A Good Man in Africa (6 page)

He dried himself leisurely. Hazel had switched on her transistor radio and low monotonous soul-music issued from the crackling loud-speaker. Morgan thought about ordering it silenced but decided to be obliging and refrain. Hazel was reliable too, he thought kindly—well, almost, in her own bizarre way. He was grateful to her.

Standing rigidly to attention and craning his head forward Morgan could just see the tip of his penis beyond the burgeoning swell of his pot-belly. Beer and sex, he thought. When he couldn’t see it any more he’d go on a diet. He continued to pass the towel regularly over his body but it was no longer having any effect; he wasn’t wet exactly, but remained distinctly moist. He padded through to the bedroom and stood in front of the standard fan. He took a large tin of talcum powder from Hazel’s crowded dressing table and liberally dusted his armpits and groin. When his pubic hairs had turned a ghostly white he
pulled on his underpants—pale-blue billowing boxer shorts. This had been another of Murray’s recommendations. There was the man again, Morgan seethed, but he had to admit it made sense, and it was comfortable. Kinjanja’s humid clime was not suited for tight, genital-bunching hipster briefs; you had to let the air get to those dark, dank places.

He caught a glimpse of a section of his torso in Hazel’s dressing-table mirror. Fat lapped over the waistband of his boxer shorts. He was particularly distressed by the two pads that had seemingly clamped themselves immovably to his back—like tenacious alien parasites—in the region of his kidneys. He was getting too large: fifteen and a half stone at the last weigh-in. He winced at the memory. He had always been on the biggish side; in his beefy adolescence his mother had tactfully described him as “big-boned,” though “burly” was how he now liked to see himself. He was of average height, around five foot nine or ten, and had always cut a stocky figure but in his getting-on-for-three years in Nkongsamba he had put on almost two stone and his silhouette seemed to bulk larger every week.

He crouched down and peered over Hazel’s shoulder at his face in the mirror. He fingered his jaw-line. Christ, he thought with some alarm, the bone is half an inch below the surface. He stretched his neck from side to side, turning his head and squinting at his profile. He had a broad face; it could carry the extra flesh not too badly, he reckoned. He smiled at himself, his strong smile, showing all his teeth. There was something vaguely Brandoish about him, he felt. Hazel looked up from her nail painting, thought he was smiling at her and smiled back.

Standing up he inflated his chest, sucked in his gut and flexed his buttocks. He didn’t really look thirty-four, he decided, that is, if you ignored his hair. His hair was the bane of his life; it was fine and wispy, pale reddish-brown and falling out. His temples took over more of his head every month. Somehow his widow’s peak held on, a hirsute promontory in an expanding sea of forehead. If his bloody receding didn’t stop soon, he reflected, he’d end up looking like a Huron Indian or one of those demented American Marines, currently wasting the inhabitants of South-East Asia, who shaved their heads leaving
only a prickly stripe running down the centre. Gently, with all ten finger tips, he teased the soft hair across his brow; it was too sad really.

Back in his clothes he returned his attention to Hazel. She was spending a long time preparing herself for something, and it wasn’t for him. He looked around the room and its tawdriness set his spirits in the now familiar slide—the frame metal bed with its thin dunlopillo mattress, the cheap local furnishings, the bright ceiling light with its buzzing corona of flying insects and Hazel’s garish mini-skirts and shifts cast around the room as haphazardly as seaweed on a beach.

“Can’t you keep this bloody place tidy?” he said complainingly. Then: “And where are you going tonight?”

Hazel was struggling into a tight pink cotton mini-dress and she was wobbly on high-heeled patent-leather shoes. “I can’t stay here all night,” she said, not unreasonably. “I am going to the Executive. Josy Gboye is starring there.”

Morgan laughed sardonically. “Oh yeah? And I suppose you’re going alone.”

Hazel adjusted her wig, a heavily back-combed straight-haired black one modelled after the hair style of a British pop-singer. “Of course not,” she said simply, “I am going with my brother.” She fastened on her gold earrings. Morgan thought she looked like a tart, lurid and sexual, and deeply attractive. He realised he was jealous; he would have liked to be going to the Executive with her, but it functioned as an unofficial campaign headquarters for Adekunle’s party workers, and it would not be wise for him to be spotted there with the elections just a week away. Besides, the last person in the world he wanted to see at the moment was Adekunle. The barbecue at the club would be safer—safe and dull.

