of the other Africans and Asians she had known at medical school had done just that. They had escaped from the Third World, so why on earth would they want to go back? They would bitch about the English weather, bitch about the racism, but they liked being able to shop at Sainsburys, watch the TV, give their children a good education. And she could hardly blame them. Their countries needed them back, but to go back would be a sacrifice for them, and why should they be the ones to pick up the tab for a world that was not fair?
She could hardly pretend it had been a sacrifice for her, because she had never been able to separate her feelings about the practice of medicine from the unfathomable desire she had always felt to serve humanity. A doctor went where a doctor was most needed, and it was hard to imagine a more needy country in this respect than her own.
But – lately there always seemed to be a ‘but’. Since the attack on her there had been a sense of…loneliness, she supposed. She felt alone, there was no doubt about it. Her family lived in New York, and in any case could not understand why she had not used her obvious gifts to make more of her life. More, that is, in terms of houses, cars and clothes. The people she worked with were the usual mixed bunch – some nice, some not so nice – but she had little in common with any of them. There were no other women doctors at the Royal Victoria Hospital, and the male doctors all wished they were somewhere else.
The Englishman who had saved her that night had become almost a friend. Or something like that. He flirted a lot, and she supposed he would take any sexual favours that were offered, but he had a wife in England, and she guessed that he too was more than a little lonely. And he was at that age, around forty, when men started wondering whether they had made the right life for themselves, and whether it was too late to do something about it.
She was nearly thirty herself, and there seemed little chance of finding a husband in Banjul, even if she had wanted one. She was not sure what she did want. Not to be alone, she supposed. Just that.
It was a funny thing to be thinking in an empty hospital reception area in the middle of the night. She sighed. In the morning it would all look so…
The burst of gunfire seemed to explode all around her, almost making her jump out of her skin. For a moment she thought it had to be inside the room, but then a shadowy figure went racing past in the street outside, then another, and another. They were probably heading for the Presidential Palace, whose gates were only a hundred yards away, around the next corner.
It had to be another coup.
There was a loud series of knocks on the concertina door and shouts of ‘open up’. She took a deep breath and went to unlock it. As she pulled it back a man half fell through the opening, wiping the blood from his head on her white coat as he did so. Behind him another man was holding a bloody side. ‘We need help,’ he groaned, somewhat unnecessarily.
Taal had walked down the radio station’s stairs, and was just emerging onto Buckle Street when a distant burst of automatic fire crackled above the sound of the lorry’s engine. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the Presidential Palace, half a mile or so to the north.
‘Fuck,’ he murmured to himself. He had hoped against hope that this could be a bloodless night, but the chances had always been slim. The men guarding the Palace had received enough personal perks from their employer over the last year to guarantee at least a few hours of stubborn resistance.
The last few bars of ‘Don’t Explain’ faded into silence, or rather into the distant sound of the waves tugging at the beach beneath the Bakau cliffs. Lady Chilel Jawara had discovered Billie Holiday on a trip to New York several years before. Her husband had been attending the UN, and she had decided, on the spur of the moment, to visit an exhibition of photographs of Afro-American music stars. It was the singer’s face she had first fallen in love with, before she’d heard a single note of her music. It was like her mother’s, but that was not the only reason. It was the face of someone who knew what it was like to be a woman.
Not that Billie Holiday had ever been the senior wife of the president of a small African state. Lady Jawara had a lot to be thankful for, and she knew it. Her children were sleeping between sheets, went to the best school, and ate when they were hungry. If they got ill a doctor was sent for.
As for herself, she enjoyed the role of senior wife. Her husband might rule the country but she ruled the household, and of the two administrations she suspected hers was both the more efficient and the less stressful. She hoped he had enjoyed the wedding in London, though she doubted it. Generally he was as bored by European ceremonies as she was.
She yawned and stretched her arms, wondering whether to listen to the other side of the record or go to bed. At that moment she heard the sound of a vehicle approaching.
Whoever it was, they were coming to the Presidential bungalow, for the road led nowhere else. She felt suddenly anxious. ‘Bojang!’ she called, walking to the living-room door.
‘Yes, Lady,’ he said, emerging from the kitchen just as a hammering started on the compound gate.
They both stood there listening, she uncertain what to do, he waiting for instructions. ‘See who it is,’ she said at last.
He let himself out, and she went in search of the gun she knew her husband kept somewhere in the house. The drawers of his desk in the study seemed the best bet, but two of them yielded no gun and the other two were locked. She was still looking for the key when an armed man appeared in the study doorway.
‘Who are you? And what do you want in my house?’ she asked.
‘You are under arrest,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘By whose authority?’
‘And your children,’ the man added, looking round with interest at the President’s study. ‘By the authority of the Revolutionary Council.’
‘The what?’
Her contempt stung the man. ‘Your days are over, bitch,’ he said.
The firefight which began at the gates of the Presidential Palace soon after four a.m., and which continued intermittently across its gardens, up Marina Parade and down to the beach, for the next two hours, woke up most of those sleeping within a quarter of a mile of the Palace.
Opposite the new Atlantic Hotel in Marina Parade, Mustapha Diop was happily snoring his way through it all until his wife’s anxiety forced her to wake him. The two of them sat up in bed listening to the gunfire, then went together to the window, where all they could see was a distant view of the moon on the surf and any number of palm fronds swaying gently in the night breeze.
Diop and his family were from Senegal, and had been in Banjul only a few weeks, since his appointment as secretary to the committee overseeing the proposed union between the two countries. Since a treaty already existed whereby either government would intervene to save the other from an armed take-over, Diop was already aware that he might prove an important bargaining card for any Gambian rebels. The sudden violent knocking on the door downstairs made it clear that the same thought had occurred to them.
Half a mile to the west, the gunfire was only audible, and barely so, when the breeze shifted in the right direction. Moussa Diba and Lamin Konko shared a north-east-facing cell in Banjul Prison, and Diba, prevented from sleeping as usual by the vengeful thoughts which circled his brain, was at first uncertain of what it was he could hear. The sound of lorries rolling past, headed into Banjul from the direction of the Denton Bridge, offered him another clue. Either there was a mother of an exercise going on – which seemed about as likely as an edible breakfast
