I waved at Helen, our cook, who was out on the balcony grilling chicken. I stripped and showered off Carlo’s beer shampoo. I tried not to think about Jean-Luc Marnier or Roberto Franconelli by thinking about my first night with Heike instead. How we’d met in the desert, she with her girlfriend in a live Hanomag truck, me on my own in a dead car being towed behind.
We’d stopped and eaten dinner around a fire, it being brisk in the desert at night. She hadn’t said a word to me, the girlfriend did all the talking. Afterwards I went for a walk by myself to look at the stars, breathe in the emptiness and feel the African continent pulsating under my feet, thumping in my chest as if I had a bull’s heart.
I thought I was on my own but then Heike was next to me. We exchanged looks but still no words and in a matter of moments we’d struggled and wrenched ourselves out of our disobedient clothes and were lying naked on the desert floor in a mad, frantic embrace. Our limbs and genitals locked together, the live ground pumping something so exotic through us we shouted when we came. The girlfriend had heard the ruckus and was forced to ask shyly and from some way off whether Heike was all right. Heike had croaked something back at her which she must have heard before from cheap hotel rooms, backs of cars, dark garden ends, because the clear desert air carried her gooseberry weariness back to us.
Having dispatched some of the nastiness, I wedged myself in amongst the floor cushions, stiffened myself with a gulp of Red Label and opened the envelope Carlo had given me. There was 250,000 CFA in it, $300, enough for 48 hours work plus expenses. There was also the other item. A newspaper cutting from the Guardian in Lagos. This is what it said:
Yesterday a police autopsy revealed that Gale Strudwick, who was discovered dead in the swimming pool at her home on Victoria Island three days ago, had died of drowning. A police spokesman said: ‘There was a large quantity of alcohol in her system and she had recently eaten a heavy meal. We do not suspect any foul play.’ Friends had described her as ‘severely depressed’ after her husband, Graydon Strudwick, died of renal failure in Akimbola Awoliyi Memorial Hospital in March.
I sank the whisky in my glass and poured another good two inches and socked it back. Then I poured another inch and in the spirit calm thought that must have been one hell of a meal to sink her to the bottom of the pool, and Gale was not a big eater. She wasn’t a depressive either, not about Graydon, anyway.
Gale Strudwick had been a friend, someone I’d known from my London days who, before she’d confused herself with money, sex and power, I’d liked as well. We’d got ourselves knotted up together in some bad business with Roberto Franconelli and her husband three or four months back. We’d both witnessed some example-setting from the Italian one night which had left me feeling like never talking again in my life, especially about football. Gale was a drinker and more lippy, more provocative, more aggressive about the money she needed to maintain the five-mile-high lifestyle she craved and which she wasn’t going to get from her dead husband’s estate. The cutting was a warning: Be sweet and you shall continue, be sour and you shall be sucking the mud from the bottom of the lagoon.
I rammed the money and clipping into my pocket and stared into my glass thinking about Gale – tough, sexy Gale – who’d talked herself a yard too far over the edge.
Heike breezed in trailing health and efficiency, and I had that feeling of looking up from the complexities of my life to see an aeroplane leaving a chalk mark on a clear blue sky and wanting to be there and out of this.
‘You look whipped,’ she said, dumping her bag on her way into the kitchen. How do women know your mental state just by walking into a room? She came back sipping a beading bottle of Possotomé mineral water, holding a glass of ice cubes.
‘I was feeling bullish,’ I said.
‘I like bullish,’ she said, kneeling down, straddling my lap and giving me a big, cool kiss. ‘What happened?’
‘You first. Yours looks better.’
‘I pulled in six hundred thousand marks from that company Wasserklammer today and they only attached strings to half of it so our little Nongovernmental Organization can expand the AIDS project in Porto Novo.’
‘You must be the boss’s blue-eyed girl.’
‘I’ve always been Gerhard’s blue-eyed girl,’ she said, exuding stuff from glands to make stallions whinny.
‘True,’ I said, damping my bitterness.
‘Now he thinks I’m a star.’
‘You don’t want him thinking you’re going to take over. I don’t think his ego could handle it.’
‘The agency’s not so far advanced that they think a woman could cut it as a boss in Africa.’
‘But we know they’re wrong.’
‘Are you trying to get round me?’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
She kissed me again and let me know through some uncrack-able eye semaphore that the long empty African evening was going to be full. I asked after Moses, my driver, who was being treated for HIV by Heike’s agency. It was one of our evening rituals, and not a bad one because he was always improving, getting stronger. This time she said I might even have him back behind the wheel in a week’s time.
I put my hands up underneath her skirt and stroked her thighs. She ran a cool, wet hand through my hair and I nuzzled her breasts.
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘You haven’t told me yours.’
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘You’ve been doing well recently. All that work in the port.’
‘Something’s just caught up with me and I have to jump.’
‘Try saying no.’
‘I did. It was rephrased in a way that begged the answer yes.’
‘Couldn’t have been that bad if they were begging.’
‘Sorry. Wrong word. These guys do not go around begging. They ask, then they lean and then…’
‘I don’t know how you get involved.’
‘They come into my office and involve themselves, Heike, for Christ’s sake. I don’t even have to be in.’
‘So you knew them?’
‘Yeah, well, something left over from that Selina Aguia business back in March.’
‘Oh God, not her.’
‘Not exactly, but someone we both got to know around that time.’
‘We were going through one of our bad patches at the time, I seem to remember,’ she said.
‘One of those momentary dark clouds that used to flit across the sunshine of our lives.’
‘Flit? I don’t remember it being as a quick as a flit.’
‘Forget about all that,’ I said. ‘I want to think about something else. I want to think about going away.’
‘Back to Europe?’
‘I was just thinking about that first night in the desert. Our first time.’
‘Oh, you mean the ground,’ she said.
‘Yeah, the ground. You remember that ground.’