William Boyd - On the Yankee Station - Stories

We went out later to buy some cigarettes. On our way back we saw a girl in a yellow window crying over a typewriter. “Think Cherylle’s crying for me?” he asked harshly. I said that she might be. “No, she’s not,” he said firmly. “Not Cherylle.”

23 October 1973

I was woken early this morning by the police. They said Lamar wanted me. Outside, he sat in the back seat of a police car. “They’ve found her,” he said. “They want me to identify. Will you come with me?”

Cherylle’s decomposing body had been found in a shack at an abandoned dude ranch out in the desert near a place called Hi Vista. There was no sign of the hippie-actor friend. Apparently it had all the indications of a half-fulfilled suicide pact. There was a note with both their signatures, but the police suspected that after Cherylle had pulled the trigger her lover had panicked, had second thoughts about joining her and had fled.

The deep irony was not lost on Lamar. He stood unmovingly as the policeman pulled back the blanket and there was only a slight huskiness in his voice as he identified her body.

2 November 1973

Lamar has just moved back to his flat. He had been staying with me since the inquest. The hippie has still not been tracked down. Lamar has been a moody and taciturn companion, not surprisingly, but he is not the broken man I expected him to be. There is a kind of fatalistic resignation about him, he talks less obsessively about Cherylle and I’m glad to say seems to have abandoned his mementoes. However, it has to be said that he is nothing like the person he was a few short months ago and he told me yesterday he planned to resign from the company. He keeps saying that Cherylle couldn’t have been happy, so it was just as well that she ended it all. “She couldn’t have been happy,” he will say. “Not Cherylle. If she couldn’t be happy with me, how could she possibly be happy with anybody else?” To Lamar’s numbed brain the logic of that statement appears incontrovertible.

8 November 1973

A dull smog-shrouded day of rain. By mistake the police forwarded on Cherylle’s personal possessions to my house, assuming Lamar was still staying here. A patrol car dropped them off early in the evening and I said I would make sure Lamar got them. There was a nylon suitcase full of crumpled clothes and a plastic bag of loose items. I laid them on the kitchen table and thought sadly of Cherylle. Cherylle, in her satin pants … her orange lips, her white-blond hair. And now? A few grubby clothes, a wooden hairbrush, sunglasses, a Mexican purse, a charm, a powder compact and a Zippo lighter with her name engraved on it …

I finally caught up with Lamar at a burger dinette down on the seafront not far from his apartment. It was still raining heavily. He sat at a table in the window surrounded by wax-paper wrappers and empty bottles of beer, gazing out at the passing trucks on the coast highway. A red tail-light glow lit his eyes.

I placed the Zippo and the compact in front of him on the table. “Why did you do it?” I asked. He hardly looked surprised. He gave a momentary start before resuming his scrutiny of the passing traffic.

“They were hers,” he said dully. “I didn’t want them any more so I just put them back in her bag.”

“But why, Lamar? Why?” His woodenness infuriated me. “Why Cherylle?”

He looked at me as though I’d asked a stupid question. “She wasn’t ever coming back, you know? But I found out where she was. I begged her on my knees to come home. But that hippie wouldn’t let her go. I tried to buy him off, but he wasn’t interested. And I couldn’t let her leave me for someone like that — for anyone. I had to do it, so I set it up that way.”

“What about him? The hippie?”

“Oh, he’s out there in the desert. No one’s going to find him in a long time.”

Lamar smiled a bitter smile and traced a pattern in the wet Formica round his beer bottle. A young Hispanic waitress approached for my order, carrying her boredom like a rucksack. I waved her away. I wanted to get out of this melancholy bar with its flickering neon and clouded chrome.

I had reached the door when I felt his hand on my shoulder.

“You can tell them if you like. I don’t care.” He looked at me tiredly.

I felt my voice thick in my throat. “Just tell me one thing,” I said. “I want to know how you feel now. Feel tough, Lamar? Feel noble? Come on, what’s it like, Lamar?”

He shrugged. “Remember that play we read once? ‘I’ll sacrifice the lamb that I do love’? That’s how it is, you know? It’s like the song says — love hurts. It gets to hurt you so much you’ve got to do something about it.”

It was all the explanation I would ever get. He stood in the doorway and watched me walk to my car. Tyres swishing on the wet tarmac, the road shiny like vinyl, the rain slicking down his short hair. As I drove off I could see him in the rear mirror, still standing there, a lurid burger sign smoking above his head. I never saw him again.

Isaac knocked at his door at half past three in the morning. It took Morgan a few minutes to wake up; then he washed, shaved and put on his light-weight tropical suit. He was going home.

The verandah was cluttered with the trunks and packing cases that were being shipped back to England separately by sea. Morgan ate his breakfast among them in a mood of quite pleasant melancholy. He gazed across the empty sitting room and at the bare walls of his bungalow and thought about the three years he had spent in this stinking sweaty country. Three rotting years. Christ.

He was still thinking about how much he wouldn’t miss the place when the car from the High Commission arrived at half past four. Morgan registered a twinge of annoyance when he saw that instead of the air-conditioned Mercedes he’d requested, he’d been issued with a cream Ford Consul. It was three and a half hours from Nkongsamba to the capital by road; three and a half hours of switchbacked, pot-holed hell through dense rain forest. It seemed that his last hours in this wretched country were destined to be spent in the same perspiring, itching agony that so coloured his memories of the past three years. Typical of the bloody High Commissioner, thought Morgan, not bloody important enough for the Merc. Trust the little asthmatic bureaucrat to notice his transport application. He’d wanted the Merc desperately; to strap-hang in air-conditioned comfort, the Union Jack cracking on the bonnet. Go out in style — that had been the plan. He looked critically at the Consul; it needed a clean and one hub cap was missing, and they’d given him that imbecilic driver Peter. Morgan rolled his eyes heavenwards. He couldn’t wait to leave.

He said goodbye to Isaac, and Moses his cook, and Moses’ young wife Abigail, who helped with the washing and ironing. He’d given them all a sizeable farewell dash the previous evening and he noticed they were smiling hugely as they energetically pumped his hands. Bloody gang of Old Testament refugees, he thought, slightly put out at the absence of any sadness or solemnity; they’d never had it so good. He cast his eye fondly over Abigail’s plump, sleek body. Yes, he’d miss the women, he admitted, and the beer.

It was still quite black outside and a couple of toads burped at each other in the darkness of the garden as he eased himself onto the shiny plastic rear seat, gave a final wave, and told Peter to get going. They sped off through the deserted roads of the commercial reservation and passed quickly through the narrow empty streets of Nkongsamba before striking what was laughingly known as the transnational highway.

This particular road was a crumbling two-lane tarmacadam death trap that meandered through the jungle between Nkongsamba and the capital. A skilfully designed route of blind corners, uncambered Z-bends and savage gradients, it annually claimed hundreds of lives as the worst drivers in the world sought to negotiate its bizarre geometry. The small hours of the morning were the only time when it was anything like safe to travel — hence Morgan’s early rise, even though his plane left at half past eleven.