Robert Wilson - Instruments of Darkness

‘What kind of films?’

‘Thrillers, comedies…’

‘Right, I was just making sure he wasn’t a Pasolini or anything.’

‘He does skin movies too, if he has to. Pays the bills.’ Charlie liked to talk tough.

‘The English guy?’

‘Yeah. My brother throws a party, like he has to, to get work now and again. It’s one of those parties, lot of girls. Lot of working girls, you know what I mean. They going round with the blow, little white piles of it on silver platters with spoons. I’m talking with these two guys. One of them is English. He’s a writer. Calls himself Al ‘cos he’s in the States. His real name is Algernon. What sort of a fucking name is that? Anyways, Al’s got a plate with some canapés on it. The girl comes round with the blow and Al picks up the spoon, loads it with blow and sticks it onna side of his plate. Then he says to the girl: “You got any celery to go with that?” Now that is what I call one big asshole.’

‘I laughed.’

‘I heard you,’ said Charlie. ‘You wanna see one of my brother’s films?’

‘No thanks, I got to go.’

‘It’s a short,’ said Charlie, leaning over, picking up the zapper and the TV came to life. There was a picture of African straw-roofed mud huts and two girls pounding yam.

‘This is Africa.’

‘This is Togolese TV, asshole.’

Charlie clicked on the video and a dark ill-lit picture came on in which only the movement of things could just be discerned.

‘Is this wildlife or something?’

‘Kinda.’

As the camera pulled back, Charlie turned the sound up and the telltale tinny music and sobbing ecstasy accompanied a shot of a woman laid out face down on a bench, her wrists and ankles tied underneath. A huge and hairy man who looked as if he drove trucks during the day held her thin waist in large and sinisterly gloved hands while he worked on her from behind. Another man sat in dazed concentration at the other end of the bench with the woman’s head nodding in his lap.

‘Good night, Charlie,’ I said, and lurched out of the room.

‘Good night, chickenshit,’ he shouted after me, without taking his eyes off the screen.

I needed some fresh air. Things appeared cut together like a film. There was no feeling of time passing. The dark corridor, the bird-like flower in the pot, the door, the warm wet darkness, the bar door. The bar door was locked. I walked down towards the sea.

I knew there was a steep bank of red earth down to the sandy beach but it was very dark and the bar was shut down so there was no light. I eased forward with one foot ahead of me until I felt stupid enough, then I stopped and looked out. My eyes got used to the dark. I was very close to the bank. It was closer to the bar than I remembered it. The sea was slowly eating its way into Charlie’s compound. It wasn’t going to be long before it all tipped into the Gulf of Guinea.

Standing in the dark was giving me sensory deprivation rather than sobering me up. I walked back to the bar; Charlie was still sitting in his living room, his brother’s film flickering on the screen. I fell heavily on my shoulder and kicked out at whatever I had fallen over, which groaned. I crawled back, and in the dim light I could just make out the slack features of the drunken Lebanese. I called the gardien and we hauled him up to the paillote, which left me speechless with a huge quantity of blood crashing through my head. The boy was covered in ants and his face and hands were swollen with mosquito bites. The gardien said he would put him in one of the guest rooms. After ten minutes, my pulse went back down from my ears to my wrist and I got in the car and drove back to Lomé.

There were street gangs operating in the centre of town and on the coast road at night. They wanted money in the name of democracy. I decided to go around town and headed for one of the causeways across the lagoon that hardly anybody used at night. There was no street lighting. There was nobody out. The noise from the cicadas closed in. A tyre burned in the middle of the road, the thick black smoke making the night thicker and blacker.

A group on a piece of wasteland stood around a blazing oil drum whose flames slashed out at the night. As I approached the lagoon, two kids ran across the road and into the dark. Further on, a young woman trotted with her hands covering her cheeks. A young man stood at the side of the road as I rolled past with my elbow out of the window. He slapped my arm.

‘Go back. Go back,’ he said.

I cut the lights, got out of the car and looked down on to the causeway. A car was parked diagonally across the road, its headlights flaring out across the lagoon. In the light, three people stood looking out into the lagoon, their hands behind their backs as if inspecting something. They crumpled forwards off the road. The sound of three shots, delayed, cracked across the water. The black, still lagoon rippled out in silver lines before the lights died on the causeway.

‘Go now. They’re coming,’ the young man said to the back of my head.

‘Who’s they?’ I asked.

‘Nobody knows,’ said the young man.

We heard the car approaching. The young man ran, his shirt tail flapping. I drove down a side street and parked by a house out of sight of the road, got out and looked back down the street. A single car drove past at walking pace with no lights on.

Ten minutes later I drove across the lagoon. The mosquitoes screamed across the water.

Thursday 26th September

By morning, my face was welded to the bed, I had an arm like a plastic leg and a brain as dry as a monkey nut and no bigger. Something rattled in my inner ear as I sat up. I drank the best part of a litre bottle of water and felt intimidated by the brightness of the sunlight slanting through the slats of the shutters forming white bars on the marble-tiled floor. I stared into them for a while until they lost what little meaning they had.

I made it to the shower and rehydrated to full size underneath it. I shaved with limited success. I flossed for the first time in a month and ended up with a cat’s cradle in my mouth. I dressed as if I’d done it before but could use some maternal supervision. I flipped off the air conditioner, opened the shutters and staggered back as the sun slapped a white rhomboid across the room. By the time I’d got to the bottom of the stairs I was ready for bed.

On the verandah, Jack was asleep in the lounger with the radio murmuring on his stomach, the TV quiet for once. I poured some coffee, ate some pineapple and retreated to a shady corner with a pair of sunglasses.

‘Morning,’ said Jack.

‘Should be,’ I said.

Jack opened one eye and found me with it.

‘What happened to you?’

‘Man to man with Charlie. The usual. Half pints of whisky, no water.’

‘Did he get ugly?’

‘He’s never been pretty.’

I sipped the coffee. It was that robusta again. It rippled through my system as if I’d mainlined it.

‘They found twenty-one dead bodies in the lagoon this morning,’ said Jack.

The black and white images of last night played themselves through my head.

‘There’s a taxi strike. We’re going to have trouble,’ he said.

‘Who did it?’

‘Nobody knows.’

‘That’s what the guy said to me last night.’

‘Which guy?’

I told Jack what I had seen.

‘Did they say whether they came from the north or south?’ I asked.

‘Both.’

‘A mixture?’

‘No. Some people say all northerners, others all southerners.’

‘Who’s trying to scare who?’

‘I’d say the army were scaring the southerners.’

‘And the army says the southerners are trying to discredit the army and are killing their own people.’