William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

‘You’re here to fish you know,’ he mock-rebuked her, ‘not sunbathe. You can sunbathe any day at the club.’

‘Oh don’t be such a bore,’ she said, lying flat on her back, her eyes closed, her hands by her side, palms down. ‘This is lovely.’

Morgan did a little dance of rage on his own adjacent rock, silently mouthing imprecations and waving v-signs at her. This was not how she was meant to behave. Still, there was plenty of time, he considered; it was only mid-morning. Olokomeji always had a calming effect on him. The sun beat down, a car buzzed by on the road bridge, the float on his line hung steady in the pool. He took a great throat-pulsing swig from his beer bottle, the chill bitter fluid sluicing down his throat, contentment spreading through his veins with the alcohol.

Two hours later the river and its banks swam in a pleasant alcoholic haze. Morgan had donned an old bush hat and draped a shirt across his shoulders to protect him from the sun’s heat, which was becoming intense as it reached its zenith. He had recast his line several times, but the original worm still remained on its hook. He was about to suggest lunch and a siesta when Priscilla exclaimed without looking up.

‘What’s that rattling noise? Is it you, Morgan?’ He looked over and saw her rod leaping and quivering in spastic rage, the fibreglass whipping and bending as though suddenly animate. He scrambled over.

‘Christ. Bloody hell! You’ve caught a fish,’ he shouted, grabbing the rod which bucked and tugged in his hand as he vigorously wound in her catch. Priscilla watched in fascination by his side.

‘God…it’s, it’s quite a…big one, too,’ he grunted in amazement. He had never caught a fish at Olokomeji.

The fish was shortly hauled thrashing into the shallows around the rock outcrop. Morgan thrust the rod into Priscilla’s hand and clambered down. Taking some loops of line around his hand he hauled the jerking fish out of the water. It was a Niger perch, looked to be about six pounds, a thick solid grey thing with a blunt face. He heaved it up onto the flat top of the rock where it flipped and quivered on the hot surface.

The fish’s one visible eye seemed to stare hostilely as they looked down on it.

‘Shouldn’t you kill it?’ Priscilla suggested. ‘You can’t just let it bake and, well, die like that.’ Morgan agreed. The only problem was he had never caught a fish that large — two feet long and heavy — and had never considered how one should go about putting them out of their misery. Did successful fishermen carry guns for this purpose, he wondered vaguely, or electric stunning devices?

He pressed his palm down on the slippery object and with his other hand wrenched and levered the hook free from its mouth. This new agony prompted the fish to renew its efforts and it bounced and floundered wildly about the rock.

‘Don’t let it fall back in!’ Priscilla squealed.

Morgan grabbed the perch with both hands, its bulk preventing his fingers from meeting on either side. It was like holding a disembodied thigh muscle, cut from a leg, yet still pulsing with life. The tiddlers he’d caught in his past had been easily dealt with: the tail between finger and thumb and the head flipped on a nearby stone. He thought he would try a variation on this method and still clutching the exhausted fish he kneeled towards some uneven projections at one end of the rock.

‘Quickly,’ yelped Priscilla. ‘Put the poor thing out of its misery.’

Easier said than done you stupid bitch, Morgan swore under his breath, and tentatively slapped its head against the rock. The fish, inspired to one final effort by this blow, twisted and jack-knifed out of his hands and fell off the edge of the rock and down onto a sand bar that ran between this and the next outcrop.

Swearing vilely Morgan jumped down after it and seized the twitching fish for the last time.

‘Right, you little bastard,’ he snarled through gritted teeth. ‘Now get this,’ and he smashed its upper half against the rock side. Once, twice, three times. Bits of flesh and blood splattered onto his forearms and very soon the fish felt inert and limp.

‘You haven’t spoilt it, have you?’ Priscilla asked in a trembling voice.

Morgan looked up. Priscilla stood on the rock edge above him. He turned the fish over; a doll’s eye dangled from the pulp he’d made of its head. Silver scales glinted from the rock.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’ll be fine.’ He stood up, damp sand sticking to his legs; fish blood covered fingers and knuckles and trickled in thin rivulets to drip from his forearms. He leapt, with as much agility as he could muster, back up the rocks onto the flat surface.

‘There you are,’ he said huskily, his chest heaving from the effort. ‘Your fish.’

♦

Morgan and Priscilla ate their lunch in an uneasy silence. She had become quite subdued while he tore at a chicken leg with pagan gusto. His mind raced exultantly. Christ, he thought to himself, D.H. Lawrence couldn’t have arranged or directed that episode any more skilfully: the violence, the blood, the male aggression, the admiring female — the very air throbbed with felt life. Furthermore, Morgan suddenly thought, if DHL was anywhere near right she should be a pushover now.

Priscilla lay back on her towel. ‘Ouch!’ she yipped almost immediately and sat up again craning her hand round behind her back. Morgan saw a stunned large black ant wobble uncertainly across the towelling surface.

‘There’s your culprit,’ he pointed and watched Priscilla flatten it with the heel of her sandal. Great, he thought, now we’ve both killed.

‘God, that was sore,’ she complained turning her back to him. He saw the bite, a sixpence-sized weal just to the left of the top bump of her vertebrae. He covered it with his lips and licked the swelling gently.

‘There,’ he said and took her in his arms. They kissed and he lowered her back down onto the towel. He leant on his elbow looking down on her face. Lovingly he brushed her fringe aside with his fingers, then kissed her again with a conscious display of passionate abandon.

This continued for a couple of minutes before Morgan stopped and re-adopted his elbow-leaning posture. He casually slipped the right hand strap of her bathing suit off her shoulder. ‘You know,’ he said in what he thought was the correct tone of childlike rebuke, ‘I’m getting dangerously fond of you.’ Priscilla lay back, her lips slightly parted. Perhaps she had had too much beer, Morgan wondered, hence her passivity. She ran her hand through his hair. He wished she wouldn’t do that.

‘Why dangerous?’ she asked teasingly.

Morgan slid the other strap down as far as it would go and bent to kiss her collar bone. ‘Because,’ he looked at her seriously, and summoned up all his courage, ‘I think I may be falling in love with you…’

‘Oh Morgie,’ she sighed and put her arms round his neck pulling herself up so she could kiss him, and, as she did so he hooked his fingers onto the back of her bathing suit and tugged it down. He felt the coolness of a freed breast against his own. He rolled her back onto the towel. A pale-pink nipple showed above the dark blue nylon of the swimsuit. Carefully he uncovered the other and slipped Priscilla’s arms out of the shoulder straps as if he were undressing a child. Her conical breasts were unbelievably firm, girlish and gravity-defying, standing straight up from her chest. Morgan kissed them reverently, they were cold and necked with tiny sand grains. Priscilla lay still with an uncertain look on her face and her shoulders hunched as if she wasn’t entirely sure how she had come to find herself in this position.

Morgan knelt beside her. ‘You’re very beautiful,’ he said in proper tones of awe. He undid the waist strings of his swimming shorts, stood up and jammed his thumbs into his waist band. ‘Very beautiful,’ he repeated, and pushed down his swimming shorts, noticing as he did so that Priscilla hadn’t moved. He had eased them round his buttocks when Priscilla suddenly said, ‘Morgan. For goodness sake what are you doing?’