Hazel saw his smouldering look and came over to him. She put her arms round his waist.

“I want to go with you,” she said, nuzzling his chest. The stiff nylon hairs of the wig tickled Morgan’s nose making him want to sneeze. “But if you won’t allow me, what can I do?”

Confronted by this logic he decided to be unreasonable.

“All right,” he said. “All right. But be back here by 10:30. I think I’ll look in later.” He thought this highly improbable but he didn’t like being taken for granted.

He bent down and touched his lips to her neck. Her skin was smooth and dry. He smelt “Amby”—a skin lightening agent most Kinjanjan girls used—talcum powder and a thin acidic whiff of fresh perspiration. He suddenly felt very aroused. He never failed to register amazement at the swiftness of his erections—and their subsidence—in Africa. He pressed himself against Hazel, and she backed off laughing, her almond eyes creased thinner with amusement. She gave her infectious, high-pitched laugh.

“Dis man,” she said in pidgin English. “Dis man ’e nevah done satisfy, ah-ah!” She clapped her hands in delighted mirth.

For some reason Morgan found himself smiling bashfully, a schoolboy blush spreading slowly across his face.

Morgan parked his Peugeot in the club car-park. He got out and gazed across the warm roofs of the other cars at the club building. It was a dark night and the gathering rainclouds had obscured the stars. A coolish breeze blew from the west and Morgan smelt the damp-earth odour of impending rain.

The club was situated to the north of the city in one of the more seemly purlieus. Nearby stood a dusty racecourse and polo ground and the only Nkongsamban cinema regularly frequented by Europeans. The club itself was a large sprawling building which had been added to many times in the last half century and its haphazard design illustrated a variety of solid colonial architectural styles. It boasted also half a dozen red-clay tennis courts, a sizeable swimming pool and a piebald eighteen-hole golf course. Inside were a couple of bars, a billiard room, a function suite of sorts that doubled as a discotheque and a large lounge-area filled with rickety under-stuffed armchairs which on festive occasions was cleared to provide space for dances, tombola and amateur dramatics or, should any crisis arise, acted as an assembly point for anxious expatriates.

It was a seedy-looking building, over-used, always seeming in need of a fresh coat of paint, but it was, by virtue of the poverty of alternatives, a popular place and Morgan, when he
didn’t detest it as a repository for all the worst values of smug colonial British middle-classdom, often found himself savouring its atmosphere—the wide eaves providing ample shade for the long verandahs, the whirling roof fans rustling the tissue-thin airmail editions of
The Times
, the barefoot waiters in their white gold-buttoned uniforms clicking across the loose parquet flooring as they brought another tall green frosted bottle of beer to your chair.

But it wasn’t always shrouded in this nostalgic fog for him; there were bar-flies and bores, lounge-lizards and lechers. Adulterers and cuckolds brushed shoulders in the billiard rooms, idle wives played bridge or tennis or sunbathed round the pool, their children in the care of nannies, their housework undertaken by stewards, their husbands earning comfortable salaries all day. They gossiped and bitched, thought about having affairs and sometimes did, and the dangerous languor that infected their hot cloudless days set many a time-bomb ticking beneath their cosy, united nuclear families.

So Morgan changed his mind about the club from time to time. It had provided him with a few sexual partners—the hard, thin-faced wife of a civil engineer with five children, the large, moustachioed energetic spouse of the Italian Fiat representative in Nkongsamba—and for this he was duly grateful. He liked the pool, too, when it was free of the wives and their screaming brats, and he happily took advantage of the tennis courts and golf course when he felt so inclined. What he didn’t like so much was the deadening familiarity of the place after three years, the same tiresome old bachelors, the sun-wrinkled, gin-sodden couples with their endless dinner invitations and impoverished conversations. Being First Secretary at the Commission made him something of a social catch, and anyone who thought they might have a remote chance of landing an OBE or MBE shamelessly sought his company, plied him with drinks and meals and with remarkable lack of subtlety would tell him of their years of unstinting service in Kinjanja, what they had achieved and sacrificed for Britain. After three years of this Morgan was beginning to think
he
deserved some sort of reward himself for the hours of his young life he had sacrificed listening to sententious political analyses and dreary racist diatribes.

