William Boyd - On the Yankee Station - Stories

Morgan had stayed at the airport hotel several times before. He remembered it as a lively, cosmopolitan place with two restaurants, several bars, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a small casino. It was usually populated by a mixed crowd of jet-lagged transit passengers, air-crew and stewardesses and a somewhat raffish and frontier collection of bush-charter pilots, oil company troubleshooters and indeterminate tanned and brassy females whom Morgan imaginatively took to be the mistresses of African politicians, part-time nightclub singers, croupiers, hostesses, expensive whores and bored wives. It was as close as Morgan ever came to being a member of the Jet Set and a stay there always made him feel vaguely mysterious and highly sexed. As they approached, he recalled how only last year he had almost successfully bedded a strong-shouldered female helicopter pilot, and his heart thumped in anticipation. Every cloud, he reminded himself, silver lining and all that. That had to be the one consolation of a truly awful day.

The airport hotel was large. A low-slung old colonial edifice at the centre was lined by shaded concrete pathways to more modern bedroom blocks, the pool, the hairdressing salon and the other amenities. As they swept up the drive, Morgan looked about him with something approaching eagerness.

The large car-park, however, was unsettlingly empty, and Morgan noticed that the familiar troupe of hawkers who spread their thorn carvings, their ithyphallic ebony statuary and ropes of ceramic beads on the steps up to the front door were absent. Also there was an unnatural hush and tranquillity in the foyer, as if Morgan had arrived at the dead of night rather than midday. Sitting on squeaky cane chairs in front of the reception desk were two bored soldiers with small aluminum machine pistols in their laps. The clerk behind the long desk was asleep, his head resting on the register. One of the soldiers shook him awake and as Morgan signed in he noticed that only a few names were registered along with his own.

“Are you busy?” he asked with faint hope.

The receptionist smiled. “Oh, no, sah. Everybody gone. Only eight people staying since last night. No planes,” he added, “no guests.”

An aged bellhop with bare feet and a faded blue uniform showed Morgan to his room in one of the new blocks. Morgan was glad to find the air-conditioning still functioned.

The day’s frustrations were not over. Morgan tried to phone the Commission in Nkongsamba but was informed that all the lines had been closed down by the army. He then went back outside and instructed Peter — who had elected to stay and live in the car in the car-park — to drive to the embassy in the capital and report Morgan’s plight.

Peter shook his head with a convincing display of bitter disappointment.

“You can never go dere,” he lamented. “Dey done build one big road-block for here,” he gestured at a point a few yards up from the end of the hotel drive. “Plenty soldier. Dey are never lettin’ you pass.”

So that was it. Morgan looked at his watch. By rights he should be high over Europe now, a stewardess handing him his meal on a tray, an hour or so from an early evening touchdown at Heathrow Airport. Instead he was marooned in a deserted hotel complex while a military coup raged outside the gate.

He walked sadly back to his room through the afternoon heat. Lizards basked on stones in the sun, idly doing press-ups as he approached, reverting to glazed immobility once more as he walked on by. To his left he saw the tall diving board of the swimming pool, and some asterisks of light flashed off the blue water he could glimpse through the perforated concrete screen that surrounded the pool area. Normally it would be lively with bathers, the bars crowded with sun-reddened guests, the nearby tennis courts resounding to the pock-pock of couples rallying. Where were the other people who were staying here? Morgan wondered. What were they like? He felt like some mad dictator, or eccentric millionaire recluse, alone in an entire multi-bedroom block with only his taciturn guards for company.

His second question was answered that evening when he went down to the restaurant. There was a table of four Syrians or Lebanese men, and an ancient, wrinkled American couple. The Lebanese ignored him; the Americans said, “Hello, there,” and looked anxious to exchange grumbles about their common predicament. Morgan sat as far away as he could. Pretend nothing has happened, he told himself; as soon as we start behaving like victims of a siege — sharing resources, privations and anecdotes — this enforced stay really will become a nightmare.

He was well into his rather firm avocado when the eighth guest arrived. If he had been asked to speculate, unseen, on his or her identity, Morgan — knowing his luck — would have laid long odds on the eighth guest being a nun, an overweight salesman or moustachioed spinster. He was surprised then, and almost enchanted when a young woman entered wearing the dark-blue skirt and white blouse of BOAC. She was quite pretty, too, Morgan assessed, his avocado untended, as he watched her sway through the empty tables to her seat close to the Americans.

For a minute or so Morgan’s heartbeat seemed to echo rather loudly in his chest as, more surreptitiously, he scrutinised the girl. “Girl” was perhaps a little too kind. She looked to be well into her thirties, that short blond hair certainly dyed, a slightly predatory air about her features due to the rather hooked nose, the liberally applied cosmetics, and lines that ran from the corners of her nostrils to the ends of her thin orange lips. She had amazingly long painted nails that matched the colour of her lipstick.

For the first time that day Morgan’s spirits were lifted. Something about her — the dark eye-shadow, her tan against the white cotton of her blouse — reminded him of the brisk sexual allure of the helicopter pilot of the year before. He passed the rest of the meal in a pleasantly absorbing miasma of sexual fantasy.

Fantasy was all he had to content himself with, however, as the girl appeared to return to her room directly after dinner. Morgan drank a couple of whiskies in the bar but was driven out by the increasingly clamorous garrulity of the four Lebanese, who played bridge with a quite un-English fervour and intensity. The American couple tried to befriend him once again but Morgan repelled their polite “Say, do you have any idea where we can change some dollars?” with a rush of eyebrow-jerking, shoulder-shrugging pseudo French: “Ah, desolé , haw … euh, je vous ne comprendre, non? Oui? Disdonc , eur, bof, vous savez haha parler pas Anglais . Mmm?” They wandered off with an air of baffled resignation.

The next morning, Morgan looked out of his fifth-floor window. From this height he commanded a considerable view of the hotel area. He could see Peter pissing into a bush on the edge of the car-park. A military jeep was pulled up in front of the central building. Over to his left and partially obscured by a clump of trees he could see the swimming pool: a static blue slab surrounded by grey concrete and ranks of empty lounging chairs. Then, as he watched, a small figure came into his line of vision. It was the stewardess, wearing what looked like a tiny yellow bikini. She jumped into the pool and swam round. Morgan watched dry-mouthed as she clambered dripping up the steps and fingered free the sodden material of her briefs, which had become wedged in the cleft between her buttocks. Morgan turned from the window and rummaged in his suitcase for his swimming trunks.

Morgan was not proud of the state he had allowed his body to get into. Always what his mother had called “a big lad,” he had assiduously developed at university a beer-gut which never disappeared and indeed had since expanded like some soft subcutaneous parasite around the sides of his torso, padding his back and swelling his already considerable buttocks and thighs. He could have done something about it once, he supposed as he stood in front of the full-length bathroom mirror; there was nothing he could do about his balding head, but the recent addition of a thick Zapata moustache had effected some positive transformation of his appearance. A straggling line of pale brown hair ran straight down from his throat, between his worryingly plump breasts, to disappear beneath the waistband of his capacious trunks. “Not a pretty sight,” a girlfriend had once remarked on observing him as he stumbled — soap-blind — from the shower, groping for a towel. Well, it was too late now, he concluded, inflating his chest and trying to suck in his stomach. In a suit he fancied he looked merely beefy; but this was another trouble with tropical climes: the terrible exposure that resulted through the regular need to shed as much clothing as possible.