William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

Morgan smiled patiently. ‘You have a point there. But, after all, a lot of diplomacy never gets further than supposition. And, on the strength of this one we…we would be interested in preliminary consultation with the, ah, putative Foreign Minister.’ Morgan finished, he was quite pleased with the way he’d expressed himself and with his neat ambiguities.

‘Consultation?’ queried Adekunle.

‘In London,’ Morgan said.

‘I see. In London.’

‘Yes,’ Morgan said, suppressing his impatience. This dainty circumlocution was suddenly getting on his nerves. ‘We will be happy to arrange the flight — first class of course — and your accommodation.’

‘In Claridges, I assume,’ Adekunle said with a broad grin.

‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact.’ Morgan was surprised.

Adekunle gave a loud laugh. ‘My good God,’ he said. ‘You British are indeed astonishing. You still think that all you need to do to get an African politician eating out of your hands is to offer first class air tickets and bed and breakfast at Claridges.’ He wheezed with laughter. A few people nearby looked round and started to laugh too.

‘Thank you,’ Adekunle said finally. ‘Thank you for your offer. I will see if I can fit it into my itinerary.’

‘Itinerary?’ Morgan repeated, nonplussed. ‘Do you mean…?’

‘Yes, my dear Mr British Deputy High Commission man. You are a very late bird to catch this worm, as the saying goes. Once I’ve been to Washington, Paris, Bonn and Rome I’ll see if I can drop in on London. Thank you again, Mr Leafy,’ he said still smiling. ‘No wonder the Empire went. Yes?’ He broke off and wandered away to speak to his waiting guests.

♦

Morgan ordered a whisky and soda from the barman. The hot blush had left his face but he felt his ears were still glowing. That stupid old fool Fanshawe, he railed to himself, nothing but shame, disgrace and public humiliation had attached itself to this spectacularly misconceived piece of under-the-counter dealing, and most of it was particularly closely associated with him. He heard Adekunle’s laugh above the hum of conversation and imagined him amusing his friends with the details of their recent conversation.

The barman put down his glass.

‘What of ice?’ Morgan asked tersely.

‘Ice ‘e dey finish,’ the barman snapped back equally shirtily and turned away. Bloody rude black bastard, Morgan seethed to himself, this fucking country was determined to…

‘Go all right?’ asked a voice at his shoulder. It was Celia Adekunle.

‘Oh fine,’ Morgan said frostily. ‘Listen, do you think you could tell this snotty so-and-so to get me some ice for my drink?’

♦

Morgan lay back on the bed in Hazel’s hotel room. He could hear the high-pitched whine of a mosquito around but he didn’t care. He threw the sheet off his damp body, sweat slicked every crevice and fold. The neon lights on the façade of the cheap hotel filtered through the shutters, the tinny music from the bar competed with the honking and revving of the traffic outside. He peered at the luminous dial of his watch: twenty past twelve. Hazel slept silently beside him on the grubby bed. He felt itches spring up spontaneously all over his body. He needed to piss. He needed a bath. He felt dreadful in fact: he had drunk far too much, he was sweaty and uncomfortable and the vigour of his sex with Hazel had supplied him with a tingling electric ache in his penis. The details of the night’s unsatisfactory events crowded in on him. He let out an apologetic sigh: he had been unpardonably rude to Celia Adekunle. On being informed that the bar had indeed run out of ice due to excessive demand he had loudly declaimed that it was exactly what he had come to expect of Kinjanja and was a small but cogent illustration of what was wrong with the country. He had then bidden her a curt good night and sniffily walked out of the party. He could still clearly recall the hurt and surprise that had registered on her face as he strode past her. He clenched his fists beneath the sheets and groaned silently to himself. It wasn’t her fault that he had been made to look a complete fool: she had only been friendly and helpful. He buried his knuckles in his eye sockets in an agony of futile remorse.

He had driven straight to Hazel’s hotel. To his astonishment she was in. He upbraided her for the filthy state of her room and had sent down to the bar for a bottle of whisky, half of which was still left. Silently, he swung himself off the bed. He stood and stretched. The room was warm and fetid. With his hands as paddles he fanned air around his genitals. His penis felt hot and sore from the two brutal couplings he had experienced with Hazel. His attempts to take out his bruised pride on her had rebounded as unsatisfactorily as ever; she had responded to his harsh gusto in kind, uncomplaining and unresentfully, with patience and as far as he could see no bad feeling whatsoever, falling into a deep and apparently untroubled sleep as soon as he switched the light out.

He pulled on his trousers and shirt. There was a bathroom of sorts along the corridor where he planned on heading. He pulled open the door a crack and peered out. There was no one in sight. He padded along the passageway and into the bathroom. Gagging from the stench, he flicked on the light. Two geckos levered themselves back into their crevices in the ceiling and a large moth went into a stall, careered into the cistern and fell fluttering to the floor.

He lifted the top off the cistern and, as expected, he found it empty. With finger and thumb he jiggled the ballcock but no water flowed. Cursing, he unzipped his fly and aimed in the general direction of the brackish toilet bowl. It was quite disgusting, this, he thought to himself. Why should he have to put up with these privations and disreputable surroundings? He had to get Hazel into a flat. Something had to change in his life, something revolutionary and drastic: it couldn’t go on this way, it just couldn’t. He thought fondly of Priscilla in this connection, emblem of a bright tomorrow, rather as a martyr would invoke an image of the Virgin as the flames licked round his knees. There, he told himself, there his hope lay, and he relaxed his sphincter’s faltering hold on his straining bladder.

The burning sulphurous pain brought a shrill yelp to his lips ancl he did a high-stepping jig of surprise and agony, his urine stream carelessly playing across the lavatory seat and immediate environs. The initial sting died down fairly quickly and as soon as he was able to he leant weakly against the wall. Careful examination revealed nothing other than post-sex inflammation and heightened colouring — for a minute he had thought it might have been a vengeful bite from a lavatorial insect he had disturbed — and as he zipped himself up he put it down to the combined effects of latex rubber, heat and prolonged friction on what was — let’s face it — a fairly sensitive organ.

Morgan had forgotten about his diagnosis the next morning as he sat on his verandah in the grip of an averagely acute hangover. Something in Hazel’s room had indeed bitten him later, and savagely too, along his right thigh, which area he now scratched steadily as he stared blearily at the Daily Graphic, one of Kinjanja’s more literate papers, whose headline read: ‘UPKP corruption probe demanded.’ It wasn’t clear at this range whether the UPKP were demanding the probe or being investigated themselves but his headache wouldn’t allow him to bring the small print into focus.

He finished his boiled egg and shouted for Friday to bring him some more orange juice. He tightened the belt on his dressing-gown. He wasn’t looking forward to going into work. Friday had told him that Fanshawe had phoned three times between nine and half past ten last night: he would be waiting on the steps of the Commission for Morgan’s report. He finished his juice, said ‘shit’ at the light fixture above the verandah table, got up and went to his bedroom. Friday had laid out a clean, pressed shirt, socks and trousers on the bed. Morgan saw he’d forgotten to put out fresh underpants. He looked in the drawer he kept them in but could only find ones he’d abandoned because the rubber in the elastic waistband had perished, making them suitable exclusively for unfortunate creatures with four-foot girths. He frowned, unable at this stage of the day to comprehend this mystery. As far as he could remember he had three functioning pairs of underpants. Friday washed them every day. He had changed twice yesterday but that still should have left one clean pair at least for him to wear this morning.