There was another club up at the university where he was an honorary member and which he sometimes patronised. It had a swimming pool and tennis courts but no golf course, was newer and smaller and the intellectual level of its members marginally higher. These two places, the cinema and private dinner parties represented all the social outlets available to the expatriate population of Nkongsamba. It’s no wonder, Morgan thought as he made his way through the parked cars towards the fairy-lit club façade and the jangling sound of pop-music, that we’re such a desperate lot.

He walked into the colonnaded entrance porch of the club house. A large noticeboard was covered with club rules, minutes of meetings and announcements of forthcoming events. His jaundiced eye swiftly surveyed what was on offer: XMAS GALA PARTY, he read, TO BE ATTENDED BY HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF RIPON. He shuddered, wondering what had possessed him to agree to be Father Christmas. Next to that was the golf-club’s GRAND BOXING DAY COMPETITION,
all welcome, prizes for everyone, sign below.
He turned away in despair. Outside the main door was a newsagent’s kiosk that sold European newspapers and magazines. Tucked away amongst the display of heat-blanched copies of
Newsweek, Marie-Claire
and
Bunte
Morgan knew there were a few issues of American sex-magazines. He was surreptitiously leafing through one entitled
Over-40
—it was not a publication for gerontophiles, the number referred not to the models’ age but to their mammary development—when he heard footsteps on the concrete path behind him. Snatching up a copy of
Reader’s Digest
he looked round guiltily and saw Dr. Murray approaching, accompanied by a young boy.

Morgan felt contrasting emotions stampede through his body: hatred, reluctant admiration, fear and embarrassment. He did his utmost to affect nonchalance.

“Evening, Doctor,” he said with wide-eyed jocularity, indicating with one twirling hand the vague source of the pop-music. “Dancing tonight?”

Murray looked at him as if he were slightly mad, but said politely enough, “Not for me, I’m just dropping my son off here.” He introduced Morgan: “This is Mr. Leafy, from the
Commission.” The boy seemed about fourteen, tall and slim with a lock of brown hair falling across his forehead. He had a distinct look of his father about him. He said hello as politely, too, but Morgan thought he detected a look of suspicious recognition in his eyes, as if somewhere, in unsavoury circumstances, they had met before.

Murray was about fifty and also was tall and slim. He was wearing baggy dark flannels and a crisp white short-sleeved shirt; indeed, Morgan had never seen him in anything else. Murray had a strong sun-battered face with deep deltas of laugh lines around his eyes and short, wavy, pepper-and-salt hair. His nose seemed a little too small for his face, and his blue eyes sometimes had a humorous glint to them, but more often than not they were probing and unforgiving. Morgan knew the look well.

“You go on in,” Murray told his son. “Phone when you’re ready to come home.”

“OK, Dad,” said the boy looking a bit nervous, and he went into the club. Murray turned to go.

“Holidays?” Morgan asked, desperately keen to keep the conversation going, remembering with real anguish what Adekunle had ordered him to do.

Murray stopped. “Yes. All the family together now; my son arrived about a week ago.”

“Uh-uh,” Morgan said, his head a sudden echoing void. “Yes, I see, must be nice having him out here,” he said fatuously.

The penetrating look had returned to Murray’s eyes. “Is everything all right?” he asked. “No recurrence, everything functioning normally?”

Morgan felt his face going hot. “Oh, yes,” he said hastily, “fine there. Absolutely.” He paused. “Listen,” he said in horribly inept bonhomie, “what about a game of golf? Must have a game sometime.” Why did Murray bring out the arsehole in him? he wondered, appalled at his lack of finesse.

Surprise registered for a moment on Murray’s face. “Well … yes, then. I didn’t know you were a golfer, Mr. Leafy?”

“Morgan, please.” Murray didn’t take up the friendly invitation. “Yes, I’m quite keen,” Morgan lied. “Funny we’ve never met on the course. When are you free?”

Murray shrugged. “Whenever suits you. Look, I must be going; my daughters are in the car. We’re off to the cinema,” he added in explanation. “
The Ten Commandments.
”

“Fine,” Morgan said, relief flooding his voice. At last he had some success to report to Adekunle. “Shall we say this Thursday afternoon. Four?”