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.’
‘Let’s do it,’ she said. ‘Let’s go up to Niger and lie on the ground.’
‘We can do a bit more than just lie.’
But she was off and thinking about it, planning it all in her head. I took my hands out from under her skirt and eased them up her T-shirt and cupped her breasts and she pressed her sex down on to my lap so I hardened. We kissed some more and I was all keen on doing some re-enactment, but Helen came in from the balcony, slapping her thigh with a wooden spoon and asked us whether we wanted our yam boiled or fried.
‘We could go up there when my mother comes out.’
‘When your mother comes out?’ I asked. ‘Your mother’s coming out here to Cotonou?’
‘Why not?’
‘The holiday destination on the mosquito coast apart from maybe Lagos,’ I said. ‘I noticed you didn’t say your father was coming.’
‘No. He’s been before. Spent a couple of years in Ghana in the fifties. He says he doesn’t need to come again.’
‘Well, that means he’s told her it’s not lion and hippo country out here.’
‘She knows that already.’
‘And she knows about the malaria, the heat, the sweat, the pollution…’
‘Why do you live here, Bruce Medway?’
‘I’m just saying it’s not Mombasa beach around here. It’s not jambo country.’
‘I know. I just want you to tell me why you live here.’
‘It’s not the climate. It’s not the cuisine.’
‘Just tell me why.’
‘I’m just saying that those two things are important holiday…’
‘I don’t want to know about what’s important for holidays. I want you to tell me why you live here.’
‘The people.’
‘The people?’
‘If I thought I wasn’t going to see Bagado or Moses or Helen again for the rest of my life, I’d feel…’
‘Yes? What would you feel?’ she asked, teasing me a little, big Bruce Medway talking about his feelings.
‘I’d feel impoverished.’
She
