only two fingers and a thumb on his right hand. Scars like a railway terminus ran up his arms and it wasn’t difficult to see that he’d been cut to the bone. He jogged a cigarette out of the packet and drew it into his mouth. He lit it with a Bic and blew smoke out on the end of a residual cough. Something else different to his photo. He’d dyed his hair black. There was some desperation in that.
‘Now you see why your looks are interesting to me,’ he said, shyly, like a schoolboy with gravel-ripped knees.
I searched for vocabulary but found only first syllables. I reached for Jacques’s whisky and slid it across to Marnier and took a half inch off my own.
‘That’s what I bring out in people,’ he said. ‘Is that Jacques’s glass? Would you mind washing it out?’
‘What happened to you, Jean-Luc?’ I asked, taking another glass out of the drawer and filling it for him.
‘Machete attack. Typical Africans…they didn’t finish the job.’
‘Not here, in Benin?’
‘No, no, Liberia. I shouldn’t have been there. Some tribal problem. The village I was in was attacked. Ten men moved through the village hacking at anything that moved. They sprayed the place with a little gasoline and whumph! They killed twenty-eight people in less than ten minutes. When they left, the locals, who had run, came back. They stitched me up, did what they could for me, got me transport back to Côte d’Ivoire. But, you know how it is, these refugee hospitals they don’t have much call for cosmetic surgeons. So…’ he finished, and revealed himself with what remained of his hands.
‘How long ago was all that?’
‘Must be three or four months now. I was lucky. None of the wounds got infected. The local people covered them in mud. That’s where all our best antibiotics come from.’
‘You must have lost a lot of blood.’
‘Not so much that I let them give me a transfusion. I couldn’t have black man’s blood run through my veins. Don’t know what it would do to me. Make me late…unreliable, things like that.’
‘You don’t think much of Africans for a man whose life was saved by them.’
‘No, no, I like them. I was just joking. I’m very fond of Africans. They are marvellous people. Those local people who helped me. So innocent. So charming. So caring. But I have my prejudices too and at my age they’re difficult to get rid of.’
‘I don’t want you to think I’m being facetious, but for a man who’s suffered what you have and only four months ago…you’ve made a good recovery.’
He grunted out a laugh or a dismissal, I didn’t know which, and stuck his cigarette in his terrible mouth and loosened off the belt of his trousers.
‘Some of my less obvious wounds,’ he said, closing his eye to the smoke, ‘are still open and very badly infected. I’m nervous in crowds. I don’t like loud noises or sudden movements. I find people difficult…to trust.’
‘But this isn’t the only reason you’re hiding, Jean-Luc, is it?’
‘This?’ he asked, pointing at his face and then laying a snub-nosed .38 revolver on my desk. ‘I’m not hiding because of this. I’ll say something for the Africans…it doesn’t bother them. They look at me as if it is normal for a white man to have such a face. And they don’t pity me either. I like that. My own people. Pah! That’s something different. They look at me as if I’m an affront. They look at me as if I should have had the sensitivity to consider their feelings. I should have thought before offending their aesthetic senses. I should be in purdah. Our society is obsessed with beauty, don’t you think, M. Medway?’
‘And your wife?’ I asked, the question in my head and out of my mouth before I could snatch it back.
‘What about my wife?’ he said, quick and vicious.
‘How has she coped with a man who left her whole and came back…It can’t have been easy.’
‘A lot of people underestimate Carole. They spend too long looking at her ass. You know, even before this I was not leading-man material. She didn’t marry me for my looks, M. Medway. And I was fifty-two years old. She was twenty-eight. What does that tell you?’
‘That maybe you’ve got a good sense of humour.’
‘Now you are being facetious.’
‘A little. But that’s what women like in a