William Boyd: On the Yankee Station: Stories

Then the brothel was raided. Christ, he’d only gone down to Spinoza’s to confront Patience with her handiwork. She hadn’t been free when Morgan first arrived, so he had chatted to the owner, Baruch — as his better-read clients whimsically dubbed the diminutive Levantine pimp — for half an hour or so, and watched the girls dancing listlessly under the roof fans. His anger had subsided a bit but he managed to stoke up a rage when he was eventually ushered into Patience’s cubicle. “Hey!” he had roared, lowering his greyish Y-fronts. “Bloody look at this mess!” But then his tirade had been cut short by the whistles and stompings of Sgt. Mbele and his vice squad.

The day had started badly. Morgan woke, hot and sweaty, his sheets damp binding-cloths. Three things presented themselves to his mind almost simultaneously: it was Christmas Eve, in four days he would be catching the next boat home from Douala and he had a dull ache in his groin. He eased his seventeen-and-a-half stone out of bed and started for the bathroom. There, a hesitant diagnosis set off by the unfamiliar pain was horrifyingly confirmed by the sight of his opaque, forked and pustular urine.

He dropped off at the local clinic before going in to the office. Inside it was cool and air-conditioned. Outside, in the shade cast by the wide eaves, mothers and children sprawled. And inside he ruefully confessed to a Calvinistic Scottish doctor, young and unrelentingly professional, of his weekly visits to Patience at Spinoza’s. Then a plump black sister led him to an ante-room where, retreating coyly behind a screen, he delivered up a urine sample. The clear tinkle of his stream on the thin glass of the bottle seemed to rebound deafeningly from the tiled walls. With a cursoriness teetering on the edge of contempt, the doctor told him that the result of the test would be available tomorrow.

He vented his embarrassment and mounting anger at his office, Nkongsamba’s Deputy High Commission, turning down all that day’s applications for visas out of hand, vetoing the recommendations of senior missionaries for candidates in the next birthday honours and, exquisite zenith of the day’s attack of spleen, peremptorily sacking a filing clerk for eating fu-fu while handling correspondence. He began to feel a little better, the fear of some hideous social disease retreating as time interposed itself between now and his visit to the clinic.

After lunch his air-conditioner broke down. Morgan detested the sun, and because of his corpulence his three years in Nkongsamba had been three years of seemingly constant perspiration, virulent rashes and general discomfort. He had accepted the posting gladly, proud to tell family and friends he was in the Diplomatic Service, and had enthusiastically read the literature of West Africa, searching, with increasing despair, first in Joyce Cary, then through Graham Greene, right down to Gerald Durrell and Conrad, for any experience that vaguely corresponded with his own. When the cream tropical suit he had so keenly bought began to grow mould in the armpits — a creeping greenish hue eventually encroaching on the button-down flap of a breast pocket — he had forthwith abandoned it, and with it all hopes of injecting a literary frisson into his dull and routine life. But, thank God, he was leaving it all soon, next boat from Douala, leaving the steaming forest, the truculent natives, the tiny black flies that raised florin-sized bites. What would he miss? The beer, strong and cold, and of course Patience, with her lordotic posture, pragmatic sex, and her smooth black body smelling strangely of “Amby,” a skin-lightening agent that sold very well in these parts.

Morgan came home after work. There had been an unexpected fall of rain during the afternoon. The air was heavy and damp; great ranges of purple cumulus loomed in the sky. He climbed up the steps to his stoop, shouting for Pious, his houseboy, to bring beer. There on the stoop table lay his copy of Keats, sole heritage of his years at his plate-glass university. He had come across it while packing and had glanced through it, with nostalgic affection, at breakfast. Now, carelessly left out in the rain, it sat there swollen, and steaming slightly, it seemed, in the late-afternoon heat — a grotesque papier-mâché brick. He picked it up and bellowed for Pious.

He stood under the cold shower, allowing the stream of water to course down his face, plastering his thinning hair to his forehead. A startled Pious had received the sodden complete works full in the face and when he scrabbled to pick it up, Morgan had booted him viciously in the arse. He smiled, then frowned. The sudden movement, though producing a satisfying yelp from Pious, had done some damage. Pain pulsed like a Belisha beacon from his testicles, now, he was convinced, grown palpably larger. He counted slowly from one to ten. Things were ganging up on him; he was beginning to feel insecure, hunted almost. Only three days to the boat, then away, thank Christ, for good.

An obsequious, chastened Pious brought him the gin on the stoop. Morgan poured two inches into a glass full of ice, added some bitters and a dash of water. He hated the drink but it seemed the apt thing to do; end of a tropical day, sundowners and all that. It was dark now and unbearably humid. There would be a storm tonight. Fat sausage flies brought out by the rain whirled and battered about him. Ungainly on their wings, one landed in his gin and drowned there, straddled on the cubes. His shirt stuck to his back; the minatory hum of a mosquito was in his ear. Crickets chirped moronically in the garden. He would go and sort out that Patience.

In Sgt. Mbele’s fetid detention hall Morgan had two hours in which to repent that decision. Finally he managed to impress Mbele, a grinning, stubborn man — with, also, the help of a thirty-kobo bribe — that as he was First Secretary at the Commission he possessed diplomatic immunity, and that he would take it as a personal favour if the sergeant wouldn’t mention him in his report. H.E., though profligate himself, admired a sense of decorum in his subordinates.

Leaving the police station, Morgan decided there and then to abandon his car at Spinoza’s and instead go to the club — a ten-minute walk — and get drunk. The Recreation Club, as it was inspiringly named, had been built for the expatriate population of Nkongsamba in the heady days of the Empire. A long, rambling, high-ceilinged building surrounded by a piebald golf-course and tennis courts, it preserved, with its uniformed servants and air-mail copies of British newspapers, something of the ease and tenor of those times. As Morgan approached, it became evident that quiet inebriation was out of the question. Gerry and the Pacemakers boomed from the ballroom; coloured lights and streamers were festooned everywhere. It was the Christmas Party. Morgan, scowling and black-humoured, brutally shouldered his way through the crowd around the bar and drank three large gins very quickly. Then, moderately composed, he sat on a bar stool and surveyed the scene. The men wore white dinner jackets or tropical suits and looked hot and apoplectic. The women sported the fashions of a decade ago and appeared strained and ill-at-ease. There were few young people; young people did not come to the tropics from choice, only if they were sent, like Morgan.

“Um, excuse me”—a tap on his elbow—“it is Mr. Morgan, isn’t it?”

He looked round. “Yes. Hello. Mrs.… Brinkit, yes? Erm, let me see. Queen’s Birthday, High Commission last year?”

“That’s right.” She seemed overjoyed that he had remembered. She was tall and thin and just missed being attractive. Thirtyish, late, probably. She wore a strapless evening gown that exposed a lot of bony chest and shoulder. Her nose was red. She was a bit drunk, but then so was Morgan.